Читать книгу Wisdom from the Couch - Jennifer Kunst - Страница 11

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YOU’VE PROBABLY HEARD IT SAID that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. By that definition, we are all sometimes, if not often, insane. Otherwise, how could it be that perfectly intelligent people do such obviously counterproductive things? Why would we do the things we know we shouldn’t do, and why would we not do the things we know we should do? Or, to paraphrase social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, why are we so stupid?

The fact of the matter is that we are not really insane. And we’re not really stupid. We are human. And human thinking isn’t always logical. Our minds are not programmed computers running robotic lives, making decisions in a mathematical way. No, we have human minds that are much more complex than that. Such complexity makes us capable of tremendous creativity and productivity, but it also makes us capable of some serious distortion. We do not see things simply as they are. Our perceptions are altered by our personal psychology—by our emotions, our expectations, our needs, and our desires. As the French philosopher Henri Bergson put it, “The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.” Our personal filters factor in: Who we are changes what we see.

This is why so much of ordinary life is a mystery to us. This is why, despite our best efforts, we often grow up to repeat the mistakes of our parents. Why a second marriage often winds up just like the first. Why New Year’s resolutions rarely lead to meaningful change. Why diets usually don’t work and sometimes even make us fatter. In short, this is why we tend to make the same mistakes over and over again, never seeming to learn.

So much of what motivates us and concerns us, holds us back, and pushes us forward lies beneath the surface of consciousness.

There are many ways to explain this phenomenon, but I wish to put forth the psychoanalytic explanation that the unconscious mind is at the heart of the matter. What lies beneath the surface tells the tale.

To use Sigmund Freud’s metaphor, the mind is like a glacier. So much of what motivates us and concerns us, holds us back, and pushes us forward lies beneath the surface of consciousness. In everyday life, we do our best to work with what we consciously know—the tip of the iceberg. But because we work at such a surface level, we don’t take into account the powerful forces that lie beneath.

There is a story told in the Bible about Jesus giving some advice to his disciples. A couple of his guys were out fishing. They were professional fishermen, so they knew what they were doing. They had spent the whole night casting their nets into the sea. They used all of their usually effective techniques, calling upon all the tricks of their trade. But even with their best efforts, on this particular night they didn’t catch a thing. Just as they were ready to throw in the towel and head home, Jesus came along and said to Peter, the lead fisherman, “Push out into the deep water and cast your nets there” (Luke 5:4). I’m sure Peter thought to himself, “Yeah, right. I’m going to take fishing advice from a carpenter’s son!” But, reluctantly—and perhaps with a bit of faith—he cast his nets into the deep water. And it turns out that’s where all the fish were.

I tell you this story because it shows how essential it is to do two things if you want to get out of your insanity and find your way into a different reality. First, you have to change your technique. And second, you have to go deep.

One of the limitations of contemporary psychology is that so many of the approaches tend to be too shallow. Many types of psychotherapy—helpful as they are—address only the surface of psychological life. Successful treatment outcomes are defined by a reduction in symptoms. Insurance companies want to see quick results, and we do, too. We are seduced by the allure of seven-steps-to-happiness and feel-better-in-ten-sessions-or-less.

But such techniques do not lead to real, lasting change.

Years ago when Shaquille O’Neal was at the height of his basketball career as the center for the Los Angeles Lakers, he spent a great deal of time at the free throw line because he was intentionally fouled so much. Free throws were his weakness, and the other teams knew it. It was a bit painful to watch this enormous and enormously talented athlete shoot the ball so flat from the free throw line, missing shot after shot after shot. I’ll never forget when local legend and sportscaster Chick Hearn analyzed the situation. He said that Shaq could not be faulted for failing to practice; in fact, he practiced his foul shot for hours, each and every day. Chick Hearn commented that the problem was that he kept practicing the same shot. No matter how much you practice, he said, you can’t change if you have a flawed technique.

Just like Shaq, we need a fundamental and deep transformation. Doing the same thing over and over again won’t lead to a different outcome. A surface adjustment isn’t going to cut it. If we want to make deep changes, we have to go deep to make them. We have to get to the root of the problem, the heart of the insanity. We have to go below the tip of the iceberg. We need an approach that appreciates the powerful influence of the unconscious. The good news is that if we change at this deep level, the surface changes will follow.

Much of what I want to show you in these pages requires an open mind. The unconscious is difficult to grasp, both as a concept and in its real influence in our lives. It can’t be measured in a direct way. It isn’t particularly well suited for study in a laboratory. It is known only through inference. It is grasped only by deduction. It is like gravity. You can’t see it or touch it, but you know it is real because its effects are real.

So I say to you, the reader, what I say to my students and patients: I can’t prove anything about the unconscious to you. I can only show you what I see; it is up to you to decide if it makes sense and if it could be useful to you.

Understanding how the unconscious mind works requires careful study. We must look for patterns, trends, and repetitions so we can get the big picture. But the devil is also in the details, as they say—in the slip of the tongue, in the unintended revelation, and in the dream that haunts us at night. Understanding the unconscious mind requires imagination, intuition, and investigation. It is both science and art. We hear the unconscious not only in the words, but also in the music. We pay attention to what is there, but we also notice what is missing. We must play with ideas rather than be bound by them. We really have to think. We have to be open to the truth conveyed in the saying that there comes a time when the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge but it can never prove how it got there.

Every year, I teach a course on psychoanalytic theory and technique to graduate students in clinical psychology. In the first session, I try to engage the students in a lively way by asking them about how we know that there even is such a thing as the unconscious. Now, these are doctoral students trained in the ways of modern scientific psychology. They can be a bit constrained when it comes to imaginative thinking. But because this is an elective course they are not required to take, those who sign up often have some openness and curiosity about the deeper layers of the mind. So they are usually willing to play with the question and often come up with some pretty good answers.

The students’ first response often involves the idea that we know about the unconscious through dreams. I once thought that this was an easy, textbook kind of answer, but I have come to believe that it is actually a more fascinating response than it might seem at first glance. After all, one could say that dreams are meaningless brain activity, a necessary physiological process to clear out the mental junk from the day. But we intuitively know that there is more to dreams than can be measured on an EEG machine. Dreams are personal. Dreams mean something.

Take, for example, the dream of a man in his first week of psychoanalysis. I heard about this case many years ago from one of my professors who used it as an illustration in one of his classes. (Please be advised that clinical material from actual patients is used sparingly throughout this book. Confidentiality and privacy have been protected by changing or omitting identifying information.) The patient was a mental health professional in his forties who had wanted to have an analysis for many years and felt that he really needed some help. But for a variety of reasons—some circumstantial and some of a yet-to-be-discovered psychological nature—he hadn’t been able to bring himself to do it. He was very pleased to have the opportunity to begin therapy with my professor, a well-regarded female Kleinian analyst. The patient had studied Freud and Klein in school, so he felt he had an idea of what the process of analysis would be like and was eager to begin. In the second session, he shared the following dream:

It was late at night and I was in bed; my wife and two children were asleep. I heard some noise in the bathroom, so I got up and went to check it out. I looked out the bathroom window and there was a woman on the roof, trying to break into the house. She was dressed in black with a hood over her face. It was clear that she was going to try to rob the house. I was terrified that she was going to harm my family. I cannot remember ever feeling so angry in my life. I reached through the window and grabbed the woman around the neck. I pulled her in and wrestled her to the floor. I was kicking her so hard that I thought I might actually kill her. But at some point, I realized that she was not fighting back. She was telling me to stop. So I stepped back and pulled the hood off her face. I was shocked because the woman was a friend of mine from high school, a person I had liked but had not been particularly close to. Her name was Melanie.

Freud called dreams “the royal road to the unconscious,” and if there was ever a royal road, this is it. I am hoping that the meaning of the dream is fairly obvious to you. It is a good teaching dream, because the elements are pretty straightforward. Even as students ourselves, when we heard the dream for the first time, my classmates and I were able to grasp some of its meaning.

If we keep the context in mind—that this is the very first dream in the very first week of therapy—would it be too much of a stretch to consider that the man is dreaming about his anxiety in beginning therapy? Can you see that he is letting us know that he is utterly terrified that the therapist (the black-hooded woman) will be a dangerous intruder, robbing him and hurting him in the most intimate and vulnerable of places (in the bathroom, potentially harming his family)? Can you see that his unconscious mind is revealing that he is going to fight against this intrusion with all his might? Perhaps this dream helps us understand why he put off therapy for so long, even though he consciously wished to have it and knew he needed it. Beneath the surface, he is frightened of what will be taken from him and of what will be done to him. He also might be frightened of what might be revealed about him—how aggressive and defensive he can become.

One of the most fascinating aspects about this story is that the patient was totally shocked by this dream and had no idea what it meant. He could not relate to his intense level of fear and aggressiveness, so out of character for him as he consciously knew himself at the time. He didn’t link the dream to his attitudes about his new analyst, even with the marvelous tip-off that the intruder’s name was Melanie. (Remember, the man had studied Klein, he knew that the analyst was Kleinian, and Klein’s first name was Melanie. Dream symbols are often quite funny.) He didn’t put together that he was dreaming about how frightened he was that the analyst would violently intrude into his psychic life and that he would fight against this intrusion to the edge of death. To me, the fact that he didn’t have a clue about the meaning of the dream is another way of seeing this man’s unconscious mind at work. Blind spots hide some of the deepest truths.

My professor told us that this man went on to have a turbulent but profitable analysis. He was open to his unconscious experience, and that proved to be a great help to him—once he got someone else to help him see what he couldn’t see. That’s really the key right there. We need someone to help us see what we cannot see.

The dream reveals one of the basic features of the unconscious mind. It is the receptacle for all of our unwanted, unbearable feelings and attitudes. What we hate about ourselves is buried there. What we fear about others is sent there. Our conflicts, our worries, our vulnerabilities, our hopes, and our terrors are relegated to the unconscious for safekeeping.

The trouble is that they are not really safe there. Our most intense feelings and fantasies need to be addressed. We have to face our fears. Otherwise, they become like Pandora’s Box—all of the dangers are locked away in the unconscious mind, but like in a pressure cooker, they want to burst out. There is an enormous pressure for them to be revealed and expressed.

When we shut off these realities of our psychological life in the unconscious, they tend to leak out into conscious life. We are more aggressive than we intend to be. We are more depressed and withdrawn than we want to be. We soothe some unknown pain through food or sex or drugs or mindless activity. We run away without knowing what we are running from. We fail to succeed even when we try. Something holds us back. Something pushes us forward. It is like gravity—or, in this case, a trapped hurricane. There is a force that acts upon us that we cannot see.

If you remember the story of Pandora’s Box, you know that it held not only the terrifying aspects of life; it also contained hope. So it is with the unconscious. The unconscious is the source of our passions, our creative energies, and our love of life. As I like to say, it is the gas in the engine; it is the juice that makes life worth living. If we rely on the unconscious too much as a dumping ground for unwanted parts of ourselves, we also lose contact with the most desirable, helpful, and hopeful parts of ourselves. In other words, if we use the unconscious to get rid of the bad, we get rid of the good stuff, too. Then we lose our drive to engage in life and to make meaning of our experiences.

Take as another example a set of dreams that a psychologist friend of mine, Lisa, had following her mother’s death. Lisa was just turning forty when she lost her mother to a year-long battle with cancer. She and her mother had a relatively good relationship, having worked through the inevitable disappointments, hurts, and grievances that are part of any mother-daughter relationship. Grateful for all that her mother brought to her life, she grieved the loss of her mother deeply.

One evening over a glass of wine, Lisa told me four dreams that she had had in the weeks following her mother’s death.

In the first dream, she dreamt that her mother had died and was walking down the long tunnel toward the light. Her mother turned to wave good-bye and saw that her daughter, my friend, was crying. Her mother said, “Sweetheart, don’t worry about me. They’ll have English muffins.” Her mother loved English muffins.

A few days later, my friend had a second dream. She was a counselor in a girls’ boarding school. Something was wrong with some of the girls and they needed her help. But it was pitch-black and she couldn’t find her way to get to them. One of the administrators was there—a woman who had the same first name as her mother—but the woman was in such a deep sleep that she couldn’t be woken up to help. Another helpful female figure was there, though. She was awake and alert and talking with Lisa. My friend said to her, “I can’t find my stepping-stones. Where are my stepping-stones?”

And then, a few days later, she had a third dream. She was at work. For some reason, it was going to be her last day. So she went to her office to clean out her desk. Everything had been packed up, but she needed to clean out the drawers. And the main task was to sort through the silverware, as there were mismatched forks and knives and spoons, some of good quality and worth keeping (they’d fit with her set at home) and some to be thrown out.

And then Lisa told me the most recent dream that she had. She and her sister were young children, riding in the backseat of a car. The car was out of control, careening down a winding road. There was no one in the front seat. No one was driving. My friend’s sister turned to her and said, “Hit the brakes!” And Lisa said, “My legs aren’t long enough; I can’t reach them.”

Freud also referred to dreaming as “dream work,” and here we can see my friend’s unconscious mind working very hard to integrate and work through the loss of her mother. Lisa and I poured another glass of wine, grabbed some tissues, and talked for hours about this tender loss and what it would mean for her life.

I will leave most of the dream interpretation up to your own investigation and imagination, but I think it is plain to see some of the broad themes. Lisa was anxious about her mother’s life after death; she was worried for her. And her unconscious mind sent her mother to a place of peace and rest. This is an act of integration with its acceptance of reality and a hope that the unknown will be a good place. This unconscious view of the afterlife—whether or not it is factually true—helps Lisa move on.

Even though, on one level, Lisa knew her mother was gone, the later dreams show that she is still not sure. Acceptance of this reality takes time and more work. In the dreams, Lisa is still looking for her mother. She is missing her. She needs her. She has to visit and revisit the reality that her mother is dead and gone; mother is in a deep sleep. A phase of Lisa’s life (the job) is over; the maternal stepping-stones are missing; the mother who drives the car is no longer there. All of these images stand for Lisa’s mother, and the hole that is left from her death must be mourned and then filled. The dreams point to the future: Lisa must find her own way, take and use the good psychological utensils her mother left her, and get in the driver’s seat of her own life.

Perhaps you can see, then, how the unconscious is not just the source and receptacle of what is unwanted and unbearable. It is also the place where important psychological work is done. It is the place and the way in which we make meaning, make sense, and make peace. The work we do while we dream is deep work, for it helps us recognize what is most precious to us. If we can become more conscious of this unconscious work, we can use its wisdom to guide our lives. Psychoanalysis, of course, is uniquely designed to help us with this work. But good conversations with sensitive friends, as well as meditation, spiritual practices, reading good books, and personal reflection of all kinds, can help us, too.

In the first session with my students, we explore other ways we can see evidence of the unconscious in daily life—repetitive patterns in relationships, Freudian slips, the transmission of psychological difficulties from one generation to the next. If we start to look for the unconscious, we can see it. We just have to pay attention.

Inevitably, the seminar discussion turns to babies. If you have ever had a baby or spent much time with babies, you know from experience that babies come into the world with their own little personalities. We do not come into the world as blank slates. No two babies are the same. From the very beginning, we reach out to the world and engage it in a personally meaningful way. While the outside world has its impact in shaping us, inborn temperament has the first word to say on who we are and who we become. Each human being is as unique as a snowflake. And I suggest that at the heart of each little snowflake-personality is an unconscious inner world.

Consider this scenario. You have a group of newborn babies and each one had a reasonably good start in life. Normal pregnancies and deliveries, no complications, perfect Apgar scores. No fuss, no muss. They are all sleeping quietly in the nursery.

Suddenly, there is a loud noise. Someone has dropped a metal pan—crash, clatter, bang! The babies are all affected by the noise; they are disturbed out of their sleep. Why is it that a third of these healthy babies will gurgle, stretch, and fall right back to sleep? Why will another third wake up, begin to cry, and be comforted with modest effort by mother or caretaker and then fall back to sleep? And why will another third cry bloody murder, be inconsolable, and stay irritable for hours before they cry themselves into an exhausted slumber?

The answer is temperament. Yes, babies have personalities from the moment their little heads pop out into the world. We are preprogrammed to experience life in certain ways. Some of us are more sensitive than others. Some are more resilient. Some are shy, others outgoing. Some are more prone to aggression; others withdraw in the face of conflict and anxiety. Some lean more on intellect, others on emotion. Some hear a loud sound and shrug their shoulders, thinking, “Eh, no big deal.” Others hear the same sound and say, “Oh my God! The world is coming to an end!”

The meaning we make from our experiences—even when we are mere babes—is what I have in mind when I say we each have an unconscious inner world. Even before our brains have developed fully, even before we have words, even before we can put two and two together, we are creating meaning. Take the three types of infants in our nursery scenario above. The quiet baby may have a sense that being in the world is a kind of numbing isolation or, better yet, a kind of ignorant bliss. The comforted baby may have some sense of safety in being held by a loving presence or, alternatively, a sense of self-confidence in being able to handle life’s troubles. The inconsolable baby may suffer her way through life with a constant feeling of nameless dread, alone and threatened in a dangerous world. There is a kind of early, meaning-making process there—the beginnings of an unconscious psychological life.

Melanie Klein believed that our life in infancy has a powerful impact on how we develop into adults. She emphasized that it is not only our experiences that shape us, but the meaning we make of them. And what we take from our experiences has a lot to do with what we bring to them.

Remember Jacob and Esau from the Bible story? Jacob and Esau were the rivalrous twin sons of Isaac and Rebekah, descendants of Abraham in the patriarchal line of Israel. As the story goes, the twins were already fighting with each other in the womb. At the very point of birth, Jacob was grasping the heel of his one-minute-older brother as he slid through the birth canal, already showing signs of the competitiveness that would lead to such radical betrayal many years later. In the end, Jacob would steal his older brother’s birthright, and the countries they would later lead would be at odds with each other for centuries. This is such a great example of what Klein meant when she said that our personalities have a trajectory from the beginning.

Now you may be skeptical, thinking this is just a story. How could a newborn—never mind a fetus—already have a personality? Believe it or not, we now have modern-day evidence to back it up. Alessandra Piontelli, an Italian psychoanalyst, did a fascinating set of studies observing the ultrasounds of twins in utero.4 Studying the twins at several points during the mother’s pregnancy, she found that the way they interacted in the womb—their relational style with one another, if you will—carried forward into how they related after birth and as they grew into more developed children. Our basic personalities are set more than we would like to believe they are.

If you had siblings or you have children, you know what I mean. Even if you look back at photos or videos of yourself as a young child, I’ll bet you can see traces of the adult you have become. While our early experiences shape us, they only shape us so much. For example, if we pay attention to the differences between children in the same family, we can see that the same parents can be viewed by their children in different ways. One child might see his or her mother as loving and available, another might see her as overprotective and smothering, and yet another as stern and demanding. Even if we take into account factors such as birth order and changing circumstances, there is just something so compelling about the idea that our inborn personalities influence the meaning we make of our lives.

So how does environment come into play? As I like to say, while innate constitution may have the first word to say about who we become, it does not have the last. The way the world responds to our inborn predisposition shapes us—for better or worse. Jacob’s envy was fueled by his mother playing favorites; Esau’s naïve self-sufficiency was fueled by his father’s blind loyalty. Instead of helping to rein in their sons’ inborn rivalry, they encouraged it. Perhaps this is what it means for the sins of the parents to be visited on their children.

I think environment affects personality development like it affects intelligence. We are each born with some range of intellectual potential. With a rich environment—such as listening to Mozart in the womb, early creative stimulation, good nutrition, good schools, involved parents, and exposure to lots of different experiences that expand the mind—we develop toward the upper end of that range. But with an environment that lacks creative stimulation, proper nutrition, and parental involvement and care, we develop toward the lower end of that range. I think it is the same with the personality. An innately competitive child will grow up to be a competitive adult—but with positive influences, competitiveness can become a strength, and with negative influences, it can become a liability.

Certainly environment makes a difference. We can think of many examples. A particularly warm family experience can soften the sharp edges of a prickly porcupine temperament. A hostile and perfectionistic family experience can intensify that same predisposition. An abusive environment can weaken the resolve and resilience of even the most optimistic little personality, while a supportive, challenging environment can foster his or her great success in life. We are a blend of our psychological hardwiring and the software operating system of our early environment.

As we grow into adulthood, this lens helps us make sense of our experiences, but it also tends to distort them.

Perhaps you now have a sense of how I understand the development of the mind, how the internal and external worlds are constantly interacting with each other as we try to make sense of our experiences. Our unconscious expectations become a kind of filter through which we experience life for many years to come. As we grow into adulthood, this lens helps us make sense of our experiences, but it also tends to distort them. We think we are seeing the world as it really is, but actually we are seeing what the baby inside expects to see. And that is why we seem so insane sometimes. We are approaching our lives through the eyes of our baby selves, through the lens of unconscious reality.

As Buddha said, “Life is a creation of the mind.”

A contemporary version of this idea adds a humorous twist: To paraphrase Albert Einstein, reality is only an illusion, although it is a very persistent one.

My thoughts about the unconscious mind are really a kind of introduction to all that is to come in the following chapters. They naturally lead to a critical question that I suspect is now on your mind. If the personality is so fixed and in such a state of confusion, how on earth can we ever hope to change?

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