I have the image of a large plane flying soundlessly into a tall building; a ball of flame and smoke. For some seconds my mind is occupied by terror, by the evocation of evil. I have not heard my patient.
Later I am similarly with the deck of the Tampa – the rough tarpaulin cover against the sun, the crammed deck, the helicopter, invisible, filming desperation. Again my mind has become occupied – unbidden and unwanted. These images have disturbed my peace, my free-floating attention has been invaded.
I am neither hungry, nor thirsty, nor faced with the immediacy of death – and yet, many times removed, I am traumatised.
When clinically I listen to stories of pain and destructiveness and sometimes evil, I am similarly affected, but my mind retains a certain freedom to create its own images and associations. I can use my countertransference to sift relevance from subjectivity.
With the plane, building and ship I am helpless and exposed, stripped of defence and protection. I am many thousands of kilometres from these sites – yet I have been deeply affected. These images will never disappear from my mind – they will join similar images from other times; the holocaust, wars. Images to which I have no direct personal connection, but which, too, have remained as terrible unprocessed, unencoded imprints in my mind. With the spectre of recent terrible events, they will remain with me forever.
If, however, I were to have been born and lived in the crucible of conflict such as Shahid takes us to in such a terrifyingly beautiful way, my mind would have experienced such horrors as constant companion. It would have been my ever present reality not just for a few seconds.
We know a great deal now about the tragic consequences of infant and child maltreatment and abuse. The child in Shahid’s poem is not so far away. Integrations of new biological and psychoanalytic thinking illuminate pathways of understanding. We can use them in our clinical work – they sometimes do feel truly puny in the face of international conflagrations.
In this powerfully illuminating and deeply disturbing paper Shahid takes us into a dark theatre of the human and social mind, that is no theatre – other than the theatre of war. A theatre populated by the ghosts and survivors of wars, orphanages and nurseries. Shahid shows us so clearly how their contagion of hopelessness and repudiation of hope spreads more devastatingly than any anthrax.
How can we apply our knowledge of the internal world to such external cataclysms? How do our theories help us and those with whom we work – or would like to help? How do we understand these apparitions of violence and pain and the strange alienation by which we meet them? What do we do with the planes and the buildings and the lines of refugees in our lounge rooms?
Shahid’s paper provides us with a deeply moving centre for thought about these issues. His theses drawn from cultural and analytic vertices, provide anchors for the incomprehensible. Shahid posits:
- All human beings are interconnected and independent – we are part of one family, nation and people.
- All aspects of human culture have their origin in the human mind, and reflect its orderly and disorderly nature.
- If an individual mind can go through a process we call psychotic, so too can the group mind and so too culture
In linking operations of the individual mind and group culture Shahid echoes the thoughts of other analytic writers, such as Bell, concerning the dual nature of psycho-analysis – looking inwards to the workings of the mind and outwards to culture and society (Bell, 1999). Some would say this is a central tenet of psychoanalysis.
According to Bell, group and social phenomena cannot be reduced purely to models derived from the functioning of individual minds; where other levels of explanation derived from social and economic theory are relatively autonomous. However, a comprehensive account of group and social processes must necessarily derive some of its content from our knowledge of what individual minds are like. Freud, for example, drew no conceptual distinction between individuals and groups in terms of human psychology. Freud wrote – “in the individual’s mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as a helper, as an opponent and from the very first individual psychology, in this extended but entirely justifiable sense of the word, is at one and the same time a social psychology as well” (Freud, S. 1921)
As Shahid says, we are part of one family, one community, one people. I would suggest therefore, our voice “need not be meek and gentle”; a thought in fact Shahid immediately confounds by the strength of his arguments; central to which are two familiar pieces of psychoanalytic data:
- That much neurotic symptomatology and much so-called normal behaviour has a psychotic core; and
- That what is mad about psychotic thinking is that it is a form of thinking that turns like a destroyer against the mind of the thinker, as if it were a hated outsider.
Shahid depicts this madness as a psycho-auto-immune disorder – a damaged mind hates whatever intact functions remain and tries to destroy them. Such malignancy can terrify the individual, the relationship and spread into a much wider world. In states of malignant narcissism and envy, the more the mind is devastated by destruction the more it is driven to destroy. A Northern Alliance and Taliban fighter, both surrounded by rubble, confer by phone about the latest bombardment – “how did you like that, we were not touched.”
Joseph Berke isolates “malice” as a central ingredient of this malignant madness. It takes many forms, ranging from child battering to murder, from aggro at sporting events to terrorism and genocide; or more subtly, isolation and self-sabotage. Berke’s “malice”comprises an awareness of something which provokes an intolerable feeling of displeasure and vexation, provoking forceful, attacking, annihilating behaviour. Envy, greed and jealousy are its fundamental components (Berke, 1988).
We know envy as a state of exquisite tension, torment and ill-will, provoked by an overwhelming sense of inferiority, impotence and worthlessness. It begins (Berke) in the eye of the beholder and is so painful to the mind that the anxious person will go to almost any lengths to diminish, if not destroy whatever or whoever may have aroused it (Berke, 1988).
But Shahid takes us much deeper than this. He reminds us that such mechanisms, fundamental to our understanding of the paradoxical nature of painful and destructive patterns of repetition, patterns of malice, have their central origin in pain and trauma. It is important that we are reminded of this basic “humanness”; sometimes forgotten in our constructions of “infinite justice” – analytic or otherwise.
Our human response to destructive paradox depends on our capacity to remain open to Shahid’s view – with which I agree - that the problem of pain is central to any psychoanalytical formulation, that the human mind is organised around a central core of pain – so too, is our culture and our civilisation.
It is a simple yet profound thesis that if we are to understand war, suicide, terror and madness, we need to understand something about pain. This is central to Neville Symington’s New Theory of Narcissism (Symington, 1993).
Shahid has captured reflections of pain from which we are largely shielded – our lounge rooms however, are full of it, we are affected and alienated from it in a simultaneous distortion of reality. We take in images of starvation, pain, “collateral” damage – and then an advertisement for pleasure – and a cup of tea. Others watch these images from positions of pain.
When we cannot bear too much pain, says Shahid, we tend to blame the sufferers for it - their fault, their problem, dole bludgers, queue jumpers, whatever.
Whilst we leap to painfully obvious examples of this dynamic in relation to our attitudes concerning indigenous Australians, refugees and the homeless, Shahid reminds us such “them and us” dichotomies can flourish in any community, even therapeutic communities and other communities of the mind.
If we are all interconnected and interdependent, then we cannot, in Shahid’s conception, be indifferent to the pain of others. And yet, we can. His example of our geographical ignorance about Afghanistan, let alone of its deeper history of blood feuds and civil war, is not so dissimilar to those denials closer to home. We do not have to travel too far abroad to find evidence for Shahid’s observations – though the “scale of tragedy” be less evident.
We all know pain – we would not be here without experience of it. However, few may have experienced that unbearable pain which Shahid describes, capable of “killingorganism, mind, culture and society or the world that suffers it”.
Faced with such hierarchies of pain, Shahid contrasts adaptive, neurotic coping mechanisms and their logical coherence with those maladaptive, incoherent or psychotic mechanisms that confound our reality, make us mad and murder our souls.
Faced with pain we are reduced to those simplicities inherent in survival – we are all fundamentalists in waiting. In the pain of argument we regress to our own known truths in a manner similar to Shahid’s depiction of religious or political fundamentalism, as an attempt of the mind to deal with pain and bring order to chaos. White is good, black is bad, this theory we might say is good, that theory bad. The steps in our level of consciousness thus begin their descent into a terror that cannot tolerate ambivalence.
Fundamentalism born of pain finds fuel in revenge and punishment. In child protection services we refer to “trauma-organised systems of violence”. (Bentovim, 1992) Shahid evokes a suicidal analogy in the Taliban’s hatred of a neglecting world motivating the destruction of the Buddhist icons clearly valued by that same world.
To quote Shahid:
“I will kill what you love and by that killing bring home to you your lack of love. You killed me a thousand times with your neglect, now I kill what you refuse to love.”
This is the mantra of the neglected and abused delinquent breaking into your icon or intent on a suicidal course of action.
A homicidal and suicidal analogy might best fit the World Trade Centre where, as Shahid hypothesises, “hatred of the indifference, of pluralism and prosperity” drives the revenge of an austere fundamentalism. Simple and chilling corroboration can be found in the austere and rigidly prescribed notes of the hijackers – “say a prayer as you enter the plane, be single-minded” etc.
Shahid reminds us, conversely, that the complexities of this current tragedy find a wonderfully reduced focus for our own reactive fundamentalist responses in the figure of Bin Laden. “Thank god for Bin Laden”, rues Shahid, he can be the “repository of indifferent cruelty, violence and hatred. By destroying him we will destroy evil and insensitivity to the lives of other people.”
I was reminded here of Neville Symington’s reflections on the human condition in hisEmotion and Spirit, concerning the precariousness of the possibility in oscillations between good and evil and how the monsters of history might easily have been powers for extreme good, and how within each of us may lurk a struggle between a Hitler (or Bin Laden) and a Mother Teresa. We are, Neville cautions, always prone to take the Hitler path, especially in our avoidance of what is painful and in our preoccupation with advantage. Closely paralleling Shahid’s thoughts, Neville suggests it is, after all, the human condition that is the source of all evil, wrongdoing, sin, suffering and human misery (Symington, 1994).
As a fundamental possibility in this human condition Shahid has taken us inevitably into the dark confusion of psychotic process – the incomprehensible, the chaotic. A place where peaceful, non-violent, accepting, tolerant and forgiving objects – the icons – can produce hatred. Shahid contrasts war torn Afghanistan with an ancient, rich, peaceful and thoughtful heritage. In the present state of unbearable pain, he suggests in the dim awareness of this lost paradise, such a state of mind would now feel totally unattainable, even mocking, confused, bewildered and anguished. Like the Taliban fighters, hiding in deep tunnels in the mountains, these feelings fester. A psychotic solution emerges – “attack” – the object that reminds and promises paradise, in this life, must be destroyed. It is projected past death into another life. “There is paradise” (Shahid).
I am reminded, in Shahid’s depictions of a national tragedy, of the inner collapse of a desperate, starving baby, tantalised and traumatised by a lost breast, dimly remembered, such that it is driven to destroy its painful and deficient inner representations; thereby removing any memory of peace in its presence.
Any link that conjures pain and envy, in Bion’s terms, must be destroyed. Any possibility of thought must be destroyed. So, then, the madness in Shahid’s explication of this aspect of Afghan heritage.
If I correctly follow Shahid’s hypothesis, the Buddhist icons reflect a state of mind so hated, because they are reminders of a state of mind so inaccessible. This state of mind is hated because it is unattainable, because, as Shahid writes, it seems to flaunt its capacity to think and find peace and because it is at such variance with a present state of mind. What one could be is hated because it is felt to be unattainable.
We see in Shahid’s formulation an outline of our thinking about inner states of infancy where variations of pain, trauma and deprivation are primary motivators of psychotic retreat and destructive envy. We could extend this to thinking about Afghanistan as a nation which has regressed to the operation of a psychotic infant intent on destruction – suicide if you like – a force that overrides its capacity to feel. It is on this wounded baby we now drop our bombs – sometimes the same colour as our food parcels.
Our understandings of the nature and consequence of severe infant trauma, both in its dynamic and biological depths, bear true witness now to the terrible ghosts emerging from this national nursery. Shahid has captured their psychotic manifestations. If the super powers had had the capacity to bear the pain of their bitten nipples and restricted their bombing to food parcels and humanitarian responses to refugees – what mothers they might have been.
But, alas, the call to war once again confirms our inability to pay heed to the lessons of history and to comprehend the cycles of pain evident if we look.
In his Islamic Perspective article, Paul Monk (Monk, 2001) reminds us of the wisdom of 5 significant historical commentators. In brief summary:
St Augustine’s (The City of God) counsel that whilst secular states rise and fall, justice not power or wealth should be our criterion for assessing worth and fates.
Edward Gibbon (The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) reminds us that once before Islam erupted out of the blue into the domains of the world’s most powerful states.
Steven Runciman (History of the Crusades) reminds us that Christianity, quite as much as Islam, has been guilty of terror and atrocity in the name of religion, eg. the crusades.
T E Lawrence (Seven Pillars of Wisdom) reminds us that the Arab people have been manipulated by the Anglo-American ascendancy for ends to do with wealth and power – not justice.
Bernard Lewis (Islam and the West) reminds us that learning about Islam is an old tradition which long antedates the Western ascendancy.
Psycho-analysis reminds us of the powerful nature of defences and defensive organisations set against painful truths, and Shahid reminds psycho-analysis that pain is the central organiser of the human mind and that it is a vehicle for understanding the cruel repetitions of history.
This repetition-compulsion in our propensity for war, within and between individuals and nations; finds thus ready historical validation. When psychotic process intervenes however, we leave behind the neurotic logic of repeating, remembering and working through. As Shahid illustrates so clearly, what the psychotic process does is break up the“coherent language of discourse and reason”. No longer can we then sit at the table and discuss our differences. Our very language of communication is destroyed. Meaning and truth become as spurious as the devotions of Bion’s “liars and scientists”.
By way of saner contrast I am reminded of Albert Einstein, who in 1932 was asked by the League of Nations, and its Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, to choose someone with whom he could have a frank exchange of views on any topic he might choose.
Einstein wrote to Freud: “Is it possible”, he asked, “to control man’s mental evolution so as to make him proof against the psychoses of hatred and destructiveness? Here I am thinking”, he wrote, ”by no means only of the so-called uncultured masses. Experience proves that it is rather the so-called intelligentsia that is most apt to yield to these disastrous collective suggestions since the intellectual has no direct contact with life in the raw, but encounters it in its earliest synthetic form upon the printed page.” (Einstein in Freud, 1933)
In his reply to Einstein Freud wrote: “Anything that encourages the growth of emotional ties between people must operate against war. In the first place they may be relations resembling those towards a loved object (though without having sexual aim) – and the second kind of emotion is by means of identification. Whatever leads people to share important interests produces this community of feeling, these identifications. The structure of human society is to a large extent based on them. Why do you and I”, Freud wrote to Einstein, “and so many, many other people rebel so violently against war? Why do we not accept it as another of the many painful calamities of life?… We react to war”,Freud continued, “because war puts an end to human lives that are full of hope, because it brings individual men into humiliating situations, because it compels them against their will to murder other people, and because it destroys precious material objects that have been produced by the labours of humanity.” (Freud, 1933)
In thinking about reconstruction and the repair of emotional ties, Shahid evokes an object-relational view of our internal worlds, populated by many figures; most particularly parental, whose continued and constructive function in our internal theatres remains vital to psychic survival.
Children born into trauma and loss, as Shahid emphasises with the Taliban war orphans, begin life in states of internal rubble. Parental objects are damaged or absent. The apparatus (or any orderly cycle of projection and introjection in establishing whole object) has already been severely damaged and in any case the opportunities for peaceful, protective, fertile, parental internalisation often are very limited. Children born into trauma, loss, deprivation and neglect, begin this way. The cycle of social disintegration continues. Anger, violence and talion law are more reliable landmarks.
You may have seen the photo of the 15 year old Taliban warlord recently, surrounded by heavily armed kinsmen, who had stepped into the shoes of his recently killed father. This is a world apart from ours and yet, as Shahid reminds us, in terms of internal possibilities, not so distant.
The nuclear fission of hatred, Shahid speaks of, thus begins with the alien and disturbing representations of tranquil or peaceful objects; in such contrast to pain and poverty. An oasis of promise prompts an intensity of envy and hatred, hard to comprehend. Shahid here depicts a frenzy of escalating destructiveness. The greater the destruction the more that is lost, the oasis becomes the mirage. A malignancy of mind that Rosenfeld and others have described, replaces normal function and evolution of the thinking process.“Hatred has murdered thought and therefore the mind shall think no more.”
In this wonderful paper Shahid provides us with a pocket of sanity in conceptualising and capturing this malignant consequence of pain. In this he takes us into the area of deep human paradox, a psychotic paradox – relevant to individual and national distress.
Shahid:
“Forever will the mind be persecuted by the fragments of its own murdered thoughts. Forever will it wander in a wilderness of dust and ashes. This is the wanton destruction of a culture, the destruction of a human mind.”
In his conception of the interconnectedness of human suffering Shahid sets a challenge, not dissimilar to the clinical. It requires clarifying those wars between parts of ourselves, our awareness of how we have the capacity to destroy what is most valuable within us.
Neville, in New Theory and Emotion and Spirit, sets out his belief that the psychological core of the human condition is narcissism. Neville and Shahid identify trauma and pain at its centre. Both, I believe, to paraphrase Neville, believe that “no progress in the transformation of the human condition will truly occur until we understand its root lies in the emotional state where the other does not exist; where reality is cancelled out; where a pseudo-self dominates the scenario.” (Symington, 1993, 1994)
The orphan yard child has turned away from hope. In the empty circles one wonders lie the blighted remnants of any future “lifegiver” reserves.
In this present insanity it is well we attend to this pain.
On the 12th September the Dalai Lama wrote a universal letter: “Dear Friends, the events of this day cause every thinking person to stop their daily lives, whatever is going on in them, and to ponder deeply the larger questions of life. We search again for not only the meaning of life, but the purpose of our individual and collective experience as we have created it – and we look earnestly for ways in which we might recreate ourselves anew as human species, so that we will never treat each other this way again.”
Since September 11th – but long before – psychotic process born of the human condition has created thousands of orphans.
The boat people off our shores bring us messages about this condition that we cannot bear to hear and cannot bear to see. We are all boat people.
I thank Shahid for his paper. It helps us to hear, it helps us to see.
Now it is time to talk.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bell, D. (1999) Psychoanalysis and Culture – a Kleinian Perspective. Tavistock Clinic Series. Duckworth, London.
Bentovim, A. (1992) Trauma-Organised Systems. Physical and Sexual Abuse in Families. Karnac, London.
Berke, Joseph H. (1988) The Tyranny of Malice. Summit Books. New York.
Freud, S. (1915) Thoughts for the Times on War and Death. S.E:14
Freud, S. (1933[1932]) Why War, S.E: 22
Freud, S. (1921) Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. S.E: 18
Monk, P (2001) Islamic Perspective. Financial Review, 26.10.2001
Symington, N. (1993) Narcissism. A New Theory. Karnac, London.
Symington, N. (1994) Emotion and Spirit. Cassell, London
