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

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СКАЧАТЬ danger of being overwhelmed. We can become inflexible, and pretend to ourselves that refusing to change your mind is a sign of strength. Alas, inflexible structures, be they buildings or meaning structures, are always in danger of breaking. Buildings are always assaulted by wind and rain, and meaning structures are always assaulted by other people.

      Even when other people are most benignly disposed towards us they are always a threat to our meaning structure because they are a constant reminder of how our way of seeing things is not the only way. Moreover, other people have the ability to deprive us of our greatest protection, our pride.

      Primitive pride is a form of thought with which we are born and takes no account of other people or of what is actually happening. It is concerned only with our survival. It can fit comfortably with the form of the story because it is adept at creating a life story where we are justified in everything we do.

      The form of the face can be a challenge to primitive pride. The face is the face of others, and all these faces have eyes which look at us. Are these accepting, friendly eyes or do these eyes say something else?

      Primitive pride can override the form of the face, especially in those people who, as babies, formed no secure bond with one mothering person. Such people create life stories which absolve them of all responsibility for what they do, but their stories, like the story of Dr Münch, provoke in other people the response, ‘Have you no shame!’

      Shame precedes a sense of guilt. Guilt requires a sense of time – past actions and future punishment. Small children who have yet to develop notions of yesterday and tomorrow do not have a sense of guilt, but they do have a very profound sense of shame. They can be held in the gaze of another person and feel exposed and vulnerable. Daniel Stern wrote,

      Babies act as if eyes were indeed windows to the soul. After seven weeks of age, they treat the eyes as the geographic centre of the face and the psychological centre of the person. When you play peek-a-boo with a baby, she quickly shows some anticipatory pleasure as you lower the blanket to reveal your hair and forehead. But only when the baby sees your eyes does she explode with delight. Six-year-olds illustrate this psychological centrality of the eyes in a different way. When a six-year-old covers her eyes with her hands, and you ask her, ‘Can I see you?’ she will answer, ‘No!’ Although we used to think that the child could not imagine you could see her if she couldn’t see you, that is not the problem. She is perfectly aware that you can see not only her but even her hands covering her eyes. What she really means by ‘No’ is, ‘If you can’t see my eyes you don’t see me.’ Seeing her means looking into her eyes.⁴⁰

      Shame evolves out of the form of the face, and so becomes part of the meaning structure at an early stage in its development. Small children suffer many experiences of shame as they go through the difficult process of learning to be clean. We do not forget these experiences of shame, and later our enemies can use them against us to destroy us.

      In Yugoslavia under Tito nationality was no barrier to marriage and there were many intermarriages between Serbs, Muslims and Croats. But once they came to power Serbian Nationalists were affronted by these mixed marriages because they showed that people of different nationalities could live happily together. Serbian Nationalists developed a policy of getting rid of mixed marriages, that of, as Diyana said, ‘Either kill them or send them out of the country. It was easy to get a visa for Australia or America because the Nationalists wanted to get rid of you.’

      Diyana was a Serb married to a Muslim and lived in Sarajevo. After eight months of enduring the siege, Diyana and her small daughter Sarah were able to join a busload of women and children leaving the city. They suffered many horrors along the way. Eventually the bus arrived in Split in Croatia. Diyana, like many of the other women refugees, had friends in Split who would have given her and her child shelter but this was not allowed. She told me, ‘One of my husband’s relatives came and paid a policeman to let me out with the child but he couldn’t do anything. I think it was political. If we get out, we will stay in Croatia and they don’t want refugees in Croatia. And that was the first time I was humiliated as a refugee.’

      She went on, ‘There were about a thousand women and a lot of children who had travelled days to get there in buses, without water, without food. The authorities locked us in a new swimming pool complex and let us sleep on the floor. And round the swimming pool were tiles.’

      A new swimming pool complex would undoubtedly contain showers, toilets and ample water. The Croatian authorities refused to let these Serbian and Muslim women use them. Diyana said, ‘They allowed us four toilets, with a small handbasin to wash hands, and by the time I got to the toilets there was no water and the toilets were very dirty. We were locked in. We couldn’t get out. We couldn’t get to a pharmacy to buy the things we needed. My daughter had already got gastroenteritis. I developed the most terrible thrush. I’d never experienced such an uncomfortable feeling, and I couldn’t do anything about it. It was purely stress, caused by stress, and I couldn’t do anything. I didn’t have water to wash myself and I was ashamed. I was clean in Sarajevo. You hear stories about humiliation, when you are not allowed to wash yourselves, you are not allowed to change yourself. You soon realize that you stink. Your hands are dirty, you don’t have anything to wash them. And it’s a humiliation for me, and I don’t want to remember. I don’t want to think about that, because I always remember those terrible two days.’

      Shame is very threatening to our meaning structure because we are held in the eyes of other people and are seen. For our meaning structure to stay whole it needs privacy. Pride, both primitive pride and moral pride, erects barriers so that people cannot peer in, and the barriers become the ways we want to present ourselves to the world. But we are always conscious of the danger of being exposed to shame, no matter how excellent our credentials that we present to the world.

      I saw an example of this outside Waterloo International Terminal when I had arrived from Paris on the Eurostar. I hurried to join the queue for taxis. Within seconds there were twenty people behind me in the queue. Immediately ahead of me was a tall, well-dressed man who turned round and, over my head, called his two colleagues further back in the queue to join him. They were also tall and well dressed and the three of them immediately fell into conversation. They were Americans of power and influence either in business or government.

      I spoke up, distinctly and sternly. I said, ‘I trust that you are all going in the same direction and in the same taxi.’

      They looked round at me. One nodded, the others said, ‘Er, yes,’ and they turned away. I had interrupted a busy conversation but now they fell silent. I thought that was because they were surprised at being reprimanded by a little old lady, but this was not so. It was the silence of shame. They had lied, and within minutes their lie would be revealed.

      The queue was at right angles to the line of taxis so I had a clear view of what happened. Our queue shuffled forward as taxis arrived, loaded and departed until the two groups of travellers immediately ahead of the Americans claimed the next two taxis to arrive. As these people were loading their bags the three Americans, keeping close together, walked some ten yards away from me to the next empty taxi. The three of them appeared to be conferring with the driver and then getting into the taxi, but then one of them sneaked away and took the next empty taxi.

      I watched and made sure they could see me watching. As his taxi moved past me the one whose lie was now manifest kept his head turned away as if he were deeply interested in the wall on the other side of the road.

      No doubt the three of them could deal with their shame by assuring themselves they had only slightly inconvenienced me and the other waiting passengers. There was a long line of empty taxis coming to pick us up. I was amused at their behaviour, and relieved. If they had shown no shame I would have been furious at being outwitted. I was pleased СКАЧАТЬ