Administrator
Extreme Ideas
Positive Health Magazine
December, 2005
Extreme Ideas
Dorothy Rowe
Last July and August our television news programmes were full of pictures of young people who were desperately trying to make the world over into what they thought it ought to be. First there were the young men who believed they could change the world by planting bombs and killing people. They were followed by the crowds of young people, some as young as fourteen, trying to stop Israeli soldiers from expelling them from the Jewish settlements in Gaza. While these events were going on Channel Four was showing a series called Hitler's Children about how the Nazi leaders forced every German child to join a youth movement, one for boys and one for girls, which appeared to give them great benefits but which was intended to prepare them to fight Hitler's war and, for the girls, to breed a race of Aryan heroes. Newsreels from that time show these girls and boys demonstrating their intense loyalty to their Führer and promising to do whatever he ordered. All of these young people were acting on the extreme ideas which had been taught to them by their elders. The young men who were prepared to become suicide bombers had been taught that to die in a jihad against the infidel was to die the death of a glorious martyr renowned through the Muslim world. The Jewish teenagers had been taught that God had given Palestine to His Chosen People, the Jews, and so the Palestinians had to be expelled. The German children had been taught that theirs was the master race destined to rule the world and that the Führer would always look after them.
Whatever our age, we all want our life to have some significance. We don't want to feel that when we die no one will remember us in any way at all. As they get older most adults will settle for the significance of having family, friends, work what has made some contribution to society, and simple enjoyment, but in our childhood and youth we see the significance we desire in more dramatic terms. Our fantasies about our future life go to extremes. If we fantasise being a footballer, then it has to be a champion; if our fantasy is to be a mother then it has to be a most beautiful woman surrounded by adoring children and the handsomest of husbands. By the end of our childhood we are well aware that the world is not what it ought to be. We become impatient with the adults who've made such a mess of things. We determine to make the world a better place, and become famous in so doing. If we are lucky we have around us adults who gently show us that the world is a complex, ambiguous place, and that it is futile to try to force reality to be what we want it to be because reality will always go its own way. If we are unlucky, we encounter those adults who hold extreme ideas and who want to use us to put those ideas into practice. They use us and betray us.
All of the elderly people who recounted their stories in the Hitler Youth showed on their faces if not in their words how hurt they had been by their betrayal by the Nazis. However, they knew they were lucky to be alive. Many of their number had died in the war and others committed suicide at the war's end. The four young men who had their life in front of them instead had their body parts scattered around an underground tunnel or a London bus, while the four who failed to explode their bombs face a life time in gaol where they will not be treated kindly. And, as Lindsey Hilsun, reporting from Gaza for the Channel Four news, wondered, how will Israel cope with all those young people who expected that God would perform a miracle and save the settlements in Gaza? Some will feel bitter and betrayed by their elders and by God, while others will carry out far more drastic actions in trying to force the world to be what they want it to be. Their extreme actions will provoke more extreme actions from those they attack.
An extreme belief is one which allows of no exceptions, no matter what the circumstances may be. Extreme beliefs never reflect reality, and they always lead to suffering. Many people hold extreme beliefs. My friend Monica believes that all the drugs prescribed doctors are dangerous. She also has a great fear of needles. Ten years ago she developed arthritis. She refuses to have acupuncture and she takes no pain killers. She smiles brightly while her hand taps out on her knee the tattoo of persistent pain. Her friends and family worry about her, but we operate on a mutual agreement. We don't tell her to abandon her belief and take something for the pain, and she doesn't tell us that we're ruining our health by following our doctor's treatment. If someone does hold an extreme idea this is how it should be. If you hold an extreme belief the only person who should suffer is yourself.
Being Listened To
Positive Health Magazine
February, 2004
Being Listened To
Dorothy Rowe
When I was in my early sixties I was sure that I would continue being the person I knew myself to be. My passion for my work and my curiosity about the world and everything in it would not diminish. Ten years on I am just the same. However, I hadn't anticipated that other people would change in how they see me. I've now discovered that for many people being old means being incapable of speaking for oneself. They believe that all old people don't keep up with progress and that they easily get confused. Since you're not capable of speaking for yourself there's no point in asking you what it is that you need. Instead, your would-be helpers give you what they think you need.
Thus a friend of mine, a contemporary, came home from hospital to find that her would-be helpers had decided to refurbish her kitchen. Gone was the stove where she had cooked the family meals. She knew its every quirk and foible. It was a family friend, a storehouse of memories. Now it was gone, and in its place a smaller object with buttons, mysterious signs and symbols, and a cacophony of strange sounds. As the would-be helpers explained, 'Now you're on your own, dear, you don't need a large oven.'
I've discovered that there's no one more deeply hurt and affronted than would-be helpers when I've told them that what they did wasn't what I wanted. How could I be so ungrateful when everything they had done had been in my own best interests?
Fortunately I've learned how to stand up for myself against those who would defeat me by making me feel guilty. It's much more difficult to stand up for yourself and insist on being heard when you've been through one of those crises which results in your getting a psychiatric diagnosis. Then everything you say can be discounted by your would-be helpers. After all, you're mad and anything you say is likely to be a crazy fantasy.
This is what Sheila Harvey found when a period of psychosis brought to the surface a long buried memory of a terrible assault by her father when she was a small child. Sheila didn't keep this discovery to herself. She told her family and found that her sister Jenifer refused to believe her. Later Jenifer wrote, 'I am not prepared to let my parents' reputation be ruined by a delusion, experienced at the height of an acute psychiatric episode.'
Jenifer was married to a psychiatrist, and so she and her husband could use the language of psychiatry to say, in effect, that Sheila's discovery was no more than the fantasy of a disordered mind, the raving of a mad woman.
As much as she loved her sister and wanted to preserve family harmony, Sheila was determined to be heard. She wrote an account of her experiences in childhood and during her psychosis. She also asked all the members of her family to write their own accounts of that troubled time. Now published under the title of Sheila's Book: A shared Journey through Madness'(1), the book shows how differently the experience of psychosis is interpreted by those who are part of the drama.
What these different interpretations show is that not only do we each have our own way of interpreting things but that we choose the interpretation which best supports our favoured view of ourselves. If we like to think of ourselves as being highly competent and tremendously caring we can feel sure that we know what is best for other people. However, if those we have done good to then protest about what we have done, our picture of ourselves is threatened, and we feel first fear and then anger. Similarly, if we draw great comfort and pride from being the child of respected and virtuous parents any suggestion that our parents were not the paragons we wanted them to be threatens our whole image of ourselves.
When we were small children there were a great many occasions where we were not listened to. Our needs and wishes were ignored and adults constantly showed us that they were sure that they knew what was best for us. Again and again we felt the terror of the threat of being wiped out as a person. To survive we had to develop ways of defending ourselves. The most effective defence is to create an image of ourselves in which we can take great pride. Perhaps we pride ourselves on our qualities of competence and helpfulness, or on being the child of very special parents. Now we can feel sure that we know what is best for other people. Another most effective defence is attack. Older siblings criticise and humiliate younger siblings who then retaliate. Bullied at home by their parents, children then bully those children they see as being weak and vulnerable.
Because adults don't see children as persons in their own right who should be treated with respect, children grow up fearing that they will be annihilated as a person. They defend themselves against this with vanity and aggression.(2) This behaviour undermines all their relationships and leads them to fear those conditions of life where they could be seen as being weak and vulnerable, as in old age or severe mental distress. Until we learn to treat everyone, whatever their age or situation, with respect and dignity we will continue to lead lives which are far more miserable, meagre and fearful than they need ever to be.
(1) Somerset Virtual College NHS Publications, Dunkirk Memorial House, Minehead Road, Bishops Lydeard, Taunton TA4 3BT, 2003
(2) Dorothy Rowe Beyond Fear HarperCollins, second edition, 2002
Review- My Dearest Enemy
My Dearest Enemy, My Dangerous Friend: Making and Breaking Sibling Bonds
Reviewed by Sandra Goodman PhD
I am a Number One fan of Dorothy Rowe. I admire her straight-talking way of discussing the inner world of individuals in light of their family circumstances and experiences, including our fear of annihilation due to perceived threats to our sense of being a person.
In this her most recent book, she sheds light on the fruitful and pivotal roles played by our siblings in our growing up, and in our present life, workplace and even the wider world. It is astonishing that perhaps the most important and endearing relationships we ever form - that with our siblings, i.e. brothers and sisters - have never been the proper investigation or study of Psychologists, Psychiatrists or Therapists. This is despite the passage of a century of becoming familiar with many forms of Psychotherapy and the notions of talking about how our life situations, behaviour and attitudes may stem from our early childhood, or our parents, or indeed life-changing events.
People talk about their relationships with their sisters and brothers with an intensity that far supersedes that of their friends or even their parents. Relationships between siblings is a vitally important relationship that we don't understand. Dr. Rowe has amassed a huge amount of research material to present this book, drawn from published letters, dramatic plays, books, personal experiences and interviews with patients. She draws from her own personal history how early events in her and her sister's life affected the way they related to each other in ways that we can all understand from our own past experiences. Many of us have had fights with our sisters and brothers which have had cataclysmic repercussions far beyond that moment in time. This is fascinating material to read and absorb and gain understanding into our own lives.
"We see the world in the way we have learned to see it. In our early years our family is our world, and so, when we encounter the world outside our family, we interpret that world in the way we have learned to interpret our family...when we encounter people in positions of authority we can find ourselves re-enacting the particular kind of encounters we had with our parents, and with our friends and colleagues we re-enact our tussles with our siblings. Indeed, we can re-enact with different groups the siblings dramas of 'the good one' and 'the bad one' "
Interwoven into this gem of a book are additional priceless insights regarding some of Dorothy Rowe's themes which she has written about in her many other books: about Introverts and extroverts, about belief in A Just world, or about believing that God or some Higher Power will influence our life. In discussing Introverts, Dorothy Rowe mentions that the term introvert has become translated into a negative, derogative term, particularly in American society, so much so that someone who is quiet, keeps to themselves, is called a loner. And this stereotype was exactly played out recently in the murderous shooting in the Virginia College, where the murderer was branded as a loner by almost everyone interviewed. There is no argument that the murderer was deranged and highly dangerous; however, it is sad that to be a loner or an introvert is now considered almost criminal, where, probably about half of people are introverts.
Dorothy Rowe is a deeply subversive and hence dangerous free thinker. She discusses Northern Ireland terrorism, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Terrorism and 9/11 and the Power of Brotherhood in a riveting chapter titled Loyalty and Betrayal. Read this book and it will surely change your life.
Journal of Health Organization and Management
The Meaning of Emotion
For all of us emotion exists like a Greek chorus in the play which is our life. Sometimes it is just a gentle hum in the background: sometimes it takes centre stage. However, the fact that something plays a significant part in our life does not mean that psychologists research it. Like every human activity, psychology has fashions. Certain topics become fashionable to research: certain words become fashionable to use. For most of my career as a psychologist 'emotion' was considered to be unmentionable and 'subjectivity' was scorned. Psychologists had to be 'objective' and 'impersonal'. Now fashion has changed and 'emotion' is definitely in fashion. Unfortunately the years of neglect meant that the problems in understanding what emotion is have not been tackled.
Emotion has always been very difficult to define. When I ask colleagues what they mean by emotion I am given a list of emotions or told - usually in many words - that it means 'feelings'. Definitions of 'emotion' always turn out to be circular and explain nothing. Collins Dictionary define 'emotion' as '(1) strong feeling, excitement, and (2) any specific feeling as love, hate, fear, anger etc.' Macquarie Dictionary defines it as 'an affective state of consciousness in which joy, sorrow, fear, hate, or the like is experienced.' Ask what 'affective' means and the Macquarie Dictionary will tell you that it is 'pertaining to feeling or emotion'.
You can spend a happy hour with any dictionary looking up 'emotion', 'feeling', 'idea', 'cognition', 'volition', 'thought', 'belief', 'attitude', 'opinion' and find yourself going round and round in circles as the dictionary defines each word in terms of the others. Some fine distinctions are made, but these are merely different aspects of the one thing, something that we all know very well because we do it all the time but we cannot define it because we cannot contrast it with anything else in the way we can define, say, 'chicken' in terms of animals, birds, and motor cars.
What are we doing when we are thinking, feeling, wishing, believing, opining, and attitudinising? We are creating that mysterious thing, meaning, and imposing it on everything we encounter. Creating meaning is what we do. We breathe and we create meaning. For a short time we can not breathe, but we cannot not create meaning. We create meaning when we are asleep or intoxicated, and we can create meaning consciously or unconsciously. Asleep we dream, and we unconsciously create the meaning 'I am uncomfortable' and change our position without waking up. What we cannot do is conceive of the opposite of meaning. We may say, 'That is meaningless' as in 'meaningless violence' but even this has the meanings of 'I cannot quite think of what meaning to give this' or 'I find this unacceptable.' We live in meaning like a fish lives in water.
Like thoughts, opinions, beliefs, attitudes and wishes, emotions are meanings, but they are a special kind of meaning. We can create a meaning about, say, the moon, and that meaning have nothing to do with us, but when we create the kind of meaning we call an emotion, when we feel angry, or frightened, or loving, or joyful, or guilty we are at the centre of that meaning. Our emotions are all about us. Even when we profess some high-minded emotion as in, 'I am angry that the rich countries have not abolished the debt of the poor countries' we are talking about our own feelings. Emotions are meanings which you create about yourself. You do not have to put an emotion into words but it is always possible to do so. The subject of these verbalised emotions is always 'I'.
Our Sense of Being a Person
Who or what is the 'I' at the centre of the meanings we call emotion? It is hard to define, yet we are all aware of what 'I' is. In fact, 'I' is awareness, but it is more than consciousness. The best definition we can give of it is, 'It's what I mean when I say "I", "me", "myself". When we are asked to describe the person that we are we answer in terms of our appearance, our gender, age, family, nationality, race, religion, class, occupation, affiliations and interests. These are all ideas, as are our memories which inform us who we are.
At about 26 weeks gestation our brain becomes capable of creating meaning and of setting up connections between these meanings. In the womb a baby becomes capable of noticing that one event invariably precedes another and of using the occurrence of the first event to predict the second. Many babies are born knowing that a certain sound, a piece of music, always precedes their feeling of pleasure which comes when the mother relaxes by sitting or lying down, thus giving the baby a more comfortable space. Once born, these babies show pleasurable anticipation when the music is played. Many British babies have been found to associate pleasure with the music of the television soap Neighbours.
All our meanings connect together and form a meaning structure which is constantly evolving and changing. This meaning structure is what you experience as 'I', in other words, your sense of being a person. There is no little you sitting inside your head and creating meaning. You are your meaning structure: your meaning structure is you.
The research on neuronal patterns of connections in the brain and the learning process suggests that the neuronal pattern in the person's brain is the site of the person's meaning structure, though how a neuronal connection is also a meaning is far from being understood. This neuronal pattern/meaning structure develops from the person's past experience. Since no two people ever have exactly the same experience, no two meaning structures are the same. This is why we are all individuals, all different from one another.
Neuroscientists have shown that our brain is incapable of giving us an exact picture of what is going on around us. It constructs pictures of what is going on, and these pictures are informed by our past experience. We each see what we have learned to see. Thus our brain forms a theory about what is going on, and this theory is based on our past experience. Our meaning structure is made up of a set of theories or guesses about what actually is. For you to feel secure you/your meaning structure needs to be validated. Your guesses must be shown to be right. Events must confirm your predictions. Other people must show by their words and deeds that you/your meaning structure are as you believe you are.
Alas, events and other people often fail to provide the validation we need. Every day some of our ideas are challenged and invalidated. The letter we expected did not arrive; our boss did not accept our work plan. These are small errors of judgement. Sometimes our error of judgement is huge. Perhaps your job for life suddenly disappears. Perhaps you find that the person you love no longer loves you. Perhaps you had always believed that if you were good nothing bad would happen to you, and then something bad happened to you. These are invalidations so huge that your sense of being a person starts to fall apart. You feel yourself crumbling, shattering, disappearing. You are terrified. Even if you understand that what is falling apart is a significant part of your meaning structure, the ideas which no longer fit your circumstances, you feel anxious and uncertain until you can construct new ideas which better reflect your new situation.[1]
Our fear of being annihilated as a person is far greater than our fear of death. We can in some measure come to accept our death, provided that we can believe that some important aspect of our sense of being a person will continue on, be it our soul or spirit, our children, our work, or just in the memories of those who knew us. Being annihilated as a person means to us that we shall vanish like a wisp of smoke in the wind, never to have existed.
Thus it is that we need to survive both physically and as a person. However, we can find ourselves in a situation where we cannot do both. In such circumstances very few people choose to survive physically and to let go of the person they know themselves to be. Some people, who have emerged from prolonged, degrading torture feeling that the person they had once been has been destroyed, find that they can never be themselves again. They feel that they have become a no-thing and that life can only be endured, not lived. Rather than exist in this way most people choose to die, perhaps heroically, perhaps by their own hand. When Private Johnson Beharry received the Victoria Cross from the Queen he denied that he had been courageous. He said, 'I knew I had to get everyone out because I couldn't have lived with myself otherwise.'[2] All heroes and heroines who survive their heroic act say that about themselves. If they had not done what they did they would no longer be able to think of themselves as being the person they want to be. Acts of suicide follow from the person deciding that the situation they are in is one where they cannot be the person they know themselves to be. A young woman I once knew saw herself as being intrinsically incapable of mothering her child to the standard that other people, particularly her mother, expected of her. Rather than be exposed as a failure and shamed, she killed herself.
Surviving as a person, not being invalidated as a person, is our absolute top priority. Emotions are meanings devoted to surviving as a person.
The Origins of the Emotions
The purpose of life is to live. In some measure all living things create meaning in order to survive. Trees may not be consciously aware or even have a brain but their internal system creates a meaning to do with striving towards the light and towards water. Ants work purposefully. To what degree apes and chimpanzees have some measure of consciousness is hotly debated amongst scientists. According to the anthropologist
Our brain generates meaning. It is not surprising that the part of the brain which generates the meaning 'survive' develops early in our gestation. Neuroscientists see the amygdala in the limbic system in the brain as the source of our earliest emotions of fear and anger. However, there must be something else present, a sense of being alive and a need to stay alive, which together form a kind of primitive pride which says, 'I am here and I intend to stay.' Newborn babies struggle to breathe, to eat and to avoid pain. When their needs are not met they complain. To generate the emotions of fear and anger a newborn's brain must contain some emergent property that might be called 'the proud I', proud because 'I' has as its purpose its survival. Fear is the meaning, 'I am in danger', but anger is the meaning 'How dare anything get in my way'.
Consciousness develops slowly. The neuroscientist
Interested though he is in people, initially a baby assesses his situation solely in terms of himself. The fear, anger and joy he shows are the uncomplicated meanings of 'I am in danger', 'How dare things not be what I want them to be', and 'Everything is as I want everything to be'. However, as the baby gets to know people, his emotions become more complicated.
In her studies of siblings Judy Dunn has observed that, 'There is a marked difference between the general distress shown by a one-year-old when his brother takes away his toy, and the frustration shown by an eighteen- or twenty-four-month-old, an anger that this person can act in this way towards me. A new vindictiveness is shown - I'm going to get back at this person in a way which will hurt him.'[4]
Hitting your brother because he has taken your toy may be no more than venting your anger on somebody who has frustrated you but
The birth of another baby in a family often reveals a sibling's precocious knowledge of what would upset his mother.
One child, whose mother and baby sister were gazing at each other in a long absorbed exchange, picked up his cup, which had a lid with holes in the top, and looking across at to the baby and his ecstatic mother, started to sprinkle his milk all over the sofa. A second child ran into the garden and laughingly let down the line with a full load of washing on to the muddy grass.[7]
A four-year-old can understand the manipulative value of guilt. One such child 'put it quite explicitly to his mother on the birth of his brother: "Why have you ruined my life?"'[8] Small children understand revenge, the emotion that says, 'You have hurt me and now I'm going to hurt you.' They also understand what empathy is, as
Empathy is a very complex emotion. 'Real empathy isn't just knowing that other people feel the same as you do; it's about knowing that they don't feel the same way and caring anyway. Babies aren't born with this deep moral insight, but, by the time they are two, they have already begun to understand it.'[10]
In this test you show a child a tube of Smarties and ask: What do you think is in this tube? The inevitable answer is: Smarties. You take the cap off and the child sees that the tube actually contains pencils. After replacing the cap, you say to the child: I'm just going to bring your friend
Children who fail the false belief tests are not being presented with a situation which involves the danger of being invalidated or the opportunity to invalidate someone else. Whatever their answer to the psychologist's question, the psychologist praises them. It is not imperative that children learn very early in life that other people can hold beliefs which are wrong, indeed believing that your parents are infallible is a great comfort when you are small, whereas it is imperative that children learn very early how to defend themselves against invalidation by validating or invalidating others.
It is in the bosom of our family that the most wonderful and the most dangerous validations and invalidations take place. For instance, praise from a parent can be at the one time validating and invalidating. The child's belief that his parent loves him may be validated, but the fact that the parent praises the child for something the child knows he is not is invalidating because it shows that his parent does not understand him. It is through our interactions with our family that we begin to create the complex meanings which express safety by being validated and danger by being invalidated.
Simple and Complex Emotions
The simple emotions of joy, fear and anger involve only ourselves and our feelings of safety, danger or frustration. These are the only meanings of which we can be absolutely certain. This is what we feel when we feel it. If we then ask ourselves why we feel joyous, fearful or angry our meanings become guesses because we cannot be absolutely certain of the situation which validated or invalidated us. ('Did the person who praised me mean what he said?') Many people destroy these absolute truths by qualifying them with 'oughts' ('I don't deserve to be happy'), or lying to themselves about what they felt. Many people say that they never get angry, and call their anger fear. Others deny that they are ever afraid because to them fear means chaos, something they cannot control.
Languages differ in whether or not they have terms for complex emotions. Japanese, so I am told, has a word for 'regret for feeling regret', an emotion many of us would recognise when we look back over our life and try to call it happy. Within a particular language terms for certain complex emotions change with changing circumstances. That complex of peculiar isolation, despair and guilt which we now call depression was called 'accidie' in the Middle Ages and in those religious times was considered to be a sin. In Elizabethan times, when a melancholic stance was fashionable amongst those who wished to be seen as significant, accidie became melancholia.[13]
Whatever they are called, complex emotions are inevitable when people live together in groups. Societies function because children are brought up to believe that as they are they are not acceptable and that they have to work hard to be good. Such education teaches a child, first, how to create the emotion of shame ('I am exposed and I shall become a nothing in other people's eyes'), and second, guilt ('I have erred and shall be punished'). Siblings compete to be seen as good in their parents' eyes, and so learn how to create the emotion jealousy ('I have been deprived of something that was rightly mine'), and later envy ('I have been deprived of something that I want and another person has').
Every interaction between people is laden with possibilities for validation and invalidation. I may think that by being concerned about your health and welfare I am validating you, but if you interpret my words and deeds as being patronising I am invalidating you. There is no simple solution to the perils of communication, but by recognising the importance of emotion we can begin to understand what emotion means.
Behind the Lines by Andrew Carroll
©
July/August 2005
Book Review by Dorothy Rowe
Behind the Lines: Revealing the uncensored letters from our
by Andrew Carroll
Ebury Press - 447 pp £19.99
My father was a great story teller. At bedtime when I was a small child I would demand he tell me a story. My favourite stories were those about when he was a soldier in France during the First World War. As I got older he added more realistic details to these stories, and I came to see how he had left his home in the Australian bush as an inexperienced young man with little education and a passion for sport and returned a committed Socialist and atheist with an intense compassion for fellow soldiers whatever their nationality. He despised the generals who treated their men as no more than disposable puppets, and he hated all political leaders who start wars, and what he called 'the vested interests' who profited from war. He was one of those Andrew Carroll called 'combat veterans' who abhor 'the glorification of war itself. They believe that sanitizing or concealing its ugliness only trivializes the sacrifices made by the men and women who serve.' Dad would have wept and laughed and reminisced over this collection of letters and 'their messages to the world'.
Dad would have been especially pleased by the inclusion of the letter from Alfred Dougan Chater to his mother on Christmas day, 1914. Here Chater described how on the front line German and English soldiers left their trenches to talk to one another and agree that they would all have preferred to be at home. Dad often described how soldiers from both sides had kicked a ball around together, and always he would add that for the rest of the war the generals made sure that over every Christmas period the heavy guns of the artillery were in constant action.
The letters in this collection come from a wide variety of wars. Andrew Carroll wisely gives the background to each letter. Those uninvolved in such wars are often uninterested or ignorant of the conflicts, and often do not want to be reminded of the repeated futility and cruelty of war.
The experience of war changes people, and not for the better. I became used to Dad's obsession with not wasting food and with his closest friend's wheezy breathing, a legacy of the mustard gas used in the First World War. When I went to Sydney University in 1948 the majority of my fellow students were ex-service men and women, most of whom had had what we used to call 'a bad war'. They would have understood what US Private Al Puntasecca meant when he wrote to announce to his family his return from the Korean War. He said, 'You know, it's almost funny, we see a guy in a wheel chair, a guy on crutches, one arm, hooks for hands, and, we break our backs trying to help him. But, what about the wounds you can't see? The phantoms, the nightmares, the ghosts in your head? I am going to tell you now, you'll need lots of patience with me. Patience, and, understanding. We all will. See you soon. See you soon. See you soon.'
And what of the children caught up in war? A young girl, Galia, in Lenigrad during the siege, writes to her aunt to tell her that each member of her family, one after the other, has died and she is all alone, under fire from the Germans and starving. 'Dearest Aunt Natasha my hope now rests with you and I wait for you to come like a guardian angel. I think that you will not abandon me'. But Aunt Natasha did not come and no one knows what happened to Galia.
Suffering, whether physical or mental, becomes unbearable if no one acknowledges that we suffer. If someone says, 'I see that you are suffering and that is terrible' somehow our pain lessens. We may fear death, but if we can assure ourselves that some important part of us will continue on, be it in our children, our work, or just in the memories our friends hold of us, somehow death becomes more bearable. Our greatest fear is that the person that we are will vanish like a rain drop in the ocean and no one will bear witness to our existence. Behind the Lines does much more than educate us about the prevalence and evil of war. It allows us to bear witness to the life and suffering of those who otherwise might be forgotten. If we bear witness to others, then perhaps others will remember to bear witness to us.
Dorothy Rowe is a psychologist and writer
______________________________________________
Copyright New Humanist 2005©
Reproduced with the permission of New Humanist
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Edvard Munch paintings
Edvard Munch paintings
Written by Dorothy Rowe and published in Hildon Magazine (Summer/Autumn 2005)
The publication of this article has been timed to coincide with a major exhibition of Edvard Munch's paintings at London's Royal Academy
(October - December 2005)
Edvard Munch -
his pictures were a means of understanding himself
Often the swirl of emotions and thoughts inside us is hard to bear. We feel confused, uncertain, fearful that we are about to be overwhelmed by chaos or lose all control of ourselves. One way of dealing with this is to create some account of what is happening to us. We may talk to someone, or keep a diary, or turn our experience into a story, a poem, a play, a song or a picture. Taking what is inside us and putting it outside helps us manage, understand and contain our experience.
Turning our experience into some artistic form is a defence, a way of holding ourselves together when we feel we are falling apart. Other people may find what we produce incomprehensible, or banal, or, at best, an explanation for our behaviour. What we produce is not art.
However, if we are skilled, what we produce may be art, and we can produce a work that vividly encapsulates our experience. If we are very skilled, what we produce may be good art, but, while what we produce is no more than an account of what we are experiencing, it is not great art.
In great art, the artist has taken his experience and turned it into an image that has a universal meaning, which speaks about and to us all. Like the poet Rilke's "imperturbable cathedral carvers", the artist has "transposed themselves into the constant stone" and turned image into "nothing but image".
Munch was a good artist but not a great artist. Unlike many artists, he painted self-portraits throughout his life. They are all about himself and his experiences, unlike Rembrandt's, which ponder upon how life shapes us all. Nevertheless, Munch's self-portraits are important because they show the internal struggles of a man who in his childhood encountered sickness, despair, death and loss, but who was not given a means of making sense of these in a way which allowed him to find the courage and hope necessary to face life. Instead, he was presented with punitive Lutheranism, stressing judgement, damnation and hell, and teaching him to see himself as a worthless person. Munch was only five when his mother died of tuberculosis; he probably blamed himself for her death. When he was 14, his eldest sister also died of tuberculosis. "Illness, madness and death were the black angels that kept watch over my cradle," Munch wrote.
To understand the effects of such a childhood we need to understand the prime importance to all of us of our sense of being a person. To be able to live comfortably with ourselves, we need to feel that we can be the person we know ourselves to be, that other people accept and value us as the person we know ourselves to be, that we have a fairly accurate knowledge of the world we live in, that we can predict fairly accurately what the future will bring, and that we shall be able to deal effectively with whatever we encounter. We need to feel that our life has significance, and that when we die we leave something of importance behind.
Whenever we encounter a situation where we cannot be the person we know ourselves to be, when other people refuse to accept us as we are, when we greatly misjudge the world and fail to predict events, when we feel that we are being overwhelmed by events, we feel that we are shattering, crumbling, disappearing. Our fear of annihilation is worse than the fear of death. With death, we can comfort ourselves with the thought that some important part of us - our soul, our spirit, our children, our work - will continue, but when we face annihilation, we feel that we shall disappear like a raindrop vanishing into the ocean, never to have existed. We are utterly terrified. Every person experiences the fear of annihilation many times in his life. This is why Munch's picture of this universal experience, The Scream, is so popular.
For some people, what most threatens their sense of being a person is the fear of being rejected and abandoned by everybody. Henri Matisse was one such person. For others, the situation that threatens them the most is where they feel that they will lose control of themselves and the world and will fall through infinite, bottomless space. Munch said "My life has been a battle just to keep myself upright. My path has led me along the edge of a precipice, a bottomless pit… From time to time I've tried to get away from the path, thrown myself into the throng of life among people. But every time I have had to go back to the path along the cliff top. It is my way, which I must follow till I plunge into the depths." The railing that bisects his pictures Despair and The Scream is the edge of that precipice.
Munch would have disappeared over that precipice into oblivion had he not painted. But the recognition his talent brought him gave him a modicum of self-confidence. This enabled him to arrive at an understanding of himself from which he could construct a way of living that kept him safe. Munch appreciated the role of this. "I would not cast off my illness, for there is much in my art that I owe to it," he wrote. His pictures were for him a means of understanding himself. Unfortunately he never escaped
the ancient curse of poets
Being sorry for themselves instead
of saying,
Forever passing judgement
on their feeling
Instead of shaping it…
Requiem for Wolf Graf von Kalckreuth,
Rainer Maria Rilke
Nevertheless, Munch's paintings have enabled a great many people with lives similar to his to turn their experiences into a painting, and from that learn how to manage, understand and contain them. Art therapy produces many minor Munchs.
Matisse changed how we all see the world. Munch changed how we see the extremes of pain and sorrow.
Psychologist Dorothy Rowe is a world-renowned authority on depression. She is the author of Beyond Fear (HarperCollins) and Depression: The Way Out of Your Prison (Routledge).
The Skeptical Intelligencer
The Skeptical Intelligencer 
Vol 3, Issue No1
July 1998
A Skeptic's Attitude to Science and Religion
Radio Four's Today programme has, as far as I'm concerned, only one fault. Thought for the Day is ring fenced. John Humphreys can't interrogate the person presenting the Thought, while every other person who ventures on to the programme can be scrutinised for lies, inconsistencies, logical errors, fudges and downright inaccuracies. On Thought for Today and, with Melvyn Bragg's blessing, on Start the Week various church men and women can be heard discussing religion and science in the terms which imply that these are equivalent modes of thought. This is one inaccuracy which ought to be challenged if not by John Humphreys then by the rest of us sceptics. Religion and science are not equivalent concepts of modes of thought. Religion uses the mode of thought called fantasy and science uses the mode of thought called scientific method.
The way we are constructed physiologically means that we are unable to perceive reality directly. All that we can ever know are our constructions, our theories about reality. (See Richard Gregory's Eye and Brain and any of Oliver Sacks books for demonstrations of this.) Once we have created a theory we can choose to examine it in terms of scientific method or we can elaborate it in terms of fantasy. For instance, we might be about to cross a busy road. We form a theory about the best moment to cross the road. We can use scientific method by drawing on the success of our past estimates of the speed of cars, or we can decide that as Mars is in the ascendant and the tooth fairy owes us a wish we can cross the road whenever we like.
Scientific method is composed of the techniques we use to overcome the limitations of our physiology in order to improve our theories about what is actually happening in the here and now. In doing science we are concerned with the past only in terms of what events led to the present event which we are examining and we are concerned with the future only in terms of how well our understanding of past and present events allow us to predict the future. While we might long for our predictions to turn out the way we want we know that the events we are examining are indifferent to our needs and wishes.
Fantasy is the mode of thought which is essentially concerned with our needs and wishes. Fantasy is not concerned with what is but with how what is might be turned into something which accords with our needs and wishes. Fantasy interprets the past and the present in order to create a future we desire.
The difference between scientific method and fantasy is very clear when we see how we treat death in terms of science and in terms of religion. Science tries to discover the causes of death but it can have nothing to say about what death means. While we are alive all we can ever actually know about death is that a body becomes strangely still. What happens after death is a matter of fantasy. We have a choice of two basic fantasies. We can fantasize that death is the end of identity or we can fantasize that death is the doorway to another life. These fantasies are perhaps the most important fantasies we can ever have because whichever we choose determines the purpose of our life.
If you choose the fantasy that death is the end of your existence then your purpose in life becomes that of making this life satisfactory. There is a multitude of ways in which you can interpret satisfactory, but whatever you choose, the only way you can face the inevitability of death with a degree of equanimity is to able to feel that your life is somehow satisfactory.
If you choose the fantasy that death is a doorway to another life you have then to elaborate your fantasy. Will this next life be more pleasant than your present life? If you say no, it will be worse, you now fear death and have to use every method to try to prolong your life. If you say yes, it will be better, you are now faced with the question of justice. Is this new life open to all or only to those who have been sufficiently good? If you decide that there are certain standards that have to be met to qualify for this new and better life you now have to live your present life in terms of the next. These are the fantasies with which religion is concerned.
I examined some of the ways we elaborate our fantasies about death in my book which I called The Construction of Life and Death but which the publishers of the second edition called The Courage to Live. I got lots of different people to tell me about their fantasies about the nature of death and the purpose of life, and I arrived at the conclusion that, if you want to lead a peaceful life, you need to have an interpretation of death which give you courage and optimism. Without exception, those people who told me about their fantasies of a vengeful God and a hell gaping open to receive them were people whose lives well fraught with depression and distress.
Alas, no matter how hard we might try to create a religious belief or a philosophy of life which invariably gives us courage and optimism, just as every event always has both good and bad outcomes, so every belief has good and bad implications. Undoubtedly it's better to believe in a God who's on your side than in one who's out to get you, but what can you believe when a terrible disaster occurs to you?
Whenever a disaster occurs we ask two questions, How did this happen? and Why did this happen? How did this happen? is the scientific question which is answered by a careful examination of the events which led to the disaster. Why did this happen? is the philosophical question, Why in the whole scheme of things did this disaster occur? This is the question which worries people the most. After the Dunblane shooting the television picture of a bouquet of flowers with the card on which was one word WHY? was shown repeatedly, while many of the flowers given as a tribute to Princess Diana and many of the messages in the condolence books carried the same question, Why in the whole scheme of things has this happened?
There are only three possible answers to this question. It was someone else's fault, it was my fault, it happened by chance. However, in a Just World nothing happens by chance.
All religions teach that we live in a Just World where goodness is rewarded and badness punished. Religions differ in how they define goodness and badness, rewards and punishment, but they all describe a world which is encompassed by a Grand Design where the good are rewarded and the bad punished. Since the evidence that rewards and punishments are handed out fairly in this life is rather slim religions require an after life to save this hypothesis.
However, when terrible disasters occur to people who are patently good or to children who are too young to have become wicked many people are not satisfied with the explanation that the good and the innocent will have their reward in heaven. Thus many ministers of religion are faced with the problem of reconciling their fantasy that the good and the innocent are protected and rewarded with the brutal reality that the good and the innocent have suffered a terrible disaster.
When I was working in the NHS I encountered a number of ministers of religion who felt that they were telling nothing but the truth when they informed, say, their parishioner that her terminal cancer was caused by her wickedness. These were ministers of one of the fundamental persuasions who rejoice that their God is a God of Wrath who smite the ungodly. Radio Four prefers those ministers of the God is Love persuasion and so, after any terrible disaster, Thought for the Day and Morning Prayer are filled with people taking vertiginous leaps across the crevasses in their arguments and hoping that no one will notice their fudges, such as where they change the meaning of a term half way through a sentence.
Of course this is what we all do when we fantasize. When we're lying in bed at night reworking the day's events into a memory which allows sleep, when we're changing what I would have said if I'd thought of it in time to what I did say we're all leaping crevasses in our arguments and fudging like mad.
However, this is what we do in the privacy of our own heads. If we're going to do it out loud, in public, and present our fantasies has hard, irrefutable facts we should expect other people to point out the error of our ways. Or at least we should expect to encounter a sceptic or two who'll apply a little scientific method to our woolly thoughts.
Dorothy Rowe The Construction of Life and Death / The Courage to Live HarperCollins, 1989
The Skeptical Intelligencer is the journal of
ASKE The Association for Skeptical Enquiry
The Journal of Palliative Care
Information Exchange
The journal of the National Council for Hospice and No 32 - March 2001
WHAT DEATH MEANS TO US
When my mother was eighty years old she said something to me which I found to be totally unexpected and utterly amazing. She said,Dorothy, I've had a good life.
I asked, What do you mean?
She replied,Your father never interfered with what I wanted to do.
I thought, but did not say, He wouldn't dare. My father was afraid of her just as all her relatives were. When Mother was displeased she would become immensely enraged, and many times she followed this with a great sulk which could last weeks, even months. She often had occasion to be displeased because, apart from flowers which she loved, everybody and everything in the entire universe failed to live up to her expectations.
When I recovered from the shock of my mother's words I was pleased because I knew then that Mother had carried out the task which we all have to complete if we are to face our death with any degree of equanimity. Our task is that we have to review our life and find it satisfactory.
Just how we do this depends on the meaning we have given to death. All we can ever know for certain about death is that a person becomes strangely still. We can only guess at what death itself is, but there are only two possible meanings we can give it. Death is either the end of my identity or a doorway to another life.
Deciding on which meaning to give to death determines what we see as the purpose of our life. If we see death as the end of our identity we have to make our life in some way satisfactory. If we see death as a doorway to another life we have to decide whether the next life will be better than this one. If we decide, as most people do, that it will be better, we then have to decide on the standards which have to be met for entry into this better life. Since we have to meet these standards we have to live this life in terms of the next.
The belief in some kind of afterlife is prevalent in all societies and throughout history. It springs in part from the keen sense of justice and fairness which young children soon develop. The need for justice can engender a belief in a Just World where, ultimately, goodness is rewarded and badness is punished. Since real life rarely shows this pattern another life is needed where justice can prevail.
Many, if not most, people believe in a Just World. This is what all religions teach, though they differ in how they define goodness and badness, rewards and punishments. People who are not at all religious will often say that if they did not believe that ultimately goodness is rewarded and badness punished they would find life unendurable.
When we are small children we puzzle over the nature of death and the purpose of life. The adults around us might subject us to formal teaching on these matters, or we might just listen to adult conversations and garner ideas. Throughout our childhood we are constantly being told that we are not good enough. We are punished for our wickedness and exhorted to be good. We enter adult life with the constant worry, Am I good enough?
By 'good' we can mean many things, not just the usual virtues of honesty, truthfulness, generosity and so on, but the qualities which earn other people's attention and admiration, such as being successful or being attractive or loveable. We each plan our lives in terms of how we define 'good' and 'death'. As adults we can be so busy living our lives that we never make conscious, much less critically review, the meanings we have given to 'good' and 'death'. We tell ourselves that where death is concerned we are the exception. Then one day we discover there are no exceptions. Threatened with death, we review our life.
We think of the times we failed other people and the times we tried our best but still people hurt, betrayed and left us. We think of the lost opportunities and the bad decisions where we failed ourselves. If we see death as the end of our identity, how can we see our life as satisfactory?
If we see death as a doorway to another life we remember what we have been taught about the judgement which is going to be made about us. Whether it is God the Father who is going to judge us or whether some unknowable Power which will decide our fate, we are helpless. It is easy to feel hopeless. How can we merit a passage to a better life?
Older people facing their own death have already encountered death many times, and so may have considered the questions of what 'good' and 'death' mean and how we should assess our life, and have used their wisdom and experience to arrive at an answer similar to that of my mother. But many older people are prevented from arriving at such an answer by their harsh, unforgiving conscience or by the bitterness and resentment which can arise when we think that we have been good but have been denied our just rewards.
Younger people facing their death find that these questions only add to their confusion about what has happened to them. Thus both young and old can need help to consider these questions and arrive at an answer which gives some measure of comfort and support. They are not helped by people who brush aside any doubts they might express with, 'There, there, dear. You're a wonderful person and everybody loves you.' Nor are they helped by being presented with some packaged formula about forgiveness and salvation. In these ways many would-be helpers snub and belittle those who are dying because they themselves lack the courage to face these questions which show us only too clearly that there are no answers which give absolute certainty and infinite security. There is always a negative implication to every belief we might hold, and doubt is an integral part of the way we think.
What we need when we face these questions is someone who can listen to our doubts and anxieties without rushing to 'make it better', who can help us explore alternative answers to the questions, and who can face having those answers which they themselves have worked out thrown into doubt. It is unlikely that my mother ever encountered such a listener because she never talked about personal matters, but she had lived long enough to listen to herself and to allow herself in her last years to become much calmer, sweeter, more accepting than she had ever been. Then she could say that her life had been satisfactory.
The Courage to Live HarperCollins and
Spirituality & Psychotherapy
Spirituality & Psychotherapy -
In Spirituality and Psychotherapy edited by Simon King-Spooner and Craig Newnes, Critical Psychology Series, PPC Books, 2001
11 November 2000
WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY 'SPIRITUAL'?
Dorothy Rowe
Religion has always been one of my interests - what people believe and why, and the consequences of different beliefs. This was the subject of my second book. I called this book The Construction of Life and Death but when the publisher HarperCollins acquired it from the original publisher John Wiley my editor changed the title to something more upbeat, namely The Courage to Live.(1) The theme of this book was that our metaphysical beliefs are central to the way we live our lives because these beliefs always concern the nature of death and the purpose of life.
All religions try to bridge the chasm that death creates in the project of our life by teaching that some important part of ourselves will continue on after death. Actually, no one knows what death is. All we can say for certain is that a living person becomes strangely still. Nevertheless we each choose one of the two possible meanings we can give to death. Either death is the end of our identity or it is a doorway to another life. Whichever meaning we choose determines the purpose of our life. If we see death as the end of our identity we need to make our life in some way satisfactory, though there are a multitude of ways in which we might define 'satisfactory'. If we see death as a doorway to another life we have to live this life in terms of the next. For instance, if we see death as the doorway to either heaven or hell then in this life we have to strive to be good enough to go to heaven.
We are not likely to choose a meaning for death in a logical fashion by drawing up lists of the pros and cons of each meaning. Rather, one or other of the two meanings appeals to us because it confirms or strengthens that whole structure of meanings which gives us our sense of being a person. If seeing death as the end of our identity fits with how we see ourselves that is the meaning we choose. If we cannot bear the thought of not existing we choose to see death as a doorway to another life. Whichever we choose, we go on to construct fantasies which elaborate the meaning we have given to death. With death as the end we might fantasise about the cessation of pain or about how we shall be remembered after our death. With death as a doorway to another life we might fantasise about that next life. The fantasies which we create to elaborate the meaning we have given to death all have this aim, the maintenance of ourselves as a person.
Such fantasies have little relationship to logic and reason and what we might call reality. In my latest book Friends and Enemies(2) I speculate about a form of thought or a function of the meaning structure which I call 'primitive pride' which reacts immediately and ruthlessly to any threat to the meaning structure. This is not a new idea. It is implicit in the psychoanalytic concepts of defence mechanisms, particularly in rationalization. Karen Horney wrote about compensatory 'pride systems'(3) while the American psychologists Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson discovered what they called 'the psychological immune system, an army of rationalizations, justifications and self-serving logic'.(4)
Primitive pride operates without reference to reason and to what is actually going on. It protects our sense of being a person even in the most extreme conditions. Thus someone in the depths of depression and in danger of being completely overwhelmed by self-disgust can be implying in what he says to another person, 'I might be totally bad but I'm better than you because I know how bad I am while you don't know just how bad you are.'
Primitive pride can save us and it can destroy us. It is primitive pride which prevents people from seeing that in certain circumstances it would be in their long-term interests to compromise with their enemies. Thus primitive pride helps maintains the conflicts in Northern Ireland and in Israel. It is also primitive pride which reacts so strongly, even murderously, to anyone whose mere existence seems to threaten dearly-held fantasies. Down the centuries the infidel has been attacked and killed. Nowadays there might be ecumenical sweetness and light among the various religious groups, but a non-believer is still a threat. Even among those peace-loving people for whom spirituality is the highest good a dangerous person is one who asks, 'What do you mean by spirituality?' As I know only too well.
In 1997 BBC Radio 4 presented a series called Devout Sceptics . When I was invited to take part I was told that each programme would consist of an interview with someone who had no religious beliefs. In the weeks leading to the recording of my interview I persisted in thinking that the series was called Passionate Sceptics, a description which certainly applied to me. My error prevented me from thinking critically about who had set up this series and why.
Thus it was not until I was in the studio with the interviewer Bel Mooney that I discovered that the series was part of the God slot, that is, the period of airtime devoted to religious matters. I was quite cheered by the discovery that that BBC religious broadcasting had adopted such a broadminded approach. It is only of comparatively recent years that Thought for Today, broadcast during the Radio 4 Today programme, has included spokespeople for Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism and Islam, but all attempts by humanists to get themselves included have been adamantly rejected.
Bel began the interview by quoting from my book The Courage to Live where I wrote, 'Despite, or perhaps because of my upbringing I have never been able to believe in a personal God and an afterlife.'(5) Bel said, 'That was written in 1981. Is it still your position?' I replied that it had always been my position and that I had never had any reason to change. I felt that I had stated my position so clearly that it needed no amplification but soon Bel returned to the subject. She asked, 'You had a traditional Christian upbringing. Who was the God you believed in when you did?'
I replied, 'I didn't ever believe in God.' I explained that somehow the belief in God had never taken hold. I had been sent to Presbyterian church and Sunday school and attended scripture classes at school, and so acquired a detailed knowledge of Christianity, but I never acquired a belief in God. Rather, I acquired an intense scepticism about anyone who claimed to be in possession of some absolute truth. Such scepticism is often the outcome of a Presbyterian upbringing. Presbyterianism rests on the individual's conscience, and such a conscience will not allow lying to oneself. I could not pretend a belief which I did not have.
Moreover, my parents had not set me an example of belief. My father had no time for religion and was intensely sceptical of anyone who set himself up as a leader either religious or political. My mother sent her two daughters to church because she was frightened of what her mother would think if she did not, but she never attended church herself. She did not like people, and no man, whether earthly or heavenly, was going to tell her what to do. In my home there was no mention of God except as a rhetorical exclamation at times of crisis.
I thought my long answer had exhausted the matter but Bel was not going to let it go. I could now see that the interview was not going to one of the Anthony Clare variety, a gentle yet penetrating exploration of how the interviewee saw himself and his world. Rather, it was an interrogation aimed at forcing from me the confession that really, underneath, like all right-thinking people, I did believe in God. Now I had a better idea of what the title of the series actually meant and what the aim of the series really was. Each person interviewed might begin by claiming to have no religious belief but, through skilful questioning Bel would elicit from them, or bring them to understand, that they did have some spiritual or religious belief in some great power.
This kind of interview has a long history. During the Spanish Inquisition the inquisitors sought to wring a confession of faith from their prisoners, and so they developed in their interrogation the contrasting themes of 'you poor wretch' and 'you have powers you know not of', themes which Bel was now employing. The 'you poor wretch' theme was there in the way Bel kelp implying that, if I had no religious beliefs, I must live a barren, empty life in a world devoid of mystery, and with nothing ahead but death and eternal blackness. This is what many religious or spiritual people see as what we sceptics experience. I know it is a waste of time to say, 'No, not really, my life isn't like that,' because religious or spiritual people do like to feel superior to us sceptics, but if Bel had asked me I would have said that I find life enormously interesting and enjoyable. I like people. One of my favourite pastimes is to be in a public place and watch people go by. If anyone cares to tell me a story about themselves I am completely enraptured by what they say. People are to me infinitely interesting. Moreover, I love the world. I watch the sky. I gaze at flowers, fields, mountains, gardens, any stretch of water, and bliss is to be beside, if not in, the ocean. Trees are my passion, such creatures of beauty, truth, reliability and safety. As a child I used to escape into the bush to avoid my mother's dangerous temper, and there were the comforting, reliable trees. A woman - a psychologist colleague - once told me that she saw trees as alien and dangerous. I was shocked in a way that few things have shocked me.
I did not tell Bel all this but I did say that I especially loved eucalypts - gum trees as we call them in Australia - and that I had planted some in each of the gardens I had owned in England. I wondered whether Bel thought that at last I had confessed to a faith, albeit an arboreal one, and indeed she did, for she began to insist that all my beliefs were spiritual and I was most devout.
Alas for Bel, my love of trees does not amount to a religion. Though the bottom of my garden in London does bear a remarkable resemblance to the Australian bush, needing only a passing kangaroo to complete the picture, when I go there and give the solid trunks of these trees a pat, or even a hug, it is the pat or hug of friendship. I do not kneel down and worship them either actually or metaphorically.
Friendship is a relationship between equals. My trees and I are equals. We both exist. I find that so extraordinary and amazing that I do not need to add anything to it. To insist that all this had a Maker and that it was all part of some Grand Design would gild the lily so much as to destroy it. Admittedly, some of our experiences are so meagre and disappointing that they need to be polished up with various fantasies, but for me existence itself is not meagre and disappointing. It does not need fantasies about a Maker and other spiritual worlds. It is more than enough in itself.
Bel's insistence that I was both devout and spiritual was yet another example of religious colonization. The Christian Church has always done this. Christian colonizers took overthe religious festivals of the people they wanted to convert and claimed them for Christ.All the human virtues are claimed to be Christian virtues, as if non-Christians cannot have a morality. In this way Bel insisted that must be devout because I had devoted my life to helping people. I assured her that this was not the case. I tried to explain that when I was born I was presented with a problem which I came to feel I had to solve in order to survive. It was, 'Why does my mother behave as she does?' Soon this question broadened to, 'Why do people behave as they do?' I now know the answer to that question. I arrived at this answer over many years of reading, listening to people, and writing to clarify my thoughts. The fact that a by-product of this intensely selfish activity was that some people found themselves helped by what I said is very pleasing to me because I would rather live in a world where people were happy than in one where people were sad and confused, but to claim that I had devoted my life to helping people would not only be a terrible lie but an insult to those many people, both devout and non-devout, who have spent their lives devotedly and unselfishly helping others.
What Bel did in this interview was to take the words 'spiritual' and 'devout' and stretch their meanings in order to prove the premises of her argument that, in fact, I held religious beliefs. Down the centuries Christian apologists have been adept at stretching and juggling the meaning of words, and at creating fuzzy meanings that mean one thing in one situation and something else in another but thus prove the apologists' arguments. However, in earlier centuries no one would be considered to be a member of a faith unless that person professed that faith and accepted without question the dogma of that faith. Where a church had great political power many people professed that faith because not to do so meant exclusion from public life and often great economic disadvantage. For instance, in Britain until well into the nineteenth century people who were not members of the Church of England were excluded from the universities and from public office, and even later Irish Catholics were excluded from all economic advantages.
As the political power of the church dwindled in the twentieth century so the language of the church changed. The language associated with hell-fire and a vengeful God disappeared except from the discourses of the evangelical/fundamentalist churches where sinners still had to be frightened into repentance. Even in these churches the emphasis was on the good news of salvation, which meant that those who had been saved were told that they were now part of a community which offered endless love and security. Meanwhile, the mainstream churches watered down the demands of their faith, while many Westerners encountering the Eastern philosophies created forms of Buddhism and Zen which eschewed the rigours of those practices and beliefs for something much more cosy. All these changes allowed people to indulge in what Simon Fanshawe called the individual personal religions of the 'pick and mix variety like a Woolies sweet counter' with 'a nice cuddly God who leaves loopholes'(6), something that the Gods of previous centuries never did. It was in this atmosphere that the word 'spiritual' came into its own.
All religions of whatever variety try to find words which imply virtue and special qualities and which are accepted without question. Politicians do the same. American politicians use 'America' and 'the American people' in this way, as does Tony Blair use 'family values'. The word 'spiritual' might once have meant simply 'relationship to God' but now it is a Humpy Dumpty word which means whatever the speaker wants it to mean. Thus, whenever someone uses the word 'spiritual' to me I have to ask, 'What do you mean by "spiritual"?'
The answers I have been given to this question are many and various but in general they fall into two groups. Both groups include the meanings 'beneficial' and 'virtuous' but they differ greatly in the extent of the territory they each cover. The first group covers only communing with nature while the second group covers power and magic.
The use of the word 'spiritual' to refer to the experience of feeling at one with nature often carries the connotation of feeling superior to others, and this comes from the vanity which is always grounded in primitive pride acting to defend the sense of being a person. Both individuals and nations have claimed superiority because they commune with nature. According to the psychiatrist and writer Takeo Doi, the Japanese 'sometimes have feelings of superiority towards Westerners who in their eyes cannot easily become one with nature.'(7)
However, Takeo Doi points out that there is a very big difference between the Japanese see themselves in relation to nature compared to Westerners. He wrote,
In the Christian world view, God is the fountainhead of all existence. Nature may be a comfort for human beings, or even a companion, but it can never give human beings salvation. Human beings seek God and attempt to find peace with God. Even nature shares the anguish of humanity and awaits the salvation of God. In Japan, God, as a creator, is absent, and, therefore, human beings seek comfort by attempting to immerse themselves completely in nature.(8)
Takeo Doi went on to speculate that in Japanese society where conflicts in society are hidden in the shadows 'It may be more accurate to say that Japanese turn to nature because there is something unsatisfying in the way they deal with human relations, rather than to say simply that they escape to nature from human complications. Only this would explain why the Japanese feel able to breathe again when they confront nature.'(9)
Whatever our nationality, an important part of our meaning structure, our sense of identity, is our feeling of belonging to the place where we were born. This never goes away no matter how many years we live elsewhere - hence the gum trees in my garden. A sense of belonging to a place is a sense of being at home there, of being part of that place and no other. Living in a place where we do not belong is very threatening to our meaning structure, but usually primitive pride comes to our rescue. When the white settlers went to America they were overwhelmed by the immensity and majesty of the land. To survive as a person they had to create an unquestioning belief in a personal God who watched over their every move, making a personal assessment of their virtues and vices and rewarding and punishing them appropriately. Thus they inflated their sense of their own importance and reduced the majesty of the wilderness to that of a servant provided by God to serve His and their purposes.
Their predecessors, the Indians, knew better than to believe in the rewards and punishments of a personal God in a land where the rewards may be unexpectedly easy (a readily captured buffalo) and the punishments inordinately harsh (an all-encompassing blizzard). Like the Australian aboriginals, they saw that the best way to survive in an inhospitable vastness was to see themselves as one with it.(10)
Australian aboriginal writers like Mudrooroo often use the word 'spirituality' when writing about their people, but they use it as a kind of shorthand to encompass many aspects of their life - their attachment to the land, the rules of their society, their history, how people should relate to one another, and the vast body of stories which inform them about the way everything in their land, human, spiritual, plant, animal, the land itself and its climate, behaves.(11) White settlers in Australia despised the aboriginals, but as the years went by many descendants of the settlers discovered in themselves an intense attachment to their land. Nevertheless, as Thomas Keneally remarked, 'If we are so enamoured of Australia after three or four generations, imagine what a sense of possession the Aborigines have after 12,500 generations?'(12)
Alas, the aboriginal people are now suffering the ill effects of spiritual colonisation in the same way they had suffered the effects of Christian colonisation which robbed them of their homes and their children.(13) Many white 'spiritual' people, while expressing immense admiration for the spirituality of the aboriginal people, take the view that, as the aboriginal people have such a deep spiritual relationship to their land, they do not need unspiritual things like decent jobs, homes, health care and education.
When 'spiritual' becomes a Humpty Dumpty word what is lost is the specific reference to a very distinct and very important experience. This is what occurs when we cease to be wrapped up in our own concerns, cease to think about the past and the future, and attend only to the present and to what is before us. When we do this we reduce the number of our meanings or constructs which form a buffer between us and what is actually going on. We see what is before us with much more clarity and, in not concentrating on our personal concerns, we feel closer and even part of all that is around us. Such an experience can be the outcome of meditation or in what Buddhists call mindfulness, that is, close attention. It is an immensely important experience because it helps us keep our anxieties and wishes within reasonable limits, it ameliorates a painful sense of loneliness, and it helps provide the conditions whereby we can be happy. Happiness is not a goal we can achieve but is simply a by-product of what we do, and can be enjoyed only in the present.
Language cannot give a good account of what it is to be at one with our surroundings, just as language never gives a good account of all great emotional experiences. Being at one with our surroundings is a unique experience and thus might merit the word 'spiritual', but when this word takes on the connotations of superior virtue and contact with mysterious powers the experience itself with all its wonderment is degraded.
Throughout the history of the human race people have explained certain events in terms of unearthly powers, and these explanations have often been turned into religions which confer, or appear to confer, particular magical powers on an elite who guard their privileges jealously. Belief is demanded from the rest of the populace, and in return the elite promise to use their magical powers for the benefit of the populace.
Justification for all this has been claimed in different ways at different times and places, but at present with genes and the genome so much in the news many apologists for religion are claiming that there must be a gene for religion or at least that a need for religious belief is an essential part of human nature. Such justifications usually ignore the situation in which all human beings find themselves. We are a puny species blessed and cursed with consciousness. We know how puny we are and how vast the universe. We try to predict and control, but the forces of nature, indifferent to our existence, go their own way.
It requires great courage to see our situation as it is and to try to look after ourselves using our intelligence and creativity without resorting to fantasies of magic. It is not surprising that many people turn to magical beliefs to give them the illusion of power and control. In the short term such beliefs can help a person deal with his fears and give him hope, but in the long-term such beliefs prevent us from gaining the knowledge and understanding which we need both to survive as a species and to become fulfilled as the person we could be.
Describing religious belief in this way can be threatening to people with strongly held religious or spiritual beliefs because they do not wish to confront their own helplessness and limitations. To defend themselves they will protest that the non-religious attitude strips from our lives all that is best and reveals the world as a meagre, ugly, hateful place.
This indeed is how many religious or spiritual people see the world. Such a view has a long history in religions where all things material and physical are despised and only things of the spirit valued. Politically such a view keeps the rich rich and prevents the poor from protesting about their poverty. However, such a way of seeing the world can have its roots in earliest childhood.
When we are small children the adults around us use their power to persuade or coerce us into being good. Alas, being good means never being good enough, and so we can easily acquire a sense of being intrinsically bad and unacceptable. At times of crisis when we are being punished for being bad or we are punishing ourselves this sense of intrinsic evil can rise like a black tide and spill out over our surroundings. We are bad and the world around us is bad. Self-disgust becomes disgust with the world. A small child might destroy his toys: an adult might see trees as alien and dangerous.
Simultaneous self-hatred and world hatred make living impossible. Primitive pride comes to the rescue and suggests fantasies of a spiritual world outside the ordinary world, a place of redemption and salvation, and magical powers.
Such fantasies can enable a child to survive both physically and psychologically, but, if the child carries these fantasies into adult life and never subjects them to critical examination, that child's life is spoilt because he can never just be, accepting himself and his world. Happiness is impossible. He has to continue to elaborate his fantasies and resist, violently if necessary, anyone who suggests that his fantasies are just that, fantasies. From this way of thinking comes endless religious wars and, in a peaceful society, the sense of danger a non-religious person can feel when confronted by a religious or spiritual person.
This is how I felt when I was being interviewed by Bel Mooney. Rather than simply explaining my views I was constantly being put on the defensive. There was the implied threat that unless I owned up to a religious belief I would be revealed as a much lesser person than I thought I was. I could have caved in, but the stubbornness of a Presbyterian conscience prevailed. I could not allow myself to be described as a spiritual and devout person with a religious passion for trees.
Curiously, in that same year, 1997, I came to the attention of a Buddhist monk, T.S. Abeywickrama from Sri Lanka and founder of the Wisdom Centre of the Universal Friendship Foundation. He wrote to me saying, 'I was amazed and delighted to see a self-enlightened westerner for the first time through your illuminating article on Why Therapy Does Not Work published in The Times. . . Your article is graphic evidence that through your own experience you are enlightened to the reality that we know only what we have constructed in our mind.'(14)
In this article I had written...
While the world we live in seems to be solid and real and shared with others, what we each experience is our own individual construction. We can imagine events that occur without any relationship to us, but what we have is not knowledge but theories. In fact, everything we know is a theory, a construction, and this construction is inside our heads. . . Because all that we have are our interpretations, we are free to choose to acknowledge that what we have are theories and that we can use all means to test these theories, or we can insist that our theories are accurate representations of the truth.'(15)
Of course this is a statement in modern day terms of the essence of what the Buddha taught. I already knew that, and I also knew that understanding the Buddha's teaching is enlightenment. Nevertheless, I was greatly amused and delighted to be told by a Buddhist monk that I was enlightened without my having to go through many hours of meditation in the sitting postures which I always found excruciatingly painful. However, the trouble with enlightenment is that it does not confer any magical powers. You just have to work at deconstructing your constructions in order to get as close as you can to seeing the world as it actually is, while all the time knowing that, constructed as we are physiologically, we can never see reality directly. There is nothing spiritual in that knowledge at all.
(1) The Construction of Life and Death John Wiley, Chichester, 1982, The Courage to Live HarperCollins, London, 1991.
(2) HarperCollins, London, 2000.
(3) see Christopher Mace 'Socratic Psychotherapy' Changes, Vol.17, No. 3, 1999, p.164.
(4) Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Vol. 75, 1998, p.617.
(5) ibid xi.
(6) Simon Fanshawe Gets to the Bottom of All Things Spiritual Radio 4, November 2, 2000.
(7) The Anatomy of Self trans Mark A. Harbison, Kodansha International Ltd, Tokyo, 1986, p.155.
(8) op cit p.147.
(9) op cit p.151.
(10) Dorothy Rowe Wanting Everything HarperCollins, London, 1991, pp. 354-358, also Dorothy Rowe Friends and Enemies HarperCollins, London, 2000, pp.256-312.
(11) Mudrooroo Us Mob HarperCollins, Sydney, 1995.
(12) Guardian October 30, 2000.
(13) ibid pp. 283-4.
(14) personal communication January 6, 1997.
(15) 'Why therapy Does Not Work' The Times January 3, 1997
Sunday Telegraph
The Sunday Telegraph
The Sunday Magazine - Colour supplement, Australia
March 4, 2001
Love Thine Enemy
Do you have an enemy - someone who hates you and wants to harm you, even destroy you? It might be just one person or a group of people. Of course, everyone has at least one enemy somewhere in the world, someone who hates us because of our nationality, or our gender, or our religion, or the colour of our skin, and who wants to destroy us, but we don't know who this person is. Do you know who your enemy is? Can you give your enemy a name?
I've been asking people whether they've got an enemy. Some people say they don't have an enemy, but a lot of people say they do. They'll say, 'It's my ex-wife', or, 'My family', or, 'My boss', or, 'My next door neighbour', or, 'Politicians', or, 'Anyone who betrays me or lets me down', or, 'People who always think they're right.' In Lebanon I found that the enemy was the Israelis, in Serbia the enemy was the Americans, and in Northern Ireland, while the Protestants and the Catholics hated one another, they all hated the British government. Having an enemy is a very popular pastime
Yet having an enemy can't make you happy. Even if your enemy hasn't physically harmed you, you can spend a great deal of time thinking about your enemy and feeling angry and resentful. You can use up vast amounts of energy in making plans to protect yourself, and you can develop all sorts of fantasies about getting revenge. Life without an enemy would be much more pleasant, yet, having an enemy can give us many advantages. That's why we hang on to our enemies and won't give them up.
The first and greatest advantage of having an enemy is that an enemy turns a diverse collection of people into a tight-knit group. This is a common experience in the workplace. A group of people can work together but hardly know one another, or be selfish and bicker over small things. Then a boss arrives who is determined to change how the place operates, but he doesn't know how to deal with staff. I never cease to be amazed at how many managers are textbook cases of how not to handle people. This kind of boss might be just stupid, or he might be might be planning to get rid of the workers he doesn't like, so he doesn't care what he does to them, but, whatever, as soon as the workers see him as their enemy, they all join together. They find that being at work is exciting and interesting. Everyone's talking to one another, sharing news and jokes, and instead of blaming one another for whatever goes wrong they now have one person to blame, their enemy, the boss.
Bosses who are cunning managers of people will often create some kind of enemy for their staff to hate. It might be a commercial competitor, or another part of the workforce, or a rival sports team, but, whatever the enemy, the staff get enthused about their work. They not only get along together, they work more productively.
Throughout history leaders have often created an enemy in order to unite their people and to secure their own power. It's often said that Australia became a nation in the First World War when Australian troops were sent to fight the Germans. This unity soon fell apart as Australia was plunged into the Great Depression of the thirties when over thirty percent of the workforce was unemployed and many people went hungry. It needed the Second World War to unite the country again.
However, we don't always hate a national enemy just because our leader tells us to. In the Second World War, even though Australians deplored the Nazi regime in Germany and felt very threatened by the Japanese advance on Australia, people didn't suddenly, all together, start to hate the Germans and the Japanese. Most people could see a clear difference between the government a country might have and the ordinary people in that country. So the Australian government had to embark on a propaganda campaign to teach us to see all Germans and Japanese as our enemies and to hate them. I was in primary school then, and I can remember having to take part in school plays that taught us who were our allies and who were our enemies.
Soldiers have to be taught to hate the enemy. My father, Jack Conn, a soldier in France during the First World War, would often tell me the story of the first Christmas in the trenches, how German and British soldiers, feeling miserable, met in no-man's land to talk, laugh and play games. After this troops were forbidden to fraternise with the enemy and every Christmas there was an especially heavy bombardment of German lines.
Nevertheless, soldiers don't always learn to hate their country's enemies. Jack Conn didn't hate the Germans, and Ted Rowe, the man I married, never hated the Japanese, even though he was in the Australian Army from 1939 to 1946. For years after the war Ted had nightmares which re-enacted some of his wartime experiences. When he was in water transport in Darwin one of his jobs was to take supplies to the Australian troops still on Japanese-held Timor. One night, just as he was docking his boat in a harbour in Timor, he discovered that the people coming on board his boat were not Australians but Japanese soldiers. Ted managed to escape but his near-disaster haunted him. After the war Ted became a lawyer and, like most lawyers, he could often be magnificently paranoid, but he never directed this paranoia at the Japanese, and, years later, he was very pleased to have a Japanese daughter-in-law.
Ted didn't see the Japanese as his enemy because he didn't feel that the Japanese soldiers were out to get him. He knew that any Australian soldier in his position on that boat would have been in danger of being killed by the Japanese. The Japanese soldiers were a threat to his safety, but they weren't his personal enemies. To see those who put us in danger as an enemy we have to see our adversary as having selected us as the special target for their destructive designs. We take their enmity personally.
Moreover, we need to see our enemy, not as a person, but as an object which we can destroy. Pauline Hanson was quoted recently as saying of the boat people, 'I'd give them food and fuel and turn them around and if the boat sinks, too bad.' Obviously Pauline doesn't let herself imagine what it must be like to be on one of those boats and know that you're never going to make a safe landfall. Both Jack Conn and Ted Rowe knew that the German and Japanese soldiers were young men like themselves and could imagine what they were going through.
Identifying whether someone actually is your enemy can be very difficult. If another nation wanted to destroy utterly our own nation and culture, just as the Nazis wanted to destroy the Jewish people and their culture, then that nation would be trying to destroy each of us, but how can you decide whether a colleague or relative who is unhelpful or hurtful to you is your enemy? We can always be quite clear about whether someone is a friend or not, but whether someone is an enemy can be very confusing. We can ask ourselves whether this person actually wants to harm us, or whether he's so stupid he doesn't understand what harm he's inflicting on us, or whether we just happen to be in his way and anyone in our position would be in danger. That old saying, 'Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that someone isn't out to get you', reflects our confusion about enemies.
Often the fear we feel when we suspect that we've got an enemy is much greater than the threat really merits. What we feel is akin to the fear we feel when we discover that we are prey to something which is much more powerful than us. In the workplace bosses have more power than the workers, so as a worker we can feel helpless and weak, just as our ancient ancestors did when they were about to be devoured by a huge, wild beast. Evolutionary psychologists speculate that this fear has been handed down from one generation to another as part of evolution, but really we don't need evolution to explain why we have a fear of being prey. When we were children we were often prey to huge, dangerous beasts, only these beasts were adults and older children. They could surprise us, and hurt us, and make us feel we were very much in danger. Our ancient ancestors tried to protect themselves by banding together with their fellows, and we as children did that same. We looked to our family to protect us.
However, the security which comes from belonging in a group never comes for free. The group always exacts a price. If you want the security of belonging to the nation of Australia you have to be prepared to pay its taxes and obey its laws. If you want the security of belonging to a family you have to give up being a selfish, self-centred baby and learn to be a good child, that is, you had to learn to be clean, unselfish and unaggressive.
Alas, learning to be good doesn't mean that we no longer feel any urge to be dirty, selfish and aggressive. What can we do with these urges which our family, and our society, will not tolerate? This is where having an enemy can be so useful. We can project on to our enemies those parts of ourselves which we find unacceptable. We say to ourselves, 'It isn't me who is wicked. It's my enemy.' In every conflict each side describes the other in the same terms. The first word which is used to describe an enemy is 'dirty'. Remember 'ethnic cleansing'? The second part of the description is a string of words that refer to selfishness - greedy, uncaring, cruel - while the third term is always 'aggressive'. We are peaceful people: our enemy is aggressive. Even if we had got our retaliation in first, we never started the conflict. It was our enemy. A fourth term is often applied to enemies by people who have difficulty with their own sexuality. They ascribe to their enemy gross, bizarre sexual practices.
Seeing the group we belong to as good and the group's enemy as wicked brings a great deal of comfort. Even better, when we might doubt that we're sufficiently up to the mark, we can assure ourselves that, even if we aren't perfect, we belong to the best group in the world. I've often heard Australians, making their first visit to England and becoming rattled by how different England is from Australia, telling themselves and me how awful England is and how much better things are in Australia. Thus they can feel superior because they're Australians. In the first two years I was in England I worked with a group of old-fashioned psychiatrists who often amazed and horrified me. I'd think to myself, 'What else can you expect from a bloody Pom!' Now I've lived in England for long enough to know that the Poms are human beings just like us.
Whenever we feel the need see some group of people as our enemy what we are trying to do is to defend our sense of being a person. Whenever we lose confidence in ourselves, whenever we feel weak and vulnerable, we feel that we are going to be annihilated as a person. We have to defend ourselves.
The sense of being a person, what you call 'I', 'me', 'myself', is made up of all your ideas, attitudes, opinions, beliefs, memories, images and feelings, in fact all the meanings you have created to make sense of yourself, your life and the world you live in. All these meanings form a structure which isn't an accurate reflection of everything you've encountered but a picture, an approximation, a theory about what's going on. When your life is going along well, everything that's happening around you seems to confirm your picture of yourself, your life and your world. However, sometimes you discover that you've made a major error of judgement, that there's a serious discrepancy between what you thought your life was and what it actually is. Anyone old enough to be reading this is old enough to have had this terrible experience at least once. You might have discovered that the person you thought would be your life companion has left you, or that your future career is no longer open to you, or that you'd always believed that if you're good nothing bad will happen to you, and now you've discovered that no amount of goodness prevents disaster. When you see such discrepancy you feel that there's nothing solid in the world and, worse, your whole self is crumbling, shattering, even disappearing. You fear that you will vanish like a wisp of smoke in the wind or a raindrop into the ocean. You're utterly terrified.
When we were small children we often experienced this terrible fear because we knew so little about the world and we often made mistakes. We set about developing ways of acting and thinking which, we hoped, would prevent us ever having this experience again. Consequently everything we do has as one of its aims to protect ourselves as a person. Enemies help us do this.
The biggest threat to our sense of being a person comes from other people. They can undermine our self-confidence, and, as our self-confidence diminishes, we find it harder to hold ourselves together. Other people can show us that we've made an error of judgement. As much as we need other people, other people are dangerous. However, if a group has an enemy, the people in the group are much nicer to one another. This is why people who are interested in soccer don't just choose a team to support. They choose another team to hate, to see as their enemy. Enemies can make team sports much more interesting.
Another great threat to our sense of being a person is having to admit to yourself that you've failed, or you've made a mistake or done something wrong. But an enemy can save us from the tedious business of having to take responsibility for what we do. We can blame all our failures and all our errors and defeats on our enemy. My friend Dusan in Belgrade told me how his father, once a boyhood friend of Peter II, the last king of Serbia, had what Dusan called 'a hen laying golden eggs, because he had those enemies he could blame for every problem he had in his life. Every failure he had he would put the blame on the Communists. He was not chosen to be a professor because he was not a Communist - the Communists wouldn't allow non-Communists to be professors. And then he had a big failure in his marriage - and that was because he didn't have a big apartment. Big apartments are reserved for party members: he was not a party member. He was drinking heavily, and he'd say he wouldn't be doing that if he'd been given all the things he deserved.'
Dusan's father didn't want to understand what had happened to him and so come to terms with his disappointments and losses. When we take into adult life the unresolved conflicts of our childhood we suffer in many different ways. Some people, wisely, by reading and discussion and perhaps going into therapy resolve the conflicts they had with their parents and siblings, but others act out their unacknowledged hatred, anger and jealousy by creating an enemy and then expressing these emotions against their enemy. An unacknowledged hatred of your father can seriously impair your ability to deal with anyone in authority.
Having an enemy is exciting, and life can be so dull and ordinary. I've met a lot of people who looked back to their youth in the Second World War as being the most best time of their life. Many people find that, as they get older, chance events and the choices they've made have led them to be quite alone without anyone to take notice of them and see them as important. Some of these people become paranoid. They believe that they know about a conspiracy by some powerful people who are plotting to take over the world, or they are convinced that television presenters speak to them directly and that messages on television and radio have a significance intended for them alone. The great thing about being paranoid is that someone, somewhere, is thinking of you.
When a conflict with an enemy comes to an end some people can find it hard to forgive because they've made their enemy an essential part of themselves as a person. In the Australia I grew up in there was a complete split between Protestants and Catholics, all foreigners were abhorred, and the Aboriginal people weren't seen as being really human. In recent studies of racism and of attitudes towards reconciliation with Aboriginal people my generation comes out as still the most racist and anti-Aboriginal. Noel Pearson has expressed concern that some of the older Aboriginal leaders think only in terms of past suffering at the hands of the whites and refuse to look to the future. It seems that some of us oldies feel that we can't afford to give up our enemies.
Enemies are useful. But in this world there are no free gifts and enemies are expensive, both in monetary terms and in terms of being a person.
Any country which engages in a war gets poorer. Britain won the Second World War but it lost the empire which made it rich. As individuals, having an enemy might help to hold us together as a person, but it stops us from developing into the wiser, more creative person that we might have been. Putting our time and energy into hatred and revenge diminishes us as a person. Seeing our enemy as a despised object rather than as a fellow human being reduces our capacity for empathy, and it's empathy that allows us to leave the narrow confines of our own little world and explore other people's worlds, and draw close to other people in kindness, generosity and love. Needing an enemy is like needing a smoke or a drink. Fulfilling that kind of need can be comforting at the time, but, in the long run, having an enemy only does us harm.
Dorothy Rowe Friends and Enemies HarperCollins, 2000.