Phantasy in Everyday Life

A Psychoanalytic Approach to Understanding Ourselves

Julia Segal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429917257
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Over the past fifty years dramatic ideas and discoveries have arisen out of the work of analysts. In Phantasy in Everyday Life the author is mainly concerned with Melanie Klein's contribution to the field and with everyday application of her theories. Central to the author's theme is Melanie Klein's concept of phantasy - the unconscious fantasies which control our assumptions, our thoughts, our emotions and our behavior. The first half of the book is concerned with daily life; the second more with theoretical issues. Written from her direct experience,the author's work will prove invaluable both to professionals and to the wider general public.

One
Introduction

Psychoanalysis has been around for a long time now. What began in nineteenth-century Vienna has spread over the world and in the process has developed and changed. Many psychoanalytical insights have crept into everyday awareness, often with their origin forgotten. ‘Freudian slips’ and Jung’s and Adler’s ‘complexes’ have become part of our language, as have ‘identification’ and perhaps even ‘projection’ and ‘denial’. The importance of children’s play, the need for mourning and the value of emotional as well as physical care in illness have all become recognized in our culture partly at least through the work of people using psychoanalytical insights.

As psychoanalysis has become better known, psychoanalysts have been accused of all kinds of evil influences and suspect practices, sometimes with justification. For a long time the women’s movement and others on the political left were strongly opposed to psychoanalysis on the grounds, amongst others, that it was aimed at making people fit into a sick, patriarchal, capitalist society. Recently it has become more acceptable to seek out analytical insights which can be used in other ways, to avoid throwing out the baby with the bathwater. There probably have been, too, so-called analysts who believed or claimed to believe that ‘all she needs is a good bit of sex’ and were prepared to recommend or even to provide it, claiming they were following Freud’s teaching. Freud was writing bitterly against such people in 1910 in a paper he called ‘“Wild” Psychoanalysis’, where he pointed out the misunderstanding of his work inherent in such attitudes. As he says there, the concept of ‘sex’ as used by him has more in common with the concept of ‘love’, including all the depth and complexity that implies, than with a mere physical act. But there have always been people who jumped to conclusions about psychoanalytical teachings on the basis of a little hearsay and a lot of fantasy.

Psychoanalysis has been attacked on many grounds. It has been dismissed as ‘contemplating your navel’, with the full scorn of a Protestant ethic which values only action, and preferably profit-making action, and decries thought, contemplation and spending money. The problem has been mistaken for the cure, so that analysis is accused of making people spend a lot of time thinking about themselves rather than working or thinking about others – when this is often the very reason people come to analysis in the first place: because they cannot work or think about others as they would like to. It has been condemned as a Bad Thing because it is expensive, and the insights it throws up have been condemned by association. It has been accused of being relevant only for nineteenth-century Vienna, as if no work had been done anywhere else since. It is accused of working – if at all – only very slowly, and being very limited in its possibilities, as if it should be a magic cure for the evils of life and people. It has been accused of working only by ‘suggestion’, as if it were some huge con trick. It has been denounced as ‘unproven’, as if drugs or ECT for example were more ‘proven’ – an idea which many doctors find laughable. It has been charged with being too concerned with infancy or sex at the expense of present-day relations, or ‘only’ concerned with the relation with the analyst; the way in which these issues are intertwined and dealt with in the context of daily life is frequently misunderstood. Psychoanalysis has been blamed too for a decline in moral standards and for the existence of the ‘permissive society’; for making people too soft with criminals, too weak with the insane or with children, too interested in sex or too ready to talk about things which would be better unsaid. Some of the accusations have some truth in them; others are wildly exaggerated or just false.

In spite of all the difficulties involved there is, I think, a resurgence of interest in psychoanalysis, and a real desire to know what it can and cannot offer, what it does and does not claim. This resurgence of interest can be seen in several forms.

In the first place, there is growing awareness on the part of the ordinary person who works ‘with people’ that there are useful ideas around which can make the task easier. Many social workers, marriage guidance counsellors and nurses, as well as some prison officers, teachers, doctors and clergy, to name but a few, have begun to find in some of the psychoanalytical sources work which has a very practical bearing on the work they do. Whereas academic psychology, as taught in Britain, seems to many such people useless and irrelevant, the ideas of Freud and Klein and other analysts – often interpreted through the Tavistock Clinic and Institute of Human Relations – have been able to throw light on the real day-to-day problems of dealing with clients and with the workers’ feelings about clients or patients. Whereas earlier attitudes towards feelings were to dismiss them and feel guilty if they did not just go away, there is a growing recognition that feelings towards one’s work and the people involved are unavoidable and can actually be used. This, however, is for many people a new and scaring idea. Those brought up in the older way may be afraid that emotions are so powerful that they can only be indulged immediately, in their entirety, or be completely pushed down and smothered. The idea that painful emotions are better kept conscious and simply suffered until they go away of their own accord is one which may not have entered their heads. Psychoanalytical insights into such emotions and the processes governing them are at variance with many commonly held views. These insights are beginning to percolate into the common consciousness, but they are much less widespread among the general public than they are among the social work professions.

In the universities psychoanalytical ideas are becoming once again serious objects of discussion, and students are gradually becoming less likely to be taught only that ‘psychoanalysis is wrong’. Even behaviourally oriented psychologists are becoming more interested in what goes on in the mind and its influence upon action and emotional states. Philosophy and English departments have always had some interest in psychoanalysis; in the past few years a school of French analysis has gained some popularity and has indirectly led to an increase in interest in the home-grown ‘English school’, including people like Klein, who in fact influenced the French Lacan. Just as there are many ways of reading the Bible, so there are many ways of reading Freud; academics may have a tendency to pick up the more abstract and philosophical aspects of his work which are of less interest to those who like the more human ‘case history’ sides as I do. But an interest in one may also link up with and lead to an interest in the other.

A further source of growing interest in the ideas of psychoanalysis is simply the spread of psychotherapy. When a friend rings up and says ‘I’ve started therapy’, ripples of interest are aroused. In the classes I teach in the University of Manchester Extra-Mural Department there are often people who have come along to make sense of what is happening to their sister in London, for example, or to see if analysis could help their brother or father who is behaving in a most peculiar way. With increasing awareness there is increasing preparedness to sit and talk to – and about – the brother who is behaving in an odd manner, and to feel there is some sense in actually listening to his ‘crazy’ ideas – since it will no longer mean just going into a mental hospital for the rest of his life if he is found to be really ‘mad’.

Two further sources should perhaps be mentioned. I think the women’s movement may have been responsible for some people beginning to look at psychoanalytical ideas or therapy to see if they can give anything to discussions about how children are brought up to be sexist or non-sexist, about the effects of having or not having a father, and about how conflicts can arise and be dealt with within lesbian relationships, to name but a few areas of interest.

Finally, the church too has in places brought in some psychoanalytical ideas where previously there were none. In Coventry, where I was brought up, the Cathedral was responsible for bringing an analyst to lead discussions between social workers and voluntary workers, when little else was going on from the point of view of psychoanalysis in Coventry.

Having said why other people may be interested, perhaps I should say something of the attraction psychoanalysis has for me. For me, psychoanalysis seems to offer a means of understanding both myself and other people in a way which leaves me more humble and yet of more practical use to others than I was before. It combines the pleasures of doing a puzzle, fitting together different aspects of a person or relationship before me and seeing how the pieces interlock, with the pleasures of seeing the changes this process can bring about in terms of people becoming better able to recognize and survive the conflicts in their lives. For me the key is the word understanding in both its intellectual and its emotional sense. My ninety-three-year-old grandfather told me with tears in his eyes that the worst thing about his deteriorating physical condition was his inability to make people understand any more; the loneliness which lack of understanding can bring about is not physical but it is extremely painful.

What I am offering in this book is an attempt to describe the ideas I have found most useful in understanding both myself and the world around me. It is not a cool unbiased account; it is not simply a description of psychoanalytical insights applied to everyday life, though it is that to some extent. Many of the ideas I am trying to explain come from other people, some I seem to have worked out for myself, some do not quite fit in either category. I am not discussing opposing views, nor the many experimental results emerging from clinical and academic psychology which may seem to confirm some of these ideas. My intention is to explain what I have found useful, both for myself and for others; why it is useful and whether it fits or clashes with other views of the world – held by different schools of psychiatric, psychological or psychoanalytical thought – I leave for the reader and other authors to examine if they wish. I have in mind readers who have never come across analysis before, or who have come across it in other contexts or from different directions, and wish to know more about it. All psychoanalytical ideas are controversial: this book is bound to give rise to agreement and disagreement amongst those who have some knowledge already, as well as amongst those who know very little of analysis. Such controversy can help to clarify and modify ideas. Meanwhile it need not prevent some of them being useful in the process of finding something better or as a means of sorting out your own opinions.

Having taught people about these ideas for some time now, I know that they can be useful in various specific ways. Utterly conflicting emotions, confusion and lack of understanding can often give rise to panic: reducing the confusion and the lack of understanding often seems to enable people to feel freer to make sensible decisions, or simply to do nothing. By making sense of apparently irrational behaviour these ideas often seem to help people to begin to understand how they can behave in ways which go completely against their conscious wishes and common sense. As a result the feeling of being completely out of control of oneself, or of being utterly at the mercy of people around, may be reduced. This kind of book is not going to help directly with very deep-seated problems, but it might help with ordinary daily problems of how to deal with people at work, in the family or otherwise in daily life. Many of the people in my classes have found that their ability to observe what goes on and to make some sense of it has been considerably increased. Teachers have told me that they have found themselves treating the children in a more relaxed manner and have as a result had fewer behavioural problems; social workers have found the atmosphere at work and with clients has altered as their own insight has improved. In my work as a counsellor I have watched many people find in themselves the ability to change their lives very much for the better, as a result of learning to look at themselves and others differently. Understanding how a miserable situation can arise does seem to make it more bearable, though it does have to be a particular kind of understanding. I come back to this point later.

What I intend to do in this book is to explain to the general reader some of the ideas and discoveries which have arisen out of the work of analysts, particularly in England, over the last fifty years or so. Basing their work on Freud’s, they have uncovered evidence which was not available to him and have as a result developed certain differences from and disagreements with his ideas. The ideas have been developed initially by piecing together clues in the consulting room, but they have often been confirmed and discovered over and over again in work of all kinds with ‘ordinary’ as well as ‘mad’ people. Analysis is a very practical matter, with theoretical ideas interacting with detailed observations. As a result many of the ideas I shall offer are of the very practical kind: simple rules of thumb to try out. The complicated ways in which these ideas make up a coherent whole – still of course in the process of developing and being changed – are touched on in places in this book, but, as in any introductory work, they cannot be fully developed here. There is no substitute for the books written by and for analysts; in some areas all I can do is to help the general reader with the ground-rules and the basic language which make these books and papers seem hopelessly obscure. But many readers will have neither the time not the inclination to read further and I am writing for such people too.

Some of the ideas I shall present consist mainly of new ways of talking about observations, new ways of describing thoughts and feelings people have about themselves and the world around them and already know about in some other way. But just as the Arabic numerals we use today offered much greater possibilities for mathematics than the Roman ones did, so new names for ways we feel and think and make assumptions about the world can offer much greater scope for understanding and talking about what goes on. As a result of the new language, new observations can be made and a whole set of new connections and relationships between these observations can be established.

Some of the ideas represent in some sense genuinely new concepts. Understanding these may not be easy and takes time. The idea of unconscious phantasy, of projection in all its manifestations, of introjection, idealization and splitting all have new aspects to them, and new applications which at first seem strange. Understanding some of the ideas behind these concepts means that we are provided with powerful new tools for thought and action.

An extremely important aspect of what I shall be presenting is the importance and significance of words, both for communication between people and for communication within the self. Psychiatry and psychology in the universities have, I think, largely neglected the use of words; the animal studies which are so popular do away with them explicitly. But words can be used to deal with anxiety, for example, and to offer particular kinds of control over the world which are not simply hindrances to deep feeling or ‘getting in the way’ of our ‘instincts’. Neither a purely ‘rationalist’ view of the world nor a purely emotional one does justice to the power of words to link and to separate, to hold together, to affect the sense of time and boundaries of pain for example, and to enable us to hold what we would otherwise lose or have to deed with in other ways. Looking at ways we deal with ourselves, both with words and in states where words are kept out or unavailable, we can make quite startling discoveries.

Analysis is unusual amongst intellectual pursuits in its insistence on the importance of both intellect and emotion, and the interrelationship between the two. The idea that we can use our emotions to detect the emotional states of others in a way which is not to be dismissed as ‘merely subjective’ and dangerous to ‘scientific objectivity’ is for many a startling one. There are indeed real problems with using emotions in this way, but so there are with using, say, an electron microscope. At least some training is required, and then the results suffer still from a particular kind of distortion. But the advantages and the increase in insight we can gain by using such imperfect and distorting instruments certainly at times seem to compensate for the lack of certainty in the result. Knowing the result is uncertain, we can then test it in other ways.

The ideas I present in this book are not hard and fast rules or theories; they do not give infallible answers. Often people in my classes complain that I have not told them how they ‘should’ behave. Non-judgemental observation of one’s own and others’ behaviour is a skill, it seems, which has to be learnt. I offer suggestions for new ways of looking, ideas as to the precise ways in which our perceptions may be at fault and new ideas as to the reliability of our complex feelings and perceptions. But I cannot look for you. I can show you a microscope and tell you what I see; you have to do your own focusing and choose what you will put under it Your own emotions are something you can detect or not; how far you learn to detect them or to use them in ways I suggest depends on you. Once you have seen something you had not seen before, it is up to you what you do about it. My hope might be that it may develop your understanding, your love, your mercy and forgiveness, and your ability to stand up for yourself in a way which makes life better for you and for those around you; but this result I cannot guarantee.

As this book is intended to be an introduction to psychoanalytical ideas for the general reader, I have to discuss the methods of psychoanalysis. I try to use my description of being in analysis in a way which shows the interaction between theoretical and practical aspects of analysis. This section may also be helpful for those who have friends or relatives in analysis, and want to know what goes on. It can be very hard, if a person you love is turning for help to someone else; you may feel rejected, guilty, useless and extremely jealous, as well as relieved and hopeful. Or you may feel none of these – but simply behave as if you were.

Psychoanalytical insights illuminate and are illuminated by literature, social observation in settings other than analysis, and also the observation of babies and children. I touch on these, too, drawing many of my examples from ordinary day-to-day behaviour.

There are difficulties in all this. It is very important to recognize that the claims of analysts are not statistical ones. Analysts, in reporting cases, cannot be understood to be saying ‘it is always like this’. In my view they have to be understood as saying Ί saw this, here, then, and this is how I understood it; is this of any use to you?’ This is a different approach from that of other disciplines. Some psychology students I once spoke to criticized the methods of psychoanalysis and the truth of its insights (without actually knowing much about what they were, of course) on the grounds that ‘n is not big enough’ – that is, not enough people have been analysed to prove anything. The point is that analysts are generally working to understand individuals rather than to make large generalizations about populations which might or might not apply to individuals in them. Knowing that, say, ‘ninety per cent of the population behaves like this, under these circumstances’ does not tell us whether the person in front of us is one of the ninety per cent or one of the ten per cent. It may be more useful to have many detailed examples of how people can behave and feel which enable us to look more closely, with fewer prejudices, at how this person is behaving and feeling now. Analysts do indeed see patterns in behaviour, and try to point them out to each other, but the patterns are not rules: they have to be tested out in each individual case. My psychology students, I think, had a somewhat crude understanding of the process of proof of theories anyway; with the development of our theories of methodology my impression is that no academic would ever claim to have proved anything, except in mathematics. All that is claimed nowadays is something like plausibility, or reasonable certainty – a much more subjective and less certain claim. But it takes time for the more sophisticated academic ideas to percolate; many people still believe that what the doctor offers is in some way more ‘proved’ than what a psychoanalyst offers, though in many cases the analyst’s methods may have been around for far longer than the doctor’s, and, as far as doing harm is concerned, it is far more likely that the doctor than the analyst would do harm. Psychoanalytical ideas may be found to be more or less useful; the problem of testing psychoanalysis as a method of treating certain states of mind is quite another matter, and an extremely difficult one, since the criteria used by the analyst may not even be recognized by people trained in different disciplines.

There are other difficulties in putting across psychoanalytical ideas too. They are, for example, often rejected because they are not very pleasant at first sight. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Phantasy as Perception
• 3 Phantasies and Feelings
• 4 Phantasies in Relationships (1)
• 5 Phantasies in Relationships (2)
• 6 Blame, Intention and Responsibility
• 7 Phantasies Related to Family Life
• 8 Phantasies about Work
• 9 Evidence: (1) In the consulting room
• 10 Evidence: (2) In the outside world
• Bibliography and Suggestions for Further Reading