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.
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