The Importance of Disappointment

Ian Craib

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134869923
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

This sane and insightful discussion explores the nature of identity in late modern societies to criticize the way in which psychotherapy has become an ideology of late modernity and to emphasize the importance of `negative' messages in psychoanalytic theory.

Chapter 1
Cutting out gingerbread people

This book is drawn from a range of experiences and ideas. On the one hand, there is my work as a group psychotherapist working with patient and client groups, student groups and groups of trainee counsellors. On the other, there is my work as a sociologist, as a teacher of and writer about modern social theory. It is a study of the nature of identity in contemporary society, and a critique of the place of psychotherapy in our society. It is also a defence of psychotherapy, against those who would dismiss it wholesale: for all its faults and problems, I will argue that it still has something important to offer, but that something often runs counter both to what people might hope to gain from psychotherapy and to a current of expectations and ways of thinking in the wider culture and society.

It is also a defence of a certain type of psychotherapy: that based within the psychoanalytic tradition. In Britain, therapy and counselling seem to be experiencing an unprecedented popularity: we have reached the stage where they figure in soap operas. This is reflected throughout the Western world and elsewhere, and over recent decades there has been a blossoming of different types of therapy that often claim to offer more than the traditional forms, more quickly and with fewer doubts and complications than can be found in the work that began with Freud. Psychoanalysis itself tends to get caught up in this, promising results that are competitive rather than realistic. So within the psychoanalytic tradition, I want to offer a defence of certain themes, in fact certain values, that I believe important to preserve. They can be summed up in words such as conflict, difficulty, work, failure, complexity, ambivalence, rationality, morality, restraint, judgement and many others, all of which I am lumping together under ‘disappointment’.

The popularity of psychotherapy and the growth of new forms of therapy is not something that just happens, nor is it necessarily a ‘good thing’, certainly not in any simple way. It is not necessarily part of the march of progress, a steady alleviation of the human condition and improvement of human relationships. I will argue that some aspects of this popularity can be dangerous, even destructive, and they can be intimately bound up with a loss of freedom and the development of a highly organised and controlled society. A society, a culture, is a complex entity and there will be, at any one time, a number of contradictory processes going on; nothing is ever simply ‘good’ or ‘bad’, and most things are at the same time good and bad. What I hope to do is not only to offer a defence of psychotherapy, to some degree against itself, but also to tease out and criticise certain aspects of our culture which seem to me to be threatening.

This should not be seen as some wholesale condemnation of the modern (or postmodern) world: I am only trying to identify some strands, albeit, I would argue, important strands, of our culture and think about them sceptically. These strands are bound up with large—scale social changes, and as they have developed, so ideas from psychotherapy and psychoanalysis have been drawn into them. I suspect that the present popularity of psychotherapy has more to do with these changes than with any virtues that psychoanalysis might possess on its own account; indeed it seems to me that one of the real virtues of psychoanalysis might be that it can protect the values that are threatened by the changes we are living through, but to do this it might have to reject its own popularity and stand back from it.

This book, then, will be about psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic ideas about psychotherapy and what we can and should expect from it, and the way in which it works; it will be about the place of both of these in our society; and it will be about what is happening to our society and the way that affects, for better or worse, the way we think about ourselves, the way we expect to live and work. It will be about what we might expect from our lives and from the society we live in.

I will often use the first person plural. Who is this ‘we’ I am talking about? Much of the time I am describing a normal human difficulty, so the ‘we’ is everybody. However, perhaps these difficulties are more pronounced for some than others. By ‘we’ perhaps I mean primarily people like myself. The social changes I am concerned with affect most strongly those who might once have been called ‘middle-class’: the professions, those controlling and some of those working in the service industries, the ‘caring’ professions, the media; those of us who have a comparatively uncertain future, reasonable levels of education, who range from the comfortably off to the comparatively poor, but who are not entirely trapped. There are many who do not fall into this category: there are those who have been consistently disappointed, whose life does not often rise much above a matter of day-to-day survival and who have little material out of which to form choices for the future. Such people might be in the majority—their existence, I suspect, acts as a permanent threat to those of us who try to avoid disappointment.

Why disappointment? In common usage, and in the dictionary, we talk about disappointment as what happens, what we feel, when something we expect, intend, or hope for or desire does not materialise. One of the difficulties of living in our world is that it is perhaps increasingly less clear exactly what we might expect or hope for or desire. In fact, these words mean different things. The most basic is desire: it carries connotations of needing urgently, yearning, to the point almost of trying to will something into existence. Sometimes we desire something so completely that we revert to our infant selves and scream, metaphorically or in reality, in the hope that our desire may be realised—just as, if we were lucky, the milk used to appear in response to our screams from the cot. Sometimes we will break things, threaten to hurt, or actually hurt, ourselves or others in order to obtain our desire. From the outside, such behaviour is often seen as simply selfish: ‘She’s only doing it to get what she wants.’ From the inside, it is more powerful, not simply a matter of wanting something but of needing it so urgently that without it, life seems unbearable. At those moments, we desire something with all our heart and soul, but go beyond the powerful yearning that is usually suggested by that phrase. In a lower key, the feeling seems to say: ‘If I yearn hard enough, long enough, if I feel this pain sufficiently intensely, then my desire will be realised.’

Most of us will experience such feelings at times, some more than others. Most of us learn eventually to survive the disappointment of desire, often with a great deal of heartache. Sometimes we will take our desire for reality: after the death of somebody we love, we will see them walking ahead of us down the street, and run to catch up, before we remember. Usually, we can accept that what we desire does not always exist; that we can desire something without necessarily hoping for it and certainly without expecting it. But perhaps there might be areas in our lives where we can believe something to be the case because we desire it, and find ourselves unable to give up the idea whatever evidence we are presented with.

I am interested in these grey areas. In psychotherapy, there are many examples: the continued belief that a particular person is really the ‘right one’ for us; the hope that we can do something to change our relationship to our parents so that they will become the people that we’ve always wanted them to be. Such beliefs are clearly not ‘mad’ and not the reaction to some trauma but none the less they do not quite stand the test of ‘reality’. My argument will be that there are certain social processes going on around us that make the reality testing more difficult and that perhaps encourage us to believe what we desire to be the case. In American and British society at the moment, for example, there are tendencies to encourage us to believe that we can achieve the personal fulfilment, the space for self-expression, the ‘personal growth’ which, in these societies, many people certainly desire.

Desire is not quite the same as hope. When we use the term ‘hope’, I suspect we are indicating that some thought has gone into the process of hoping; we are not quite so driven by basic forces as we are when we desire. To hope for something implies an acknowledgement that the hope may not be realised, that we have made some judgement about what reality can offer and we are testing it. But we can discover that we have unrealistic hopes and we find ourselves maintaining the hope against the evidence; it is not unknown to talk of the triumph of hope over experience.

There is something different in our experience of hope. We have desires whether we like it or not. On the whole, we like to have hopes, they are amongst the things that keep us going; the opposite of hope is hopelessness, despair, giving up. There might be periods in our lives, after the disappointment of hope, when we try to give up all future hopes, not being able to face again even the possibility of the pain of disappointment. Some people despair and do not return to hope; but many will despair in the hope that hope will return. Sometimes we fight hard, quite consciously with great energy, to maintain our hopes, the psychological equivalent, perhaps, of the stiff upper lip. There are times, perhaps, when hope seems to be everything, when to give up hope is to plunge into nothingness. And, in the same way that there are certain processes at work in our society encouraging us to desire the impossible, so there are processes which encourage us to hope for too much, not to surrender our hopes when they prove unrealistic or to surrender them, as far as possible, without experiencing the pain and despair that follow. The search for somebody or something to blame when hopes are frustrated can help to avoid the pain and has become intimately bound up with modern politics.

There is a connection here between hope and ideals—the way we would like the world to be and the sort of people we would like ourselves to be. It can seem that without our ideals, nothing is worth while; we need to hold onto them but at the same time we need to accept that our ideals are never likely to be realised. If we believe we can achieve our ideals, then we are back with blind desire, but of a more persecutory nature. If the world won’t match up to our ideals, then we must try to force it; if we don’t ourselves match up to our ideals, then we punish and try to force ourselves. Perhaps the dominant sense in which we have in the past talked about idealism, whether on a political or a personal level, has been in terms of altruism: of giving to other people, of restraining one’s own desires and demands and often of creating a situation in which other people may do the same. It has been associated with morality, enforced on us by society and on ourselves by ourselves, through a sense of failure and guilt. Now, however, there is a tendency to equate morality with self-expression, with the satisfaction of our needs and wants; we often regard ourselves as having ‘rights’ to these things; they become our ideals. And when we fail to live up to them, it is not ourselves but society and other people that we punish.

Another way of putting all this is that we might change our desires, hopes, ideals, into intentions and expectations, things we actually set out to achieve in their fullness, rather than see them as distant goals that we will never achieve, yet still have to work towards, or as pleasant dreams that are, in reality, simply not on. It is a paradox of our existence that we have to be in both of these positions at the same time. Some part of us wants immediate satisfaction, wants it all and wants it now, and whilst we might try to rationalise this away with our knowledge that it is unreasonable, our gut reactions belie our heads. To occupy the second position as well, to make the compromises with reality, involves an ongoing, painful process that is rather like giving up part of ourselves. At a time when self-fulfilment and self-expression seem to be major cultural values, achieving this second position becomes more and more difficult. There are ways in which reality itself, our social reality and the natural world around us, becomes uncertain, obscure. We do not quite know what it is. And it is as if, in response to this immense uncertainty, we have to believe in the certainties of our own desires. The tangles and confusions that we get ourselves into when trying to maintain these certainties come to seem preferable to the pain of disappointment and uncertainty.

Alternatively we may try to give up our hopes, not in the despair that always lurks behind disappointment, but as a sort of abstention from areas of life where these difficulties most often manifest themselves. We might decide that because we cannot be absolutely certain of everything, then we cannot be certain of anything. We might decide that because we cannot be absolutely sure of what is right or good or beautiful, then nothing in particular is right or good or beautiful, and we save the energy of expending serious thought on these things. Our inner life becomes empty and our outer life a cynical manipulation of people and events for our own, usually modest, purposes.

Many of the things that frustrate us belong to the world outside, but in this book I am interested in the way we are inevitably frustrated by the social world and by our own psychological and physical make-up. It might sound odd to emphasise disappointment in a discussion of psychotherapy. The public face of psychotherapy and counselling is a comforting and understanding face, providing help and support, easing pain, sorting out difficulties and problems, resolving conflicts, enabling people to find themselves, take responsibility for themselves and satisfy their needs. Some of this is rooted in classical psychoanalytic theory, in Freud’s criticisms of the repression of sexuality. Freud, however, was writing in a form of society where too much, rather than too little, repression seemed to be required and where many neuroses seemed to be the result of keeping too tight a rein on instinctual desires, particularly sexual desires. One of the ways in which psychoanalysis first entered popular culture was with the idea that we ought to be less repressed sexually.

Increasingly, ‘repression’ has come to gain as many negative connotations when it refers to internal, psychological processes as it has when it refers to external, political repression, although they are by no means the same thing. The removal of repression, the expression of needs, of desires, has become a theme of modern culture and of many post-psychoanalytic therapies, and it is not unusual to hear people claiming rights to self-expression, rights to have their needs met, not in the political sense of freedom of speech and reasonable standards of living, but in terms of personal relationships, where the meaning can be very different: I can say what I want to you, however much hurt and humiliation it causes; you must give me what I need, whatever its cost to you, or else. Often the ‘or else’ entails the end of the relationship, the satisfaction of needs triumphing over connections to other people. There is, of course, a matter of balance in all this: I am not suggesting that people should make themselves slaves to others, or refrain from voicing anger, but it often seems to me that the subtleties and difficulties of all this are ignored.

These claims are often bound up with a sense of omnipotence, and if they are refused, we rage against a world which will not be as we want it to be. The claim ‘I have a right to control my own life’, when made collectively by a subjugated people, has a very different meaning to that which it has when it is made by an individual. I spend my life surrounded by other people, who are more or less independent of me and constantly doing things on their own account. As a consequence, I have to adjust to them. If I am to control my own life, then I will first have to control the lives of all those around me. The rights I might have to do as I wish are certainly a political matter, but they are also a moral matter. I think it would be unacceptable for a society to outlaw extra-marital sexual activities. It would rightly be claimed that that is a matter for individual conscience. But if I were to claim that I have a right to engage in extra-marital sexual relationships, irrespective of the wishes and feelings of those who would be affected, I would be denying my conscience and duty to find reasonable ways of living with those around me. The very powerful ideas of self-expression that we can find in both the wider culture and the world of psychotherapy and counselling need careful examination.

I want to take my argument further and look at what we are doing if, as psychotherapists or counsellors or health professionals of any sort, we get caught in this denial of negative experience.

The cultural pressures, often normal pressures which have to do with wanting to help people, to ease suffering, to be effective, to be good at our jobs, make us vulnerable to the denial of the necessity and inevitability of certain forms of human suffering. We set out to cure and we construct blueprints of what people ought to be feeling, ought to be like, and we can too easily set about trying to manipulate or even force people into these blueprints. I will be arguing all the way through this book that we need to be aware of the complexity of situations and the narrowness of the various lines that we tread, and that it is too easy to get carried away in directions that often run counter to the values we believe in.

Patients, of course, can tell us this very clearly if we choose to listen. As a way of illustrating this, I want to take a vignette from my own practice: a therapy group that at the time consisted of seven members. The background to the particular incident was that some months previously I had returned to supervision, and I was now discussing this group regularly in my supervision. The group was not aware of this in any conscious way, but the information had clearly been conveyed unconsciously. This was made known to me through the metaphor of feelings about their parents, and the things that their parents expected of them. To feel bad, unhappy, depressed seemed to be taken by parents as a criticism or attack, parents assuming that it was their fault. This extended through feelings to actions and ways of living which seemed to hurt parents. When discussing why this should be the case, it was thought that an important part of it was that their behaviour was taken to reflect on their parents in the eyes of other family, neighbours, etc. ‘If I am depressed, then my parents will feel that aunts and uncles will regard them as failures.’

The group was, of course, quite right; having joined a supervision group, I very much wanted my patient group to ‘work’, to do well, to be happy, to be cured, and I certainly felt that their failure to do this would reflect on my ability in the eyes of the aunts and uncles in the supervision group. To put it simply, I did not want to appear to be a bad therapist.

This theme had been around for several weeks. In the particular session I wish to discuss here, the group had been working away at a number of issues; the ‘parent’ theme was around but not especially prominent. I had said very little for the first hour of the session, although I had been aware that one woman, A, had been silent, often looking worried and distressed.

I had commented that I was very aware of her silence and I wondered what might be happening. She responded that she was thinking hard about what people were saying, and it was clear that she did not want to add anything more.

About ten minutes after this, another woman, B, produced a very powerful fantasy. After the previous week’s session, when two of the men in the group had been talking about how they wanted to change, she had gone home and started to see everybody in the group as potential ‘gingerbread men’ (her words), put out on a tray and waiting to be cut into their proper, similar shapes (which would then, presumably, be hardened in the oven), This had been such a powerful and frightening fantasy for her that she had not been able to go to her kitchen drawer all day.

In the discussion that followed, I was presented with three different ways in which I was experienced as the cook, cutting them out into required shapes. The first came from a man who had joined the group, amongst other reasons, to learn to assert himself more. He had noticed in his first months that although I sometimes asked questions of other people, I did not ask him anything. He thought this was deliberate, a way of forcing him to join in on his own account. He was right that there was certainly a deliberate sense about it on my part, but as I thought about it afterwards, this seemed fair enough. This was for two reasons: firstly, it left him to do something he wanted to do—to learn how to join in on his own account; and secondly—and import...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE
• CHAPTER 1: CUTTING OUT GINGERBREAD PEOPLE
• CHAPTER 2: THE ORGANISATION OF MOURNING
• CHAPTER 3: PSYCHOANALYSIS AS THE THEORY OF DISAPPOINTMENT
• CHAPTER 4: LOOKING ON THE BRIGHT SIDE
• CHAPTER 5: THE ORGANISATION OF SOCIAL LIFE
• CHAPTER 6: THE FRAGMENTATION OF EVERYDAY LIFE
• CHAPTER 7: THE POWERFUL SELF AND ITS ILLUSIONS
• CHAPTER 8: THE DISAPPOINTMENT OF IDENTITY: WHAT SORT OF MAN?
• CHAPTER 9: THE FALSE SELF OF LATE MODERNITY
• CHAPTER 10: THE DISAPPOINTED SELF
• CHAPTER 11: THE VALUES OF PSYCHOANALYSIS
• REFERENCES