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

described, ‘loses the will to live’, and dies. As we get old some parts of our meaning structure change and adapt to the inevitability of death. We might not want to die this very minute or even next month or next year, but the inevitability of death brings some unexpected comforts. Whenever I read about the extreme changes of climate predicted for the middle of the next century I think, ‘Well, I don’t have to worry about that.’ ‘Losing the will to live’ might be the meaning structure becoming one simple idea: ‘It’s time to go.’

      This is not what happens to those people who find that the terrible disaster they have suffered completely confounds their expectations of what life was about. If they cannot construct another set of meanings, if primitive pride cannot overcome such an assault on their meaning structure, they cannot survive. Nearly fifty years after the Second World War the psychologist Aaron Hass interviewed some of the survivors of the concentration camps.

      Jack Diamond was forced to watch as his brother was hanged in Auschwitz. He told me what it was like to be a teenager in that universe. ‘In the camps you became an adult overnight … I was like a general planning for a war … not to be noticed … The intellectuals were the first to die … They thought about it all. How could humanity do this? Who wants to live in a world like this?… I just put my head down and didn’t ask the larger questions. I think it was easier being an adolescent, because I wasn’t mature enough to ask the larger questions. My father, he died spiritually before he died physically. He kept asking, ‘Where is God? How is this possible?’ I got frightened, I got scared, but I wasn’t internally destroyed. So many adults lost their will to survive … Sometimes I created an invisible wall shutting out what was happening … as if it wasn’t happening. My father did see everything that was going on around and it destroyed him.’³⁸

      Losing the will to live, that is, primitive pride closing down, results in death. Suicide is unnecessary. In fact, suicide is primitive pride asserting itself. Whenever we contemplate, and perhaps carry out our suicide, it is primitive pride deciding that there is a conflict between the body’s need for survival and the meaning structure’s need for survival. In such a conflict the body has to go. It has to be killed.

      The actress Kathryn Hunter, in an interview with Lyn Gardner, spoke of this. ‘When she was twenty-one and in her final year at RADA, locked in an unhappy relationship from which she could see no escape, and in a trough of depression so deep that “I could hardly be bothered to kill myself”, Hunter leapt from a window.’ She didn’t die, but her injuries left her with long-term difficulties, the overcoming of which made her reputation as a fine actress all the greater. She said of her suicide attempt, ‘“The fall was just something that happened. A long time ago. A stupidity. The action of a child who discovered that things were not as she wished.”’³⁹

      Primitive pride demands that reality conform to its wishes. Through time and experience we might gain the wisdom to know that reality is indifferent to our wishes and that this is not to be deplored but seen as something that makes life interesting. If we could make everything predictable how dull life would be.

      Most of us, as children, develop that set of ideas which is commonly called a conscience, and out of that set of ideas comes a pride of which we are always conscious. This is moral pride which, like primitive pride, endeavours to protect the integrity of the meaning structure, but which, unlike primitive pride, takes some account of what is actually going on. Moral pride is concerned with avoiding shame and guilt which always threaten the meaning structure, and with maintaining the ideas we have about how we ought to live our lives. Whenever we say, ‘My conscience will not allow me to do this,’ moral pride is operating.

      However, despite the fact that moral pride does take some account of what is going on, we can still set ourselves some rules which will lead us into danger. If we insist that our beliefs about the purpose of life and the nature of death – that is, our religious and philosophical beliefs – are absolute truths then our meaning structure is threatened every time we meet someone who holds beliefs different from ours. If we take pride in the way we are unchanging in all our beliefs and opinions, a significant discrepancy between what we thought our life was and what it actually is will sooner or later appear and threaten our meaning structure.

      Refusing to change our views is always a sign of weakness. To be able to let our views evolve along with our experience, to be able to reflect upon events and consciously choose a wise interpretation, to be able to say, ‘Yes, I was wrong,’ or, ‘I used to think such and such but now I think so and so,’ we need to feel that, even as we modify our views, our sense of identity has a basic strength which is able to withstand the assaults made upon it by unexpected events and by other people. It is a tensile strength which flexes but does not break. This strength comes with overcoming our fear of the world and of other people. If we see the world as a frightening place and most other people as enemies we never feel strong because we see the world and its inhabitants as being stronger than us. We feel that we are in constant danger of being overwhelmed. We can become inflexible, and pretend to ourselves that refusing to change your mind is a sign of strength. Alas, inflexible structures, be they buildings or meaning structures, are always in danger of breaking. Buildings are always assaulted by wind and rain, and meaning structures are always assaulted by other people.

      Even when other people are most benignly disposed towards us they are always a threat to our meaning structure because they are a constant reminder of how our way of seeing things is not the only way. Moreover, other people have the ability to deprive us of our greatest protection, our pride.

      Primitive pride is a form of thought with which we are born and takes no account of other people or of what is actually happening. It is concerned only with our survival. It can fit comfortably with the form of the story because it is adept at creating a life story where we are justified in everything we do.

      The form of the face can be a challenge to primitive pride. The face is the face of others, and all these faces have eyes which look at us. Are these accepting, friendly eyes or do these eyes say something else?

      Primitive pride can override the form of the face, especially in those people who, as babies, formed no secure bond with one mothering person. Such people create life stories which absolve them of all responsibility for what they do, but their stories, like the story of Dr Münch, provoke in other people the response, ‘Have you no shame!’

      Shame precedes a sense of guilt. Guilt requires a sense of time – past actions and future punishment. Small children who have yet to develop notions of yesterday and tomorrow do not have a sense of guilt, but they do have a very profound sense of shame. They can be held in the gaze of another person and feel exposed and vulnerable. Daniel Stern wrote,

      Babies act as if eyes were indeed windows to the soul. After seven weeks of age, they treat the eyes as the geographic centre of the face and the psychological centre of the person. When you play peek-a-boo with a baby, she quickly shows some anticipatory pleasure as you lower the blanket to reveal your hair and forehead. But only when the baby sees your eyes does she explode with delight. Six-year-olds illustrate this psychological centrality of the eyes in a different way. When a six-year-old covers her eyes with her hands, and you ask her, ‘Can I see you?’ she will answer, ‘No!’ Although we used to think that the child could not imagine you could see her if she couldn’t see you, that is not the problem. She is perfectly aware that you can see not only her but even her hands covering her eyes. What she really means by ‘No’ is, ‘If you can’t see my eyes you don’t see me.’ Seeing her means looking into her eyes.⁴⁰

      Shame evolves out of the form of the face, and so becomes part of the meaning structure at an early stage in its development. Small children suffer many experiences of shame as they go through the difficult process of learning to be clean. We do not forget these experiences of shame, and later our enemies can use them against us to destroy us.

      In Yugoslavia under Tito nationality was no barrier to marriage and there were many intermarriages between Serbs, Muslims and Croats. But once they came to power Serbian Nationalists