"It's Good to Talk?"

A professor in a classroom here in Mumbai tells me that he encourages his students to speak up in class. He says that the only way to ensure the students do so is to make speaking in class mandatory. “Once they understand this is the norm you expect, they’ll get used to it,” he says. “But you have to make it clear in India”. On the same day, the Chairman of an engineering company tells me that one of his Managing Directors from overseas has, “Just learned the difficult lessons that Indian employees don’t always tell you when something is going wrong. He’s just found out that saying nothing, means something”.

In Western society, communicating assertively is generally perceived as a sign of a healthy personality and those who are rather silent, tend to be devalued as shy, passive, or lacking independent opinions. Westerners perhaps make the assumption that talking is a positive act, a critical ingredient of independent thinking. By talking, an individual expresses his ideas, his points of view and individuality. Socrates viewed knowledge as existing within people and needing only to be recovered through verbal reasoning. Homer considered one of the most important skills for a man to have to be that of a debater. Freud of course believed that the critical success of any psychoanalysis was the patient’s ability to freely associate verbally his thoughts and feelings, with the voice of the internal critic held in abeyance.

In the consulting room is a client who is a Managing Director of one of the banks. Instead of hearing him say that rather overused legacy of the British, “I’m fine”, a sign of “Improvement” might be to hear the client verbalise more of the complexities of what is going on in his internal world. Things like, “Well, I’m struggling to maintain my enthusiasm at work, yet at the same time, I seem to be working 12 hours a day and can’t stop”. Narrative complexity as a sign of intelligence is one of the ways Western psychological models rate higher levels leadership consciousness. And of course such models are being imported into India. My culturally specific beliefs and assumption backed of course by evidence from Western psychology, suggests that this client will benefit most by such revelations aloud not only to himself, but with a skilled professional who is interested in him. In this relationship space of two people’s curiosity about the deeper motivations of this man, we hope that new personal awareness arises, and thus a richer picture of how he might live his life and conduct his business. A client may want to explore how he can relate better with his team members, how to energise and motivate staff across many geographies or how to deliver a profoundly moving speech.

But is such talking about such things valued in the context of a developing country like India? There are signs that it is, although perhaps the nature of the development process is not fully understood. This may be partly due to the lack of management education and development that focuses on the critical skills of relating in the workplace. After all, it is our ability to work together effectively and efficiently that gets things done and done well. However, most large Companies here now have 360 degree feedback processes, whereby an individual receives written feedback on the impact his leadership has. Yet judging by some of the reports I read here, they seem rather censored and “Nice”. Shame may also be attached to speaking with someone outside the immediate family, but also a sense of uncertainty of what this sort of relationship entails, and so it is easier to pick up a book on leadership, as though insights transplant themselves magically from the page to the leaders actions.

In the Indian tradition, personal development has historically focused upon meditation; the idea that silence and introspection will be beneficial for higher levels of thinking. In fact from this perspective, perhaps all this thinking and talking may indeed be viewed as the root of the client’s troubles. Talking might therefore be conceived of differently. Eckhart Tolle, known for his book “The Power of Now”, popular here in India as well as overseas, extolls the power of being in the present moment, promoting the importance of meditation, and other forms of contemplative activity. In a recent talk he gave, he rather humorously warned his students, “If you think you are enlightened, go and spend a week living with your relatives and see how reactive you still are”. He was also suggesting that meditation is not something to do to become better meditators, but to enable us to have greater peace and more harmonious relationships with others. He also warned that we babble too much, mindlessly filling up space with words like the ramblings of the disoriented madman we might see on the street. We say what we don’t mean, and we keep hidden what we really feel. And we say a lot, not only in speech, but critically in how we say things. Some evidence suggests that the greatest distortions in our communication are in the sound, the music of what we say, and the dance of how we use our bodies. If I verbally try to tell you I value you, whilst at the same time, using the tone of a depressed bureaucrat, with my arms folded as I gaze at the ceiling, you will get a very clear message from me. When we are unsure about someone’s intentions in their communication, we draw only 5% on the words, some 38% on the sound, and a massive 55% on body language. One of the most common criticisms of Indian leaders is their harshness with staff. This is often justified to me with comments like “it’s the only way to get them to do anything”. Yet as an outsider looking in, it seems to me that at times, rather sadist leadership virtually immobilises staff in a vicious circle of freeze and fear. One writer in response to the previous blog on cricket and coaching suggested to me that this harshness is developed in the Indian household, as the child observes his mother berating servants. Whatever the roots might be, it important that Indian leaders with aspirations to work in the International context understand there are much more rigorous expectations of their conduct.

All these ideas of “East” vs. “West” are of course a rather common post-colonial polarity. It is likely that the business man in India has far more in common with the business man in New York than the villagers in rural India. In fact internationally, all the leaders who have been measured and rated as having a higher level of leadership consciousness, report having both a regular practice such as mediation and being involved in some sort of dialogue with others as a means of their growth. The international evidence however, on influential communication, reminds us very clearly that if a leader wants his staff to speak out, he must role-model that behaviour himself. So, for example, if he wants his staff to be open about production or trading problems, whatever the issue might be, they will need to have witnessed their leader disclose his own personal challenges during his career. Of course, in order for someone to talk, there must be a listener. How good most leaders are at listening is questionable. Professor Richard Hackman from Harvard University, found that in his research on black-box data from flight crashes, that almost without exception, there was a dissenting voice saying early on there was a problem with the plane. Yet in each case, no one listened. The voice was too junior, too small to be taken seriously. Listening involves stepping into the agenda and perspective of another. One suspends one’s own greedy needs to say this or that, and let go of control of a conversation. Only those with solid enough self-esteem are good listeners.

No matter who we are, or where we are from, whatever unknown cultural codes are embedded in our being, we all share in common the never-ending decision-making about what to say and what not to say. When the veil between the conscious and the unconscious mind is thin, we will be verbally reactive, or blocked like cement so that we cannot find the flexibility to utter even one word.

I think it is fairly culturally safe to say that we are all on some level, longing for real human contact. The workplace is of course the site of our attachments with others. For many, it is not only a source of identity, of self-esteem it is also a place of belonging. Our leaders just like the teacher at the beginning of this piece signify what is expected, what is permissible and what degree of depth in relating to one another is “normal”. Leaders of course do this, not only by what they say, and whether they have the confidence to be good listeners, but in what they do.

As Gandhi put it, “My life is my message”.

"What Do You Expect?"

As international citizens, thinking people, whatever national identity we wear, however tightly fitting it might be, we choose how we engage with matters of the world at large.  Just as the bureaucrats, police and politicians can decide their particular ethical brand and style of participation in political processes, equally each one of us decides the degree to which we attempt to participate in developing a democratic and fair world.

India right now, is abuzz with social activism as a citizen movement led by Anna Hazare demands the right to a corrupt-free India. Hazares “Fast unto Death” pledge has created a renewed sense of hope and vitality that there is huge commitment and citizenship willing to show-up and be involved in shaping the evolution of the country.  In a similar vein to the trajectory of Nelson Mandela, who virtually became President of South Africa from his prison cell, it appears Anna Hazare is rapidly becoming the moral commander of India. Along with him, countless Indians took a pledge to fast, whilst 100,000s protested across the country. Those who were fasting, including Hazare are eating once again, thanks to political pledges to design an adequate anti-corruption Jan Lokpal Agreement.  But it’s clear that Hazare will be back on his “Fast unto Death”, and no doubt thousands of others will join him if his expectations are not met. His passion, his commitment is rooted very firmly in the plight of the poor of India, who after all, suffer most at the hands of corruption.

The very moment expectations of incorruptibility falls, evolutionary pressure bears down and we start to experience shifts. Evolutionary pressure to be better depends on expectations of standards regarding honesty or corrupt practices, which the drafting of the Jan Lokpal Bill seeks to address.  If the public has low expectations, they will end up confirming them.  In turn, this leads to further citizen apathy.  Apathy is understandable, given the anti-corruption bill has been presented eight times since 1968 to no avail.

Despite the country’s population of over a billion people, the average number of whistle-blowers complaints of corruption through the Central Vigilance Commission, between 2005 and 2009, was a paltry annual average of 346.  This cannot possibly be apathy alone, but a process that doesn’t work. System blockages, lack of flow, a sense there is no one to turn to, leaves any community constipated by its problems. When bureaucrats around the world evade their ethical responsibilities by hiding in procedural and plumbing excuses, it saps the human spirit.  It erodes a dignified sense of empowerment. It also tells us of the low level of leadership development, known in psychological circles as the “Expert” level of leadership we are dealing with. In psychological terms, it is the tyranny of “Schizoid” functioning.  This is a clinical term to describe a constellation of lack of affect, of emotional deadness, a cold, indifference towards others, often accompanied by insidious smirks and other odd physical characteristics. A constipated culture blocks our energy so much so, that for many, it appears they exist under a veil of depression.  Yet escaping to complacency and apathy, as I am clearly hinting at here, maybe a disease more virulent than at least attempting to shape our global evolution, even if we fail.

What is powerful here in India, unlike say the social activism of Egypt, is that the youth of India have the stately leadership figure of Anna Hazare, whose commitment to the people of India is dignified and impressive. Unlike India, other social movements have faced the tyranny of insidious press silence, no access to the internet or telephones.   In the minds of many here, perhaps assisted by the articulations of the press, the spirit of Gandhi has returned, as has a degree of faith in leadership and decency.  Once again, this “Second Freedom Struggle” as the press are coining it, arises from a base of personal, rather than positional power.

Great expectations energise the bureaucrats and politicians against corruption and keep the fire of political and social activism burning. While power corrupts and corruption undermines the legitimacy of power, the prospects for social and economic development crucially depends on the evolution of a web of expectations. Your expectations, my expectations.  All expectations begin in the mind, with a simple self-reflection, of “How do I expect to be treated?” Higher levels of consciousness ask, “How do we expect our children to be treated?” Higher levels again, ask “What should all our children’s children have a right expect?”  

“Will this movement fizzle out?” some ask. I doubt it. There’s too much (1) vision for a corruption-free India, too much traction of real (2) dissatisfaction and too much solid thinking concerning (3) implementation. These are the three ingredients required for deep change to occur.  Time will tell no-doubt.  Nevertheless, within two days of Anna Hazare ending his fast, the Finance Minister announced that India will be ratifying the United Nations convention on corruption “Soon”.   This will mean that it is much easier to reclaim corruption money in tax havens overseas, that official will be expected to comply with codes of conduct, and disclose financial assets.  As the UN literature states, "offences committed in support of corruption, including money-laundering and obstructing justice, are also dealt with."   

The day I write this, a friend of mine is angry and despairing of the corruption dilemma he faces.  There are consequences if he accedes to paying a bribe and there are consequences if he doesn’t.   My only advice to him is to “Imagine you are ninety years old, looking back on your life, what you want to see that you did today?” Sadly, whether in a country or a corporation, the human citizen is often feels left with merely one final recourse of action.  I will give you my feedback about this country, about this corporation by leaving.  Talent walks out the door, and takes a plane somewhere else.  This beautiful country called India will potentially lose a critical mass of talent if basic expectations of decency are not met. When leaders don’t listen fully and act expediently what else can they expect? The significant factor distinguishing those of higher levels of leadership is timely action.   “Soon” cannot be soon enough.

"India's Cricket Lessons"

This is a tribute to Gary Kirsten the coach to the India Cricket team. What a fantastic result Team India. It feels a huge honour to be living in the City of Mumbai, home to the match, probably the most exhilarating place in the world on the winning Saturday night. The whole City came to a celebratory standstill, as people face-painted with the red, green and white of the Indian flag danced on top of their cars along Marine Drive and the sky lit up with fireworks in all directions within seconds of the match win.

Coach Gary, a former South African cricketer’s favourite motto is: “There is no greater waste of a resource than that of unrealised talent”, (the words of the former U.S. president Roosevelt). Talent development is all about reducing the gap – the gap between current performance and desired performance. When you are on your knees utterly empty of any belief in yourself, the coach lends you their relentless confidence in you, “I was thankful to him for keeping his faith in me when I was going through a tough phase,” says player Suresh Raina. When the comfort of laziness creeps in, the coach, in as aggressive or warms a manner as is required, reminds the player to step-up and be all he can be.

As a coach he helped the players identify both their individual areas for growth and blind-spots in performance, as well as, in their strengths and weaknesses in the team functioning. He motivated them to believe in themselves, to believe in each other, that they could pull-off this outstanding result for their country. He worked with the team to develop their emotional as well as physical fitness, as well as their game-strategy.

Coaching business leaders has everything in common with coaching sports players and teams. In fact, several years ago, I worked with an Investment Bank, alongside Clive Woodward who at the time was successfully coaching the England Rugby team. The critical ingredient, despite immense talent, was that this global team had a crippling sense that they could not win accolades like Euromoney because a competitor institution was in their group mind “better, more talented”. They weren’t. The other team just had more belief in themselves. Through a series of leadership and coaching strategies we created a winner.

When the coach sits in front of a guy who he or she knows can reach higher and higher levels in his performance, the coach is looking at two things. Firstly, is the guy motivated to excel, to be the best he can be? What degree of skills-gap are we looking at here? A good coach is essentially an artist. An artist works creatively to get under the skin of another human being. Sometimes deliberately making them angry to evoke change, other times nurturing that tender spot in the psyche that has produced a highly critical voice inside the person that impairs their performance. It’s mind-training, it’s strategy-building and it’s behavioural training. We coaches end up loving those we nurture, especially the ones that fight with their hearts and souls to bring out the best in themselves and offer the gift of their talents to the world. Knowing you matter to the coach is highly critical for the relationship to work, “Gary treated us like family”, as player Sehwag put it.

Whether cricket, business or Bollywood, the person you want to coach is the one who wants to live his or her life asking “How can I do better”, “How can I show-up more”, rather than merely point the finger at others and say “But I couldn’t do it, because, because, because”. They are the curious souls who want to make sense of themselves, of why they do this, and why they don’t do that. For us coaches, they are treasured people who live in our hearts and minds, who keep us awake at night when they are in the throes of transformation, and remain with us, often many years after their physical presence has left our lives.

I don’t know who you are reader. If you’re a cricket fan, you can pretty much rest assured that Gary Kirsten gave everything of himself to coach that team. And he will have given up a lot in his own life to do this, especially his family. That’s what we do. We turn ourselves inside out to make growth and transformation possible, because it’s often what makes us feel happiest and most purposeful in our lives.

But something puzzles me about India. We have these incredible cricket guys, who clearly are entrepreneurs of their own growth and development. These players made a proactive decision to work with someone who can help them grow individually and collectively. Of course they may have been defensive and didn’t like the feedback at times. That’s natural because change is difficult. Yet, are business leaders in India as committed entrepreneurs to their own growth as these players? It seems to me that many business leaders in India tend to leave their growth utterly to chance or pay minimal lip-service to it.

Whether you are a cricket player or a leader, the only way towards higher level performance is through feedback. Feedback maybe about the way you relate on the pitch or in the corporate boardroom, feedback concerning how you manage your emotions and your energy when you perform. A good coach (read good leader) tells you, “I love the way you do x”, “I don’t like the way you do y”, and “What I want you to do is z”. One of the leaders as coach I worked with would be saying this sort of coaching language 30-40 times a day to her team members.

Discussing this over dinner, Indian friends tell me that I underestimate the way many business men and women in Mumbai dislike criticism. I try to explain that feedback highlights strengths, highlights areas for development. That feedback is not about who you are. It’s about ways to improve your behaviour. It’s the exciting fact that as we achieve one stage of potential, yet another emerges. What you do, when you start to interrogate yourself, with someone else, when you start to question your tacit assumptions about yourself about other people, you start to wake up. You also then start to be a different kind of person. One man, in his early forties tells me that few of his colleagues are prepared for even thinking about themselves, because their mothers have been telling them they are perfect, just because they are boys, since the day they were born. I respond that this doesn’t explain the profound commitment of the India Cricket team, who were also boys once, to their growth and development, which after all, led to a profoundly exhilarating ‘win’ for the whole country.

Perhaps there is something yet to evolve more fully in India, in terms of education concerning what personal and professional development is; particularly concerning emotions, communication and relationships.  Personally, I celebrate the courage of the India cricket team as role models of commitment to growth, to endeavouring to look in the mirror and ask “How can I improve” and having the courage to get expert help to make those changes real.

Perhaps this is the deeper, more profound lesson that Indian cricket offers. The true nature of winning is in overcoming ourselves.  It is also an enormous tribute to the likes of Sachin Tendulkar, confident enough to graciously acknowledge Gary in today’s Asian Age with the words “I want to thank Gary. He has to be given credit as he instilled a bit more self-belief in us. We have been very consistent during the last two years and this is a result of that. I have really enjoyed my game under him.”

I want to end this blog with the words from a speech in the film “Any Given Sunday”. My appreciation and tribute to the exceptional Team India, a part of which was Coach Gary Kirsten. In the film, Al Pacino plays the coach to a soccer team (I’ve changed the word soccer to cricket for fun). It is a profoundly moving speech in the film, just before the team is about to go into the game like Sri Lanka vs. India, the game of their lives:

“I made every mistake a middle-aged man can make – I threw away all my money, I chased off anyone who’s ever loved me and lately I don’t even like the face in the mirror. You know, when you get old in life, things get taken from you. That’s part of life. You find out that life’s a game of inches and so’s cricket – because in either game, life or cricket, the margin for error is so small, I mean half a step too late or too early, you don’t quite make it. One half second too slow too fast you don’t quite catch it. The inches are everywhere around us, in every break of the game every minute every second.

On this team we fight for that inch. On this team we tear ourselves and everyone around us to pieces for that inch. We claw with our fingernails for that inch, because we know that when we add up all those inches, that’s gonna make the fxxking difference between winning and losing. Between living and dying. I’ll tell you this – in any fight it’s the guy who’s willing to die for that inch. And I know if I’m going to have any more life in me, it’s because I am willing to die and fight for that inch. Because that’s what living is, the six inches in front of your face. Now I can’t make you do it. You’ve got a look at the guy next to you and you’ll see a guy who will sacrifice himself for this team, because he knows when it comes down to it, you’ll do the same thing for you. That’s a team gentlemen. And either we heal now as a team, or we will die as individuals.

That’s cricket guys. That’s all it is.”

"Kindness as Forbidden Pleasure"

The modern world exhorts us to take pleasure in possessions, in power, success, and independence. In Mumbai, just like any other major world City, having “Made it” seems to involve accumulating property, land and acquiring great financial wealth.  It is through with these things, we often have the illusion that we are indestructible and our true dependence on others is dispensed with.   Kindness to people, it seems, is increasingly becoming something akin to being a little dumb, or foolish and wearing bad sandals.

Freud believed that there is more than one sort of kindness.  There is kindness as a moral obligation, ‘I should be kind or people won’t like me’, or kindness as calculated bribery, “I’m going to be nice to her so that she will do xyz for me later”. Then there is a genuine kindness - a deep desire that arises in a person. The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips says that people come to therapy not because they are more unhappy than anyone else, but because they feel “limited in their capacity to care for others”.

Walking alone through Breach Candy last night, a wealthy area of South Mumbai, I passed half a dozen people, curled up, some on straw mats, on the streets where they will sleep for the night.  This is their home. There was a huddle of three mothers and two small children no more than three or four years old. I don’t know their names.  Maybe like my dear friends, their names are Pooja, or Parveen or Angali.  I don’t know how these mothers came to be on the streets, or whether they will eat tonight, or if like me as a mother, they are scared that if they sleep, their children might be taken or wander off.  One of these little children looks just like the son of friends of mine.  He has a cheeky alert face. He is on the streets because when he was born, he was undoubtedly issued fewer tickets in the lottery of security and pleasures than my friend’s son. 

It strikes me that our moral actions, what we do when faced with an opportunity to act with kindness, are deeply contextualised and located.  If these mothers and their children were sitting in this awful deprived state, in the village of Piddinghoe in England, where I used to live, any number of neighbours I can think of would quickly have them under their roof.  Neighbours like Gill would produce cakes and have toys out for the children, Chandra would be on the phone to some politician seeking guidance to help them and Mike next door would no-doubt be doing all sorts of kind things, especially if he could do them without people knowing.

But this is not Piddinghoe.  It is Mumbai and the problems of homelessness, massive poverty and starvation, seem so insurmountable that we have to keep a distance.  To imagine these mothers as human beings, with thoughts and feelings just like my friends Pooja, Parveen and Anjali, is virtually unbearable.  We cannot bear such closeness, such proximity, even in our imagination.  The British Psychoanalyst and paediatrician, Donald Winnicott wrote extensively on the human dance of closeness and distance.  We distance in order to defend something – pain in this case, of avoiding connecting with the deep suffering of others.  We distance in order not to bear any responsibility for their suffering.  Perhaps we distance ourselves from the joy of being kind to them. Mothers have to learn to gradually distance themselves more, from their growing children, step by step, least they smother their children’s confidence and belief in their ability to explore the world with some independence. Distance isn’t always inadvisable.  But distance invariably leads to disinterest.

One way some of the wealthy citizens of Mumbai distance themselves from the suffering of others, is by never leaving the comfort of the rear seat of their chauffeur driven cars.  They rarely take to the streets and step closely amongst the poor.  One client of mine took the risk of closeness, deliberately, in order to feel the pulse of the City.  Walking close to the railway station he found a baby girl on a pile of rubbish.  What struck him most was how many people simply looked at this baby girl and walked on by.   He took action and she is now funded by him, safely in a very good orphanage. Just as the writer C.S.Lewis said, “The greatest mystery of life is to give is to receive”. This man feels genuinely good about himself, more than any kind of person acquiring might and is now investing time and money in those like this baby girl born with few tickets.

The only vague sense of a rulebook of kindness is perhaps the kindness expected of parents towards their children. It seems it is the one area of virtually international agreement where kindness is expected, with a lot of country-level variation of course.  But what does kindness mean to those in such unfortunate positions as these mothers and their children on the streets? 

Psychoanalysis reminds us there is enjoyment in hate which prevents kindness.  There is pleasure to be had, although only confessed to with some difficulty, in discharging our aggression, our spite, our envy, our retaliation. The pleasure of hate takes the time when we might otherwise be kind. There are dangers of course in feeling too much. But it is only those humans who have learned to bare frustration – our self-satisfying narcissistic pleasures who are capable of putting the needs of others before one’s own.  Freud believed that those with a deeply rooted sense of kindness are much less susceptible to moral coercion of what the masses are doing, like mindlessly chasing money, and able to live more fully from their own conscious and what their particular version of ‘right’ is.

Gandhi once said that “He simply wanted to please his own conscience which is God’s”.  In Hindu scripts we are asked to act with kindness and not expect gratitude, Christianity asks of us to “Love thy neighbour”, and Muslims remind us to give 10% of our wealth to the poor. All religions and faiths preach the importance of kindness. But if a visit to the Church, the Mosque or the Temple doesn’t translate into humanitarian action, into the daily grind of kindness, it seems a rather pointless exercise, and little more than a few hours spent wearing a faith as though it is merely a religious jacket, to take on and off at will.

There is a wonderful movement called “Random Acts of Kindness”.  Quite simply, one performs a random selfless act, to make the wellbeing of a stranger just a little better. Creative friends of mine once spent a day randomly giving strawberries to strangers who looked unhappy.  Another gathered up as many elderly people as she could who were going to be alone over the Christmas holidays.  They all came to her table for the day. She had cancer at the time, yet doing this made her feel good and she lost her absorption in her own suffering for a while.  Along with the bunch of ole folks, she was able to enjoy the reality that we are deeply dependent on others, and that is not such a bad thing. In fact it’s a pleasure.  

There is a lovely little book called “Kindness”, where the authors assert, that children are born kind; that it is the family that is the primary site that children learn to value or fail to value kindness.  Highly self-involved parents teach their children the values of self-absorption.  Parents only interested in their children’s grades in examination, will of course fail to nourish their offspring’s moral development and humanity towards others. Yet sometimes, that brutality nurtures a compassion for others, learned through one’s own suffering.

One of the living Indian Saint’s from Kerala is called Amma.  She is known as the ‘Hugging Saint’ for the way she gives love by hugging people fifteen hours a day.  She lives and practices the most profound compassion and love for all of humanity, in providing numerous schools, hospitals and homes for those in dire need of care and consideration.  She lives a frugile existence in a room, just six feet by six feet. May be she will not change the world.  But she will have the joy of knowing that she is taking a slice of the world’s poverty and making it her responsibility.

She is the happiest person I have encountered.  People like Amma, existing with such few needs, disturb the consensus of the masses that kindness is sacrifice rather than pleasure. People who are highly generous to others, yet seem to have virtually nothing by way of our material standards of success, disturb us.  They rattle our theories about ourselves. They risk closeness and seem to be enjoying it. They are a threat.

Whatever the names of the mothers on the street are, whether one is called Anjali, another is called Pooja, and the other is called Parveen. I still wonder what your names are and what new kinds of conversations are possible.

"War, Suicide & Sublimation"

All humans carry a potent charge of aggressive energy and Freud believed that in the deployment of this energy, we generally have only a pair of choices. (Although there is another way that I’ll come onto later.)  Either we bottle-up the aggression, turn it on ourselves, inflicting a self-abusive narrative of doing something wrong for whatever it is we are feeling or experiencing. Our alternative, is to aim our aggression outwards towards the world at large and begin large or small-scale wars.

 In today’s Asian Age, there is a tragic story of a middle class wife who committed suicide by hanging herself from the ceiling fan.  Suicide is always an extreme version of aggression turned inward. The person is both a murderer (of themselves of course) and a victim of being murdered (by themselves of course).   Yet at the same time, there is a passive aggression towards those who are left behind – often hurt, bewildered, and likely to spend the rest of their lives wondering what they could have done to prevent this. 

Intensive bottling-up feelings, Freud believed, is a result of an overbearing “super-ego”, a part of oneself that issues overtly strong, often fixed messages of how one should behave.  Clients I see struggling to release themselves from the edicts of the superego often speak in a very tightly bound narrative – “I don’t like music”, “I have to stay with my husband even though he beats me”, “I’ll enjoy my life once I retire”.  Their language lacks creativity and often one sense’s an overriding sense of guilt should they do what truly makes them happy.  Perhaps rigid on their path that fits well with social norms, but perhaps not themselves, one often feels in the presence of a kind of masochism, a commitment to suffering and stubbornness that can infuriate others.  But as a French psychoanalytic teacher once reminded me, “never underestimate the lengths a masochist will go to, to be attacked”.   Masochists essentially get pleasure in being attacked – that’s their perversion, their “thing”.

The parting words of a man to his wife (who I knew), shortly before he committed suicide by standing in front of a train, were “I will do something that will make everyone hate you”.  Suicide always involves others in this way. Yet, the headline of today’s article, of the woman who has hanged herself from the ceiling fan, reads “Cops arrest husband for woman’s suicide”.  Her aggression not only turned inward, but outward, the result being that her husband is punished and imprisoned for something that she did.  I find this law rather absurd and in need of some review, particularly in light of the psychology of suicide and its violent element of punishing others.

We have choices if we find ourselves in miserable situations. When Brian Keenan was held hostage he told the world on his release “you can always take power – whatever is happening to you – even if it is a refusal to eat for a while”.  There is often a way out, that doesn’t involve this level of harm.  This woman has probably hurt her family members as well as her husband in a way from which they will likely never recover.  I find myself wondering if this law may in fact punishes people who are terribly distraught already.   

Whilst either one purge oneself of inner tensions by going to war in some way or another, or bottles-up to a degree that leads to a deep malaise or depression, Freud pointed out there is another way.  And that way is the arts of sublimation.  In the acts of sublimation, we convert our instinctual energy into writing, painting, science or some other artistic creation.  But Freud also pointed out that it is only those with intelligence and intellectual ability that are able to convert in this way.  Yesterday, at the Taj Hotel bookshop, opposite the Gateway of India, I came across a fantastic magazine called “Adbusters” (see Adbusters.org). It is a creative sublimation of energy and rage about the “perfect” idols and images in fashion and beauty advertisements.  One for example shows two rather perfectly carved faced boys, advertising Burberry clothes, with the text changed to “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society”. 

So if you are feeling flooded by rage and like going to war over something or feeling deadened by the life you are living, sublimate!  Put down the bar of chocolate and the remote control.  Maybe that piece of prose, play with paints and colours, or pick up the drum you played as a child might give you a more creative solution to what it is that is troubling you.  And if you don’t know how to do that perhaps you need to see a psychologist.

"The Psychology of Corruption"

The Psychology of Corruption

The view that India is a society riddled with corruption and almost terminally crippled by it is a stereotype that is reinforced in the Indian newspapers on a daily basis. A brief glance at the front page of The Times of India newspaper this morning, I can see stories of bribing of MP’s votes in a nuclear deal and army officers found guilty of a housing scam.   Evidence of the perception – and the stereotype of corruption the country appeared in comments by two Indian Supreme Court justices during a 2007 bail hearing of a former state chief minister who had been sentenced for violating the Prevention of Corruption Act of 1988 “The only way to rid the country of corruption is to hang a few of them from a lamp post,” the justice declared adding, “Everywhere, we have corruption.  Nothing is free from corruption. Everybody wants to loot the country”.

Is rampant corruption merely a question of basic human immorality, or is there something more complex that happens in our relationships with one another and the ways in which we derive our self-esteem? A hugely popular social sport in the elite clubs of Bombay is to chatter about the extent to which the various clubs are corrupt, especially, how much a large brown envelope under the table should contain in order to gain membership.

Imagine if you will, in a mahogany walled meeting room of one of these old colonial clubs, the all-male, elderly Executive Committee are having their quarterly meeting, when suddenly, a man barges into the room and begins a lengthy tirade against the committee.  He is accusing them of gross misconduct and corruption in the form of receiving bribes from contractors and of giving free club membership to members of the police to get them “on-side”.  The Chairman, visibly frustrated, censors the dissenting voice by having the man forcibly removed from the room.  What this dissenting voice has to say is effectively silenced.  The Chairman then adjusts his tie, and instructs everyone to turn to item 78 on the agenda - whether to invest in an additional swing in the children’s area, near the pool area.  Without exception, everyone in the room is struggling to suppress an array of emotions, including the Chairman who continues to pet his tie in the way a child might pet a dog.

It is true to say of the executive committee that the dissenting voice is no longer among them; they are free from his presence, from his insulting laughter and his comments. But in some respects, nevertheless, the repression has been unsuccessful; for now he is making an intolerable exhibition of himself outside the room, and is shouting and banging on the door. More repression ensues as the security-staff are told to remove the man immediately.  Which after about 20 minutes, they do.

What this reminds us is that censorship and suppression never quite works effectively or compliantly. This is perhaps one of the most powerful teachings of psychoanalysis – that repression is rarely entirely successful.  That evening in the bar, the man who is dispelled from the room, along with fellow club members, are sipping their whiskey’s and begin to question the motives of the Chairman – “if the allegations aren’t true, why didn’t he let him talk?” says one person, adding “was he in on a deal?”   Of course, many others in the bar overhear the now animated conversation, the volume fuelled by alcohol so much so that a journalist is busy taking notes on his blackberry on the table behind them. Two days later, a news item appears with the headline “Corruption at One of India’s Elite Clubs”. 

But what of the expelled man who made the original accusations?  What happens to him now?  He is of course at home, not to be seen at the club, concerned whether some  officials might be exercising the real price for their ‘free’ memberships, by hurting him or a member of his family, as the anonymous phone call suggested.  Meanwhile, the Executive Committee decide it is important that they have the right to permanently evict any member from the club in the future, should they feel that they aren’t “Serving the interests of the club well”, whatever that means.  So at the next AGM, they propose an amendment to give the committee the powers to effectively dismiss any dissenting voice and essentially remove the members of their basic civil liberties.

Sadly in many working groups, dissenting voices are intolerable; to be silenced and or characterised as mad, in a manoeuvre to justify the expulsion of individual(s) and any accompanying more sinister acts that may ensue.  But why such terrorism towards dissention? Why such fear of thinking and speaking out?  According to Freud and I think this is a hugely neglected aspect of his work, many adults never acquire a true moral conscience.  In other words, what they have is no internalised prohibitions on their own behaviour, no true sense of feelings of guilt concerning how they behave or the consequences of their actions.  What these adults have instead is social anxiety. This social anxiety concerns firstly the fear of being caught doing the wrong thing in the eyes of one’s peers or social circle and secondly, a fear of loss of love which contains an inherent loss of regard by others.

So the herd-like behaviour, devoid of thinking, is essentially about a fear of not being loved.  Of course a person with a higher sense of self-esteem, of greater regard for oneself, is less likely to act immorally. After all, if your moral compass is strongly internal and of your own, you won’t need to receive your self-esteem from others or in a stack of bribes in quite the same way. What this also implies in my thinking is the best way to deal with people who lack a true moral conscience is to “out” them, or ostracise them and increase the very thing they fear most, social anxiety.  Of course, one might also attempt to emotionally hold a sense of rage, as well as, empathy.  Easier said than done perhaps. After all, it is the poor who suffer most at the hands of corruption.

"Psychoanalysis: The Science Of Love"

Psychoanalysis: The Science of Love

Psychoanalysis views extreme versions of excess as perhaps a cry for help. The man I sit with (and for obvious reasons I am fictionalising here) in my consulting room here in South Bombay is a highly successful entrepreneur in financial terms. Sadly, his fiancé left him over a year ago. Yet ever faithful to his illusions, he continues to mentally scheme and strategist ways to get her back. She is in fact, now married to someone else and has a child. This reality is simply too unbearable for him. He has entered the pretend play world of the child, rather than bare a functioning engagement with reality and avoid the difficult grief-work of acceptance and loss. What causes this sort of hallucination? Over time, I learn that as a child when he turned to his mother to say tell her he could not sleep, or was frightened by a bad dream, her response, rather than to enter into some sort of comprehension of his emotional world, or comfort, she would more often than not, completely negate his feelings with rather severe comment, “you’re fine, nothing will happen to you,”.

As a child he spent much of his time in the fantasy world of computer games, alone in his room. Drugs, especially cocaine, add another method of further cutting off from reality, a disorientating fuel for his romantic and the grandiose illusions. Each drug binge leaves my client with a sense of yet further depletion of his sense of self and any meaning from his real life. It brings a sort of self-disgust that often leads to yet another drug-spree. The challenge of working with this man is that he is obstinate, rather deceitful to himself and has great difficulty learning from his experience.

When two millionaire brothers compete with one another to accumulate as much land and property as they can, it is far too simplistic to view this as merely a vulgar display of wealth. Again, psychoanalysis complicates matters. In the analytic space, we learn that as children, the brothers were regularly graded as to their performance at school during the week. Their father would shout, pointing a finger, “you are an ‘A’” to one child and “you are a ‘D’” to the other. This harshness of parenting seems not uncommon in the clients I see in this City. No doubt, the well intentioned father was trying to drive the boys to achieve more. However, rather than help them gauge their success based on an internal compass that asks “are you doing your best here,” the competition is externalised and the enemy that stands between succeeding or failing is identified: one’s own brother. Without some sort of working through the effects of this early training in rivalry, the skylines of the City will continue to be marked by the symbols of their childhood experience.

The guiding principles of psychoanalysis, is that our basic psychological framework for trusting others is formed in the relationship with our primary caregivers, typically our parents of course. In the site of the family, we develop a prototype for later relations. In that family setting, we learn and develop internal working models or theories if you to like, to make predictions of how other people will respond. In a healthy family, you are likely to hear frank communication of the parents own working models, spoke aloud, such as “I seem to think that if you stay out late tonight, something might happen to you…” Yet this sort of communication is perhaps rare in many families and instead - there is a defensive exclusion of information - important things that need to be said, are not said. When parents, sadly pretend things are not as they in fact are, to a degree that is a sort of farce, it may be just too unbearable for the child to think about.  When the memory that is supplied by those around him is experienced as vastly different from the child’s experience, the family narrating one thing, but the child knowing something else, a place of non-though provides the comfort to temporarily protect the child from mental pain, or confusion or conflict. This is what might be going on when we see children who appear to be excessively wilful, or indeed excessive will-less. It is a recipe of course, for the child to seek safety and comfort in getting lost in a world of fantasy, devoid of reality, a childhood way of coping with what is just too unbearable to think about.    

In a sense, this is a recipe for the child and soon to be adult, in learning to become a fake, a master of disguise.  What the child (now adult?) most longs for, is that when reaching out for comfort that he or she receive love and attention and support to independently explore the world. Without this sort of support, the child develops an internal model of themselves as both untrustworthy and incompetent. Distant caregiving involves distancing from oneself. It sets the norm where real contact with reality is diverted in fantasy production, and nullifies a healthy curiosity for self-understanding.

So it is here in the family that we learn the essence of how to relate to one another, and how to form close attachments not only with others but with ourselves. Healthy love relationships delight us, give us confidence and support us.

This close emotional bonding is what we call love and the scientific study of love and how it develops has its roots in psychoanalysis.