Author: Elisabeth

On binaries and the impulse to impose order

When my youngest daughter was three, we visited friends who were older than us, childless and without the usual cohort of toys available in other people’s house. To while away the time my daughter took to tipping over a jar of buttons my friend kept on her sewing table. Then she sorted with vigour, first in colour lots, the greens, blues and whites, then in order of size, finally she tackled shapes though most buttons were round. 

My daughter spent hours at this task which gave her all the pleasure of a game, a form of playfulness where she was able to create a sense or order out of this disorder.

I think of her now at play when I consider our human impulse towards classification and order. A strange leap to another passion of mine, one I think can be dangerous, including the therapeutic nihilism that comes out of labelling people who do not fit the acceptable norms of behaviour into categories such as borderline personality disorder, the so-called personality disorders of the DSM-5, which to my mind can be used as an attack on a person’s credibility.

When we claw back the features marking a person as borderline, a person deemed to fit somewhere between the medical categories of neurosis and psychosis, Freud’s classical nosology of the basic human condition, I’m into one of those misleading and artificial binaries that entered the psychological world.

When I began my training as a psychoanalytic therapist my teachers assured me, almost everyone is neurotic. The basic human condition, no matter how well raised, how well analysed, no matter how well we manage to deal with our troubled souls and weird ways of being, our bad habits, most of us are at heart neurotic. Or so the early Freudians argued

But for some of us, some whose minds get unhinged, typically through extreme levels of trauma we copped the glorious label of psychotic. In simple words we were mad.

There’s the mad and the sane. 

In my thirty fifth year I spent a year visiting Heatherton psychiatric hospital in Cheltenham one day a week for the purpose of understanding more about psychosis. I went as part of my training to become a psychoanalyst. In those days the prevailing belief was that psychosis was untreatable by conventional therapeutic means, with few exceptions. The preferred treatment for such souls was medication. 

Then in line with the gradual intensification of the medicalisation of states of mind as erupted in the early 1900s when another binary erupted between these men in the helping professions, beginning with Freud who wanted to turn states of mind into aspects of the body, propelled by his drive theory. 

For Freud we are all motivated by basic physiological drives for sex and food, these drives fuel our behaviour, whereas others preferred to adopt a morel chemical approach to our minds, our brains.

The mind body binary erupted into the psyche soma division that fed into arguments of therapy as a science in need of medical techniques. Think of lobotomies – taking out part of a person’s brain to quell their unruly emotions – versus, the mind as more complex and multi layered. 

Antonio Damasio writes about awareness, and the folks I studied in my PhD exploring the nature of the autobiographical impulse we learn from earliest days. 

Everywhere I look I find the binaries, beginning with the genders, the impulse to categorise as male or female, fat and thin, tall or short, ugly or beautiful, and all the in-between or mixtures fall to the way side like my all daughter trying to make some sense of the vast sea of buttons on the floor scattered around her small form.

Thresholds of pain

My mother taught numbness as a way of coping. She called it good immunity. Our bodies were built of sterner stuff. We did not get sick, and if we did it was readily overcome. No need for doctors, even for her and my father unless things were desperate or pregnancy related.

And even then she liked to remind us, in third world countries, places like India women had their babies in the fields on the job and then picked themselves up, hoisted their tiny newborns onto their backs and got back to work.

Remarkable bodies and beings, and we too could be like this of we chose. It was easy. Do not let aches and pains get to you.

So an earache could be managed with a scarf around your head to keep out the cold air. A tooth ache I managed by rubbing toothpaste on the cavernous hole in the back of my molars and clenched down hard before going to sleep on the pain.

This way worked up to a point. It left me with a high pain threshold which my mother argued would be helpful in the making of babies and the living of life.

I once saw a kinesiologist who looked into my eyes.

‘You have a good immune system,’ he declared as if a fortune teller. How could he tell simply by looking into my eyes, and even then not like an ophthalmologist who can track the course of veins running through my eyes. This man saw something that told him about the state of my body, including ‘a tendency towards constipation,’ he said.

I believed him because it was true then. Not now. Not since increasing my intake of water and regularly drinking prune juice. A wonder drink. Not that you need to know this. No one knows to need these things, which is another thing my mother taught us. To be silent. To keep whatever thoughts and feelings we were permitted to ourselves.

And last night in my dreams a familiar dream, one in which I had not attended a single history class all year and the exam was looming. Would I drop out ahead of time and what might this do for my record, or would I flip open books in the nick of time, skim read as much as possible on the big themes and then wing it?

‘You’re good at writing,’ my dream companion said. ‘Better to go this way than to drop out.’

Another of my mother’s teachings. Go through life lightly. Wing it. Don’t ponder too long on the imponderables, except for religion and even then don’t torture belief too much, just live your best and all will be well.

Be adaptive, my mother taught.

Roll with the punches. Behave as though nothing is wrong, and he hurts you only because he loves you. How much these messages have stuck and now on the edge of adjusting to life with a new computer, forced to upgrade given my old computer, which was perfectly serviceable as far as I could tell, could no longer receive updates because it was too out of date. 

How I despise the inbuilt redundancy of physical items. Another of my mother’s messages. Make do with what you have. Recycle and re-use. All good messages, up to a point. 

As a child, same underpants five days in row, same socks could get smelly. A bath once a week. Not her fault of course but circumstances. A lack of amenities. I don’t hold her responsible for the lot.

Still I wonder these days about my own anesthetising sensibilities. My tendency to dissociate when the going gets tough and my readiness to hide from feelings even when my heart is thumping.