What makes this experience particularly terrifying is that, buried in your memories of the time when you lived in a world of giants who misunderstood you and laughed at your attempts to talk, are memories of falling apart not once but often. How frightening those experiences were, and how hard it was to put yourself together again! Very likely the adults around you called these experiences ‘temper tantrums’, and they might have scolded or slapped you, making the experience very much worse. They did not understand that, because little children have a limited knowledge of the world, the way they have made sense of the world is often disconfirmed by events. Then the children can feel completely overwhelmed and unable to make sense of what is happening. Their meaning structure falls apart. They scream and cry, and need to be held and talked to gently.
Small children quickly develop defences to keep their meaning structure intact. One such defence is to become very particular about what they eat. They have discovered that food can spring big surprises. As we all know, sticking to the familiar makes us feel safe.
If parents understand and accept this they can put aside their anxiety that their child is not getting an adequate diet and wait patiently for this phase to pass. Children can choose a most peculiar range of foods but still get an adequate diet provided they do not feel threatened by parents who want them to eat properly.
Here ‘eating properly’ means eating the right kind of food at the right time in the right place and in the right way. It is the parents’ ‘right’, not the child’s ‘right’, and when the parents try to impose their ‘right’ on the child the child has to resist because, in trying to remove the child’s defence and impose their ideas on the child, the parents, in the eyes of the child, are threatening to annihilate him as a person.
This is the issue at the heart of all our relationships, be they loving relationships with friends, family and lovers, or hateful relationships with those who try to do us down, or power relationships with those who want to tell us what to think and do – people like teachers, clerics, politicians, advertisers. Without exception, other people are always a threat to our meaning structure. By trying to impose their ideas on us they can get us to doubt the validity of our own meanings. We might gratefully accept our mother’s advice to stay healthy by eating lots of fruit or the bank’s advice about a mortgage, but if we find ourselves being streamrollered into doing something we do not want to do, or if constant criticism leads us to lose confidence in our ability to make even the smallest decision, we start to lose that which an intact meaning structure gives us: the sense of being who we are. Even more, we can become frightened that we are going to be annihilated as a person,
Other people live in the world around us, and so, like everything else around us, they cannot be known directly by us. All we can ever know of other people is the picture we create of them, a guess which always carries a degree of error and uncertainty. The only direct knowledge we can ever have of anyone is our knowledge of ourselves, our own thoughts and feelings, our own personal truth. Everything else is a guess.
Unfortunately, many children lose the ability to know exactly what they think and feel. The adults around them tell them that their thoughts and feelings are childish, wrong, irrational, even wicked. Moreover, adults can behave in such a way that the child becomes confused. If a parent beats his children and treats them cruelly while at the same time demanding the children’s love the children cannot freely love or hate the parent. Some children deal with this confusion and with being told that their thoughts and feelings are wrong by turning away from what goes on inside them and instead paying attention only to what goes on around them. In adult life they cannot distinguish anger from fear, they cannot recognize what their most important priorities are, and they say of themselves, ‘I don’t know who I am,’ or even, ‘I’m a role without an actor’.
As adults we can try to protect ourselves from all kinds of uncomfortable emotions by lying to ourselves, by telling ourselves that we are not angry when indeed we are, or that we really have not hurt other people but have acted only in their best interests. Such lies might bring short-term relief, but their long-term effects are destructive, not least because we have destroyed the only truth about which we might be absolutely sure.
If we want our meaning structure to be as accurate a picture of the world as possible we need to develop ways of checking the accuracy of the meanings we create. The starting point for this is the acceptance that things are not as they seem. My colleague Chris French, reader in psychology at Goldsmiths College, has done a great deal of research into the paranormal and what people are prepared to believe. Chris divides us all into sheep and goats. The sheep, he says, tend to believe in the paranormal while the goats tend to doubt such claims. I have always been a goat, but Chris, so he told me, began with a sheeplike belief in the paranormal but, like all good scientists, when his results did not support his beliefs he changed his beliefs. Nevertheless, like all wise goats, he knows that there is much going on in the universe which we cannot apprehend, and so he keeps an open mind and is prepared to be surprised.
To check the accuracy of the meanings we create we need to develop our own scientific method. We need to be aware that the meanings we create are hypotheses, theories about what is going on. We have to test out these theories by looking for evidence which supports or disproves them. We can develop the habit of looking very closely at a situation before creating our own theory. We can become skilled in collecting evidence, asking questions, and comparing our observations with those of other people. We can refuse to become tightly wedded to our theories and, when we are proved wrong, we can, without too much pain, relinquish our theories and create new ones.
Alas, a close, honest inspection of the natural world and the people in it does little to bolster our confidence in our own significance in the scheme of things. The planet we inhabit and the universe of which it is part are indifferent to our existence, while most – perhaps all – of our fellows are far more interested in their own concerns than they are in us. This state of affairs is very disturbing to many people and, rather than getting to know the world and their fellows, they prefer to create fantasies where the universe came into being in order that they could exist and where their lives have an absolute significance which time and other people can never destroy.
Such fantasies can give comfort and, when times are hard, courage and optimism, but events can easily throw doubt on the truth of such fantasies. It can be a great comfort to believe that you live in a Just World where, inevitably, the good are rewarded and the bad punished. You can assure yourself that if you are good nothing bad can happen to you. But what do you do when something very bad happens to you? Do you decide that in your case the system of justice has failed and you have been denied your rewards? Or do you decide that you had been kidding yourself and that you really are a bad person deserving of such punishment? Or do you abandon your belief in a Just World and accept the large amount of evidence that life can be very unfair simply because things happen by chance?
Meanings which we acquired in childhood can be very hard to change. I have met many people who are unable to abandon their belief in a Just World and who spend lives of great misery alternating between bitter resentment at not getting their deserved rewards and guilt at their wickedness, for which the disasters they have suffered are a punishment they deserve.
Being able to change our meanings is not just a matter of how long and how strongly we have held these meanings. Meanings too can be held in place through the forms of thought in which they are contained.
The pattern of genes which each of us inherits is an array of possibilities. How each of these possibilities becomes an actuality depends on the experiences each individual encounters.
The array of possibilities is an array of forms. There is the form of a heart, a brain, a hand and so on. One individual’s form of a hand might