"Britain on the Couch"
A Review
A Letter to Oliver James about "Britain on the Couch: Why We're Unhappier Compared with 1950 despite being Richer" Arrow Books, London, 1998.
Dear Oliver,
Its been a long time since we both lived in 14 Derby Grove in Nottingham. You may recall that, at the time our paths separated, you were beginning your training to become a therapist and I was going mad. That has paradoxically meant that our lives have followed parallel interests ever since. Several years after you left Nottingham I got involved in the psychiatric services user movement and then became development worker at the Nottingham and District Mental Health Association. My job title is still Development Worker in Mental Health though a lot water has passed under the bridge again. I am now employed by an organisation that I helped set up called Ecoworks which attempts to find environmental related new beginnings for people who have had mental health problems. (Eco - for ecology). So you see we are in the same trade.
In recent years I have to say I have not followed some of the debates about mental health so closely because my work has taken me into developing collective alternatives for users of the mental health services and other disadvantaged people. Now and then my mother would mention seeing you on the television but, as I shall relate, and it obviously connects to your book, I have rarely bothered to watch English TV in recent years so I hadn't noticed that you had become so successful. Recently however I came to gather together various things I had written over the years in order to put them on a web site. In that context I came across your book "Britain on the Couch". It is somewhat ironic then that I had already decided, after an essay I wrote several years ago, to call my web site "A Strategy for Losers" when I find that your book is so much about the subjective sense that so many people have that they are "losers".
I have to say that there is a lot of overlap in our analyses of the problems , as well as possible solutions, but there is also a lot that is different. Over the years I struggled to understand my own psychological and emotional problems and came up with my own theories. I started out very influenced by, and learning a lot from psychotherapeutic ideas and, where I do differ from you, increasingly rejecting of medication. I have not taken (psychiatric) medication for years and while I would not rule it out in a fundamentalist way, I think you, like many others in the mental health field, are far too positive about it and are too keen to discount the negative effects. I wonder if you have read Peter Breggin's book "Toxic Psychiatry"(Fontana 1993).
Rejecting medication
If people reject medication it is often because medication is subjectively extremely unpleasant, they are frightened of becoming dependent (often with good reason), there are frequently long term effects which are quite damaging (like tardive dyskenias and perhaps tardive psychosis with neuroeleptics). In addition, all too often, medication compliance can come to symbolise the fact that their life is stuck in the role of mental health patient with everyone in their world of relationships (carers, doctors, social workers) insisting that they keep on taking it. What then happens is that the emotional turmoil and confrontation with carers, doctors and social circle associated with coming off the drugs is so great that another breakdown is virtually forordained anyway. The person provokes a confrontation thereby and they are driven into isolation, fear and sometimes even hiding in and because of the very act of withdrawal. On the level of brain chemistry if people break down or deteriorate when taken off medication (whether neuroleptics or Prozac) one cannot be certain that this is because the absence of the drug has led to the re-emergence of an underlying condition or whether they are having withdrawal symptons caused on rebound by the prior existence of the drugs. In the former view the value of the medication is suggested. In the latter view the reverse. Only on the long term studies can one make a judgement of such things - the few studies I know off in regard to major tranxs support the view that those without medication do better long term. I have not taken any medication nor seen a psychiatrist (except briefly last year) since the early 1990s and my mental health is now in general much better than it was then.
Therapeutic ideas without a therapist
Undoubtably therapeutic ideas have helped me - but "therapeutic ideas" rather more than therapy. Although I did have therapy for a time I worked out many of the issues and self help approaches for myself. (You can see my essays on my web site where you will find a lecture I gave to the World Congress of Social Psychiary in Hamburg in 1994 on "Childhood and Psychosis"). I've also published stuff on "Madness and its Causative Contexts" in Changes 12, 2, 113-32 and "Meaning Madness and Recovery" in the Clinical Psychology Forum 103 May 1997 pp19-26. In recent years I have become increasingly frustrated by one-sided psychological explanations of madness which is another place where I begin to part company with the emphases of your book. To a degree this is a question of nuance and emphasis but there are real differences.
My approach stresses the need for individuals to organise and change the pattern of arrangements in their everyday life activities. Everyone nowadays wants to think theirs is the more holistic approach and I guess I do too. I think there is a need to develop a non psychological and non medical model for individual and collective growth, stress and breakdowns. I don't mean such a model would have no brain chemistry nor psychological dimensions but only that it would not privilege these sides.
Life management breakdowns
Explaining it briefly here basically my view is that, to stay alive, every adult must have arrangements to hold together an interrelated pattern of some kind of habitat, relationships, income and work, a more or less routine or changing pattern which maintains the health and functions of their physical body. The psychic state to hold these things together is the individual's sense of orientation in the world which reflects an always unique personal history (or herstory), the things that they have experienced and how they have dealt with or coped with them in their past. Childhood and earlier relationships are crucial in the way they calibrate the person's basic expectations and interpretations about the world. Their aspirations and beliefs also effect how the person wants to, and is able to, move their life forward. This personal orientation is inserted in some way in commonly held patterns of social and community orientation (which are often largely articulated through the media). A breakdown will alway be a breakdown in the whole pattern with a crisis in habitat, income, relationships, work and physical health - as well as psychological turmoil and disorientation. Each individuals's breakdown will be explainable in terms of their inability to hold together different elements in any individual pattern. (This is explained in most detail in my article in Clinical Psychology Forum as well as in my web article reviewing Capra and my web article on Life management breakdowns.)
Seeing your model in terms of my model you highlight those situations where a person is dissatisfied with an existing life arrangements pattern but cannot achieve (enough) changes or can only achieve changes in ways which are very stressful or disruptive e.g. a desire for more income and more consumer goods in the household or a desire for changed domestic relationships in habitat and work arrangements - with their resulting frustration. I think you do that incredibly thoroughly.
Are "we" really "richer" and who is this "we" anyway?
I've got a lot out of reading your book and the thorough way you focus in on broken attachments, excessive comparisons and personal aspirations over-heated by the competitive and market pressures of late capitalism. But its not quite the way I would present the issues. You do draw out the effects of inequality and relative deprivation - but you have an assumption that economically things are better off than in the 1950s so that, had aspirations and relationships not changed in a way that makes us more dissatisfied, there seems to be a sense in your writings that we would be able to recognise that we are "objectively" better off. But are you sure about that? Are you sure "we" are "richer"? The point is that among economists there has been a big debate for a long time whether the rising national income statistics really point to increased national welfare. Once one starts taking other indicators of economic progress one does not have to resort to changes in mass psychology and gender relationship stress to explain why increasing numbers of people would be more unhappy. I recall that the New Economics Foundation have compiled a measure, I forget the source but you could probably get it easily enough, which suggests that real sustainable national income rose in the 50s and 60s but peaked about 1970 and has been falling. Thus, on different measures, "we" are probably no better off than we were in 1950s. Of course with all sorts of new products and technologies and all sorts of new problems it is difficult to compare 1950 with 1990. "We" definitely have more cars and washing machines (though I haven't got either and couldn't care less about that) but we haven't got so much scope for sunbathing without getting skin cancer or so many unspoiled places in the countryside (which I do care about).
More reasons to be miserable
It can be argued, for example, that the environments in which many people live have deteriorated in a way which would be negative to mental health. (I have made this case in an article in a journal, for a time produced by Routledge called "Care in Place" on "Mental Health and the Environment" - I am working on this at the moment to post it to my web site as Routledge have agreed that I can re-publish it there). A further process is the destruction of communities by town planning slum clearance and relocation policies which destroyed many people's support and emotional networks -even though the demolition and building programmes of new houses and flats would have shown up as positive increases in national income. Or again, you mention improving one's diet as a means to a better emotional state - might not some of current unhappiness be that nutritional intake has deteriorated? A huge number of people in the US are obese which is doubtless partly psychologically induced comfort eating but it is also grotequely over indulgent beef eating, sugar eating, junk eating - partly a dynamic coming out of the food industry. Moreover you can argue that there is more unhappiness not only because there is more relative deprivation but because in some parts of society there is more absolute deprivation.
Absolute deprivation
The idea that "we" are richer is about averages but I think some people have got poorer - many young people for example who can no longer get student grants or social security benefits. When you and I were at Nottingham University the streets were not full of young people made homeless by social security cuts and poverty impacting on already stressed families. Increasing inequality has meant low taxes and high incomes for these aspiring wannabees who have managed to suck economic resources into their pockets and the real losers are those who sleep rough and go without benefits and hope. The absolutely destitute then add to others misery when, in some cases they turn to crime. Thus inequality lowers life quality for other sections of the population directly. Again you can argue that a huge amount of misery is now caused by dependence on illegal drugs (and you cannot avoid giving at least some people the message that chemistry is the way to happiness as an unintended side effect of your own writings...).
It is not that you do not mention (some of) these things it is that you mention them in passing as details in the broad brush of your analysis but then you come back at the end to privilige the aspirational, comparison and attachment-loss aspects. Why not accept that many of these things are directly, in their own right, reasons for misery - as direct effects of a deteriorating environment, economic and social structure for a large number of people. What you are giving privileged emphasis to is why, while they are screwing everyone else, the worried well are still not happy. It is too simple to say "we" are "richer". Some of us are poorer and some of us are richer in some things and poorer in others.
The next 50 years - the unsustainability of wannabe consumerism
There is yet a further serious problem for you if you want to have discussions about how "we" might be happier in the future. (And problems for me and everyone else of course). This problem arises because "we" cannot assume a continuation of today level of "riches". There is actually a need to achieve massive reductions in the consumption of non-renewable energy and materials in the next few years for reasons of economic sustainability. Thus even if we are "better off" than in the 1950s there is no way that we can continue to sustain the 1990s production patterns. According to the very respected scientific studies of the Wuppertal Institute in the next 50 years sustainability means the reduction of consumption of non renewable energy and materials by up to 80 to 90%. If society does not achieve these reductions everyone is going to be unhappy because we will be heading rapidly to extinction. You refer several times, for example in references to how gender relationships will evolve to how these gender changes will become clearer in 50 years. I think that gender questions will evolve over the next 50 years of course but the bigger question is whether we will be heading towards extinction of not. One optomistic way of looking at our future, I suppose, is that as there is so much of a mess now that there is a huge amount of room for improvement in gender relationships. It is in this aspect of life that we could perhaps see the scope for improving quality of life while individual consumption declines.
But individual consumption must decline - i.e. the advertising wannabe culture is environmentally unsustainable. "Individual consumption" can be massively reduced without inevitable declines in welfare (as I show in essays on my web site) through pooling, sharing and restructuring local and domestic economic relationships in and through community development strategies. This requires a serious look at the psycho-dynamics of community development processes to challenge the very problems that you highlight. The consumer culture cannot be competed with on its own terms. It must be challenged by a commnity re-development strategy which offers people a different package of things - convivial social activity and scope for creativity together to end a plague of social isolation. (All things highlighted by yourself). What I doubt however is that the wannabees can achieve this.
Re-conceptualising "the need" for status
Also I don't quite see the issue of status like you. I situate the issue of status to a large degree in a broader conceptual framework. I don't think human's have an innate need for status so much as a need for agency. Agency is the ability to influence and change the world in which one lives. In most societies in the pursuit of socially conventional goals the people with the biggest agency are those with the greatest status because they possess the greatest power. Their power lies is their ability to mobilise energy in the pursuit of their defined purposes and the low status people have to fit in with these purposes and arrangements - often the rearrangements to the world to suit the agendas of the powerful lead to chaos in the life patterns of less powerful people. But there is not, to my perception, an inherent need, per se for status. Jean Liedloff's book on the Yeaquana Indians shows a society where people regulate their relationships on the basis of equality - which in this case means taking other people's feelings into account in joint arrangements and not forcing things on people. I believe the Hopi Indian culture is (was?) one where everyone must be treated alike, no one must be inferior or superior, the person who praises himself or is praised is automatically subjected to criticism, games are played without keeping scores.
Status, reward and social orientation systems - how you can play different games
I get from your book the notion that as a society we have now got too much status difference and too much competition in too many areas of life and individuals have not learned well as individuals to "discount" the effects in ways which will preserve their self esteem. I have to say I don't like the word "discount" because when you are not comparing like with like, as you say, comparisons are unfair - and I would go further and say they are very often positively irrelevant. Teasing out the dimensions of this question - of how people compare themselves to each other and rank themselves in relation to each other on things which are actually non comparable is an issue that goes to the heart of unequal societies. I think you are absolutely right to question it. In doing so you actually call into question a central ideologucal pillar of social hierarchy - in pre-capitalist hierarchies the claim is that people are intrinsically inferior or superior in their genealogy under god but in capitalism you are supposed to get your just rewards on the basis of competitive market performance. Once you start to question whether this view as a social orientation strategy, as a common thought pattern that welds society together, makes any sense, then you are questioning something very fundamental. I've looked at this a lot in my writings from a number of dfferent angles - but I think it is a taken for granted underpinning of virtually everything - and indeed I agree with you that you can trace mental health problems back to it (as I do manic depression for example). But I do not like the word "discounting" because it implies the basic idea of comparison is OK as long as we could find the right adjustment magnitudes - and the "right adjustment" should always be done in such a way as to protect one's own self esteem. You have a go at English modesty at some point - but if people are not modest and if they publically revel in their successes isn't this going to tend to be more psychological hurtful for the losers? Its all very well to say get the psychological benefit from beating people but don't take it so hard if you are beaten - but things are not like that. If you beam with smiles at beating someone and celebrate this doesn't that rub salt in the wound of the others loss. More to the point these are not just issues of psychological state - this winning and losing thing is usually the basis of higher income levels, awarded contracts, prizes. It is not only about purely subjective comparing - in the prize one goes back into practical things in real life. As I said the winning and losing thing underpins material reward structures and access to consumption - you consume more because that is supposed to be the reward. These are the other sides of the same coins. Indeed you write somewhere that you are undermining yourself if you do not get the full psychic benefits of beating someone at golf if you adjust your achievements with notions as to why you would not expect them to be on the same form as yourself. Also, in many cases, the psychic blow at losing includes not getting the material reward after having put oneself to a great deal of performance related stress when you try to measure up but do not do well enough to overcome the handicap you started out with in the first place.
Performance stress, scheduling stress and more reasons to be miserable
Although mentioning competition and comparisons a lot you do not much touch upon the misery that arises in performance stress - which is another thing in its own right. It is all very well for psychologists to issue slogans like "not everything worth doing is worth doing well" (Sheldon Kopp) but increasingly, if you want to keep your job, you have to do it very well indeed - even though you can no longer believe in your job anymore and it bores you stupid there is some prat somewhere who is lounding proclaiming how you should pursue excellence or, if there isn't, the firm you work for might go under on the market if you don't - in which case you will be unable to take an income home and relationships and habitat will fall apart. That is why I have stressed a strategy on m web site for "losers" which starts outside of market competition - in domestic relationships and neighbourhoods. Unfortunately for me work, even in the domestic field, insulated from market competition, has to be set up through project funding. But project funding is monitored more and more closely with more and more conditions by officials in local government and funding agencies. No matter where you are there is this relentless performance stress and your blood pressure goes through the roof . You can refuse to feel small or inferior to these officials but they can still make your life a misery - while they get away themselves with delays and cocks ups in their own administration which throws your own plans into chaos and gives you scheduling stress. Here I think that computers, by making it possible to collect often spurious information on things, have encouraged a relentless tendency to monitor everything. This is supposedly to get the information to improve services but what it often does is takes time away from doing your work into filling forms about it instead. Thus tests and information collected on children not only stresses children it stresses teachers and makes it less and less possible for them to do their actual teaching job. Good money for Bill Gates though. There are more things to make a person unhappy, Oliver, than your philosophy allows for.....
Where status and abilities do not match up - incompetency among high status people
Sometimes the problems can work the other way. In my essays I take it for granted that in order for people to work together they need to have a sense of each others skills, abilities, connections and clout in order to make joint arrangements. One problem in work settings is where people's estimate of themselves and their importance does not match their real abilities - in which case they can suffer severe embarrassment or make life really diffcult for people who have higher abilities. One cause of misery is where incompetent seniors can make life a misery for more competent juniors who they find threatening - or where colleagues who are dependent on each other cannot rely on less competent colleagues. Thus these things do matter but there is far more to it that people making comparisons without appropriate kinds of discounting. I often think there are some professions specially made for people who have big opinions of themselves and small abilities - psychiatrist is one. It requires virtually no skill, has a quiescent client group who cannot answer back without being automatically invalidated and allows the doctor to play at being god.
Status and social exclusion - when you don't want to be "included" in Planet Money
Connected to the comparison issue is the notion of "social exclusion". You can argue that socially excluded people are hurt becase they are frustrated that they are not "socially included" in the mainstream society. This is not always how it is. Having myself been a psychiatric patient and experienced life on the other side I can honestly say that I am not interested in "social inclusion". To me an emotionally healthy response to a world in which social comparisons are made and you are seen at the bottom is to turn your back on it all and sod off somewhere else. You are fond of animal studies - I bet in the wild a lot of what you would call low status animals just wander off and start up on their own somewhere else. Of course I cannot start up being a millionaire somewhere else but alternative lifestyles have always been cultural responses to social exclusion. There is a danger of becoming a new sect or clique but it is quite possible to distance yourself from the mainstream culture - it is not so difficult as you think to cut yourself off from the crap without going totally into a hermitage. When an American millionairess said "Only the little people pay taxes" I regard her as extremely arrogant and do not want to be a part of that kind of society. To use the word "discounting" to describe what I feel about a woman like that is not very accurate. I don't think I have very much in common with the people from Planet Money at all so any comparison would be spurious. The point here is that I have different goals and purposes in life - I am playing a dfferent game. Thus she cannot be "beating me".
If they beat you at their game - you can always start playing another
The anti-psychiatrist Szatz wrote somewhere that to be mentally healthy you have to have a game to play in life. Money making as a game, and comparing your scores in that game is not one that I am interested in. If you are playing a different game you do not end a loser. I do not want to be part of New Labour culture (new money I suppose) . In days not long gone by many people did not "discount" in upward estimates of their social importance. They were motivated by ideologies in which they rejected the values and society that they lived in - they played the class struggle game. I don't play that anymore as I think that game is too often futile but the point I am making is that once you reject the mainstream social games how it measures you is no longer relevant to your self esteem. Indeed self esteem may not be the best way of describing your overall morale - which is more likely to reflect your own assessment of whether you are making progress towards your own goals.
Nowadays a lot of people know that consumer culture is unsustainable in economic terms and are trying to build their lives around different values and activities - the green lifestyle. In my development work I see drawing people with mental health problems into community level gardening, eco-habitat renewal and the like as a way of giving new interests and motivations. It is valuable in its own right but it also partly protects people against the destructive psycho effects of consumer culture. It brings people who have had breakdowns into contact with eco-activists who don't give a fig about what your Tunbridge Wells house is valued at.
Candide's approach - tending your garden
In this respect I wonder if you have ever read Candide by Voltaire. Right at the end of the novel, in which the hero and his companions have suffered a host of terrible misfortunes, largely brought on by their unquestioning following of socially conventional aspirations for power, wealth and the like, they visit a a happy man and his family who is not the slightest bit interested in the deadly machinations and murderous intrigues going on in the centres of power but who simply tends his garden. They too abandon all interest in such things and end their days happily "tending their garden". Perhaps it is worth quoting a Korean proverb here: To be happy for a day get drunk. To be happy for a year get married. To be happy for your life get a garden.
Actually my personal garden is a bit of a mess but I have found some of my happiest moments on sunny days and in the dusk in the community garden I have helped to create - together with other people. (Not that it is without problems mind). You may say that this is trite - but actually community gardening is growing fantastically rapidly in the USA and Canada in some of the worst burned out ghettoes - so a real green community development strategy is not at all unrealistic as part of a strategy for healing some of the things you mention. (Storr's book hints at the potential for healing through expression of creativity - however his book, originally about artists and intellectuals is not particulalry interested in the creativity of ordinary people - only Oxbridge types).
I was surprised that you seem to be unaware of David Smail's books "Illusion and Reality" which is about the very myths generated by consumer and advertising culture that you write about and the "Origins of Unhappiness" and "Taking Care. An Alternative to Therapy". Particularly in "The Origins of Unhappiness" Smail (formerly a Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Nottingham!) does a detailed analysis of interpersonal and social power relationships and their psychological effects. However Smail has no way, as a therapist, of proposing how the broader overarching patterns of social power are to be transformed on behalf of their victims...a weakness of all his books - as of yours.
I've got a view on these issues that I have been working away at for years in my role as a development worker - with, I think, some but very limited, success. Rather than ramble on about my ideas - if you are interested I hope that you will visit my web site which is at
A Strategy For Losers
Turning off the TV - or using it to learn another language
Finally a few more points: you highlight all sorts of potentially negative psychological effects of TV watching. So why don't you suggest that people turn the bloody tele off then? Alternatively, watch it in another language via satellite. While you are learning you will only have a vague idea of what is going on and will learn an language instead of rotting your mind. When I had a German partner briefly a number of years ago I decided to learn German. I decided that the main problem would be in devoting extra time to learning German and maintaining my interests. Textbook and classes tend to be boring, I loath know it all teachers asking questions before you are confident and know enough, and teaching stuff in on topics that I would not be interested in using the language for. So I decided to do in primitive German what I would ordinarily do in English and stopped buying an English paper and got a German one. I pondered over German texts on eco-cities and such like. I also stopped listening to the English news and listened to German news on short wave and then on a sattelite tv. I effectively stopped watching the English TV - not that I was ever very interested anyway. For years I only ever watched "Last of the Summer Wine". For several years I had only a vague idea what was going on in the world as shown on TV. Of course I read newspapers sometimes in the laundrette. But mostly I have concentrated on things I might be able to influence rather than media stuff - and also some stuff I got via the German media.
The chattering classes
You can say I am out of touch if you like but, what does being "in touch" mean. Lots of people seem to have detailed opinions about issues over which they can do nothing at all - except write to the paper. This is what the chattering classes are to me - they have opinions on everything and do nothing. I met them in Germany too - intellectuals whose commitment was to go to earnest Friday evening seminars to show off their knowledge and rehearse opinions on everything while doing f... all. If you want influence in the world then in my view you get that influence by demonstrating in practice that what you believe in can be made to work and refecting on what you have actually done and experienced. Outside of that, other than for keeping a tenuous watching brief on the world you might as well cut yourself off from it. Everyone decides to cut themselves off to a degree anyway. A bit of avoidance is necessary for getting on with things - damn it you write for the Sun - if you read that for your news what exactly are you in touch with anyway? Now I just read (bits of ) Der Spiegel once a week and watch German TV a bit, as well as BBC World. The result is that I am vaguely aware of things in the UK but not closely and absorb very little "media culture" at all. In regard to adverts in another language well they are the best things to watch when you are beginning to learn a language because you have so many visual clues as to what the words are about....
I was at a party with old "political comrades" on election night and they could not quite grasp why, while I was pleased that the Tories were chucked out, I was quite cool and not so ecstatic and exhilirated as them. You can actually withdraw from the consumer culture - and if (some) bloody irritating feminists make your emotional life hard work you can withdraw from a sex life too. As Storr puts it, you can get into your creativity instead of sex. I went without for some years when I decided I would rather not bother if it was going to be such hard work. In the end I am back in a relationship again - much to my surprise when it started...
Sex - women beyond the Mills and Boon romance
On the sex side I am not so sure that some of your generalisations are no longer as valid and that things are changing. I've found a lot of (feminist) women turned on by Nancy Friday's collection of literary masturbatory fantasies. On the media level I noticed recently that a women's mag that I picked up in the laundrette actually had an article on how to make your own porn movie and star in it at home. This included details like lifting her leg so that you could see penetration on camera and warning that, in regard to the so called "money shot"(porn industry jargon for a "facial cum shot") that semen in the eyes can sting. This was in a mass circulation women's mag. I've had conversations with women in the UK and Germany which suggest to me that there are quite a few women around who have very similar feelings and attitudes towards hot sex as men. Many of them have read Nancy Fridays books which you do not mention. I think that Nancy Friday analyses rather well the sorts of gender differences about sexuality that you write about (and which I am arguing here are changing in some places). Friday makes her argument largely by focusing on young boys and young girls very different relationships to their mothers - in it is easier for boys to throw off their mothers inhbiting influence than girls for whom mother is a role model.
Princes, princesses and sex - do they go together (or come together for that matter)
On a related point it seems to me that princesses are bound to find it difficult in bed. Perhaps I could put it like this - ladies and gentleman do not have sex, women and men do. Princes and princesses are even more likely to have a difficult time with sex. For one thing while they are having sex they are on state duty as stud and womb creating heirs for the royal soap opera. But more than this. Status in a hierarchy can ultimately be measured in how far away you get from direct participation in field labour and dirt. The lowest status jobs involve dirt - e.g. Cleaning jobs are some of the lowest status and you can then literally be "treated like dirt".At the other extreme the British aristocrats and colonial masters tended to wear white and have white gloves because they were showing their lifestyle did not involve getting dirty and if they did then there were making a statement about there being plenty of servants to provide a change of clean clothes. There is also a connection here with racist psychology where purity and whiteness is high status. In the cowboy movies the hero is always wearing light clothes while the baddies wear dark clothes. The white knight on a wite horse is to be contrasted with the black knight. (A friend points out to me that in Wuthering Heights Heathcliffe is the one who arises the heroine's passions - and he is swarthy and dark. Yet she marries the refined and pale noble character who cannot however give her the passion that she needs). The "purer" you are, the more "refined". What is more the real nobs, the real important people have to differentiate themselves from the likes of us in as many senses as possible - not for them using the soup spoon towards themselves, using their fish knife to cut their roll, nor slurping their soup. Yet the more you are ruled by etiquette and manners to demonstrate your superiority in ritual the less spontaneous and direct, the more distanced you are from your spontaneous animal functions. So of course sex, which is about generating and exchanging body fluids, is likely to end up tragi-comically by a personality stilted by manners and etiquette. Can an English rose and a noble prince ever get out of identity and role enough to really enjoy a non self conscious raunchy romp and its inevitable gushing splatter? Of course I don't have any inside information but I doubt it. (If one compares an erotic artist like Franz von Bayros who pictures the sex life of the aristocracy and Zille who pictures the sex life of the Berlin proletariat I think it is Zille who shows something more sympathetic, more erotic and closer to real life).
Pornography and changing patterns of sexual fantasy
Incidentally there are porn magazines which feature women over 40 - as one can see on any well stocked newsagent top shelf - and there have been for many years. Morever in Germany some of the Sattelite TV programmes show women opening sex shops for women selling dildoes and stuff, as well as selling(hetero and lesbian) porn videos made for women by women. They claim to have an increasing market. One thing my (female) therapist did help me on was when she suggested that Nancy Fridays books of male fantasies ("Men in Love")and womens fantasies ("My Secret Garden" and "Women on Top") were very similar. I agreed and started feeling that it would be very strange if, underlying the neuroses caused by personal and social repressions, there were not complimentary patterns of horniness. After getting to know and talk to women about this idea I can't say I have any need to change my mind. Its not a thing I would have believed even ten years ago but life moves on and fortunately I mix in different circles nowadays. Actually drawing out the difference between Nancy Fridays first book on women's fantasies (Secret Garden) and her second one (Women on Top) she argues that some women are losening the bonds of sexual inhibition and increasingly separating "sex" from "love". I suspect that the increasing availability of pornography is one influence - it certainly is on the continent.
I think you can see this far more on the continent and I really do feel the English and AngloSaxon world has got a problem about sex which you will not find (to the same degree) on the continent. (Mind you the German's are so pompously serious about their fulfilling in a disciplined way their new national duty "to have fun" - Spass zu haben...).
Being open and true to yourself so as not to mislead others
In a changing world I think it is virtually impossible to envisage a sufficient constant "new common pattern" emerging in relationship so that, given all the other turmoil that you draw attention to, the best you can do is to try to offer a different common way of thinking about the issues. That way people do not have to try to model themselves on any "right" particular pattern of relationships but can actually think more clearly about what they want in a relationship and be more open and clear with others so that they stand more chance of getting what they want. Its less about trying to be "right" as trying to be open so that if other potential partners don't like what you are, or what you want, then they have to cause for complaint because they can simply avoid you. The idea is from Shakespeare - it is not about having endless worried thoughts about what is the (politically or morally) correct kind of relationship as if there is a correct kind of relationship but about being true to yourself and therefore not false to anyone else.
In this there is a need to rethink morality and its place in sexual matters. You can argue that morality is an effect of cultural patterns more than cause of it. However "morality" and "ethics" and "norms" are based on what people think are the common patterns. If people adhere to common patterns they can co-ordinate their behaviours in a way which does not lead to role confusion and distress. In a period where there are no "norms" or norms are being questioned or changed people are bound to get upset because they have the anxiety inherent in uncertanty of not knowing in each new relationship how to act and respond. It is a matter of a sort of collective cultural disorientation because, without a common pattern, anything that one does might conceivably lead to offense, hurt and rejection. Indeed, you show that men are now all over the place about this and women either use male confusion for power trips or resent having to choose between doormats and tyrants. (But why do insist on the word "dominant for a man who has leadership qualities, who is assertive and self confident. To my mind you can have all those things without being "dominant" - you can lead by suggesting things to people without dominating them. You can be assertive about what you think and feel without dominating anyone and you can be self confident without needing to dominate so why are you "dominant").
Sincerity, openess and difference - non futile relationships
In my view there is no longer any possibility of setting down common norms as one could in a relatively slowly changing traditional society of small communities. Thus the game is not about following a ritualised game of courtship where eveyone knows the rules but a game of exploratory relationships and being yourself openly. But you need to know what you are seeking to explore and clarify in relationships - hence my mock exam paper (at the end of the theory of loneliness web article). In the end my view is that you should be able to do anything you bloody well want as long as you are clear about what you want and the other party is clear and they want something that matches - so that you don't hurt them, impose on them or manipulate them.
In my view what matters is that relationships are non futile. In the end what hurts is the disorientation and pain when you don't know where you stand. I think there is a lot of misery not ponly because people reject other people but because the rejected people have no way of making sense of what has or is happening to them. They don't know whether to trust other people who may be hiding, deceitful and have hidden and obscure motives. This means that people need to become clearer about what they are doing in the earlier stages of relationships. (See my web paper on informal social networks). What hurts above all in emotional relationships is insincerity - because for your personal orientation and to both be free in relationships you must know where the other person is comng from so you can accurately see where you are with them. To be helpful I think people need a common way of thinking about "love", what the word might mean and the contexts in which it arises. I wrote the theory of loneliness with this in mind but also the mock exam paper on love affairs from the University of the North Pole that is put as an appendix at the end of that web article.
Taoism - The power in needing less
Finally here is an philosophical antidote to unhappiness caused by over heated material aspirations and comparing yourself to others. It was written by Lao Tzu in the 6th century BC. I have taken this from R L Wing's translation and I have also quoted his commentary:
The Power in Needing Less
Which is dearer
Name or life?
Which means more
Life or wealth?
Which is worse
Gain or loss?
The stronger the attachments
The greater the cost.
The more that is hoarded
The deeper the loss.
Know what is enough;
Be without disgrace,
Know when to stop;
Be without danger.
In this way one lasts for a very long time.
"Commentary: In the Taoist view, individuals who are materially orientated - who identify themselves with their possessions - have no real place in the universe other than moving matter from place to place and reproducing life forms that may ultimately have the potential for intellectual evolution. Materially oriented individuals cannot evolve intellectually because their attachments to and hoarding of matter trains the mind to view reality as fixed and unflowing. This view is in harmony with dying, not growth, and thus canot connect with the larger meaning behind consciousness.
Those who follow the Tao realise that they are in a more powerful position because they are mobile, unburdened and independent. For the Taoist, excessve possessions are like ballast. They are released to gain buoancy. Just as air rushes in to fill a vacuum, more things will come into and pass through such lives. Most important the capacity to need less and pass things on brings evolved individuals closer to themselves and closer to the unfolding of reality - a perspective of advantage on the world." (R.L. Wing "The Tao of Power". Thorsons 1997).
I think one of the last books Erich Fromm wrote was very influenced by Taoism. Again I cannot remember the title exactly but it is something like "To Have or to Be". Its about whether one finds satisfaction in possessions or in what one does. To be too fixated on possession and "status" stifles what one can do creatively - because one is so busy hanging on to one's position in money making hierarchies that one cannot be sincere any more about anything. In my essays on the millennium bug (particularly the everyone a loser one) I suggest that there is chronic inability to tell or perceive the truth in all hierarchies and this particular crisis is interesting in the way that it has and will bring this out.
Too much success is not advantageous
There is another Taoist saying which I like very much - also in the Tao te Ching somewhere that "Too much success is not an advantage" which I think partly explains the misery of "successful" people. I know another clinical psychologist who I said this to once. She had become very popular for her pop psychology books and I meant by this that only when you come up again and again about the paradoxes and frustrations of the world can you keep on learning. Successful people often stop learning because they are only surrounded by admirers and so never see the world from any other point of view than their own. Another example was when I sent a review of one of his books to Fritjof Capra and got a postcard back saying that he received so many letters he could not reply to them all. He was, in my view, one of those people who was so successful that he wasn't going to have to look at other ways of seeing things - indeed he could not practically find the time to consider his critics.
Often, I think, when you are successful your income and consumption levels go up - you have to spend more because you are going around to different places all over, must eat out, live out of hotels, have a car, mix with other successful people and spend like them - thus you sort of get trapped in it. As I described above people have to hold everything in balance and one they become successful they need the income stream to hold everything else in balance. Once, moreover, you are selling your books in print you cannot easily decide that they are wrong - what are you supposed to say to all those people who have just spent their money on a copy? Sorry - what I wrote needs changing - buy my next work. ( I wrote a book nearly published in Austria - there are bits of it in German on my web site and bits in English too. But I am glad that the contract fell through. By the time it was translated I had changed my mind on lots of issues so had I gone ahead I feel I would have been making money out of subtly misleading people.....When you are successful I guess the real problem is that you fear to lose out - fear also the loss of status and authority.)
Fawning relationships
There is also the sense that being above people is always very lonely - true intimacy is not possible without an equalitarian relationship and a free relationsip in which you know people's basic responses, what moves them and no one can really know that in detail other than for a very few. I've noticed at meetings that I have been too people are so fawning with "experts" including therapists - and so often the therapists seem quite unconscious about the way they are lapping it up. Who are these experts on the human condition anyway? I don't go along with Masson (in his book "Against Therapy") for his anti therapeutic fundamentalism but I think he (and expressed in a better way Smail) are right to criticise therapy and therapist as "experts in being human". It often ends badly once this taken for granted know it allness becomes ingrained in the "therapist" who simply does not recognise how they have grown used to the power trip so stops questioning their own assumptions. My mother went to counselling for her grief when my father died - because it was assumed that she needed it as a matter of course by the experts from the hospice and she was terribly humiliated by the taken for granted sit round in a circle talk about our feelings approach of a condescending know it all therapist. The therapist counsellor was totally unaware that my mothers relationship with my father was a private thing and therefore her grief was a private thing - not something to be processed in a public therapeutic sausage factory.
Lonely is the head that wears the crown - and often stupid too
But whoever you are, being looked up to and admired separates you from those very people who might idolise you, so it is a strategy bound to fail if it evolved in childhood as attention seeking. Attention seeking is often something that evolves as a substitute for affection. But clearly it will not satisfy if the underlying need is for affection. Affection implies closeness which you cannot have easily where there is a status thing in the relationship. The status thing getsin the way of closeness. I don't want to measure myself in relationship to people "above me" because I know that such a lot of them are rendered stupid and miserable by their power. Every time you read about a dictatorship that topples you read how small minded the "big people are" - how completely out of touch they are with the lives of their subjects as the are surrounded by bum sucking yes people who always tell them what they want to hear so that they have completely lost the capacity for critical thinking. Upwardly mobile, no thanks. You can keep your miserable successful people and queens of hearts - their misery is absolutely inevitable because they are stupid because they are out of touch and the best cure for social comparisons is to point out why this should be. I have to say that a large reason for my own problems was that I was an arrogant know it all marxist who was going to set the world to rights with huge crowds at my feet cheering me on to lead the world liberation. So naturally I had breakdowns - I thought I knew it all so I had to discover I knew nothing at all in the hardest way.
Trust and intimacy is almost bound to be a big short if you are famous
Cravings for intimacy and closeness cannot be substituted for by being famous on the end of a camera lense - indeed in the very lack of privacy it becomes impossible to develop trusting relationships. Closeness is by definition impossible in the life of a superhero - because closeness is a word which literally means tactile and physical closeness and while Marlon Brando might hop into bed with every woman it will not be possible to develop any other than a superficial closeness because temporary. Anyway I am becoming opinionated in this rambling so I will shut up.
All the best - sorry if some of these things are quibbles. I agree with most of what you say.
Brian Davey
September 1999
© BRIAN DAVEY