Friends and Enemies: Our Need to Love and Hate. Dorothy Rowe

treatment. The current view of psychiatrists in the UK is that those people who are deemed ‘to suffer from a psychopathic personality disorder’ are untreatable. Consequently such people cannot be detained in a psychiatric hospital no matter how great a danger they might be to other people. Some terrible tragedies have followed from this. I think that one of the great tragedies of the twentieth century is that, although the importance of a baby bonding with a mothering figure was recognized in the 1950s, little money and effort have been spent in determining whether a deficit in bonding can be overcome. A remedy for this deficit would have a widespread effect far greater than the cures for various genetic physical disorders which are now being discovered.

      A remedy for this deficit in the ability to create human relationships would need to be applied early in a child’s life because the lack of this ability has profound and long-term effects. I saw this in the many hours I was able to spend talking with these patients called psychopaths. What I learned explained much of what I had observed.

      We all treat objects in the same way. We either manipulate them, or use them for our benefit, or ignore them. On occasions we destroy them. Those people who have never acquired the model of a relationship treat other people in the same way. They manipulate them, they use them for their own benefit, they ignore them, and occasionally they attempt to destroy them. Being on the receiving end of such treatment is difficult and painful because every interaction can become a threat to the integrity of one’s meaning structure.

      It is out of our model of relationships that we create that model we call ‘conscience’ or ‘superego’, a model which causes trouble for us for the rest of our lives, but which enables us to live in groups. Those who lack the model of relationships and, consequently, the model of conscience live lives unimpeded by guilt. Many such people end up in jail, but many more become extremely successful politicians and entrepreneurs. Many, fearing the punishments which breaking the law can bring, lead what are apparently normal lives. They might marry, have children, but because they are adept in making excuses for themselves and inspiring guilt in others, and because they are untroubled by the need to tell the truth, they become the most powerful member of the family, the centre around which all the other family members revolve.

      From such little acorns do massive oaks grow, when all that the baby wanted was some regular interaction with another person.

      The interaction which the baby seeks always follows a particular pattern. It is a pattern we all know, and thus adults who would say they know nothing about babies can still be drawn into this interaction and know how to play.

      Face to face either the baby or the adult can invite the other to play by looking into the other’s eyes and making a noise or a movement such as pushing out the bottom lip or wrinkling the nose. If the other responds with sounds and facial movements what follows is a conversation: this begins with an interchange which sets the scene, rises to a crisis, and falls away in a dénouement. The interaction follows the pattern of a play, and a play is always a story.

       The Story

      Stories so abound in our lives that, like the man who was surprised to discover he talked prose, we can be surprised to find that everything we know comes in the form of a story.

      The form of a story is very simple. It has a beginning, a middle and an end. For us to find a story satisfactory it has to be complete. If someone says to us, ‘I was on a train the other day with some people and you’ll never guess what happened,’ we are being given the middle of a story and invited to guess the end. But before we can make a guess we need to be told the beginning of the story. What train was it? Where was it going? Who were the people? Once we know the beginning we might or might not be able to guess the end, but, if we have become intrigued by the story, we cannot feel satisfied until the story is complete – beginning, middle and end.

      There are many different ways of telling a story but each way must complete the basic form. Novelists, journalists and essayists often try to draw the reader in by telling the middle, or part of the middle, of the story first. Such a device aims to surprise and intrigue the reader, something which scientists telling the story of their research must not do. Academic journals require that the story be told twice, first in a brief summary and then in the detailed form of introduction, method, results, discussion and conclusions. Cookery recipes have the ingredients as the beginning, the preparation as the middle and the cooking and serving as the end. This cooking and serving we might actually do, or we might simply imagine doing it, and thus complete the story. The story told by instruction manuals for video recorders and the like requires the reader to enact the story. The beginning is to take the recorder out of its box and to name the parts. The middle of the story is to decipher the prose and the diagrams, set up the recorder and work out how to use it, and the end to sit back in successful satisfaction.

      The form of the story is the means by which we link one event to another. We cannot survive physically or as a person when all we see is a passing phantasmagoria where events occur with no connection one with the other. We need to see connections between events, and our need often overrides what is actually happening. Thus some people explain an individual’s character and life in terms of the movements of the planets, while other people use as the explanation some mythopoeic gene.

      The most prosaic way of seeing a link between one event and another is the simple observation that one event is always followed by another particular event. From such an observation we go on to use the occurrence of the first event to predict the second. The observation and the prediction take the form of a story. Thus we can be sitting in our garden on a sunny day (the beginning of the story) and we see black clouds massing on the horizon (the middle of the story). We predict the end of the story: ‘It’s going to rain.’

      This particular prediction/end of story comes out of our past experiences. We have seen lots of black clouds followed by rain. But the way in which we have linked these events together comes from that form of thought which is innate, the story.

      Babies while still in the womb, from about twenty-four weeks’ gestation, show that they are using the form of the story. Even before the cortex of their brain is complete they are able to observe that one event always follows another event and to use the occurrence of the first event to predict the second.

      Perhaps the commonest example of this is in the way that babies in the womb can link the feeling of pleasure with certain sounds, particularly rhythmic, sweet music. No doubt for a baby in the mother’s womb the ride can be quite rough and constricted when the mother is busy and active. When she sits down and puts her feet up to rest, the stillness and easing of constriction must create in the baby a feeling of pleasure. Many mothers, just before they sit down to rest, switch on some music. If the mother has sat down to watch or to listen to her favourite soap opera the baby comes to hear the same music every day and, soon after the music begins, the baby feels a sense of ease and pleasure. The baby creates the story ‘I’m feeling uncomfortable’ (beginning), ‘Here’s the music’ (middle), ‘Something nice is going to happen’ (prediction/ending). When the baby is born and the music is switched on the baby remembers the story, and looks in the direction of the music with what is called the ‘alerting response’, the expectation that something nice is about to happen.

      Daniel Stern calls this ability of the baby to create a story ‘the protonarrative envelope’. This is ‘an emergent property’, which is

      an organization that is in the process of coming into being or that has just taken form … an emergent property of the mind … has coherence and sense in the context in which it emerges. That is to say, the diverse events and feelings are tied together as necessary elements of a single unified happening that, at one of its higher levels, assumes a meaning … More recent developmental research is beginning to suggest that the infant is intuitively endowed with some kind of representational system which can apprehend the intentional states of agents … The ability – in fact the necessity – to see the human interactive world in terms of narrative-like events and their motives, goals and so on, is achieved very early.²³

      We use the form of the story not just to link one event to another. We also use it to create meaning.