Nick Read » Mindbodydoc

How you make me feel; projection and its identification.

Nick Read — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 21:06:44 +0000

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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The past is another country. Or is it?

Nick Read — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 20:18:38 +0000

Friar Barnadine: “Thou hast committed–”
Barabas: “Fornication– but that was in another country / And besides, the wench is dead.”

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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There, but for the grace of God; a perspective on psychosis.

Nick Read — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 12:17:03 +0000

You’re driving me mad, I’m going crazy, I’m losing my mind, he’s just daft, it just doesn’t make sense! How many times a day do you hear such sentiments? How often do you express them yourself? Our lives are so complex, so pressurised that we have to work very hard to keep things together. And yet, we don’t see too many overtly mad people these days; most are medicated; a few locked up in institutions. But we can all show pockets of paranoia when our buttons are pressed. We can all go mad, especially if deprived of social contact and support. There is, however, a distinction between being mad and going mad and some people are just nearer the edge than others.

The medical term for madness is psychosis, which essentially implies having beliefs, attitudes and behaviour that are antithetic to social convention. Psychosis is not the only category of mental illness; there is also neurosis. The old adage captures the distinction nicely. A neurotic thinks that 2 and 2 equals 4 and is worried about it. A psychotic just knows that 2 and 2 equals five. So neurosis is a disturbance of doubt while psychosis is a condition of certainty and conviction. They are styles of being, different but not immiscible. Although people may try to evade the torment of neurosis by developing delusions , they can still be tortured by convictions of victimisation, devastated by fears of fragmentation. Life for somebody who is psychotic, can literally be hell! Even when things are calm, there is no peace from their internal thoughts and voices. No wonder so many people who have a psychotic breakdown, chose to end their own lives.

The problem is not so much how we can distinguish between neurosis and psychosis but how we can we distinguish each from so called ‘normality’. ‘Normal’ is a social construct, defined by reference to the culture a person comes from. The Christian notion of God, his reincarnation as Jesus Christ, the virgin birth and the resurrection, is considered quite normal in the United States of America and much of the western world. But as Richard Dawkins has emphasised, what is God but a massive delusion? The only reason a religious conviction is not considered mad is that the same delusion is shared by others. Falling in love is another delusion that is widely encouraged by society even though it has such massive potential to shatter a person’s private web of meaning.

Psychosis is a distortion of meaning and as such, a logical consequence of being human. We can all go a bit mad at times. Human beings are creatures of meaning, compelled to find reasons for their existance and what happens. They have a big brains that can see into the future, and a deep seated fear of what might exist in that void. They have the imagination to invent stories and can be both comforted or tortured by the delusions they create.

Meaning develops through relationship with others, initially our mother, father, brothers, sisters, grandparents and later, a wider circle of family and friends , teachers, mentors, books and television. It is conditioned by society, represents society and maintains us within that society. Therefore, if we regard psychosis as an alternative or distorted state of meaning, it is a social disease. It stands to reason that those who grow up isolated, conditioned by perceptions that are incompletely normalised by others, develop their own fragile belief structure that can set them apart from others. Alone in a black and white world, where people are either idealised or denigrated, they can tend to be suspicious and blame others. All the good stuff is located in themselves while the bad stuff is projected out though the opposite may attain.

But there are shades of isolation. People who live on the cognitive borders of society are able to function quite normally for much of the time, but may exhibit uncompromising and paranoid ways of thinking when their meaning is challenged. Mental illness might be regarded as a defence against the loss of meaning induced by change.

As creatures whose identity is created from meaning, we are all vulnerable to change. Any of us can be overwhelmed and devastated by an event that is completely outside our experience, and most of us, especially the more solitary, adopt strategies to prevent the devastation caused by a breakdown of meaning. Some may assume an idealised persona, a special identity that offers a role and purpose. This may be reinforced by special musical, literary or artistic talents perfected through the years of isolation. Others may mould themselves to their environment, sensing what others want and adapting to it. Women are said to be better at this, readily adapting their personality to the needs of a new partner. And finally some keep it all together by encapsulating themselves in an all consuming interest, an obession for work, a dedication, a faith.

We can see examples of such behaviours in our colleagues, friends, family and in ourselves, but some people are more fragile, more susceptible to change and more clearly defended against it. But fragility is no reason for segregation. Society needs to achieve a democratisation of belief and thought. People with conviction and creativity can be exciting and inspiring. Most effective politicians have some spark of madness in them. They can be dangerous unless reined in by their civil servants. Society advances, not by the most stable, healthy members of society, but by those independent thinkers, who may at times be considered mad by their colleagues. Darwin, Einstein, Newton, and many of the great writers, artists and composers have all been considered mad at times. Ignaz Semelweis, whose hygeinic principles saved the lives of millions of women from puerperal fever, spent much of his life incarcerated in mental institutions.

Some of the ideas in this article were inspired by a talk on psychotherapy and the psychoses given by Darian Leader at the Biennial Conference of the Hallam Institute of Psychotherapy on October 2nd.

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Ghosts in the Nursery

Nick Read — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 12:06:11 +0000

Henry James leaves his stories open to his readers interpretations. That is the source of their intrigue. The ‘Turn of the Screw’ is his most famous and most chilling novel, but why? Is it because it explores, albeit obliquely, that most horrific of topics, the loss of innocence.

The governess is both an unreliable and uninformed narrator and as such gives the tale its edgy somewhat hysterical character. She has been employed by their uncle to look after Flora and Miles’, in effect to become their parent. We assume their real parents have died. On the day of her departure for Bly, the large country house, where they live, she is given a letter saying that Miles has been expelled from school for some undisclosed misdemeanour.

She meets the children and is instantly charmed. They are polite, intelligent and kind, but there is something a little too knowing about them. She leans from the housekeeper, Miss Grose, that both Miss Jessel, her predecessor and Peter Quint the butler, died shortly after leaving Bly, but she sees what Miss Grose identifies as apparitions of them in the grounds and the house. Jessel and Quint seem to have some malign hold over the children, and the governess fears for their safety. What on earth has been going on? There are dark hints of sexual abuse. The apparitions increase and the children appear to collude in the deception but by the end we begin to wonder whether they are just creations of the governess’s overheated imagination. Flora is taken away for her own safety by Miss Grose. Miles remains with the governess but dies in her arms while she is trying to prevent him from looking at Quint.

The Victorians were very interested in ghosts and long exposures required to take contemporary photographic images reated ‘evidence’ of all kinds of ephemera and phantasms; lost objects. The children, we assume, had already experienced loss, first of their parents, then of their uncle and the servants he employed to look after them. The governess, we learn, has also experienced loss and perhaps her neediness creates strong attachments first with the absent uncle and with the children, but does she also create ghosts? Are not only Peter Quint and Miss Jessel but also Ms Grose and even the children projections of her fearful imagination?

If what happens cannot be processed (with the aid of a parental figure), then they become very frightening. Is this fear what the governess experiences and transfers to the children? Benjamin Britten, who wrote an opera of the same name, had a deep empathy with the character, Miles. He was sent away by his beloved mother to boarding school where he was abused. But did he later abuse his choir boys, as suggested by Alan Bennett’s new play, A Habit of Art?

The richness of James’s story lies in the gaps, which create space for the authors interpretations. There are links with mourning and melancholia, for example. Mourning is a process of working through memories until they wear away, but in melancholia, the aggrieved identifies with the lost object (the ghost) and blames himself. ‘The shadow of the object falls on the ego’. The tendency for the melancholic to identify with the person who has let them down is known in psychoanalytical terminology as projective identification. This process defends against the realities of separation by assuming the absent identity; in other words, becoming the ghost. We sense the horror of this in the two innocents.

Melancholia may be thought of as a condition of too much empathy, too much forgiveness. It’s a disease of therapists; too much ruth; ruthful instead of ruthless. The one who is lost remains as a ghost inside us and because we can’t evict them, we have to suffer. Natasha Kampusch was kidnapped as a child and held in a cellar for 8 years but felt protective towards her kidnapper and guilty about escaping and telling. Children often think its their fault when parents split up. Lovers frequently blame themselves when they are rejected because they can’t bear to lose their beloved.

Ghosts in the Nursery was an event organised by the Harry Guntrip Psychotherapy Trust on October 9^th to coincide with a performance of Britten’s ‘A Turn of the Screw’ by Opera North.

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White ribbons; repression and its consequences

Nick Read — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 18:18:58 +0000

Eichvald is a small Baronial village in northern Prussia, a patriarchal society dominated by powerful male autocrats who justified their abuse of their womenfolk and their children on the grounds that it was what they needed. ‘This will hurt me more than it hurts you’.

It is the autumn of 1913 and strange things have begun to happen in the village. First it is the doctor’s ‘accident’. His horse trips on a wire stretched across the gate to his house, throwing him heavily, the end of his collarbone sticking out through the skin of his shoulder. Next the farmer’s wife falls through the rotten floor of the baron’s sawmill and is killed instantly. In revenge and anger with his father, who refuses to claim compensation or grievance, their eldest son destroys the baron’s field of cabbages and is instantly dismissed, committing the family to starvation. Then Sigi, the Baron’s son is kidnapped, flayed and found in the middle of the night hanging by his ankles in the barn in a state of severe shock. Then the steward’s baby son is left exposed to the freezing cold. Finally Karli, the midwife’s son, who has Down’s syndrome is attacked and nearly blinded. The culprits are never discovered though a sinister group of children always seem to materialise offering to help after each an atrocity is committed. It might appear that, led by Klara, the pastors eldest daughter, they are taking their revenge for the cruel repression they had endured at the hands of their fathers, but we never quite know for sure.

When Klara and Martin arrive late for supper, the pastor forces them to wear white ribbons as a sign that they have not learnt to be responsible. Martin is further humiliated by having his hands tied to the sides of his bed to stop him masturbating while Klara collapses while being severely and unjustly reprimanded by her father in front of the whole class.

And then there is the doctor, who, not just content for abusing his housekeeper, is also forcing his attentions on Anni, his fourteen year old daughter. And the steward, who thrashes his son within an inch of his life for taking Sigi’s whistle from him and throwing him in the pond. This is a highly dysfunctional village that seems to thrive on malice.

And Eva, who is unfairly dismissed by the Baron and then prevented by her father from marrying her sweetheart, who teaches at the village school.

It is the schoolteacher who finds out what has happened, but when he confronts Klara and Martin, they lie; they know only too well the penalties for being honest. Their father, the parson, grows angry and accuses him of spreading calumny on innocent children and threatens to report him to the school board.

The note attached to Karli notes that the sins of the fathers are visited on their children. It would seem that Klara and her gang become avenging angels. Klara even kills her father’s pet bird, though her youngest brother poignantly offers to replace it with the bbird he has rescued because his father is so sad.

The film ends with the news of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo and the imminence of war. We are left with the sense that in some way the children have brought about the horror that was the first world war. They didn’t, but the narrator, who is the schoolteacher as an old man, says that the events in Eichvald in 1913/14 might clarify what was eventually going to happen in Germany. Theirs was the generation who became Nazis and perpetrated their own cruel repression on the Jews.

White Ribbon was directed by Martin Hanneke and released in 2009, being awarded ’ La Palme d’Or’ in Nice. It is a powerful and disturbing film. It is the children are the stars of the film; they act their parts with such convincing realism while the cimetography with its long gothic shots of the snowbound village and its protestant inhabitants reinforces the dark repression.

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All life is yoga

Nick Read — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 18:12:18 +0000

‘All life is Yoga.’ So wrote Sri Aurobindo, sage and spiritual master, the author of ‘A Synthesis of Yoga.’ Yoga is not just a series of exercises to improve posture and make the body supple, its acolytes would define it as a method for self perfection leading ultimately to a union with the Divine. Yogis believe that since we are all potentially divine, our aim must be to achieve the perfection of that divinity by improving each part of our own being; body, mind and intellect.

Yoga achieves perfection of the body through the asanas and pranayamas (Hathayoga). Asanas are a series of stretches and postures, which, it is claimed, give you the same cardiovascular efficiency as vigorous aerobic exercise and vast improvements in fitness. Each posture stretches a certain set of muscles and is followed by a posture that stretches the opposing set. They need not be difficult and the postures do not have to be maintained for long. Proceed at your own pace. It will leave you feeling remarkable relaxed and refreshed. Pranayamas are a set of breathing exercises that invigorate and balance the system.

Yoga achieves perfection of the mind through meditation (Radayoga). The meditation is designed to clarify the surface layers of the mind as lack of movement clarifies a muddy pool so you can see down to the depths. It involves sitting or lying comfortably in a quiet place in a relaxed posture and by breathing and inward chanting to attain a deep state of consciousness akin to trance. Preoccupations, worries, regrets are banished from the mind while you concentrate on the here and now. In trance, there is a clearer focus on the sounds and feelings around you while everything else drifts away. Meditation is focus and can be achieved through creative work; painting, sculpture, gardening, poetry, music, cooking, even running and walking or even sitting quietly by the side of a river fishing. Find the time and the space in your life to do this.

Asanas, pranayamas and meditation exist for one purpose, that is to acheive that peaceful state of body and mine that allows a contemplation on the meaning of life, what yogis say is union with the divine, or an innermost state of peace and contemplation.

Yoga is not another religion. Yogis do not believe in a single God or even a company of Gods, but they do believe in the notion of a divinity, a state of being that creates and pervades all existence and they revere sages like Sri Aurobindo as instruments to help us attain a state of perfection.

I cannot believe in such a divine presence, although I acknowledge the power of the human mind to create it. There is much about our existence that we cannot explain, but I like to place my faith in evolution, cosmology and the amazing power of the human mind to create meaning out of our existence. But I do believe that Yoga is a wonderful system of healing the mind, the body and the spirit or meaning and I incorporate asanas and meditation as an essential components of my everyday life.

Our lives are so fragmented; we express so many different aspects of ourselves at different times. We are, in the words of Sri Aurobindo, disorderly ordered. We seem to have a fatal attraction to pain and suffering. Yoga is a means of liberating ourselves. Yoga is not only a method by which man can attain that state of peace and relaxation that facilitates health, fulfilment and happiness. It also creates a state of being that allows reflection on the deeper meanings of our existence, alongside but separate from our daily preoccupations with work, family and the material aspects of contemporary living.

Some yogis may renounce all material connections, retire to an ashram and live a life of self perfection, but most of us cannot do that. Each person must follow their own path. But we may find time during the day to carry out asanas and pranayamas and we may also be able to build into a more balanced way of life time to meditate and reflect on the deeper meanings. This can only help us to cope with stress, to think about what we are eating, how we are living and deal better with the strains of life that cause illness.

In June, I lived for three weeks in the Sri Aurobindo ashram high above the town of Nainatal in the foothills of the Himalayas.

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Running from women with reindeer and other obsessions.

Nick Read — Sat, 01 May 2010 17:29:21 +0000

The U boats lay in wait for us as soon as we rounded North Cape. There was only a narrow passage between the tundra and the ice, and as they closed in on the convoy underwater, Stukas from their Norwegian bases, dive bombed us from above. It was hell! The sea was always rough and water washed over the guns froze immediately. If anybody fell overboard, they didn’t last more than 3 minutes.’

I listened but couldn’t identify with Ron’s experience. It felt disloyal to do so. Hadn’t Dad been sent up to Orkney to risk his life protecting the Arctic convoys? Hadn’t he crashed and nearly died up there? Did he deserve to have his wife stolen, his family disrupted by one of the sailors he protected? So I suppressed my curiosity.

Many years later, I grew to love Northern Finland. So when I spotted ‘Running with Reindeer’, that described an exploration of the Kola Peninsula, the destinations of the Russian convoys, over 10 years in the nineteen nineties, I had to find out more.

But it was the author, Roger Took, who intrigued me. Why on earth would a sensitive, rich middle -aged man, an art historian and museum curator, an establishment figure, want to spend so long in what he described as one of the most unfriendly and inhospitable places on earth?

But Took was a man obsessed. In just one month, he learnt to speak Russian well enough to get by and arrived alone in the derelict port and abandoned goods yards of Murmansk with its grim government buildings and decrepit five story apartment blocks. His stated purpose was to find the remnants of the Saami, the Lappish peoples, still living in the far north of Russia, and to discover how much of their culture still survived.

But there was more to it than that. Took went out of his way to court suspicion, discomfort and danger. There was little that was uplifting in his book. He trudges across the tundra in freezing rain with inadequate shelter and food, he falls up to chest into bogs, he spends a night in a filthy cabin where he witnesses a drunken homosexual gang rape, he visits restricted inlets where decommissioned submarines rot, their reactors disintegrating and turning the sea radioactive, he sees mountains devastated by open cast mines and he records a landscape blasted and polluted by nickel smelting. He does finds isolated pockets of Saami, but realises that their traditional way livelihood of reindeer herding, hunting and salmon fishing was ruined collectivisation, their culture corrupted by alcohol and prostitution.

His is a grim tale with no redemption. So why wasTook so attracted to this, the most devastated and corrupt aspects of civilisation that he returned again and again. That question bothered me increasingly as I persevered with the turgid academic prose of his punishing narrative. What was it about this guy? There was an unrelenting darkness about him. But why? I had to consult Google.

I was shocked to discover that Roger Took is in prison. There is a long article, written for The Spectator in 2008 by Carol Metcalfe. He had bragged in his blog about being part of a group of men, who raped and murdered a 5 year old girl in Cambodia. Although Took dismissed this as fantasy, there were scores of incriminating images on his computer and he had been paying his step grand-daughter to have sex with him. Wikipedia lists difficulties in his marriage, another woman he could not forget, sexual frustration and a fragile, sensitive personality. Any review of his book, which was nominated for an international prize for travel writing, has been removed.

So were Took’s expeditions deliberately punitive or just an escape from the perversity of his privileged lifestyle? Was his book an attempt to purge himself of some dreadful shame?

What made Took a paedophile? Did an unduly close and controlling relationship with his mother make committed mature relationships with women seem too threatening. Did the difficulties he had in his two marriages instigate the need for the kind of controlling sexual relationships, he could procure only with emotionally needy and vulnerable children? Did his celebrity and privilege create a sense of entitlement; the feeling that he could indulge his perversions?

His book fails to provide any answers to these questions, but the final chapter does allude to encounters with teenage prostitutes in Murmansk in 1998. Ron had also mentioned picking up Russian women in Murmansk; the Winston Churchill House of Friendships catered for the needs of foreigners, but few sailors ever realised the terrible price the women would pay for friendship.

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In search of meaning

Nick Read — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 11:53:05 +0000

‘To live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering. If there is any purpose in life at all, there must be a purpose in suffering and in dying. But no man can tell another what this purpose is. Each must find out for himself, and must accept the answer that his solution prescribes. If he succeeds, he will continue to grow despite all the indignities.’

So writes one time Harvard Professor of Psychology, Gordon Allport in his preface to Viktor Frankl’s abiding monument, ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’. He claims it as the central theme of existentialism. We might, however question whether it is always necessary to suffer in order to grow. There is something Calvinist in that notion. But what Frankl shows us through his narrative is how it is possible to withstand the most dreadful pain, torture and privation by finding and retaining an essential meaning in life.

Viktor Frankl was a jewish psychiatrist, living in Vienna in 1939. He could have escaped to America; he had a visa, but he could not bring himself to abandon his parents to their fate. He was arrested by the Nazis and taken to Auschwitz, but he survived. He wasn’t a Capo, a privileged collaborator; he found the meaning in his suffering to survive.

‘Man’s Search for Meaning’ focuses on everyday indignities and privations, the cruelty, the lack of food, sleep and adequate clothing, the lice, dysentery, work, and endurance.

After the initial shock of becoming a number instead of a human being, a prisoner enters into phase of apathy and indifference. He tries not to be noticed, merges in with the crowd, gives an impression of smartness and fitness for work; does anything that would stop him being singled out and sent to the gas chambers. Many gave up, refused to work and accepted their fate, but those who survived discovered and nurtured an essential purpose in life that was worth clinging on to.

Frankl describes how the memory and love for his wife kept him alive. In the midst of the most dreadful degradation, he focussed on thoughts that uplifted the soul; an image of mountains, the coming of spring, music, snatches of poetry, the book he wanted to write.

There is nobility in suffering, Frankl claims, opportunities to find a moral compass and retain human dignity. Suffering can bring out the best in a person if he sees meaning in it.

Fyodor Dostoevsky said that the only thing he dreaded was not to be worthy of his sufferings. Those who let their inner hold on their own dignity and meaning, eventually fell victim to the camp’s degrading influence. They gave way to introspection and retrospection, lost purpose and hope, and just lay on their bed of stinking straw and were taken away to die.

Frankl described a strange timelessness in the camp. Hours or days of degradation and pain, passed slowly, but months and years passed quickly, punctuated by suffering. Survivors saw it as a provisional existence, something to be endured for as long as it took; they retained the hope they would be free.

Prisoners were supported by the companionship of mutual privation. They tried to help each other. They kept each other warm at night, they remove the lice from their hair, they shared their food, they told grim jokes. They were a kind of community; they trusted each other. Religion was a potent bonding force; prisoners often gained solace by praying together every night.

Unfortunately, their suffering did not always end when the guards left and the camp gates were opened . Release was all too often associated with bitterness and disillusion. Life had moved on. Their family had died. There was no work and they had lost the companionship of shared suffering. Others could not understand

For Frankl, his experience in Auschwitz became the mainspring of his life. From it he developed a philosophy of hope and a psychotherapy for those in despair, based on the discovery of the meaning of their suffering. It was Niezsche who said, ‘He who has a why (a purpose) to live can bear almost any how.’ Frankl explains that the ‘why’ of existence is was not so much what we expect from life, more what life expected from us in terms of work and family. Life ultimately means taking responsibility. Sometimes action is needed, sometimes contemplation, sometimes it’s just necessary to accept fate. When a man realises that suffering is his destiny, he will accept it as a challenge. Such thoughts can keep a prisoner from despair. Again, Nietzsche, ‘That which does not kill me, makes me stronger.’

Few of us in the west have ever been tested in the way Frankl was. But meaning can be threatened in other ways, such as the death of a spouse, the devastation of divorce, the collapse of love, the loss of purpose in retirement or unemployment, the estrangement from one’s children, the disillusion with a cause or faith. When people lose meaning and purpose, then they succumb to an inner emptiness, an existential vacuum, the boredom and loneliness, which lies at the base of much of the unhappiness of modern life.

Empty people try to fill their lives with thrills and diversions; the sexual libido becomes rampant in existential vacuum, so does the pursuit of power, the addiction to shopping, alcohol, drugs, the accumulation of money. It is pure escapism into immediate gratification, a frantic search for meaning in sensation. ‘We had such a wicked time, I got smashed, the sex was fantastic!’

Such diversions rarely lead to meaning. Quite the reverse; often the will, the hope, the purpose and the self respect dies a little more. Frankl states that people can transcend the thrill-seeking self and discover a meaning in their lives by creating a work or a deed, by experiencing something or encountering someone (such as falling in love), and most of all, by the attitude we take towards unavoidable suffering.

He claims that we can be ennobled by taking on the suffering another would have to bear, like giving up a relationship that would devastate them, an ambition that would cause them pain. This might give suffering a meaning, but it is avoidable. And is martyrdom and self sacrifice ever a valid route to redemption and happiness? Only if the sacrifice has a deeper meaning to the integrity of the ‘soul’, outside of the act itself.

Survival of identity and meaning (what I tend to regard as the soul) is more important than mere corporeal integrity. The anorexic starves their body so that their basic identity and meaning can thrive. And for many other sick people, illness endures the meaning of what has happened, until a person can bear to bring it to mind. If the meaning and purpose are devastated by life’s vicissitudes, then the body will easily become vulnerable to disease. Mind, body and soul (meaning) are a continuum, which contains health and happiness.

‘Man’s search for meaning’ was first published in 1946 in German under the title of ‘Ein psycholog erlebt das konzentrationslager’. Frankl developed the existential concept of logotherapy from his experience. Unlike psychoanalysis, logotherapy does not dwell on the past, but focuses on the development of a meaning in a person’s suffering that can break the cycle of loneliness and unhappiness.

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It’s a Dog’s Life!

Nick Read — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 15:52:12 +0000

‘A dog is a man’s best friend’, so they say. They are our companions. They are, like us, social carnivores that hunt in the daylight. We were made to collaborate. How much more effective we would have been as hunters with dogs to detect and chase our prey. And dogs would have played a crucial role in the development of civilization by protecting our crops and home and herding our animals.

But there’s more to it than that. Dogs offer us their devotion. To them we are the pack leaders – to be appeased and served. Dogs are attuned to us, they obey our commands, respond appropriately when we point; they can be trained. Chimpanzees, although they have 99% of our genetic code, tend to do their own thing, albeit intelligently. There is even a dog who has learnt 300 words and can fetch an object from another room, having only just seen a picture of it. And think of how working dogs can be trained to herd sheep, to retrieve an animal that been shot, to sniff out drugs or explosives.

Dogs make a deep emotional bond with us. Studies have shown that when dogs look at images of humans, they are drawn to the left side of the face which expresses emotion more eloquently and has a direct connection with the emotional right side of the brain. They tune into our emotions and can respond to our feelings. They know when we are upset or angry. They feel it. And dogs are good for us. We are more likely to survive a myocardial infarction if we have a dog and less likely to have another heart attack.

Dogs have evolved an elaborate vocal repertoire to communicate with us. Most dog owners can recognize at least six types of bark. These are emotional signals; excitement, anger, aggression, hurt, fear, playfulness. Brains scans have shown that the same area of orbito-frontal cortex lights up and we release the bonding hormone, oxytocin, when we look at pictures of dogs as when we look at images of children. Our need to nurture runs deep. Dogs induce the nurturing behaviour in us they need for survival, and they also release oxytocin when they look at their owners and are fondled. Dogs not only give but they induce unconditional love.

DNA data has established that our domestic dog is descended from the grey wolf and came into existence about 100,000 years. But wolves or wild dogs do not acclimatize to humans naturally. They cannot read our emotions and they don’t have the same vocal repertoire. When wolf puppies are brought up with humans, they revert to wolves at about 8 weeks and become dangerous. It takes many generations of selective breeding to get an animal that behaves like a dog. Long term experiments conducted on Silver Foxes in Eastern Siberia has shown that domesticity can only be induced after 50 generations. Only then do they behave like dogs. The strange thing is that in breeding out aggression, other characteristics change too, like the colour of their coats and the shape of their heads, their ears and their tails. In fact, they become like puppies. Selective breeding for domesticity favours juvenile characteristics.

This makes me wonder whether sexual selection in human societies over the many generations since civilization began has also succeeded in breeding out aggressive characteristics? Are we just all big babies? Have we bred domesticity in ourselves and with this passivity, laziness, neediness and a predisposition to obesity, heart attacks and diseases related to anxiety, such as Fibromyalgia and Irritable Bowel Syndrome?

Contrast our open faced, needy population with the hard bitten images of tribal chieftains, warlords who seize and impregnate their women by force. Such brutal sexual acquisition might perpetuate a much more ruthless typology until such time as civilization suppresses the behaviour that has induced it? The aggressive no longer rule the earth, at least outside the strongholds of Afghanistan, but have we become too tame, like the dogs?

This article was the topic of a Horizon documetary, shown on BBC television last week.

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Haunted! ‘Trauma’ and McGrath’s ghosts.

Nick Read — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 17:09:57 +0000

Charlie is a psychiatrist, an expert on trauma. His marriage to Agnes broke up after her brother, Danny, committed suicide. Danny was a Vietnamese veteran whose buddy was killed by a booby trap device right next to him. He was also Charlie’s patient. He blew his brains out after Charlie had decided to probe the circumstances of his buddy’s death. His mother always said that Charlie intruded too much.

Charlie met Agnes again after his mother’s funeral. She was kind to him. They made love, but by that time Agnes was married and he was getting involved with Nora, a disturbed younger woman who suffered from traumatic nightmares. Nora was also having an affair with his artist brother, Walt, though Charlie didn’t realize it at the time. As Charlie’s mind begins to unravel under the stress of his situation, he moves to work in an isolated mental home in the Catskills. But the town where he got an apartment, was also the scene of his own trauma, which was rekindled when Walt and their father, Fred, come to visit him. Years ago when he and Walt were very young, Charlie witnessed a fight between his parents in their hotel bedroom just down the street. In his recurrent nightmare, it was Fred who was holding the gun to his head, but Walt explains it was it his mother; she had squeezed the trigger but it didn’t fire. ‘This is what you get when you come into a room without knocking.’ It’s then that he goes mad.

Trauma is Patrick McGrath’s latest novel. It lacks the power of Asylum, Spider and Dr Haggard’s Illness, but like them explores the meaning and method of madness, making it frighteningly accessible and storing up the tension until the final denouement. Only then can you see the patterns of his trauma, the ghosts of what has happened in the events that befall him and the choices he makes; his everyday life.

The sight of Dannys exploded head, the blood and brains that splattered the wall, that reminded him of what nearly happened to him led to him leaving Agnes. It was his intrusiveness that led him to enter his parents bedroom and become a psychiatrist. It was his need to put things right that made him care for his mother in the confusion of her old age. But she hated him for it. Shame is so often a cause of hatred, as McGrath explains. Charlie’s shame over Danny’s suicide made him leave Agnes. He looks after Nora; indeed he is attracted to her because she is so disturbed like his mother. But there are echoes of his early relationship with Walt in this. Walt always let Charlie take responsibility for dealing with their parents. And so although he was having an affair with Nora, Walt couldn’t handle her neuroticism and so encouraged the relationship with his brother.

Trauma generates ghosts, thoughts that we cannot get rid of, memories that that continue to haunt our lives, influencing our actions and behaviour, determining the choices we make. For the most part, what happens to us is not a matter of luck or fate, it is conditioned by the events and situations that have made us who we are. And so a traumatic situation that occurred many years ago can continue to reverberate in every choice we make, especially those intuitive choices that do not require analysis. In that way we re-experience the things that matter most to us over and over again, in the hope of resolution or at least the achievement of an understanding that will help remove the stain of shame.

Charlie had protected himself from his trauma by dedicating his life to care and understanding, to trying to make it better. But the dreadful realization that his efforts might have actually made things worse led him to escape into madness. So what hope is there for recovery? Medications can only dull an intolerable reality. Psychotherapy may provide a safe space where his stuff can be experienced through the agency of the therapist, but the therapist and the therapeutic situation has to provide a suitable object or space for projection and transference. No, perhaps his salvation is only possible through the redemptive power of love. Agnes husband has died. Charlie is devoted to his daughter, Cassie. Perhaps their love can restore the stability to exorcise the ghosts and heal his troubled mind.

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