Читать книгу Friends and Enemies: Our Need to Love and Hate - Paula Nicolson, Dorothy Rowe, Dorothy Rowe - Страница 10

The pattern of genes which each of us inherits is an array of possibilities. How each of these possibilities becomes an actuality depends on the experiences each individual encounters.

The array of possibilities is an array of forms. There is the form of a heart, a brain, a hand and so on. One individual’s form of a hand might become a hand which is soft and slender. Another individual’s form of a hand might become a hand which is large and muscular, while for another individual the form of a hand might become corrupted by the effects of Agent Orange with which the baby’s father was sprayed during the Vietnam War, and the baby is born with two stumps at the end of his arms but no fingers.

Similarly, that array of genetic possibilities which can become the ability to create meaning contains forms of thought. These are forms which are found in all human beings. Just as we explore our environment using the form of the hand so we think about our environment using our different forms of thought.

Just how many forms of thought there are I do not know, but it seems to me that there are three forms which are essential for the effective functioning of the meaning system, so that we can each live as an individual in a society where other individuals are essential to our survival, both as a body and as a person, yet where other individuals, while they might cherish our body and indeed our existence, often threaten our survival as a person. In families this happens all the time.

These three forms of thought are:

1. The Face, the means by which a baby bonds with a mothering person;

2. The Story, the means by which an event becomes meaningful to us;

3. The Strategy for Survival – Primitive Pride, the means by which the meaning structure maintains its existence in the face of threat.

The Face

Amongst the artefacts in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens is a statue much older than the beautiful gold jewellery and the charming pottery of Mycenean Greece also in the museum. This statue comes from the Cyclades and was sculpted nearly 3,000 years before the birth of Christ. Despite its age it looks remarkably modern. It is a representation of the human form, about five feet high, in cool, pale marble, elegant and calm and without adornment or accretions of hair or clothes. The head is smooth, the face oval, the eyes no more than dots, nose straight and vertical, mouth no more than two half moons, the ears small circles. All human faces are more complex and irregular than this simple design, yet each of us, whether we lived five thousand years ago or now, sees this simple pattern as a face. To us an upright oval which encloses a vertical line in the middle, topped by two small circles on either side and below its base a horizontal line, is a face.

This interpretation of this design seems not to be a learned but an innate response. Newborn babies prefer to look at a face than at anything else, be they real faces, photographs of faces or cartoon faces. When a baby is offered an array of designs where each design consists of a vertical oval containing two small circles and two straight lines in various positions the baby fixes his eyes on the one particular arrangement of circles and lines which we call a face. The form of thought which enables us to recognize a face allows us not only to identify the basic form of a face but to make fine distinctions which allow us to distinguish one person from another. ‘We are our faces. To our fellow human beings, if not to ourselves, they are the key identifiers. Our brains have exquisite machinery for processing and storing a particular arrangement of eyes, nose and mouth and for picking it out from other very similar arrangements.’²⁰ Computer experts are now turning this ability of ours into algorithms which can identify one particular face in a crowd of faces and give it a name. Big Brother is indeed watching you.

The form of the face is essential to the formation of relationships. With this form of thought the baby has a hook for catching hold of other people. Offered a number of faces and particularly a face which appears frequently the baby elaborates the basic form. If a baby at two or three weeks is offered an array of photographs, one of which is the face of his mother and the others the faces of women who look like his mother, the baby will identify his mother’s photograph and gaze at that in preference to all the other photographs. Of course the baby has more information about this face than he has about the others. ‘The distance between the eyes of the baby at the breast and the mother’s eyes is about ten inches, exactly the distance for the sharpest focus and clearest vision for the young infant.’²¹ Now he knows her smell, her touch, and the comfort, satisfaction and pleasure she can provide. He learnt the sound of her voice when he was still in her womb. (Babies are born interested in human voices. At birth babies prefer to listen to human speech than to other sounds, and at four days they can distinguish certain properties of their mother tongue from those of other languages.)

Cartoons and photographs are all very well, but what the baby wants is a face which responds, which moves and talks, and shows those changes which reveal something of what is always hidden: the other person’s thoughts and feelings. Just as the stony face of the Cycladian statue is as disturbing as it is intriguing, so we are all disturbed by someone whose face reveals nothing of their thoughts and feelings. The face of authority, emotionless, unrevealing, is adopted by those who want to inspire anxiety in those over whom they wish to have power.

It is impossible to establish a relationship with someone whose face reveals nothing of their thoughts and feelings. A baby who is born to a mother who is depressed soon discovers this.

Studies of depressed mothers and their babies show how, when the mother fails to respond to the baby or when the mother begins an interaction with the baby and then does not complete it, the baby is profoundly affected. Daniel Stern, who has been studying the interactions between mothers and babies for many years, described what happens.

Compared with the infant’s expectations and wishes, the mother’s face is flat and expressionless. (I am assuming that the mother has become depressed recently enough that the infant has a set of schemas of her normal behaviour with which to compare her present, depressed behaviour.) She breaks eye contact and does not reestablish it. Her contingent responsiveness is less, and her animation and tonicity disappear. Along with these invariants coming from the mother, there are resonant invariants evoked in the infant: the flight of his animation, a deflation of his posture, a fall in positive affect and facial expressivity, a decrease in activation, and so on. In sum, the experience is descriptively one of ‘microdepression’.²²

Those people who claim that, since depression ‘runs in families’, it must be caused by a gene are ignoring the profound effects a depressed mother has on a child. What neuronal gestalts does a ‘microdepression’ form and what behaviour do they later produce?

The form of the face which we each inherit carries with it the information not just that the face is significant for the baby but that it is qualitatively different from those other patterns which the baby learns are called ‘bottle’, ‘cot’, ‘rattle’, ‘dummy’ and so on. Human beings are different from objects because, even though there are objects which move and make sounds as humans do, objects do not have thoughts and feelings.

Babies are born with the potential to acquire this information but they cannot make this potential actual unless they are presented with one consistent, caring, interacting face. This face does not have to belong to the baby’s biological mother. Adoptive mothers, fathers, aunts, grandmothers, siblings or one attentive nurse can provide the relationship which becomes a model for all subsequent models in the baby’s life. This model states that all human beings have thoughts and feelings, and that a relationship consists of an engagement of the thoughts and feelings of two people, one with the other. In acquiring this model the baby becomes a fully paid-up member of the human race.

Babies are tenacious in their search for a face, and thus many babies born in less than favourable circumstances still manage to acquire their model of a relationship. However, for some their search is not successful and, while they might grow up knowing intellectually that human beings are different from objects, experientially, in their bones and in themselves, they do not know the difference between a person and an object. To them human beings other than themselves are no more than a particular kind of object.

I have spent much of my life both professionally and personally in the company of people who treat other people as a particular class of object. For many years I worked in a psychiatric hospital where one of the consultant psychiatrists specialized in the treatment of people diagnosed as psychopaths. I observed no successful treatment. The current view of psychiatrists in the UK is that those people who are deemed ‘to suffer from a psychopathic personality disorder’ are untreatable. Consequently such people cannot be detained in a psychiatric hospital no matter how great a danger they might be to other people. Some terrible tragedies have followed from this. I think that one of the great tragedies of the twentieth century is that, although the importance of a baby bonding with a mothering figure was recognized in the 1950s, little money and effort have been spent in determining whether a deficit in bonding can be overcome. A remedy for this deficit would have a widespread effect far greater than the cures for various genetic physical disorders which are now being discovered.

A remedy for this deficit in the ability to create human relationships would need to be applied early in a child’s life because the lack of this ability has profound and long-term effects. I saw this in the many hours I was able to spend talking with these patients called psychopaths. What I learned explained much of what I had observed.

We all treat objects in the same way. We either manipulate them, or use them for our benefit, or ignore them. On occasions we destroy them. Those people who have never acquired the model of a relationship treat other people in the same way. They manipulate them, they use them for their own benefit, they ignore them, and occasionally they attempt to destroy them. Being on the receiving end of such treatment is difficult and painful because every interaction can become a threat to the integrity of one’s meaning structure.

It is out of our model of relationships that we create that model we call ‘conscience’ or ‘superego’, a model which causes trouble for us for the rest of our lives, but which enables us to live in groups. Those who lack the model of relationships and, consequently, the model of conscience live lives unimpeded by guilt. Many such people end up in jail, but many more become extremely successful politicians and entrepreneurs. Many, fearing the punishments which breaking the law can bring, lead what are apparently normal lives. They might marry, have children, but because they are adept in making excuses for themselves and inspiring guilt in others, and because they are untroubled by the need to tell the truth, they become the most powerful member of the family, the centre around which all the other family members revolve.

From such little acorns do massive oaks grow, when all that the baby wanted was some regular interaction with another person.

The interaction which the baby seeks always follows a particular pattern. It is a pattern we all know, and thus adults who would say they know nothing about babies can still be drawn into this interaction and know how to play.

Face to face either the baby or the adult can invite the other to play by looking into the other’s eyes and making a noise or a movement such as pushing out the bottom lip or wrinkling the nose. If the other responds with sounds and facial movements what follows is a conversation: this begins with an interchange which sets the scene, rises to a crisis, and falls away in a dénouement. The interaction follows the pattern of a play, and a play is always a story.

The Story

Stories so abound in our lives that, like the man who was surprised to discover he talked prose, we can be surprised to find that everything we know comes in the form of a story.

The form of a story is very simple. It has a beginning, a middle and an end. For us to find a story satisfactory it has to be complete. If someone says to us, ‘I was on a train the other day with some people and you’ll never guess what happened,’ we are being given the middle of a story and invited to guess the end. But before we can make a guess we need to be told the beginning of the story. What train was it? Where was it going? Who were the people? Once we know the beginning we might or might not be able to guess the end, but, if we have become intrigued by the story, we cannot feel satisfied until the story is complete – beginning, middle and end.

There are many different ways of telling a story but each way must complete the basic form. Novelists, journalists and essayists often try to draw the reader in by telling the middle, or part of the middle, of the story first. Such a device aims to surprise and intrigue the reader, something which scientists telling the story of their research must not do. Academic journals require that the story be told twice, first in a brief summary and then in the detailed form of introduction, method, results, discussion and conclusions. Cookery recipes have the ingredients as the beginning, the preparation as the middle and the cooking and serving as the end. This cooking and serving we might actually do, or we might simply imagine doing it, and thus complete the story. The story told by instruction manuals for video recorders and the like requires the reader to enact the story. The beginning is to take the recorder out of its box and to name the parts. The middle of the story is to decipher the prose and the diagrams, set up the recorder and work out how to use it, and the end to sit back in successful satisfaction.

The form of the story is the means by which we link one event to another. We cannot survive physically or as a person when all we see is a passing phantasmagoria where events occur with no connection one with the other. We need to see connections between events, and our need often overrides what is actually happening. Thus some people explain an individual’s character and life in terms of the movements of the planets, while other people use as the explanation some mythopoeic gene.

The most prosaic way of seeing a link between one event and another is the simple observation that one event is always followed by another particular event. From such an observation we go on to use the occurrence of the first event to predict the second. The observation and the prediction take the form of a story. Thus we can be sitting in our garden on a sunny day (the beginning of the story) and we see black clouds massing on the horizon (the middle of the story). We predict the end of the story: ‘It’s going to rain.’

This particular prediction/end of story comes out of our past experiences. We have seen lots of black clouds followed by rain. But the way in which we have linked these events together comes from that form of thought which is innate, the story.

Babies while still in the womb, from about twenty-four weeks’ gestation, show that they are using the form of the story. Even before the cortex of their brain is complete they are able to observe that one event always follows another event and to use the occurrence of the first event to predict the second.

Perhaps the commonest example of this is in the way that babies in the womb can link the feeling of pleasure with certain sounds, particularly rhythmic, sweet music. No doubt for a baby in the mother’s womb the ride can be quite rough and constricted when the mother is busy and active. When she sits down and puts her feet up to rest, the stillness and easing of constriction must create in the baby a feeling of pleasure. Many mothers, just before they sit down to rest, switch on some music. If the mother has sat down to watch or to listen to her favourite soap opera the baby comes to hear the same music every day and, soon after the music begins, the baby feels a sense of ease and pleasure. The baby creates the story ‘I’m feeling uncomfortable’ (beginning), ‘Here’s the music’ (middle), ‘Something nice is going to happen’ (prediction/ending). When the baby is born and the music is switched on the baby remembers the story, and looks in the direction of the music with what is called the ‘alerting response’, the expectation that something nice is about to happen.

Daniel Stern calls this ability of the baby to create a story ‘the protonarrative envelope’. This is ‘an emergent property’, which is

an organization that is in the process of coming into being or that has just taken form … an emergent property of the mind … has coherence and sense in the context in which it emerges. That is to say, the diverse events and feelings are tied together as necessary elements of a single unified happening that, at one of its higher levels, assumes a meaning … More recent developmental research is beginning to suggest that the infant is intuitively endowed with some kind of representational system which can apprehend the intentional states of agents … The ability – in fact the necessity – to see the human interactive world in terms of narrative-like events and their motives, goals and so on, is achieved very early.²³

We use the form of the story not just to link one event to another. We also use it to create meaning. Nothing is fully meaningful to us until we have embedded it in a story.

You might be in your house or office when, quite unexpectedly, something happens. You immediately name this unexpected happening ‘an extraordinarily loud noise’. Your naming of this event could be quite accurate, but the meaning of the event cannot be complete until you create a story around it. Immediately you create a theory about what the noise was. You might decide that it was a clap of thunder, or an explosion, or a traffic accident, and so on. Your theory must include the beginning of the story – what led up to the clap of thunder or the explosion or the accident – and the end of the story – what effects the thunder, the explosion, the accident will have. By creating this story you complete the meaning you have given to the event. Then you might decide to check the accuracy of your story by going and looking, or you might decide that you are sure you are right, and get on with what you are doing.

We are busy creating stories and listening to stories all the time. We gossip, we watch television, we daydream and tell ourselves stories. We love stories, but the story which matters most to us is our own life story.

Our meaning structure is a collection of stories, but all these stories are held within one story, our life story. Our sense of identity – that is, the person we experience ourselves as being – and our life story are one and the same. We can think of them as being separate – ‘This is me and this is my life story’ – but in fact me/my life story is the form which holds the meaning structure together and gives it a certain coherence.

It is our life story which embeds us in time and place. Our actual experience of living is a string of present moments. The form of the story gives us a sense of time (or it might be that our sense of time gives us the form of the story, or that the form of the story and the sense of time are aspects of the one form). We never actually experience the past or the future. They are just ideas, parts of the form of the story. Out of the story form/sense of time comes our life story/identity.

In our life story the middle is where we are now. The beginning is not just about our own past life. It is about our family, our roots. Knowing who our family was and where we came from is tremendously important in creating a complete sense of identity. In 1994 many Sydney suburbs were threatened and some houses engulfed by huge bushfires which, leaping at high speed from the top of one tall tree to another, would bear down on houses where the occupants, believing they were safe, were peacefully going about their business. Many families had to flee with little time to gather up valuable possessions. All Australians considered the question, ‘What’s the most important thing to take with you if you have to leave your home in such a hurry?’ There was universal agreement on what to take: the family photograph albums. There could be no replacement or recompense for such a loss.

One of the cruelties inflicted on children down the centuries has been to deny them the right to know where they came from and who their family was. Orphanages have often been guilty of this crime against the children in their care. Nowadays some child-care agencies have a policy of helping children separated from their families to put together a ‘life story book’ containing the letters and photographs which enable the children to create the beginning of their story. Children thus helped speak of their life story book as giving them great comfort, but, alas, there are still many adults involved in child care who do not realize the importance of the life story and they fail to provide children with the means of creating and maintaining the beginning of their story.

The ending of our life story has yet to be lived. It is made up of expectations and predictions about what our life will be. This is where the coherence and stability of our meaning structure is at its most vulnerable. If ever we discover that we have got the beginning of our life story wrong, if we discover that our parents were not the people we thought they were, or the circumstances of our birth were markedly different from what we had been told, we can feel quite disturbed, particularly if these discrepancies have implications for how we have chosen to live our lives and how we see our future. However, such discoveries are made by only a few of us. What happens to us all is that at least once in our lives the ending of our life story is disconfirmed. Our life is not going to turn out as we expected. We discover that John Lennon was right: ‘Life is what happens while we’re making other plans.’

Usually it is other people who disconfirm the ending of our life story. They die, or they betray us, or reject us, or simply turn out to be different from what we thought they were. When they do this, or when other events show us that we have got the ending of our story wrong, we feel our meaning structure tremble and threaten to collapse.

Dangerous though other people may be, we need them to confirm our meaning structure. The ancient Greek philosopher Xenophanes spoke of how all we know is but ‘a woven web of guesses’. We need to check and to keep checking whether our guesses have some close relationship to what has happened, what is happening and what will happen. To do this we can see for ourselves and we can ask other people what they see. When people tell us that what we see is what they see we feel strengthened and more confident. But if someone keeps telling us that we have got it wrong we can come to doubt every meaning that we create.

Women who are married to men who constantly denigrate them can lose their self-confidence and come to believe that they are so stupid and incompetent that they cannot manage without the man who is destroying them in order to overcome his own sense of weakness. Such women create life stories, not of escaping or of fighting back, but of being the passive victim of whatever their husband, or life, might do to them.

Children need adults round them who confirm the child’s meanings, or, when the child has got it wrong, will gently steer the child to a more accurate representation of the circumstances the child is trying to understand. Alas, many adults do not do this. Instead, they tell children that they are stupid, or they shame them by laughing at them. Even worse, they tell the child that he has lied when he knows that he has not.

This was a favourite ploy of my mother whenever I told her something which did not fit with the way she saw things. When I was twenty-seven and pregnant I was working very hard. In the last few weeks of the pregnancy I developed the early symptoms of toxaemia and was sent to hospital. My doctor told me that I had not been getting enough rest. When I told my mother this she said, ‘That’s not true, Dorothy. You never work hard.’ This for me at twenty-seven was a story I could joke about with my friends, but when I was a child such a rejection of my truth was very disturbing.

At four I developed symptoms which could signal the onset of diphtheria, a disease from which, in those pre-antibiotic days, many children died. I was put into the infectious diseases ward in the local hospital and my parents forbidden to visit. I remember my stay there extremely well. For the first few days I was in a cot but some days later I was shifted to a bed, not my own bed but one which I shared with another girl. She was older than me and was already at the head of the bed where she could use the radio headphones. I was at the foot, and so did not hear the message my parents had arranged to be broadcast over the local radio. Eventually I was sent home (I didn’t have diphtheria, just the incurable bronchiectasis which has plagued my life) and my mother asked me if I had heard the radio message. I said I had not and explained why. My mother told me I was lying. ‘They wouldn’t put you two to a bed,’ she said. No doubt she had her reasons to say that. Her own anger and disappointment that I had missed the radio message, and, possibly, her guilt at not being there to look after me, were hard for her to deal with, but she held the view, as most parents did then, that one of the uses of children was to be a scapegoat on which parents could vent their feelings.

My big sister must have observed my mother’s success in being able to deny inconvenient facts because she adopted the ‘Dorothy’s lying’ ploy. Such constant assaults on my understanding of what went on around me had devastating effects on my self-confidence. I could not show that I was distressed by what they said because, if I did, they would tell me I was stupid to be so sensitive. Consequently, I grew up doubting my perceptions and in my teens and early twenties there were times when I nearly lost my grip on reality completely. Years later I worked with people diagnosed as schizophrenic and I heard stories of childhoods where the child’s truth had been denied by the family, stories which made my heart turn over just as it does whenever I discover I have just had a close brush with death.

What we all want is that others should know our life story and acknowledge the truth of it and that we have lived. This is why graves are marked, memorials are built and histories written. If no one knows your story it is as if you are nothing and, when you die, it will be as if you have never existed. This is why many people are pleased that their name has been in a newspaper or that they have been glimpsed on television by millions. The fear of being a nothing, of never having existed, can feel like utter shame, the utter terror.

It was this utter shame and utter terror which the SS militiamen guarding the German concentration camps visited upon the prisoners. Primo Levi recorded that

the first news of the Nazi annihilation camps began to spread in 1942. They were vague pieces of information, yet in agreement with each other: they delineated a massacre of such vast proportions, of such extreme cruelty and such intricate motivation that the public was inclined to reject them because of their enormity. It is significant that this rejection was foreseen well in advance by the culprits themselves.²⁴

He went on to quote Simon Wiesenthal, who described these SS militiamen in the last pages of his book The Murderers Are Among Us. They told the prisoners that

‘However this war may end, we have won the war against you; none of you will be left to bear witness, but even if someone were to survive, the world would not believe him. There will perhaps be suspicions, discussions, research by historians, but there will be no certainties, because we will destroy the evidence with you. And even if some proof should remain and some of you survive, people will say that the events you describe are too monstrous to be believed: they will say they are exaggerations of Allied propaganda and will believe us, who will deny everything, and not you. We will be the ones to dictate the history of the Lagers.’²⁵

Primo Levi described how

Almost all the survivors, verbally or in their written memoirs, remember a dream which frequently recurred during the nights of imprisonment, varied in its detail but uniform in its substance: they had returned home and with passion and relief were describing their past sufferings, addressing themselves to a loved person, and were not believed, indeed, not even listened to. In the most typical (and most cruel) form, the interlocutor turned and left in silence.²⁶

This dream became a reality for many of the survivors of the Holocaust. People did not want to hear their story because it threatened their own meaning structure. In a television news report about the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the state of Israel, one woman, a survivor of Auschwitz, told how, when she finally arrived in New York, her relatives did not want to hear about her experiences because they had suffered so much during the war. They told her, ‘The queues for food were dreadful.’

Perhaps her relatives prided themselves on their ability to suffer and they did not want to acknowledge that someone else’s suffering was greater than their own. Perhaps they did not want to examine the question of why God would let good people suffer in this way, or perhaps they could not tolerate a story which showed how a person can be trapped and helpless. Concentration camp survivors who did tell their story were often challenged by their listeners, who asked, ‘Why didn’t you try to escape?’

Sometimes listeners would offer suggestions based on what they thought they would do in such a situation. Primo Levi recalled such an event. He wrote,

I remember with a smile the adventure I had several years ago in a fifth grade classroom, where I had been invited to comment on my books and to answer pupils’ questions. An alert-looking little boy, apparently at the head of the class, asked me the obligatory question: ‘How come you didn’t escape?’

Primo explained to him how the Lager was organized. The boy wanted a diagram, which Primo supplied. The boy studied it and presented Primo with a plan:

At night, cut the throat of the sentinel: then, put on his clothes; immediately after this run over there to the power station and cut off the electricity, so the searchlights would go out and the high-tension fence would be deactivated; after that I could leave without any trouble. He added seriously: ‘If it should happen to you again, do as I told you; you’ll see that you’ll be able to do it.’²⁷

The dangers of not being believed were recognized by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. A system for briefing and debriefing those people who testified was set up, and though it did not work perfectly, it went some way to prevent those who had to talk about the traumas they had suffered from feeling that they had not been believed.²⁸

Just as we need other people to confirm our story, so we need to confirm our story to ourselves. That is, we need to tell ourselves the truth. Our story is a construction, and if we want to lead a reasonably peaceful life we need to create a life story in which the pieces fall into a pattern where the pieces fit and which does not conflict with our need for a sense of pride and self-worth. But what if the events in our life conflict with this need? One solution is to lie to ourselves. It is an easy thing to do, but the results are always disastrous.

I have met many people who describe their childhood as idyllic and their parents as perfect. Some of these people say that they do not actually remember their childhood but they are sure it was a perfectly happy one. Not all these people were suffering from depression and anxiety. Some led apparently normal lives, though they were often troubled by their inability to maintain good relationships with others.

No childhood is idyllic and no parent is perfect. All children suffer, but some are fortunate enough to suffer less than most. One of the tasks of adult life should be to inspect the beginnings of our story and see it clearly and truthfully. From our adult perspective we can modify the interpretations of events we constructed in childhood.

In a workshop I once ran one of the participants talked about the brutal punishments his father administered. In adult life his great problem was his rage, which had disrupted all his important relationships. Later he and I travelled by train together, and we talked about our fathers: they were both men of considerable ability who had never had the chance to put that ability to good use. Limited by education and opportunity, they had seen it as their duty to work in demanding, unsatisfying jobs in order to support their families. As my companion talked about his father he acknowledged that he could take some pride in him, and with this some of the sadness which lay beneath his rage showed through, the sadness of a child who had offered his father love and been rejected.

In looking at his story from an adult perspective he made the story more complex. It was no longer about a brutal father who terrorized his son. It became a story of a man who was trying to be what he thought a good father should be, and a son who loved, hated and feared his father. A more complex story, but a more truthful one.

Simple stories lay blame simply. ‘My father was totally wicked,’ or, ‘I was wicked and my father was right to punish me.’ Complex, more truthful stories apportion not blame but responsibility.

Responsibility properly applied relates to that over which the person has control. Parents have a great deal of control over what happens to their children when they are small, and so have great responsibility for the care of their children. Parents have no control over what happens to their adult children and how their adult children interpret what happens to them, so parents cannot be held responsible for what their adult children do. However, the question of responsibility becomes more tricky when the parents see a link between what they did when the children were young and what their children do when they are adults. Had they acted differently would their children now be acting differently? In those past years could they have chosen to act differently or was their choice constrained by what they knew at the time?

This is the question which plagues many parents when they review their lives, often at the behest of their adult children. As a parent concerned about your children’s education you might have surveyed the options for secondary schooling and, after much deliberation, you might have decided to invest your savings in your children’s education and send them to a well-regarded boarding school. As an adult one of your children talks of how the boarding school was the best experience ever, while the other child says, ‘How could you be so cruel as to send me away from home?’

No doubt the child who disliked being away from home would say, ‘You didn’t listen to me,’ but parents can listen to their children and still get it wrong. The circumstances of their lives did not offer them an infinite range of choices, and they could not foresee how ideas about education and families would change. They could act only with the knowledge they had then. Later perhaps the best they can do for their life story and for their adult children is to say to them, ‘Yes, these things did happen. I tried to do my best but I can see now I made mistakes. I’m sorry.’

The question of responsibility is quite different when our choice of action was not constrained by what we knew at the time. If we know that something is wrong and we still choose to do it we are fully responsible for our actions. Every adult who accepted Hitler’s plan to exterminate all those people who impeded his plan for a pure Aryan race, and who by action or non-action helped put his plan into operation, is responsible for what each one of them did. It was not only Germans who chose this course of action. Such people came from all the European states. What they had in common was an inheritance of ideas from European civilization and from the Christian tradition. Most would have claimed an allegiance to one of the Christian churches, but even those who did not call themselves Christians would still have been aware of Christ’s teaching about the necessity of loving one another and forgiving our enemies. Not one could honestly claim, ‘I didn’t know it was wrong to humiliate, torture and kill other people.’

Knowing that we have acted wrongly should provoke guilt and shame, but these are very painful emotions. One way of dealing with them is to lie to yourself. You tell yourself a story which is not true.

Most adults who lie to themselves begin by lying to other people. Certain facts are inconvenient for them: they do not want to take responsibility for what they do. They act in bad faith towards other people, and they slip into acting in bad faith towards themselves. They start believing their own lies, and, as I now observe in my contemporaries who have done this for most of their lives, as the years pass their memory becomes confused. They have lost the ability to distinguish between what did happen and what they fantasized had happened, what they themselves did and what other people did. Through their lies they have denied themselves the strength and comfort our life story can give us when we reach an age where the inevitability of death cannot be denied. For this we need a life story which is grounded in the truth that we have made mistakes, we have suffered, we have endured life’s blows, but we have come through and it was good. Though we might fear the processes which lead to death, we do not fear death itself for it is the appropriate end to our story.

To arrive at such a story is not easy. Primo Levi acknowledged how hard it is when he wrote about Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, former commissioner in charge of Jewish affairs in the Vichy government around 1942, who was personally responsible for the deportation of 70,000 Jews. After the war, wrote Primo Levi,

Darquier denies everything: the photographs of the piles of corpses are montages; the statistics of millions of dead were fabricated by the Jews, always greedy for publicity, commiseration and the indemnities … I think I can recognize in him the typical case of someone who, accustomed to lying publicly, ends by lying in private too, to himself, and building for himself a comforting truth which allows him to live in peace.

To keep good faith and bad faith distinct costs a lot: it requires a decent sincerity or truthfulness with oneself, it demands a continuous intellectual and moral effort.²⁹

Some people are not prepared to make such a moral effort. They are not prepared to suffer the pain of shame and guilt or the difficulties which can follow the making of a moral choice.

In 1998 the German news weekly Der Spiegel carried a story by Bruno Schirra about his visit to the eighty-seven-year-old Dr Hans Münch, a Bavarian doctor who could attest to the accuracy of the film Schindler’s List. He told Bruno Schirra, ‘“The selection process is portrayed completely authentically. Every detail is right. It was exactly like that.”’

Bruno Schirra wrote,

Hans Münch spent 19 months in Auschwitz. He served in the Hygiene Institute of the Waffen-SS. He carried out his work as conscientiously as all the other SS ranks. ‘To eradicate the Jews, that was the job of the SS at the time,’ says Münch. ‘I could do experiments on people, which otherwise were only possible on rabbits. It was important work for science.’

Münch wanted to be a scientist and Auschwitz gave him what he wanted. He said,

‘These were ideal working conditions: a laboratory with excellent equipment and a selection of academics with worldwide reputations.’

His job was to fight epidemics. Typhus, dysentery and typhoid were always breaking out, and since SS people were dying, there was a need for action.

But fighting epidemics in Auschwitz meant ‘that all the huts were closed off. Nobody came out and nobody went in. Everybody was gassed, because it was possible that someone could pass it on. That was the usual treatment.’

He talks about it casually. There is no doubt and no emotion.

‘Did it bother you?’

‘No, no, not at all, because it was the only way not to let things get much, much, much worse.’

‘Gassing was better?’

‘Of course! Of course! If you think it through to its logical conclusion, it was the only way to prevent the whole camp from being destroyed.’

Münch still believes today that this was the only possibility. For him, it was a humane act. ‘If they hadn’t been gassed, they would have died terrible deaths from epidemics.’

For Münch, the notorious SS doctor Josef Mengele was ‘the kindest of colleagues. I can only say the best things about him.’ On 29 June 1944 Mengele sent him the head of a twelve-year-old child. Münch examined it and sent the findings back on 8 July. ‘It was an everyday event,’ he says today. ‘Mengele and the others sent us heads, livers, spinal cords, whatever they had, and we analysed them.’ Did he ever refuse? Even today the idea is unthinkable. ‘That was my duty, and duty was duty, and schnaps was schnaps.’

Dr Münch’s wife was with him in Auschwitz. During the interview she became increasingly distressed. She said, ‘“My God, I’m so ashamed of being German.” Münch looks up. “I’m not.” Well, he says, the Jews might have had it bad in Auschwitz. But it wasn’t easy for him either.’ When asked, ‘“What does Auschwitz mean to you?”’ he answered calmly, ‘“Nothing.”’³⁰

What can we say about Dr Münch? To say he is a monster might relieve our feelings but it does not explain what he is actually doing when he eschews shame and guilt and denies the suffering of other people. One way of explaining the process which led him to make such a monstrous choice is to see that when Dr Münch was offered a choice of disobeying orders, or fighting and perhaps dying on the Russian front, or, as he saw it, advancing his career, he chose his career. In doing so he retreated to an unelaborated form of thought which is concerned with the survival of the meaning structure no matter what the cost. This form of thought is the primitive form of pride.

Primitive Pride

On 15 April 1945 the British army entered Bergen-Belsen camp in north-west Germany. The soldiers who liberated the camp and the medical staff who came to assist them were among the first to report through their letters what they saw. Lieutenant-Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin, DSO, TD, wrote,

I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was a barren wilderness, as bare and devoid of vegetation as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles where they’d been dumped by other inmates, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they’d fallen as they’d shuffled along the dirt tracks … One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day would go on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect …

Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand propping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves of the dysentery which was scouring their bowels, a woman standing stark naked washing herself in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated …

It was shortly after the British Red Cross Society teams arrived, though it may have had no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick also arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don’t know who asked for lipstick. I wish I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for those internees than the lipstick. Women lay in beds with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet lips, you saw them wandering around with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick.

Do you see what I mean? At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tattooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick gave them back their humanity.

Perhaps it was the most pathetic thing that happened in Belsen, perhaps the most pathetic thing that’s ever happened, I don’t know. But that’s why the sight of a piece of lipstick today makes my eyes feel just a little uncomfortable.³¹

And how hugely important is that uncomfortable feeling in our eyes, the tears of sorrow and pity that come when we recognize the humanness of another person, a fellow human being. We recognize them and their story, and we see them in us and us in them. We can guess at what they are feeling and why they did what they did. There is something both pathetic and brave in what these women did. Wearing lipstick was not going to make one iota of difference to the physical condition of these women, but it was a way of defending themselves against the assaults they had suffered on the sense they had of being a person.

Lieutenant-Colonel Gonin knew that the women who wore the lipstick were making a statement about their identity and their pride. He knew that he did the same, not by wearing lipstick but by wearing his army uniform, and that using lipstick, a uniform or whatever to express identity is characteristic of our species Homo sapiens sapiens or Modern Humans. Our distant ancestors, the Early Humans, had no beads, pendants or necklaces, no painting on cave walls. In his study of the development of the mind the archaeologist Steven Mithen wrote, ‘A characteristic feature of all Modern Humans, whether they are prehistoric hunter gatherers or twentieth century business people is that they use material culture to transmit social information’³² – that is, to define their identity and to demonstrate to others their definition of their identity.

Babies are not born wearing some identity statement – their mothers press that upon them soon enough – but they are born with the need to be a person and to be treated as a person. Most adults recognize this though they might not articulate it as such. They know that a regular pattern to the day benefits the baby and that a baby needs company. The regular pattern reinforces the baby’s meaning structure and the company of other people confirms the baby as a person. If the baby is deprived of company or if the regular pattern of care is badly disrupted the baby becomes distressed. It seems that at birth, when the baby encounters an environment not as supportive and predictable as the womb, the baby is primed to survive both as a body and as a person. Just as a baby whose mouth and nose become covered will scream and wriggle in order to breathe, so a baby who finds his meaning structure under threat will demand the conditions necessary for its survival.

The purpose of life is to live, and just as everything that is alive will strive to survive physically, so every meaning structure strives to maintain its coherence and thus survive. The mechanism for doing so is given by the form of thought which I have called primitive pride.

I first became aware of this way of thinking when, in the early seventies, I was spending much of my working day in conversation with people who were severely depressed. To become depressed you have to turn against yourself and hate yourself. My patients were experts in hating themselves. In utter humility and pain they would describe to me how they had failed in everything, how they were responsible not only for every disaster they had suffered but for every disaster that had befallen their family and friends. Some claimed responsibility for world poverty and the degradation of the planet. If I tried to suggest that they were claiming responsibility for matters clearly not in their control they would correct me by telling me that they must be responsible for all these disasters because, if they had been really good people, these disasters would not have happened. They were inherently inadequate, unacceptable, bad, the wickedest people the world had ever seen. At every encounter they would thank me for listening to them and say, ‘You shouldn’t waste your time with me. There are many more deserving patients than me.’

In the face of such a massive, relentless attack, how does a meaning structure manage to remain whole? I found that, as I listened to these people, in the welter of self-castigation and humility something else would occasionally show through. It might just be a facial expression, a tone of voice, or a remark made in casual conversation while we were preparing a cup of tea or standing in the queue at the canteen.

What showed through was pride. I was first aware of this pride as I listened to some of my patients talking about their suffering. I was very familiar with this way of talking. It is the voice of the expert sufferer. Expert sufferers take pride in their ability to suffer. My mother was an expert sufferer. The suffering of anyone else paled into insignificance when compared with her suffering, and in the family she brooked no competition. Thus I never acquired the knack of talking about my own suffering. I find it very difficult to say, ‘I’m ill,’ or ‘I’m anxious.’ When I’m on my deathbed and you ask me how I am I shall say, ‘Fine.’ This, I am sure, was one of the reasons my husband found me so attractive. He was an expert sufferer and needed a silent and attentive listener.

Expert sufferers can specialize not just in physical suffering but the mental suffering that goes with guilt. If you say to such an expert sufferer that something has gone wrong and perhaps they could put it right you will find that they do not make a move to do so. Instead they fall to suffering, saying, ‘It’s all my fault, I’m so guilty, I’m sorry I’ve done this to you, how can I ever make it up to you, you don’t know just how guilty I feel,’ and so on and so on. Their aim is to make you feel guilty for having made them feel guilty. Not that your suffering guilt can ever match the agony they suffer. Expert sufferers take great pride in their capacity to suffer and they resist anyone who tries to take their suffering away from them. Martyrdom can be a wonderful source of pride.

Most of my depressed patients revealed a pride in how bad they were. They were not ordinarily bad. They did not want to be ordinary. If they could not be the Most Perfect, Wonderful, Intelligent, Beautiful, Successful, Admired and Loved Person the World Has Ever Seen they had to be the Worst, Most Despised, Confused, Evil Failure and Outcast the World Has Ever Seen.

Over the weeks and months that we talked the life story of each of my patients gradually unfolded, and primitive pride was revealed in the codicils that came with their statements about who they were and what the ending of their story would be. Each life story was unique, but they had some common themes such as:

• ‘I am a shameful person and must creep around the edges of society, asking permission to exist and expecting a refusal.’ Primitive pride then adds, ‘God sees my suffering and will one day comfort and reward me.’

• ‘I am wicked, the cause of my disaster, and depression is my deserved punishment.’ Primitive pride then adds, ‘But I’m a better person than everyone else because I know how wicked I am whereas other people don’t recognize how wicked they are. Through my suffering I shall find redemption.’

• ‘I shall expunge my shame and guilt by dying.’ Primitive pride then adds, ‘I will force those who shamed me to witness my suffering and know that it is their fault.’

• ‘I will never forgive those who shamed me.’ Primitive pride then adds, ‘My revenge will be merciless and eternal.’

In telling their story some of my patients recognized and confronted their primitive pride. They saw that it kept them in the prison of depression, and they decided that the cost was too great. There were other and better ways of creating a life story, and, in realizing that they were free to do so, they freed themselves from their prison. Some of my patients found that the immediate rewards their primitive pride gave them were too delicious to relinquish. They remained depressed.

The meaning structure is a self-regulating system. All self-regulating systems have within their structure some mechanism which maintains the integrity of the system, preventing it from grinding to a halt or shattering to pieces. Our body, a self-regulating system, has a number of such mechanisms. The mechanism which forms blood clots to stem the flow of blood through a wound is one. In the meaning structure primitive pride is the form of thought or mechanism which selects from within the individual meaning structure a collection of meanings; when put together, these meanings serve to give immediate protection to the integrity of the meaning structure. This collection of meanings may have little relationship to what is actually happening or in the long term be an adequate defence. Indeed, it usually creates more problems than it was assembled to solve. Its importance is that it can be assembled immediately, in the blink of an eye.

In psychoanalysis one of the mechanisms of defence is rationalization, which is a concept with a passing similarity to primitive pride. With rationalization, as Otto Fenichel explained,

Emotional attitudes become permissible on condition that they are justified as ‘reasonable’. The patient finds one reason or another why he is to behave in this way or that, and thus avoids becoming aware that he is actually driven by an instinctual impulse. Aggressive behaviour is sanctioned on the condition that it is viewed as ‘good’; a like situation holds true for sexual attitudes.³³

In the 1930s the psychoanalyst Karen Horney developed the concept of compensatory ‘pride systems’ which, as described by the psychotherapist Chris Mace,

attempt to minimalise internal anxiety by maintaining self images that are inconsistent with social realities. These are identified with characteristic goals and fixed attitudes, providing a source of inconsistent behaviour at any time. If reality threatens to impinge, conflict and anxiety are the inevitable result as the fragile balance between these internal systems is disturbed.³⁴

Two American psychologists, Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson, though working quite differently from psychoanalysts and from me, encountered primitive pride, which they called a ‘psychological immune system’. They had wanted to discover how quickly people recovered from the shock of some disaster or some unexpected good fortune. They found that when people were asked how long they thought it would take them to recover from, say, being jilted or being elected to a much wanted position, they had predicted that it would take far longer than it actually did.

What happened was that the psychological immune system, which was ‘an army of rationalizations, justifications and self-serving logic, soothes our psyche during bad times’. Daniel Gilbert said, ‘People are famous for making the best of bad situations and rationalizing away their failures – which allows them to remain relatively pleased with themselves despite all good evidence to the contrary.’³⁵

Primitive pride is concerned with choosing from the array of possible interpretations of a situation that interpretation which will best keep the meaning structure intact. It can act swiftly without having to resort to conscious thought. It is not concerned with testing an interpretation against reality nor is it concerned with the long-term implications of a particular interpretation, even if the implication is that the person will suffer.

This action of primitive pride can be seen in the pattern of events which leads to a person becoming depressed. Some disaster occurs which causes the person to see a serious discrepancy between what he thought his life was and what it actually is. The meaning structure cannot adjust to this discrepancy without a major reorganization, and so the person starts to feel himself falling apart. Primitive pride comes into action and provides an interpretation which serves to hold the meaning structure together, namely that the person himself is the cause of the disaster. The holding together operation is successful because the interpretation is simply an enlargement of what the person believes, but what comes hard on its heels is the imprisoning isolation of depression.³⁶

Not only is primitive pride not concerned with testing meanings against what is actually happening, it can perform its function of maintaining the integrity of the meaning structure simply by denying that certain things are actually happening. The story which many Serbs have always liked to tell themselves is that, throughout history, Serbs have, without exception, been virtuous victims. In June 1999, as NATO troops uncovered more and more evidence of the massacres by the Serbian army of Albanian Kosovans and the Serbs in Kosova fled their homes for the safety of Serbia, many Serbs preferred to believe what their state media told them, that they were the innocent victims of NATO aggression, while some denied the evidence of their own eyes. Rory Carroll, an English journalist in Belgrade, reported:

Asked whether Serb refugees should be interviewed about possible atrocities, Belgrade shoppers yesterday gave blank responses. The refugees fled because the Kosovan Liberation Army was a gang of murderous terrorists, not because they had done something to provoke retribution, many said. As for the refugees, they deny any wrongdoing against their Kosovan Albanian neighbours. Questioned about the March 26 massacre at Suva Reka in which men, women and children were shot at close range, Serb refugees from the town claimed that not a hair had been touched on a single head.

Reports of mass executions, grenades tossed at children, trucks ferrying bodies, were a fantasy. ‘Not one Albanian has been killed, not one,’ said Bravko Petkovic, 32, who worked in Balkan Tyre factory.

A crowd of young men, arms folded, said it was inconceivable that they or any other Serbs could have killed their neighbours. ‘Do we look like murderers? Come on, we’re family men,’ said Vesko Mladevovic. ‘We got on very well with the Albanians, even though they were kidnapping and shooting us.’³⁷

Primitive pride can also keep us alive when the conditions of our life are at their most dire. Instead of giving up and dying we stay active and, even without conscious thought, we carry out those actions which can ensure our survival. That is how people torn from their homes and robbed of everything they hold dear manage to go on living day by day.

As the many millions of people who live in great poverty show, it is possible to survive on very little. The trick seems to be to keep our expectations in line with what’s on offer. ‘What’s on offer’ is not just a matter of physical survival. It is also a matter of what’s on offer that will maintain our sense of identity/our life story. It is easier to survive on very little if you live in a community where you have a place and where the other members of the community treat you with respect. Poverty is much harder to bear when you are utterly alone.

Does your environment allow you to be yourself and do other people see you as you see yourself? Whenever your answer to that question is ‘No’ primitive pride comes to the rescue. It might perform a reconstruing of your life story, perhaps, ‘Even though other people spurn me, God loves me and will reward me for my virtue,’ or it might say, ‘If I cannot live my life as I am I shall die my death as I am.’ Where primitive pride is concerned, the meaning structure must survive even if that means letting the body die.

Primitive pride, like all the mechanisms which keep us functioning, will at some time come to an end because no living thing lives for ever. In the face of overwhelming disease, injury or simply old age, the mechanisms which keep us breathing and thinking close down. They come to an end and we die. Sometimes primitive pride closes down first, and with that a reasonably healthy body dies. This is a common phenomenon in hospitals dealing with an ageing population. A patient whose physical condition could have supported many months of life simply, as it is usually described, ‘loses the will to live’, and dies. As we get old some parts of our meaning structure change and adapt to the inevitability of death. We might not want to die this very minute or even next month or next year, but the inevitability of death brings some unexpected comforts. Whenever I read about the extreme changes of climate predicted for the middle of the next century I think, ‘Well, I don’t have to worry about that.’ ‘Losing the will to live’ might be the meaning structure becoming one simple idea: ‘It’s time to go.’

This is not what happens to those people who find that the terrible disaster they have suffered completely confounds their expectations of what life was about. If they cannot construct another set of meanings, if primitive pride cannot overcome such an assault on their meaning structure, they cannot survive. Nearly fifty years after the Second World War the psychologist Aaron Hass interviewed some of the survivors of the concentration camps.

Jack Diamond was forced to watch as his brother was hanged in Auschwitz. He told me what it was like to be a teenager in that universe. ‘In the camps you became an adult overnight … I was like a general planning for a war … not to be noticed … The intellectuals were the first to die … They thought about it all. How could humanity do this? Who wants to live in a world like this?… I just put my head down and didn’t ask the larger questions. I think it was easier being an adolescent, because I wasn’t mature enough to ask the larger questions. My father, he died spiritually before he died physically. He kept asking, ‘Where is God? How is this possible?’ I got frightened, I got scared, but I wasn’t internally destroyed. So many adults lost their will to survive … Sometimes I created an invisible wall shutting out what was happening … as if it wasn’t happening. My father did see everything that was going on around and it destroyed him.’³⁸

Losing the will to live, that is, primitive pride closing down, results in death. Suicide is unnecessary. In fact, suicide is primitive pride asserting itself. Whenever we contemplate, and perhaps carry out our suicide, it is primitive pride deciding that there is a conflict between the body’s need for survival and the meaning structure’s need for survival. In such a conflict the body has to go. It has to be killed.

The actress Kathryn Hunter, in an interview with Lyn Gardner, spoke of this. ‘When she was twenty-one and in her final year at RADA, locked in an unhappy relationship from which she could see no escape, and in a trough of depression so deep that “I could hardly be bothered to kill myself”, Hunter leapt from a window.’ She didn’t die, but her injuries left her with long-term difficulties, the overcoming of which made her reputation as a fine actress all the greater. She said of her suicide attempt, ‘“The fall was just something that happened. A long time ago. A stupidity. The action of a child who discovered that things were not as she wished.”’³⁹

Primitive pride demands that reality conform to its wishes. Through time and experience we might gain the wisdom to know that reality is indifferent to our wishes and that this is not to be deplored but seen as something that makes life interesting. If we could make everything predictable how dull life would be.

Most of us, as children, develop that set of ideas which is commonly called a conscience, and out of that set of ideas comes a pride of which we are always conscious. This is moral pride which, like primitive pride, endeavours to protect the integrity of the meaning structure, but which, unlike primitive pride, takes some account of what is actually going on. Moral pride is concerned with avoiding shame and guilt which always threaten the meaning structure, and with maintaining the ideas we have about how we ought to live our lives. Whenever we say, ‘My conscience will not allow me to do this,’ moral pride is operating.

However, despite the fact that moral pride does take some account of what is going on, we can still set ourselves some rules which will lead us into danger. If we insist that our beliefs about the purpose of life and the nature of death – that is, our religious and philosophical beliefs – are absolute truths then our meaning structure is threatened every time we meet someone who holds beliefs different from ours. If we take pride in the way we are unchanging in all our beliefs and opinions, a significant discrepancy between what we thought our life was and what it actually is will sooner or later appear and threaten our meaning structure.

Refusing to change our views is always a sign of weakness. To be able to let our views evolve along with our experience, to be able to reflect upon events and consciously choose a wise interpretation, to be able to say, ‘Yes, I was wrong,’ or, ‘I used to think such and such but now I think so and so,’ we need to feel that, even as we modify our views, our sense of identity has a basic strength which is able to withstand the assaults made upon it by unexpected events and by other people. It is a tensile strength which flexes but does not break. This strength comes with overcoming our fear of the world and of other people. If we see the world as a frightening place and most other people as enemies we never feel strong because we see the world and its inhabitants as being stronger than us. We feel that we are in constant danger of being overwhelmed. We can become inflexible, and pretend to ourselves that refusing to change your mind is a sign of strength. Alas, inflexible structures, be they buildings or meaning structures, are always in danger of breaking. Buildings are always assaulted by wind and rain, and meaning structures are always assaulted by other people.

Even when other people are most benignly disposed towards us they are always a threat to our meaning structure because they are a constant reminder of how our way of seeing things is not the only way. Moreover, other people have the ability to deprive us of our greatest protection, our pride.

Primitive pride is a form of thought with which we are born and takes no account of other people or of what is actually happening. It is concerned only with our survival. It can fit comfortably with the form of the story because it is adept at creating a life story where we are justified in everything we do.

The form of the face can be a challenge to primitive pride. The face is the face of others, and all these faces have eyes which look at us. Are these accepting, friendly eyes or do these eyes say something else?

Primitive pride can override the form of the face, especially in those people who, as babies, formed no secure bond with one mothering person. Such people create life stories which absolve them of all responsibility for what they do, but their stories, like the story of Dr Münch, provoke in other people the response, ‘Have you no shame!’

Shame precedes a sense of guilt. Guilt requires a sense of time – past actions and future punishment. Small children who have yet to develop notions of yesterday and tomorrow do not have a sense of guilt, but they do have a very profound sense of shame. They can be held in the gaze of another person and feel exposed and vulnerable. Daniel Stern wrote,

Babies act as if eyes were indeed windows to the soul. After seven weeks of age, they treat the eyes as the geographic centre of the face and the psychological centre of the person. When you play peek-a-boo with a baby, she quickly shows some anticipatory pleasure as you lower the blanket to reveal your hair and forehead. But only when the baby sees your eyes does she explode with delight. Six-year-olds illustrate this psychological centrality of the eyes in a different way. When a six-year-old covers her eyes with her hands, and you ask her, ‘Can I see you?’ she will answer, ‘No!’ Although we used to think that the child could not imagine you could see her if she couldn’t see you, that is not the problem. She is perfectly aware that you can see not only her but even her hands covering her eyes. What she really means by ‘No’ is, ‘If you can’t see my eyes you don’t see me.’ Seeing her means looking into her eyes.⁴⁰

Shame evolves out of the form of the face, and so becomes part of the meaning structure at an early stage in its development. Small children suffer many experiences of shame as they go through the difficult process of learning to be clean. We do not forget these experiences of shame, and later our enemies can use them against us to destroy us.

In Yugoslavia under Tito nationality was no barrier to marriage and there were many intermarriages between Serbs, Muslims and Croats. But once they came to power Serbian Nationalists were affronted by these mixed marriages because they showed that people of different nationalities could live happily together. Serbian Nationalists developed a policy of getting rid of mixed marriages, that of, as Diyana said, ‘Either kill them or send them out of the country. It was easy to get a visa for Australia or America because the Nationalists wanted to get rid of you.’

Diyana was a Serb married to a Muslim and lived in Sarajevo. After eight months of enduring the siege, Diyana and her small daughter Sarah were able to join a busload of women and children leaving the city. They suffered many horrors along the way. Eventually the bus arrived in Split in Croatia. Diyana, like many of the other women refugees, had friends in Split who would have given her and her child shelter but this was not allowed. She told me, ‘One of my husband’s relatives came and paid a policeman to let me out with the child but he couldn’t do anything. I think it was political. If we get out, we will stay in Croatia and they don’t want refugees in Croatia. And that was the first time I was humiliated as a refugee.’

She went on, ‘There were about a thousand women and a lot of children who had travelled days to get there in buses, without water, without food. The authorities locked us in a new swimming pool complex and let us sleep on the floor. And round the swimming pool were tiles.’

A new swimming pool complex would undoubtedly contain showers, toilets and ample water. The Croatian authorities refused to let these Serbian and Muslim women use them. Diyana said, ‘They allowed us four toilets, with a small handbasin to wash hands, and by the time I got to the toilets there was no water and the toilets were very dirty. We were locked in. We couldn’t get out. We couldn’t get to a pharmacy to buy the things we needed. My daughter had already got gastroenteritis. I developed the most terrible thrush. I’d never experienced such an uncomfortable feeling, and I couldn’t do anything about it. It was purely stress, caused by stress, and I couldn’t do anything. I didn’t have water to wash myself and I was ashamed. I was clean in Sarajevo. You hear stories about humiliation, when you are not allowed to wash yourselves, you are not allowed to change yourself. You soon realize that you stink. Your hands are dirty, you don’t have anything to wash them. And it’s a humiliation for me, and I don’t want to remember. I don’t want to think about that, because I always remember those terrible two days.’

Shame is very threatening to our meaning structure because we are held in the eyes of other people and are seen. For our meaning structure to stay whole it needs privacy. Pride, both primitive pride and moral pride, erects barriers so that people cannot peer in, and the barriers become the ways we want to present ourselves to the world. But we are always conscious of the danger of being exposed to shame, no matter how excellent our credentials that we present to the world.

I saw an example of this outside Waterloo International Terminal when I had arrived from Paris on the Eurostar. I hurried to join the queue for taxis. Within seconds there were twenty people behind me in the queue. Immediately ahead of me was a tall, well-dressed man who turned round and, over my head, called his two colleagues further back in the queue to join him. They were also tall and well dressed and the three of them immediately fell into conversation. They were Americans of power and influence either in business or government.

I spoke up, distinctly and sternly. I said, ‘I trust that you are all going in the same direction and in the same taxi.’

They looked round at me. One nodded, the others said, ‘Er, yes,’ and they turned away. I had interrupted a busy conversation but now they fell silent. I thought that was because they were surprised at being reprimanded by a little old lady, but this was not so. It was the silence of shame. They had lied, and within minutes their lie would be revealed.

The queue was at right angles to the line of taxis so I had a clear view of what happened. Our queue shuffled forward as taxis arrived, loaded and departed until the two groups of travellers immediately ahead of the Americans claimed the next two taxis to arrive. As these people were loading their bags the three Americans, keeping close together, walked some ten yards away from me to the next empty taxi. The three of them appeared to be conferring with the driver and then getting into the taxi, but then one of them sneaked away and took the next empty taxi.

I watched and made sure they could see me watching. As his taxi moved past me the one whose lie was now manifest kept his head turned away as if he were deeply interested in the wall on the other side of the road.

No doubt the three of them could deal with their shame by assuring themselves they had only slightly inconvenienced me and the other waiting passengers. There was a long line of empty taxis coming to pick us up. I was amused at their behaviour, and relieved. If they had shown no shame I would have been furious at being outwitted. I was pleased they had shown some shame because in their positions of power and influence their ability to feel shame would help keep them honest. I once worked with a consultant psychiatrist who never felt shame. He would lie in front of people who, he knew, knew that he was lying. His lack of shame frightened and confused those who did have the power to challenge and rebuke him, and so, never being called to account, he could continue to improve his own position while bringing havoc into the lives of others.

Shame might be dangerous to our meaning structure, but it is one of the means by which we can establish and maintain good relationships with other people. We have to take other people’s interests into account. But shame is not just a matter of being seen by others. It is also a matter of being seen by ourselves. We can become the viewer and stand naked in our own eyes. In this situation the threat to our meaning structure can be immense and so, knowing this, we can deny ourselves much in order not to be shamed in our own eyes. We can do this in extreme conditions, as Primo Levi recalled:

I entered the Lager as a non-believer, and as a non-believer I was liberated and have lived to this day; actually, the experience of the Lager with its frightful iniquity has confirmed me in my laity. It has prevented me, and still prevents me, from conceiving of any form of providence or transcendent justice. Why were the moribund packed in cattle cars? Why were children sent to the gas? I must nevertheless admit that I experienced (and again only once) the temptation to yield, to seek refuge in prayer. This happened in the October of 1944, in the one moment in which I lucidly perceived the imminence of death. Naked and compressed among my naked companions with my personal index card in my hand, I was waiting to file past the ‘commission’ that with one glance would decide whether I should go immediately to the gas chamber or was instead strong enough to go on working. For one instant I felt the need to ask for help and asylum; then, despite my anguish, equanimity prevailed: you do not change the rules of the game at the end of the match, nor when you are losing. A prayer under these conditions would have been not only absurd (what rights could I claim? And from whom?) but blasphemous, obscene, laden with the greatest impiety of which a non-believer is capable. I rejected that temptation: I knew that otherwise were I to survive, I would have to be ashamed of it.⁴¹

When we act as the other and shame ourselves we become a threat to our own meaning structure. We know what matters most to us, and when we want to criticize ourselves we know what to say to throw the whole meaning structure into doubt. I like to pride myself on being intelligent and well organized. When I took the wrong set of keys and locked myself out of my house my immediate reaction was to say to myself, ‘How can you be so stupid?’ This is the same phrase I often hurl at the television screen or a newspaper as yet another story of the blind stupidity of those in power or who want to be in power unfolds. This is but one small example of how, although our physiology condemns us to the isolation of our own meaning structure, other people are always part of us.