All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion (54 page)

In
The Psychology of Women
, the analyst Helene Deutsch draws on the case of a woman she names ‘Mrs Smith’ to explore the workings of a particular kind of remedial identification between friends. Mrs Smith was incapable of bringing a pregnancy to term. She had had numerous miscarriages and suffered a stillbirth when a baby was born a month too early. The problem, as Deutsch saw it, was that Mrs Smith’s ‘identification with her aggressive mother had filled her with almost conscious horror’: this made taking on female matter problematic. Also, her mother had wanted a son, and the birth of her daughter had been met with long-term hostility.

Mrs Smith was eventually able to have a child, but only by the intercession of a friend with whom she could identify–a friend who had a mother whose maternal warmth embraced both of the younger women. In her memoir, Deutsch makes it clear that Mrs Smith is in fact herself. By a happy coincidence, she and her friend, ‘a goddess of serenity’, had become pregnant at around the same time. An identification with her meant ‘my motherhood changed its character. Through a psychological impact on biological forces, my desire for a child was fulfilled.’ Her friend gave birth one month later than she had expected, just when Deutsch’s pregnancy had reached full term.

We develop, become the adults we are, with and through others–both real and imaginary. Even when they have real playmates, toddlers invent imaginary friends who sustain them. They become partners in pretend play, serve as vehicles for elaborating their fears and desires, provide a repository for secrets and wish-fulfilments, as well as help them to differentiate between right and wrong. They also help them to deal with problems and with loneliness: fantasy, after all, is one of the ways humans have of making good the stresses and strains of everyday life. One little girl who played the piano a lot was accompanied by Mozart, Beethoven and a musical retinue when she went off to preschool. A three-year-old boy, who had just had a baby sister, invented an older brother for himself, who kept him fine company while his mother focused on the new arrival.

In a recent UK study, eighteen hundred children were asked about their past or present experience of fantasy friends. Forty-eight per cent had one or had had several. These children, as well as many observed by other researchers, displayed greater creativity than their peers, were more competent at language, were better able to imagine the minds of others and read their expressions–were in other words better at making ‘real’ friends and better at relations with adults. They also had a better grasp of symbolic thought, important to their subsequent intellectual abilities.

In one gender-based study, researchers found that while girls tend to ‘have’ a companion, boys tended to ‘be’ their companions. In other words, rather than having Spiderman as their friend, they became him. Boys also tended to make their imaginary companions better at everything, stronger, more powerful; while the little girls made their friends less strong and powerful, and then helped them. Since children take their cues from the culture around them, it’s unsurprising that even where imaginary friends are concerned they fall into our time’s stereotypes: women today are still valued for the care they can provide, while what is demanded of men is action and power.

Our epoch affords increasing possibilities for virtual make-believe. Individuals well past toddlerdom can fantasize any number of personalities for themselves while interacting with cyber-friends. We celebrate numerous remakings of the self, masquerade the performance of various gender identities and metrosexuality. In this environment, some psychoanalysts have begun to say that they are seeing an increasing number of ‘as if’ personalities in their consulting rooms: people who mimic others wholesale, imitate what they latch on to outside themselves, rather than identifying in an imaginative and reciprocal way. In other words, they don’t engage. They simply repeat or double others, passively don personae without ever building up any emotional links. In one case, a man becomes a lawyer after having befriended a successful advocate. When that relationship ceases, he happens on a sailor and joins the merchant navy, and so on, without ever querying or doubting his choices and actions. Breakdown can ensue when the object of their imitation disappears. This distortion of personality is akin to what Winnicott calls a ‘false self’–a self built in utter compliance with the environment, with deprivation at its genesis. If ‘human kind/Cannot bear very much reality’, as T.S. Eliot says in the first of his
Four Quartets
, ‘Burnt Norton’, too much fantasy leads to its own forms of suffering.

Past toddlerdom, virtual friendships have the potential for encasing us in prolonged immaturity. We over-idealize our ‘imaginary friends’, provide them with ‘angels’ wings’: they’re easy to love since they don’t frustrate us by not complying with our wishes in the way that embodied others do. When the latter are engaged with and then, being real, inevitably thwart our grandiose desires and expectations of them, love too quickly turns to hate. People lash out, unable to control their impulses and their rage. Anxiety can set in. This latter can also be a defence against a sense of fundamental weakness: the helpless inner child has never grown up enough to bear the contrariness of really existing others.

For Better or for Worse

The friendships of the years after toddlerhood provide the first we can fully remember. Like first loves, they imprint themselves on us. A best friend becomes someone we can share with and be recognized by. She or he can also possess wished-for aspects of ourselves: abundant curly hair, the ability to ride or swim or to talk back to teacher. Her family may present a hugely informative contrast to our own–an at-home or working mother, brothers, pictures on the walls, books, exotic food. The friend’s family can indeed be a major component of the ‘bestness’ of our friend. Alternative models of love and living arrangements stretch the child’s vision of the world and may also provide succour if life is difficult at home.

In the flux of the playground, early friendships also mark out our first wounds outside the home. The rivalries of school, the loss of best friends, the pain of rupture, may play into our sense of injustice: a demand for equal treatment for all.

During those labile and libidinally charged years which are adolescence, the young grow notoriously promiscuous in their friendships, locating in each often short-lived relationship something that they lack and as a result idealize in the other and will defiantly defend if they encounter parental opposition. Winnicott attributes this to the fact that teenagers are basically ‘isolates’, in part repeating a stage of earliest omnipotent, excited, yet utterly helpless infancy, before the recognition of fully existing others had come into being. In an essay entitled ‘Adolescence: Struggling through the Doldrums’, he notes that adolescence is characterized by a radical combination of ‘defiant independence and regressive dependence’, the rapid alternation between these states, and ‘even a coexistence of the two extremes at one moment in time’–a description struggling parents will recognize.

These isolates collect together, finding comfort in shifting numbers. Themselves as yet unformed, without moorings, yet propelled to break away from the family, they find their anchors in a group where identities are forged on the basis of partial identifications. A shared activity or interest, love of a particular band or star, a mutual interest in a political issue, a mutual injustice, provides a group identity, often under a leader who, as Freud might say, represents an ego ideal, a combination of the desired characteristics. In the aura of the charismatic leader or the cultural ideal, individual rivalries can be put to rest. Pop stars often serve the purpose admirably.

Winnicott also posits that in the libidinal defiance of the adolescent there is an antisocial core, which most young won’t live out for themselves in any radical way. But if a member of their group is indeed wildly antisocial, ‘delinquent’, and enacts a ‘crime’, they will bond around him, since he has given expression to their defiance. Through his act, they ‘feel real’. Even if individually they may not approve of the act, they will remain loyal to him and defend him.

Like all our emotional attachments, early friendships have their dark sides and bitter sequelae. Pre-adolescent groupings, like later ones, are often consolidated by marking out an enemy or a scapegoat on whom all our own undesirable or spurned characteristics–our very helplessness–are projected. The narcissism of small differences takes hold: tiny divergent properties of dress or appearance stand in for our own often unconscious fears and hates. These are suddenly made living flesh in another whom we can detest. Vicious bullying may ensue.

In
Cat’s Eye
, Margaret Atwood details a girl’s friendship in the 1950s with devastating accuracy and shows its lasting force.

Eight-year-old Elaine moves from an enchanted, wandering rural existence with her entomologist father, unconventional mother and dear older brother to take up life in a half-finished house in a conventional 1950s suburb of Toronto. The rituals of school and the whole complex, ordinary world of ‘girls and their doings’ await her. She has not been well prepared. Her parents have been keeping things from her. Other families, she quickly realizes, when she makes her first tentative friendships with Carol and Grace, are not like hers. Nor does she know how to be a girl. She is both tomboyish outsider and vulnerable misfit.

Enter Cordelia who lives in a large two-storey house, with egg cups, napkin rings and a powder room. Her mother not only has a cleaner, but paints. Cordelia’s two clever older sisters banter, as she does, in a mocking way. Elaine adores her brazenness and certainty, her scornful tones, her wild impropriety.

But Cordelia, who has the other girls, too, in her thrall, declares that Elaine needs improvement. A reign of terror is unleashed in its name. The girls mock the way Elaine dresses, eats, walks and laughs. They draw attention to her failings, her looks. They enact her burial. They torment her. Persecute. Elaine submits: ‘I am not normal, I am not like other girls. Cordelia tells me so, but she will help me… It will take hard work and a long time.’ Terrified of losing ‘my best friends’, wanting to please, to hold even their perverse attentiveness, Elaine with increasing desperation endures a final long winter of nightmarish cruelty. ‘Hatred would have been easier,’ she later reflects. ‘With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.’

Out of this thing called love, in her desire to please and appease, Elaine succumbs to a self-annihilating task. Devilish Cordelia has thrown Elaine’s ‘stupid’ winter hat into a steep ravine where ‘the bad men are’ and the girls are forbidden to go. Elaine is ordered after it. She overcomes a last vestige of inner resistance and creeps down the hillside, into the half-frozen creek. Icy water fills her boots, weighs down her snowpants. She reaches for her hat and when she looks up at the bridge, her ‘friends’ have gone. She is alone. The cold chills her to the marrow. She can’t move. She lies down at the edge of the stream, her head ‘filling with black sawdust’. Death invites, ‘peaceful and clear’. A woman appears, holds out her arms to her, urges her up, wraps her in warmth, tells her: ‘It will be all right. Go home.’ Elaine knows the woman who has saved her is the Virgin Mary. When she returns to school, freed in a sense because the old submissive self who wanted to be loved has died in the ravine, she finds she can now stand up to the bullying. It’s easy. If they’re not her friends, nothing binds her to them. She recognizes that they have needed her to enact their dominance and now she doesn’t need them. She is indifferent.

In that indifference, Elaine is strong. In high school, the balance of power shifts and it is Elaine who knows how to get on with boys, who grows cruel towards an increasingly helpless and friendless Cordelia. The last time she sees Cordelia as an adult, her one-time friend and persecutor is confined in a ‘discreet private loony bin’. Behind her ‘locked, sagging face’ is a ‘frantic child’.

It is her friendship with Cordelia that haunts Elaine’s return at the age of fifty to Toronto as an accomplished and successful artist embraced by young feminists. In her canvases, it is her childhood friends and their shared world that figure large.

Buried early friendships with their see-saws of love and hate, power and helplessness, under this spotlight, are as formative as later sexual passions. They endure within us. In Elaine’s case, her relations with Cordelia make her distrust women: ‘Women collect grievances, hold grudges and change shape,’ she reflects. ‘They pass hard, legitimate judgments, unlike the purblind guesses of men, fogged with romanticism and ignorance and bias and wish. Women know too much, they can neither be deceived nor trusted. I can understand why men are afraid of them.’Yet Cordelia is her twin, the one who holds a key to her reflection, and at the novel’s end, when the Cordelia she was hoping she would once more confront fails to turn up–may indeed be dead–Elaine addresses her aura: ‘This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over tea.’

The ordinary virtue of friendship, the ability to laugh at life’s vagaries over a cup of tea with a compatible other, is what many, once early passions have been spent, hail as one of life’s great gifts. Amongst my interviewees, one fifty-five-year-old man confessed–as if it were a deep secret, so unfashionable that it was difficult to share–that after the break-up of his first and only marriage, he had decided he was simply better at friendship and enjoyed it far more than any libidinal pursuits.

In fact, long-standing couples, after the hurly-burly of those days of getting and spending, lusting and rearing, also attest that it is the friendship between them that counts for most. Kindness, loyalty, the pleasure of having one’s views or outrage shared, reflected, replied to by a familiar, buoys one through life. Cupid’s searing arrows, the turmoils of passion, can feel, in retrospect, like rampaging tornadoes that lifted one savagely up and away from the more beneficent calms of steady companionship. Love here may be a more temperate zone, but it is love for all that.

It may be a wish to rebalance the prevailing contemporary ethos which makes me want to stress and end on this temperate zone of love. We are what was once called ‘old’ far longer than earlier generations. The assumptions underlying our world are that we are isolated, selfish, self-gratifying creatures, with rampant needs that demand satisfaction and protection. Yet looking around, it is also clear that what makes life worth living, what makes us feel alive and gives us hope from day to day, is the ordinary kindness to one another that we are capable of. It is unromantic civility and quotidian generosity that encourage our intimacies to endure. If in the name of love, we long for Himalayan peaks of rapture and find ourselves enmeshed in grand and unruly passions and their accompanying anguish, it may not come amiss if, in the name of common humanity, we also stretch our ways of loving into those foothills where it’s good to walk and talk with friends.

There is more, though it is perhaps the subject of another book. In our imagining of the good life–a society worth living in and in which we and our children flourish–it is not only the fundamental rights of security and freedom the state is able to enshrine that are essential. We also need love. We need to give as well as take it. We need solidarity with our fellow beings. Happiness is not the question here. Love can bring that, but often does not. We need love because it confronts us with the heights and depths of our being, shows us what we can and cannot endure and reconciles us to what we discover in ourselves and others. We need love so as to be the human creatures that we are at our best, at once great and greatly fragile.