We talk too glibly of living with uncertainty. We do that now, facing a new year after the shock of the old. At the beginning of the year many of us were paper millionaires, if we were to believe the value put on our houses - and now have lost that spurious virtual status in the economic down turn. Does this mean that we are able now to ‘get real’? Priests speak to our own doubts rather than politicians trying like evangelists to ‘save’ the economy: how can it be sensible to spend money we haven’t got to get out of the mess caused by spending money we haven’t got ….
The experts would say that we just don’t understand. One thing we have learned is that no-one understands, no-one knows how it works.
But how do we know anything? We know most things through the filter that we call self. We can only absorb facts that are in accord with our essential view of self, our self at the centre of things, ringmaster in the circus of life. Some of this is culturally determined and and some of it is psychology. In object relations theory the other exists in relation to the self. Winnicott said that you cannot see the infant on its own, but in relation to the mother. With globalization we cannot see our bank account on its own, but in relation to spiraling systems of international debt and credit. We don’t understand but in the last few months we have got to acknowledge what we already sort of knew that. There is a momentary realization that we are not the independent actors we think but particles in a cosmic brainstorm. Of course we hope that normal service will be resumed as soon as possible, when we can be comfortable again with an egocentric view of human agency – when things get better and we think we have done it ourselves.
The starving refugees of Darfur may have a better hold of reality than the readers of the Guardian and the Mail. That is the tragedy.
The idea of the self as a filter through which we sieve reality makes sense to me – that is, it appeals to my own sense of self as a convenient holding together of our experiences as a coherent whole, so that we can have a go at understanding what is going on. I realize that other people may not find this interesting at all. By seeing the self as a system, with a boundary to distinguish what is inside and out, what is subjective and objective, what is idiosyncratically creative (and potentially mad) and what is socially constructed (and potentially dead), we are making coherent our partial reality.
But we are at the same time recreating and reinforcing a dichotomy (inside/outside/ subjective/objective) as if the observer is outside the frame. But we also know that is not the case. How we think, feel, perceive the world and act in relation to everything around is, with all the distortions and special effects that we insist on in our self-obsessed project, that is also reality. This is our philosophical gene at work.
The common image of is of us as deluded fools unable to face an ultimate reality or truth. But our foolish delusions are part of that reality. The dichotomy I find more useful than I-it or me-not me or self-object (which are all exclusive ways of defining reality) is that between exclusive and inclusive states of mind. (There are two kinds of people in the world – those that think there are two kinds of people and those who don’t.) In an inclusive scenario there is no separate existence to justify the politics of difference. It is absurd then to say that I am better than you, or that anyone has rights or moral advantage over another. At this time of economic downturn it could be good to do away with bonuses and performance-related pay as a first step to facing the facts.

The pornography of life
We argue that there is a difference between fantasy and fact. But the difference is not automatic, clear and unambiguous.
One of the learnings from meditation practice is an increased awareness of how we are all the time making stories, inventing or recreating situations where we play out dramas in our minds. And most of the time we are unaware that we are doing it.
Sometimes a day dream becomes more conscious, subject like any creative experience to a secondary process of analysis and cohesion. But most of the time we don’t specially notice the stories we are telling ourselves.
This story-telling is though the process by which we turn fantasy into fact. We are rewriting experience to make a coherent picture that we can appreciate and recognize and say, yes, this is me, and this is the world we are in. Depending on stuff, ‘this is me’ may look good or not, and the world we are in may be more or less benign or hateful.
So what is fact or fantasy?
A fact is a fantasy that we have no desire to contradict.

Thinking about society – a Sunday afternoon conversation in north London.
A symposium – of three men and five women, in their 50s and 60s, clinicians, managers, consultants in health and education.
‘You are not to write about us in the Sun.’
But what about putting you on a blog, right on the public/private boundary?
What is public and what is private information? We are preoccupied with inclusion and exclusion. We are struggling with changing notions of privacy – but is this just a generational thing – or a more seismic shift in our understanding of self?
As we get older, even facing retirement, we feel a kind of exclusion, but still looking to find ways to contribute. That is always going to be the way, sometime being on the inside, sometimes outside. A levelling out of experience can be very dull.
It is a fact, we think, that not everyone can do a degree in philosophy, but universities want to be inclusive, to give anyone that opportunity. Such democratic inclusivity comes up against our innate elitism, the secrets of our dark heart.
There are other times that we endorse a democracy of competence. A good mechanic is like a good GP. We all develop those competences that give us satisfaction.
But there is a nervousness about personal and professional boundaries. Patients google their therapists and perhaps that way catch a glimpse of their hedonistic lifestyle. And we feel betrayed by the false inclusivity of emails – and the lazy habit of copying everything to everyone.
What does it mean to google ourselves – to look to see how we seem on the internet? The rules are changing, uncertain, and make us unhappy. We don’t mind being known for our professional roles – but we don’t want other people to know our weight.
What happens when you put in the name – there is an anonymous process of selection. ‘We have tested this site and not found any significant problems. ‘ We have to accept that we choose to be part of this – there is a wish to be noticed, and not just for our professional roles.
There was always gossip. But that leaking of private information retained a certain exclusivity in its distribution – there were always those in the know. It was not broadcast in the indiscriminate way of the internet, with hundreds of thousands of hits on a prurient video. What then about the persecution of Big Brother CCTV– when even the parking of your car makes you paranoid? Now we are struggling with a new etiquette: just don’t do anything you don’t want other people to know about.
My definition of a celebrity goes like this: someone who prepared to live their private life in public– their sex life and their weight are for us to goggle at in the waiting rooms of our lives, reading Hello magazine. What is our interst in the Oscars –the frocks? or celebrating movies as art, something we can celebrate about America?
What other ways are there to know who we are? There is the archiving of memories. The British Library keeps tapes of distinguished p[eople talking about their lives but there are lots of examples also of random or ordinary reminiscence –oral history projects and Mass Observation. And there are new cooperative methodologies - for example, surveying the bird population. The problem for future historians will be too much data.
We all have the wish at times to find out more about origins, like a great-grandfather who came from Ireland or (for an Italian) an English grandmother! We want to be more interesting to ourselves, to make sense of fragmented identities, make a coherent history.
With the wars and migrations of the last century, there is inevitably dislocation,for example for those coming from countries that are no longer countries. We have a sense of the privileged arms of our families and also of peasant or yeoman stock. Historic distinctions leave behind very important hierarchies - think of Sephardic and Ashkenazi and Hassidic jews. We give value to the historic – what we hold on to from the past - as if it is a contemporary experience. But also those with an immigrant past are living with a successful story, a pride in achievement, having descended come from people who have been able to do dramatic things in their lives.
We could make associations to the dislocation, disruption and even violence in the adolescent experience. In a way that is reflected by the instant identity of YouTube, it is commonplace to observe, admire and envy transformations in one generation. [Think of the Oscar winner, There Will Be Blood]. Mostly, though, we are assigned a place and stay in it and statistics indicate that there is less social mobility now than before Thatcher and New Labour. What we are missing, though, is any of the old solidarity in relation to the bosses.
In a knowledge economy we don’t know when are we working or not – for example, reading a journal in the bath. Competence and celebrity get mixed up and become indistinguishable. We may idealise the skilled working class, David Beckham, and admire ‘Posh’ for her knowing send up of herself.
Very rarely is celebrity associated with genius – but there is Daniel Barenboim. To someone who went to his recent series of concerts, together with what he is doing politically, this makes him profoundly inspirational. We admire also his great courage. In a recent interview he was happy to talk about most things, but not that he fears for his life. He has managed his talent, from being a child prodigy to now, aged 65 – we think with some awe how he has lived up to his potential. We may see also how he uses his gift for a project – and how this makes him very different from your ordinary celebrity. Unless you think that it is enough that self-promotion is now the project: thinking of Posh and Becks again, he plays his football as best he can and she may also be in fear for her life, the target of stalkers.
If self-promotion now is the project, some of us are uncomfortable about putting ourselves out there. We are not the Beckhams, that’s for sure. Their celebrity seems empty but we keep reading the magazines.
Not everyone would agree, but you could argue that it is possible to use one’s ordinary talents to be extraordinary. Think, say, of the woman who reacts to a family tragedy by organising a tenant protest on an estate.
But what has happened to the projects we care about? Psychoanalysis, group relations, no longer offer the hope now for universal change, that the founding pioneers believed. These are projects that have become tired. We do not feel so courageous now – this is a sad thought but truthful. We still have some capacity to take risks and we still know what we believe to be the truth about things.
The projects are tired but they have not failed. Psychology thrives, professionally and culturally, educating us about emotional intelligence, even though it is coming on a bit too strong on the narcissistic side. You can’t compare Barenboim and Beckham.
While we have been talking, there has been a cup-tie being played. Suddenly there is a new enthusiasm in the room:
‘What is the score?’

happy new year

One thing leads to another seems to be the Buddhist philosophy of karma. I have heard a Buddhist definition of reality – it is the fabricating of what has dependently arisen. So Tibetans understand subjectivity, where people see what is real to them ‘from their own side’. No doubt the Chinese have a different perception. So what is real is not inherently independently real, as we tend to think: what we can say is real is a relationship, which is changing and impermanent.

I don’t pretend to understand all of this. But I want to find a way of describing what I don’t understand in words that I can understand – so getting away for Buddhist language of ‘emptiness of self’ or ‘no self’

I am thinking this as we come to the end of the year. A child soon learns on his birthday that he is not really a year older suddenly and January 1st will not be markedly different from the day before. But these virtual boundaries are useful to us in appreciating both continuity and discontinuity in life. We are the same and not the same – all the time.

I am interested in the phrase – ‘things are constantly changing’. It sounds contradictory. I want to be pedantic and say, what you really mean is – continuously changing. But perhaps you mean what you say, after all.
Happy new year.
Or, as a Buddhist might say, may all living creatures be at ease in the new year.

WE ARE ALL STRANGERS NOW


The idea of a Middle England is an attempt to hold on to an identity that is slipping away. It creates – does not recreate, because it never existed – a homogenous community in the mind, ‘people like us’, in a society full of people who are evidently not like us at all.

An alternative identity, to make better sense of the reality, might be that of local stranger – not global citizen, that is romantic nonsense mostly except for some mega entrepreneurs – but strangers living locally and integrating as best we can or as little as we like in a society that is full of indigestible difference.

Of course a lot of people are more obviously strangers, new immigrants, political or economic exiles from societies that nurtured them, more or less. Many people have benefited, experienced dramatic transformation from the experience of exile – writers and artists make their restless identity the focus of their creativity and so do other professionals and business people. It can have genetic advantages: among my first cousins I just look at how big Australians are compared with their European forebears.

But now the category that we call indigenous is shrinking faster than the polar icecaps. Those that might think of themselves as indigenous are having to reinvent themselves as strangers in their own society, competing in their sectarian interests with other minorities.

This is in no way an easy process – it suits some post-modern people, who make themselves over, such as celebrities, but also ordinary people are looking for makeovers, dieting, taking drugs, going on Facebook, chasing after status jimjams …. whatever. Most of us can indulge some of that, but no-one – with very few exceptions – is totally post-modern in their thinking and experience.

We have to learn to be strangers in our home environment. This can be satirised in the grumpy old men and women movement, as recorded in television programmes – but young people can be just as grumpy, in this sense.

A working definition of ‘grumpy’: reacting to what makes us feel alien in a familiar environment.

In the extreme, this leads to fundamentalism, The BNP, Islamists, who can tolerate difference, these are social reclusivists, and to a lesser degree so are those who live in gated communities, or those who cluster together, students, Polish workers, whoever.

‘Middle England’ is one example of a wider phenomenon of defending one’s identity in an environment that we would like to be familiar, but it’s not. And in reality there is not one Middle England but thousands, niche markets for identity, and Middle England is best understood as an umbrella term for this phenomenon.

The dynamics that we have to think about is that between the social reclusivist and the citizen – the psychological tension in every individual as to whether they want to live in a closed or an open society – and the day by day, minute by minute decisions that we make to do one or the other.

Where do we get our morality from? We say – if it is legal, it is all right. Tax avoidance, loans from dubious clients. And if it is not legal, we say we did nothing wrong. Arranged a convenient alibi, bought some shares at the right time – we live by our own rules. If it is in our immediate interest and we can get away with it, that is sufficient justification for any action.

After the death of god comes the death of shame. If we are found out, we write a book about it. What is most important is to convince ourselves that we exist, and for this we need money, status, power, and most of all we need to be able to wave at the camera. The small boy standing behind the television commentator and waving his arms is in training to be a celebrity. The crowd that forms for the reporter in a bombed out street in Bagdad and we see on our evening news is giving meaning to their anonymity.
The falseness of their demonstration for the camera turns their tragedy into entertainment and everyone is diminished. Such is the process of self-justification.

I am however resistant to this assertion of self at the expense of dignity. My reasons are not entirely rational, in some aspects they may even be pathological – but I believe they also have some moral point.

I have to think why I find self-advertisement to be at best unconvincing and often offensive. There is a cultural difference of course – when for a time I had an American colleague, I was able to observe and experience an unironic self-promotion that at first took my breath away in its presumption. And of course this is the norm now in corporate life.

So what do I find objectionable? It is the blatant and crude attempt to manipulate the perception of us. When I advertised for carers for Anna, I received email after email from people who said they had a sense of humour. There is no way by email that you can demonstrate a sense of humour and anyway the only evidence of any worth is they way you find that you feel about other people, not what they say about themselves. But in our self-image dominant culture we list GSOH as if this is equivalent to an academic qualification.

‘God, I have a problem’

I might say that – and often do - as an expression of temporary anguish. A communication that is more important to give than to receive. Or it could be a prayer. An intimate communication to an unknowable other. – yet expecting a response, a reaction of some kind.

Internet communication can be talking into the ether, not expecting a response, but I am realising more these days how it may carry an emotional message, and the usual rules of transference and counter transference apply. I used to think that emails, being autistic, get misunderstood because they are flat, and lacking depth or perspective – but the misunderstood email is, I now realise, also very much a product of projective identification.

Young people carry out their complex courtship and mating routines by texting. We are all getting used to living and working in virtual communities. I am not talking about YouTube or Second Life. There is a web hub, where Tavistock Institute social scientists and consultants are learning to talk together in a new space for them. There are experiments in internet-based group relations conferences. It all has a West Coast feel about it, which reminds this old hippy of the ‘60’s and 70s. . And indeed I see a San Francisco group have successfully developed a Buddhist sangha.

I wonder if we could learn from people who pray. I understand that people often have an informal communication with God. And I remember I have heard in particular Jewish stories full of humour about such communications.

What happens when we talk to others as if we are talking to ourselves? Or talk to ourselves, content that others may overhear. These are closed system communications in an open systems framework.

God, this is confusing. (You can decide for yourself if this is a comment or a prayer.)