D.H.LAWRENCE ON THE ROLE OF THE FATHER

................................by Elizabeth Hope

........Relating to the first evening of our series of seminars on ‘Siggy and his Successors’, Elizabeth Hope came up with this interesting quotation from D.H.Lawrence, whom most of us know only as a novelist. Apparently, he wrote a remarkable number of essays that remain neglected and generally unknown. Elizabeth says, “These essays by Lawrence have much to add to our discussion of ' psychodynamism’. I thought this quote would have been useful for the father's role when it arose the other night.” Here is the quotation from Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious by D.H. Lawrence:

............' But if the child thus seeks the mother, does it then know the mother alone? To an infant the mother is the whole universe. Yet the child needs more than the mother. It needs as well the presence of men, vibration from the present, body of the man There may not be any actual palpable connection. But from the great voluntary centre in the man pass unknowable communications and untellable nourishment of the stream of manly blood, rays which we cannot see, and which so far we have refused to know, but none the less the quickening dark rays which pass from the great abdominal life centre in the father to the corresponding life centre in the child. And these rays these vibrations are not like mother vibrations. Far, far, from it. They do not need the actual contact the handling and caressing. On the contrary the true male instinct is to avoid physical contact with the baby. It may not even need actual presence. But present or absent there should be between the baby and the father that strange intangible communication, that strange pull and circuit such as the magnetic pole exercises upon a needle, a vitalistic pull and flow which lays all the life-plasm of the baby into the line of vital quickening , strength , knowing. Any lack of this vital circuit, this vital interchange between father and child, man and child means an inevitable impoverishment to the infant.
..............The child exists in the interplay of the two great ‘l’s, the womanly and the male. In appearance the mother is everything. In truth the father has actively very little part. It does not matter if he hardly sees his child. Yet see it he should and touch it sometimes, and renew with it the connection the life circuit, not allow it to lapse, and vitally starve his child.

NOTES FROM A GROUNDHOG

....................by Stanley

....I am trapped in my story. Every day I tell the same tale. Oh yes, things change outwardly, superficially. But me – I never change. I am the same me as yesterday, and the day before. I know. I can remember myself. Each day defines the next one; each day the only day of my life.
.....What is this ‘me’ that keeps repeating? Who am I that I can’t escape and tell a different story? My efforts to escape, to change, are all part of the eternal repetition.
.....I come home to myself and have to admit that I am not a very nice person. I am ungrateful, disloyal and self-centred. I always have been. I try to shift the responsibility, but it doesn’t work. Even though my mother never showed affection I always knew she was on my side. I was three months old when she was widowed and later married a horrible man just to give us a roof over our heads. She never had any more children. I was the only one; and how did I repay her? I left home as soon as it suited me, never to return, abandoning her to her fate. I know who I am: I am ungrateful, disloyal and self-centred. I never change. That’s me; and Groundhog Day is every day.
......I try, and have always tried, to alter the story, to paint myself in a better light. But inflating one’s ego doesn’t work. Nothing beats coming up against the truth. But it is a strange and disturbing paradox to step outside your story, look at it, and know it’s true; to remember my dead mother and wished I could have stood by her, wished that I could have been the kind of son that she would have wanted – as loyal a son as she was a mum. But I couldn’t, didn’t – didn’t want to. I had to kill her and be sorry; and for the rest of my life know that I am ungrateful, disloyal and self-centred.
......I never knew I was that guilty; but there is nothing better than knowing what you really and deeply believe. It’s such a relief.
......Knowing the full strength of what you believe about yourself, however bad, is better that struggling against what you didn’t know you believed. The struggle against the unknown is problem.
.......For some people the situation can be the opposite of mine. If you had a family that made you no good, you might struggle against the unacceptable truth that you are OK. You don’t get guilty for being a bad person; you get guilty for feeling good. Self depreciation keeps you belonging to those who defined you. You might be angry with them, but you stay in their space. To really get that you are OK would mean rejecting the family – loss and alienation. Better to be the black sheep of the family, than to have no family at all.

THE TURNING OF THE WORM

.............A truthful fiction in the first person
....................................by Stanley

......I am a worm that has turned – thoroughly sick of being used. All my life I have been helpful, listened to other people’s problems and wished them well. But how rarely did anyone ask me how I was – except in a perfunctory way when it was obvious they didn’t really want to know.
......My cry of rage came when it hit me that my kindness and generosity had been taken advantage of for too long. Enough already!
.....I had suspected that most of my friends and colleagues took me for granted; taking, but seldom giving. I knew it, but something always prevented me from rebelling. I made excuses for people, wanting to think the best of them. I was fixated on being helpful. But somehow I knew that I had got myself into a bind where their expectations of me were perfectly justified: yes, I had always given the impression that my selflessness was perfectly natural to me; so what more natural than that they should believe in the impression I had always given them.
......And what more natural than that they should be shocked when I rebelled, when I made it clear that I existed too. Mind you, when I did make it clear, my inner rage came through. I wasn’t very nice when said I had listened to their problems far too long. In fact, I was quite nasty. And when they criticised my abruptness, I lost it – oooh temper, temper! I came away shaking and doubting myself.
.....My former ‘friends’ started to drift away. I didn’t seem to be the flavour of the month any more. They must all have thought I’d changed for the worst for some unknown reason. They were right in thinking I was not the person they thought I was.
.....I discovered there is no way you can change from being a people-pleaser to being-real without rage. This is because rage is what I felt all the time, deep down. When I was being so nice to everyone I was hiding my rage, even from myself. Rage at my long neglect. My real self was raging so I had to be nasty to be real. There’s no way of skipping that stage. Of course I was nasty, rage is never reasonable. To try to rage reasonably or raging alone is to still fear showing anything else but the nice person. The nice, helpful person was my trap. And now the one thing I fear is being in social situation where my former self will trap me again. I can’t tell you the anxiety I feel about slipping into the nice person again. I know myself. I am not so far out of the woods: certain kinds of people can turn me into an agreeable, smiling nobody. I will lose myself again. The dread of being taken over by my old self is quite frightening.
......I know how it all came about. As a young person I learned that the only way to get even a modicum of approval was pretend to be what they wanted. I deleted myself and substituted a clone and it has taken me 40 years to recover. But with the encouragement of my therapist and some new friends I know I will make it. I can already feel the difference.

..........(The above is not a biography or autobiography but a fictional composite)

THE SELF-CONFIDENCE DISORDER.

...... Just imagine: you are 16 years old. You are not ignorant. I mean, you know what sex is supposed to be about. But this is your first date. You are going to meet this gorgeous person of the opposite sex; and it’s your first date – ever !
.......If you didn’t feel nervous you wouldn’t be normal. I mean, you definitely wouldn’t be normal, would you?
.......Or suppose you are a teacher. You’ve been teaching for 30 years. But you are about to walk into this new classroom with a sea of adolescent eyes staring at you – and there is no way of knowing what they are thinking or what they will do. I don’t care who you are, you wouldn’t be normal if you weren’t nervous.
.......Or a more mundane scene: you are in bed with your partner and feeling a bit randy, but unsure how she is feeling, I mean headache-wise. Do you make a move and risk it or not? To be completely relax in this situation is not normal. If you don’t feel nervous here something is wrong. Why do I say this? Surely if you have grown used to someone you should feel intimate and relaxed. True!
........But to feel completely relaxed is to be pretty sure what is going to happen. What will happen will be the same thing that happened last time, and the time before that, and the time before that. Repetition is the guarantee of safety. Which is fine, but if you feel too safe your nerve ends aren’t tingling. Sex in the mortuary – that’s what’ wrong.
........If you don’t feel nervous in a situation there is nothing at stake; and in matters of love you should feel that your whole existence is at stake, otherwise there is something wrong. Similarly in therapy. If you are a therapist, like me, you feel nervous at the start of every session. In five minutes I will start a session with another human being. Not only is the client’s life at stake, mine is too. Not in the sense that I must prove myself. But therapy goes to the root of one’s life, of one’s existence. One risks quite a lot because one never knows. Neither party knows. That is what it’s all about. And I can’t take someone there unless I am willing to go there myself. Therapists who are self-confident are scary.
.......Same with dates, same with teachers, same with lovers, same with therapists. How can you trust or love anyone who is afflicted with a self-confidence disorder? Some good counselling is the only thing that can cure them and help achieve a greater balance of nervousness in everyday life.
.......Nervousness and excitement are two sides of the same feeling. The negative side tells me that something vitally important is going on. Rather than new strategies to overcome the nervousness, I need to come into possession of what is going on. Nervousness is a golden opportunity, because something of vital importance trying to reveal itself.

............................... Yours, Provocatively,

.................................... Stanley

CAREGIVERS.

................... by Stanley

........I am about seven years of age at a fairground in England with my mum. She pays sixpence each for us to ride on the Ghost Train – a string of small open carriages on a miniature rail line that disappears into a dark tunnel. From out of the tunnel I can hear ghoulish howls, cries and hideous laughs. The carriages start to roll towards the dark opening. I am sitting alongside my mum quietly terrified. My most vivid memory is hanging on to her arm and saying: ‘Don’t be frightened mum – I’ll look after you !’
........I won’t say I’ve have been a caregiver ever since, because my caregiving began long before that. I mean, my kind of behaviour on the Ghost Train didn’t suddenly start at seven. The picture of the child who mothers his mother is well known. And the reason is easy to see. If you are insecure, you have to take care of the one you are counting on to take care of you. Especially in any unsure and dangerous situation - which life most often is, or at least was, for me. It really is a matter of reasoned self interest.
........The kind of caring we instinctively feel safe with is the kind that has no hidden agenda, it just feels good, relaxing; but sometimes care comes with a veiled motive. Is it to make the carer feel better? One senses the caring is not congruent, it’s uncomfortable, tiring. Afterwards you feel depleted.
.........One of my problems has always been that I am nervous when being cared for, even when there is no hidden price tag. For instance, whenever I’ve been sick it’s an ordeal when someone wants to help me. I’m on edge. I’m in bed sick and I have to keep reassuring everyone I’m OK. I can’t be just looked after because I’m so busy looking after the one who’s looking after me. Now, I wonder where I got that from !
.........Caring is psychologically rich. It is an ambivalent mix of motives we would prefer to think of as simple and straightforward. Like the juice of love when seen under the microscope it is teeming with life forms, some benign and some pathogenic. Caring is always more than it seems.
.........In the business of caregiving there are those who give it and those who receive; and those who take care of others most often can’t receive it; and those who receive it most often don’t give. The selfless and the selfish often go together as a workable, but unequal pair.
........The selfish are an easy target for moral criticism. The selfless, the caregivers, are applauded; but the compulsive caregiver makes us uneasy. Their habit of always putting others first makes us feel something isn’t quite right. All you can do is tell them, “You have to look after yourself, you know.” The advice usually makes no difference.
.......In some people’s hands caring can be toxic. There are helpers whose caregiving is designed to kill. They often gravitate to the ‘helping profession’ as a perfect cover. Medical and psychological services are great hiding places. There they can practice their malevolence under the cloak of professional concern, but they can be recognized by a certain lack of generosity. They work by the book. In fact, they use the book to penalise whenever they can. If they are in any position of authority in a helping agency they will turn it into a punishment centre. Unfortunately, helping agencies are easily ‘turned’ in this way because these killers have the ability to gather ‘pieces of paper’ that qualify them for positions of control. But they are easy to spot: they have heads, but no bodies.

STUCK IN THE NOW

................ by Stanley

......Living in ‘the now’ is an attractive idea, but it is possible to be stuck in the present unable to get out. Present concerns seem to fill the scene demanding all one’s attention. But ‘the now’ is porous and full of holes through which the past can insinuate itself, dressed up to resemble an issue in the present – just as though it were the real problem.
.......One often sees people stuck in a present-time problem that recurs over and over – maybe in various forms, but always really the same problem. Talking about it can discharge the feelings on it and so relieve the pressure, but each time nothing leads beyond the present-time constituents of the difficulty. It just stays as it is; and when it’s gone, it’s gone – until next time.
........In each crisis a past trauma takes the form of a present-time problem. That’s why each crisis looks the same.
........One can sense in all this a discernable resistance to the past. Not really apparent, though, because the person can refer to the past in a general sort of way like: ‘I’m sure it all comes from the way I was brought up’ or ‘I don’t want to blame my parents for everything’. They will even refer to certain specific roots of the problem in earlier times, but it’s only a passing acknowledgment on their way to total immersion in the present situation, the real guts of it – or so they believe.
.........But this attitude is part of a bigger picture. The way they have always dealt with painful situations, a particularly childlike strategy, was to dissociate from it. When the trauma was over they cut off from it, go out and play, pretending it didn’t happen. You can be pretty sure that when a person is badly stuck in the present, the early years were very painful. The dissociative strategy became a way of dealing with intolerable situations. The past trauma may not be a specific incident, but the whole atmosphere of childhood.
........As a kid dissociation was the only thing they could do. But it has consequences in adult life where the person will lurch from crisis to crisis.
........As I said, in each crisis the past trauma takes the form of a present-time problem. Once the person has discharged the emotion on the present issue the doors then close again and it is as though it didn’t happen. They feel better. But the total situation is the same as before. The past trauma sits waiting in the wings for the next trigger.
........The problem is not so much the trauma in the past, but the continuous style of dissociation. One must be aware that the fear and worry surrounding the past event is embedded in this strategy of dealing with it; and the anxiety about slipping out of ‘the now’ is enormous, so the day must by filled with worrisome activities that keep the mind fixed exclusively in the present.
........The wisest and most balanced people often have a very painful past. There is a way in which the past can enrich the present by a continuous and subtle interchange with it, bringing an emotional ambivalence and depth. It isn’t that one has learned from the past – nothing so mundane. It’s more like a certain fluidity, a mutual interchange, where the present influences the past as well! One moves through a landscape that is never the same, never fixed or one-dimensional. The doors are all open and each moment is always more than it seems.
........It’s not about being able to remember all the facts and fantasies of a lifetime, not about literal remembering. Not about remembering, so much as being open to subtle reminders of where I have come from and who I have been – ghosts I might have neglected or forgotten. It’s about whether these inaudible intricacies can whisper and whether you cock your ear to listen. Living in the now is fine, but it’s also a question of being receptive.

SEE TWO COMMENTS ON THIS ARTICLE BELOW

THE GIFT

...............................................by Stanley

............Much of my life I have waited for someone to give me the gift of myself. That’s what I was always waiting for. In every relationship I looked into the eyes of the other hoping that she will see me for what I knew I almost was. I wanted that special kind of approval that would let me ‘come out’, as they say. It made me a kind of waiting, hopeful child, but over the years I have gradually learned to be more maturely dependant. Less ashamed, that is, of my lifelong infantilism.
...........Realising, too, that this is what therapy is about. Not about finding formulas of the mind or archetypes beyond the mind, not about psychological management, not about curing disorders and dysfunctions. It’s about giving another the gift of themselves, being with them, looking into their struggles with empathy and with pride at what they are edging painfully towards, knowing that they are relying on someone to give them the gift they can’t give themselves.
...........For it is so hard to do it for yourself alone. To give life a kick start it seems as though something essential has to be given. It was true in the beginning of one’s life and, in some sense, it is always true; the audience gives me my role in the play.
..........It’s a strange paradox that the hardest thing to give to myself…is myself!
..........The other person is part of me and if they withhold on me I’m stuck; but we will face anything except the truth of this kind of dependency.
..........Dependency is so terrifying that many people go into what you could call creative overdrive, determined to fashion themselves, to not be reliant, to give to themselves what they need – what they now believe can never, ever be given by anyone else. Thus their primal need and dependency goes underground, still in its infantile form. But being adults they now seek what they need from others surreptitiously. They often become very giving people – generosity with a hidden agenda.
..........It is almost an axiom of pop-psychology that, as an individual, you have to be the source. It’s no good looking to others to give you the gift. Life will only give you what you put into it. The ‘law of attraction’ they call it. This keeps one obsessively trying to create oneself as a worthy attractor. But a gift earned is not a gift.
..........The doctrine that one can make oneself worthy assumes that one has the power to do it. That one has the wherewithal is a puffed-up fiction to bolster the illusion of omnipotence. Nothing is more terrifying than one’s weakness, need and fragility. That’s the place where I know the terrible, terrible truth: I can never provide what I need. I am not enough – that by myself I am simply not enough.
..........That’s the way I started life – and that’s where, in a sense, I always am.
..................................*
..........Sigmund Freud was the innovator of the Psychological Age we live in. He invented it. But what has become of psychoanalysis, almost drowned out by the thousands of offshoots it produced? Well, over the last year I have been finding out. Psychoanalysis has evolved quite a bit. Working within Freud’s framework of ideas people like Fairbairn, Kohut, Leowald and others have produced new and valuable ideas. I propose a series a TAAP seminars to examine and discuss all this new material. Dates and times will follow.

A LITTLE FLIGHT RELIEF.

............................from Stanley

.....After a year working with really serious issues I think my unconscious has needed a break. Several times during the holidays I have had early morning dreams of composing the most unusual letters. Here is one:

..........To Air New Zealand
..........Dear Sir
..........My name is Stanley Richards and I am a gorilla. My wife Gladys is also a gorilla. We wish to book a flight from Christchurch to Queenstown on January 29, 2008. Early morning if you can.
..........Would it be possible for you to arrange a seat near a window for my wife, since she is prone to air sickness, a condition which is exacerbated by the fact that she is six weeks pregnant? A window seat would undoubtedly help.
.........Could you also arrange for a wheelchair at the airport, not for my wife, but for me as I suffer from motor neurone disease? While I am mostly quite able, I am prone to episodes where I revert to earlier forms of phylogenic development.
.........I feel obliged to mention that my wife and I will be suitably dressed for the trip since this question has previously arisen when making application for oversea flights on other occasions.
.........May I extend to all Air New Zealand staff the appropriate season’s facilitations. .........In anticipation of a reply at your earliest convenience,
.......................I remain,
.........................Your Most Obedient Servant
...................................Stanley Richards
.
......................................................*

Interpret that !