THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE

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

......In western depth psychology there is an aspect of what we call ‘the self’ that has been missed; it is an omission that runs through the whole gamut of psychoanalysis from Freud to Jung and Hillman. What we’ve missed in our psychology is the physical body – the body as essentially me.
.....We must be very clear what we are saying here. The body stands at the threshold of both the subjective and the objective worlds. Firstly, the body is an objective thing in the world. We can look at it from the outside and examine it just as we can any living organism. It can be studied scientifically and medically. I can have this objective view of my own body, just as I can with anyone else’s.
......When we refer to the physical body there is a lurking ambiguity. We usually mean heart, blood circulation, brain, nervous system, etc etc. The difficulty arises when we imply by this that our subjectivity, our mind, our soul, is not physical. This lands us in a dilemma because it artificially splits our actual experience. Arthur Koestler called it the illusion of the ghost in the machine.
......But the body is not just a machine that I inhabit; it is also my subjective experience of myself. This is the experience of the body as me, the foundation of myself as a subject; and this subjectivity is mine alone. No one else can experience it directly but myself. It cannot be examined medically or scientifically because it is not an object – it is a subject, the sense of myself.
......There are all kinds of arguments, religious and cultural, that might persuade us that there is a difference between the body on the one hand and the soul or mind. But putting these arguments aside, and going on how I actually find myself from moment to moment, there is no question that I experience myself subjectively as a physical being. It is part of my essential nature that I am located in physical space and time and that I experience seeing, hearing, feeling, touching, loving and hating as a physical being.
.....If one imagines oneself as a ghost without a body it is impossible to conceive, for example, that one would have any emotions, because emotions are both subjective and physical. Both. We only experience our emotions through our physicality. Deaden the body with drugs or anaesthesia and there are no emotions.
......But we have a cultural prejudice against thinking this way. It seems to offend our preconceived notions of the soul or mind. But there is no reason we cannot say that the ‘soul’ is just another name for our embodied experience. Certainly there is the body, but there is also the body of me. There is no way we can get away with a philosophy that does without either – the body as an object and as a subject.
......There are all kind of interesting avenues that flow from this idea. In one aspect, it really does turn psychotherapy on its head. We can now credit the body’s powers that we always knew it had, but never admitted.
.......When a person disowns the body they will never let it inform them, they can never trust it. Sometimes the body becomes the enemy. We can see why they lack vital emotional functions; why their intuition of other people and the environment is shot; also because they are disembodied why they can never be certain of themselves. We say they live in their heads – as though the head is the last domain they can occupy. Obviously they can think – and sometimes brilliantly – but that’s all. They lack the body’s imagination and its own kind of complex practicality, its holistic intelligence that can work without thinking. Of course, people in this state of deprivation do go on functioning because the body goes on doing its job on its own, doing its own thing without permission, help or credit, often against the opposition of the head-centred ego.
......Neuroscience is discovering how we can manipulate the brain and produced all kinds of subjective affects; and we know how chemical substances can do the same. But we forget that the body made the body in the first place and that subjective emotional experience can alter the body’s objective structure.
......The body stands at the crossroads. It is the only thing in the world that is also your conscious self. Our value of the mind has had a good go, but we are incomplete unless we can give the body its due. Not locating the mind in the body, but getting the mind as the body.

I’M FINE – how are you ?

...........................by Stanley
......The determination to make things OK when they are not OK begins early in life. The game of pretend is what kids do best; they are wonderfully competent at transforming reality into what they want it to be. Fine, when you are pretending the lounge sofa is a fire engine, but not so good when you are trying to make a miserable home life into a feel-good happy family. No two people are the same, but I’ll tell you a story of the way it can go.
.....There is a limit to how long a kid can keep pretending against all odds. Reality will break though when family quarrels or dysfunctions are too overwhelming, forcing the child to endlessly renew its efforts to make the environment safe and nurturing by sheer wishing and willing. It doesn’t have the power to change reality, but it can fantasise, it can pretend.
......I can pretend that if I am good enough it will make them happy. Trying to make myself good enough for others can turn me into a lifelong people-pleaser.
......Of course, I can pretend I don’t need a family and go off on another tack. There are a thousand clever ways to make it all better: ‘At least I’m good at school’ is one way; or ‘When I grow up I’m going to… – imagined futures overriding the present; adults euphemistically call this ‘having goals’. Or much later I can make like I’m a successful entertainer, amusing everyone; or even getting to be an actor, singer or performer on the stage, actually creating a big approving family – admiration on a big scale.
......Come to think of it, each profession is also a form of pretending. To have a profession is to profess. To make this real to myself is to constantly keep up the fantasy of actually being what I profess.
......All these devises, you might say, are perfectly harmless, even necessary in the game of life. Where they become questionable is when they are used to suppress the bodily felt-sense that something is not-OK. Trying to pretend over the top of anxiety is hard work. But no amount of physical or mental juggling will really help – only a direct address to the bodily felt-sense of something being not-OK, giving up trying to make it OK. Daring to look at a persistent sense of something wrong that’s been with me longer than I can remember.
......Ages ago when I first began to pretend everything was OK I thought that if I wanted something badly enough it would happen – a kind of infantile positive thinking. I suppressed the not-OKness into my body and my body has been carrying it ever since like a low grade illness. It can turn some people into hypochondriacs, imagining that the body is only physical.
......The body can remember what really went wrong, even if I have forgotten; and when I first begin to look at it, it feels like an uncomfortable physical sensation, a feeling I am so used to I no longer notice it. It’s a vague discomfort. Then the work begins of tracking this vague something, unraveling a long, tangled but precise history, going back to my childhood.
......It’s not that I have forgotten the factual events of the past, not a question of ‘recovered memories’. I can remember what happened, but I had forgotten the way it was, the sharp feel of it, the implications, the endless ramifications, and of just how it keeps recurring in my present life.
......My own story surprises me because it is so different to what I had pretended; and yet, in a way, it doesn’t surprise me because I knew it all the time – at least, I could always sort of sense it there.
.......And when it is unraveled there is a relief in being able to give up the constant struggle to make like everything is OK. It’s then I realise this struggle has been far worse than the reality I was trying to suppress – a reality that belonged to the ever present past
.......But for a Great Pretender like me the first step is to admit everything is not-OK.
.......I’m not fine – how are you?

THE CRITIC

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

.....Many people are aware that they have a troublesome inner critic, realising that they can be, at times, far too harsh and judgemental on themselves. ‘I’m my own worst enemy’, they will say.
.....Over the years this internal critical in the personality has been given different labels. Freud called it the super-ego. Searching to name it, a client of mine came up with ‘The Clobberer’ – very descriptive. Fairbairn called it ‘The Anti-Libidinal Ego’ – good, because it is critical of any form of pleasure; later he called it ‘The Internal Saboteur’ – full marks, because that is exactly what it is.
.....But whatever we call it, it is that part of you that makes you wrong, useless, ugly or stupid. It specialises in accusations that you are – on the whole – a failure; and whatever you do is wrong. Sometimes this internal critic is in the background, sometimes right in your face.
.....The Internal Saboteur makes one very sensitive to other people’s criticisms; then both internal and external attacks join together to make a devastating onslaught.
......There is little one can do directly to change this setup. Strategies, like positive thinking, designed to live over the top of it, are useless. The Internal Saboteur is a real problem and it is not subject to control. It is, as they say, ‘its own person’, with its own agenda. I am not speaking figuratively. It is structurally separate from your own ego. Often it opposes with subtle and ‘reasonable’ criticism. Needs and wants that are already a bit shaky are easy targets. It makes impulsiveness and pleasure suspect.
.....The Internal Saboteur is a split off part of your own psyche you would have given birth to a long time ago. It would very probably have been a time when you were dependant and an essential relationship failed you. You went on trying and failing to get what you needed until eventually you turned against your need. ‘I don’t want it – I don’t want them – they can go to hell’. The whole thing is then repressed and dissociated, but goes on fighting every needy impulse from then on.
......It is a brilliant solution when you are a child. It turns off the pain and you feel independent. The problem is that it is not just a denial of ‘them’, it is a denial of yourself, the most central part of you: the core life impulse that moves you forward every moment, urging what you want, what you need. By this act of self-preservation you have created another centre in your personality – one that essentially denies that it wants what it wants. It splits you off from yourself. It can make you painfully ‘good’, afraid to put a step out of line in case you cop it. The Internal Saboteur will keep you in line.
.......But if you retain a rebellious spark of life in you, you are up against the Internal Saboteur. Everything that is really good for you, this other centre in you sabotages, opposes, criticises, downgrades. It can be unbelievably cruel. This situation can be so bad that it can destroy every impulse in life that’s worthwhile. It can lead to depression and suicide. Or it can continually harass you like a low-grade infection. Or it can lie in the unconscious waiting for you to feel particularly self-satisfied before it attacks.
......I tell you, the Internal Saboteur is no joke; no mere metaphor, but a stubborn fact as real as your body.
.....You have to really get this before you can work on it. You will realise what I mean by ‘getting it’ if you re-read my last post on ‘Notes from a Groundhog’. There it is, not jibbering in the background, but right out in front – a full frontal attack.
......My experience there is an example of how the Internal Saboteur can strike in reaction a personal win, a soulful breakthrough. It simply cannot stand any hint of narcissism or self-satisfaction – and so it bursts out of hiding, revealing itself in all its viciousness. In my case, I can own it, guilty not of what it accuses me, but acknowledging it as a starving, angry and repressed part of myself; acknowledging also that I gave birth to it as a way of surviving when I was in dire straits, long, long ago.

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.