The Rough Beast: Psychoanalysis in Everyday Life

Denise Cullington

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429833069
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The past continues to operate powerfully, wordlessly, in that less conscious part of our human mind and can trip us up unexpectedly. We can perceive and respond to situations in ways which are more to do with early experiences than the present. We can push from mind what we would rather not know. Feelings such as doubt and sadness can seem too weak; envy and anger, too bad; feeling small and in any way in need, could leave us too vulnerable.

Though most will never have their own experience of psychoanalysis (or less intensive psychoanalytic psychotherapy), psychoanalytic ideas can be profoundly helpful in making sense of ourselves. Having some access to those more hidden parts of our human mind, we can feel more alive, more real and less likely to act out in unexpected ways.

An accessible, sympathetic and challenging guide, The Rough Beast: Psychoanalysis in Everyday Life is for all those who are curious and sceptical as to what, why and how psychoanalytic understanding is useful in everyday life.

Chapter 1

Introduction

What is psychoanalysis?

As children we learn what is wanted and admired and what most certainly is not – and that, we cover over. We cover it from ourselves as much as from anyone else, being busy, positive, and not thinking: just getting on with things. Only at odd moments of external stress, exhaustion, in dreams, in the middle of a row, or having taken too much alcohol or other drugs does something rougher slip out.

Previous generations kept a ‘stiff upper lip’ in times when warfare and early deaths provided much to cause a lip to wobble. For a later generation the injunction was to be ‘laid back’ and ‘cool’.

And now? Presentation rules. Positive thinking: keep the outside glossy and hope the inside will shift to match. Magazine articles and many self-help books offer the message that a makeover – a new haircut, new clothes, new interest, a job, car, house or affair – should mean the Good Life and the end to doubt, anxiety or restless nagging resentment.

But, too often, the enthusiasm passes and you are left with that same old flawed you. The outside might indeed look better. If you have been encouraging yourself more, being more active, you could indeed have a new spring in your step – but even so, might still feel that there is a less airbrushed you that has not gone away. You can end up feeling inauthentic: that the inside and the out do not match. Unwanted rougher feelings still lurk: feelings of anxiety, doubt, and depression – and resentment that you should suffer these feelings when luckier others apparently do not.

At any one time, one in six of us could be diagnosed as suffering from clinical depression or anxiety; a further tenth rely on alcohol or other drugs to manage their mood (Layard, 2006). We suffer stress-related and psychosomatic ailments, and GPs can frequently find no physical cause for the many who go to them for help with aches and pains. Women and men, adolescent and adult, can exercise and diet their bodies into particular desired shapes, hoping to find relief. Many take prescription or non-prescription drugs to achieve the required liveliness or to smooth over disturbance.

The problem is that managing what is unwanted by pushing it from mind leaves you emptier and with fewer links to your emotional self. Not knowing might feel safer – but leaves you feeling less alive. You may hope for closeness and intimacy – but can fear letting in a partner, family or friends in case they see this rougher you. It is all too easy to end up under a layer of armour, defended against an inner beast that, unattended, remains inarticulate – slouching and suspicious. Knowing your less-than-perfect self might be a blow but, when you can spend less energy covering it over, it can also be freeing – making it possible to feel more alive, closer to yourself and to others.

This book offers psychoanalytic ideas for discovering that lesser known part of the mind. Just as Einstein’s discoveries are fundamental to modern physics (even if parts have been elaborated on and others superseded), so too are Freud’s ideas, some dating back well over one hundred years, and developed in revisions by Freud and by other analysts. I bring ideas of Freud, Melanie Klein, Anna Freud, Winnicott, Bion and later analysts to help us notice what goes on in us all and the impact of that as we go through life. I do not mention by name the many analysts from the British tradition whose development of these ideas permeate this account.

Neither do I speak of analysts such as Jung, or other analytic thinkers whose traditions are not mine. There may be much to say, but I am not the person to write of them and there is enough here for a rich feast.

I bring brief examples from patients, all of whose details have been changed in some way to protect their identity. I also use clinical examples from Freud, Klein, Winnicott and Anna Freud and offer more detailed accounts of some of them in the Appendices. For those interested, they can be read in the original too.

As in an analysis or psychotherapy, my aim is not so much to give a lecture on psychoanalysis but to offer an experience of being listened to, and listening to yourself, in a psychoanalytic way. It entails circling round ideas, coming across them from different angles, which may only slowly begin to make some sort of emotional sense.

So what is psychoanalysis?

We do not function only logically and rationally. There is another parallel part of mind that is more primitive, passionate and impulsive, governed by wishful thinking. Psychoanalysis offers access to that deeper layer.

It does not supplant the findings from religious faith, meditative techniques, cognitive–behaviour therapy, or neurophysiology: it enriches them, fundamentally. It describes something that is about an emotional truth rather than a logical, rational truth. So something can seem logically ridiculous and yet still strike a distant, uneasy chord.

This other part of the mind is less available to the conscious mind, in part because it stems from a pre-history before there were words in which to think and encode: a time when the baby we once were experienced bodily sensations and biologically driven impulses, and attempted to make meaning of the world – of the good and the bad, and what or who could be trusted. It is an infantile mind.

But, Freud argued, this part of mind is also less available because what is to be discovered is disturbing and shameful, and we push it from our conscious mind. He described the relation between the logical, reality-orientated part of the mind (the ego) and this other impulsive, wishful-thinking one (the id) as

like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse … often a rider, if he is not to be parted from his horse, is obliged to guide it where it wants to go

(Freud, 1923, p. 25).

To benefit from that powerful, lively, self-willed, panicked and sometimes destructive aspect of ourselves, control on its own does not work.

The point is not to get rid of everything more primitive, for it is the source of liveliness, energy, who we are. It is better, however uncomfortably, to have some awareness of what goes on in us often out of conscious sight: then we have more choice, we use less energy in shutting down. Freud’s horse (or my rough beast) needs to be attended to and allowed space or it may bolt, stampede or kick out unexpectedly, or give up and live disheartened in one tight, safe corner of the field.

Psychoanalytic ideas can be jargon-filled and hard to understand. However, the problem can be less that the ideas in themselves are so complicated, but more that it involves noting things about ourselves that we would rather not. It works not through practical advice, but through finding words for what is otherwise inarticulate, offering non-moralistic scrutiny.

Psychoanalysis is creative and contradictory – not surprisingly if you think of the focus of the study: our endlessly complicated human selves. There are disagreements within groups, tensions and arguments – as you might expect (and even hope for) in any lively extended family – where ideas matter. And such challenges help us to clarify ideas and to keep learning from clinical experience.

How something is taken up may differ in a consulting room in different parts of the world, but what you would be likely to find in any of those places is a very particular, careful listening, not only to the words, but to the emotional quality of what you bring and its meaning. Its thinking valuably informs many less intensive treatments: in work with adults and children, in families and in group settings.

Psychoanalysis is not perfect. It is not quick or easy. It takes time: time to wonder and for things to drift away. It takes an alertness, an interest in your own mind and its panicky evasions, a preparedness to wonder whether, at this moment in your life, what you tell yourself is unbearable might be uncomfortable but thinkable. If so, it might be possible to manage your anxieties in a different, less constrained way.

Some of what Freud said, which was so unacceptable at the time, is now simply taken for granted. Others of his ideas are still disturbing and we can want to disparage them – maybe more so if they are uncomfortably true. It is easy to be dismissive of Freud: to take one part of his ideas gained from over 40 years’ clinical experience and disagree with it, ignoring how those ideas developed and changed. And ignoring, too, what astonishing food for thought his theories offer.

Does psychoanalysis work?

Analysts have always been interested in showing the power of their understanding through careful clinical case studies in the more than one hundred years since Freud first began. Many people who have had an experience of being a patient have felt subtly but deeply helped – and some feel their life has been saved.

Psychologist Kay Jamison wrote of her manic-depressive cycles, and her finding that she needed medication to stop her suicidal impulses and stabilize her mood, which then made long-term psychotherapy possible. She wrote,

ineffably psychotherapy heals. It makes some sense of the confusion, reins in the terrifying thoughts and feelings, returns some control and hope and possibility of learning from it all. Pills cannot, do not, ease one back into reality

(Jamison, 1995, pp. 88–89).

Analysts have been slow to embrace other research, arguing that techniques such as randomized controlled trials over-simplify and are intrusive on their patients. But studies have accumulated over the past 30 years that show how helpful psychoanalytic therapies can be for patients with complex and long-term difficulties (Leichsenring, 2005; Leichsenring & Klein, 2014).

So for example:Psychoanalysis is not about belief and submission, but about hypothesis building and testing. Freud (and subsequent analysts) worked carefully with patients, noting and learning from experience what helped and what did not. And what is most convincing for a patient or a reader is when an idea or an example makes sudden, disturbing, gut sense.

• One recent study bringing together results from twenty-three separate outcome studies, showed consistently good results for psychoanalytically based psychotherapy (Shedler, 2010a, 2010b).¹
• Patients with chronic, treatment-resistant depression plus additional personality difficulties showed significant and stable gains as a result of weekly psychoanalytic psychotherapy over 18 months (Taylor et al., 2012; Fonagy et al., 2015).²
• Twice weekly psychoanalytic psychotherapy over two years was helpful with patients with complex needs who had dropped out of other forms of treatment (Bell, 2018).
• Analytic understanding was a great help in a day hospital unit for those with borderline personality disorder (Bateman, 1995).³

Notes

1    Treatment resulted in symptom improvement but in wider gains too: patients improved in their sense of self, they had better impulse control, they related better to others and they developed personality resources which helped them withstand future stresses better. These gains maintained and often increased over time.

2    The Tavistock Depression Study.

3    Ideas such as splitting and projection, and of hatred of the staff coming together like a parental couple were fundamental to the understanding of the disturbing and intense feelings and enactments within the unit.

Chapter 2

Fundamental Freud

I had an overpowering need to understand something of the riddles of the world in which we live and perhaps even contribute something …

(Freud, 1926, p. 252).

By the end of the nineteenth century, Vienna, once the capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire, had ‘a stagnating social order based on a feudal Catholic tradition’ (Natter, 2001). Critics condemned a 1910 Gustav Klimt exhibition for showing ‘nakedness for its own sake’, ‘sick art’, and ‘highly repellent’ work, as a result of which ‘the moral floodgates would open’ (Natter, 2001, p. 30). What Freud began to say (and Klimt depict) was often unacceptable and shocking to a hypocritical turn-of-the-century world where the number of prostitutes in Vienna was astonishingly high (Vergo, 1975), and where, in the opposite corner, was another powerful influence, Rationalism: the argument that everything was available to the conscious, logical mind.

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)

Freud was the first born and favourite son of a young mother, Amalia, and a much older wool-merchant father. He was treated as special, his mother’s golden Sigi, and funds for his schooling were found even after the bankruptcy of his father’s business.

When Freud was two, a younger brother died – and later, in his self-analysis, Freud recalled how he was pleased at the death. When the young Sigi complained that his sister’s piano practice disturbed him, the piano was removed. The family expected great things of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Permissions
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• 1. Introduction: What is psychoanalysis?
• 2. Fundamental Freud
• 3. How does psychoanalysis work?
• 4. The downside of change
• PART I: Analytic understanding of early life
• PART II: Freedom of thought
• PART III: Conflict through the life stages
• PART IV: Adulthood
• Appendices
• References
• Index