When we cannot find a way of telling our story, our story tells us – we dream these stories, we develop symptoms, or we find ourselves acting in ways we don’t understand.
Being present builds a child’s condence because it lets the child know that she is worth thinking about. Without this, a child might come to believe that her activity is just a means to gain praise, rather than an end in itself. How can we expect a child to be attentive, if we’ve not been attentive to her?
This sort of gap between what a person says and what he makes you feel is not uncommon – think of the friend who rings you when you’re down, talks to you in an encouraging, supportive way, but leaves you feeling worse. The space between Matt’s words and the feelings he provoked in me was enormous. He was describing a life that was frightening, but I didn’t feel frightened for him. I felt uncharacteristically disengaged.
At one time or another, we all try to silence painful emotions. But when we succeed in feeling nothing we lose the only means we have of knowing what hurts us, and why.
In other words, paranoid fantasies are disturbing, but they are a defence. They protect us from a more disastrous emotional state – namely, the feeling that no one is concerned about us, that no one cares. The thought ‘so-and-so has betrayed me’ protects us from the more painful thought ‘no one thinks about me’.
It is less painful, it turns out, to feel betrayed than to feel forgotten.
Her paranoia shielded her from the catastrophe of indifference.
Sometimes change comes not because we set out to x ourselves, or repair our relation to the living; sometimes we change most when we repair our relation to the lost, the forgotten, the dead.
We resist change. Committing ourselves to a small change, even one that is unmistakably in our best interest, is often more frightening than ignoring a dangerous situation.
We hesitate, in the face of change, because change is loss. But if we don’t accept some loss – for Tamitha, the loss of her baby photos – we can lose everything.
Like everyone else, psychoanalysts do get caught in the lawyer’s role; our job is to try instead to find a useful question. Our weapon against negativity is not persuasion, it’s understanding.
To psychoanalysts, Styron’s problem is not unfamiliar: there are many men and women who work hard to attain a goal, achieve success, and then suddenly, cataclysmically, fall apart. What are the unconscious forces that cause us to sabotage ourselves – sometimes in even the tiniest of ways – when we’ve achieved a success?
There are various ways to circumvent depressed, anxious feelings. It’s not uncommon, for example, to exploit sexual fantasies, or to use hypochondriacal worries. Elizabeth employed her disasters to calm herself – they were her tranquilliser.
Like Elizabeth, we can take on a catastrophe to stop ourselves feeling and thinking – and to avoid responsibility for our own intimate acts of destruction.
Boredom can be a useful tool for a psychoanalyst. It can be a sign that the patient is avoiding a particular subject; that he or she is unable to talk directly about something intimate or embarrassing. Or it can mean that patient and psychoanalyst are stuck; the patient is returning again and again to some desire or grievance that the psychoanalyst is failing to tackle. A boring person might be feeling envious, and might kill a conversation – disrupting it or paralysing it – because he cannot bear to hear a helpful or compelling idea coming from someone else. Or the boring patient may be playing possum – just as there are beasts in the jungle that survive by playing dead, some people, when frightened, simply shut down. It’s also true that psychoanalyst and patient will sometimes unconsciously collude to desiccate the atmosphere between them because they fear things becoming too emotionally disturbed, or too exciting.
The future is not some place we’re going to, but an idea in our mind now. It is something we’re creating, that in turn creates us. The future is a fantasy that shapes our present.
Think about the impasse,’ she said. ‘You know that when there’s a deadlock it’s usually because the impasse serves some function for both the patient and the analyst. Think of this deadlock as an obstacle that the two of you have created. What purpose does it serve you?
Looking back, it is clear now that Thomas and I were at an impasse because neither of us could bear the thought that he was irreparably damaged. And it was only when we were both able to be sad, to despair because we couldn’t fix what was broken, that his spitting stopped serving a purpose for us and we were able to move forward.
It isn’t always true, but it was in my case, that if you’re frightened of being criticised, you’re probably pretty critical.
I listened as Alice then described a passage from C. S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed, in which Lewis fears that, bit by bit, he is losing the memory of his dead wife: ‘like snowflakes settling down on his memory of her until her real shape is hidden, is how Lewis puts it.
My experience is that closure is an extraordinarily compelling fantasy of mourning. It is the fiction that we can love, lose, suffer and then do something to permanently end our sorrow. We want to believe we can reach closure because grief can surprise and disorder us – even years after our loss.