Dorothy Rowe - Beyond Fear

‘Naïve psychiatry’ may still be flourishing but so is naïve psychology. If this psychology were water it wouldn’t wet the soles of your feet. When I read much of the work of my colleagues, whether academic papers in learned journals or self-help books for the general public, I get the feeling that most members of my profession have led extraordinarily sheltered lives, or perhaps in their teens they encountered life in all its crudity and messiness. Recoiling in horror, they comforted themselves with a fantasy of a pleasant, technicolour world where all problems are soluble. To maintain this fantasy into adulthood they had to ignore anything to do with politics. Traditionally, the British Psychological Society (BPS) has viewed politics as distasteful. More recently psychologists in the UK, along with those in the USA and Australia, have come to fear that any interest in the political aspects of their work could threaten their livelihood in a highly competitive market. Such timidity has led to the BPS’s professional journal, The Psychologist , reading like a high-school magazine written by diligent, unquestioning students. Psychologists feel sorry for their clients, but the way most of them talk about their clients, both publicly and privately, reveals that they do not see their clients as fellow adults but as wayward children whom they can teach to live in sensible ways. They present their advice to these children briskly and with authority because they feel it would lessen their standing in their profession and in the eyes of the public to admit to doubt and inadequacy. They seem to have no measure of how naïve they are.

There are those academic psychologists who live in a world of very long words, all of them abstract nouns. To them people are but containers for traits such as ‘sociability’, ‘religiosity’, ‘extraversion’ and ‘introversion’. (In much the same way naïve psychiatrists see people as mere containers for ‘depression’ or ‘schizophrenia’.) Psychologists discover these abstract nouns by giving groups of people questionnaires about what they do. Their answers are reduced to numbers, and these numbers are put through some statistical processes to see how the answers clump together in different groups. These groups are given abstract nouns as names, and these names are regarded as being ‘factors’ or ‘traits’ which explain why people behave as they do. Thus, these psychologists know that you don’t have dinner with your friends because you like to see them but because you have a trait of sociability. They have not noticed that two people can do exactly the same thing but for totally different reasons, and that it is our reasons which impel us into action.

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