Projection is a ubiquitous feature of human nature.  It is the cornerstone of evolution; what makes us human; the effect of an opposable thumb.  As soon as we could throw, we could make things happen; we could control the future (see  Projection, the missile of evolution. December 24^th, 2010), but this required us to perform the mental trick of imagination; to think the way things might be, to make believe. 

Psychological  projection performs that same mental trick, it transfers what we feel onto somebody else, to imagine it is they who have those some feelings and attitudes.  So we protect ourselves from  psychic damage by projecting the bad stuff onto  those we recognise already possess some of the characteristics we want to get rid of.  ‘She’s just so selfish.’  ‘I can’t trust him’.   He’s so lazy, careless, unreliable, fussy, messy.   This happens  all the time.  Just listen to how ‘a gossip of girls’ on the train criticise absent ‘friends’.  Look at how politicians try to achieve a semblance of dominance and control by rubbishing their competitors; how newspapers take hold of that and amplify it.  But it’s not just bad stuff.  Idealisation is a kind of projection.  When we admire somebody, respect somebody, fall in love with somebody, we transfer our wishes for how would like to be onto that person.  They become a mentor, a role model, an object of desire.  

Projection starts, like everything else, in childhood.   Children deal with uncomfortable feelings like fear and anger by externalising them.  First identify your enemy, locate all the bad stuff into them and then you can justify an attack.  Or identify the one you admire, locate all your wishes in that person and make them your best friend.  Projection is a mental trick.  There are goodies and baddies; in my childhood these were cowboys and Indians; the English and the Germans.  How differently you see things as you grow up.   Maturity is a state of recognising the bad feelings, taking them back and containing them, realising that what we criticise in other people is also part of us, accepting our essential humanity.    

Groups, organisations, institutions, governments, states, do it all the time.  They are pathologically split; they operate at a very childlike manner and project all their own concealed characteristics, especially the bad ones like unreliability, inadequacy, lack of sophistication, to say nothing of selfishness and ruthlessness onto  their competitors.  Colonel Gadaffi is currently the embodiment of all evil though only a few years ago, he was our special friend.  But the only thing that’s changed is our own projections.   Members of an exclusive culture,  music critics, art enthusiasts, historians, theatre buffs, vintage car collectors, can tend to puff themselves up by broadcasting their lacunae of esoterica to an audience they assume knows nothing and can be diminished by their ignorance.    

But projection can only really work in society if others identify with it.  This is what the psycholanalysts (another in- group) call projective identification or to put it in everyday speak, ‘how others make us feel’.   In voodoo, pointing the bone can cause others to feel so guilty by inference whether they are or not, that they slink away and die.  They have been ostracised from the tribe; they are not worthy to belong anymore and they cannot therefore survive.  Social exclusion is a powerful force; guilt and shame, powerful identifications.  People who have done something shameful to attract the projections of others, who use it as a shield for their own shame.  And it’s always the ones with most to be ashamed of that seek out those they can offload on to.  Those who feel unhappy make those who are close to them unhappy too  

Projective identification operates in so many aspects of human behaviour.   Bullies  can’t contain their own fear, so they make others frightened of them.  Suspicious people are secretive and engender mistrust and lies.  Needy people cannot give and induce need in others.  Those who are envious put on airs and graces to try to make others envy them.  Lovers who feel insecure may do something to make their partners feel jealous.  Unhappy and lonely people make those who are close to them unhappy too because at least they are toegether in their misery.  Teachers, who are not confident,  can make their students feel stupid,  but equally the over-confident student can make a teacher defensive.  ‘You make me feel sick,  you make me so angry, you just make me depressed.’    These are all common identifications within relationships. 

Those who carry a grudge are attracted to political groups, but can be very dangerous because they can cause others to feel bad and act out.   So did Ian Brady make Myra Hindley do it.  Projective identification is never a justification in law but it happens. 

War is mutual projection as each side used propaganda to unsettle the other.  Sport is the same.  Winning the mental battle wins the war or the tennis match.  Do not flinch; maintain the upper hand.   And we the observers so want the underdog, the good guy to win, we will do all we can to inspire him with our enthusiasm.  It almost worked with Tim and we’re trying our best with Andy, the nearly men of British tennis.      

Some doctors are so anxious they can make their patients terrified.  Michael Balint, the author of ‘The Doctor, the Patient and the Illness’ recognised this.  Patients pass the anxiety of not knowing what’s wrong with them on to the doctor, so that he orders more tests in order not to appear a failure.  Or their attitude may make their doctors feel angry, depressed, tired.   Emotional transference is such a powerful phenomenon.  As a therapist, I had always marvelled at how one client could make me feel so wound up and energetic; the next so tired I could fall asleep and have actually done so, but they were lying on the couch and I was sitting behind them and they never noticed.  

Actors are masters of projection.  They tune into their audience and can make us all identify with the emotions they project.  I have had two actors in therapy.  One made me feel so angry,  I actually had chest pain and needed to ask him to leave.  The other made me feel such surges of desire and compassion, it was all I could do not to take her in my arms and love her right there and then.     

But it’s not all negative.  We can also use projection to bring out the best in people.  Look at the way babies project their hunger onto their mother, who identifies with it and feeds them.  Falling in love feeds upon itself.   We project our beliefs and feelings into those whom we love and if they love us too and are a suitable object for our projection, they identify our desire and act in a way that intensifies it. 

Lovers  give each other those  feelings of security, excitement, togetherness, they’ve been looking for all their life, but what then happens to the bad feelings?   Well, if they can never let this love become as imperfect as the rest of life, then these feelings are projected out onto others, and the exclusive couple clings together united against the world, unable to trust anybody else.   But most marriages are not like that.  They are states of mutual projection and identification, and partners try to look after their own well being  by making their partners shoulder the blame and feel bad.  You never think!  You’re totally selfish!   I just can’t rely on you.  In a way they need the other to get rid of the bad feelings.   When it works well, it’s a trade off.    One may make the other feel alive while the other projects a feeling of safety.  It works.  The problems come when one of them changes the dynamic; meets somebody else, suffers a setback that destroys their confidence,  accepts a job that satisfies their needs.     

Projective identification requires us to think.  When somebody behaves angrily or badly to us, we need to reflect on our own attitude and behaviour and the reason for it.  How did it all start?  What was the trigger, the fear?   We all have responsibility in our functioning society to bring out the best in people, the most constructive response,  but in a narcissistic, self seeking society, people all too often have to have their own way, because ‘we’re worth it’.   It may be unfashionable to say, but I do believe that we have the friends, the colleagues, the children and the relationships we deserve because we help to make them the way they are for us

Why do we trust some people and not others?  Why do we admire some people?   Why do some people make us uncomfortable?  Is it because they remind us of significant figures in our lives; our mother, our father, a brother or sister, a lover, a husband, wife, a teacher?   Are they suitable objects for our projections?  

Projection is a ubiquitous feature of human nature.  It is the cornerstone of evolution; what makes us human; the effect of an opposable thumb.  As soon as we could throw, we could make things happen; we could control the future (see  Projection, the missile of evolution. December 24^th, 2010), but this required us to perform the mental trick of imagination; to think the way things might be, to make believe. 

Psychological  projection performs that same mental trick, it transfers what we feel onto somebody else, to imagine it is they who have those some feelings and attitudes.  So we protect ourselves from  psychic damage by projecting the bad stuff onto  those we recognise already possess some of the characteristics we want to get rid of.  ‘She’s just so selfish.’  ‘I can’t trust him’.   He’s so lazy, careless, unreliable, fussy, messy.   This happens  all the time.  Just listen to how ‘a gossip of girls’ on the train criticise absent ‘friends’.  Look at how politicians try to achieve a semblance of dominance and control by rubbishing their competitors; how newspapers take hold of that and amplify it.  But it’s not just bad stuff.  Idealisation is a kind of projection.  When we admire somebody, respect somebody, fall in love with somebody, we transfer our wishes for how would like to be onto that person.  They become a mentor, a role model, an object of desire.  

Projection starts, like everything else, in childhood.   Children deal with uncomfortable feelings like fear and anger by externalising them.  First identify your enemy, locate all the bad stuff into them and then you can justify an attack.  Or identify the one you admire, locate all your wishes in that person and make them your best friend.  Projection is a mental trick.  There are goodies and baddies; in my childhood these were cowboys and Indians; the English and the Germans.  How differently you see things as you grow up.   Maturity is a state of recognising the bad feelings, taking them back and containing them, realising that what we criticise in other people is also part of us, accepting our essential humanity.    

Groups, organisations, institutions, governments, states, do it all the time.  They are pathologically split; they operate at a very childlike manner and project all their own concealed characteristics, especially the bad ones like unreliability, inadequacy, lack of sophistication, to say nothing of selfishness and ruthlessness onto  their competitors.  Colonel Gadaffi is currently the embodiment of all evil though only a few years ago, he was our special friend.  But the only thing that’s changed is our own projections.   Members of an exclusive culture,  music critics, art enthusiasts, historians, theatre buffs, vintage car collectors, can tend to puff themselves up by broadcasting their lacunae of esoterica to an audience they assume knows nothing and can be diminished by their ignorance.    

But projection can only really work in society if others identify with it.  This is what the psycholanalysts (another in- group) call projective identification or to put it in everyday speak, ‘how others make us feel’.   In voodoo, pointing the bone can cause others to feel so guilty by inference whether they are or not, that they slink away and die.  They have been ostracised from the tribe; they are not worthy to belong anymore and they cannot therefore survive.  Social exclusion is a powerful force; guilt and shame, powerful identifications.  People who have done something shameful to attract the projections of others, who use it as a shield for their own shame.  And it’s always the ones with most to be ashamed of that seek out those they can offload on to.  Those who feel unhappy make those who are close to them unhappy too  

Projective identification operates in so many aspects of human behaviour.   Bullies  can’t contain their own fear, so they make others frightened of them.  Suspicious people are secretive and engender mistrust and lies.  Needy people cannot give and induce need in others.  Those who are envious put on airs and graces to try to make others envy them.  Lovers who feel insecure may do something to make their partners feel jealous.  Unhappy and lonely people make those who are close to them unhappy too because at least they are toegether in their misery.  Teachers, who are not confident,  can make their students feel stupid,  but equally the over-confident student can make a teacher defensive.  ‘You make me feel sick,  you make me so angry, you just make me depressed.’    These are all common identifications within relationships. 

Those who carry a grudge are attracted to political groups, but can be very dangerous because they can cause others to feel bad and act out.   So did Ian Brady make Myra Hindley do it.  Projective identification is never a justification in law but it happens. 

War is mutual projection as each side used propaganda to unsettle the other.  Sport is the same.  Winning the mental battle wins the war or the tennis match.  Do not flinch; maintain the upper hand.   And we the observers so want the underdog, the good guy to win, we will do all we can to inspire him with our enthusiasm.  It almost worked with Tim and we’re trying our best with Andy, the nearly men of British tennis.      

Some doctors are so anxious they can make their patients terrified.  Michael Balint, the author of ‘The Doctor, the Patient and the Illness’ recognised this.  Patients pass the anxiety of not knowing what’s wrong with them on to the doctor, so that he orders more tests in order not to appear a failure.  Or their attitude may make their doctors feel angry, depressed, tired.   Emotional transference is such a powerful phenomenon.  As a therapist, I had always marvelled at how one client could make me feel so wound up and energetic; the next so tired I could fall asleep and have actually done so, but they were lying on the couch and I was sitting behind them and they never noticed.  

Actors are masters of projection.  They tune into their audience and can make us all identify with the emotions they project.  I have had two actors in therapy.  One made me feel so angry,  I actually had chest pain and needed to ask him to leave.  The other made me feel such surges of desire and compassion, it was all I could do not to take her in my arms and love her right there and then.     

But it’s not all negative.  We can also use projection to bring out the best in people.  Look at the way babies project their hunger onto their mother, who identifies with it and feeds them.  Falling in love feeds upon itself.   We project our beliefs and feelings into those whom we love and if they love us too and are a suitable object for our projection, they identify our desire and act in a way that intensifies it. 

Lovers  give each other those  feelings of security, excitement, togetherness, they’ve been looking for all their life, but what then happens to the bad feelings?   Well, if they can never let this love become as imperfect as the rest of life, then these feelings are projected out onto others, and the exclusive couple clings together united against the world, unable to trust anybody else.   But most marriages are not like that.  They are states of mutual projection and identification, and partners try to look after their own well being  by making their partners shoulder the blame and feel bad.  You never think!  You’re totally selfish!   I just can’t rely on you.  In a way they need the other to get rid of the bad feelings.   When it works well, it’s a trade off.    One may make the other feel alive while the other projects a feeling of safety.  It works.  The problems come when one of them changes the dynamic; meets somebody else, suffers a setback that destroys their confidence,  accepts a job that satisfies their needs.     

Projective identification requires us to think.  When somebody behaves angrily or badly to us, we need to reflect on our own attitude and behaviour and the reason for it.  How did it all start?  What was the trigger, the fear?   We all have responsibility in our functioning society to bring out the best in people, the most constructive response,  but in a narcissistic, self seeking society, people all too often have to have their own way, because ‘we’re worth it’.   It may be unfashionable to say, but I do believe that we have the friends, the colleagues, the children and the relationships we deserve because we help to make them the way they are for us

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                     Christopher Marlow (The Jew of Malta)

What made people like Guy  Burgess or Anthony Blunt rebel against their society, betray their  country and spy for the soviet union?  Was it a reaction against the seemingly inexorable rise of Fascism, or was it the rejection of a brutal class system?   Did their experience of having to hide their homosexuality from a bigoted society cause them to turn against the very establishment they were supposed to be members of?   I blame the father.  ‘Another Country’  highlights the projection of the strict father to be found in the hypocrisy and snobbery of the English public school.  Guy Burgess was at Eton.  The school was run not by the Masters, but by the Gods, the only boys who were allowed to wear coloured waistcoats.  And Guy, the aesthete, aspired to be elected to the Pantheon (if only to display the waistcoat).   

Miranda Carter, in her biography of Anthony Blunt, claims that his miserable time at public school, fostered a subversive but also superior attitude toward British society. This potent combination – insecurity and moral superiority – fed into a belief that this chosen elite had the right to be exempt from mere conventional morality for the good of the masses.

The regime of the Gods was repressive, militaristic and essentially corrupt, a system designed to create the rulers of Empire.  Guy was beautiful, louche, artistic and openly homosexual. He was confident enough to love whom he wanted;  after all several of the Gods had been his lovers.  And he was clever enough to be feared.  But when Martineau is discovered in flagrante in the boiler room and hangs himself in shame, the Gods clamp down on homosexuality in order to contain the threat of scandal.  Guy at first escapes public humiliation by threatening to expose his lovers.  But as desperate as he is to become a God, he is also desperately in love with James.  And this love leads him to indiscretion and exposure.  So he shields James him from possible expulsion, accepts the blame and the punishment and is customarily debarred from elevation to the Pantheon. 

So, was it his humiliation at school that that made Guy Burgess turn against the English class system and betray state secrets to the Russians?   Was it rejection by a system he secretly admired and aspired to?  Was it envy, revenge, the feeling of the outsider?   Was it then, on the verge of his adult life,  that he realized how much the British class system relied on outward appearance and how devastating being openly gay was for a diplomatic career?  Was that the point that he allowed himself to become radicalised by his best friend Tommy Judd – an intellectually committed Communist?

Or was it in part his betrayal by his adored mother?   In a tender moment with James at night in a punt on the river, he discloses how he had to release his mother, trapped in bed after his father collapsed and died while making love to her.  Quite soon afterwards, she married an army officer. 

Another Country portrays the road to betrayal as a personal, emotional crisis, rather than an intellectual identification.  As a young man, Guy was portrayed as mischievous, sensitive, intelligent, in love, but tragically crushed by the juggernaut of the English class system? He was being bred to inflict rule and punishment in the real world by playing at Gods at school. And against this inhumanity he rebelled.

The theme was composed, as with all of us, early in Burgess’s life, and had to be worked through.  Always an outsider, he ended his life, a broken, isolated, embittered man, living in a seedy apartment in Moscow with only the faded sepia prints of Eton hanging on his walls to remind him of the turning point.     

‘Another Country’ made me think of my time at Taunton School.  In the early sixties, the ancien regime of the English public schools still held sway; Taunton was still attempting to produce young men to run the Empire, even though that institution was all but dismantled.   They still had a combined cadet force; they still do, I think.   Sport, an essential component of the school curriculum,  encouraged teamwork, loyalty and identification with the system.  The establishment still didn’t foster original thinking and expression; it indoctrinated.  At the time, I had a strong sense of duty.  My parents admired that system and I felt bound by obligation to uphold it, but I never felt that emotional sense of belonging that many of my friends of that time still do.  My life has been patterned by ambivalence.   

For one of my school friends, Maurice, Taunton school fostered a deep sense of entitlement and rebellion.  What he did at school could be contained. Now, fifty years on, he is pitted against the Justice system, the General Medical Council and the House of Lords all at the same time.  But for every one damaged by the system, there were nine created by it.  Sir Peter Westmacott, one time our ambassador in Paris, was one of our contemporaries at school. 

‘Another Country’, starred Rupert Everett as Guy and a younger Colin Firth as Tommy Judd.  It was  directed by Marek Kanievska in 1984.

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Oh My God!   Or as Mrs ‘Odge might say,  ‘Well, ‘eres a pretty pickle.’     

So why isn’t it easy?    Why shouldn’t people be free to love whom they like when they like?  Why do people get hurt?   Why do they feel guilty?  Why does it always turn bad?

Gilda is one of those delightful women, beautiful, intelligent, impulsive; a loving and free spirit with a real zest for life.  Otto and Leo are two sensitive and sensuous young men, who are both enjoying the  exhilaration of success.   Otto is a painter;  Leo an up and coming playwright.   They are young, and in love.   Gilda first chooses Otto and they live in a romantic garret in Paris.  Then Leo returns after a successful run in New York and she abandons Otto to live with Leo in London.  Then a year or so later, Otto returns and after a steamy night, she leaves them both and the next we know she has married the older, safer and rather tedious Ernest and become established as a New York socialite and art dealer.  Meanwhile, Otto and Leo get drunk, realise how much they love each other and go off round the world on a sequence of slow boats.  Two years later, they turn up in Ernest and Gilda’s apartment in New York, whereupon Gilda decides to leave Ernest and live with Otto and Leo in a ménage a trois.  

It is all so wonderfully romantic and amusing – so Noel Coward!   But is this so much a design for living as a strategy for loving?   And will it ever work?   One feels that it’s alright for Gilda.  She has the attentions of two handsome, successful young men who both adore her, but how will she cope with their love for each other?   It may be so exciting for the moment, but what will she do when they both get a bit fed up with her attention seeking and want a bit of basic male bonding?   Go off to Ernest again?   And can you imagine all three of them in bed together; the competitiveness, the jealousies?    Which of the men will go first and where?  How will she hold them together?  How will she satisfy two enormous egos?   For this to work, it would mean them all being terribly responsible and level headed.  When has Gilda ever been level headed?    

It’s not so much that it’s morally wrong.   It is, of course, but morality is a social construct;  there to protect us, not just an edict to be ignored.   Any one of us can love more than one person deeply,  but it is impossible to maintain an intimate relationship with two people for very long without resorting to a whole complicated web of secrecy and deception.  

When people fall in love, they expose the most vulnerable aspects of themselves.  It’s a courageous act of absolute trust and it risks nothing less than devastation of the personality through destruction of meaning.   Gilda and Leo and Otto may think they may have acquired sufficient experience and wisdom to maintain a stable triangle, but it takes enough time for any of us to sort out a relationship with one other person; how much more effort would it take to sort out a three-way intimacy?  And how long would it last without resorting to the rot of deception.    And finally, would it be worth it?  Some of the recent literature to come out of the middle east, illustrates the complex  jealousies of polygamy.  I can’t see polyandry being any better.    

Still, it’s wonderful entertainment and any good art; it makes you think. 

Design for Living by Noel Coward is currently playing at The Old Vic.  Lisa Dillon is delicious and delightful as Gilda (and that dress!),  though it was clear who was in charge.  The actors who played Otto and Leo were less credible.  And one had to feel some sympathy for Ernest, though his marriage to Gilda seemed less a meeting of minds and souls than a business arrangement, a mutual exploitation.  It was originally banned from performance on the London Stage.    

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Dance is the physical expression of romantic love.  Every week, we witness transformation in dance.    Under the guidance of their professional partners,  C list celebrities; rugby players, singers, actors, even politicians, who have never before trod the fantastic light,  develop the confidence and attitude to dance.   And as they improve, the relationship between the couples gets closer until they almost seem to merge and move together as one.  It’s like watching people fall in love.   The women all lose weight and glow with passion; the men perform like Gods.   Urged on by the comperes and the judges, week by week they take more risk.    We fear the crash – but at the same time desire it.  This is compulsive viewing.      

Pamela Stephenson,  psychotherapist and one time comedienne, now one of the contestants,  described it like this.  ‘ Suddenly you’re in this hot bed of emotion,  locking loins, arguing, fighting, making up, hugging.   The professionals are very attractive, very intimate, very attentive, very emotional.  It’s very hard not to fall in love a bit and that for some,  can be very confusing.’ 

Contestants may enjoy the sensation of having their heads in the clouds but they have to keep their feet on the ground.  Nabokov once defined fame as a stranger caught in their own snapshot, but  they mustn’t let themselves believe in it.  Celebrities are commodities for projection.  We, the voyeurs, enjoy the frisson with desire and dread.      

Love is not for the faint hearted.   It’s a dangerous business; full of conflict and ambivalence.   Dance, like courtship displays in birds and mammals,  expresses the desire, the fear, the aggression, the affection.   

If you truly love somebody,  all meaning is invested in that person.  Even the most mundane aspects of life are enhanced by the most intense colours, textures and tones.  But if that love fails, that intensity suddenly evaporates and life loses its meaning.  It’s all or nothing, life or death.  So the dreadful danger of love is the disillusion and devastatation;  the death of the spirit that ensues from a catastrophic loss of meaning.   The professionals understand this;  they never really lose themselves in the dance, they have the technique to act ‘as if’. 

But how precarious for those learning to dance for the first time;  they stand on the edge,  make to go and then hold back, and their body can expresses the ambivalence and spoil the performance.  They lack the technique that experience provides, to make it up.  They have to dance with their heart or not at all.  That’s why the judges, especially the effusive Bruno Tonioli, are all the while exhorting contestants to let go.  Love can make any of us dance perfectly!      

But it can be  so difficult to trust.  If we give ourselves to another person, then we lose our autonomy.  We may crave the freedom of love, but we fear the dependence,  because therein lies self deception and delusion.   People don’t fall in love with another person; they fall in love with themselves or more accurately,  the enhanced image of themselves they see in their lover’s eyes?   

Fear of solitude and nothingness encourages us to take refuge in love, but fear of entrapment  may cause us to flee it.  Dance is the enactment of the ambivalent;  cynicism; the elevated eyebrow of fear? 

But let’s be positive. Love is such wonderful make believe.  Even by proxy,  it has the potential to create such poignant joy.   How dull life would be without that dangerous hope?      

So take care but not that much.  And keeeeeep  dancing!   

The same applies to the bland,  self satisfied conviction, the  hand-me-down intimation of bliss that is spiritual love.  Do you really need to relinquish your soul in the service of your God?   Spiritual leaders grow fat on the respect and adoration of their disciples.   And the faithful thrive on the illusion of righteousness.   But human beings never got anywhere by sitting on a mountain contemplating nirvana just because they don’t dare to express their own thoughts and desires.  Religions have always been based on fear.  

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Some time later, they meet again in Paris.  Jules and Catherine invite Jim to their mill on the Seine.   Jim tells Catherine he is going marry Gilberta.  Catherine produces a revolver and threatens to shoot him.  He wrestles the revolver off her and escapes through the window.  Some time later she calls him.  They all go for a picnic by the river.  Catherine invites Jim to go for a drive with her; she has something to tell him and she invites Jules to watch them.  She then drives the car off a broken bridge into the river, killing them both.  Jules is destroyed.   

So what kind of person is Catherine?  They say she is La Reine.  She has to be obeyed.  Impulsive, controlling, charismatic and sexually provocative, she is the sort of free spirit that has men in her thrall.  Although they might be able to possess  her sexually, they can’t tie her down.  She will always find someone else who is more interesting, more exciting.  What is the point of life if it is not exciting?  Catherine falls in love at the drop of a eyelid, but she cannot love.  She cannot tolerate the day to day living, the routine of it, the struggles. She is too hedonistic, too easily dissatisfied.  She has to have drama.  Like a spoilt child, she needs  attention; it’s her life’s blood.  But if she doesn’t get it, look out, there will be trouble; she will betray, abandon, and is even prepared to kill.   She has a split personality.  She can be delightful and entertaining when it suits her, but she also has a dark, murderous side with  little empathy and no sense of guilt or shame.  She will manipulate and exploit men to achieve power and excitement, but never quite realises how she hurts them.  She never thinks how her behaviour affects Jules or her daughter.  She can’t help it.  It’s the way she is.  Her men either have to worship her or be destroyed.  Jim refuses to play the game and is sacrificed.  Jules has to suffer – forever.

Jeanne Moreau plays Catherine in Truffaut’s 1962 masterpiece of French cinema.

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When Charles Bovary, recently widowed, asked her father if he could court her, she was excited.  How romantic!  Charles clearly adored her.  The reality was less exciting.  She was only a teenager and like another teenager who married another Charles, she found her husband stuffy and boring and her way of life dull.  She knew how attractive she was to men and felt she had wasted herself with Charles.  Still, she did her best, she tried to make her husband’s life as comfortable as possible, but inside she was becoming desperate.  The invitation to the Viscount’s Ball was a rare opportunity to blossom.  Her card was full; she danced every dance, but none with Charles.  But he was not a suspicious or devious man; he liked to see the admiring glances men gave to Emma.  He was pleased she was happy. 

But the ball just added to her frustration.  She found the Viscount’s embossed cigar case on the way home and treasured it.  She began to dream of exciting liaison’s with other men.  She began to flirt.  Soon she had attracted Leon, a handsome though impecunious clerk.  Emma would slip out for clandestine liaisons at the bottom of the garden after Charles had gone to sleep.  She would entice Leon to abscond from his work in the afternoon.  She was taking enormous risks but she didn’t care; there were in love and that the only thing worth living for.   When Leon took fright and left her to go to work in Rouen, Emma was devastated.  She hardly went out of her room and complained of her palpitations. 

Not long afterwards, she attracted the interest of Rodolphe, a wealthy landowner who had recently bought the chateau outside the village.  He was not a timid man and made his intentions known to Emma from the start.  Wasn’t this what she had always dreamed of?  Rodolphe was confident.  He knew how to romance a woman and soon they were lovers, seizing every opportunity during the day to meet.  Often Emma would hurry to the chateau to spend her afternoons with Rodolphe.  She couldn’t get enough of him.  But she was running up enormous bills at the haberdasher and store in the village to maintain an increasingly exotic life style.  She persuaded Rodolphe to run away with her.  She would leave Charles, their daughter Berthe, and escape to Paris and from there to Italy.  They would be so happy.  It was sad, but for Rodolphe, Emma was becoming an embarrassing liability.  She was wonderful and entrancing, but he had to get away.  So he chose the coward’s route and left her a note as he sped through the village in his coach. 

Emma collapsed when she read the note and was ill for months.  She became pale, lost weight, had frequent attacks of the vapours.  She had little interest in the house, her appearance or even Berthe, but then she met Leon again and their relationship flared into a dangerous passion that threatened his new occupation in Rouen.  Besides, she was getting into serious financial difficulties and was being sued for debt.  Eventually, she could hide their precarious situation from Charles any longer; a notice was posted in the village square to the effect that their furniture was to be seized and sold off. 

Emma implored Leon to help; she even tried to encourage him to steal the money she needed from his firm.  She then went to Rodolphe, but he rejected her too.  So she persuaded the pharmacist’s assistant to open the store  where she discovered the arsenic and took a generous amount.  Charles spared nothing on the funeral; he doted on little Berthe, who had her mothers looks and charms.  But a year after Emma’s death, he opened Emma’s bureau and found all of the love letters.   Poor Berthe found him that evening dead in his chair.  He had had a heart attack. 

So how are we to understand Emma?  She was certainly an incurable romantic and she had the looks and the style to go with it.  She was the kind of person, who could illuminate a room.  She had a dangerous sexual energy, that would respond to any romantic impulse, she did not stop to see the consequences of her actions,  she wanted something or someone and she had to have them, no matter the cost or the risk.  But if any spurned her, she would cast them off without a second thought.  Those she loved to distraction, she would hate to destruction.  In the end there was only one way out for her; the romantic death.

Flaubert’s is a classic description of the hysterical personality.  All the features are there, the impulsive behaviour, the splitting, the fantasy life, the failure to consider consequences, the decline to an inevitable conclusion.  He would have been well aware of contemporary psychiatric descriptions of hysteria.  Nevertheless his novel shocked bourgeois society.  So is Madame Bovary a novel of its time?  Not at all!  Although Hysteria has been replaced in psychiatric nomenclature by borderline or narcissistic personality disorder, it has not disappeared.  People like Emma are still around – in fact the our current celebrity and media culture encourage it.  And hysteria remains the best term for it and Flaubert’s the best description.

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 A woman had to be sharp to survive,  she had to be adaptable, use all her skills and wiles to gain advantage of her sexuality and the susceptibility of men to it in order to survive.   There was a lot of pretence.  Men feared this.  Seductive women were often accused of witchcraft.  In 1620, King James issued instruction to his clergy to ‘inveigh vehemently against the insolence of our women’.   

Thomas Middleton was a contemporary of Shakespeare.  His play ‘Women Beware Women’ explored this fear of women.  So when Bianca is raped by the Duke, she quickly sees advantage in this and abandons Leantia, who allows himself to be Livia’s toy boy and is richly rewarded for it.  And Isabella quickly learns to pander to the lusts of the fool she is betrothed to while all the time continuing her passion for her uncle, Hippolyta.  And Livia pulls the strings.  It is she who convinces Isabella that she is not really related to her uncle and removes the restrictions on her passion.  It is she who invites, she invites Leantia’s mother and her daughter in law, the newly-wed Bianca to her house, where she is taken by Guardino and shown erotic sculptures before being locked in and raped by the Duke.  It is not for nothing that Leantio’s mother, playing chess,  observes that Livia is cunning at the game. She finds it exciting and is favoured by the Duke.     

Accused of lust by his brother, the Cardinal, the Duke tells Hippolyta that his sister has been dishonoured by Leantia, who must be killed, freeing Bianca for marriage.  In her grief, Livia reveals Isabella and Hippolyta’s incest.  In a grotesque masked ball to celebrate the Duke’s marriage, Isabella is raped and dies, Hippolyta is murdered.  The Duke drinks the poison meant for his brother, the Cardinal.  Bianca drains the cup and dies.   The Cardinal is the only one left standing.  Good prevails in the end and the Cardinal inherits the throne. 

 Sexual politics in the seventeenth century is more about lust and greed, compromise and corruption.  Love doesn’t come into it, but fear does; the fear of condemnation by the people and excommunication from the church.  The moral of the play is simple.  Greed and lust never work, even if you are a Duke.   Even today, those with power and money, cannot get away with everything they want.  John Terry found this out.  So did Tiger Woods. 

‘I convinced myself that normal rules did not apply.  I thought I could get away with whatever I wanted.  I felt I had worked hard my entire life and deserved to enjoy all the temptations around me.  I felt I was entitled.  Thanks to money and fame, I didn’t have to go far to find them’. 

Linda Davies, a former investment banker, draws parallels with the financial crisis.  The Bankers were able to exploit their investors’ greed and lust for power to create an illusory wealth and politicians, reluctant to kill the golden goose, turned a blind eye.  The result; disaster on a global scale.

Women Beware Women is currently playing at The National Theatre.   

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It is 1885 and there’s  trouble in the Balkans – as usual!  Sergius, so ambitious for glory, leads a foolhardy cavalry charge against the Serbian machine guns.  He’s not to know that the Serbians had been issued the wrong ammunition and could not retaliate.  So his glorious charge scatters the enemy, who disperse into the countryside.   The population are advised to keep their doors and windows bolted, but Bluntschli, a Swiss mercenary , shins up a drainpipe into stumbles into the bedroom of Raina, who is not only the daughter of the Bulgarian commander , Colonel Petkoff, but is also betrothed to the heroic Sergius. 

Raina is moved by Bluntschli’s fear.  She gives him chocolate creams to eat and hides him.  He falls asleep on her bed.  Raina and her mother, Catherine, then help him escape by disguising his uniform under their father’s old coat. 

A few months later,  peace breaks out and Petkoff  and Sergius return from the war.  Bluntschli, who has been promoted captain, calls to return the coat.  It’s the stuff of farce.  Petkoff and Sergius must not know their wife and fiancée concealed a deserter, but how can the return of the missing coat with Raina’s signed photograph,’ to my chocolate cream soldier’, in the pocket.  But Petkoff and Sergius are more  bluster than brain.  They welcome Bluntschi  as an honourable foe and use his practical abilities to help them organise the demobilisation of their troops and horses.  

Bluntschli is a professional.   For him, war is a job of work.  He keeps his head down, does his duty and waits for the peace.  By comparison, his erstwhile opponents appear ridiculously pompous.  Petkoff is actually scared of his troops and wants nothing more than to retire to his country house.  Sergius is a liability. He would sacrifice the safety of his troops in his desperate quest for personal glory. So much for honour! 

But what of love?   Sergius is not in love with Raina; he does not know or understand her.   Besides, he can’t keep his hands off Louka,  Raina’s wily, cynical maid, who sees the little boy inside and is more of a challenge.  Raina, meanwhile, has developed a soft spot for her chocolate cream soldier; he understands her and makes her laugh.  Even her parents are won over when they learn of his inheritance. 

In ‘Arms and the Man’, George Bernard Shaw points a satirical Irish finger at the ridiculous hypocrisy of honour and romance.  As Bluntschli explains, sensible people are frightened, they lie, they deceive, they pretend.  They may like to think themselves honourable but faced with  mortal danger, they will do all they can to stay alive.  Only the mad will sacrifice everything for love and glory.

What Shaw is writing about, in cold psychoanalytical language, is narcissism.  Sergius doesn’t love Raina;  he is merely in love with the reflection of his own image in her eyes.  The beautiful and spirited Raina makes him feel much more of a man than he knows he really is.  He lacks confidence and can only gain self esteem by exciting the admiration of others.  He lives in the regard of others.  It is his life blood.  Without it he dies.  His need is so desperate, he will risk everything, even the lives of his men, the future of his country.    

He even feels compelled  to seek regard in the cynical arms of Louka, though he knows that she will be the one to destroy him.  An overweening desire for fame and celebrity is always accompanied by a tendency to self destruct.  Think of George Best, Gary Glitter, Paul Gasgoine,  Jade Goody.     

And for Raina, the commanders daughter who cannot go to war herself, Sergius is the embodiment of her own inbred projections of bravery and honour, the only man worthy of her love;  it’s glory by proxy.   The  narcissistic love object has to be impressive; it doesn’t work otherwise.  Raina is in love with how the attentions of so brave a man can make her feel adorable, admirable, desirable, loveable; all a self centred woman could even want.       

So are we to believe that romance and glory are but the delusions of a fragile psyche,  make believe; the stories we tell ourselves in order to conceal a reality we can’t accept.    Bluntschli explains that humanity is never that wonderful or glorious,  but he’s an administrator, the son of a hotel owner.  But do we always want to be that sensible?  There’s no meaning in that and life without meaning is not worth living.  Don’t we need make believe too?   If not, what would be the point of literature, music, the visual arts?   The moments of madness, falling in love, crazy projects, bring us life and permit change.  Banish them and we become depressed and die a little more.   But contain them,  allow our healthy narcissism, our self confidence and esteem to receive nourishment  of novelty  from friends and family and who knows, we could even be happy.     

‘The world will always welcome lovers.  As time goes by.’        

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Ingrid Bergman was for my sixpence, the greatest film actress there ever was.  She was a natural, right from the start.  She loved the camera; it held no fears for her.  Maybe it was because she enjoyed posing for her photographer father, Julius, so much.  He once commented that one of the children he photographed would some day become famous.  Little did he know that this would be his beloved Ingrid. 

It was perhaps the tragedies of her early life that gave Ingrid that look in the eyes, that orphan appeal for love, that came straight through the camera and said ‘Hold me, look after me.  I love only you and I need you so badly!   It was irresistable!   

Ingrid was deeply affected by the story of  her parents romance. Her beautiful mother, Friedel, had fallen in love with Julius at the age of 15 when she saw him sketching in the park but had to wait seven years before her parents considered his prospects sufficient to look after daughter.  The marriage was blissfully happy, tinged only with a wistful sadness when Frieda’s first two children died in infancy.  Then Ingrid arrived and was adored by both her parents, but just two years later Freida died.  Ingrid had little recollection of her mother, and was loved and cherished by her father, but when she was  just 12, her beloved father died of stomach cancer.  At the time she consoled herself by reading  Friedel’s love letters to Julius during their long period of waiting.  This may well have implanted the longing for romantic love that shines through the eyes in all her screen parts. 

The eyes have it.  Ingrid was not an iconic beauty, she was tall, had slightly prominent teeth , refused to pluck her full eyebrows, but she looked healthy, had flawless skin and that look.  Always the look!  And she was a chum, the girl next door you could lark about with.  She had a mischievous penchant for practical jokes.   

After her father died, Ingrid was looked after by aunts and uncles, who deeply opposed her  ambitions to be an actress, but relented after exacting a promise that if she failed the auditions for the Royal Stockholm Theatre at her first attempt she would abandon all notions of the stage as a career.  She didn’t.  She was a natural.  Film roles followed and by the age of 21 she was a celebrity.  

 Over the next ten years she moved to Hollywood and made a sequence of films.  She was an instant box office success.  People loved her natural beauty, her innocence, her girlishness, her intelligence, her sense of fun.  But Ingrid was a young woman who knew what she wanted and how to get it.  She was a bird with balls.  She would deliberately take on the difficult roles which didn’t always cast her in the best light.  She loved acting.  She loved the challenge and the celebrity.  She loved being loved.

But in real life she was always looking for that special romance, that perfect bond of intimacy, that constant warmth of feeling;  the man who would adore her, cherish her and keep her safe enough to pursue her ambitions.  She wanted the consistency of a deeply intimate relationship to give her the confidence to risk the excitement of the challenge of a new part.  The two were not always compatible and her men did not necessarily want to play the house husband to the famous actress. 

She married Petter Lindstrom, who was a dentist, when she was just 22.  He was her first long term relationship and was somewhat older – maybe that was part of the attraction for her;  Petter could look after her.  But he was a bit cool and distant and tried to curb her exuberance, control her behaviour, watch her weight.   He didn’t like the way she frowned and somewhat  jealous of her relationships with her leading men, although she took her responsibities as wife and mother very seriously and was not unfaithful.   By 1943, at the height of her fame, she suggested to Petter they might get divorced.  There was nobody else but the marriage had rigidified and her career had left it behind.    

Then she met the mercurial maverick director, Roberto Rossellini.  It was love at first sight.  He was married with two children, she with one.  There were difficulties getting divorces.  People were scandalised when she moved to Rome and began living openly with Rossellini and so soon obviously pregnant.   She got terrible letters. Offers of parts in America dried up overnight.  Besides, Rosselini made it clear that he wouldn’t allow her to go back to America or to work for any other director but him.  Their professional association arrested both their careers.  Their affair turned her from goddess to whore overnight.   She needed to draw on great reserves of courage to live through the scandal of her affair and marriage to Rosellini, and the separation from her daughter, Pia and from Petter, whom she still needed as a friend and helpmate.  But she was in love and at times of her greatest loneliness and fear, she could always escape into her role in the play.    

She had three children very quickly by Rosselini, Robin and the twins, Isabella and Ingrid Isotto,  but her relationship with Rosselino was becoming difficult.  He worked like an artist, he wasn’t disciplined.  He used amateurs and never knew the script in advance, expecting the actors to improvise. He would suddenly leave the set and retire to his bed for days.  Ingrid was a professional, she needed consistency.  He gave her the kind of controlling inconsistency where only he knew the answers, which  came to him in a flash of inspiration.  She longed to work with other directors, but Ingrid was his property.   Eventually after seven years, he went on an extended project to India.  He was away a year and returned with his own Indian family. 

Ingrid’s subsequent marriage with the Swedish producer, Lars Schmidt went much the same way.  She was working again, rebuilding her career and may have neglected the marriage a bit, taken Lars for granted.  There was an element of self destruct in Ingrid.  When she had the love she craved, the consistency she needed, she became insecure and bored and needed to escape into another role.  She couldn’t hang on to the marriage.  It sort of drifted away.  Ingrid was always comfortable with acting.  It was life that made her nervous.

 ‘The greatest loneliness’, she once said, ‘was the loss of intimacy with someone you had once been close to, of being with them and finding you have lost the ability to connect.’ 

Ingrid ignored the lump in her breast at first  because she was in a play and about to start a new film.  By the time she got it treated, it had spread, but she carried on acting, often in great pain.  Her last project was a  portrayal  of Golda Meir; she kept her grossly swollen arm elevated all night so she could do the scene where she was required to lift both arms up in a typical Golda Meir gesture – she was that professional.  As she got older she became more forthright, if she didn’t want to do something, she didn’t.   She had no need of pretences any more.

Impulsive, amusing, needy, sentimental,  though at the same time kind and generous and loyal to her friends,  Ingrid was never the celebrity; she could not be aloof.  She needed to connect to people too much.  But there was always something of the orphan about her, clinging on to her previous emotional securities, meaningful objects, letters, photographs, friends and dreams.   She was the beautiful empty princess.  ‘My life was always concerned with finding and holding on to love,’ she commented towards the end.  She never stopped looking for the quality of intimacy her parents had enjoyed but had never realised that their relationship too would have transformed into something more mundane had it lasted.  Better for us, the millions who have fallen in love with the image that Ingrid expressed,  that it didn’t.   

 Ingrid Bergman died of breast cancer in 1982 on her 67^th birthday.  The English edition of Charlotte Chandler’s biography ‘Ingrid’ was published by Simon and Schuster in 2007.

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The fact that she was a celebrity helped, of course.  Violet Gordon Woodhouse was one of the greatest musicians of her generation,  a virtuoso on the keyboard, who did so much to recapture the unique qualities of the harpsichord and clavichord  and interpret the compositions of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and  Scarlatti.  People would be enraptured by her musicianship.  It was not only technically perfect, but she seemed to have a unique insight into the mind of the composer.  Hearing her play was a rare and exquisite emotional experience. She put the whole of herself into the  performance, expressing every nuance without sentimentality.  But she expended the same emotional intensity to her relationships as she did to her music.  Her vivacity could enthral her audience and leave them feeling  they had been touched by fairy dust.   Not only men but women too fell in love with her often for years.   

But it wasn’t her virtuosity that attracted people.  And it wasn’t her beauty either. She was as petite as a Dresden figurine and beautifully clothed, but she had a receding chin, large dark eyes  and a somewhat swarthy complexion inherited from her grandmother who was a Sumatran princess (although that was a closely guarded secret).  It was perhaps a certain imperiousness,  a sense of personality that made people feel they were in the audience of somebody special, a presence that demanded attention, devotion and adulation.  Her music was the expression of her personaility.  She was a Queen.  

These days we would recognize Violet as having a narcissistic personality.  Although she could be kind and compassionate when it suited her, it was her needs that always took precedence.  Violet did what she wanted, how she wanted and with whom she wanted.  She had known that she possessed a special gift from a very young age and expected to be spoilt.  She was the only one of her siblings who could charm their irascible father, and her musical gift meant, like other gifted musicians – Yehudi Menuhin comes to mind – she was set apart as the centre of attention at an early age.  Violet could always get her way though willpower and childlike magnetism.   Dorothy, her sister, was the sole repository of envy. 

But selfishness does not come without a dark side.  Violet could be autocratic and even vicious when people opposed her.  She tended to encourage the submissiveness in women she had despised in her mother and if she felt she was not being given the deference she deserved, she would create such a mood of disapproval that it would reduce those around her to a state of misery.  But she didn’t hold a grudge for long.  She always saw the best in people and had an impulsive, bubbly nature, a, provocative gaiety that was irresistible and tended to bring out the same in others.  She made people feel good – and if people feel good they tend to hang around.   She needed affirmation and she was clever enough to know how to get it and keep it. 

 Violet never had children, and could be criticised for not giving her ‘husbands’ the freedom to have families of their own.  One wonders what kind of men they were.  Some have even suggested they might have been gay, though there is no indication of that.  And they did not seem weak men.  Bill, Max and Dennis served with great bravery and distinction in the Great War, all three attaining the rank of Lt. Colonel.   No, the arrangement seemed to suit them.  And once Violet had decided she wanted something, she would not give it up.            

Violet Gordon Woodhouse was an expert. She knew how to get her needs met without compromising herself.  She had the brass neck to lead her life as she wished but still avoid the condemnation of society.  She had an imperiousness that would brook no opposition.  But as long as she got her own way, there was little malice in Violet and she gave more than she received.  She was one of these rare charismatic personalities who bring joy into people’s lives and leave the world a better place than they found it.      

As her biographer, Jessica Douglas-Home wrote,  ‘Life enhancing people are rarely perfect – their flaws are part of their vitality and their fascination. Violet possessed an exquisite selfishness, but despite her well-deserved reputation for generosity, friendship and warmth, she could also be cold and critical.  But those who loved her forgave her everything. 

Violet, the biography of Violet Gordon Woodhouse, was written be her niece, Jessica Douglas Home and published in 1996.  It’s a good read!   

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