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

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СКАЧАТЬ psychiatrist who never felt shame. He would lie in front of people who, he knew, knew that he was lying. His lack of shame frightened and confused those who did have the power to challenge and rebuke him, and so, never being called to account, he could continue to improve his own position while bringing havoc into the lives of others.

      Shame might be dangerous to our meaning structure, but it is one of the means by which we can establish and maintain good relationships with other people. We have to take other people’s interests into account. But shame is not just a matter of being seen by others. It is also a matter of being seen by ourselves. We can become the viewer and stand naked in our own eyes. In this situation the threat to our meaning structure can be immense and so, knowing this, we can deny ourselves much in order not to be shamed in our own eyes. We can do this in extreme conditions, as Primo Levi recalled:

      I entered the Lager as a non-believer, and as a non-believer I was liberated and have lived to this day; actually, the experience of the Lager with its frightful iniquity has confirmed me in my laity. It has prevented me, and still prevents me, from conceiving of any form of providence or transcendent justice. Why were the moribund packed in cattle cars? Why were children sent to the gas? I must nevertheless admit that I experienced (and again only once) the temptation to yield, to seek refuge in prayer. This happened in the October of 1944, in the one moment in which I lucidly perceived the imminence of death. Naked and compressed among my naked companions with my personal index card in my hand, I was waiting to file past the ‘commission’ that with one glance would decide whether I should go immediately to the gas chamber or was instead strong enough to go on working. For one instant I felt the need to ask for help and asylum; then, despite my anguish, equanimity prevailed: you do not change the rules of the game at the end of the match, nor when you are losing. A prayer under these conditions would have been not only absurd (what rights could I claim? And from whom?) but blasphemous, obscene, laden with the greatest impiety of which a non-believer is capable. I rejected that temptation: I knew that otherwise were I to survive, I would have to be ashamed of it.⁴¹

      When we act as the other and shame ourselves we become a threat to our own meaning structure. We know what matters most to us, and when we want to criticize ourselves we know what to say to throw the whole meaning structure into doubt. I like to pride myself on being intelligent and well organized. When I took the wrong set of keys and locked myself out of my house my immediate reaction was to say to myself, ‘How can you be so stupid?’ This is the same phrase I often hurl at the television screen or a newspaper as yet another story of the blind stupidity of those in power or who want to be in power unfolds. This is but one small example of how, although our physiology condemns us to the isolation of our own meaning structure, other people are always part of us.

Others – the Necessity and the Threat

      Other people are essential to us because they can confirm our existence. They can break through our essential isolation and confirm our meaning structure. But they can harm and even destroy us by withholding this confirmation. Torturers and jailers the world over know this. In May 1998 Graziella Dalleo was interviewed on the BBC.

      While Argentina hosted the World Cup in 1978 and celebrated its success, many of its citizens were being tortured. Graziella Dalleo was one of Argentina’s ‘disappeared’ at that time. She described the extreme situation in Radio 5’s ‘Watt in the World – a guide to footballing countries’.

      She said, ‘Those of us being “re-educated” during the World Cup were allowed to watch the games on TV in the “fish tank” [where hard labour was enforced] … After watching the World Cup final in the “fish tank”, the commandant of the camp whose name still fills me with terror … came in and embraced us one by one and said, “We won! We won!” I remember feeling that if he’s won we’ve lost – if this is a victory for him, it is a defeat for us. The guards then told five or six of us to get into a car. I remember it to this day – a green Peugeot 504 – and he drove us to the centre of Buenos Aires. It was incredible.

      ‘There were so many people out on the street celebrating Argentina’s victory I asked the general if I could stand up and put my head through the car roof. I stood up and looked out – I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Rivers and rivers of people singing, dancing, shouting. I began to cry, because I remember thinking if I start shouting “I’ve disappeared”, no-one’s going to give a damn. This was the most concrete proof I ever had that I had ceased to exist.’⁴²

      Such an experience is not uncommon in those countries where torture is the routine way of dealing with prisoners, especially those who are regarded as a threat to society. Most of us have experienced a milder but still distressing form of torture where our companions have a mental picture of us which bears little likeness to the person we know ourselves to be. When this happens we can feel very, very lonely. When my friend Ann Hocking wrote to me after her dog died she said,

      The other evening when I was at a musical evening at the church I saw a man from Mosborough whom I used to know. I said, ‘You don’t remember me, do you?’ He said, ‘Yes I do. You’re Martin’s mother, aren’t you?’ I said, ‘No, I’m Ann.’ He shouted across to another mutual acquaintance, a woman, ‘Look who’s here. Do you remember who she is?’ ‘Oh yes,’ the woman said, ‘It’s Sarah’s grandmother.’

      I hate that. When I was little my mother would never use my name. She would say, “This is my daughter, Jim’s sister,’ as if I didn’t exist in my own right. Now I’m Martin’s mother, Ray’s wife, or Sarah’s grandma. It makes me sick. I’ve got a name. Why don’t people use it?

      I guess that’s why I miss the dog so much. He would never go away from me. He would never take his eyes off me while he was awake. He didn’t care what I looked like or how old I was or that I’d got no job and no money. People want you to try to merit their love all the time. The dog never did, even when I shouted at him. He still loved me. I didn’t have to give him breakfast in bed to make up for it. He just accepted me for what I am. People have a lot to learn from dogs.⁴³

      Ann as Martin’s mother, Ray’s wife and Sarah’s grandma slots her neatly into the working-class suburb of Sheffield where she lives. If her family, friends and acquaintances saw her as she really is she would be constantly confounding their expectations, thus troubling their own meaning structures. She is a mother, wife and grandma, but she is also a skilled artist, a philosopher who asks the big questions and a sharp observer of other people with a keen eye for hypocrisy and lies. I doubt if there is any society who could see her as she is and find her easy to fit in, but there would be certain societies, certain artistic societies, where her individuality would be appreciated.

      Ann is a threat to her society only in so far as she does not conform exactly to her society’s expectation that she be a modest mother, wife and grandma who complains only about domestic matters and who confines her interests to gossip and television. While she does not fit that picture exactly, her existence does not threaten the image other members of that society have of themselves, as did the existence of the survivors of the Holocaust when they emigrated to Israel after the Second World War. Aaron Hass recorded,

      Perhaps the fiercest blow to survivors who emigrated to this hazardous territory was the psychological distance imposed by the sabras (those born in Palestine) … Jokes deriding the victims circulated. A popular one began with the question ‘How many Jews can you fit into an ashtray?’ … Far from being perceived as heroes, they were considered reminders of all which the glorious modern Jew must shun. Even among their own, in a Jewish state, survivors were kept from speaking out. In 1949, David Ben-Gurion СКАЧАТЬ