Читать книгу Beyond Fear - Paula Nicolson, Dorothy Rowe, Dorothy Rowe - Страница 18

Newborn babies are noisy and spontaneous. What they feel they feel totally. A happy baby is happy from top to toe. A hungry baby is possessed by hunger pangs and greed. An angry baby feels total and absolute anger, unrestrained by guilt or the fear of hurting others. A baby’s feelings are fully felt and fully experienced, and the baby acts with complete unselfconscious self-confidence. Yet by the time the babies become toddlers, gone is the birthright of being simply themselves. Now self-conscious, toddlers have learned how to deny their thoughts and feelings and thus who they are. All babies must enter into a relationship with their mother in order to survive both physically and as a person, yet it is through this and other relationships that babies learn how to deny themselves and their feelings.

As babies enter into their relationship with their mother they become increasingly aware of their mother’s feelings. A baby does not understand causal connections - that exploring the texture of the mother’s face by pinching her cheeks causes her pain - but he is sensitive to her moods. Her joy or anger or fear are part of her baby’s experience.

This experience of emotions and the means by which they are expressed, in smiles and frowns, cries and words, touches and cuddles, creates and maintains the relationship that joins the baby to the human race and to life.

Babies have been around for as long as human beings have been, yet it is only in the last forty years or so that they have been systematically studied. What is clear now is that babies come into the world primed to make relationships with other people. In the womb they learn to recognize their mother’s voice, and, perhaps, their father’s voice. When they open their eyes and see the world, what they look for is a face. A photographic study by Lynne Murray and Liz Andrews¹ shows little Ethan being born. One minute later he is comfortable and relaxed as he is held by his mother, Julie. He opens his eyes and looks directly at her. He watches her intently, his eyes scanning the details of her face. As Julie talks to him, his face becomes more mobile and expressive. A few minutes later Ethan is handed to his father, John. He gazes intently at his father and is totally absorbed. Then John slowly and clearly protrudes his tongue, and Ethan attends closely. He appears to be concentrating completely on his mouth as he frowns and shuts his eyes, then he looks back at John and protrudes his own tongue. He is fifteen minutes old.

These photographs show that not only is a newborn baby immediately and deeply interested in faces, and able to imitate the movement of another face, but that the emotions he expresses are not random but arise directly and meaningfully out of his experience. When the midwife interrupted Ethan’s first examination of his mother’s face he complained vociferously, and was not satisfied until he was back looking at his mother.

At birth babies know that a happy tone of voice goes with a smile. At nine months they can tell the difference between expressions of happiness, sadness and anger, and understand something about the emotions that produce these expressions. At eighteen months they know that other people see things differently from them. By two they have that deep knowledge of other people which we call empathy.²

Just as we were born with the ability to breathe, so we were born with the ability to experience our emotions fully and to be aware of other people’s emotions. Small children might not be able to put an accurate name to what another person is feeling, nor to understand why the person is experiencing a particular emotion, but they can see and feel what the other person is feeling. One of the most moving photographs to have emerged from the conflict in Kosovo in 1998 was one taken by Andrew Testa. In this a young woman refugee is sitting on the ground in a state of complete despair. We can see from her clothes - leather jacket, jeans, jewellery - that she has been dispossessed of a reasonably comfortable life (no Albanian had a completely comfortable life in Kosovo under the rule of President Milosevic). Her daughter, four or five years old, is squatting in front of her, her head on one side, her hands held out at body width and curved facing each other in that gesture we all use when we want to indicate compassion for the other person. We can see that the little girl is talking to her mother and we know that she is saying, ‘There, there, Mummy. Don’t cry. We’ll be all right.’

The little girl’s gesture of empathy shows that as well as her own suffering she can also feel the suffering of her mother. Empathy enables us to leave our own limited world and enter, through our imagination, the world of other people. Thus we are able to have the closest and strongest relationship with others and to expand our own world, not just in knowledge and understanding, but in developing what is best in human beings - tolerance, kindness, generosity, love. However, empathy comes at a price.

Empathy may enable us to establish and maintain good relationships with other people, but it also means that we can more than double our own suffering when we have an empathic knowledge of another person’s suffering. We feel the pain of pity, and this is often multiplied by feelings of helplessness when there is nothing we can do to reduce the other person’s suffering. In order to protect ourselves from the pain of pity, many of us refuse to empathize with those who suffer. We call people fleeing terrible conditions in their homeland ‘bogus migrants’. We turn off the television news when pictures of war or starvation appear. We blame the victims of injustice as being the authors of their own suffering, and we claim that people of another race, religion or nationality are not fully human and therefore do not feel pain as we do. If this becomes our preferred way of dealing with the suffering of others we seriously diminish ourselves, becoming a lesser person than we might have been.

Human beings are not merely conscious. We are self-conscious - that is, we can, as it were, stand outside ourselves and look at ourselves. We judge ourselves. We have feelings about ourselves, and these feelings can include empathy.

Empathy is a blend of identifying with, feeling sympathy for and understanding of which we can direct not just at other people but also at ourselves. Empathy with oneself is not self-pity. Self-pity reflects the theme ‘Why me? It’s not fair’, and this complaint is based on the idea that life ought to be fair. The underlying theme of empathy with oneself is simply ‘This is’. To be able to empathize with ourselves we need to accept and value ourselves, not because we measure up to some standard which we have set ourselves but simply because we exist. When we reject and hate ourselves we have no empathy with ourselves.

However, even if we do value and accept ourselves, we can refuse to empathize with ourselves. When we suffer either physical or mental pain we can reduce our conscious awareness of the pain by refusing to empathize with ourselves. We can split ourselves into two pieces - the piece that observes and the piece that suffers. We can do this, say, to reduce the pain and horror of having a tooth pulled or of being raped. As a short-term defence this can be a very effective means of surviving as a person, but if we do not reconnect ourselves when the period of suffering is over we do ourselves enormous damage. Split in two, we cannot feel whole and acceptable, and in denying our own pain we become oblivious to the pain others feel. Thus a boy who is frequently beaten by his father can, very sensibly, deal with the pain of the beating by detaching himself from it and telling himself that he feels nothing. However, if this becomes his habitual way of dealing with pain, he grows up to be a man who inflicts pain on others and feels that he does no wrong.

To empathize with ourselves and with others we have to be able to feel our feelings fully and to name our feelings truthfully. Feelings or emotions are meanings. They are our interpretations of a situation. People often talk about emotions as if they are completely separate from thoughts, but this is not how we experience emotions. We see something happen and we feel an emotion, but what we feel is our interpretation of what is happening in relation to ourselves. For instance, you hear a very loud sound. You interpret this as, ‘That’s a bomb. I’m in danger. I’m frightened.’ The first two interpretations are thoughts, the third is a feeling.

The bit of our brain that emotions relate to develops earlier than our cortex which relates to language, and so the meanings we call emotions are not initially expressed as words. However, these wordless interpretations can be turned into words. The meanings we create initially in words can be about things unconnected to us, but the meanings we call emotions are always connected to us. They are meanings about the safety of and danger to our meaning structure. When something happens which confirms or validates our ideas, we feel safe. These are feelings which can range from mild satisfaction to intense joy and happiness. These meanings/feelings are versions of the meaning, ‘I’ve got it right! It’s just how I want it to be! How wonderful!’ When something happens which disconfirms or invalidates our ideas we feel in danger. These are feelings which can range from mild anxiety through fear to terror, and they can be quite complex interpretations. The meanings of safety of and danger to our meaning structure are often referred to as positive and negative emotions. Positive emotions are meanings about being validated as a person (e.g., happy, content, satisfied) and negative emotions are meanings about being invalidated as a person (e.g., fear, anger, shame, guilt, hate, envy, jealousy and so on). We interpret being invalidated in a multitude of ways. Pride plays an important part in our emotions, not just in the safety emotions but in the danger emotions which can act as defences. Anger is the meaning, ‘How dare this happen to me!’; envy, ‘He has something which I want’; jealousy, ‘He has something which is rightly mine.’ Hate springs to our defence when we feel weak and helpless, and revenge turns the defence of hate into what is traditionally seen as the best of defences, attack. The emotion of forgiveness is the meaning, ‘I am no longer in danger from those who injured me.’

Our emotions are statements of our own truth, but such truths can themselves seem to be dangerous to us. Introverts can find that the truth ‘I am afraid’ threatens chaos, while extraverts can find that the truth ‘I am angry’ threatens to sever relationships. Hence introverts favour the defence of isolation where they separate their feelings from their awareness of a troubling event and tell themselves that they are calm, completely undisturbed by any emotion. Extraverts favour the defence of repression whereby they separate their awareness of a troubling event from the emotion it arouses and then forget that the event has occurred. They remain aware of their feelings but explain them as arising from some other event or as being an inexplicable emotion. If these feelings are of anger they are likely to tell themselves that they are not angry but frightened. They dare not risk being angry lest those who angered them reject them.

The dangers of employing either the defence of isolation or the defence of repression are well recognized in psychotherapeutic circles, but the capacity to feel our feelings fully and to name them truthfully has in recent years been burdened with two pieces of popular jargon, namely ‘emotional literacy’ and ‘emotional intelligence’. The term ‘emotional literacy’³ quite rightly draws attention to our need to recognize and name emotions truthfully. The term ‘emotional intelligence’⁴ suggests that there is some kind of intelligence to do with the emotions which is the equivalent of intellectual intelligence, and thus, like intellectual intelligence, has some inherited component. Some people might seize on this to excuse their own lack of interest in trying to understand themselves and other people. Recognizing and naming our emotions is a learned, not an inherited, skill, a skill which we can constantly improve by being honest with ourselves and by observing other people closely.

Babies, like all the newborn of other species, are born with the ability to seek out the conditions necessary for their survival. Just as a hungry baby will search for something to suck for sustenance, so a lonely baby will search for someone to love, and will offer this love trustfully and hopefully to the person who offers in return care and protection. Mothers sometimes have difficulty in loving newborn babies, but we, as babies, have no difficulty in loving our mothers, and this hook remains in our hearts for ever, no matter what our mothers do to us. We may give up loving our mothers when our love is not returned, but we never give up wishing that we had had a mother who loved us as we wished to be loved. We can feel the same about our fathers. After a lecture in which I talked about friends and enemies, a man told me about how his father had always rejected him. As he did so his eyes were squinting in the way that eyes do when they are holding back tears. His father was ninety-four and he was in his sixties.

Babies are very good at being themselves, but this does not suit whatever society they have been born into. Every family has its own rules and expectations, and the baby has to learn to conform. Long before we had words to define it we were presented with the dilemma ‘Shall I be an individual or a member of a group?’ We knew, though we felt our knowledge only in our fear and anger and our sense of our existence, that we could not survive alone, yet it was equally dangerous to give up being ourselves. If we were lucky we had parents who understood this, treated us with respect and loved us for what we were, and not for what we might become - that is, the person our parents wanted us to be.

Before they are even born, babies start receiving messages from their parents. It is now well established that quite early in the foetal life babies distinguish sounds and prefer pleasant sounds to unpleasant sounds. In the womb babies are able to associate one event (say, a sound) with another event (say, a change of conditions in the womb), and use the occurrence of the first event to predict the second. Thus one baby may associate the sound of sweet music with the relaxation of the womb as the mother, having switched on her favourite soap opera, puts her feet up for a rest, while another may associate the sound of a man’s voice shouting obscenities with a disruption to the calm of the womb as the mother flinches away from a blow. Once born, the baby discovers a world of touch, light and smell. A newborn baby can easily identify the mother’s odour and prefer it to all other smells, and just as easily distinguish the firm but gentle touch of the confident, loving mother from the uncertain or sometimes painful touch of an unconfident, even rejecting, mother.

Parents give out many messages, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. The baby finds these messages to be very powerful because they are first-time events. He has little past experience to provide a contrast, and is as yet unable to translate these messages into words. Instead, the baby creates images of sound, vision, touch, taste, kinaesthesia and smell. These images become part of the baby’s meaning structure and, especially when they are reinforced by later events, can remain with the baby into adulthood, sometimes having powerful consequences.

In adult life many of us find that we can be troubled by vague anxieties or an apparently inexplicable dampening of our mood when we have no reason to feel unhappy. To work out why this happens it can be useful to bring into clear consciousness the image that accompanies these feelings. If you have kept or managed to regain the confidence you had as an artist when you were small you could paint a picture of the image. Or you could simply ask yourself, ‘If I could paint a picture of what I’m feeling now, what sort of picture would I paint?’, and then carefully inspect the picture in your mind’s eye to find what it means for you. Do not waste your time looking for meaning in terms of Freud’s dream symbols or Jung’s archetypes or tarot cards or the I Ching and the like. What is of supreme importance is what the image means to you.

As you look for what the image means for you, you are likely to see some connections which go further and further back into your childhood, even to babyhood. It can be helpful to talk to family members about events surrounding your birth and babyhood, though from what my clients have told me, it seems that there are many mothers who do not take kindly to any suggestion that they were anything less than perfect nurturers. It can be difficult to get across that you are not making enquiries in order to blame your mother for not being perfect but simply to establish what happened and, in particular, what your mother was feeling when you were a baby.

It is important to find out about your mother’s feelings so you can see whether your image arises out of what was going on inside you or out of your response to what was impinging on you from outside. Thus your image might relate to your intense feelings of hunger as your family, caught up in a war, were unable to feed you, or strong feelings of pain from an essential surgical procedure. Or it might relate to your awareness of your mother’s intense feelings, perhaps of anger, hostility, despair, depression, or, most frequently, anxiety. Many women who have since childhood been plagued by vague anxieties and nameless dread find a focus for their fear in their children. Achieving motherhood, they rapidly become experts in every doom or disaster, however remote, which might beset a child. They resist any attempt to apply logic and reason to their endless anxious monologue because, perhaps for the first time in their lives, they are able to take the fear from inside themselves and feel justified in projecting it on to their baby. This can be helpful for the mother but tough for the baby, who cannot distinguish what are his own burdens and what his mother has imposed on him.

However, babies thus burdened do grow up and become able to reflect upon themselves and their life. Images of hunger and pain allow us to meditate upon the implications of such hunger and pain - namely, the feelings of helplessness, of being abandoned, alone, of having no control, of losing the structure we know to be ourselves. Doing this, we are actually dealing with our present predicament, because these are the issues that often arise in our daily lives, and, in thinking about this, we become more knowledgeable and more courageous. Images of our mother’s feelings allow us to discover that her feelings belong to her, not to us. We can transfer the burden back where it belongs. When, in my forties, I discovered that my image, which I had come to see clearly and named ‘Old Death’s Head’, was of my mother’s state of depression and of her hostility to me, I could then say to myself, ‘That image is not an integral part of me’. With this discovery I not only felt lightened, I saw myself as infinitely more valuable and acceptable than I had thought myself to be.

Mothers and prospective mothers have often told me how frightened they become when they encounter me talking about how a mother can have such devastating effects on her baby. I respond by assuring them that if, in truth, you love your baby and wish him well and do not seek to hide this from him, then he will recognize the abiding, secure current of your love and will survive the surface ripples that come with your ordinary human fallibility. Just as some babies carry into adulthood images which produce feelings of anxiety and despair, so other babies carry into adulthood images which give self-confidence and security, even when the reality of current events may suggest the opposite. There is nothing to match the self-confidence of an adult who, as a child, never had reason to doubt his parents’ love.

Bringing up children is not easy. There is no one right way to do it because so much depends on finding a desirable balance between opposites. For instance, you want your child to fit into a group, but not so well that he becomes a doormat for others to walk over, and, as much as you want your child to be an individual, you do not want him to be idiosyncratic to the point of eccentricity. You want your child to understand that to be assertive can be fine in many situations but that a person who is unremittingly selfish is not liked. Moreover, in teaching that some activity is a virtue you cannot help but imply the vice that accompanies it. If cleanliness is next to godliness, then dirtiness is next to evil.

Bringing up children can never be a simple matter of just feeding and clothing them and keeping a roof over their heads. Our physiology may determine that we each live in our own individual world, but to develop and survive as a person we need other people. Hence children have to learn to fit into society. Some are not actively ‘brought up’ but just left to grow, perhaps because their parents think this method of child-rearing removes the danger of harming the child by imposing rules and demands, or perhaps because they are too distracted or too selfish to do anything but leave the children to bring themselves up. Some children will thrive in a relaxed environment but others will not. Even when the parents impose no rules, the children create their own in order to develop a sort of regularity which gives security. An individual child is likely to develop rules, rituals and fantasies to create an idiosyncratic order, while in a group of children the oldest will take on the parenting role. Moreover, even when the parents think they are making no demands on the child, the latter can be busy interpreting certain of the parents’ words and gestures as implied instructions.

The child’s interpretations of the parent form the crux of the problem of bringing up children. You can read extensively in developmental psychology, study parenting skills and draw up a plan incorporating every best practice in parenting, or you can ignore the matter of being pregnant until the midwife puts your baby in your arms, but either way the person your baby becomes will be determined not by what you do but by how your child interprets what you do. The best you can hope for is that if you always try to behave towards your children with love, support, kindness and patience, and if you try to understand your child’s point of view and take it into account in making your decisions, there will be a good chance that your children will not lose the love they so readily had for you when they were born. There will even be a chance that your children will, on a few occasions, actually listen to what you have to say.

I have now seen grow to adulthood a number of babies born to various friends of mine who have always striven to bring their children up with love, support, kindness, patience and an understanding of their children’s point of view. Each of these young adults is now a basically happy individual with genuine self-confidence and not merely that adolescent cockiness which hides deep uncertainty. They get on well with their parents and other people. However, I still see around me parents whose child-rearing practices may be different from those of their grandparents but who suffer the same fraught outcomes. One way or another, many children still find themselves in situations where their sense of being a person is under threat, and so they have to develop many defences in order to keep themselves safe.

A baby’s sense of being a person - that is, the baby’s meaning structure - develops while he is still in the womb. Different experiences lead to neural connections, the physiological substrate of the meaning structure in the brain, being set up. Once the baby is born, his meaning structure grows and is modified with every experience, and out of the substructure of neural connections consciousness evolves. Out of consciousness comes self-consciousness. Just how and when these changes take place is not understood, but current knowledge suggests that consciousness develops slowly, coming on, as the scientist Susan Greenfield once remarked, like a light turned on with a dimmer switch.

Even though a baby may not be experiencing fully what we call consciousness, he can from his past experience create expectations. When these expectations are fulfilled (e.g., a baby’s version of ‘There’s the music. Now I’m going to feel more comfortable’) that part of his meaning structure is strengthened, but when these expectations are not fulfilled his meaning structure is threatened. A baby cries not just from hunger but from the fear created when the expectation that the discomfort of being hungry will be assuaged is not fulfilled. Learning to become a member of society is a process of having expectations not fulfilled and of finding ways of coping with such threats to the meaning structure.

To enter into the life of their family and thus into society, a baby has to acquire the knowledge that in society there are limits to self-expression. These limits, the baby soon finds, apply particularly to defecation and micturation and everything to do with cleanliness, to greed, and to anger.

All families are clean. The world over, all families are clean. They each have high standards of what constitutes cleanliness. The trouble is there is no universal agreement as to what constitutes cleanliness. When India was part of the British Empire the fastidious English in India deplored what they saw as the lack of hygiene in Indian homes, while Indians, the Hindus especially, deplored the disgusting habit of the English of lying in their own bath water. Similarly, in one family, underclothes may be changed every day but there are no rules about teeth-cleaning, while the family next door changes underclothes less frequently but brushes their teeth without fail after every meal. If each family discovers the rules of the other family, then each regards the other as dirty, or at least as not following the proper rules of cleanliness. Dividing the world into categories of ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’ is something all human beings do. We just do not agree on what these categories should be, and each of us believes that our categories are right and everyone else’s are wrong.

A baby’s introduction to his family’s rules about cleanliness comes when he discovers that he is no longer allowed to relieve the pressure in his body when and where he pleases, but only at certain times and places as his family decrees. Some fortunate infants do not encounter these rules until the sphincter muscles are strong enough to hold back the pressure of urine and faeces. A baby does not acquire voluntary control over his sphincter muscles until he is about three years old. If the rules of the family are imposed at a time when the infant has a good chance of complying with the rules successfully, he can enjoy the great pleasure of basking in his family’s praise and approval. However, in our society there are still a great many babies who are sat on pots and ordered to perform long before they can possibly understand what is expected of them, much less carry it out. Even more are there babies whose performance of their natural functions is treated by the adults around them with disgust and rejection. Many parents whose own toilet training left them feeling great disgust for their own excreta find that they cannot cope with their baby’s. Other parents, who have followed a plan of patience and praise in toilet-training their babies, suddenly become extremely anxious when their three-year-old is in danger of failing to gain admittance to a nursery which will not take an untoilet-trained toddler.

There are sound reasons why the waste products of our body should be kept separate from other objects in our environment. Such waste products can contain elements and processes which can bring about illness and death. But our reactions to these substances are more than a sensible response to possible physical danger. There is another danger there, something so terrible that we cannot utter its name. Fire is dangerous, but we still just call it ‘fire’. Whereas these waste products are never spoken of directly by well-brought-up people. All kinds of circumlocutions are used. However, if one wishes to be extremely vulgar or express great disgust and rejection, then there are a multitude of words and phrases referring to these products which can be used. ‘Shit’ means much more than ‘faeces’.

Every infant has to learn far more than the practical procedures for the disposal of one’s faeces and urine. All the magical and fantastical meanings which the members of the infant’s family hold have to be learned and reacted to. There are meanings which relate to the sense of having within oneself something bad and contaminating which has to be expelled. These meanings link with a sense of being disgusted with oneself when one is the object of other people’s disgust. A mother may not express disgust and rejection as she bathes her smelly baby and dresses him in clean clothes, but the contrast with dirt and disgust is implied as she says, ‘Don’t you feel better now? Aren’t you a lovely clean baby?’

There are meanings which relate to the sense of having within oneself something which is powerful and destructive which can be used against other people or retained so that other people are not injured or such power is not lost. Infants soon discover how to take revenge on a parent by interrupting the parent’s meal and demanding to be put on the pot. However, revenge against parents can be dangerous because they are giants who hold all the power.

There are meanings which relate to the need for privacy and the danger of intrusions on this privacy. Such intrusions may be in terms of being the butt of other people’s humour, as when others laugh at our discomfiture when we are discovered emptying our bowels and bladder, or in terms of other people’s curiosity, as when others want to inspect what we produce and to assist in its production with enemas and emetics. Such intrusions can take on a sexual quality, so that the anus can become partly or even wholly the location of the person’s sexual feeling and interest. It is no wonder that so many of us are incapable of letting our body perform its functions of digestion and elimination but are forever caught in a painful oscillation between diarrhoea and constipation.

For many of us simple cleanliness is a source of fear. We have to defend ourselves against this fear. Dirt we see as danger. We divide our world into the categories of clean and dirty, categories which become fixed and impenetrable. We learn our society’s methods of dealing with dirt and establishing cleanliness, and we adapt these methods to create our own rules which seem to us unbreakable, absolute laws of the universe. Every one of us operates with such a set of laws.

Often our rules go beyond their function of ordering the universe and become rituals, regular patterns of behaviour which have a magical quality. To protect our meaning structure, primitive pride, with its lack of interest in reality and reason, can easily suggest rituals which we deem capable of influencing our good fortune and keeping death at bay. The obsessions and compulsions of someone considered to have obsessive-compulsive disorder are not symptoms which present themselves at the onset of disease but are simply an extension of the rules, rituals and ideas which the individual has long held.

Our notions about dirt and cleanliness do not form one distinct part of our meaning structure, separate from all other parts. Rather, these notions connect to other ideas, and are reinforced by other ideas. Many of us have abandoned the idea that a dirty person is necessarily a wicked person, but most of us see clean as beautiful. Then we can call cleanliness purity. Robyn Davidson wrote:

A couple of years before [my journey in the desert] someone had asked me a question: ‘What is the substance of the world in which you live?’ As it happened, I had not slept or eaten for three or four days and it struck me at the time as a very profound question. It took me an hour to answer, and when I did, my answer seemed to come directly from the subconscious: ‘Desert, purity, fire, air, hot wind, space, sun, desert desert desert.’ It had surprised me, I had no idea those symbols had been working so strongly within me.⁵

Purity can also mean the absence of excess, and this was certainly the way Robyn saw it. Her camel journey across the Western Australian desert was one of shedding burdens both literally and metaphorically. However, even before this journey she had learnt in childhood that she must not be greedy.

A healthy baby is born greedy, and so it needs to be, for only greedy babies will suck. Without greed a baby would not survive. Being greedy, a baby wishes to feed when hungry and sleep when satisfied. Some lucky babies are allowed to do so. But many are not. Many millions of babies have mothers who are too poorly fed themselves to be able to feed their babies whenever they are hungry. Such babies have to make do with what is offered to them and, if they survive, they may be haunted for the rest of their lives by images of hunger and greed. These images may be immensely powerful. I have never been in danger of starving, but images of hunger have been handed down to me by earlier generations of my family. My father, who, as a soldier in France in the First World War, had often gone hungry, would at home consume scraps of food and stale crusts of bread rather than have the food thrown away. Messages about hunger came to me from other family members who had gone hungry in the bush when food was scarce, or had been told by their relatives about the famines that beset the poor in Ireland and Scotland. Living alone in London now, I buy less food than I might consume and can easily afford because I cannot bear food to be wasted. My father would be proud of me.

In affluent countries where no baby need go hungry, many do because their mothers, intent on being ‘good mothers’ obeying the dicta of their own mothers or the child-rearing ‘experts’, feed their babies according to schedules which relate to the adults’ needs rather than the child’s. Being hungry and being left to cry until the clock reaches a certain hour were for many of us our first lesson in learning that we were of little importance in the scheme of things. We learned that saying ‘I want’ is greedy, and being greedy is bad. Whenever we feel a desire that we cannot fulfil and perhaps cannot even articulate, and we see other people enjoying the fulfilment of this desire, we feel envy. Envy is a natural response, and a common one, because we can always imagine more than we can ever do or own, and if it is acknowledged and accepted it can become part of the motivation which urges us on to greater things.

However, if we feel envious and cannot do anything about it, if we feel helpless and frustrated, and the frustration goes on and on, then our envy becomes mixed with rage and a fierce desire to destroy both what we want and the person who has what we want. Babies are helpless, and, when their desires are not met, they can feel a destructive rage which they express not just in crying and flailing limbs but also in biting the breast which is offering to feed them. Some mothers, pitying their baby’s helplessness, accept their baby’s greed, envy, frustration and rage, and so patiently hold, soothe and feed their baby. But other mothers see this violent rage as evidence of the baby’s inherent evil. They become frightened of their baby and seek to drive the evil out with stronger rules and punishments. The baby must learn obedience. What he learns is that envy is always accompanied by fearful impotence and murderous rage. Such envy is common in our world, and usually underlies the destruction and terror which one group of people can inflict on another.

Children who are taught that greed is bad are also taught that envy is bad, and so they are condemned to a life of struggling with their impulses of greed and envy, either sacrificing themselves to others, never daring to ask for anything for themselves, or resorting to devious, dishonest ways of trying to gain more for themselves and to hinder and destroy the people they envy.

In families and in society anger is always a problem. It is our natural response to frustration, and without it we, a physically weak species compared to those which competed with us for food, would not have been able to use our intelligence to establish ourselves as a viable species. Anger can make us creative and brave, but we need to live in groups, and anger within the group is always a threat to its cohesion. In a family, when the father becomes angry, whether he beats his wife and children or merely retires to his room in icy silence, the other members of the family feel frightened. As they did when they were children, many adults devote their lives to doing nothing to make their mother or father angry. A baby being angry can frighten the parents because they fear that they will not be able to control this new member of the family. For such parents the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott wrote:

We all know what it is to lose our tempers and we all know how anger, when it is intense, sometimes seems to possess us so that we cannot for the time being control ourselves. Your baby knows about being all-out angry. However much you try, you will disappoint him at times, and he will cry in anger; according to my view you have one consolation - that angry crying means that he has some belief in you. He hopes he may change you. A baby who has lost belief does not get angry, he just stops wanting, or else he cries in a miserable, disillusioned way, or else he starts banging his head on the pillow, or on the wall or the floor, or else he exploits the various things he can do with his body.

It is a healthy thing for a baby to get to know the full extent of his rage. You see, he certainly will not feel harmless when he is angry. You know what he looks like. He screams and kicks and, if he is old enough, he stands up and shakes the bars of the cot. He bites and scratches, and he may spit and spew and make a mess. If he is really determined he can hold his breath and go blue in the face, and even have a fit. For a few minutes he really intends to destroy or at least to spoil everyone and everything, and he does not mind if he destroys himself in the process. Don’t you see that every time a baby goes through this process he gains something? If a baby cries in a state of rage and feels as if he has destroyed everyone and everything, and yet the people round him remain calm and unhurt, this experience greatly strengthens his ability to see that what he feels to be true is not necessarily real, that fantasy and fact, both important, are nevertheless different from one another. There is absolutely no need for you to try to make him angry, for the simple reason that there are plenty of ways in which you cannot help making him angry whether you like it or not.

Some people go about the world terrified of losing their tempers, afraid of what would have happened if they had experienced rage to the fullest extent when they were infants. For some reason or other this never got properly tested out. Perhaps their mothers were scared. By calm behaviour they might have given confidence, but they muddled things up by acting as if the angry baby was really dangerous.⁶

Donald Winnicott wrote this about forty years ago but his wise lesson has not been learned by many people. Over the past few years I have run a number of workshops on the topic of ‘Anger, Revenge and Forgiveness’. My idea for this workshop was that in the morning session we would discuss how this trinity was handled in our childhood families, and in the afternoon session our discussion would concern our present families, with the emphasis on looking for parallels and contrasts in each pair of families. So much for a great idea. In each workshop the participants, who came from a wide range of backgrounds, had so much they wanted to talk about in connection with the way anger was handled in their childhood family that little time was left for the remaining topics.

In all these workshops each of the participants fell into one of two groups with regard to their childhood experience. Either they had grown up in a family where anger was expressed with great emotion and noise, even violence, or they had grow up in a family where anger was never revealed directly. There were cold silences, sulking and icy withdrawals from family life. I asked all the participants whether their parents had even discussed with them, in the way they might have discussed with a child road safety or being unselfish, how anger ought to be handled. Not one participant said that their parents had done this. Indeed, the idea that anger could be a topic of discussion between parents and children was to some participants shocking in its novelty.

Anger is integral to the way we live. Events and people constantly frustrate us, and we respond to frustration with anger. How best to express that anger is always a problem. Anger is another aspect of our lives where we have to find a balance. An angry response can save us from death or injury, and can ward off the disconfirmation of our meaning structure. Anger is pride in action, warning us that we are in danger. When someone insults us our immediate response of ‘How dare you!’, whether said aloud or not, can do more for our self-confidence than any amount of positive self-talk. Yet our anger can put us in danger. Other people may respond with anger or reject us for our unacceptable behaviour. In dealing effectively with our own and other people’s anger we need to see it as something which is basically natural and valuable but which needs to be tended carefully, in the same way that fire is natural and valuable but needs to be handled with care.

My workshop participants showed very clearly that the two parental styles of dealing with anger had been a poor preparation for their future life. Both groups were frightened of anger. Those who had grown up in a family where anger was unrestrainedly expressed were frightened of anger because they saw it as unpredictable, dangerous and destructive. Those who had grown up in a family which pretended that they did not feel anger were frightened of anger because it was a silent, unpredictable, hidden danger. Being frightened of anger for whatever reason prevents a person from developing flexible and adaptive ways of dealing with it. Some people deny that they ever get angry, but they find themselves plagued with inexplicable fears and with headaches or stomach and bowel disorders. Other people are aware that they are angry but they are so frightened of their anger and feel so guilty about being angry that they cannot express their anger in any effective way. If we cannot deal sensibly with anger we have difficulty in all our relationships, and if we see anger as always being wicked and unworthy we condemn ourselves as being wicked instead of understanding how anger is a necessary defence which can hold us together when events and other people threaten to annihilate us as a person.

In the first three years of their life babies learn a great deal about those aspects of the world which are dangerous and about how they can defend themselves against these dangers, including how to deny their fear and how to deny those aspects of themselves which the people around them will not accept. Adults usually treat babies with some degree of tolerance, but when babies turn into toddlers and then into children, much of this tolerance is withdrawn. As children we discover that, whatever childhood is, it is not the happiest time of our lives.