THE LIES WE TELL OURSELVES & other defences against changing our lives

A DEFENCE IS something one uses to hide something else.  During these heavy monsoon downpours in the City our best ‘defence’ is a hardy umbrella, or to stay indoors and watch the lashing rains from the comfort of an air-conditioned apartment. A ‘defence’, in the law courts, is merely that which one stands-by, to argue one's position: "M'Lord, my client was indeed not exposing himself in the Borivali Park, he was merely perusing the zip of his trousers when they fell down, just as the woman happened to be walking close-by." A psychological ‘defence’ is that which use to protect ourselves (another umbrella if you like) unconsciously, to ward off reality.  For example, I am warding off feeling that I think I am being an idiot for choosing a particular course of action, but I manifest this by saying that other people think I am an idiot (projection). 

Deciding what is true in the psychological consulting room is a process of detection, not unlike the court perhaps, in that it often involves finding ways through games of distortion, elaboration and walls of defences.  To bribe a judge in the courts of India is the ultimate, if dubious defence: “Here your Honour, I hope this 5 Lakh of rupees will help you arrive at an expedient decision in my favour.” Other than bribery in the form say of impression-management, ‘I will charm you, so that I hope you will say nice things about me to my boss’, more overt hints at transactions are rare in the consulting room.  Although I did once is encounter a client, who asked me, “Perhaps you would like me furnish you with a larger consulting room?” after regretting sharing with me his involvement in a corruption scandal.

What psychoanalysis can do is expose us to the lies we tell ourselves. It also reminds us that in the court, probably nobody is telling the ‘whole truth and nothing but the truth’, through the existence of the ever-present unconscious that makes the ‘whole truth’ unknowable. In the law court, you have an adversary, a person on the “other side”, who is against you.  It’s a game of for and against, winners and losers.   On Freud’s couch however, the adversary is not some opponent with his strong defence and thick folder of justification, but a part of you - the  complainant, the applicant, the respondent – all representing different parts and edicts of your mind. This is what we will explore today, through an in-depth illustration with a client, of the defences we all have that prevent us from becoming who we claim we want to be.     

All clients come to session because there is something they don’t know and at least appear to want to know.  A client, let’s call him, Atul, he tells me he is feeling flat and has long bouts of apathy. Atul is a Hindu although he tells me he is a somewhat reluctant temple-goer. In his early forties, well dressed in his expensive suit, and highly polished shoes, I learn that he had an arranged marriage some 15 years ago, his parents having approved their joint astrological chart and he has two children. Educated in India, he has not had much in the way of international work experience, other than working with some foreigners in the office. He tells me that he is struggling to motivate the team he leads, and engage them fully. During the first few sessions we discuss his difficulty with making clear decisions, avoiding any real sense of closeness with people at work and what sort of effect they have on the people around him and the success of his business.  Despite my sense early it seemed as though he would like me to write a prescription that would make his problems go away in a painlessly, this early dialogue is fairly straightforward.  The room was imbued with a gentle convivial sort of ambience.

His character, his idiom if you like, is revealed more over time, not only in what he says, but in other mannerism, patterns of arriving (always on time), his being (upright, neat, not a hair out of place, sitting very still in the chair) and leaving the sessions (always being shocked when the session comes to an end).  His speaking, after beginning to feel more at ease with me, as I encourage him to say anything that comes up, is often a stream of attacks between different parts of his mind, which goes roughly something like this:

“I think it’s rude to make people speak if they don’t want to.

 I suppose you think I’m being a coward.

You know xx person. I don’t want to be rude like him.  

He’s a complete bully, he’s shameless, ruthless, doesn’t care about anyone’s feelings. 

You think I want to be like him? You want to turn me into him?

Maybe I shouldn’t be in banking.

I know I’m useless at this job.

You think I’m useless don’t you..

I don’t believe people should be so selfish the way they treat people in this industry.

I just don’t know what I am doing.

I don’t know why I am doing this job – I hate it most of the time.

These guys get paid a lot you know, they should take responsibility for their

 businesses.

I want to run a business that is caring about people. 

But my guys are a lazy bunch, they don’t take any responsibility.

They don’t tell me what they are doing so how the hell can I fix things when they

 blow-up.” 

Beginning to explore how his personal history has shaping his way of living now, evoked a deep resistance in him.  Statements such as “Look, I don’t believe in looking back.  My father was a hard-working man,” were common. At times, he would withdraw, becoming silent, like a small child in a man’s suit, attempting to shut out the threats of the world around him. Or there were times when I asked him, “what sort of feelings do you think evoke in the guys in your team?” he would reply with an abrupt, “I don’t know, why does this matter.” Such was his defence.

As we began to develop a stronger working relationship, he slowly revealed that his father was a distant figure, with somewhat sadistic characteristics.  He would ruthlessly express his regular dissatisfaction with Atul as a young boy, bombarding him with instructions of not only how the boy should think, but what exactly he should think about.   To explore how Atul’s own mind was turned against Atul, and attacking him in the same way as his father did, was a frightening element of himself to face.  This endless ‘mental interference’ exhausted him.  What we were able to explore, was how deeply rooted is his disgust at his father’s aggression and Atul’s unwillingness to take any assertive leadership position. Being direct as a leader in Atul’s mind, meant only one thing: to be horribly aggressive just as his father had been. These feelings were painful for him to connect with.  They evoked a strong defense, a force that “prevents a return to memory.  The patient’s not knowing is really a not wanting to know.”       

So the psychologist’s role is to “overcome this resistance.” And help the client build a more rational assessment of himself and the things that have shaped him.  How does this happen?  Let’s turn to Freud:

“What means have we at our disposal for overcoming this continual resistance?  Few, but they include almost all those by which one man can ordinarily exert a psychical influence on another.  In the first place, we must (1) reflect that is a psychical resistance, especially one that has been in force for a long time, can only be resolved slowly and by degrees, and we must wait patiently.  In the next place, we may reckon on the (2) intellectual interest which the patient begins to feel after working for a short time.  But lastly – and this remains the strongest lever – we must endeavour, after we have discovered the (3) motives for his defence, to deprive them of their value or even to replace them by more powerful ones.”  

Fortunately, Atul was intellectually engaged in exploring own psychology and ‘what made him tick’ as he put it.  This made our engagement from the early days very satisfying for both of us.  The clients who rarely last the course of their development journey, lack such intellectual inquiry and often seek comfort and solace in a narrative that simply, unreflectively blames others. Not only that, Atul boss had demonstrated openly commitments to his own leadership development, thus providing him with a substitute elder figure, perhaps in a sense, a more solid father-figure.  Being the father of two young sons, gave him further incentive to avoid the distant fathering that had hurt him so very deeply.  The beauty of course, is that in allowing himself to express his love for his boys more deeply, and to give them the room to think for themselves was a deeply reparative and healing experience for him. In our relationship, he experienced good attention that he wasn’t used to, learning that it was safe and in fact enjoyable to share more of himself.  This richer dialogue enabled Atul to get to know himself more deeply and to choose thoughtfully, rather than reactively, how close or distant he wanted to be from others in any given moment. 

Clients who honour us, by allowing us to be alongside them on this profound journey, live forever in our heart. I continue to wonder how they are, many years after they have left the consulting room. I remember Atul as an extremely brave man, for in his heart, is a deep desire to be decent man, to be more loving and less shut off from life. His inquiry into himself was a gift that enriched all the relationships in his life.  He was able to begin to connect with how his resistance, particularly how his extreme level of work-aholism served to disconnect him from painful memories, which when faced, rather than endlessly held at bay or acted-out, weren’t in fact so difficult to face at all.  He shocked himself by finding that he procrastinated less and felt less afraid to risk standing out from the crowd and taking a strong position.  Of course, what was the hardest to face, was he was burying awareness of his own aggression that shared many common features of his father. At one point, screaming a series of abuses at me, he tested my tolerance to stick with him, whatever he did and learned some important lessons about reparation and recovery.

Sadly, not everyone makes it through this journey of defences in the way Atul does.  In a world of increasing addictions to busy-ness, consumer spending, drugs and alcohol we seem to be collectively building up more and more defences against experiencing ourselves.  I find it extremely sad, as I write this, the extraordinarily talented British singer Amy Winehouse, died at just 27 years old, from what appears to be drug addiction.  Her album “Back-to-Black,” is an astonishing musical achievement.  She will now write no more news words, there will be no more new music.

It is as though her ‘defence’ against health, was made of stone.   Perhaps she was like the writer Ernest Hemingway, who shortly before he committed suicide, told his friend Htochner, “If I can’t exist on my own terms, then existence is impossible.  That is how I have lived, and that is now how I must live – or not live.”

Amy was Camden, in London’s very own star.  My daughter Emily is just 4 years younger than her, working in Camden and used to see Amy from time to time in the local pub, who she described as a warm, friendly and down-to-earth. Thank God, my daughter is alive and well, working in her job at the Camden, no-doubt with her neatly packed lunchbox on her desk. She contributes, with a profound dedication, to making the lives of people with learning difficulties richer and more fulfilling.   I won’t shield myself by hiding behind a defence that says “It’s fine, I’ll see her soon.”  I wish we were in the same room, in the same country right now. I allow myself to connect with that feeling, beneath any defence, even though it is painful.

 

Growing & Shrinking: India in the $335 billion+ Beauty Business

PSYCHOANALYSIS DECONSTRUCTS fictions, falsehoods and all sorts of fakery.  Bland familiar stories become more interesting through the intelligent act of sensitive listening and paying attention. If something is growing, the psychoanalyst in the corner of the room is curious to see what might be shrinking.  We are forever interested in narrative twists and turns, opacities, inconsistencies, slips in the traditions of conduct, innuendos and occasional burps, otherwise outcast by either stereotypes or empirical traditions. To crack a Freudian joke, we are curious whether ‘a cigar is sometimes more than a cigar’. Not only are the client’s words of interest, but phrasing, language construction, the embedded promises in the cultural landscape is worthy of a little analytic nudging and inquiry.  I’m curious to explore the business of global beauty trends emerging in India and some unexpected, shrinking, side-effects.

The notion of the ‘ideal ego’ in psychoanalysis is a projected image with which the person identifies.  In a simple sense, it is what someone would like to be.  Advertising of course, promotes images of the ideal, fostering a sense of possibilities. Mental health, arguably concerns both the gap between reality and the ideal ego of oneself, as well as, the lengths a person is willing to go to achieve that ideal. Where might you ‘draw the line’ so-to-speak to achieve the modern beauty ideal? For some, plastic surgery would be a step “too far”, but Botox might be okay. If someone measures five foot four inches and attempts to be six feet by having surgical procedures on his body, it is easy to think the person has lost more than his psychological footing.   In Richard Harrison’s “Silence of the Lambs”, we meet a serial killer, a former patient of Hannibal Lecter who murders women and uses their skin to sew together a construction of a woman that he can wear.  Again, we are in the business of fantasy, yet most attempts to change the appearance of oneself are rarely as extreme. But at what point do attempts as bodily transformation enter the arena of madness and the macabre, or create other effects we are not prepared for?

In most scholarly centres around the world, you are likely to spend more time studying Freudian texts in the Media Studies and Literature departments than in the school of Psychology. So Freud’s contribution to critical analysis doesn’t merely help us subvert, or at least question the stories we tell ourselves, but those that are thrust upon us,  and has been usefully given over to deconstruct  literary texts, movies, reveal the narrative promises in advertising campaign, or indeed the rhetoric of war. As I have written in earlier articles, psychoanalysis asks us to give up our belief in magic and engage our critical thinking, here today, by focusing on beauty and body image. 

The body has always featured as a means of participating in the cycle of capitalist production by the poor, the oppressed, or lower classes.  Boxers use their physical might to enter into the money-making ring, and   have for centuries used their bodies in prostitution, or to make themselves more marketable in the competition for to secure a financially dependable male.  Today, many Indian women use whitening skin creams.  Some may argue as a sort of colonial hangover that equates white with power, or a legacy of the caste system that equates fairer skin with those of higher status such as Brahmins and the Indian aristocracy. In his book, “Beauty Imagined”, the Harvard history professor points out that the first wave of the globalization of beauty, coincided “with the highpoint of Western imperialism, made it all but inevitable that being white was seen as possessing superior beauty—alongside superior everything else”.

 A local psychotherapist here, who treats adolescent girls and women, attributes this body-bleaching to the stereotypes imparted to Indian girls having “very white western dolls as their models of perfect femininity,” describing the difficulty in former times of purchasing beautiful (not ugly) Indian brown faced dolls.  Advertising of course shows us normative ideas of beauty ideals in a culture.  The cream “Fair & Lovely”, (which thanks to the English pronunciation on T.V. sounds like “Fair & Ugly”) promises dejected looking dusky women that they will become a more marketable commodity by equating whiteness with either a better chances at an executive job, or leading the man of your dreams to be utterly love-struck by your paleness.  Beauty is of course a huge global business estimated in the region of $335 billion. Globalisation, clearly more than the simply outsourcing of jobs to poorer countries and greater geographic mobility for some people, bringing with it a sense of flattening or MacDonaldisation of the world.

India’s beauty market for example, doubled in size between 2002 and 2007. Advertising of such products of course functions by identifications of beauty, i.e. that you will identify with that which is being sold to you. Only through debate, resistance and feedback does this industry’s message of what is ‘normal’ and desirable change.  The Company Unilever, for example, that produces “Fair & Lovely”, also manufactures the “Dove” product of skin creams with an all-together different campaign in Europe, geared towards Western feminist sensibilities. Called the “Empowerment Campaign", it promotes identification with all manner of female body shapes, sizes and skin tones.  Implicit in two very different campaigns, are on the one hand the message ‘you are a worthwhile woman if you are fair skinned’, on the other, revealing an equally culturally constructed notion of female beauty ‘you are worthwhile whatever shape and colour you are’.         

How we relate to images of standard feminine beauty is to a degree, a matter of personal choice and preference, as well as, efforts at critical engagement with cultural messages.  Psychoanalysis of course subverts any real sense of a thorough knowing of ourselves, or complete awareness of how we are affected by cultural imagery, through its insertion of the idea of the unconscious. We simply cannot know what ‘gets-in’ to us.  Nevertheless, social activists continue to undermine rigid patriarchal definitions of ‘man’ and ‘woman’.  For instance, a few years ago in the U.S., there was a campaign by male and female sexual politics activists, attempting to subvert rigid gender stereotypes.  In the period leading up to Christmas, they swapped the voice boxes in the popular dolls Barbie & Ken.  On Christmas morning, when children pressed the voice button on their dolls, they found themselves in for a shock.  Barbie, in her pink mini-dress said in a deep husky voice, “Hi, let’s go kill the enemy” and Ken in his army fatigues squeaked, “Hi do you think I look pretty today?”

Beauty capitalism is high-growth business in India. Hindustan Unilever is opening a Lakme beauty salon every week, and Jawed Habbit Hair & Beauty (JHHB) had 37 salons in 2006, rising to some 225 by the end of 2010. One rising form of outsourcing in India involves transferring the hair from the heads of the poor Indian women, so that it can be glued to the heads of women of Mumbai.   Basically, hair extensions made from real hair. Only the poor do not receive any obvious direct financial benefit for giving away arguably one of the few things they own, the hair on their heads.  They do this as a form of purification at their Hindu temples as they pray for food, shelter and education for their children. It is the temple-bosses who are the ones who receive the financial gains in the region of something like $100,000 for 400 kilos of hair. The women are not aware that their hair is sold.  What happens to the money is unclear.

This is the focus of the rather brilliant documentary “Hair India”, by Raffaele Brunetti.  It is a visual narrative of hair transactions from the poor to the relatively wealthy, imbued with human and geographic distance. The poor woman and the woman in the Mumbai salon who will adore the hair do not meet. The Temple priests sell the hair to a company called “Great Lengths” and ship them to their headquarters in Italy.  Mumbai salons then purchase the hair which is shipped back to India, having been cleaned, prepared with the glues and whatever it is they do, packaged, prettified.  Hair outsourcing in India, began during the 1980’s, but the boom took place as hair extensions became a popular some 10 years ago. Indian hair is considered the best in the market for its quality and length. Indian women from poor villages don't use any chemicals and take great care of their hair: they comb it frequently and only use coconut oil on it. “Great Lengths” hair extensions are allegedly the best in the world, their products adorning the heads of many Hollywood stars.

The film “Hair India” is a subtle documentary that gently emphasises the elegance and grace of the poor women, in contrast with the women of Mumbai involved in the world of hair extensions.  The central character, Sangetta, who will have the hair extensions fitted is seen at Dishad’s hair salon in Mumbai, quizzing the salon staff for names of Hindi film celebrities who may also have such extensions. In the film, we meet the poor climbing the steps to the temple.  We then cut to the Mumbai polyester-clad women tottering about on high heels in bars and fashion shows, as they survey sumptuous displays of food and shots of a tray weighted down with loaded glasses of alcohol. A poor woman Helmata and her family gaze into the windows of shops that sell televisions and rather poignantly, a shop that sells toilets and other bathroom fittings.  Such things, the television (connecting us with the wider world?) and indoor toilets are presumably something she and her family are unlikely to afford. In a glamorous Mumbai bar, Sangetta turns to one of the women to discuss her hair extensions saying with a smirk, "everyone tells you you'll feel like a goddess".

While the hair extensions are being glued to Sangetta’ s  head, by four salon workers, she looks up and says, “it’s like a dream sequence in a Hindi movie, it changes,”  as she watches her  hair stretching some two feet in length, amassed on her head and draped around her body rather like a monsoon cape.  Sangetta appears to be creating her dream, an ideal version of herself that requires no more effort that sitting in a chair and dispensing her cash.  Whether it works - whether her emerging dream, will in reality make her feel like a goddess - is not clear.  What psychoanalysis gives us, why it is such a powerful theoretical framework, is that it continuous draws us to unexpected side –effects, things that happen that we don’t plan for – perhaps ridicule for having fake hair, glues that in the long term destroy one’s own hair, or perhaps, as research on excessive cosmetic surgery has shown, further depletion of one’s self-esteem.

As international standards of beauty invariably depict tall and thin women, it is hardly surprising that other Western di-eases associated with body-images are imported into India.  A recent study concerns the rise of teen-anorexia in India in the age group 15-25, across 10 Cities including Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Kolkata and Bangalore.  The findings suggest that high numbers of both boys and girls are using fat burners, self-induced vomiting, fasting, and diet pills in an effort to be thin.    The authors say, “Today, even kids are not off-limits to the celebrity-driven trend of staying slim to look perfect and are dieting and starving themselves to achieve desired results”.  For example, the researchers found that in their 12-15 year olds sample, some 30% were involved in dieting at least three times a week.  But if this is a straight forward matter of simply internalising external images, how does this work?

The most virulent disease of body image and weight loss, not infrequently leading to death, is Anorexia Nervosa.  According to DSM IV, the ‘bible’ of mental disorders, the key features of the illness are (1) a refusal to maintain a healthy weight range for age and height, or failure to make expected weight gains at times of growth and physical development, (2) Fear of gaining weight or becoming fat, (3) loss of periods (menstrual cycle) in women who are not using any external source of estrogen, e.g. oral contraceptives. I am told by several doctors here in Mumbai, that the main middle-class hospitals here are seeing young urban girls, from middle class family’s presenting starvation related diseases that haven’t been seen for over twenty years.

Traditionally, Anorexia is viewed within the framework of individual psychopathology.  However, Helen Malson’s research on Anorexia, considers ways this dis-ease has been interpreted from a feminist perspective, placing it firmly and appropriately in my view, within the socio-economic, cultural and political context:

“women's anorexic (over-)control of their/our bodies, has, for example, been interpreted as a response to our lack of control over other aspects of our lives (Lawrence, 1984), whilst the diminutive proportions of the 'anorexic' body have been interpreted as an embodiment of women's subordinated and 'child-like' social status (Chernin, 1983) and as a rejection of or ambivalence towards traditional femininity (Orbach, 1993), as well as an (over) conformity to contemporary cultural dictates about 'idea' (heterosexual) femininity (Boskind-Lodahl, 1976).

What she further problematizes, is not only the assumption that the saturation of images of skinny-ideals of womanhood as something people over-identify with and are stupidly duped by, but in a sense points to the potent rebellion that maybe hidden in the refusal to menstruate and develop womanly attributes, such as breasts. She is in fact saying, something more is going on here than the interpretation of swallowing whole the images of ideal womanhood. The psychoanalytic theorist Jacqueline Rose makes a similar point when she says that, “Most women do not painlessly slip into their roles as women, if indeed they do at all.”

She goes on to say:

“What distinguished psychoanalysis from sociological accounts of gender, is that whereas in the latter, the internalisation of norms is assumed roughly to work, the basic premise and indeed starting point of psychoanalysis is that it does not.”

Therefore, might it be that anorexia is a symptom, a Freudian one indeed, that the internalisation fails? In Malson’s deeply sensitive in-depth interviews with girls diagnosed with Anorexia, she encouraged them to talk about what they feel they achieve by starving and becoming thin.  They tell her it gives them a sense of “a sort of hiding”, “a way to disappear”, “something that’s my own”, interpreted by Malson, as “A body that appears to disappear and that signifies an attempt at (feminine) identity put under erasure.” She does not ignore the reality that “self-starvation results in a very real destruction and de-materialisation of the body,” but hints that this links with the way the woman becomes a sort of “background text for advertising consumer products.”

Susie Orbach, a British feminist and activist since the 1970’s, popularly known for her book “Fat is a Feminist Issue”, and as Princess Diana’s psychotherapist, is concerned that younger people “are more interested in "being something rather than actually contributing something. It goes along with the whole celebrity culture, with consumerism.” What does this mean for young women? She says, “I think young women are still very hampered by feelings of un-entitlement, but covered up with the defense of 'we can do it, we're great, and we’re ambitious’.”

The desire to be attractive will always be with us and may have some element of Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’ roots, particularly here in India, where gender inequality remains strong.  How attached we are to impossible masquerades of ourselves seems to be the heart of the issue, linked to our engagement in gender politics in refining and questioning what the construction of the identity of “woman” means personally to each and every one of us.  When I was student, the phrase “The Personal is Political”, was and continues to be a phrase I identify with. Watching signs and symptoms of Anorexia infiltrate India and the rising death rates of young urban girls that will inevitably follow must signal that at the very least the importance of critical engagement with the side-effects of beauty consumerism. Seeing beautiful brown Indian women turn white in front of our eyes on our T.V. screens and the effects of damaging skin through bleach, seems no less insidious than a shadow of colonialism hanging over this amazing country.         

The Hottest Psychological Sport

There is a Latin proverb that says, “Revenge is a confession of pain”. Psychoanalysis is of course confessional in the sense that a client tells his or her story to the interested therapist. The therapist in turn helps shape the story, creating a richer, perhaps more complicated narrative. As I have said in earlier articles, this idea of talking outside the family rather than merely popping a “Sod-it-all” psychiatric pill, or other medication through alcohol, food, or compulsive shopping, is still a relatively new idea to the modern would-be Mumbai middle-classes.

In let’s say, New York or London, to get curious about yourself with a professional psychologist is almost as common-place as having a personal fitness trainer.   Many clients, such as Indian’s outside of India, often the high-achieving go-getter’s, are dedicated to developing their emotional intelligence, in order to grow their leadership capacity to match the changing demands as their roles expand.  They are aware that as one layer of potential is achieved, yet another emerges as is the way of evolving high levels of consciousness.  They recognise that as their business evolves through its psychological evolution, becomes increasing complex, so must they too.  In Mumbai, there is still something of a culture of shame, and weakness surrounding personal development – “I must be mentally ill” - a narrative of personal inadequacy, rather than credit to the person for having the courage to explore how to show-up better in life for themselves and others. It's essentially the difference between having a coach in the game of life, just as you might to improve your cricket prowess, and thinking you must be nuts if you can't control your mind to have that singular concentration of the best on the green. Naturally, if one is compelled by necessity to pursue financial stability, i.e. base-level security motivation for food and shelter to draw on Maslow’s hierarchy of psychological needs, taking time to explore the ‘how’ and patterns of one’s life, one’s habitual ways of relating, may naturally seem extremely low in one’s set of priorities.

“Keep it in the family” here as a way of dealing with emotional and interpersonal issues, may involve a deeply affectionate degree of closeness unheard of in the average European family, but it may also have its shadow-side (as everything invariably does) of being too insular. Recently, I was asked to work with a woman with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD).  She hasn’t left her bedroom for thirty-five years. Quite simple, the family may often not address the issue of the elephant in the room, a suffocating quasi-closeness that doesn’t allow for any perspective and prevents any acknowledgment or open discussion of the core problems the extended family is facing. And in that closeness, when the bottling-up gets too much, the elephant farts so loudly everyone stares in shock, resentment and revenge is popular outlet for frustrations.

New clients, who are perhaps more internationally acquainted, arrive with their curiosity to the consulting room rather like a fresh novel, assured, nervous, anticipatory. For a few minutes before the new client arrives, I am already wondering what they will present: how they will describe the plot of their life, their joys and troubles. Each client is as unique as any novel can be, and yet patterns emerge across the months, themes seemingly recurring as the flow of different novels, the clients, come and go. Parents who were obsessed with their children’s achievements or their own pursuit of money, at the expense of their child’s wellbeing is a theme that stands out. Chasing money but needing love is another. Erectile dysfunction is common with the extreme male high-flyers, although not just here but in most countries I have worked. But the theme we will explore today, from the Mumbai consulting room, is the frequency with which the topic of revenge occurs in the stories of client’s lives and what they have to face and negotiate.

There are as many ways to look back and explore the patterns of one’s life, as well as there are methods of refusal to do so. To be at peace with the close or distant past, both consciously and unconsciously is to be able to live in a way that involves a refusal to participate in ‘eye for an eye’ type of vengeful solution. Time, some chewing over, acceptance is a psychological necessity to digest the realities of life that we don’t always get our own way. Someone cuts into your lane as drive through this maddening Mumbai traffic, the furniture doesn’t arrive on time, the friend lets you down, or the relative sabotages your plans. Each frustration offers a choice of action. Each frustration provides an opportunity for revenge and retaliation. You respond to the man who cuts across your lane, by chasing him and blocking his path further down the road. Or you figure, well, maybe his mother is in hospital so let’s give him a break, he’s in a rush.

Psychoanalysis of course disturbs any straightforward notion that revenge is somehow merely a ‘normal’ (if albeit popular) course of action. It equates the revengeful character with a childhood whereby events and experiences were felt as loss. The exacting of revenge in adulthood is the unconscious retaliating for those experiences. Let me illustrate. A client called Radha was the youngest of five children and the only female child. Her childhood was restricted to the home, whereas her brothers were given freedom to run wild, play outdoor sports and meet their friends. Privileges of the male children of the family, her brothers, were lavished on them indiscriminately, whilst Radha, merely had the ‘privilege’ of supporting to her mother, and being quasi-parent to her brothers.  She was force-fed the idea that all that mattered was to be slim and desirable for a future husband.  Her primary revenge on her demanding mother was a refusal to be slim and healthy, instead ballooning into a fat “Auntie” as she put it, by the time she was seventeen.  Describing herself as “wilful”, she approached most matters of adulthood as simply a case of winning or losing, a game of tactics and strategies rather than intimacy. Her childhood isolation, the rage it has left her with, has never been mourned, so as an adult she continues to live it in her relationships with others, as though seven years old still, although masquerading in adult clothing, faking it, in order to “win” and dangerous if she loses.

Revenge therefore, is an eye for an eye, but with an eye firmly closed on the past. It may indeed, as Gandhi once said, not only make “the whole world blind”, but it is enacted by the psychologically unsighted, who fail to see how their early life is re-enacted in a present moment. Whatever perceived injustice, or perceived harm, (which of course maybe very real), rooted in the unconscious sense of damage to the childhood psyche, old and current losses are negotiated and deferred in this manner. Patterns of revenge as a compulsive strategy in life are an attempt at unconscious mourning; an attempt to recover something lost, as Christopher Bollas, a most insightful British psychoanalyst puts it, “By a violent intrusion into the other – to recover what has been stolen from oneself”, not in the present, but in childhood. To fill-up the other person up with such toxic reactions, is essentially a theft, “At the very least he steals the recipient’s peace of mind”.

I think a food analogy might be helpful here. In Gestalt psychotherapy, with its roots in psychoanalysis, we make parallels between how we experience and negotiate life, with our relationship with food.  Gestalt psychotherapy emphasises the here and now flow of relating between the client and therapist in much the same as psychoanalysis does, but with more of an emphasis upon experimentation.  For example, rather than merely discuss say a client’s difficulty with handling authority figures at work, the Gestalt therapist will devise an experiment, such as what we call “Chair work” with client practising and playing with different kinds of speech as the boss were sitting in the empty chair opposite. Gestalt draws upon the eating cycle to in this way: so food comes in the body, food goes out of the body and something goes on in between. With the background of sufficiently stable childhood, where the child’s emotional needs are considered more often than they are dismissed, we learn as adults to makes choices from the menu of life, to digest our food and therefore digest life, to imagine the various choices we might make. If we were to mindlessly force food into our oesophagus, without any sort of chewing over, we would make ourselves ill. Compulsive revenge, like other forms of psychic destructiveness, is failure in digestion – failures to chew-over the in- the- moment choices of action – to digest reality as a mature adult. Enactment makes everyone ill including the revenger. The essential adult functioning that is most profoundly lacking in the addict of revenge is the ability to think. Forever loyal to their revengeful compulsions, just like the addict is to gambling, it is a childish attempt to be an omnipotent magician, capable of over throwing reality. And as I have said earlier, by attempts at overthrowing reality, mourning is postponed and loss negated.

The revengeful character does not process his childhood losses by attempts to simply block out his or her emotional world. That would simply be an attempt to turn oneself into stone. Like water in a faulty vessel, the impulse leaks, the outlet for aggression taking a more concealed but not necessarily a less virulent passage out, in subtle hostilities, revenges and often withdrawal.  Withholding, withdrawing, “I don’t like what you said,  so I won’t say anything to you ever again”, the elephant in the relationship if you like, trampling over any growth or possibility of reparation, and ultimately a theft of the other’s peace of mind we referred to earlier. 

Christopher Bollas reminds us that in the consulting room, we are increasingly dealing with more and more personality disturbances that involve a deadening of affect. He points to “blank selves”, “blank psychoses”, the “organizing personality”, who come to the consulting room as they are “aware of feeling empty, or without a sense of self and they seek analytic help in order to find some way to feel real or to symbolize a pain that may only be experienced as a void or an ache.” He terms such a person as, ‘Normotic’, “someone who is abnormally normal…too stable, secure.”

Such a client came to see me in Mumbai several years ago, a rather withdrawn, obedient character, who seemed to be content enough with his life, thrived on structure, but lacked an essential spontaneity.  He told me he was boring, I asked him that perhaps he was bored with himself. As I sat with this man, it was difficult to locate who he was, as though I was sitting with a distant object, rather than a person. The contact between this client and I had little vitality, as though he had no experience at all of relating in a close and intimate way.  In fact, I often found my mind wandering about practical tasks I needed to do later in the day. This lack of affect in my client clearly evoked a similar lack of affect in me.  His deadening of his emotional world became mine too. He often spoke in a series of fortune-cookie dismissals when I attempted to inquire about how he felt about a particular event he was describing, “You have to look forward in in life”, “I believe in being positive”. Such inquiries were clearly odd to him, as he was “simply unaccustomed to hearing an adult talk to him about ordinary fears and uncertainties.” His pattern was to turn the potently “meaningful, into the meaningless.” Hence little introspective curiosity about himself or imagination about who how he could lead his business or conduct himself more effectively.  This is of course derived from the fact of “not being known or reflected.” His manner of being seemed something derived from outside of himself, rather than through the natural struggles of human becoming. Whilst we might say the highly emotionally charged, “psychotic has ‘gone off at the deep end’, the normotic has ‘gone off at the shallow end’.”

What was the early life of this man characterised by: loyal parents, who were somewhat distant and flat in their ability to relate to this man when he was a child.  There are a few particulars worthy of mentioning.  His father was clearly a disturbed man, rather distant and morose. In itself, this might not seem particularly unusual, so much as the fact that there was no discussion in the family about the state of the father, an equivalent of “leave your father alone’, whose mental equivalent is ‘leave that part of your mind concerned with your father alone’.” As we became closer to connecting with his destructive feelings underneath his boredom with himself, he was never to return to the sessions. 

The Normotic family is at least on the surface ordered.  Bollas discusses how in the Normotic family, the mother may somewhat compulsively run an efficient, clean and highly ordered household.  The servants will know their place, be expected to obediently follow their mistress’s orders. Family friends will be ignored or rejected for the more important priorities of buying the new napkins for the family lunch. “There’s so much to do”, she will mutter from the kitchen, as long as it doesn’t involve a deeper relating and closeness.  In the Normotic family “this might be described as ‘your mother is helping out’ whose mental equivalent is ’when you believe you see signs of distress in us, cancel that idea, and replace it with an observation of the action you see before you’.”

Was my client afraid of being overwhelmed by his feelings? I think so. He was, simply not ready to be with me and birth a more vibrant and authentic self.  By withdrawing in this way, without any dialogue that would signify adult closure on the relationship between us, he ensured he kept a place in my mind (an attempt at the theft of my peace of mind) and perhaps a door open. To say, “Thank you, but this is not what I want”, would be to create an adult ending.  This way, there is a gain a quasi-deferral of loss.  One way is to see this is as a form of silent revenge, for our relationship having not only awakened the other side of him, but that I had witnessed it and all its destructiveness, a taste of which I felt in the last session and certainly made me sit upright.  Another way is to make sense of this withdraw, is that to break out of his rather robotic ways of living and relating was simply too terrifying, a part of him knowing that beneath that perfect order, his addiction to work, his expulsion of anyone who dared to get close, was a rage that harked back to times long ago.  What he didn’t understand, was that he wasn’t required to deal with this alone (as no-doubt he had dealt with emotional dynamics in the past) and that there was someone there by his side on this journey, to help him digest his psychic reality and provide the reflective care of being with a person who was interested in him. Alas, such authentic relating was something he had not experienced in the past and perhaps sadly, never will.

Such refusals of engaging with one’s evolution are often deeply saddening (but of course understandable) for us psychologists.  These are the clients who haunt us, as though they have disappeared from the restaurant, half way through a meal and we wonder what happened to them. That leap towards a truthful examination of oneself, as the poet W.B. Yeats said, “Requires more courage than to kill men in the battlefield.” The shift from a lower state of evolution to a higher one, will always require a moment where one feels rather in mid-air, with hints of the shadow of who we might become, walking beside oneself, before a more solid sense of self and authenticity and all the complex and rich feelings that being truly human involves emerges.