By Kevin Murphy M.Sc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
As I said last week, we arrive at the age of five or so and have already come to an understanding of a genderised positioning in terms of our identity. We have done this through experiencing the interaction of not just our primary carers (usually mother and father) but also our own interactions within that dynamic .
As it is a genderised positioning we are fairly clear, even if we are still too young to put words on it, about whether we consider ourselves to be boy or girl. I put it this way to underline what I said last week about the psychoanalytic concept and belief that biology does not determine gender.
And, equally, contemporary psychoanalytic theory suggests that while there can only ever be two genders, the barriers between the two are not absolute. That’s why we can find one position shading into the other – men with varying degrees of female elements in their psychological make-up and women with varying degrees of male elements in theirs.
I mention this because once the issue is approached from this perspective it not only throws a new and interesting light on the issue of identity (with its core element of sexuality) but also on our ideal image of what we should be. If a man sees himself as a man, then what kind of man does he believe he is or should be? And remember, there are many, many answers to the question of what it is to be man and often the culturally accepted stereotypes do not do justice to the complexity of people’s lived experiences. The same applies to women. If a woman sees herself as a woman, then what kind of woman does she believe she is or should be?
If we go back a little to what I was saying about the developmental path we all travel in order to emerge into who we are, psychoanalytic thinking has traditionally given central importance to the Oedipus Complex. This is the period in life, starting from infancy until about 5 (by 7 it is finished) when every child goes through the rivalry and competing struggles for attention, love and desire for the opposite sex parent.
This period ends, for the vast majority of people, with the child coming to an understanding that the one they want is not only unavailable to them but more importantly is out of bounds as an object of desire. And it is the installing of this simple and yet universal truth that brings with it a plethora of variations in terms of the adults that it produces. At base, the very act of installing this message dictates that we must let go of something we like and seek sustainable pleasure elsewhere in the wider world.
This, as modern psychoanalytic theory is at pains to point out, is not just about the incest taboo. Yes the boy must separate emotionally from the mother figure, the girl likewise from the father figure. But this action is also about conveying to us fundamentally essential tools that we will need if we are to take up our positions as fully functioning, independent adults. These ‘tools’ include the notions of metaphor, sublimation, meaning, signification, law, the intrinsic understanding of ‘no’ and the acceptance of loss.
Contemporary psychoanalytical thinking groups these under the broad heading of castration, keeping the word that Freud used to first identify this phenomenon. For him, the driving fear within the Oedipus Complex for boys was the threat of castration by the father; his penis would be cut off in retaliation for desiring the mother in rivalry to the father. The girl, in traditional thinking, would already have suffered castration, being without a penis, but be driven during this phase to seek a substitute for it in the eyes of father.
However, contemporary psychoanalytic thinkers have considerably broadened out the notion of castration to include the obvious but necessary loss that occurs for both boys and girls when the objects of their infantile desire are put beyond their reach. It is a universal rule that applies to all cultures and is as relevant today as it has always been.
So the act of symbolic castration conveys the notion of metaphor because another image must be inserted or substituted in place of the early and idealised love image of our mother or father. Like metaphor, the substitute found elsewhere will also offer love or the promise of it but it will not be our parent figure that remains the object of desire.
Sublimation, as the act of diverting sexual energy away from the primary sexual object, is another tool. Learning this at an early age allows us as adults to channel sexual energies into other activities, not necessarily directly sexual but ones that bring a degree of pleasure nevertheless.
The very fact of separation being successful, and it is successful to varying degrees depending on the individual child and the family setting, ensures that meaning is achieved. With this grasping of meaning, the child is better prepared for the plethora of encounters in his development to adulthood that will also require him to interpret in order to arrive at meaning.
The child also learns the ‘no’ that society expects every family to teach its children in terms of the incest taboo. A boy cannot continue loving his mother as the sole provider of his psycho-sexual needs and it is obvious to understand why. Likewise a girl must separate from the father.
And, finally, although there is a cutting free of the more incestuous bonds that can threaten to bind us and strangle our progress towards individuality, there is also a necessary loss involved in all of this. We are, after all, losing an almost nirvana-like sense of belonging and symbiosis with an unconditionally loving object. Although we are being separated for our own psychical good, we feel the loss. Some of us feel it more intensely than others. It is this loss that often recurs in depression in childhood, early teens or adult life. But the ability to cope with loss is an essential ‘tool’ for all of us on the road to independent living.
But before we get there another equally important stage now emerges. From 5 years or so onwards, there is a placid period for most children – provided the first five years have not been overly traumatic. This is the latency period during which all the sexual tensions go underground. Again and again in therapy people will refer to this period of their lives when they describe the happy childhood they had. And they are right. Free from the pull and push of internal and sexualised desires, this is a relatively straightforward time in children’s lives.
And then at the end of this, around the age of 12 and it can vary in individuals, we have the re-emergence of the sexual drive as the process of physical maturation shifts gear. This, for psychoanalytic theory, is effectively the second time that we as individuals experience sexual turbulence in our lives. For most theories, puberty is the onset of the sexual being. For psychoanalysis, it is the powerful return of it. So essentially we are now set on the threshold to re-experience the psychical patterns that have been already laid down at an earlier stage of our development.
Next week I will conclude on this theme.
Monday, February 1, 2010
Monday, January 25, 2010
How We Become Who We Are - 1
By Kevin Murphy, MSc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
People often ask what is the difference between psychoanalysis, psychiatry and psychology. Well, you could easily distinguish psychoanalysis from the other two on the basis that they have opted for a scientific based approach and in psychiatry’s case a pharmacologically based one. Their approach is based on observable, repeatable phenomena in order to arrive at general rules that explain human actions and offer a generally applicable treatment or cure for all forms of deviations from the norm.
Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, has focussed firmly on the unconscious as the hidden locus of our motivations, aspirations and actions. And each treatment is tailor made for the individual.
But there is another significant way in which the distinction can be made. Psychoanalysis has been committed from its very inception to the notion of sexuality. That is, a sexuality that runs to the root of who we are as human beings. Granted in our early infantile life this sexuality is more what Freud once called an ‘affectionate erotic interest’ in other beings around us.
But from quite early on, this affectionate interest becomes joined by a sexual stream that leads us eventually towards puberty and a developing maturation as a sexual being.
And why is sexuality so important to us? Well, while studies might tell us that men think about sex every three minutes, or that the average married couple might engage in sex 2.1 times per week, all of us are aware of our sexuality on a continuous, second by second basis. There is no part of our waking day (or our dreaming night) when we are not conscious of ourselves as either man or woman. This knowledge of who we are is genderised, it has a sexualised content.
Sexuality, therefore, is a central element in our sense of personal identity, whether in our private moments or in our interactions with others. This also encompasses the notion of being a man who might love men or a woman who might love women.
For this reason when it comes to examining issues in the consulting room that affect people in their daily lives – depression, anxiety, personality issues, relationship problems and so on – we often find somewhere in the background an issue of sexuality to some degree. If we examine identity, and there’s no getting away from it, then we bump up against sexuality practically every time.
Indeed, it is the threat of finding this very root that often brings some people to a halt in their therapy. Naturally they’d like to feel better but they’d rather not go there, fearing what it might reveal about them.
The irony is that the fear around this is usually the same unconscious fear driving their symptoms in the first place.
So why does sexuality have such a central place in our lives? The answer is because of the central place it has in our development. Modern psychoanalytic theory traces it back to our helpless infant state when we are at the beck and call of internal drives that are as insistent as they are confusing. To answer the demand of these internal drives – eg, hunger, thirst, discomfort, heat, cold, anxiousness, satisfaction - we look to our primary carer.
We develop the vague awareness that if we understand what it is that makes our carer respond to us then our needs will be met. This usually involves becoming whatever it is that triggers their desire to meet our needs.
A little later we notice our primary carer usually, but not exclusively, has another person on the scene. This is usually father and from this point on we realise that we don’t have the exclusive magic entity, whatever it is, that can trigger mother’s desire in our direction. Maybe father has it too or has a better version than we have?
Of course, we never find out if father actually does have it but even so we usually imagine he does. At this point we now take our early infantile state of helplessness in which our needs have to be met by the primary carer and we do an interesting thing.
We apply what we experience around us, as the third point in this interpersonal triangle facing two distinct genderised positions, the caring human figures that now come with a sense of sexual difference, and we come to the following understanding: if the father figure has the answer to this question of desire, then having one’s needs satisfied must be something to do with this genderised difference.
From the age of 5 or so we are vaguely aware that gender difference, in particular something that this male figure has, is the key to the whole thing.
Just to confuse you a little further, in modern psychoanalysis one’s biological make-up has nothing to do with defining oneself as a man or a woman. As a result, it is possible for a biological woman to take up the role of father in this scenario. But I’m going to stop here at this point. The next part of development needs a full explanation so I will continue on this theme next week.
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
People often ask what is the difference between psychoanalysis, psychiatry and psychology. Well, you could easily distinguish psychoanalysis from the other two on the basis that they have opted for a scientific based approach and in psychiatry’s case a pharmacologically based one. Their approach is based on observable, repeatable phenomena in order to arrive at general rules that explain human actions and offer a generally applicable treatment or cure for all forms of deviations from the norm.
Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, has focussed firmly on the unconscious as the hidden locus of our motivations, aspirations and actions. And each treatment is tailor made for the individual.
But there is another significant way in which the distinction can be made. Psychoanalysis has been committed from its very inception to the notion of sexuality. That is, a sexuality that runs to the root of who we are as human beings. Granted in our early infantile life this sexuality is more what Freud once called an ‘affectionate erotic interest’ in other beings around us.
But from quite early on, this affectionate interest becomes joined by a sexual stream that leads us eventually towards puberty and a developing maturation as a sexual being.
And why is sexuality so important to us? Well, while studies might tell us that men think about sex every three minutes, or that the average married couple might engage in sex 2.1 times per week, all of us are aware of our sexuality on a continuous, second by second basis. There is no part of our waking day (or our dreaming night) when we are not conscious of ourselves as either man or woman. This knowledge of who we are is genderised, it has a sexualised content.
Sexuality, therefore, is a central element in our sense of personal identity, whether in our private moments or in our interactions with others. This also encompasses the notion of being a man who might love men or a woman who might love women.
For this reason when it comes to examining issues in the consulting room that affect people in their daily lives – depression, anxiety, personality issues, relationship problems and so on – we often find somewhere in the background an issue of sexuality to some degree. If we examine identity, and there’s no getting away from it, then we bump up against sexuality practically every time.
Indeed, it is the threat of finding this very root that often brings some people to a halt in their therapy. Naturally they’d like to feel better but they’d rather not go there, fearing what it might reveal about them.
The irony is that the fear around this is usually the same unconscious fear driving their symptoms in the first place.
So why does sexuality have such a central place in our lives? The answer is because of the central place it has in our development. Modern psychoanalytic theory traces it back to our helpless infant state when we are at the beck and call of internal drives that are as insistent as they are confusing. To answer the demand of these internal drives – eg, hunger, thirst, discomfort, heat, cold, anxiousness, satisfaction - we look to our primary carer.
We develop the vague awareness that if we understand what it is that makes our carer respond to us then our needs will be met. This usually involves becoming whatever it is that triggers their desire to meet our needs.
A little later we notice our primary carer usually, but not exclusively, has another person on the scene. This is usually father and from this point on we realise that we don’t have the exclusive magic entity, whatever it is, that can trigger mother’s desire in our direction. Maybe father has it too or has a better version than we have?
Of course, we never find out if father actually does have it but even so we usually imagine he does. At this point we now take our early infantile state of helplessness in which our needs have to be met by the primary carer and we do an interesting thing.
We apply what we experience around us, as the third point in this interpersonal triangle facing two distinct genderised positions, the caring human figures that now come with a sense of sexual difference, and we come to the following understanding: if the father figure has the answer to this question of desire, then having one’s needs satisfied must be something to do with this genderised difference.
From the age of 5 or so we are vaguely aware that gender difference, in particular something that this male figure has, is the key to the whole thing.
Just to confuse you a little further, in modern psychoanalysis one’s biological make-up has nothing to do with defining oneself as a man or a woman. As a result, it is possible for a biological woman to take up the role of father in this scenario. But I’m going to stop here at this point. The next part of development needs a full explanation so I will continue on this theme next week.
Monday, January 18, 2010
Sex, Sexuality and Men
By Kevin Murphy M.Sc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
An otherwise healthy heterosexual man who finds himself unable to speak to women in social situations is more than likely going to consider himself deficient in some way. Equally, but perhaps even more so, an otherwise healthy heterosexual man who cannot perform sexually with a woman he finds attractive is going to consider himself deficient to the point of being abnormal.
Often these types of inability are allowed to knit themselves into the fabric of someone's life before they decide to do anything about it. And by the time they do decide to get help they can often be so panicked by it, and so exhausted from years of covering it up and trying to ‘think out’ a solution, that they approach therapy in an emergency state of mind. They want it fixed immediately and their eyes are so firmly fixed on the solution that they can’t concentrate on the cure.
But the cure, if it can be called such, is as much in the approach as it is in the method. It is easier to explain this notion if we first consider how men themselves conceptualise and verbalise the problem they believe they are trying to fix.
When a man presents in therapy with a proven inability to speak to women socially, he usually imagines it is simply a communication problem. Given the right lines, the right moves, the right tips from someone like Will Smith in the 2005 movie Hitch, he can perform as good as the next man. Unfortunately, the imaginary ‘next man’ always seems to perform better than he does and the more attractive the woman the less able he is to interact at any meaningful level.
These men also usually believe that they allowed themselves get out of the habit of speaking socially to women and so the skill was simply lost. They were too busy building a career, they lived in a quiet part of the world, they had a small circle of friends, or they simply never noticed it until recently. Whatever the reason, it now represents an unavoidable obstacle to their enjoyment of life and they want it removed.
By the same token, but in a qualitatively different way, the inability to perform sexually with a woman is also a burden and an obstacle. In this case, however, it is impossible for the man to claim, whatever about his partner, that it was something he failed to notice.
Men who suffer from this will generally have fewer excuses to tell themselves while having a greater number of excuses for their partners. Some men employ a strategy of dating a succession of different women so that failure to perform can continually be presented as being a ‘first time’ occurrence. Those with steady partners can often obfuscate around physical tiredness, stress, or direct their sexual activity to non-penetrative sex. Plus, men also have the option now of the medical route with prescription drugs to help them overcome the problem.
It might seem as if they are two vastly differently conditions, being unable to speak and being unable to perform sexually. And indeed in one sense they are. Often men who are unable to perform sexually are well capable of introducing themselves and speaking to women they have never met before. And, alternatively, men who are unable to speak to women socially are often quite capable of performing sexually. They are not necessarily inter-related to the extent that one follows the other.
But they are related in one sense: they are the manifestation of a man’s inability to represent himself as a man before a woman, in one case verbally and in the other sexually.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, the key question is ‘why is it before a woman that the man ‘fails’ ? Particularly when you consider that men who present with these problems are usually incredibly accomplished in many other areas of their lives.
As mentioned earlier, where there is no evidence of physical or intellectual disability, the popular understanding of an inability to speak is shyness, or lack of practise, or lack of confidence. Around an inability to perform sexually, you will hear the same reasons being trotted out.
But psychoanalytically the roots of these conditions are found in the very nature of the relationship between the man as a sexual being (in this case heterosexual) and the woman whom he encounters as an anxiety-inducing object (in the broadest sense of that latter term).
While we may have shifted the ground somewhat away from notions that most people will be familiar with, we are also shifting it away from notions that tend to stigmatise these conditions, namely that they are due to some inherently ‘unmanly’ features; far from it. We are are now in the realm of an inability to permit pleasure.
The relationship between the adult man and woman, in the pre-sexual or social phase and in the sexual phase itself, is for men a repetition of their earliest experiences of male-female encounters. For practically all of us, the first female figure in our lives is our mother and the first model of a relationship is between our parents or primary care givers.
After that we are usually playing out our own version, positively or negatively, of what we have learned as measured against the template of those experiences. This is not the same as saying men seek their mothers. That is far too simplistic. Psychoanalytic theory says two broad things: firstly that each individual has a particular set of experiences in this regard and so emerges unique and different to everyone else. There are no generalities in terms of outcome that apply.
Secondly, men in particular can often find themselves unable to perform verbally or sexually because they loved their mothers too much (or were loved too much by them), because their father figures were too ineffective often in spite of appearing strong and because conflicting questions arose at an early age around the issue of sexuality for them.
Their subsequent experiences of relationships from the earliest times were characterised by guilt, anxiousness, uncertainty, dependence and incomplete emotional satisfaction. And as you can see, in this position there is no possibility of pleasure.
But our earliest sense of interpersonal pleasure comes from the experience of loving and being loved. We love in order to ensure that we are loved in return. The experience of being loved in return can unwittingly turn into an overwhelming experience. In the same way that loving a primary carer too much or inappropriately can give rise to unconscious guilt, being loved too much in return can overwhelm and cause anxiety.
Both guilt and anxiety are the things that close us down as adults when we attempt to reach across the sexual divide either verbally or physically.
Finding our particular place in this complicated tapestry is the business of psychoanalysis. It is not a quick cure but it is one that offers rich rewards for those who approach it with patience and commitment. Like the newest theories around the concept of ‘mindfulness', it is best suited for those who focus on each step of the journey rather than remain fixed on the ultimate destination.
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
An otherwise healthy heterosexual man who finds himself unable to speak to women in social situations is more than likely going to consider himself deficient in some way. Equally, but perhaps even more so, an otherwise healthy heterosexual man who cannot perform sexually with a woman he finds attractive is going to consider himself deficient to the point of being abnormal.
Often these types of inability are allowed to knit themselves into the fabric of someone's life before they decide to do anything about it. And by the time they do decide to get help they can often be so panicked by it, and so exhausted from years of covering it up and trying to ‘think out’ a solution, that they approach therapy in an emergency state of mind. They want it fixed immediately and their eyes are so firmly fixed on the solution that they can’t concentrate on the cure.
But the cure, if it can be called such, is as much in the approach as it is in the method. It is easier to explain this notion if we first consider how men themselves conceptualise and verbalise the problem they believe they are trying to fix.
When a man presents in therapy with a proven inability to speak to women socially, he usually imagines it is simply a communication problem. Given the right lines, the right moves, the right tips from someone like Will Smith in the 2005 movie Hitch, he can perform as good as the next man. Unfortunately, the imaginary ‘next man’ always seems to perform better than he does and the more attractive the woman the less able he is to interact at any meaningful level.
These men also usually believe that they allowed themselves get out of the habit of speaking socially to women and so the skill was simply lost. They were too busy building a career, they lived in a quiet part of the world, they had a small circle of friends, or they simply never noticed it until recently. Whatever the reason, it now represents an unavoidable obstacle to their enjoyment of life and they want it removed.
By the same token, but in a qualitatively different way, the inability to perform sexually with a woman is also a burden and an obstacle. In this case, however, it is impossible for the man to claim, whatever about his partner, that it was something he failed to notice.
Men who suffer from this will generally have fewer excuses to tell themselves while having a greater number of excuses for their partners. Some men employ a strategy of dating a succession of different women so that failure to perform can continually be presented as being a ‘first time’ occurrence. Those with steady partners can often obfuscate around physical tiredness, stress, or direct their sexual activity to non-penetrative sex. Plus, men also have the option now of the medical route with prescription drugs to help them overcome the problem.
It might seem as if they are two vastly differently conditions, being unable to speak and being unable to perform sexually. And indeed in one sense they are. Often men who are unable to perform sexually are well capable of introducing themselves and speaking to women they have never met before. And, alternatively, men who are unable to speak to women socially are often quite capable of performing sexually. They are not necessarily inter-related to the extent that one follows the other.
But they are related in one sense: they are the manifestation of a man’s inability to represent himself as a man before a woman, in one case verbally and in the other sexually.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, the key question is ‘why is it before a woman that the man ‘fails’ ? Particularly when you consider that men who present with these problems are usually incredibly accomplished in many other areas of their lives.
As mentioned earlier, where there is no evidence of physical or intellectual disability, the popular understanding of an inability to speak is shyness, or lack of practise, or lack of confidence. Around an inability to perform sexually, you will hear the same reasons being trotted out.
But psychoanalytically the roots of these conditions are found in the very nature of the relationship between the man as a sexual being (in this case heterosexual) and the woman whom he encounters as an anxiety-inducing object (in the broadest sense of that latter term).
While we may have shifted the ground somewhat away from notions that most people will be familiar with, we are also shifting it away from notions that tend to stigmatise these conditions, namely that they are due to some inherently ‘unmanly’ features; far from it. We are are now in the realm of an inability to permit pleasure.
The relationship between the adult man and woman, in the pre-sexual or social phase and in the sexual phase itself, is for men a repetition of their earliest experiences of male-female encounters. For practically all of us, the first female figure in our lives is our mother and the first model of a relationship is between our parents or primary care givers.
After that we are usually playing out our own version, positively or negatively, of what we have learned as measured against the template of those experiences. This is not the same as saying men seek their mothers. That is far too simplistic. Psychoanalytic theory says two broad things: firstly that each individual has a particular set of experiences in this regard and so emerges unique and different to everyone else. There are no generalities in terms of outcome that apply.
Secondly, men in particular can often find themselves unable to perform verbally or sexually because they loved their mothers too much (or were loved too much by them), because their father figures were too ineffective often in spite of appearing strong and because conflicting questions arose at an early age around the issue of sexuality for them.
Their subsequent experiences of relationships from the earliest times were characterised by guilt, anxiousness, uncertainty, dependence and incomplete emotional satisfaction. And as you can see, in this position there is no possibility of pleasure.
But our earliest sense of interpersonal pleasure comes from the experience of loving and being loved. We love in order to ensure that we are loved in return. The experience of being loved in return can unwittingly turn into an overwhelming experience. In the same way that loving a primary carer too much or inappropriately can give rise to unconscious guilt, being loved too much in return can overwhelm and cause anxiety.
Both guilt and anxiety are the things that close us down as adults when we attempt to reach across the sexual divide either verbally or physically.
Finding our particular place in this complicated tapestry is the business of psychoanalysis. It is not a quick cure but it is one that offers rich rewards for those who approach it with patience and commitment. Like the newest theories around the concept of ‘mindfulness', it is best suited for those who focus on each step of the journey rather than remain fixed on the ultimate destination.
Monday, January 11, 2010
Of Saints and Sinners
By Kevin Murphy, M.Sc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
When someone regularly quotes God in their daily utterances we usually mark it as an unnecessary vanity or an irritating personality trait. Not everyone believes in God. And not everyone wants to have it thrust at them as the only possible way of living one’s life.
That’s why it becomes such a point of fascination when people who obsessively promote their religious beliefs, and by implication their special relationship with God, fall from their carefully constructed state of grace. We have a recent case of it with a politician in Northern Ireland; one that involves all the necessary ingredients for public scandal - infidelity, sexual impropriety, secret financial dealings and all delivered in a setting of power and privilege. Once again we find ourselves considering the fate of someone who was quick to point out the sins of others but who now finds themselves in the place of sinner.
There have been many other examples. Think of the number of high profile American evangelist preachers – men whose careers have been predicated on that ‘special understanding of’ and ‘special relationship with’ God – who have been exposed as hypocritical in their private lives.
Even closer to home, think of the number of priests who have had and continue to have sexual affairs even though this is supposedly prohibited to them. And that’s before we include those priests and religious orders who sexually and physically abused generations of children, a form of sexual perversion that requires an even more specialised perspective, although it is related.
Human frailty is a fact of life but when you stand back from the glaring contradiction at the heart of these behaviours, it is as if the pressure of putting oneself, or being put there by others, in a position of moral authority comes with a built-in danger of falling from that pedestal.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, however, the process by which this happens has been part of the theory for over a hundred years. In 1907, Freud wrote a paper called Obsessions and Religion in which he said that ‘complete backslidings into sin are more common among pious people’ than they are among the ordinary population.* What’s more, he went on to say that this generally gives rise to a whole new impetus for penance, effectively beginning the cycle of extreme religiosity all over again.
What, then, does the theory say as to why this type of situation arises in the first place? Well let’s look at the popular understanding first. We usually see a person who has lived an impeccably ordered and upright life engaging in an activity that is morally at odds with this usual pattern. Generally speaking, we explain it away on the basis that the pressure of work, the loneliness of the position, the effort of being so pure, or whatever, led them more than the rest of us to being especially prone and susceptible to temptation. All well and good.
Psychoanalysis, as you might expect, sees things differently. And bear in mind we are talking here about people who have a more intense relationship with religion and the concept of God than the general population. From a psychoanalytic perspective, therefore, an extreme religious belief – and we see many examples of this in the world today – is a form of obsessional neurosis.
Obsessional neurotics, among many other things, are characterised by compulsive behaviours and self-imposed prohibitions that bar them from a whole range of ideas and actions they consider to be ‘bad’. The person behaves on the face of it as if motivated by the purest of intentions. At another level, however, they also exhibit the same set of behaviours that you would see in a person wracked by guilt.
Freud honed in on the sense of guilt and suggested that it was unconscious and was the pious individual’s response to the earliest psychological experience of sexual impulses. These responses are then revived and renewed in later life as newer temptations arise and are pushed away equally vigorously. The guilt also carries with it a lurking sense of anxiety, combined with the expectation of punishment, and these must also be warded off at all cost, usually by ceremonial ritual.
It is the sense of guilt, as far as Freud is concerned, that allows the pious to say that they know they are miserable sinners at heart. So while their actions may send out a different signal publicly, all the praying, proselytising, ritualising and quoting of Scripture are personally directed defensive or protective measures.
The essential point at work is the renunciation of the underlying instinctual life that exists in all of us, in this case the sexual instinct. It is a suppression kept in place by force of will and supported by ritualised behaviours and the repetition of religious doctrine.
But instincts are much like a strong flowing river and Freud points out that any attempt at their suppression is usually inadequate. That is why we see so many examples of those who live on the moral high ground falling to earth. Their chosen way of embracing religious fervour is directly related to their experience of and relationship with their own underlying instincts, again predominantly sexual.
The irony is that despite living lives that bring them so close to the things that make us human, few of these fallen leaders seem to emerge any the wiser for it.
The best moral leaders are those who not only recognise their human frailties but who can manage to accept them and assimilate them into their journey to whatever god they believe in. History shows us that the most influential religious people are those who have managed to go to the heart of their own selves and accept what they have seen there.
* Freud, S., 1907, Standard Edition 9, Vintage – The Hogarth Press, London, p. 125.
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
When someone regularly quotes God in their daily utterances we usually mark it as an unnecessary vanity or an irritating personality trait. Not everyone believes in God. And not everyone wants to have it thrust at them as the only possible way of living one’s life.
That’s why it becomes such a point of fascination when people who obsessively promote their religious beliefs, and by implication their special relationship with God, fall from their carefully constructed state of grace. We have a recent case of it with a politician in Northern Ireland; one that involves all the necessary ingredients for public scandal - infidelity, sexual impropriety, secret financial dealings and all delivered in a setting of power and privilege. Once again we find ourselves considering the fate of someone who was quick to point out the sins of others but who now finds themselves in the place of sinner.
There have been many other examples. Think of the number of high profile American evangelist preachers – men whose careers have been predicated on that ‘special understanding of’ and ‘special relationship with’ God – who have been exposed as hypocritical in their private lives.
Even closer to home, think of the number of priests who have had and continue to have sexual affairs even though this is supposedly prohibited to them. And that’s before we include those priests and religious orders who sexually and physically abused generations of children, a form of sexual perversion that requires an even more specialised perspective, although it is related.
Human frailty is a fact of life but when you stand back from the glaring contradiction at the heart of these behaviours, it is as if the pressure of putting oneself, or being put there by others, in a position of moral authority comes with a built-in danger of falling from that pedestal.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, however, the process by which this happens has been part of the theory for over a hundred years. In 1907, Freud wrote a paper called Obsessions and Religion in which he said that ‘complete backslidings into sin are more common among pious people’ than they are among the ordinary population.* What’s more, he went on to say that this generally gives rise to a whole new impetus for penance, effectively beginning the cycle of extreme religiosity all over again.
What, then, does the theory say as to why this type of situation arises in the first place? Well let’s look at the popular understanding first. We usually see a person who has lived an impeccably ordered and upright life engaging in an activity that is morally at odds with this usual pattern. Generally speaking, we explain it away on the basis that the pressure of work, the loneliness of the position, the effort of being so pure, or whatever, led them more than the rest of us to being especially prone and susceptible to temptation. All well and good.
Psychoanalysis, as you might expect, sees things differently. And bear in mind we are talking here about people who have a more intense relationship with religion and the concept of God than the general population. From a psychoanalytic perspective, therefore, an extreme religious belief – and we see many examples of this in the world today – is a form of obsessional neurosis.
Obsessional neurotics, among many other things, are characterised by compulsive behaviours and self-imposed prohibitions that bar them from a whole range of ideas and actions they consider to be ‘bad’. The person behaves on the face of it as if motivated by the purest of intentions. At another level, however, they also exhibit the same set of behaviours that you would see in a person wracked by guilt.
Freud honed in on the sense of guilt and suggested that it was unconscious and was the pious individual’s response to the earliest psychological experience of sexual impulses. These responses are then revived and renewed in later life as newer temptations arise and are pushed away equally vigorously. The guilt also carries with it a lurking sense of anxiety, combined with the expectation of punishment, and these must also be warded off at all cost, usually by ceremonial ritual.
It is the sense of guilt, as far as Freud is concerned, that allows the pious to say that they know they are miserable sinners at heart. So while their actions may send out a different signal publicly, all the praying, proselytising, ritualising and quoting of Scripture are personally directed defensive or protective measures.
The essential point at work is the renunciation of the underlying instinctual life that exists in all of us, in this case the sexual instinct. It is a suppression kept in place by force of will and supported by ritualised behaviours and the repetition of religious doctrine.
But instincts are much like a strong flowing river and Freud points out that any attempt at their suppression is usually inadequate. That is why we see so many examples of those who live on the moral high ground falling to earth. Their chosen way of embracing religious fervour is directly related to their experience of and relationship with their own underlying instincts, again predominantly sexual.
The irony is that despite living lives that bring them so close to the things that make us human, few of these fallen leaders seem to emerge any the wiser for it.
The best moral leaders are those who not only recognise their human frailties but who can manage to accept them and assimilate them into their journey to whatever god they believe in. History shows us that the most influential religious people are those who have managed to go to the heart of their own selves and accept what they have seen there.
* Freud, S., 1907, Standard Edition 9, Vintage – The Hogarth Press, London, p. 125.
Monday, December 21, 2009
A Festival of Film
By Kevin Murphy,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
The link between psychoanalysis and film is, believe it or not, long established. At first glance it might seem as if they are strange bedfellows. What has the business of therapy got to do with cinema? Well, psychoanalysis was put on the world map, so to speak, by Freud’s most famous book ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ in 1900. And movies were born at much the same and, by their very nature, are the art form that most closely replicates the dream state. They are visual, switch from scene to scene, can frighten or inspire, and generally have a meaning that, blockbusters aside, is not immediately obvious and often cleverly disguised. As such, they provide rich pickings for psychoanalytic enquiry.
But it goes further than that. All the major neuroses, psychoses and perversions first outlined by Freud have been touched on by film makers over the last century in one way or another. One that immediately comes to mind is Hitchcock whose 1945 Spellbound with Ingrid Bergman and Gergory Peck had dream scenes designed by Salvador Dali. But there are endless more examples.
Every murder story has an undercurrent that psychoanalysis loves to examine. Every love story is a search for the missing part of all of us. Every comedy lets us access unconscious truths that would normally go unsaid. It goes on and on. In fact Freud himself was asked on numerous occasions to write a movie script with Hollywood offering him large sums to do so. He turned all the offers down.
And Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci, who was the honorary president of the First European Psychoanalytic Film Festival in 2001, has been in psychoanalysis since the late Sixties, and has spoken about the way in which this experience coloured the films he made immediately after his analysis began: Last Tango in Paris, The Conformist, The Spider's Stratagem, 1900 . 'I found that I had in my camera an additional lens,' he once said, 'which was not Kodak, not Zeiss, but Freud.'
This is by way of noting that a Festival of Psychoanalysis and Film, jointly sponsored by The Irish Forum for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (I.F.P.P.) and Independent Colleges Dublin , is taking place in Dublin on January 29th and 30th. I include details below for anyone who wants to book a place. It promises to be both interesting and entertaining. It will be held in Independent Colleges on Dawson Street, Dublin 2.
The theme of the festival is ‘Love and Madness’ and the format will be that participants will have a choice of three movies at any one time. Each movie will be introduced by the person chairing it and afterwards there is a discussion. For those within the psychoanalytic area it will be a celebration of film and a chance to hear and air views on their possible meanings, both intended and unintended. For those new to psychoanalytic thinking it will be a chance to offer new and different perspectives.
There is an opening reception at 5pm on Friday 29th after which the choice of movies starting at 6.35pm are the Oscar winning Black Narcissus (1947) which is a story of five young British nuns in the Himalayas who succumb to earthly temptation. There is also Lars and the Real Girl (2007), a comedy in which an awkwardly shy young man in a small northern town brings home the girl of his dreams to his brother and sister-in-law's home. The only problem is that she's not real - she's a sex doll Lars ordered off the Internet. The third movie of Friday evening is The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) which is about a 1950s Manhattan lavatory attendant, Tom Ripley, who borrows a Princeton jacket to play piano at a garden party and ends up going to extreme lengths take on another persona.
On Saturday 30th, the first three films at 10:00 a.m. are The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema which takes the viewer on an exhilarating ride through some of the greatest movies ever made. In it, philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek is variously untangling the famously baffling films of David Lynch, or overturning everything you thought you knew about Hitchcock. Alternatively you can see Estamira (2006) a documentary about a sixty something woman in Rio de Janeiro, who is an insane but happy woman that has been working for more than twenty years in the city dumpster in Gramacho. The third alternative of the morning session is Donnie Darko (2002) about a young man who doesn't get along too well with his family, his teachers and his
classmates; but he has a friend named Frank - a large bunny which only Donnie can see.
At 1.15pm on Saturday the three film choices are Safe (1995) which is about California housewife Carol who has it all but who succumbs to a curious illness and seeks to find a cure with a phony guru. Some Like it Hot (1959) is the second choice and is the classic Billy Wilder comedy with Jack Lemon, Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe. The third movie is The Soul Keeper (2003) which is the true story of Sabina Spielrein, a patient of both Freud and Jung. She has an affair with Jung which, when it becomes public, he denies.
Then at 4pm we have Reign Over Me (2007) which has Adam Sandler playing a riveting role as a man who loses everything and almost loses himself. He finds a path out of his situation through the friendship of an old college mate. The second choice is Betty Blue (1986), a French movie about the beautiful Betty who slips into madness despite the intense love of her boyfriend Zorg. And the third movie is Ai No Corrida (1977) one of the most notorious films in movie history that is based on a true story set in pre-War Japan about a man who engages in a perverse affair with his servant. Banned at its premiere at the New York Film Festival in 1976 it is not for the faint hearted.
So a veritable feast of cinema with the promise of lively discussion and debate afterwards. The organisers tell me that the cost is €25 for the full programme, €15 for one day and €5 for an individual film. Booking is essential and can be done through calling 01-6725058 or by emailing Caroline at caroline.mellows@independentcolleges.ie or Eve at eve.watson@independentcolleges.ie
* The next blog will appear on Tuesday January 12, 2010.
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
The link between psychoanalysis and film is, believe it or not, long established. At first glance it might seem as if they are strange bedfellows. What has the business of therapy got to do with cinema? Well, psychoanalysis was put on the world map, so to speak, by Freud’s most famous book ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ in 1900. And movies were born at much the same and, by their very nature, are the art form that most closely replicates the dream state. They are visual, switch from scene to scene, can frighten or inspire, and generally have a meaning that, blockbusters aside, is not immediately obvious and often cleverly disguised. As such, they provide rich pickings for psychoanalytic enquiry.
But it goes further than that. All the major neuroses, psychoses and perversions first outlined by Freud have been touched on by film makers over the last century in one way or another. One that immediately comes to mind is Hitchcock whose 1945 Spellbound with Ingrid Bergman and Gergory Peck had dream scenes designed by Salvador Dali. But there are endless more examples.
Every murder story has an undercurrent that psychoanalysis loves to examine. Every love story is a search for the missing part of all of us. Every comedy lets us access unconscious truths that would normally go unsaid. It goes on and on. In fact Freud himself was asked on numerous occasions to write a movie script with Hollywood offering him large sums to do so. He turned all the offers down.
And Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci, who was the honorary president of the First European Psychoanalytic Film Festival in 2001, has been in psychoanalysis since the late Sixties, and has spoken about the way in which this experience coloured the films he made immediately after his analysis began: Last Tango in Paris, The Conformist, The Spider's Stratagem, 1900 . 'I found that I had in my camera an additional lens,' he once said, 'which was not Kodak, not Zeiss, but Freud.'
This is by way of noting that a Festival of Psychoanalysis and Film, jointly sponsored by The Irish Forum for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (I.F.P.P.) and Independent Colleges Dublin , is taking place in Dublin on January 29th and 30th. I include details below for anyone who wants to book a place. It promises to be both interesting and entertaining. It will be held in Independent Colleges on Dawson Street, Dublin 2.
The theme of the festival is ‘Love and Madness’ and the format will be that participants will have a choice of three movies at any one time. Each movie will be introduced by the person chairing it and afterwards there is a discussion. For those within the psychoanalytic area it will be a celebration of film and a chance to hear and air views on their possible meanings, both intended and unintended. For those new to psychoanalytic thinking it will be a chance to offer new and different perspectives.
There is an opening reception at 5pm on Friday 29th after which the choice of movies starting at 6.35pm are the Oscar winning Black Narcissus (1947) which is a story of five young British nuns in the Himalayas who succumb to earthly temptation. There is also Lars and the Real Girl (2007), a comedy in which an awkwardly shy young man in a small northern town brings home the girl of his dreams to his brother and sister-in-law's home. The only problem is that she's not real - she's a sex doll Lars ordered off the Internet. The third movie of Friday evening is The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) which is about a 1950s Manhattan lavatory attendant, Tom Ripley, who borrows a Princeton jacket to play piano at a garden party and ends up going to extreme lengths take on another persona.
On Saturday 30th, the first three films at 10:00 a.m. are The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema which takes the viewer on an exhilarating ride through some of the greatest movies ever made. In it, philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek is variously untangling the famously baffling films of David Lynch, or overturning everything you thought you knew about Hitchcock. Alternatively you can see Estamira (2006) a documentary about a sixty something woman in Rio de Janeiro, who is an insane but happy woman that has been working for more than twenty years in the city dumpster in Gramacho. The third alternative of the morning session is Donnie Darko (2002) about a young man who doesn't get along too well with his family, his teachers and his
classmates; but he has a friend named Frank - a large bunny which only Donnie can see.
At 1.15pm on Saturday the three film choices are Safe (1995) which is about California housewife Carol who has it all but who succumbs to a curious illness and seeks to find a cure with a phony guru. Some Like it Hot (1959) is the second choice and is the classic Billy Wilder comedy with Jack Lemon, Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe. The third movie is The Soul Keeper (2003) which is the true story of Sabina Spielrein, a patient of both Freud and Jung. She has an affair with Jung which, when it becomes public, he denies.
Then at 4pm we have Reign Over Me (2007) which has Adam Sandler playing a riveting role as a man who loses everything and almost loses himself. He finds a path out of his situation through the friendship of an old college mate. The second choice is Betty Blue (1986), a French movie about the beautiful Betty who slips into madness despite the intense love of her boyfriend Zorg. And the third movie is Ai No Corrida (1977) one of the most notorious films in movie history that is based on a true story set in pre-War Japan about a man who engages in a perverse affair with his servant. Banned at its premiere at the New York Film Festival in 1976 it is not for the faint hearted.
So a veritable feast of cinema with the promise of lively discussion and debate afterwards. The organisers tell me that the cost is €25 for the full programme, €15 for one day and €5 for an individual film. Booking is essential and can be done through calling 01-6725058 or by emailing Caroline at caroline.mellows@independentcolleges.ie or Eve at eve.watson@independentcolleges.ie
* The next blog will appear on Tuesday January 12, 2010.
Monday, December 14, 2009
‘We Are Cured Because We Remember’
By Kevin Murphy, MSc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
I have had a number of clients in recent weeks who have all said the same thing in their own different and unique ways. They have no memory of their childhoods. That's not to say that I insist on people having a memory of one thing or another. One of the fundamental 'rules' of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy is that people choose to speak about whatever they want. There is no direction in terms of 'you must speak about this'. It is a freedom that runs to the heart of analytic work.
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
I have had a number of clients in recent weeks who have all said the same thing in their own different and unique ways. They have no memory of their childhoods. That's not to say that I insist on people having a memory of one thing or another. One of the fundamental 'rules' of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy is that people choose to speak about whatever they want. There is no direction in terms of 'you must speak about this'. It is a freedom that runs to the heart of analytic work.
That's why the comment had such resonance. These were very different people from different walks of life who each came up with the same statement by different routes. Each had a sense of simply not remembering large chunks of what is, essentially, their past. They did remember bits and pieces here and there but their own perception of it was that this part of their personal history was, to put it bluntly, forgotten.
The second interesting thing about it was that all of them saw nothing unusual about this. So essentially, you have a situation where people go through life unable to remember much about what they were like in their earliest experiences. And, hand in hand with that, they are quite accepting of it.
Now it should be said that there will always be parts of our childhood that remain forgotten. Very few of us remember every detail although there are some people who do. Remembering is a patchy experience for most of us. But the experience, and it is not uncommon to come across it in practice, of 'not remembering one's childhood' has other aspects to it.
Often we forget not because we simply have bad memories but because we unwittingly push things out of consciousness. Why do we do this? Sometimes yes the memory is bad, or sometimes the experience of being dependant was unpleasurable for us, or we may have acted in a way that we care not to recall, or we may have had a fright or a scare or a fearful moment or disappointed someone dear to us, or even disappointed ourselves. Our memories are being repressed all the time. Even as adults, we often forget the name of someone we are less than enamoured with, or we forget an appointment that we never really wanted to commit to, or we have no memory of a holiday that was ghastly. It is part of our defence system and sometimes it is useful.
But being unable to access or visualise memories of this kind can often have a downside too. You particularly find it with people whose lives are being badly affected with anxiety or depression or sexual issues or even obsessive and compulsive symptoms. These kinds of conditions are usually experienced by people as being of relatively recent origin. Most point to their teens as being the time of onset. And, for the most part, that is true in the sense that this was a period in their lives when they became aware of their symptoms.
But becoming aware of something is not the same thing as pinpointing when it started. Often you find that the roots of anxiety or depression or many other debilitating conditions reach much further back. The person who became badly affected by a teenage or late childhood experience was already emerging as the kind of child much earlier who would be susceptible to that.
This is why having access to memories can be so important. Understanding who we are now is as much to do with understanding the present as it is to do with understand our past. Someone once said that if we do not understand history we are doomed to repeat it and the same could be said of individuals. Within all our memories, especially the ones we cannot access, there is valuable meaning tied up and unexplored. There is also a degree of energy being used to keep it from view. Memories don't just stay inaccessible without some effort employed to keep them that way.
Yet it is surprising how many people believe that memories are of no value and should not be considered when looking for answers, or that they are intrinsically painful and should be left well alone, or that they are impossible to recall and so no effort should be made in that direction at all. And so a vital avenue of exploration gets closed off.
And yet what analytic practice teaches again and again is that memory can unfold slowly, bit by bit. Once one memory is recalled, then it is possible for another to follow and then another. A foothold is all that is needed and then the links which bind all our memories start to operate and more and more pictures emerge. If we even get a glimpse of who we once were it is of huge value in adding the missing piece to the jigsaw of who we are now.
French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan once said we don't remember because we are cured, we are cured because we remember. The act of remembering is the cure. Being able to remember is a sign of health. Being willing to remember is a sign that fear is abating and confidence is returning. It is the lifting of the veil, the new light that we shine into an old part of ourselves that brings new meaning. And we use this meaning to combat the emptiness, the lack, the void, the agonising puzzle that is at the heart of anxiety and depression and so many contemporary ailments.
- Next week I'll be highlighting an upcoming Psychoanalytic Festival of Film in Dublin.
Monday, December 7, 2009
Depression in the modern world
By Kevin Murphy, MSc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
It is good to see the popular advice around depression making it seem a less threatening ailment than it first appears. Pretty much wherever you look these days, the language you hear is usually the same - calming, practical, commonsensical. Seek help, talk to someone, don’t get isolated, consider medication, go to therapy, tell someone you trust how you are feeling. If your job is making you blue, change it. If you are feeling lonely, get out and make friends. The emphasis is on de-stigmatising and de-mystifying which, in themselves, are good things.
And when it comes to the causes of depression, which is a crucial question when in Western society it is reaching pandemic proportions, you usually find that the commonly provided view is that it is a mix of things: some social, personal and biological factors. It is hard to argue with any of this, especially as all the bases seem to be covered. Even genetics is usually thrown in for good measure.
Where psychoanalytic theory and practice differs from the usual run of advice and information, is that its focus on cause is more detailed, more directed at the individual sufferer and more relevant to our contemporary society. You could say it is a hand-stitched approach rather than a production line one.
Why? Because it includes two other sources of depression that other theories either ignore or don’t recognise. These are the unconscious, the individual unconscious of the person suffering depression, and the wider cultural context as it has evolved today.
This notion struck me at the recent 16th Annual Congress of the Association for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in Ireland (APPI) which was held in St. Vincent’s University Hospital, Dublin. The theme of the Congress was ‘Depression and Melancholia in Modern Times, A Psychoanalytic Understanding’. When the papers for the event are published I may do a blog summarising each of them, because they give a flavour of the unique way that psychoanalysis has in approaching this subject.
I won’t go into the history of it but if you want to read the seminal paper then Mourning and Melancholia (1917) by Freud is the place to go. Since then the theory has been steadily evolving and it was fascinating to hear what contemporary theorists and practitioners had to say about it at the recent Congress.
While most commonly accessible advice on depression focuses on the social, personal and biological aspects that cause depression, psychoanalysis hones in on the fundamental place that the individual takes up for significant others in his or her life. It posulates that we are driven to be the thing that drives important others. Put another way, our true desire is to be the desire of the other person. Depression, therefore, is essentially caused by a setback that sees us ‘tumbling out’ of this desire of the other. As perspectives go it is a fascinating one. But, equally, it is not something we are consciously aware of. It is all happening at the unconscious level.
Talking to people suffering from depression in the consulting room, it is striking how they speak the language of loss – this brings us back to Freud’s paper above, in which he was the first to see that depression had a great deal in common with mourning. They understand that something, or someone, has been lost to them but they do not know what it is in those people that has been lost to them. On the conscious level, they understand that they experience the unpleasant symptoms of depression – something within themselves has been lost – but they do not know what that something is - the loss is at an unconscious level. For psychoanalysis the thing that has been lost is this essential position within the human dialectics of desire, the place of being the desire of a significant or important other or others.
The theory also depicts how, as a result of this tumbling out of the desire of the other – a mother, a father, a main carer, a lover, a friend, a sibling - the individual is then thrown onto a trajectory of essentially attacking him or herself as a result of this failure. Failing to be the desire of an ‘other’ means that an ideal they had of themselves – something we all need to get us through life - has been damaged. And, because they were unable in some way to sustain this essential ideal, they then become the target for self-hate and self-loathing.
That’s the unconscious part. Then we have the wider cultural context. Changes in the role of fathers, in the methods of child rearing, in the responsibilities of mothers, in the value systems of society, in the importance of ideals of bodily perfection, in the decline of religion and authority, in the rise of scientific and capitalist discourses and in a devaluation of human individuality, has meant that it is harder for people to find sustainable ideals. By this I mean, ideals that are within reach, that come without too much expectation, that are credible and workable.
In the Victorian era people lived according to a widely understood and often unspoken command to ‘obey’. It was an era characterised by obedience, self denial, the repression of bodily desire and obedience to church, state, community and family. We can never go back to that because the world has evolved, for better or worse, depending on your point of view.
Today, we live according to a widely understood and often unspoken command to ‘enjoy’. For some, it is an easy one to follow because it matches perfectly our contemporary desire to escape, de-stress, find meaning, be happy, be free, experiment, give free rein to our curiosity. For those who suffer depression, however, it is just as ferocious and unrelenting a command as the earlier one to obey. And this, among many other reasons, is how psychoanalysis is different to other approaches.
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
It is good to see the popular advice around depression making it seem a less threatening ailment than it first appears. Pretty much wherever you look these days, the language you hear is usually the same - calming, practical, commonsensical. Seek help, talk to someone, don’t get isolated, consider medication, go to therapy, tell someone you trust how you are feeling. If your job is making you blue, change it. If you are feeling lonely, get out and make friends. The emphasis is on de-stigmatising and de-mystifying which, in themselves, are good things.
And when it comes to the causes of depression, which is a crucial question when in Western society it is reaching pandemic proportions, you usually find that the commonly provided view is that it is a mix of things: some social, personal and biological factors. It is hard to argue with any of this, especially as all the bases seem to be covered. Even genetics is usually thrown in for good measure.
Where psychoanalytic theory and practice differs from the usual run of advice and information, is that its focus on cause is more detailed, more directed at the individual sufferer and more relevant to our contemporary society. You could say it is a hand-stitched approach rather than a production line one.
Why? Because it includes two other sources of depression that other theories either ignore or don’t recognise. These are the unconscious, the individual unconscious of the person suffering depression, and the wider cultural context as it has evolved today.
This notion struck me at the recent 16th Annual Congress of the Association for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in Ireland (APPI) which was held in St. Vincent’s University Hospital, Dublin. The theme of the Congress was ‘Depression and Melancholia in Modern Times, A Psychoanalytic Understanding’. When the papers for the event are published I may do a blog summarising each of them, because they give a flavour of the unique way that psychoanalysis has in approaching this subject.
I won’t go into the history of it but if you want to read the seminal paper then Mourning and Melancholia (1917) by Freud is the place to go. Since then the theory has been steadily evolving and it was fascinating to hear what contemporary theorists and practitioners had to say about it at the recent Congress.
While most commonly accessible advice on depression focuses on the social, personal and biological aspects that cause depression, psychoanalysis hones in on the fundamental place that the individual takes up for significant others in his or her life. It posulates that we are driven to be the thing that drives important others. Put another way, our true desire is to be the desire of the other person. Depression, therefore, is essentially caused by a setback that sees us ‘tumbling out’ of this desire of the other. As perspectives go it is a fascinating one. But, equally, it is not something we are consciously aware of. It is all happening at the unconscious level.
Talking to people suffering from depression in the consulting room, it is striking how they speak the language of loss – this brings us back to Freud’s paper above, in which he was the first to see that depression had a great deal in common with mourning. They understand that something, or someone, has been lost to them but they do not know what it is in those people that has been lost to them. On the conscious level, they understand that they experience the unpleasant symptoms of depression – something within themselves has been lost – but they do not know what that something is - the loss is at an unconscious level. For psychoanalysis the thing that has been lost is this essential position within the human dialectics of desire, the place of being the desire of a significant or important other or others.
The theory also depicts how, as a result of this tumbling out of the desire of the other – a mother, a father, a main carer, a lover, a friend, a sibling - the individual is then thrown onto a trajectory of essentially attacking him or herself as a result of this failure. Failing to be the desire of an ‘other’ means that an ideal they had of themselves – something we all need to get us through life - has been damaged. And, because they were unable in some way to sustain this essential ideal, they then become the target for self-hate and self-loathing.
That’s the unconscious part. Then we have the wider cultural context. Changes in the role of fathers, in the methods of child rearing, in the responsibilities of mothers, in the value systems of society, in the importance of ideals of bodily perfection, in the decline of religion and authority, in the rise of scientific and capitalist discourses and in a devaluation of human individuality, has meant that it is harder for people to find sustainable ideals. By this I mean, ideals that are within reach, that come without too much expectation, that are credible and workable.
In the Victorian era people lived according to a widely understood and often unspoken command to ‘obey’. It was an era characterised by obedience, self denial, the repression of bodily desire and obedience to church, state, community and family. We can never go back to that because the world has evolved, for better or worse, depending on your point of view.
Today, we live according to a widely understood and often unspoken command to ‘enjoy’. For some, it is an easy one to follow because it matches perfectly our contemporary desire to escape, de-stress, find meaning, be happy, be free, experiment, give free rein to our curiosity. For those who suffer depression, however, it is just as ferocious and unrelenting a command as the earlier one to obey. And this, among many other reasons, is how psychoanalysis is different to other approaches.
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