Beyond Fear. Dorothy Rowe

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      Here was a four-year-old prepared to take responsibility for her brother’s death because she saw that as being preferable to knowing that terrible things can happen at any time and that neither she nor her mother could prevent them. Yet, even though pride may have provided her with an explanation which showed that this event did not happen by chance, this explanation would ensure that she could never be happy. Happiness, she would have come to believe, was something she did not deserve.

      I continued to study the functions of pride, and by the time I came to write Friends and Enemies¹⁶ I was thinking in terms of two kinds of pride - moral pride, which is a way of thinking which develops as we create a conscience, and primitive pride, which is an integral part of the functioning of the meaning structure. Both kinds of pride aim to maintain the integrity of the meaning structure and thus prevent us from changing, and both can work together and enhance each other, but, while moral pride can be a spur to unselfishness, tolerance and a love of truth, and be amenable to logic and reason, primitive pride is always utterly selfish, utterly ruthless and impervious to the demands of reason. Nicky Harris described how, while she knew quite well that she was not responsible for her son’s death, she could not help expecting and indeed wanting the police to arrest and punish her.¹⁷

      Any working system has within it certain forms or mechanisms which enable the system to function. I wrote:

      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.¹⁸

      In psychology no one ever discovers anything which is completely new. Many people have noticed pride’s function in survival as a person, though they may not have called it pride. Psychoanalysts have described the defence of rationalization, and one analyst, Karen Horney, wrote about what she called ‘pride systems’. More recently two American psychologists, Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson, uncovered what they called a ‘psychological immune system’, which was ‘an army of rationalizations, justifications and self-serving logic’.¹⁹ Many psychologists working with people who are experiencing a psychosis now see hallucinations and delusions as methods of trying to maintain ‘self-esteem’.²⁰

      ‘Self-esteem’ is a jargon term for a complex of ideas concerning how we feel about ourselves - that is, how much we care for and care about ourselves, how much we value ourselves, on what values we judge ourselves and how harshly we judge ourselves. When we are fond of ourselves, look after ourselves, when we value ourselves and judge ourselves reasonably and in a kindly manner, we feel self-confident, and so when we encounter a crisis or disaster we see it as a challenge which we shall master. When we do make a mistake both moral and primitive pride can comfort us. If, for example, you make some arithmetical errors in your income tax return and someone points this out to you, you can comfort yourself by thinking, ‘Well, I mightn’t be good at maths but I really know how to put words together.’ Or, when someone is unpleasant to you, instead of trying to work out why, you can simply assume that actually, underneath, that person really does like you.

      The more we despise and hate ourselves the greater the degree of comfort pride has to create, and the greater the degree of comfort we need the less realistic that comfort becomes. Thus we can take pride in having impossibly high standards, or we can take pride in being the object of a worldwide conspiracy of influential people, or in possessing some vast mystical power which controls the universe. Our pride can indeed comfort us, but we can become so attached to that comfort that we refuse to give up our comforting delusions, even though these are the very ideas that create great distress for us because they are so removed from a realistic appraisal of ourselves and our world. We hang on to our comforting delusions, not just because they comfort us, but because they protect us from our greatest fear.

Our Greatest Fear

      We experience our existence in such a way that it seems to us that we live in two separate realities. One is the reality of what goes on outside us, what we call the world. The other is what goes on inside us, our thoughts, feelings, images, sensations and perceptions. To cope with living we have to be able to distinguish what goes on inside us from what goes on outside us, and then to knit together, in some consistent way, our internal and external realities so that we can find a meaning which enables us to carry our life forward and communicate with other people. We have to relate our thoughts and feelings to our perception of the outside world, and we have to relate our perception of the outside world to our thoughts and feelings. This two-way process is what psychologists call ‘reality testing’. If we do not do this very well we are considered by others to be mad, or at least very strange.

      Knitting these two realities together is not easy because they do not appear to be equally real. One of these realities seems to be ‘really real’: the other is ‘kind of’ real. For some of us our internal reality is more real than our external reality. For some of us our external reality is more real than our internal reality. This ‘more real’ relates to what it is we sometimes doubt. Some people never doubt what is going on around them but at times they doubt their own thoughts and feelings, and such doubt can lead them to say, ‘I don’t know who I am,’ or, ‘I don’t know what I feel.’ Other people never doubt their thoughts and feelings; indeed, their sense of existence is the one thing they never doubt, but the appearance of the world around them, or even that it exists, is something they do doubt, particularly when they lose confidence in themselves or they encounter a sudden crisis.

      Whichever reality appears to be the less real for us is the reality which contains a great danger.

      For those people for whom external reality is more real than internal reality, internal reality contains a danger which is felt as an emptiness, a vacancy from which all kinds of unknown and unknowable things can arise. Such people will express this by saying, ‘It’s not wise to introspect too much,’ or ‘I spend too much time trying to understand myself.’ For them the embrace of external reality is not dangerous. What is dangerous is for external reality to drop away and for them to be left alone and isolated, an emptiness in an emptiness. For these people, being left alone, completely abandoned and rejected, is the greatest fear.

      For those people for whom internal reality is more real than external reality, external reality contains a danger which is felt as an unknown and unknowable territory from which all kinds of uncontrolled and uncontrollable forces can arise. Such people have no anxiety about introspection, for within themselves is where they live their life, but they often speak of needing peace, which means a quietening down of, or distancing oneself from, external reality. For them external reality dropping away and leaving them isolated is not dangerous, for they live within their internal reality. What is dangerous is the embrace of external reality, because out of external reality can come the forces which confuse, overwhelm and destroy. For these people, chaos is the greatest fear.

      When СКАЧАТЬ