Violent Innocence

BOMBS IN BOMBAY and blasts in Britain, a smart capitalist might see this as wise time to buy a few shares in a window replacement company. The rest of us might dare to think more radically in trying to understand what all this sort rage and anarchy is about, beyond the convenient and dismissive rhetoric of thugs and terrorists.

On my recent flight to the UK, I sat next to a charming Englishman, an Economist who shared with me a number of observations about Britain.  He observed, he told me, that since the credit crunch, that devastated the livelihoods of so many people, there were more high-end cars in the hedge-fund streets of Mayfair in London than ever.  He added that it appeared the gulfing divide between the haves and have-nots appears to be growing.  He also told me that he feels there is an underlying anger and despair in Britain about the future and the bail-out of the banks, did little to help the plight of individuals who had lost jobs, businesses and homes.  Within three days of telling me this, the riots broke out across London, then Birmingham, then Manchester.

Struck by the similarity of a conversation I had on the way to the airport, I tell the Englishman, that interestingly, a friend who has lived in Bombay for many years sensed there was more anger brewing in urban India.   I shared with him that my friend had said, “There is a tangible tension in the City that you didn’t use to feel,” he observes. “We have these great lifestyles, with drivers, cooks and servants, who we all get so cheaply because they live in slums. It can’t go on forever.”  The Englishman asked me whether I felt India might join the revolutionary ranks of Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia in demanding greater justice from political leadership and the state.  However without a strong social movement against injustice, I shared that it seems unlikely soon.

The book he occasionally glances at, possessively in my lap, is the stunning collection of essays by Jacqueline Rose, just published this year by Duke.  I explain to him with the passion of a nine year old Spice Girls fan, “She is an extraordinary woman who brings the full force of psychoanalytic thinking to such a daring range of topics as the politics of Israel and Palestine, Suicide Bombers, Feminism, Peter Pan, Sylvia Plath, the South African Peace and Reconciliation process.” 

What is very clear about Rose’s approach to mobs, gangs and terrorists, whether in Britain or Bombay, is that we are madly off the mark, possibly deluded citizens, if we lazily presume this sort of phenomena is merely about individual pathology, or some sort of essentialist diatribe about certain religious or class based groups in society.  Tariq Ali, in his London Review of Books blog, reminds us of the singular event, the police shooting of an unarmed citizen, the tipping point of the riots in the UK, happened “Because grievances build up over time, because when the system wills the death of a young black citizen from a deprived community, it simultaneously, if subconsciously, wills the response.” He also adds that for the 1000 deaths of young men in custody in Britain, since 1991, not one single policeman has been charged, despite overwhelming evidence.

What Roses applies, is that without bringing into the field of politics the difficulties and challenges of the inner life, not merely in an individualistic way, but in terms of the collective inner life that shapes politics and world events, healthy, sustainable, transformation will not occur.  Drawing upon Freud, in her essay on Mass Psychology, she warns any country to be aware that:

“If a culture has not got beyond the point where the satisfaction of some participants requires the oppression of others, maybe the majority (and this is the case with all contemporary cultures), then understandably, the oppressed will develop a deep hostility towards a culture that their labour makes possible but in whose commodities they have too small a share.”

Introducing Rose at a recent talk she gave at the London Review of Books, Paul Myerscough rather magnificently laid out the kinds of ways in which she asks us to think the unthinkable into politics and our lives.   The unthinkable, firstly as that which we can hardly bare to think.  The unthinkable, that dares to poke around in the private and collection operation of fantasy.  The unthinkable, as out of sight and awareness in those things that can’t be admitted into our consciousness.  It is to think the things we don’t want to think about and we can’t think, because it hasn’t been thought before.

This is precisely what we hope also happens of course in the consulting room  work -  we open up a space, for radical thinking - a space to ‘think the unthinkable. Whether the war is going on inside or outside, lurking beneath is invariably a narrative of victimhood.  What Rose reminds us, as is that it is healthy to acknowledge an event, a moment when we feel we have been a victim, but we are absolutely stuffed, the moment we make victimhood or suffering a part of our identity. 

The complacent state of victimhood, involves of course living either individually or collectively, a life to the tune of a stuck record that says “It’s not fair, look what they have done to me.” Not only disempowering, it is used to justify all manner of hideous cruelties and offensive acts of retribution.    Most difficult global affairs or charged interpersonal conflicts, therefore involve what Christopher Bollas describes as ‘Violent innocence’.  It is this, Rose reminds us, a discourse of suffering and victimhood, that underpins certain types of Zionism, which allows a complete denial and negation of the brutal oppression of the Palestinians. At the heart of this, in opposing sides in a war, is an inner collective life, that battles over the right to claim “My side is suffering the most.”  The space in between, would involve the difficult task of allowing both narratives be heard, for meaningful dialogue to occur. However, the sort of sophistication of both collective and individual consciousness this requires, is often painfully lacking and not without dangerous consequences.  This is of course, partly because it demands a deep inquiry into oneself, or indeed one’s nation and the operations of collective fantasy. 

It’s the voice that says, hey, hang on a minute, how much more destruction do we need to witness, before we begin to think the unthinkable, to step out of our tribal mentality and radically think for ourselves.   Martin Luther King once said, “It’s not what the bad guys do, the problem is what the good guys don’t do.” I think a contemporary version of that has to include what the good guys don’t dare to think. Therefore in a sense, our not doing something, in this case, thinking the unthinkable, maybe even more insidious that we dare to imagine.

Peeking into the Past, to Get Out from Underneath It

Peeking into the Past, to Get Out from Underneath it

“Every historian discloses a new horizon.”

George Sand

HISTORY IS THE STORIES we tell ourselves about the past.   In his book India After Gandhi, the author Guha, put together a sequence of events to create a narrative of building the nation-state of India since Independence. One of the things I rather like about this book is that as an historian, he is willingly to research into lesser known libraries and characters off the main road of India’s history. 

Sitting with a client is not dissimilar to picking up a history book and waiting for the narrative to begin. As I sit with a client we’ll call Neehal, he shares with me a very tight narrative of his life: Cathedral school, a first arranged marriage that ‘failed’ within two months, a second arranged marriage he describes as “failing,” a job in banking.   In reporting his most recent history, he tells me he is angry at what he describes as the “unfairness” of being turned down for promotion at work because of he has “anger issues.”  Guha’s book is a fat four inches thick, my client’s history of his life is barely one page.

Forming representations of past events, will of course depend not only on our level of intelligence, but the sensitivity we are accustomed to receive in sharing ourselves with others, as well as, bearing some honesty about our role as the creators of our own history.  The child, who is force-fed not to feel or what to feel, or how he ‘should’ react, will have enormous problems digesting and figuring out who he is, with his experience disavowed in this way. Cut-off from himself it is likely he will be terribly cut-off from others.  History is of course invariably biased, distorted and often self-serving. Ludicrous tales for example, of Indian history, suggest that quite contrary to the evidence, the British simply dreamed up drawing a line across India and created Pakistan and that was that. The implication of this historical view is that Indians must have been a rather passive lot, to be merely victims of the all-powerful British, which of course, they were not.  In other words, in every story, there are more deeply embedded narratives and assumptions.  How much more difficult it is to ask ‘How did we let this happen?’, or ‘What is my role in this history?’ In the consulting room, we hope that our clients leave us at the end of our time together with a more logical and thoughtful sense of their history, even willing to look at data they may find offensive, so that they can make better adult choices going forward.  

As Christopher Bollas puts it, as historians of our own lives, “We must be willing to wander in and out of recovered memories, in particular those which are seemingly trivial.” We are all personal historians.  As a historian of my own life, I once wrote a piece that began, “Why use the word nest, just call it empty.”  It was a self-reflective article that centred around the history of my daughter leaving home for University.  A pair of tweezers sat untouched on a bathroom shelf for months after she left. I hated those tweezers. As a more empirical piece of history, it would read something like: September 2006, daughter leaves home, mother embarks on major renovation project on the house, managing it mostly from a hotel room at the Intercontinental on Marine Drive, in this city.  Gnarls Barkley’s song ‘Crazy’ was a popular song that year. Yet this simple representation of the tweezers is imbued with more meaning, more resonance than any simple list.

Psychoanalysis approaches history through such seemingly ordinary observations, known as ‘screen memories.’  Clients may bring us lists, but we are interested in what might be brushed aside, made not list-worthy.  Many years ago, a client called Clara came to see me after she had left an abusive relationship.  “Did you ever get a sense that he had this side to him?” (A question of history of course) She replied, “Funny you should say that, the first time I saw him I thought of a boy who was the bully when I was at school.”  So history naturally contains both that which we are willing to turn away from, as well as turn towards.

Many clients come to see a psychologist because they are simply longing for a sensitive conversation about their history.  Sifting through the material of the past that Neehal presents, we begin to deconstruct his over-riding historical text, which goes something along the lines of “I was a difficult child, nobody could reign me in, my parents were busy, they were wonderful people, and I deserve what I got.”   Essentially, at the heart of his feelings about himself, were that he was bad through and through.

But what if the parents are not the perfect angels or terrible villains we claim to recall?  Several times in the sessions, when Neehal described some adolescent capper that he got up to, stealing a car, taking his father’s watch, I found myself again and again, wondering wherever were his parents?  It seemed as though he had grown-up in an environment of material abundance and a sense that he should be ‘grateful for being so lucky’, yet at the same time, bestowed very little in terms of psychological containment or adequate attention to enable him as a boy to develop the important attributes of being ‘grown-up.’ 

Children, as we know, will of course protest about everything: “I want my toy”, or “I’m not going to bed” or “I want granny now” even though perhaps granny has passed away.  Each of these moments is a negotiation, an opportunity for tenderness or indeed cruelty towards the child.  The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott coined the term the ‘good enough’ mother (parent) who more often than not, responds to the child’s demands with understanding.  The core message Neehal received was that his feelings didn’t matter, (therefore in his mind he didn’t matter), and in response to his cries for help, was often flooded by his parents self-absorbed narratives about ‘what they had to put-up with from him’ or ‘can’t you see I’ve been working all day.’ Each time he received a battering from his father, or verbal insults from his mother, in equal measure, they would fake seductive reparation with the gift of material things, or sudden lavish attention, ‘as-if’ the abuse had never happened.  What terrible confusion for this little boy.

How the parent communicates with the child will help a child digest reality that you can’t always get what you want. Digesting is not just about force-feeding children a list of rules of how they should behave. It has to be a conversation, not merely an autocratic colonizer taking over the child’s experience and reality.  It certainly isn’t about teaching children how to abuse by hitting, slapping, pinching and abusing them. Without adequate developmental containment, it is hardly surprising that Neehal had great difficulty anchoring himself in reality and continues to be prone to regular emotional outbursts.  Any efforts to think as a child about what was happening to him were silenced.  As a child rarely soothed in his distressed, he inevitably has a hard time learning how to sooth himself. Facing how he was repeating his childhood experience of attachments, he had to visit the abusive side of his himself. 

You might say that Neehal started out as a poor historian of his own life.  In his historical narrative, there was one villain and it was him.   Everyone else was a good guy, end of story.  Well perhaps it would have been the end, if he hadn’t chosen to come to the consulting room.  Towards the end of one session, having shared with me the way his father physically hurt him, I mentioned in passing that in my experience, clients talk about the easiest parent first.  The hardest work in the sessions was facing some of the realities of his relationship with his mother.

There is I think, some very deep confusion’s about any sort of psychotherapy.  Our task with our clients is not to help them feel more, as the popular press likes to suggest.  No, they are generally feeling too much already.  What we do, is try to help our clients think better.  X occurs, Y occurs, why do you draw this particular inference, or interpretation?  It is about daring to look a little more deeply with a less emotional perspective.  Sometimes, a client will extrapolate “I am bad”, because it is just too unbearable to imagine the alternative that he was actually very neglected as a child.  What we are seeing here, is the case of a child, whose rage towards his mother, is swallowed and redirected towards himself. To keep the dangerous mother at a distance, he was still as an adult man, keeping her very close. The part of himself he had to meet in our work, was the deep sadness and loneliness he often felt as a child.  Over time, we explored the terror he felt whenever he let anyone, particularly women, get close to him.  The hardest part of all this work for Neehal, was to connect with the rage he felt towards Mommie Dearest. Yet, he was able to take-in and digest that a part of him that was in fact not furious about the present, but furious about the past, and how it featured in his own repetition of abuse in the here and now.    

By reviewing the past in this way, by being better historians, we get to transform it. Any historical narrative that merely suggests we have been colonised by others whether nation or person, forced to conform, held-back, abused, is a denial of individual or collective collusion and collaboration in one’s own fate.  We can either keep living this old interpretation of history, or make a choice now to create a different history for the future.

So rather than merely regurgitate and live from a victim narrative, which merely reduces a nation or a person’s confidence to a puddle of inferiority, we try to do something else. Rather like taking the debris of the past in our own hands, we creatively use our psychology to make something else out of it, renewed with vitality and the possibility of making associations between back then and now.  Just as historians give birth to new ideas, as historians of our own lives, new insight, new awareness give birth to new futures.  Never, is too late to do that, or indeed ever too late have a sensitive conversation with yourself, even if everyone around doesn’t know how to listen.

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.