Poems of Childhood

All these poems call to mind my childhood. I was blessed with good fortune. I think of the many events that were so happy and full of joy. These poems though are focussed upon agony and desolation. This had its origin I believe in the fateful fact that my mother fell ill just after my birth. One of my earliest memories is of her with her leg in plaster. She developed a tubercular knee just after my birth. I was I believe affected by this event. It was pure chance that my birth coincided with this event in my mother’s life. I believe that chance is a major actor in the human scene and, I believe, that psycho-analysis attributes to intentions many things which belong to chance rather than human deliberation. I think this originates from Freud’s brilliant exposition in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, The Interpretations of Dreams and Jokes and their relation to the Unconscious. That there are frequently intentions lying behind what seem to be chance events is certain but it has been exaggerated. What Freud says here needs to be balanced with that marvellous passage of his in The Future of an Illusion:

“There are the elements, which seem to mock at all human control; the earth, which quakes and is torn apart ad buries all human life and 26 its works; water, which deluges and drowns everything in a turmoil, storms, which blow everything before them; there are diseases, which we have only recently recognized as attacks by other organisms; and finally there is the painful riddle of death, against which no medicine has yet been found, nor probably will be. With these forces nature rises up against us, majestic, cruel and inexorable; she brings to our mind once more our weakness and helplessness, which we thought to escape through the work of civilization … Impersonal forces and destinies cannot be approached; they remain eternally remote. But if the elements have passions that rage as they do in our own souls, if death itself is not something spontaneous but the violent act of an evil Will, if everywhere in nature there are Beings around us of a kind that we know in our own society, then we can breathe freely, can feel at home in the uncanny and can deal by psychical means with our senseless anxiety.” ¹

The error of attributing the Freud of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life to the Freud of The Future of an Illusion is a case of taking something which is true of a discrete domain of human experience and applying it to events that are quite outside that domain and makes a madness out of the latter. In fact it is a madness hidden within professional verbiage. Total madness is when I believe everything that happens is intentional. So what begins as a significant insight becomes, in the hands of a group addiction to the idea, a madness. There is a lust with us human beings to find a simple recipe that will explain a whole universe of phenomena. Turning chance events into deliberate intentions is how Freud understands the source of animism. This endowment of accidental happenings with an intentionality is a primitive mechanism. When I went for supervision to Wilfred Bion and told him of my patient who was late because of the snow on the ground he said to me: ‘You need to tell her that God has sent that snow down to get between you and her’. Yes, even the snow, the rain or the heat has been sent by God to prevent two persons coming into communion with one another. No poet has given more potent expression to this than Andrew Marvell in his poem The Definition of Love. Sanity requires a recognition that many events happen to 27us from chance but also that some events happen by intention. This makes an understanding of the world a more complex affair and it is this which we humans try to avoid through the implementation of a simplistic recipe. My mother’s illness and disablement at the time of my birth was a chance event. Blaming her puffs me up and makes me in control of events. It puffs me up in a delusional way but diminishes the capacity of my mind. I believe that this attribution of intentionality to accidental events is a way of closing the mind into a smaller circle. This is what Freud implies in the passage quoted is that we close the actual world down into the circumference of what is familiar. We are required to expand our minds to encompass both the intentional and accidental. This expansion of mind is not just an intellectual demand but an emotional one also.