I was on vacation in Tremezzo, Italy at a favorite hotel on
Lake Como which had a floating pool in the lake complete with an artificial
sand beach. In order to get to the beach
you had to cross the main road around the lake.
Once we got across the road the person who took care of the lounge
chairs was about to lead us to virtually the last available chairs. At the same time another couple came down and
was taken to the last two lounges, which were next to ours. By American standards the chairs were more or
less on top of each other.
At any rate, as we all settled in my wife realized she
forgot something and had to go back to the room. The other couple also realized they forgot
something. My wife and the husband from
the other couple left to navigate crossing the road together, and the wife of
the other couple seemed quite friendly and asked me some standard where are you
from and what to you do, getting-to-know each other questions. I told her that I’m a psychologist.
She became extremely attentive and told me that she had
always wanted to ask a psychologist a question that profoundly troubles
her. She was Jewish and from Iran, which
she and her husband had to leave and emigrated to the U.S. She always wanted to understand why the Shah
hated Jews. I made some reasonably half
assed out-of-the-book comment about prejudice, but she did not accept it as a
terminal statement.
She told me I didn’t understand what she was asking and I
asked her to explain more. She told me
that the way children in Iran were taught how to count was to ask them if they killed 5 Jews today and
4 Jews tomorrow how many Jews had they killed.
I was stymied by the power of the story and the intensity of
her need to know. I clearly did not have
an answer. At that time I was an adjunct
professor at Columbia University teaching doctoral students in their clinical
psychology program how to do psychotherapy.
I decided to bring up the question about hate at the next meeting I
attended, thoroughly expecting to get either an answer or at least a clear path
to one. What I got instead was not a lot
better than my initial response to the woman in Lake Como. This surprised me since the faculty at
Columbia were clearly outstanding scholars as well as outstanding therapists.
So the question still stands: where does all this hate come
from?
In my travels in the world of psychology I actually believe
I found the answer. Stick with me
through some more stories and I hope you will be as struck by this answer as I
have been.
The answer comes from people studying developmental
psychology – how minds develop.
Specifically, from an enterprise called “Object Relations”, which is
about as misnamed as a field could be.
The enterprise is definitely about relations, but has nothing to do with
objects but rather with people. It
should really be called People Relations. The theory is about how children
learn to build up a notion of the external world, how they learn to
differentiate between self and others.
As an infant develops feelings develop. Part of what the mind does is to
split off parts of the self and project them into the external world. Good feelings are split off and projected
out, as well as bad feelings.
Any of us who have had children are aware of the profound
changes in development as a child develops and builds up their image of the
external world. From the perspective of
the parent, they go from an infant who takes over your life to a toddler who
engages you like nobody else can (as well as scares the hell out of you as they
put themselves into potentially dangerous situations), to two-year-olds.
At this two year stage (often called ‘the terrible twos’) a
funny thing happens. Your beatific,
engaging, endlessly learning, wonderfully cuddly child learns the concept:
NO. All of a sudden all kinds of
contrary behaviors manifest themselves.
I used to send the
doctoral students who came to my office for supervision on their first patients
down to West End Ave. to observe mothers crossing the street with their
children. The two-year-old drama was
remarkably repetitive: the mother starts crossing the street holding the
child’s hand (West End Ave. is unusually wide with 4 lanes plus parking on each
side of the street street and a large amount of fast moving manhattan
traffic). The lights give you enough
time to cross, but not much time left over because the street is so wide. The scene is that the child stops somewhere
in the middle of the street, doesn’t want to move, and often sits down. Meanwhile the light is about to change and
the mother has to do something to prevent disaster. After a brief negotiation, possible yelling,
comes forcibly grabbing the child and scurrying to safety on the other side of
the street.
From the parents’ perspective something has certainly
changed in their loving cooperative child.
The notion is that what has happened is two things. One is that the child is developing
autonomy. The other is that whereas
children develop and have loving and positive feelings, at this stage of
development negative feelings need to be dealt with. The task for the child is
to figure out what to do with these unpleasant feelings. The virtually universal solution is to
project them out to others so that they do not have to be experienced as
belonging to ourselves. We all have
learned to do this at a very early age.
Projection is a defense mechanism, a way of protecting
ourselves from dangerous feelings. We
take those internal feelings and experience them as coming from somebody else
instead of being inside of ourselves.
You must realize that projection is an unconscious
phenomenon: we do something very
dramatic but absolutely do not realize we are doing it. Unconscious means the same as unaware. Human minds, all of our minds, are constantly
and fervently doing things to protect us from thoughts, from feelings that
would threaten our ability to function and to be at peace. These things are things we are not aware
of. To use the jargon of psychology,
they are unconscious.
My background is in neuroscience – I love neuroscience…I
love science. Some of my most exciting
experiences have been in that world. The
truth is I don’t really believe something until I see it – until I witness an
experiment supporting the existence of whatever it is that is being talked
about. As interesting as these notions
are, I need to see it in order to believe it.
So how do you see this operating in the world? Well, look at child literature, fairytales,
the beginning literature. What do we
see? The good guys and the bad guys are
always there. There’s the evil witch
(holder of the bad feelings that need to be projected out somewhere) and the
hero fighting the witch. Here we have an
external representation of an internal process of mind.
Early on in my practice, when I was just beginning to learn
about these things, I had agreed to do one session with the child of a single
parent in therapy with me. Even though I do not work with children, I thought
meeting them would help me figure out a way to help them. She was particularly troubled and how to
help her had become of great concern to her parent. As best as I can remember she was about 10 or
11 years old.
She came into the office wearing what looked like army
fatigues, had each hand in one pocket of her jacket, and sat down in the chair
just like that – with her hands still in her jacket pockets. After talking to her for a little while to
try to understand how she was seeing his world I found myself asking her what
was in her jacket, since she seemed to be holding onto whatever was there for
dear life. It had become very
distracting for me.
She proceeded to take one hand out that was holding a GI Joe
figure – the good guy. When she took out
her other hand she was holding some sort of ‘creepy crawly’ weird somewhat
slimy looking creature – the bad guy. My
thought was holy cow – here it is – she’s carrying the two separate domains of
feeling separately - and she can’t figure out how to put them together. She can’t deal with her own bad feelings,
projects them out, and is constantly playing it out with someone in the
external world. At school she is always
fighting with someone. Hopefully someone
will be able to work with her to own her own feelings so she doesn’t have to be
in an eternal external struggle.
Owning our own feelings is what it is about. To whatever extent we are unable or unwilling
to do that, we are destined to project them out and struggle with them by a
conflict with whomever we have projected them to.
More evidence for this notion in our fantasy world: the most successful modern day literature is
all about such a struggle. Literature
today often takes the form of plays which takes the form of movies. Star Wars is an amazingly engaging struggle
of The Evil Empire versus Hans
Solo. Yoda, incidentally, is the guru
showing the power of being in touch with your feelings. He is the voice saying not to worry about the
bad feelings, to confront them, and the good ones will prevail.
More evidence in the real world: Nixon described Russia as “The Evil Empire”
in one of his television appearances. It
was clear that he really believed it and couldn’t understand how anybody on the
planet could see it any other way. When
the cold war ended psychologists who were interested in the notions we have
been discussing brought up an interesting question. If, on a societal level, the bad guy, the
place we had put all our own bad feelings, was Russia – what happens when the
cold war comes to an end? Where are all
the bad feelings going? One hypothesis
back then was that it would go to Aliens.
We would see aliens as the new bad guys.
Indeed for a few years after the end of the cold war there was a clear
increase in the interest in worrying about being invaded by aliens (although
I’ve never seen any actual data).
What happens after a war when the hated enemy becomes a
neighbor we interact with politically, economically and socially. It is amazing how all that hate dissipates
and the vacation industry thrives on bringing people to Germany, Japan,
Vietnam, etc. However, the notion is
that the hate has to go somewhere, and of course today there are endless
candidates in the Mideast. Politicians,
I think, are really good at mobilizing reservoirs of hate towards countries for
their own political goals. This is not
to say that evil does not exist – of course it does, unfortunately it
does. However, it behooves us to
understand how to separate real evil from ‘convenient’ evil. Awareness is the key to this ability.
Whenever politics takes advantage of the hate reservoirs,
whenever religion takes advantage of it to tie people to it, whenever any
individual or culture does that, we see bizarre episodes of seemingly senseless
hate do great destruction. It is a
profound challenge to own our own bad feelings, to not project them out, and
for sure not let them be manipulated by individuals or by crusading groups.
One of the rewarding parts of doing psychotherapy is seeing people
become aware of their feelings and figure out how to deal with them. Many people have told me that one of the
reasons that they came to therapy was because they did not want to repeat a
negative family experience like the one they grew up in. In couples therapy people have often said
that they want their children to grow up in a much better environment with much
less conflict and anger than the one they grew up in. It is extremely gratifying to watch people figure
out their own unconscious reflexes, come to terms with their feelings, and not
have to repeat the same mistakes they have made themselves or seen in
others. As one person put it, to become
a more evolved human being.
