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| Chapter 3.
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Chapter 3. Analysing animosity
“A graduate student at the University of Nebraska was forced to remove a photo of his bikini-clad wife from his desk, when two female students complained to the chairman that they felt sexually harassed by it. This used to be called “paranoia.” Why are snippy neurotics running our lives?” Camille Paglia (1)
If it remains possible to convert fiction into fact by constant repetition, as child salvationists, victim feminists, careerist police officers and tabloid editors have discovered, it is perhaps some comfort to those they have destroyed, should they still be alive, to recognise that the same formula does not appear to work for truth. No matter how sincerely you believe your own lies, they will still remain lies, no matter how many times you tell them. It may be useful to explore what would happen to the assertions of moralists if we received them from a psychoanalytic, as opposed to a journalistic, perspective.
Code words and scapegoats
The great American dissident and writer, Gore Vidal, once commented on the use of code words by opportunistic politicians, fundamentalist morality crusaders and authoritarian law enforcers, in fomenting outbreaks of mass hate, particularly at times of crisis or opportunity (such as bad news coverage for the government, or election campaigns, or the exceedingly rare example of the gruesome murder of a child, especially if this involved sexual molestation). As it is now considered a matter of bad taste to deploy openly racist, misogynistic or homo-bashing vocabularies, American authoritarians (like their British counterparts) devised substitute terms to distract people from their real economic and social-liberty interests, code words which all ‘right thinking’ people can easily decipher. This means that when vote-hunters want to conceal the fact that they will do nothing to advance the lot of those whose lives are blighted by preventable poverty, or do anything to even minimally assist ordinary income earners struggling to make ends meet, they will launch populist campaigns (fanned and fuelled by a snarling and slavering media machine) under headings like ‘law and order’ and ‘getting tough on welfare chiselers’.
At the time of Vidal’s essay, many white, God-fearing Americans (whom Gore calls ‘Christers’) believed, wholly contrary to the evidence, that criminals and welfare claimants were chiefly black, with the result that these campaigns were widely registered as meaning ‘Get the ... I am a racist idiot!
Presently, we find that we (apparently) have no need for code words; there is a recently manufactured group which has no constituency to protect it, and onto which it is possible to displace all the hatreds which can no longer be openly expressed towards blacks, unconventional women and gays. Moreover, such hatred can be expressed without let or hindrance, and without mincing words: ‘Protect our children!’ means ‘Get the paedos!’ and both phrases can be used openly and interchangeably in public. And we all know that ‘paedophile’ means child-abducting sex-murdering rapist.
But as far as real children are concerned, we might find ourselves in a saner, more congenial and more rational world for their upbringing if we were to suspend our customary fear and loathing toward ‘paedophiles.’ I think this word is being used as a propagandistic codeword, with effects every bit as malignant as the ... I am a racist idiot!
One rapidly discovers, when confronted with a victimologist, that their questions (for example, “Do you consider this a victimless crime?”) have nothing to do with intelligent debate, and everything to do with incrimination and condemnation, in other words, with closing down debate, not opening it up. The questions, as I’ll elaborate upon in a moment, share presuppositions which you are not meant to challenge (Should you answer, “Ought looking at pictures be regarded as a crime in the first place?” you will certainly increase your chances of getting a harsher prison sentence). In the simplistic, primitive world of good guys and bad guys dreamt up by prosecution lawyers and child salvationists, divergence from the one true path of moral rectitude is, by definition, crime. If you look at a picture of a boy or a girl, it means you are planning to *bleep* a boy or a girl. That this is the most insupportable bull*bleep*, that there is no evidence whatsoever to support this, despite many decades of trying to establish such crude causal links, will not deter zealous salvationists from claiming that their own weird fantasies about you should be regarded as fact.
Disgusted decency
If most of the men destroyed by Operation Ore and its poisonous spawn are now redesignated as ‘paedophiles’, we are very peculiar paedophiles. We are the kind of paedophiles who have no desire to have sexual contact with ‘children’ (the scare quotes simply hint at the absurdity of contemporary UK law - a ‘child’ covers anyone from a toddler in nappies to a sexually active seventeen year old). There are presently many, many more people in prison, and almost certainly permanently ruined as a result, for looking at pictures than for molesting children. It is a category error of truly psychotic proportions to regard the two acts as equivalent.
The fact that huge numbers of so-called ‘internet paedophiles’ (people who have looked at photographs and drawings) are herded onto the same register as child rapists and sexual murderers, who, despite their tiny number, nonetheless serve to represent public fantasies of ‘sex offenders’, merely accentuates the absurdity (or political expediency) of such a crudely overinclusive list in the first place. I strongly suspect that most of these men, if I and the others I met on the ludicrous thought-crime programme we were subjected to are anything to go by, are harmless, gentle individuals who simply got a bit depressed. But mass incarceration, psychological torture and excessive stigmatisation tend to happen when paranoid revulsion gets mistaken for morality. A law suffused with hysterical hate is unlikely to be a sane one, or to have sane effects.
This is not intended as one of those well-intentioned but naïve flower-power denunciations of hate favoured by soppy, idealistic hippies in the 1960s, which viewed aggression as a kind of preventable psychopathology. Sadly, holding love-ins and urging everyone to be nice have not led to greater world peace. I share the psychoanalytic view that hate is not only an ineradicable aspect of human nature, it can also be at times both necessary and healthy. It becomes malignant and destructive only when it is disowned, displaced or mendaciously rebranded as a kind of righteousness.
Any form of ‘decency’ which is founded on an act of murderous violence or humiliating cruelty will be forever haunted by that primary aggression no matter how assiduously it seeks to bury it. This kind of decency – ‘Get the scapegoat!’ decency - will always feel the insistent undertow of its indecent origin; it will be compulsively driven to shore up its dissimulated virtuousness by locating the bad guy outside its city walls. It is a structure in need of an enemy. Indeed, it is defined by its excluded other: I am ‘X’ because I am not ‘Y.’ And all Xs must be defended against Ys, who must be tracked down, rounded up and eliminated, for the good of society, for preserving our way of life, for public protection, for the sake of the children. Defending supposedly unquestionable social norms by manufacturing fictional enemies, whilst pervasive, is a project worthy of further enquiry. Establishing something called ‘decency’ on the basis of eradicating other people is, one might think, a questionable enterprise. Moralists, however, have always operated like this: ‘I’ am ‘decent’; ‘you’ are a ‘pervert.’
Indecent scepticism
But psychoanalysis raises impolite questions about these distinctions. Could it be that what is banished from my preferred version of myself - ‘I’ - simply gets exported to ‘you’? Can I feel superior by forcing you to feel inferior? Or, can other people be used as receptacles into which ‘the decent’ expel their unacceptable fantasies? Psychoanalysis, at its best, opposes these deceits. It is less concerned with identifying dangers from other people, from outsiders, than it is with accepting all those dangerous desires we would rather attribute to others. And even more incomprehensibly to small-minded moralists, psychoanalysis insists that acceptance does not mean enactment (quite the opposite, in fact).
Decency, innocence, danger, paedophilia: four terms which not only seem to depend upon each other but are today as interconnected as conjoined quadruplets. A pivotally unsettling question might be to ask what it is we (think we) know when we believe we know what these words mean. As manifest paedophilia (3) is exceedingly rare, and as the number of assaults and murders committed by the most dangerous individuals has remained the same, infinitesimally small, for many decades, the rising tide of horror and panic (and enjoyment) surrounding this contemporary bogeyman must be attributable to something other than climbing numbers.
It may be more edifying to examine what the official storylines about children leave out. As Slavoj Zizek put it:
“Perhaps the best way of encapsulating the gist of an epoch is to focus not on the explicit features that define its social and ideological edifices but on the disavowed ghosts that haunt it, dwelling in a mysterious region of nonexistent entities which nonetheless persist, continue to exert their efficacy.” (Zizek, 2000, p.3) (4)
All positive assertions, all creeds, all institutions, in other words, may profitably be subject to a psychoanalytic ‘x-ray’ for an examination of their structuring fantasies. From a psychoanalytic point of view, the ghosts which haunt us come from our own unwanted and disowned desires. The profit arising from psychoanalytic investigation, then, will not take the form of fortification for the dominant moral order, but of the truths it would prefer to keep obscured. It is perhaps little wonder that moralists and victimologists prefer cognitive behavioural psychology, which has nothing embarrassing or incriminating to say about their less manifest motivations at all.
Psychoanalysts, in addition to their formal teaching and reading, are obliged to undergo a lengthy personal analysis (the ‘training analysis’) before they are allowed to practise; they are expected to know their own weaknesses, irrationalities and temptations in order to avoid projecting them on to their future patients. Cognitive therapists learn from manuals and textbooks: they are rarely required to question themselves, and certainly not to the degree and duration of a psychoanalyst. Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is a technology, psychoanalysis a journey into the human soul. This does not make it above criticism; but its depth and breadth, drawing from art and literature as well as science, history and anthropology as well as philosophy, equip it to make a radical critique of cognitivist psychology, and CBT in particular, which the latter is wholly unable to reciprocate.
Before considering the weaknesses of cognitivist approaches further, we might pause here, as a prelude to analysing animosity, the distorted, malignant form hate acquires when it is projected onto others and disowned by the projector, to raise some questions about what we think we know when we know that we want to ‘get the paedos.’
Questions we love, questions we avoid, and people we love to hate
The American academic James Kincaid, who has studied the emergence into culture of the ‘erotically innocent’ child from the Victorian era to the present, is worth quoting at some length. His thesis, based on painstaking historical and literary analysis, is that it is the ideological insistence on ‘childhood innocence’, the emptying out from the ideological figure of the child of all abrasive attributes (aggressivity, sexuality, envy, avariciousness, etc), that has had the perverse effect of directly eroticising real children in the minds of the very same adults who suspect sexual abuse everywhere they look.
What the ideological construct of ‘the child’ is left with once these attributes are evacuated are precisely the very qualities (of purity, innocence and reticence) which were, and still are, perceived by many men to be intensely erotic, as young Victorian women, who were often suffocatingly reared to behave in these ways, frequently discovered. The great psychoanalyst, Melanie Klein, revealed in her work with children just how charged with aggressivity, sexuality, envy and sadism even very young children can be. For the salvationists, anything negative which occurs in a child’s mind or conduct can only have been put there by a beastly adult. For Klein, this is a sentimental delusion and grossly unjust to real children, who cannot live up to such wishful adult prescriptions.
Unless they adopt the role of victim, real children are left to struggle with powerful psychic forces which their egos are too immature to bind safely, or they are demonised as anti-social yobs or even as evil devil-children, as the popular media depicted the two pathetic and very disturbed children who murdered the toddler James Bulger in 1993. In many respects, the shrill hatred and terror mobilised by the high priests of tabloidworld against these unfortunate boys was as venomous, paranoid and bloodthirsty as that of the authorities depicted in Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible. Creating lynch mobs is hardly a sign of either morality or civilisation; regrettably, many newspaper editors and journalists appear to regard such campaigns as hallmarks of public decency.
Commenting on a series of high-profile media frenzies centring on child sexual abuse in the contemporary USA, all compulsively and repeatedly told and re-told to an eagerly receptive public, Kincaid wonders about why we love certain questions but not others. To begin with, Kincaid considers the questions we don’t love to ask. Listing the various massively publicised stories he has just analysed (5), he raises the questions we prefer not to address, or don’t even think of addressing: what is the source, the nature and the size of the pleasures we take from such stories? What are these stories, where do they come from, and why do we tell them with such relish? What kind of relish is it? Why do we want to hear these feverish tales about the sexuality of children, and why do we listen to them so eagerly? What is it about the child and its eroticism that so magnetizes us? In short, why do we tell the stories we tell? Why do we need to hear them? As Kincaid notes, despite the fact that these are plain sorts of questions, we often don’t attend to them. We prefer others, which he lists as follows:
1. How can we spot the paedophiles and get rid of them?
2. Meanwhile, how can we protect our children?
3. How can we induce our children to tell us the truth, and all of it, about their sexual lives?
4. How can we get the courts to believe children who say they have been sexually molested?
5. How can we get the courts to believe adults who suddenly remember they were sexually molested as children?
6. How can we get ourselves to believe others when they say they remember being sexually molested years ago?
7. How can we know if maybe some people are not making these things up, misremembering?
8. How can we know if bumbling parents, cops and (especially) therapists are not implanting false memories?
Though some of these questions seem to take revenge on other questions, they all have one thing in common: they demand the same answer, “We can’t”. (6)
Kincaid is mapping the contours of a, possibly the, most addictive social panic of all: paedohysteria. We are often aware of what and who we hate, and why we hate them, but less often are we aware of why (or even that) we sometimes love to hate. It is this ‘loving to hate’ factor which I believe is of pivotal importance in our perennial, and escalating, addiction to panics over children and sex, and to our horrified fascination with paedophiles, the contemporary cultural repository for our most viscerally enjoyable hatreds. Perhaps now is a good moment to take a closer look at hate – healthy and pathological.
Hate: true and false
Might there be such a thing as healthy hate? It’s an emotion that often gets a bad press; we think of necks bulging with engorged veins, spittle flying from snarling mouths, and fits of hair raising violence. But, if we momentarily set aside red-necked racialists and bile-spewing fundamentalists, we might begin to find a more ordinary and beneficial emotion. Perhaps the most remarkable thinking on hate remains that of the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, who wrote a seismic little essay about it as early as 1947 (7).
Winnicott’s startling finding is this: hate is a necessary part of human emotional development. If you can’t hate objectively, you will hate subjectively – forever despising that which, via the fantasy of projection, you have lodged in other people. The point here is that projection distorts perception and sabotages genuine fellow feeling: you cannot truly relate to another human being if you are actually all the time seeing only what you have projected onto him. In other words, you will be forever on the run from your own unwanted emotions, or forever trying to control other people because you imagine they are laden with disavowed bits of yourself. Worse still, in extremis you will be unable to differentiate between love and hate, a tragic, life-blighting confusion which Winnicott found in psychotic patients (for psychotics, wholly unable to hold conflicting emotions of love and hate together, love is hate). And even more startlingly, hate begins at home, in early infant care. It only becomes unmanageable when it is disavowed or sentimentalised (which, for Winnicott, is a sickly attempt at self-deception: ‘I’m purely good and kind and caring; only bad people hate.” This is a ‘you, not me!’ manoeuvre aimed at concealing powerful emotions).
Is it possible, Winnicott effectively asks, for a mother to safely and healthily hate her infant? A cognitive behavioural therapist would be scurrying toward the latest manual on anger management to teach such a wayward parent the right way to be normal (in other words, a silly fantasy dreamt up by cognitive behavioural therapists). A Winnicottian analyst would say “Of course you hate, as well as love, your baby; you’re not sick or wicked – it’s a natural response to the wear and tear, the tyranny even, of your infant’s ruthless neediness!”
Babies and toddlers don’t really care very much if you’re running on empty, if you’re desperate for a sleep, or a pee, or a ham sandwich. They just require you to respond now, without delay, to their discomfort, to their wish for company, to their immediate interests, fickle as quicksilver though these may be. In the beginning, every parent of a small child knows that there is no way around this ruthless demandingness, because to a very young child it is an entitlement, a right, not a special privilege. If you can allow them, small children will teach you how to parent them, or what they need from you, which amounts to the same thing. And since all children are unique, no manual on normalcy can tell you what to do. In fact, if you rely on these guidelines as opposed to the special cues provided by your very own child, you are almost certain to run into error. Children are not born normal – they haven’t read the manuals or the tabloid press. They just experience and respond according to their own particular rhythms and preferences. Experts on normalcy will claim otherwise, but no expert on normalcy could possibly be an expert on your child’s development (no one can be an expert on your child apart from you).
Ordinary mothers, Winnicott insists, have at least eighteen reasons to experience completely sane and unremarkable hate towards their babies (and mothers, Winnicott claims, hate their babies long before their babies are capable of hating them). Here are a few of them:
The baby is a danger to her body in pregnancy and at birth.
The baby is an interference with her private life, a challenge to her preoccupation.
To a greater or lesser extent a mother feels that her own mother demands a baby, so that her baby is produced to placate her mother.
The baby hurts her nipples even by suckling, which is at first a chewing activity.
He is ruthless, treats her as scum, an unpaid servant, a slave.
He tries to hurt her, periodically bites her, all in love.
His excited love is cupboard love, so that having got what he wants he throws her away like orange peel.
He is suspicious, refuses her good food, and makes her doubt herself, but eats well with his aunt.
After an awful morning with him she goes out, and he smiles at a stranger, who says: ‘Isn’t he sweet?’(8)
I laughed out loud, in relief, when I first read this, as a young first-time father; I suspect that all of us who have seen babies through to maturation, whether we are mothers or fathers, will recognise some if not all of the items on Winnicott’s list. The crucial point here is that most mothers survive this early experience of ruthless infant neediness without collapse or retaliation (9). They do not give vent to their hate: they just know that the love they feel will balance it out, and they might just as well bear it as try to get rid of it.
Later, when small children begin to know about hate themselves, when, inevitably, they discover that mummy and daddy are unable to prevent discomfort, sleepy crankiness, momentary hunger, transiently cold wet diapers, and so on, they will feel more at ease with this emotion if they have been fortunate enough to have had parents who can handle it. For Winnicott, this just means getting through it without becoming vengeful or victimised. It is this experience, that of a loved parent who can survive their primitive, pre-concern ruthlessness, which enables infants to integrate aggression as a resource (i.e., ‘I can be angry without destroying everything I love’). The strain on mothers, or primary carers, is as enormous as it is unavoidable. As Winnicott puts it:
“A mother has to be able to tolerate hating her baby without doing anything about it. She cannot express it to him. If, for fear of what she may do, she cannot hate him appropriately when hurt by her child she must fall back on masochism, and I think it is this that gives rise to the false theory of a natural masochism in women. The most remarkable thing about a mother is her ability to be hurt so much by her baby and to hate so much without paying her child out, and her ability to wait for rewards that may not come at a later date.” (10)
It might be worth looking at Winnicott’s psychoanalytic response to a delinquent boy during World War II, if only to contrast it with what such a ‘young offender’ might find in the culture of professionalized vindictiveness which dominates today’s agenda. The boy, nine years old, had been sent to a hostel for evacuated children Dr. Winnicott consulted to. But, Winnicott tells, unlike most of the other children, he had been sent there not because of bombs but because of truancy. Winnicott mentions that he had hoped to give the boy some psychotherapeutic treatment during his stay in the hostel, ‘but his symptom won and he ran away as he had always done from everywhere since the age of six when he first ran away from home.’
However, during an interview prior to hostel admission, Winnicott realised that he made a significant connection with him: “I could see and interpret through a drawing of his that in running away he was unconsciously saving the inside of his home and preserving his mother from assault, as well as trying to get away from his own inner world, which was full of persecutors.”
These words are worth pausing over. Rather than being frogmarched into ‘addressing his offending behaviour’ long before he had any capacity to do so, as he would undoubtedly have to do today at the hands of behaviour managers, his actions are instead accorded a degree intelligibility through Winnicott’s deep awareness of his survival techniques. Rather than being given an ASBO and made to attend a meaningless behaviour programme, the boy instead feels deeply understood by this slightly eccentric man, who senses that he has never been able to express natural aggression and appetite safely and securely. Truancy, for this boy, is a form of love - ‘I will run away rather than hurt you, mummy, because I know you can’t take my aggressive feelings.’ Even more poignantly, Winnicott understood the terrible fear driving this child’s manifest conduct: “If mummy can’t handle my aggression, it must be too evil to look at, so I’ll just run off whenever I feel cross, or after someone has angered me. My head is full of monsters.”
I’ll let Winnicott describe what followed in his own words:
“I was not very surprised when he turned up at the police station very near my home... My wife very generously took him in and kept him for three months, three months of hell. He was the most loveable and most maddening of children, often stark staring mad. But fortunately we knew what to expect. We dealt with the first phase by giving him complete freedom and a shilling whenever he went out. He had only to ring up and we would fetch him from whatever police station had taken charge of him.
“Soon the expected change-over occurred, the truancy symptom turned round, and the boy started dramatising the assault on the inside. It was really a whole-time job for the two of us together, and when I was out the worst episodes took place.
“… The important thing … is the way in which the evolution of the boy’s personality engendered hate in me, and what I did about it.
“Did I hit him? The answer is no, I never hit. But I should have had to have done so if I had not known all about my hate and if I had not let him know about it too. At crises I would take him by bodily strength, without anger or blame, and put him outside the front door, whatever the weather or the time of day or night. There was a special bell he could ring, and he knew if he rang it he would be readmitted and no word said about the past. He used this bell as soon as he had recovered from his maniacal attack.
“The important thing is that each time, just as I put him outside the door, I told him something; I said that what had happened had made me hate him. This was easy because it was true.
“I think these words were important from the point of view of his progress, but they were important in enabling me to tolerate the situation without letting out, without losing my temper and without now and again murdering him.” (11)
I suspect that if Winnicott had managed this poignantly troubled child’s symptoms like this today, a social worker and a policeman would have been knocking on his door, ready to arrest him for child abuse (fortunately for them, they would not have to take on this child’s massive and provocative disturbance themselves). In today’s tyrannical ideology of compulsory niceness to ‘victims’, all the child needs is love, patience and kindness. If a child proceeds to trash these qualities, without mercy or respite, it is the fault of the carer, not the child, who has been ‘abused’ and therefore needs infinite indulgence and compensation. No matter how well intentioned the paving, this particular path leads straight to hell.
A child who has not met intelligent, controlled hate from his parental environment will simply go on trying to find it, go on becoming more and more impossible, as children in local authority ‘care’ so frequently and tragically do. This benign hate, Winnicott shows us, is a necessity. Such children have to do this until they find what they are looking for (good, ordinary, healthy hate) or their aggression feels limitless; it is not an especially good idea to burden children with providing their own limits.
Winnicott believed that early parenting placed an enormous strain on young mothers and fathers, and that they should be afforded equally enormous support and understanding, even when they made mistakes. Although he could not endorse what follows (he died in 1971), I think he hints here at some of the main causes of contemporary paedohysteria. If you have to simply contain your own inevitable hatred of being treated like a slave, of being deprived of sleep and time to yourself, of being rejected at whim by His Majesty the Baby while he smiles charmingly at the lady in the supermarket checkout, you might be tempted to do a fundamentally dishonest and futile thing. You might choose to repress your healthy, ordinary hatred, instead of simply bearing it in the faith that it will soon pass.
Freud knew that repression was not simply a swallowing down of bitter truths, a holding inside. It could also take the form of transference – literally, transferring the feelings you cannot bear to acknowledge as your own onto an outsider. This is the point at which healthy, ordinary hate turns malignant.
Whilst Freud never disputed the necessity of repression: we are, after all, animals, even if we are the kind of animals who invented civilisation, he was deeply averse to conventional, blind, conformist repression. Animals tend to adopt Darwin’s theories all too concretely – if you’re having a bad day when I’m feeling bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, I’ll eat you. But human animals invented social bonding and shared language to complicate this simple, ‘survival of the fittest’ rule.
Malignant hating: animosity
Perhaps it is little wonder that a brilliant Jewish polymath, during an era when his culture was about to become genocidally anti-Semitic, worked out the social and psychological dynamics of ‘othering’ (in Freud’s vocabulary, ‘transference’). When transference comes to town, sociality changes: suddenly, we have ‘us’ and ‘them.’
Psychoanalysis refuses othering; if you are looking only for an accomplice to justify your hatred toward those you have targeted as beyond the pale, you’d better not go to see a psychoanalyst. A vast battery of spurious experts will be available to you instead, from law enforcement officers, social workers intent on rooting out abusers, to the militant witchfinders running victim survivor groups. If you told one of the latter about, say, a friend at work who had been sexually harassed, they would almost certainly have a good deal to say about what you could do to assist her (or him), for example, helping the ‘victim’ to report the perpetrator to ‘the authorities’. A psychoanalyst, however, may say nothing at all, and simply wait quietly and patiently for further thoughts to emerge in your mind about this scene.
Psychoanalysis, in other words, is not primarily concerned about punishing wrongdoers. It is concerned with permitting repressed, unconscious fantasies, desires and beliefs to emerge for conscious contemplation. For this to happen, you need a quiet, confidential space, and unhurried time, not a list of action points. Cognitive behaviourists and victimologists alike have no concept of the unconscious; therefore you are more likely to receive advice for the ‘appropriate’ way to act upon the predicament you have just described. Appropriateness and inappropriateness are, of course, defined by the therapist/victimologist.
A psychoanalyst might be more intrigued about why you feel like mentioning this scene now. This does not imply disbelief; pre-emptive dismissal is every bit as stupid as immediate credulity. The scenario, in fact, comes from Christopher Bollas and David Sundelson in their urgent, stirring warning about the rise of hysterical victimology which, they persuasively and repeatedly demonstrate, has authorised breaches in confidentiality so enormous that psychoanalysis has become virtually impossible to practise in the USA and Britain.
Psychoanalysis depends upon total confidentiality. It requires people to talk honestly about their darkest and most disturbing thoughts, fantasies and desires. With child protection fanaticism being enshrined in numerous laws on both sides of the Atlantic, analysts are now obliged to report to the authorities anyone who talks about ‘deviant’ fantasies (which policemen and prosecution lawyers deludedly regard as straightforward intentions). To fail, or refuse, to do so risks censure and even prosecution (including imprisonment) for the analyst. Notoriously, some of the people most in need of treatment, people with so-called borderline personality disorders, who struggle to keep fantasy and action distinct, and acting out adolescents, who use melodramatic provocation to manage terrible psychic agonies, are the very people who will be most dissuaded from seeking treatment as a result. Needless to say, the small number of individuals who ruminate on assaulting a child will not allow themselves to come anywhere near a psychoanalyst with these conditions in place, even though they may desperately want help. The law, Bollas and Sundelson show, is turning psychoanalysts into policemen.
Let’s return to the example of the patient who reports the incident of a work friend’s sexual harassment. Why on earth would a psychoanalyst remain silent upon hearing this? Bollas and Sundelson have an eloquent and sane reply:
“… in what is termed object relations theory, it is always assumed that whatever a patient talks about might express an unconscious and unwelcome part of the self. So the harassing figure at the place of work might be the first unconscious sign of the patient’s verbalisation of a part of himself that is sexually attracted to the friend. By selecting the harasser as an object through which to signify this desire, the patient actually invites the analyst to condemn this desire by indicating shock or outrage, and by suggesting punitive forms of action. Such indications would have the effect of sealing off the patient’s sexuality under a plastic coating of moral authority, bonding the patient and clinician, but, unfortunately, bonding them in opposition to the expression of sexuality.” (13)
Does moralistically sealing off sexuality from further exploration make it safer or more reformable? Does refusing to discuss something make it go away? There is an enormous difference between the focus of psychoanalysis - the unconscious mind - and that of ordinary ‘advise-based’ counselling, which aims to help by telling people what they should do. This is all right if you’re thinking of buying a washing machine, but not if you’re trying to live your life authentically. Who can tell you how to do that? Instead, psychoanalysis provides a safe, receptive area, marked off from the noise, distractions and provocations of ordinary life, in which to listen to your own mind as it gives you bulletins of unconscious news.
It is in the unconscious that we plant our fears, which include our unwanted desires and temptations (if we didn’t have unwanted desires, there’d be no need for an unconscious; those who deny its existence must spend their days trying to escape its effects, perhaps by becoming a child salvationist). It is precisely because he does not react in a customary social manner that the psychoanalyst can listen out for the subtle, evanescent ambiguities that signal unconscious communication. If we cannot embrace our own unconscious thoughts and wishes, we will resort to pinning them on someone else.
Access to the unconscious can only be approached, as Freud discovered, by freedom of expression (‘free association’). If you try to pursue it, by asking questions, you’ll simply evoke conscious rationalisations. Uncensored free expression, to this day an almost shockingly radical notion for a curative discipline (aren‘t doctors meant to ask you about your symptoms?) - inevitably means that you end up saying things you never expected to say, reminiscing about events you’d not thought about for years, and, frequently, saying things you didn’t mean to say. For an analyst, the unconscious emerges through what is actually said, not what you intended to say. It is when the conscious ego slips up in its surveillance and monitoring of your talk that the unconscious speaks.
But if the patient is asked to free associate, so is the analyst. The person on the couch speaks freely and truthfully, an incredibly difficult thing to do, in actual fact, and the person behind the couch listens freely. The analyst does not have an agenda other than to wait for unconscious signals. And, as unconscious communications often contain many more than one idea or desire, in listening quietly and freely, the analyst is giving himself time to mull over the possible multiple meanings behind the manifest act or word. Returning to our example, Bollas and Sundelson continue:
“Perhaps the patient is asking that a morally censorious part of her personality be taken on; or perhaps it is a communication from the transference: the patient feels sexually molested in the workplace of psychoanalysis. Whatever the psychic truth seems to be will rarely be instantaneously clear. It will take time - nonreactive time….
“The analyst will, however, eventually come to an interpretation. And if he says, for example, that the patient finds it easier to talk about her own sexual feelings for her friend by attributing them to an aggressive man who deservers condemnation, he has not rejected the patient’s account of her friend’s work harasser. Instead he has decided, as always, that whatever psychic truths there are in any narrative must take priority for the analysand if psychoanalysis is to function.” (14)
What I am trying to get at here is that apparently axiomatic words and deeds can have exceptionally divergent meanings, depending on the libidinal co-ordinates, the unconscious desires, invisibly choreographing them. What you see depends upon what you are using to aid your vision. Just as you cannot see sub-cellular structures like mitochondria with a magnifying glass, so you cannot see unconscious processes with moralistic ideologies.
It is worth pausing on Bollas and Sundelson’s tentative interpretations: if someone feels driven to report, with disgust, a scene of ‘sexual harassment’, is it enough to take this on face value, or would it be wiser to ask: why has this person described this scene in these terms? As victim therapists find any expression of erotic interest from a male toward a female (or even another male) as harassment and victimisation, this question has an added urgency. Do we let rigid ideologues rule our lives, or ought we be free to be sceptical about their assertions? If moralists create an environment in which erotic desire is regarded as a form of assault, what are we to do with our desires? If, as Freud suggests, we are all desiring animals, the notion that desire is the equivalent of assault, or that desire leads ineluctably to assault, leaves us all in deep trouble. Could one desire in a ‘wanting to be’ rather than ‘wanting to have’ modality (i.e., I want to imagine that I am being an adolescent again, to re-experience that early sexual experimentalism, rather than: I want to *bleep* an adolescent)? Freud would have answered: of course.
In an essay written in the early 1970s (but published much later out of consideration for his patient’s confidentiality), the psychoanalyst Eric Brenman found himself thinking deeply about tunnel-visioned righteousness, which he called ‘cruelty and narrow-mindedness.’ He was working with an extraordinarily vicious patient, who relentlessly veiled her talion-law vindictiveness with a patina of victimisation. So committed was this unfortunate woman to violent virtuousness that she drove almost everyone she approached away from her. Brenman eventually helped her to be kinder, both to herself and to others, but only after years of analytic struggle, during which he had to hold back the frequently provoked inclination to judge her, punish her. As a seasoned psychoanalyst, he knew that if he gave vent to these immediate responses, he would merely entrench her sense of vindictive victimhood. She saw herself as purely good - all her misfortunes and difficulties were inflicted upon her by malevolent and envious others. Naturally, her own spiteful, rigid and malicious treatment of everyone she got close to was rationalised by her as (a) a natural response of a pure, innocent person to other people’s nastiness, and (b) justice. Brenman eventually helped her to let go of this cruel and self-defeating moralism. Nobody can love a spiteful do-gooder, after all.
Summarising the mental manoeuvres involved, Brenman wrote:
“When love and hate clash, either we feel guilt and make reparation, or we are persecuted by guilt. To avoid either consequence, we can pervert the truth, draw strength from a good object and feel free to practise cruelty in the name of goodness. It is as though we omnipotently hijack human righteousness and conduct cruelty in the name of justice.” (15)
Love and hate inevitably clash for anyone rearing a child from infancy - primary, ruthless dependency - to maturity (thanks for helping, mummy and daddy). It is when we try to split these conflicting components apart, encouraged by political moralism, and project them into good and bad types of human being, that emotional lying can become enshrined in public law.
To the politically correct, aggression is a kind of affliction; to most people it is an ordinary component of human emotional responsiveness. We all need aggression and objective hate when it is called for, to protect ourselves from assault and injustice, malicious lies and duplicitous righteousness. Today, a mother who feels negatively, no matter how transiently, toward her child will be viewed as in need of parenting training (CBT again, of course - often taught by people who are not parents themselves but who nonetheless believe that the manuals they have read qualify them as so). For Winnicott, she would be embraced compassionately as an ordinary human being who finds being treated as a slave unpleasant.
But perhaps we have only raised questions in this chapter. We are aware that the fictions, lies and displaced desires that formed racism created a tragedy, a holocaust. But why such horror, such disgust, such hidden enjoyment, now, in childhood sexuality? Why must it always be represented - over and over again, to feed our fascination - as abuse?
Maybe we should take a cool, analytic view at ‘deviant desires’ next.
(1) Camille Paglia (1994), “No Law in the Arena” in Vamps and Tramps, p50, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd.
(2) Gore Vidal (1979) “Sex Is Politics”, Playboy, reprinted in Gore Vidal (1999) Sexually Speaking: Collected Sex Writings California: Cleis Press, pp 100-101.
(3) As defined by psychiatry at any rate, which at least attempts to be meticulously discriminating and detailed in its differentiation of various mental ‘disorders’. The police and the child salvationists predominantly seem to use the word ‘paedophile’ in the same was as the black cab driver or bloke down the pub – ‘perv’, ‘nonce’, ‘anyone we don’t like who fancies someone younger than himself.’ The result? If, as is currently the case, anyone under the age of 18 is considered a child in UK law, the salvationists can argue that teenagers exploring sex, mutually and non-coercively, are indistinguishable from four year olds, and someone will have to pay for such ‘abuse’ if it comes to light, even if it is one or both of the teenagers. We now have children as young as 10 on the Sex Offenders Register.
(4) Slavoj Zizek, “Giving up the Balkan Ghost” in Slavoj Zizek, The Fragile Absolute – or, Why is the Christian legacy worth fighting for? London and New York: Verso, 2000, p3.
(5) Specifically, that of Ellie Nesler, the mother who shot dead her son’s alleged abuser in court, the trial of the Menendez brothers who as adolescents had murdered their step-father whom they claimed had repeatedly sexually molested them as children, Woody Allen’s marriage to his adopted daughter, Michael Jackson and his alleged sexual infatuation with young pubescent boys, and the ‘Satanic Ritual Abuse’ panic culminating in a lengthy trial of parentally accused day-care workers.
(6) James R. Kincaid “Producing Erotic Children” in Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children ed. Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004) pp 8 – 9.
(7) D. W. Winnicott (1947) “Hate in the Countertransference” republished as Chapter XV in Winnicott (1987) Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis London: Hogarth
(8) ibid., p201.
(9) For Winnicott, ruthlessness in infancy is not organised cruelty but an unavoidable developmental immaturity, an ability to feel concern for any else; it is cured by gradual maturation and good enough parental care.
(10) Winnicott (1947), ibid., p. 202.
(11) Winnicott (1947), ibid., pp. 199-200
(12) Christopher Bollas and Davis Sundelson (1995) The New Informants: Betrayal of confidence in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy London: H. Karnac (Books) Ltd
(13) Bollas and Sundelson (1995), ibid., pp 65 - 66.
(14) Ibid., pp 67 -68.
(15) Eric Brenman (1985) “Cruelty and narrowmindedness” republished in Elizabeth Bott Spillius (ed.) (1988) Melanie Klein Today, Volume 1: Mainly Theory New York and London: Routledge, p. 257.
Copyright © Inquisition 21st century
Go to Chapter 4.
Created on 04/10/2009 08:42 AM by Editor
Updated on 08/18/2009 11:29 AM by Editor
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