“Happy new year!” Oh yeah? Is that a statement of fact, because a cursory glance at the news headlines, or the struggles in the lives of those nearest and dearest to us, would suggest otherwise. Or perhaps it’s a command. Happy people are so much easier to deal with. Governments love the idea of happiness, because if they can inveigle the electorate into believing they’re happy—in a “musn’t grumble”/”we’re all in this together” kind of way—people are less likely to notice if they’re victims of a deeply unfair social order (and less likely to vote for the opposition). “Happy” can look a lot like “placid,” “compliant” or “easy to control.” Easier for governments to paste over the distress they cause with smiley-face PR rather than creating the best conditions for happiness such as an egalitarian, truly democratic society with high levels of social capital and low levels of inequality. What’s that you say? “Happy new year” is neither a fact nor a command, but merely a simple wish—a hope from a friend who cares that tomorrow will be better than yesterday? Ah OK, I get it now. You want me, you and everyone to be happier in 2016, yes? Who doesn’t want to be happier? And that modest goal is certainly achievable. The happiness industry is there to serve your needs. It will all too happily (!) offer you antidepressants, cognitive behavioural therapy, workshops, lectures, self-help books, positive-thinking homilies, and endless research studies into what makes us happy. What makes us happy? • Harvard psychiatrist and Zen priest Robert Waldinger recently revealed the fruits of a 75-year study: It is close relationships—with an emphasis on quality rather than quantity, including a good marriage—that make for a happy life. • A recent large longitudinal study in Scotland suggests that men who haven’t made progress in their careers by the age of 27 will be less happy than those who have, although rather obviously it’s perhaps less the job that that’s making them happy than the circumstances that helped them to land it: a good childhood, good education, good opportunities, a good environment. • Being playful, mindful, forgiving and compassionate—and getting the basics right like diet, exercise and sleep—these are all good daily, tried-and-tested practices for happiness, as is cultivating a stance of gratitude. For “positive psychology” evangelists like dog-torturer turned U.S. Army dark arts coach Martin Seligman, happiness is simply a choice. It is possible willfully to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative, to filter out anything unseemly from your senses, to engineer a state of blissful ignorance. More to life than happiness But is happiness really what we’re after? However much we might pretend otherwise, human existence is generally more like a Greek tragedy than a Richard Curtis movie, and the sooner we accept that, the better off we'll be. There is darkness in the world. There is darkness, too, within. In the book “Going Sane,” Adam Phillips argues that in striving for what he calls “superficial sanity”—a sanitized kind of happiness based on conformity—we cover up our essential, vital, passionate, creative, true selves and feel dead inside. As Winnicott put it: “We are poor indeed if we are only sane.” The influential British therapist said he started out “sane” but through analysis and self-analysis was able to reclaim some measure of “insanity.” Sanitized “sanity” requires a severance of the connection with our true self and the things that make us distinct: our philosophy, passion, desires, play, creativity, quirks and eccentricities. Writes Phillips: “Sanity of a kind is recruited, is all too easily recruitable, as part of modern armoury. What is being pursued when sanity is pursued, what is done in the name of sanity, can be a self-blinding.” This kind of sanity diminishes us. Such“sane” shiny happy people can be somewhat comic, ever-compliant and rather boring to be around. In an old cartoon in The New Yorker, one happy couple leans forward at a dinner party and tells the other happy couple: “Did we ever tell you about the time we had an overdue library book?” 3 steps for 2016 1. If your rational, sensible self wants to make some new year’s resolutions, let it. But you know it’s going to be a rough ride, right? Your unconscious selves, those mischievous gremlins in the machine that like chocolate and Netflix and loathe exercise and hard work, will sabotage you at every opportunity. Why don’t new year’s resolutions stick? Because on some level, we don’t want them to. So maybe it’s time to call a team meeting of all the disparate players on your struggling football team and make sure all the voices get heard. Ask yourself what you really want. A good integrative/existential therapist can help; start your search here (or contact me). 2. Widen the circle. Abraham Maslow said we’re either stepping forward into growth, or stepping backward into safety. Sometimes we really do need to make ourselves safe, to marshall our defences, to find ways of soothing ourselves, to retreat beneath our own, unique version of some metaphorical comfort blanket. But from this secure base, now and again we need to a few things that to another person might be nothing but to us feel like giant symbolic risks. Try something new, make more social connections, have some new experiences. Put yourself in situations where you feel a little out of your depth, dumb, or afraid. 3. Get in touch with your own madness rather than disowning it. There’s more to life than just pursuing happiness. There's more to you than the highly-edited, socially acceptable version. Listen to your heart's desires, however odd and unfashionable they may seem to others. A worthy goal might be to embrace all aspects of your self, and accept and honour the full range of human experience. To live more authentically, more meaningfully, more fully rather than attempting to adhere to some imagined approved standards of a happy life. Here’s to a mad, sad, bad, glad new year! “I believe it will have become evident why, for me, adjectives such as happy, contented, blissful, enjoyable, do not seem quite appropriate to any general description of this process I have called the good life, even though the person in this process would experience each one of these at the appropriate times. But adjectives which seem more generally fitting are adjectives such as enriching, exciting, rewarding, challenging, meaningful. This process of the good life is not, I am convinced, a life for the faint-fainthearted. It involves the stretching and growing of becoming more and more of one's potentialities. It involves the courage to be. It means launching oneself fully into the stream of life. Yet the deeply exciting thing about human beings is that when the individual is inwardly free, he chooses as the good life this process of becoming.” So it’s Thanksgiving Day in America, an annual tradition that dates back to 1621, a day for family, gratitude and generosity. A day of eating a big roast (all that tryptophan will make you sleepy—a whole nation sedated). A day of watching the big NFL games on TV (team sports are a safe proxy for aggression and violence—a whole nation pacified). And above all, a day to give thanks (a whole nation made grateful). There is an idea from the positive-thinking end of psychology that regularly expressing gratitude makes you happy. Some people make every day a day of thanksgiving. There’s a lot to be said for that. You can spend your energies on the half of the glass that’s empty, or you can be energised by the half that’s full. As Victor Frankl wrote in his book on surviving the Holocaust, Man’s Search for Meaning: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances.” It’s one thing for you to choose your attitude—to accentuate the positive in your life, for example, or to give thanks. But it’s quite another for someone else to demand it. Not even your psychotherapist, or Bing Crosby, and certainly not your government, have the right to that. To eliminate the negative, even if that were possible, would be to deny the reality of your situation, your feelings, and an important part of you. On a national level, positive thinking decrees carry a kind of totalitarian message of the continue-flogging-until-morale-improves variety. There’s something slightly creepy about Bhutan’s state-mandated “happiness” initiative, or the United Nations’ “International Day of Happiness.” To Native Americans, Thanksgiving is a travesty—it should be a day of mourning. University of Texas professor Robert Jensen argues for turning it into a National Day of Atonement to acknowledge the genocide of America’s indigenous people. Not a day devoted to celebrating colonialism. Ben Norton recently summarized the double standard of powerful nations in Salon (“This is why they hate us”). Western governments will make stirring speeches about freedom and democracy at home, then hope no one notices when they prop up appalling dictators, fund terrorists and destroy democratically elected governments overseas. As president Franklin D. Roosevelt’s is alleged to have said about the brutal Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza: “He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.” Along similar lines, American scholar Noam Chomsky's novel idea for how his nation could reduce the level of terrorism around the world was: “Stop participating in it.”
An important ending warrants cake. And at a meeting of therapists, what better than a cake bearing Sigmund Freud’s face? How very Freudian. The father of psychoanalysis would likely regard biting into his face as a highly Oedipal act. He might note our obedience to the pleasure principle: we get cake, we eat too much, then the reality principle sets in—we feel gross and our super-ego makes us feel guilty. He would chuckle at our cake-related repetition compulsion. He'd probably say the whole thing was all about sex. What actually did Freud have to say about cake? A quick online search of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud reveals a handful of mentions. A retelling of an interpretation of a cake-related dream. An analysis of an irritating, unfunny joke involving cake. A 1909 letter to Ferenczi offering “most cordial thanks for the very splendid holiday cake.” And this little tale, courtesy of one of Freud’s closest chums, Dr. Hanns Sachs: “Our maid is particularly fond of a certain kind of cake. There is no possible doubt of this, as it is the only thing that she always makes well. One Sunday she brought in this particular cake, put it down on the sideboard, removed the plates and cutlery of the previous course and stacked them on the tray on which she had brought in the cake; she then put the cake back on the top of this pile instead of on the table, and disappeared with it into the kitchen. Our first idea was that she had noticed something that ought to be put right about the cake, but when she failed to appear again my wife rang and asked: ‘Betty, what has happened to the cake?’ ‘How do you mean?’ replied the maid, not understanding. We had first to point out to her that she had taken the cake away with her again. She had put it on the pile of dishes, carried it out and put it away ‘without noticing’. “Next day, as we were about to eat what remained of this cake, my wife noticed that there was just as much as we had left the day before—in other words, that the maid had rejected her own share of her favourite dish. When asked why she had not eaten any of the cake she replied in some embarrassment that she had not wanted any. “The infantile attitude is very clear on both occasions: first the childish insatiability which did not want to share the object of her wishes with anyone, followed by the equally childish defiant reaction: ‘If you grudge it me, keep it for yourselves; I don't want anything at all now’.”
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AuthorJohn Barton is a counsellor, psychotherapist, blogger and writer with a private practice in Marylebone, Central London. To contact, click here. |