There are those clinical psychologists who aim to replace their client’s ‘dysfunctional cognitions’ with ‘functional cognitions’ which bear a remarkable similarity to their own eminently ‘functional cognitions’. Cognitive behavioural therapists who are in close contact with real life know quite well that there is no set of ideas or beliefs that will invariably lead to us being secure and happy, because all the interpretations we make of what is happening have both good and bad implications. For instance, seeing yourself as being competent has the good implication that you will be able to face new situations with confidence, but the bad implication that, seeing you as competent, people are less likely to help you. Naïve psychologists seem not to understand this. Psychologists who practise positive psychology, the psychology of happiness, advocate, amongst other things, that each day we should count our blessings. Psychologies magazine asked me to take part in a debate on happiness with Professor Christopher Peterson, an American psychologist well known for his work in positive psychology. The features editor of the magazine sent me an unedited copy of what Professor Peterson had written. He concluded his argument with,
Should we eradicate sadness from the world? Yes. This is not to say that we should eradicate challenge and difficulty, not that we could really do that. Challenge and difficulty are the stuff of life: they make innovation and accomplishment possible. But what we should do is to encourage people to respond to setbacks not with despair but with good cheer, hope and perseverance. Happiness makes this possible.
Should we pursue happiness? Yes.
This was written in August 2006 while world governments dithered over what, if anything, they should do to stop the death and destruction in Lebanon following the invasion by the Israeli army. It seems to be very naïve not to understand that there were many Lebanese and Israelis who were suffering the kind of losses which create a sadness that would stay with them till the end of their days. When we lose something which is an essential part of our being, be it a person, a home, a livelihood, or a future, we are left with an empty space inside us that no amount of blessings can ever fill.
Also in August 2006, an Austrian girl, Natascha Kampusch, who had been kidnapped when she was ten by a man, Wolfgang Priklopil, managed to escape after eight years’ captivity in a cellar under Priklopil’s house. This must have been a terrible experience, but worse was to come. According to those psychologists and psychiatrists who are experts on such things, at some point Natascha was struck by a terrible disease, Stockholm syndrome. This disease caused Natascha to sympathize with her captor.
Stockholm syndrome resides nowhere but in the minds of these psychologists and psychiatrists. They believe that diagnosing Natascha as having this illness shows that they are great experts. They also avoid having to explain to the public what happens to us all when we are imprisoned on our own for an indefinite period. We all need contact with other people just as much as we need food. Lacking contact with people, we become unable to distinguish our thoughts and feelings from what is going on around us. This is well known from the accounts of people who have spent long periods in solitary confinement and from sensory deprivation experiments. When we are starving we will take the vilest of nourishment, and, rather than be completely isolated, we will create a relationship with whoever is on offer, no matter how vile that person may be. Hostages like Brian Keenan and John McCarthy, who spent five years in captivity in Lebanon, much of that time on their own, have described this in detail. Psychologists who have studied how a baby forms a bond with a mothering adult have shown how the nature of the bond is very much determined by the way the mother responds to the child. Simply put, when the mother is unfailingly pleasant and kind, the child assumes that the mother will always be available and thus can bear being separated from her; when the mother is unfailingly unpleasant and unkind, the child forms only the slightest of bonds. When the mother alternates between being kind and pleasant and being unkind and unpleasant the child forms an anxious attachment to the mother, a bond which is very strong because, even though the child is frightened of her, he always hopes to be rewarded by her. To survive as a person Natascha had to form a relationship with Priklopil. Because he was sometimes kind and sometimes unkind Natascha became anxiously attached to him, and so she was distressed when she learned that he had killed himself. Placed in a similar situation, we all would have done much the same as Natascha, and none of us, including Natascha, would have been struck by the dreaded Stockholm syndrome.
Diagnoses like this put a security fence between the professional and the person who is suffering. It is the professional who is being kept safe from the horrors and the pain of real life while pretending to be an expert on people. Very little of the theory and practice of psychology and psychiatry relates to real, lived experience. Psychoanalysts have always tried to describe real, lived experience, but their desire to be special and different, as marked by their special language and by the difficulties in acquiring a ticket of entry to their group, has always overridden their desire to give a generally comprehensible account of what it is to live. Much the same can be said of the existential therapists. I have always tried to describe through the stories I tell what it is to be human, but I take things apart, while the great writers, artists and composers encompass life in all its complexity. Denis Noble, in his book The Music of Life, said of his colleagues, ‘Scientists and others tend to be quite fond of neat, clear-cut patterns. Nature is not. Nature is inherently messy… For some scientists reductionism functions as a security blanket. It avoids the need to ask too many questions, to stare into the abyss of uncertainty.’4
For most psychiatrists and psychologists, DSM diagnoses function as a security blanket, saving them from having to confront the messiness of life and its great uncertainties. Diagnoses also allow them to see other people, not as agents, but as puppets. The theories which picture people as puppets are about behaviour being the outcome of the actions of genes, biochemistry, disorders, traits, or the movements of the planets. Such theories are far removed from what we actually do. Neuroscientists have now put beyond doubt the fact that we cannot see reality directly but know only the constructions of our brain which come from our past experience. Developmental psychologists who understand this have applied this knowledge to their studies of babies and toddlers, and have shown that babies are born, not as passive puppets, but as agents, eager to make relationships and to act on their world.
Since no two people ever have the same experience, no two people ever see anything in exactly the same way. What determines our behaviour is not what happens to us but how we interpret what happens to us. In every moment of our life we are engaged in interpreting what is going on. We are, in effect, meaning-creating creatures. This is what it is to be human.
All the meanings we create form a kind of structure, and out of this structure comes our sense of being a person. Because we cannot see reality directly, every interpretation we make is a guess about what is going on. Thus, what we experience as ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘myself’ is a set of guesses about ourselves and our world. Our guesses are also predictions. When we find that our predictions are proving to be reasonably accurate we feel secure. However, the world can often surprise us, not always in pleasant ways, and when this happens some of our ideas fall apart. This is a very common experience. Unless we know that what we are experiencing is a necessary collapse of our ideas, we feel ourselves to be falling apart. If we are full of self-confidence we can say to ourselves, ‘I’ve got through things like this before and I’ll do so again,’ but, if we lack all self-confidence, we feel that our very self is crumbling, shattering, even disappearing. We feel a terror greater than our fear of death. Facing death, we can tell ourselves that some important part of ourselves will continue on, perhaps our soul or spirit, or the memories others have of us. Facing the annihilation of our sense of being a person, we feel that we are about to disappear like a wisp of smoke in the wind. In such terror we can resort to those desperate defences which psychiatrists call mental disorders. They are not illnesses but defences which serve to hold us together when we feel ourselves falling apart. We can relinquish these defences once we come to understand that what is falling apart is not our self but some of our ideas. These ideas must fall apart so we can build new ones that better reflect what is going on in our life. We are not puppets, victims of our genes, traits, or star signs,