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

never forgive those who shamed me.’ Primitive pride then adds, ‘My revenge will be merciless and eternal.’

      In telling their story some of my patients recognized and confronted their primitive pride. They saw that it kept them in the prison of depression, and they decided that the cost was too great. There were other and better ways of creating a life story, and, in realizing that they were free to do so, they freed themselves from their prison. Some of my patients found that the immediate rewards their primitive pride gave them were too delicious to relinquish. They remained depressed.

      The meaning structure is a self-regulating system. All self-regulating systems have within their structure some mechanism which maintains the integrity of the system, preventing it from grinding to a halt or shattering to pieces. Our body, a self-regulating system, has a number of such mechanisms. The mechanism which forms blood clots to stem the flow of blood through a wound is one. In the meaning structure primitive pride is the form of thought or mechanism which selects from within the individual meaning structure a collection of meanings; when put together, these meanings serve to give immediate protection to the integrity of the meaning structure. This collection of meanings may have little relationship to what is actually happening or in the long term be an adequate defence. Indeed, it usually creates more problems than it was assembled to solve. Its importance is that it can be assembled immediately, in the blink of an eye.

      In psychoanalysis one of the mechanisms of defence is rationalization, which is a concept with a passing similarity to primitive pride. With rationalization, as Otto Fenichel explained,

      Emotional attitudes become permissible on condition that they are justified as ‘reasonable’. The patient finds one reason or another why he is to behave in this way or that, and thus avoids becoming aware that he is actually driven by an instinctual impulse. Aggressive behaviour is sanctioned on the condition that it is viewed as ‘good’; a like situation holds true for sexual attitudes.³³

      In the 1930s the psychoanalyst Karen Horney developed the concept of compensatory ‘pride systems’ which, as described by the psychotherapist Chris Mace,

      attempt to minimalise internal anxiety by maintaining self images that are inconsistent with social realities. These are identified with characteristic goals and fixed attitudes, providing a source of inconsistent behaviour at any time. If reality threatens to impinge, conflict and anxiety are the inevitable result as the fragile balance between these internal systems is disturbed.³⁴

      Two American psychologists, Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson, though working quite differently from psychoanalysts and from me, encountered primitive pride, which they called a ‘psychological immune system’. They had wanted to discover how quickly people recovered from the shock of some disaster or some unexpected good fortune. They found that when people were asked how long they thought it would take them to recover from, say, being jilted or being elected to a much wanted position, they had predicted that it would take far longer than it actually did.

      What happened was that the psychological immune system, which was ‘an army of rationalizations, justifications and self-serving logic, soothes our psyche during bad times’. Daniel Gilbert said, ‘People are famous for making the best of bad situations and rationalizing away their failures – which allows them to remain relatively pleased with themselves despite all good evidence to the contrary.’³⁵

      Primitive pride is concerned with choosing from the array of possible interpretations of a situation that interpretation which will best keep the meaning structure intact. It can act swiftly without having to resort to conscious thought. It is not concerned with testing an interpretation against reality nor is it concerned with the long-term implications of a particular interpretation, even if the implication is that the person will suffer.

      This action of primitive pride can be seen in the pattern of events which leads to a person becoming depressed. Some disaster occurs which causes the person to see a serious discrepancy between what he thought his life was and what it actually is. The meaning structure cannot adjust to this discrepancy without a major reorganization, and so the person starts to feel himself falling apart. Primitive pride comes into action and provides an interpretation which serves to hold the meaning structure together, namely that the person himself is the cause of the disaster. The holding together operation is successful because the interpretation is simply an enlargement of what the person believes, but what comes hard on its heels is the imprisoning isolation of depression.³⁶

      Not only is primitive pride not concerned with testing meanings against what is actually happening, it can perform its function of maintaining the integrity of the meaning structure simply by denying that certain things are actually happening. The story which many Serbs have always liked to tell themselves is that, throughout history, Serbs have, without exception, been virtuous victims. In June 1999, as NATO troops uncovered more and more evidence of the massacres by the Serbian army of Albanian Kosovans and the Serbs in Kosova fled their homes for the safety of Serbia, many Serbs preferred to believe what their state media told them, that they were the innocent victims of NATO aggression, while some denied the evidence of their own eyes. Rory Carroll, an English journalist in Belgrade, reported:

      Asked whether Serb refugees should be interviewed about possible atrocities, Belgrade shoppers yesterday gave blank responses. The refugees fled because the Kosovan Liberation Army was a gang of murderous terrorists, not because they had done something to provoke retribution, many said. As for the refugees, they deny any wrongdoing against their Kosovan Albanian neighbours. Questioned about the March 26 massacre at Suva Reka in which men, women and children were shot at close range, Serb refugees from the town claimed that not a hair had been touched on a single head.

      Reports of mass executions, grenades tossed at children, trucks ferrying bodies, were a fantasy. ‘Not one Albanian has been killed, not one,’ said Bravko Petkovic, 32, who worked in Balkan Tyre factory.

      A crowd of young men, arms folded, said it was inconceivable that they or any other Serbs could have killed their neighbours. ‘Do we look like murderers? Come on, we’re family men,’ said Vesko Mladevovic. ‘We got on very well with the Albanians, even though they were kidnapping and shooting us.’³⁷

      Primitive pride can also keep us alive when the conditions of our life are at their most dire. Instead of giving up and dying we stay active and, even without conscious thought, we carry out those actions which can ensure our survival. That is how people torn from their homes and robbed of everything they hold dear manage to go on living day by day.

      As the many millions of people who live in great poverty show, it is possible to survive on very little. The trick seems to be to keep our expectations in line with what’s on offer. ‘What’s on offer’ is not just a matter of physical survival. It is also a matter of what’s on offer that will maintain our sense of identity/our life story. It is easier to survive on very little if you live in a community where you have a place and where the other members of the community treat you with respect. Poverty is much harder to bear when you are utterly alone.

      Does your environment allow you to be yourself and do other people see you as you see yourself? Whenever your answer to that question is ‘No’ primitive pride comes to the rescue. It might perform a reconstruing of your life story, perhaps, ‘Even though other people spurn me, God loves me and will reward me for my virtue,’ or it might say, ‘If I cannot live my life as I am I shall die my death as I am.’ Where primitive pride is concerned, the meaning structure must survive even if that means letting the body die.

      Primitive pride, like all the mechanisms which keep us functioning, will at some time come to an end because no living thing lives for ever. In the face of overwhelming disease, injury or simply old age, the mechanisms which keep us breathing and thinking close down. They come to an end and we die. Sometimes primitive pride closes down first, and with that a reasonably healthy body dies. This is a common phenomenon in hospitals dealing with