Following the school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018, we got a first-hand glimpse of the repugnance we feel in relation to the cowering effects of fear. The image of deputy Scot Peterson, an otherwise sound member of the sheriff’s department, standing frozen outside the entrance to the school while children inside were being killed was both shockingly flagrant and sadly understandable.
What intrigues me about courage, and the lack of it, is not whether it works in overcoming fear, or whether it is something we can acquire, but instead, why it has become necessary in the first place. Why has our culture, and countless cultures before it, built so many rituals to support the attainment of courage? Courage, it seems, is a bit like a winter coat. Although it might be quite attractive, we certainly wouldn’t own it if it weren’t so damn cold. What is it about fear that requires such drastic countermeasures? Isn’t fear designed to alert us to what is dangerous? Why would fear, something so crucial to our survival, evolve within us to become such a threat?
“Our deepest fears are like dragons guarding our deepest treasures.”
—Rilke
Every so often, a patient of mine asks me about the turtles. I have a lot of them. They sit on several shelves in my office, along with my books. I don’t remember how I started collecting them, but I do remember when I got the first one.
I was cleaning out my mother’s apartment after she died. There it was, in a little curio cabinet. I remembered this turtle from my childhood. It was a goldish-colored metal, and its shell opened to reveal a hidden compartment. I took it down from the shelf and sat wondering what I might find inside. Would it be some clue to my mother’s life or to my childhood? Perhaps something long forgotten: a lock of hair, an antique ring, an old penny. When I opened it, however, I was surprised to find it empty. I think I was disappointed, but it is hard to know, given the grief I was in.
When patients ask me about the collection, I am open to talking about it. I have never told anyone about the connection to my mother; I simply say that I started collecting them a while back and that I find turtles quite fascinating. I often say something about how they remind me of people, the shells we have and the ways we hide.
I believe I said something like this to April. She and I had been working together in psychotherapy for a relatively short time, maybe six months, when she asked about them. Most likely, before I told her what the turtles meant to me, I inquired about what she imagined.
In depth psychotherapy, the relationship of patient and therapist is both real and imagined. It is real in that, as a therapist, I work to be present and emotionally truthful. But it is imaginary in that, as a therapist, I come to inhabit roles for my patients—and they for me—that are infused with subjective imaginings. This, in the work of depth psychotherapy, we call transference and countertransference.
What we have discovered as clinicians over these 120 years, since Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung turned our attention to the unconscious, is that patterns from our early development tend to be the raw materials from which we build our imaginative perceptions of others.6 These “projections” are something we all experience. In essence, they are the building blocks of our subjectivity.
In using the term imaginative to describe this type of cognition, I am highlighting a model of the mind that we will be exploring more in Chapter Three. Imagination, in this model, is less of a conscious creative act and more of an unconscious one. It is something creative that is continually being produced within our minds, something we only tangentially participate in. The psychologist Steven Pinker refers to this as the basis of intelligence, a process of “metaphor and combinatorics.”7” So, when April became curious about why I have a collection of turtles, it was an opportunity for us to understand just a little bit more about her and where her mind spontaneously would take her.
April is a thirty-two-year-old single woman who has lived her entire life in New York City. She grew up with a narcissistic father who was quite emotionally demanding. Currently, she works as an actuary in the insurance industry.
My experience of April is difficult to describe. She is pleasant and attractive, in a down-to-earth sort of way. She is socially adept, but there is a remote quality to her that is always present. There are moments in the midst of her speaking when she will look downward in such a way that her eyelids seem to close. These are moments of quiet distance in which April seems far away, on what she calls her “secret island.” So I wait. I wait for her to return. And when she does, it is almost as if she is surprised to find me still there. That’s when I see the fear.
April grew slowly into her fear, it seems. Little by little, her father’s expectations, demands, and subtle coercion began to shape a pattern of threat recognition around love and relationship. She slowly receded from dating and romance, and by the time I first met her, she had been alone for a number of years.
As I began my explorations to understand these relational movements of fear and defense, I quickly discovered that human beings seem to be the only animals that suffer with fear in this way. I am not talking about fear limiting behavior or restricting exploration; that is a part of fear’s arsenal that serves all animals, protecting them from harm. I am talking about a deeper impact upon our humanity, some way in which fear seems to turn against us. What we will see, going all the way back to the first moments of life, is that there is something quite unique about us as human beings, and that this difference alters the way fear operates within us.
The Birth of Fear
As babies, we come into the world utterly helpless. Not only do we rely on our caregivers for protection and physiological nurturing; we rely on them for more complex psychological development as well. This is where we part company with other animals. Later in this book, we will drill down a bit deeper into the particulars of how evolution brought us to this place, but for now, let it suffice to say that Homo sapiens come into the world with significantly higher degrees of dependence than other animals, including our primate relatives. Coming into the world with vulnerability such as this opens us up to a broad range of potential psychological troubles. And yet, our vulnerability and dependence often go unnoticed—that is, until something goes wrong.
Following the bombings of London in World War II, countless children and infants were orphaned and housed at the London Foundling Hospital. Working there at the time was an Australian physician and psychoanalyst by the name of Rene Spitz.8 What struck Spitz initially was how quiet it was in the nursery at the hospital. Even though these many infants, under one year old, were abandoned and alone, none of them were crying. Spitz began to study these infants and started the world on a path toward understanding the needs of infancy and the importance of maternal love.9
Spitz came to understand what happens to a baby that is systematically deprived of love. Severe neglect, such as these infants experienced over many months, began to turn them into mere shells of human beings. The physicians called this condition “anaclitic depression,” a depression that occurs in the first year of life, stemming from trauma such as this.
To get a better idea of what these withered infants were like, I recommend that you Google the videos of Rene Spitz and the “Foundling Infants.” You will see how the life force within these young human beings receded back into some deep reservoir,