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In Winnicott’s preferred developmental story it is only through hatred that relations between people move out of fantasy and into reality, into the possibility of actual exchange. And this is for a simple reason: hatred is what the child feels when he can let himself acknowledge that the parent (inevitably) frustrates him; that the parent is a real person (it is not the real mother who has limitations, it is the idealized mother who cannot actually nourish the child). It is only when we compare real people with the men and women of our dreams that they disappoint. In Winnicott’s view, once the child has felt and lived out his frustration with the real mother and father, and they have survived it – which might involve hating the child back, but without in any way abandoning him – he can resume his relationship with them more realistically; he has added to the stock of available reality. If he had turned away from them at this point – retreated from real engagement, stopped making demands – or they had turned away from him, they would have all gone on living a fantasy life together (ideal relations as an enraged retreat from real life). Real kindness, real fellow feeling, entails hating and being hated – that is, really feeling available frustrations – and through this coming to a more realistic relationship. This, one might say, is a more robust version of kindness, a kindness made possible through frustration and hatred rather than a kindness organized to repudiate (or to disown) such feelings. Kindness of this variety allows for ambivalence and conflict while false, or magical, kindness distorts our perceptions of other people, often by sentimentalizing them, to avoid conflict. Sentimentality is cruelty by other means.
- Adam Phillips & Barbara Taylor, On Kindness
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Showing posts with label Adam Phillips. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Adam Phillips. Show all posts
February 8, 2010
February 7, 2010
It is kind not to overprotect other people from oneself, especially from one’s sexuality.
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Ordinary kindness is not a manipulative bribe or a magical cure, but a simple exchange. In a parent-child relationship where no one is looking to the other to rescue him, each can enjoy the other without needing to transform him. The modern child is perceived as someone who is always running the risk of having to become a parent to her parents; someone whose concern for her parents’ well-being can be the very thing that waylays her developmental needs. In other words, modern stories about child development are like cries for help from the grown-ups, who sound strangely oppressed if not actually enslaved by their children. It is as if now parents are more dependant on their children than children are on their parents; that what we are left with after two hundred years of intensive study of children is a world in which parents are frightened of their children, of their vulnerability, their neediness, their frustration and their rage, and in which parents look to their children for so-called self-esteem, to give their lives point and purpose. In which, to put it as simply as possible, parents and children are unable to collaborate with each other in the ordinary business of growing up. Committed to an image of the child as a bundle of rapacious, fundamentally insatiable desires, growing up becomes little more than a type of profiteering. It is this predicament that psychoanalysis seeks to address: what happens to kindness and fellow feeling in the hothouse of the family? What, if anything, can be done to prevent kindness becoming the first casualty of family life?
Whatever else it is, psychoanalysis is an account of how and why modern people are so frightened of each other. What Freud called defenses are the ways we protect ourselves from our desires, which are also our relations with others. Indeed, the history of psychoanalysis after Freud reflects many of the dilemmas we have about kindness (it would be an interesting exercise to read ‘sexuality’ as Freud’s word for ‘fellow feeling’). Are we, Freud’s followers wondered, committed to our desires and their gratification, or to other people? And what, if anything, could such a distinction mean? Do we crave (sensuous) satisfaction as so-called drive theorists say, or do we crave intimacy and relationships? Do we want good company or good sex, if we have to choose? If kindness, in its anti-sentimental sense, is at the heart of human desiring, then these become merely false choices, the wrong way of talking about what goes on between people. Sex becomes one of the more complicated forms of fellow feeling (there is no sex without kindness or its refusal); and aggression becomes one of its more obscure, least articulated forms (there is not kindness without aggression or its refusal). It is kind not to overprotect other people from oneself, especially from one’s sexuality.
- Adam Phillips & Barbara Taylor, On Kindness
.
Ordinary kindness is not a manipulative bribe or a magical cure, but a simple exchange. In a parent-child relationship where no one is looking to the other to rescue him, each can enjoy the other without needing to transform him. The modern child is perceived as someone who is always running the risk of having to become a parent to her parents; someone whose concern for her parents’ well-being can be the very thing that waylays her developmental needs. In other words, modern stories about child development are like cries for help from the grown-ups, who sound strangely oppressed if not actually enslaved by their children. It is as if now parents are more dependant on their children than children are on their parents; that what we are left with after two hundred years of intensive study of children is a world in which parents are frightened of their children, of their vulnerability, their neediness, their frustration and their rage, and in which parents look to their children for so-called self-esteem, to give their lives point and purpose. In which, to put it as simply as possible, parents and children are unable to collaborate with each other in the ordinary business of growing up. Committed to an image of the child as a bundle of rapacious, fundamentally insatiable desires, growing up becomes little more than a type of profiteering. It is this predicament that psychoanalysis seeks to address: what happens to kindness and fellow feeling in the hothouse of the family? What, if anything, can be done to prevent kindness becoming the first casualty of family life?
Whatever else it is, psychoanalysis is an account of how and why modern people are so frightened of each other. What Freud called defenses are the ways we protect ourselves from our desires, which are also our relations with others. Indeed, the history of psychoanalysis after Freud reflects many of the dilemmas we have about kindness (it would be an interesting exercise to read ‘sexuality’ as Freud’s word for ‘fellow feeling’). Are we, Freud’s followers wondered, committed to our desires and their gratification, or to other people? And what, if anything, could such a distinction mean? Do we crave (sensuous) satisfaction as so-called drive theorists say, or do we crave intimacy and relationships? Do we want good company or good sex, if we have to choose? If kindness, in its anti-sentimental sense, is at the heart of human desiring, then these become merely false choices, the wrong way of talking about what goes on between people. Sex becomes one of the more complicated forms of fellow feeling (there is no sex without kindness or its refusal); and aggression becomes one of its more obscure, least articulated forms (there is not kindness without aggression or its refusal). It is kind not to overprotect other people from oneself, especially from one’s sexuality.
- Adam Phillips & Barbara Taylor, On Kindness
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February 5, 2010
From On Kindness by Adam Phillips & Barbara Taylor
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The child’s first, formative trauma is his growing acknowledgement of his need for others (in actuality the mother is as vulnerable to her need for her baby as the baby is to his need for her; parents need their children not to worry about them too much). The needy child experiences a trauma of concern (‘How can I take care of my mother to ensure that she takes care of me?’) which calls up his natural kindness; but this concern – and the later forms of kindness that emerge from it – is too easily turned away from. This turning away we call ‘self-sufficiency’, and when we want to pathologize it we call it ‘narcissism’. The pleasure of kindness is that it connects us with others; but the terror of kindness is that it makes us too immediately aware of our own and other people’s vulnerabilities (vulnerabilities that we are prone to call ‘failings’ when we are at our most frightened.) And vulnerability – and particularly the vulnerability we call ‘desire’ – is our shared biological inheritance. Kindness, in other words, opens us up to the world (and worlds) of other people in ways that we long for and dread. How can people, from childhood onwards, feel confident enough to take such risks?
People want safety, whatever the cost. Perhaps it is one of the perils of secularization that if we no longer believe in God – in a Being who is himself invulnerable, and so capable of protecting us – we cannot avoid confronting our own relative helplessness and need for each other. If there is no invulnerability anywhere, suddenly there is too much vulnerability everywhere. How do we deal with this? In his novel Raw Youth (1875), Dostoyevsky describes a morning when people wake to find themselves alone in a godless universe. Instead of bewailing their loss, they turn to each other, substituting their own tenderness and concern for divine protection. Acknowledging human vulnerability, they respond to it positively. Kindness, for them, becomes a way of experiencing their vulnerability that tests the strengths and limits of their resources to deal with it. When God is dead, kindness is permitted. When God is dead, kindness is all people have.
So it is not that real kindness requires people to be selfless, it is rather that real kindness changes people in the doing of it, often in unpredictable ways. Real kindness is an exchange with essentially unpredictable consequences. It is a risk precisely because it mingles our needs and desires with the needs and desires of others, in a way that so-called self-interest never can. (The notion of ‘self-interest’ implies that we always know what we want, by knowing what the self is, and what its interests are. It forecloses discovery.) Kindness is a way of knowing people beyond our understanding of them. By involving us with strangers (even with ‘foreigners’ thousands of miles away), as well as with intimates, it is potentially far more promiscuous than sexuality. But as we shall see, the child needs the adult – and his wider society – to help him keep faith with his kindness, that is, to help him discover and enjoy the pleasures of caring for others. The child who is failed in this regard is robbed of one of the greatest sources of human happiness.
- Adam Phillips & Barbara Taylor, On Kindness
.
The child’s first, formative trauma is his growing acknowledgement of his need for others (in actuality the mother is as vulnerable to her need for her baby as the baby is to his need for her; parents need their children not to worry about them too much). The needy child experiences a trauma of concern (‘How can I take care of my mother to ensure that she takes care of me?’) which calls up his natural kindness; but this concern – and the later forms of kindness that emerge from it – is too easily turned away from. This turning away we call ‘self-sufficiency’, and when we want to pathologize it we call it ‘narcissism’. The pleasure of kindness is that it connects us with others; but the terror of kindness is that it makes us too immediately aware of our own and other people’s vulnerabilities (vulnerabilities that we are prone to call ‘failings’ when we are at our most frightened.) And vulnerability – and particularly the vulnerability we call ‘desire’ – is our shared biological inheritance. Kindness, in other words, opens us up to the world (and worlds) of other people in ways that we long for and dread. How can people, from childhood onwards, feel confident enough to take such risks?
People want safety, whatever the cost. Perhaps it is one of the perils of secularization that if we no longer believe in God – in a Being who is himself invulnerable, and so capable of protecting us – we cannot avoid confronting our own relative helplessness and need for each other. If there is no invulnerability anywhere, suddenly there is too much vulnerability everywhere. How do we deal with this? In his novel Raw Youth (1875), Dostoyevsky describes a morning when people wake to find themselves alone in a godless universe. Instead of bewailing their loss, they turn to each other, substituting their own tenderness and concern for divine protection. Acknowledging human vulnerability, they respond to it positively. Kindness, for them, becomes a way of experiencing their vulnerability that tests the strengths and limits of their resources to deal with it. When God is dead, kindness is permitted. When God is dead, kindness is all people have.
So it is not that real kindness requires people to be selfless, it is rather that real kindness changes people in the doing of it, often in unpredictable ways. Real kindness is an exchange with essentially unpredictable consequences. It is a risk precisely because it mingles our needs and desires with the needs and desires of others, in a way that so-called self-interest never can. (The notion of ‘self-interest’ implies that we always know what we want, by knowing what the self is, and what its interests are. It forecloses discovery.) Kindness is a way of knowing people beyond our understanding of them. By involving us with strangers (even with ‘foreigners’ thousands of miles away), as well as with intimates, it is potentially far more promiscuous than sexuality. But as we shall see, the child needs the adult – and his wider society – to help him keep faith with his kindness, that is, to help him discover and enjoy the pleasures of caring for others. The child who is failed in this regard is robbed of one of the greatest sources of human happiness.
- Adam Phillips & Barbara Taylor, On Kindness
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August 14, 2006
Appetite and fear are inextricably connected...
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Appetite and fear are inextricably connected; and all creatures are endangered by the fundamental project of meeting their needs. But the human creature meets his needs, in both senses; unlike every other animal. He must meet his needs in order to survive, and over time, he will have to become acquainted, too, with what he will learn to call his needs. And what he will meet, unlike any other animal, is the exorbitance, the hubris of his appetites. Indeed the stories he will be told about his appetite – explicitly in words, and implicitly in the way his appetite is responded to by other people – is that it is, at least potentially, way in excess of any object’s capacity to satisfy. He will be told, in short, that he is by nature greedy. He will discover, whether or not this is quite his experience, that he apparently always wants more than he can have; that his appetite, the lifeline that is his nature, that is at once so intimate and so obscure to him, can in the end drive him mad. He may be sane, but his appetite is not. This is what it is to be a human being; to be, at least at the outset, too demanding.
Satisfactions are of course possible but disappointment and disillusionment are unavoidable. At best one can develop a bearable sense of one’s limitations; at worst one is driven mad. Given one’s appetite – given the ways we have inherited of describing it – one becomes realistic, or one lives in the no man’s land of the tantrum and the grudge. To talk about appetite, in other words, is to talk about whatever it is that we have to complain about.
– Adam Phillips, Going Sane, p 101-102
All the new thinking, like all the old thinking, agrees that there is something catastrophic about being a person. The catastrophe is located in various places; in our being born at all, in our being condemned to death; in our vulnerability as organisms, or in our cruel injustices as political animals; in the scarcity of our natural resources, or in our greedy depredation of them; in our Fall, or in our hubris. But all these catastrophes, one way or another, are linked to our appetites, as creatures who want, and who are driven by, what is at once necessary and missing from our lives. Our wants may be ‘constructed’ – given form by the language available in the culture – but that we want is not in doubt. It is whether our wanting has catastrophe built into it - whether our wanting is such that ruinous frustration or ruinous aggression is inevitable; or is indeed a necessity to keep wanting on the go – or whether our wanting is made unbearable only by the ways in which it is responded to, that is now in question. The language of sanity and madness provides a vocabulary for asking and answering questions about appetite.
– Adam Phillips, Going Sane, p 120-121
The sane adult is protective – and not only of children, but of himself and others – in a way that avoids covertly undermining the strengths of those who are apparently in need of protection (‘The friends of the born nurse / Are always getting worse,’ as W.H. Auden wrote). The sane adult assumes that it is possible for people to get pleasure from who they happen to be, and that part of this pleasure is bound up with versions of self-reliance that are not merely a more or less bitter denial of a need for other people. The two most dispiriting forms of modern relationship are the protection racket and the sadomasochistic contract in which, respectively, one person’s strength depends on the other person’s weakness, or one person’s pleasure depends upon the other person’s suffering. The sane person’s project is to find more appealing ways of being weak and strong; or to find alternative pleasures to the pleasures of power and of helplessness. The way most people are prone to see what they call human nature now makes even the thought of alternative forms of pleasure and excitement sound hopelessly naïve. It would be part of the sane person’s sanity to want new forms of pleasure in which neither one’s kindness nor one’s excitement are overly compromised (one emblem of this might be those gay men who experiment in coming without getting an erection). The sane person knows that being able to only be a nice person is the death of sexual excitement; and that being able to only be nasty is too isolating.
– Adam Phillips, Going Sane, p 234-235
.
Appetite and fear are inextricably connected; and all creatures are endangered by the fundamental project of meeting their needs. But the human creature meets his needs, in both senses; unlike every other animal. He must meet his needs in order to survive, and over time, he will have to become acquainted, too, with what he will learn to call his needs. And what he will meet, unlike any other animal, is the exorbitance, the hubris of his appetites. Indeed the stories he will be told about his appetite – explicitly in words, and implicitly in the way his appetite is responded to by other people – is that it is, at least potentially, way in excess of any object’s capacity to satisfy. He will be told, in short, that he is by nature greedy. He will discover, whether or not this is quite his experience, that he apparently always wants more than he can have; that his appetite, the lifeline that is his nature, that is at once so intimate and so obscure to him, can in the end drive him mad. He may be sane, but his appetite is not. This is what it is to be a human being; to be, at least at the outset, too demanding.
Satisfactions are of course possible but disappointment and disillusionment are unavoidable. At best one can develop a bearable sense of one’s limitations; at worst one is driven mad. Given one’s appetite – given the ways we have inherited of describing it – one becomes realistic, or one lives in the no man’s land of the tantrum and the grudge. To talk about appetite, in other words, is to talk about whatever it is that we have to complain about.
– Adam Phillips, Going Sane, p 101-102
All the new thinking, like all the old thinking, agrees that there is something catastrophic about being a person. The catastrophe is located in various places; in our being born at all, in our being condemned to death; in our vulnerability as organisms, or in our cruel injustices as political animals; in the scarcity of our natural resources, or in our greedy depredation of them; in our Fall, or in our hubris. But all these catastrophes, one way or another, are linked to our appetites, as creatures who want, and who are driven by, what is at once necessary and missing from our lives. Our wants may be ‘constructed’ – given form by the language available in the culture – but that we want is not in doubt. It is whether our wanting has catastrophe built into it - whether our wanting is such that ruinous frustration or ruinous aggression is inevitable; or is indeed a necessity to keep wanting on the go – or whether our wanting is made unbearable only by the ways in which it is responded to, that is now in question. The language of sanity and madness provides a vocabulary for asking and answering questions about appetite.
– Adam Phillips, Going Sane, p 120-121
The sane adult is protective – and not only of children, but of himself and others – in a way that avoids covertly undermining the strengths of those who are apparently in need of protection (‘The friends of the born nurse / Are always getting worse,’ as W.H. Auden wrote). The sane adult assumes that it is possible for people to get pleasure from who they happen to be, and that part of this pleasure is bound up with versions of self-reliance that are not merely a more or less bitter denial of a need for other people. The two most dispiriting forms of modern relationship are the protection racket and the sadomasochistic contract in which, respectively, one person’s strength depends on the other person’s weakness, or one person’s pleasure depends upon the other person’s suffering. The sane person’s project is to find more appealing ways of being weak and strong; or to find alternative pleasures to the pleasures of power and of helplessness. The way most people are prone to see what they call human nature now makes even the thought of alternative forms of pleasure and excitement sound hopelessly naïve. It would be part of the sane person’s sanity to want new forms of pleasure in which neither one’s kindness nor one’s excitement are overly compromised (one emblem of this might be those gay men who experiment in coming without getting an erection). The sane person knows that being able to only be a nice person is the death of sexual excitement; and that being able to only be nasty is too isolating.
– Adam Phillips, Going Sane, p 234-235
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