Friends and Enemies: Our Need to Love and Hate. Dorothy Rowe

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СКАЧАТЬ was an expert sufferer. The suffering of anyone else paled into insignificance when compared with her suffering, and in the family she brooked no competition. Thus I never acquired the knack of talking about my own suffering. I find it very difficult to say, ‘I’m ill,’ or ‘I’m anxious.’ When I’m on my deathbed and you ask me how I am I shall say, ‘Fine.’ This, I am sure, was one of the reasons my husband found me so attractive. He was an expert sufferer and needed a silent and attentive listener.

      Expert sufferers can specialize not just in physical suffering but the mental suffering that goes with guilt. If you say to such an expert sufferer that something has gone wrong and perhaps they could put it right you will find that they do not make a move to do so. Instead they fall to suffering, saying, ‘It’s all my fault, I’m so guilty, I’m sorry I’ve done this to you, how can I ever make it up to you, you don’t know just how guilty I feel,’ and so on and so on. Their aim is to make you feel guilty for having made them feel guilty. Not that your suffering guilt can ever match the agony they suffer. Expert sufferers take great pride in their capacity to suffer and they resist anyone who tries to take their suffering away from them. Martyrdom can be a wonderful source of pride.

      Most of my depressed patients revealed a pride in how bad they were. They were not ordinarily bad. They did not want to be ordinary. If they could not be the Most Perfect, Wonderful, Intelligent, Beautiful, Successful, Admired and Loved Person the World Has Ever Seen they had to be the Worst, Most Despised, Confused, Evil Failure and Outcast the World Has Ever Seen.

      Over the weeks and months that we talked the life story of each of my patients gradually unfolded, and primitive pride was revealed in the codicils that came with their statements about who they were and what the ending of their story would be. Each life story was unique, but they had some common themes such as:

      • ‘I am a shameful person and must creep around the edges of society, asking permission to exist and expecting a refusal.’ Primitive pride then adds, ‘God sees my suffering and will one day comfort and reward me.’

      • ‘I am wicked, the cause of my disaster, and depression is my deserved punishment.’ Primitive pride then adds, ‘But I’m a better person than everyone else because I know how wicked I am whereas other people don’t recognize how wicked they are. Through my suffering I shall find redemption.’

      • ‘I shall expunge my shame and guilt by dying.’ Primitive pride then adds, ‘I will force those who shamed me to witness my suffering and know that it is their fault.’

      • ‘I will never forgive those who shamed me.’ Primitive pride then adds, ‘My revenge will be merciless and eternal.’

      In telling their story some of my patients recognized and confronted their primitive pride. They saw that it kept them in the prison of depression, and they decided that the cost was too great. There were other and better ways of creating a life story, and, in realizing that they were free to do so, they freed themselves from their prison. Some of my patients found that the immediate rewards their primitive pride gave them were too delicious to relinquish. They remained depressed.

      The meaning structure is a self-regulating system. All self-regulating systems have within their structure some mechanism which maintains the integrity of the system, preventing it from grinding to a halt or shattering to pieces. Our body, a self-regulating system, has a number of such mechanisms. The mechanism which forms blood clots to stem the flow of blood through a wound is one. In the meaning structure primitive pride is the form of thought or mechanism which selects from within the individual meaning structure a collection of meanings; when put together, these meanings serve to give immediate protection to the integrity of the meaning structure. This collection of meanings may have little relationship to what is actually happening or in the long term be an adequate defence. Indeed, it usually creates more problems than it was assembled to solve. Its importance is that it can be assembled immediately, in the blink of an eye.

      In psychoanalysis one of the mechanisms of defence is rationalization, which is a concept with a passing similarity to primitive pride. With rationalization, as Otto Fenichel explained,

      Emotional attitudes become permissible on condition that they are justified as ‘reasonable’. The patient finds one reason or another why he is to behave in this way or that, and thus avoids becoming aware that he is actually driven by an instinctual impulse. Aggressive behaviour is sanctioned on the condition that it is viewed as ‘good’; a like situation holds true for sexual attitudes.³³

      In the 1930s the psychoanalyst Karen Horney developed the concept of compensatory ‘pride systems’ which, as described by the psychotherapist Chris Mace,

      attempt to minimalise internal anxiety by maintaining self images that are inconsistent with social realities. These are identified with characteristic goals and fixed attitudes, providing a source of inconsistent behaviour at any time. If reality threatens to impinge, conflict and anxiety are the inevitable result as the fragile balance between these internal systems is disturbed.³⁴

      Two American psychologists, Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson, though working quite differently from psychoanalysts and from me, encountered primitive pride, which they called a ‘psychological immune system’. They had wanted to discover how quickly people recovered from the shock of some disaster or some unexpected good fortune. They found that when people were asked how long they thought it would take them to recover from, say, being jilted or being elected to a much wanted position, they had predicted that it would take far longer than it actually did.

      What happened was that the psychological immune system, which was ‘an army of rationalizations, justifications and self-serving logic, soothes our psyche during bad times’. Daniel Gilbert said, ‘People are famous for making the best of bad situations and rationalizing away their failures – which allows them to remain relatively pleased with themselves despite all good evidence to the contrary.’³⁵

      Primitive pride is concerned with choosing from the array of possible interpretations of a situation that interpretation which will best keep the meaning structure intact. It can act swiftly without having to resort to conscious thought. It is not concerned with testing an interpretation against reality nor is it concerned with the long-term implications of a particular interpretation, even if the implication is that the person will suffer.

      This action of primitive pride can be seen in the pattern of events which leads to a person becoming depressed. Some disaster occurs which causes the person to see a serious discrepancy between what he thought his life was and what it actually is. The meaning structure cannot adjust to this discrepancy without a major reorganization, and so the person starts to feel himself falling apart. Primitive pride comes into action and provides an interpretation which serves to hold the meaning structure together, namely that the person himself is the cause of the disaster. The holding together operation is successful because the interpretation is simply an enlargement of what the person believes, but what comes hard on its heels is the imprisoning isolation of depression.³⁶

      Not only is primitive pride not concerned with testing meanings against what is actually happening, it can perform its function of maintaining the integrity of the meaning structure simply by denying that certain things are actually happening. The story which many Serbs have always liked to tell themselves is that, throughout history, Serbs have, without exception, been virtuous victims. In June 1999, as NATO troops uncovered more and more evidence of the massacres by the Serbian army of Albanian Kosovans and the Serbs in Kosova fled their homes for the safety of Serbia, many Serbs preferred to believe what their state media told them, that they were the innocent victims СКАЧАТЬ