CAN THERE BE CRITERIA OF FRIENDSHIP?

 

 

[ The original title, in 1998, was :

 

IF NOT THIS, WHAT THEN?

REGULAR ENGAGEMENT WITH FRIENDS  

AS A CRITERION OF ADULT MATURATION.

 

I have tinkered with it over the years,

But still agree with its approach

and its NOTES format. ]

 

 

==================================================================

 

Imagine being asked the very, very, very ordinary question :

“Why do you call person-F `friend', and not some other word?",

your answer would include your criteria of friendship. Here are:

 

 

 

MY CRITERIA OF FRIENDSHIP

 

 

 

1)         ENTHUSING-SELF DELIGHT

 

            I see, and I believe, that it gives F genuine delight to see me in a state of enthusiasm. F wants to

             know why I am enthusing, and to share this state. F regularly asks me the Enjoyment Question:

             "What have you enjoyed recently?"

 

2)         HARMLESSNESS

 

            I see, and I believe, that - allowing for ordinary ambivalence - F does not intend me harm: grand

             malice or even petty malice & F strives to protect me from harm - from things, people and

             situations.

 

3)         GOOD IN MINUTE PARTICULARS

 

            F shows regular and predictable concern for my welfare: regular hospitality, phone-calls and letters. 

             This manifest concern doesn't fall below some kind of engagement once fortnightly.

 

 

4)         INSPIRITING

 

            I see, and I believe, that F wishes me well as I am: and hopes that I will take from his/her

             well-wishing the heart and courage to attempt skills, creations, relationships and Goods that so far I

             haven't dared to try.

 

 

5)         ROAD-AID

 

            Were I to ask F - even with minimal or confused explanation - to be at some remote lay-by at some

             remote time, F would strive to be there without question or excuse.

 

 

6)         GRAND-AID

 

            Were I to ask F - even with minimal or confused explanation - to get me a thousand-pounds cash,

              within twenty-four hours, F would strive to get it without question or excuse.

 

 

7)         CHIDE-AID

 

            Were I to start slipping towards significantly immoral behaviour - in the domestic, professional or

             political domain - F would grab me, metaphorically or literally, by the neck, thrust me against the

              wall and ask: "What the fuck are you doing: (to yourself and/or to her/him)!"

             And I would not resent this, nor refuse to answer honestly, because I would be absolutely certain

             that  F had my best interests at heart.

 

 

========================================================= 

 

SOME NOTES

 

1: It is argued that each of the seven criteria is necessary, and that jointly they become sufficient to define a Proper Adult Friendship.  So to the

extent that a criterion is only weakly present or not present at all, the relationship is weaker than a Proper Friendship.  Ideally all these various weaker-forms-of-friendship would have precise names. Lived experience shows us people connect in many ways, so why is English, like so many other languages, deficient in terms for these varieties. Isn’t it an ordinary index of development and civilisation that its people generate new words for nuances of experience and behaviour?.

 

 

2:THE ORDER OF PROGRESSION

through the criteria is as follows:-

 

i)   A person passes from stranger-hood to acquaintanceship to the intuition of the possibility of friendship by criteria (1) and (2).

ii)  This intuition of a possible friendship is confirmed and brought to reality by criteria (3) and (4).

iii)  If criteria (1), (2), (3) and (4) are maintained diligently, then one has a strong intuition that criteria (5), (6) and (7) are now latent within the friendship.  In fact they may never have to be tested or even uttered: they are mutually understood.

 

 

3: Of course friends can get separated by work, marriage, babies, and war.  They find themselves hundreds of miles apart or on different continents, or simply too preoccupied to engage in person once fortnightly.  But if someone persists in claiming that he/she can't find/make TWO hours at least every two months to write a proper letter - that is emotionally proper, and not merely clever, evasive posturing, and absolutely not the nadir of ‘friendly’ correspondence, the N. American Circular-Letter -then he/she fails criterion (3): and is, in fact, taking the piss!

 

 

4: Men and women have ordinarily ambivalent feelings: even towards people they genuinely love very deeply: and so towards their friends.  They feel - often precisely during their friend's enthusing moments - irritation, jealousy, envy, petty-malice and even flashes of grand-malice that suddenly make them feel ashamed.  To have these emotions from time to time is normal.  This normality is expressed wonderfully by the Ancient Chinese saying: "There is no greater pleasure than seeing one's friend fall from the roof".  Obviously, if these emotions become frequent and then dominant this marks the beginning of the end of the friendship.

 

 

5:   YOUR FRIEND-LIFE

“Hello mate/daarlin'!  Howz yer luv-laif? Heh!Heh!"  This is the question that the Geezer in sixties/seventies films would ask all and sundry.  I don't think there is in English or any other language, an equivalent saying "How is your friend-life?" which is part of ordinary social life.  Why?  As I explore this theme of friendship, I am conscious that it is considered more indelicate than speaking of sexual preferences or even ablutions.  For of course others can respond to an account of one's sexual preferences by instant dismissal or contempt or even an (unbelievable) uninterestedness.  But to mention `friendship' is to immediately remind others of the state of their friendships - if and how friends fit into their private lives.  It is understood implicitly, and perhaps explicitly, by everyone that though one can imagine and even live a life without sexual expression - and even claim Brownie or Godly points for it - one can't advocate a life without friends:  because that is precisely the definition of "a living death".

 

Most people have some relatives, but it is certainly imaginable in this century that Fate might wipe out all one's blood-kin.  Then the only genuine emotional connection one can possibly have with humanity is friendship. So to the extent that one's friends are one's criterion of being alive, one will judge if and how the people one calls friends actually do keep one genuinely alive, rather than in some persistent emotionally-vegetative state (PEVS), day to day.

 

There is no clearer marker of someone's utter failure to attain adult/maturation than their lack of Proper Adult Friendships.  Anyone who is physically-adult and says "I haven't had proper friends in my life: nor do I want them now" just introduces him/herself as the Saddest Bastard in the World.  S/he needs serious help.  You are not their therapist/priest.  Look and Pass On!

 

 

7: STORY

A man shares a flat with a man and a woman.  The three of them commit a crime.  Time passes.  All three are in danger of arrest.  He and the woman have sex.  Time passes.  He assaults the woman and stabs - almost to death - the other man, who was about to betray him.  The woman stabs him fatally, and escapes.  (Looks like Chaucer. But it’s the film Shallow Grave).  The dead man's last words are:-

"Oh yes!  I believe in friends.  I believe you need them.  But, if one day, you find you just can't trust them anymore - well what then?

What then?"

 

 

 

8: ANOTHER ‘REAL’ STORY 

Two women go to bingo regularly.  Years pass.  One of them gets cancer and has less than a year to live.  Weeks pass.  One evening, out together, the other woman wins £18,000.  She immediately insists that her friend accept half.  She does.  They go on a cruise together.  Time passes.  She dies happy.

(I know the man who was friends with them. I found it astonishing and heartening: and as rare as…..)

 

9: TWO NECESSARY QUESTIONS

 

Every adult MUST be able to answer this:

 

i) "What criteria of friendship did your parents pass on to you - directly, indirectly and at what ages?"

 

ii) In reality, it is only parents who MUST be able to answer this:

"What criteria of friendship have you passed onto your children - directly, indirectly and at what ages?  Why these criteria?  If they are not the same as the criteria your parents gave you, how did this happen: and why?

 

(Men and women with no children can only answer this question hypothetically.  But that they would even think to try, means something).

 

10:  HOW MUCH COMPANY?

 

"You don't seem to realise, that in married life three is company and two is none".

 

As with so many of Oscar Wilde’s seemingly trivial or cynical aphorisms, underneath they carry a mighty understanding.  For in ordinary life there must be some kind of unsexualized emotional intimacy that provides the reference point for the later sexualized intimacies.

 

I will ignore the necessary parent-child emotional intimacies that shape the primary human impulse towards all intimacy.  Instead I'm stressing the unsexualised - or minimally and latently sexualized intimacy - that is commonly referred to as `friendship'.  The friends one has in junior school, between five and eleven years of age, provide a reference point for the ones one has later, between eleven and sixteen.  Of course it is rare at those ages to think in terms of reference points:  but at some emotional level, one is comparing and orientating one's heart all the time. 

 

Sexual desire is such a powerful force at 15, and still decades later, that one cannot minimise the way it restructures all one's pre-sexual ambitions in relationships, or even work.  This is essentially why the quality of one's pre-sexual friends, by the seven criteria above, provide a necessary reference point.   (Of course the criteria make allowances for the younger person's lack of material means - money, cars etc).

 

11: LSP – LOVER/SPOUSE/PARTNER

It may be objected that except for bisexuals, same-sex friendships also provide a reference point, and throughout one's adult life.  This is partly true.  But with the advent of sexuality there comes those most elusive and unmanageable forms of greed and envy - sexual greed, sexual envy and the probable consequence sexual wrath.  This is the stuff of:-

 

i)    High Art:   Othello (Shakespeare)  Elective Affinities (Goethe)

 

ii)   Pop Song : “There goes my first-love, with a guy I used to call my friend"

 

iii)  Jokes: "My wife has just run off with my best-friend.  I'm heart-broken. I do miss him".

(best told by Les Dawson).

 

My fundamental point is that one must be wary of making the terribly tempting, but ultimately terrifying category-mistake.

A friend is NOT a lover/spouse/partner (LSP).

I state this as an axiom. A friend may, of course, develop into an LSP.  But once this happens, one needs a second human being to be the `friend'.  Emotional nature abhors an emotional vacuum.  The common response is "Oh, but MY lover/spouse/partner is my best friend".  This is of course the perfect expression of the category-mistake.

 

Though people have spoken for centuries of the Eternal Triangle as a malign spectre hanging over all dyads - viz two's company, three's a crowd - each of us begins in a triad: mother-father-baby.  It is absolutely necessary that this triangle, as full of ambivalent emotions as any human relationship, is predominantly benign.  What psychoanalytic theory has brought into high relief is one of the characteristics of the father that will help guarantee that the triangle is benign:  viz "One of the tasks of the father is to protect the child (male/female) from its mother."

The corollary is to protect the mother from the child.

 

The protection is from excessive, and so suffocating, attention: whether in the benign form of interest & kindness or the malign form of demands & vicious attacks - emotional, physical, sexual.  The pathological motive for such excessive attention is the mother's misperception of the baby/child - expecting from it a role or purpose that others in her own life have failed to provide.  What such invasive attention does is poison and even destroy the Winnicottian `potential space'  between two human beings that is necessary for development and individuation and the health-giving free creative exchange that is play.

 

Analogous to this role of the father in childhood is the role of the friend in adulthood.  For both a man and woman in a LSP-relationship their (respective/separate) friend is vital to protect him/her from their LSP.  This protection is from the messy transferences LSPs make towards each other.

 

(It is a controversial point whether the friend should be same-sex or not: and also what gender the friend in gay relationships should best be.  Fairly obviously a person who is not able to make and keep a friend of either gender is disturbed in some way.  This is a separate topic, to which I return below).  But, by definition, an LSP cannot be a friend.

 

What happens when LSP-relationships end?  Byron suggested an emotional `law': "Friendship may develop into love: but love never subsides into friendship".  Again this is a controversial point, for millions of people have varying degrees of emotional intensity with ex-LSPs.  I suppose the point is whether we need a more precise nomenclature than "ex"!

 

 

 

12: GOD’S APOLOGY

Interestingly, Kingsmill's famous definition, "Friends are God's apology for relatives" refers broadly to family, but doesn't clarify whether the key friends are before and/or during one's own marriage.  But the point is clear enough and consonant with the argument here: friends are both necessary and in fact a blessing.

 

“I’ve lost my dearly-beloved, friend, daughter".  This pitiful, unwitting threnody captures perfectly the truth that one cannot ever sum up people's capacity for misunderstanding.  Having just written this piece so far - to the conflation of friends and LSPs - I heard, on a tv documentary (1998), a wretched woman offer this description of her relationship in plaintive, but unconvincing, tones.  She had just been convicted of the neglect, but acquitted of the abuse, of her daughter.  The poor 13 year old had just died of morbid obesity: a 48 stone being, almost incapable of movement, she was stewing in her own excretia and bed-sores until her heart gave up the struggle.

 

The `scientific' defence was that she had a rare condition that left her chronically hungry but with almost no metabolism.  But at the metaphoric/pathological level what did food and feeding - between infancy and death - mean in this mother-child dyad, except some kind of mad ambivalence with malice ascendant?  There seemed to be no father or friends in the story.  One can only wonder how the mother will eat, let alone grieve henceforth.

 

 

 

13: “GOOD" TV?

 

INTERVIEWER:        What did Lady Di mean to you?

 

ROUGH MAN:           (emotional tone) She helped me when I was mugged and fallen in the water.

                                     I was homeless.  She gave me £5.  Then she helped me find a flat.  I was 40

                                     this month she died.  Without her I wouldn't have seen 40.  (pause) She was

                                     like a best friend.

 

INTERVIEWER:        (silent)

 

ROUGH MAN:           (more emotional)

 

 

Instead of manipulative silence, the honourable interviewer would have responded to the man's final remark, "She was like a best friend", with:

“I do not doubt your pain then or distress now.  And I applaud her kindness to you.  Please may I ask how do you compare?  Who was your best-friend at 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, then and now?"

The man's reply would probably have been evasive or unbelievable.  At which point the interviewer could have said, gently or scornfully:

"What do you mean `best friend'?  You seem to have no idea from your experience.  In fact you know no more about friendship than a person who has never been in plane, or balloon, or parachute, or bungy or trapeze, knows about flying.”

He might have added either in a gentle tone “Alas! I hope you will find real friends”  or with scorn, “You saddo!  Stop fantasising about princesses. Get a real life!  Get REAL friends!”

 

 

 

12:  FRIENDIVINE

 

"Oh what a friend I have in Jesus!" (Song)

 

The only reply should be "Well what then!  What kind of friend?" . Friend-Jesus can only be an extrapolation from the mortal friends one has by the above criteria.  Beware of someone who says Jesus/Mohammed/Krishna/Buddha is their best or only friend.  He/she will do more damage in the world than someone who has Satan as their best friend.

 

 

 

13 : COINCIDENCES

 

The feminists of the seventies famously remarked: "There is more to real-sex than masturbation-in-the-vagina".  [Greer].  This applies to both female and male masturbation.  Of course during penetration both the man and the woman are inhabiting, physically, geographically, and scientifically, the same genital-matrix space.  But their emotional presences may be differently present or even be elsewhere.  To be "had" or "known" sexually one must be there, as an integrated desiring Ego, to be had/known.  I'm not saying sex without love is without meaning or value.  What I'm emphasising is that if sex is not to reduce to the dire strait of wanting only masturbation-in-the-vagina (my MTV!), then I  (the integrated-I) must want the other person also to be present as an I (an integrated-I) wanting me to be present as I.

 

Analogously, one can be in the same (non-sexual) space as one or many persons - school, games-field, pub, college, work, concert, dinner-party, wild-party, holiday - for months and years, but still not be connected as friends.  One can know a lot of people for years but still not have a single real friend.  One must want to be a friend and one must want to have a friend.  The rest is social bustle.  It is not without value: but it is of pre-adult value.

 

 

14 : BLAND AMBITION: The Boy Looked at Julie.....

 

"From very early on in my life I never quite understood what friends were FOR….If ever I am in a position in which I must choose to pursue my own pleasure and thereby break one or more innocent hearts and lives of those close to me, or forgo that pleasure and keep the hearts and lives of loved ones intact, there simply is no choice.  In such a scenario, I feel - and here I must take a deep breath - that literally no one matters to me".

[Julie Birchall]

 

Her first significant relationship on becoming a precocious journalist at 17, was a barely sexualised, SM charade.  (Would Henry Fielding have called such a character Birch-all!).  Alas:, for all  that rock `n' roll wild-cat cred, these two quotations from her autobiography reveal her as strangely and enduringly sad.

 

                                           

 

15 :   NEVER MIND THE POLLUX

 

One morning, 8am, a national commercial radio station: a `young' programme with the ‘zoo format’ – the DJ always has his gang in the live studio. We hear the (wretched) BT commercial, asking us to nominate our Best Friend for even more savings!

 

DJ       : (enthusiastically) Yeh! That's very good... best friend. So you lot. Whose your best friend ... who would you nominate... the person you want to speak to most often...?

Gang   : (laughter)

DJ       : Who?

Helen  : Who would I?

DJ       : YES!

Helen  : (laughs, slightly nervous) Oh it would be...my sister.

Gang   : (mock sigh) Aaaahhh!

Mike   :  But you live on top of her!

Gang   : (laughs)

Helen  : Yes, she's on the flat below.. (laughs).. But I see her more outside than there. So I'm always on the phone to her...top to below....

DJ       : So, Peter, you?

Peter    : (sudden silence)

DJ        : Your best friend?

Peter    : (nervous laughter, again silence)

Gang    : (lower laughter)

DJ        : Mmm? You know the person you -

Peter    : (interrupting : then hesitant tone) I suppose it would be my wife.

Gang    : (mock sigh) Aaahhh!

Peter    : (more confident but still unconvincing) Yes, I suppose my wife.

DJ        : So who is mine?

Gang    : (Laughs)

DJ        : The person I want to chat to the most.

Paul      : No one!

Mike    : (laughs) Yeh!

Paul      : You don't want to chat to ANYONE!

Helen    : I know.

Paul      : Gazza?

DJ         : No!

Helen    : Danny Baker?

DJ         : No! (laughs) It's Dirk, my new gay-friend.

Gang     : (laughter)

DJ         : (laughs) Yeh, we talk all the time.

 

************************************************************************

CONTEXT : Chris Evans is 35.The gang are 18-30: well-off, low-level, cool-Britannia media types. It is unlikely that DJ is gay. It seems more a good-story/publicity stunt.

 

I heard this [in 1998] a few weeks after writing the piece above. It seems a good illustration of my remark that nowadays people find it easier to talk about their sexuality, even publicly, than their friendships. In the strange silence, which seems longer on the radio, and in the nervous laughter one can feel the cool gang's anxiety over this very simple question asked by DJ "Who is your best-friend?". No one, including DJ, answers it properly. Each makes a category mistake, and doesn't even realise it: at some level and despite all their cool, they don't have a clue.

 

 

 

16:  INVERTED SCHADENFREUDE

 

I gave the piece to two friends: D a group analyst & Buddhist, and M, a Cambridge don in Management Studies. A few weeks later we met for a friendly ‘seminar’: using the questions in the Appendix  as a basic structure. We talked for over two hours. I found it enjoyable and valuable. I was particularly interested in the idea of the positive criterion  viz. criterion 1 : Enthusing-Self delight: and how culturally it is sort of suppressed or displaced by the criterion of sympathy and help in times of trouble. This is best captured by the bland tone of the lyric in the title song to the emotionally limp and often barren tv sitcom Friends:  "I'll be there for you."

 

D remarked that in Buddhism there is a term, untranslatable, which does mean “a kind of empathic delight in another person's delight ”.  M proffered the term "inverted schadenfreude".  The question is, which experience, in Austin's (sexist) phrase "wears the trousers".  Which experience does one have first and in reference to which one understands the other.  An optimist would say one has the Enthusing-Self Delight first: and the advent of schadenfreude is felt initially as puzzlement and guilt: (cf tristitia).  Some Kleinians would say that maturational marker of the depressive position presupposes some schadenfreude.

 

17:  BRINGING YOUR FRIEND FORWARD TO TELL HIS BEST

 

In her delightful book, The People In The Playground, Iona Opie records the following incident.  At the end of a busy playtime, watching, listening and recording, she wanted to go:

 

But one pleaded, and lingered with his friend and would not go.  "One joke PLEASE".

I nodded.

"I don't know it, `e knows it".

He took his friend's head between his hands and whispered in his ear.  The friend looked pleased and began reciting.

 

Opie records the rude joke/rhyme: and then comments. “Friendship is bringing your friend forward to tell his best joke.”

Well, I thought, a perfect mixture of my criteria 4 and 1, Inspiriting and Enthusing-Self delight.

 

 

 

18:  JUST AS LONG AS YOU ARE THERE

 

M and D spoke, as many do, of themselves and of their parents having friends from a long time back, who are now a long way away.  Because of time, distance, chance - and inertia - they get to meet only once or twice a year or Olympiad.  And because of a different inertia they rarely exchange letters.  But whenever they do meet, it seems, because of their shared past, like they'd only been parted yesterday: and conversational and emotional intimacy is re-established in minutes.  This is a great joy.  They might say this proves there is no need for regular letters/phone calls.  I have no wish to argue the toss with this ordinary and yet powerful feeling.  Yet even in such good relationships one has the unsettling feeling of having to collapse the rhythm of affect appropriate to each bit of narrative - between meetings - into one flattish narrative: that at worst sounds like a North American annual circular letter.

 

 Perhaps, scepticism about this is better expressed in the song by Arrival (1970) Friends.

 

I have a friend, who has friends, by the river.

They too have friends, who have friends of their own.

They sit around smoking pot after dinner,

Which was bought by some friends they have known.

But no one really seems to care,

Just as long as you are there.

 

My Criterion 3, Minute Particulars, is my questioning of this accepted rhythm.  I am making the simple observation that it would be a different experience of friendship if one did write the proper bi-monthly letter during the long years apart. In those, let us say, two hours of writing a letter one would be experiencing one’s distant friend in one’s heart and mind. And as one read one’s friend’s letter, one would also feel that he/she had quite recently been holding one in his/her heart.

 

 

19:  DON’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO!

 

Let me approach this in a different way.  Winnicott, the great child psychoanalyst, believed that it was possible to describe, and attain, the conditions of good-enough parenting that would take the infant from kinship to democratic citizenship, and thereby avoid the formation of a personality that needed the compensations of structural inequality or dictatorial and inegalitarian regimes, whether as master or slave. The child grows learning and believing that she is invited to a dialogue of increasing complexity with those with whom she lives – first mother, then also father, then also siblings, then also grandparents, then in the beyond-kinship world, neighbours, friends, school people, community people….

 

At adolescence, the teenager becomes aware of a strange ambivalence.  She is keen to assert her independence from the parental emotional-intellectual paradigm: but when the sense of exhilaration at this suddenly changes into fear, she wants to retreat to the comfort of her childlike unquestioning acceptance of that paradigm. The crucial thing is that she MUST engage in a dialogue with her parents about the respective merits of her parents' moral paradigm and the one she is trying to articulate.  She CAN'T withdraw from this dialogue.  The dialogue goes on for a few years.  Sometimes it becomes fierce, threatening, unbearable to her or her parents or both sides.  (This is brilliantly observed and explored in the comedian Harry Enfield's Kevin sketches).

 

But in an ordinary family both parties come out of the other side - stronger and better individuated and better connected.  What such an adolescent will carry into her young adulthood is a sense of the absolute value of such a dialogue: with its implication that for her own moral development and continuing moral well-being, there must be AT LEAST ONE person in her social circle with whom she MUST engage in a dialogue about moral action.  Of course parents retain some sway but it is different now.  A new figure is important for her adult life.

 

Friendship offers the enticements of emotional intimacy. At best it can remind one of the oceanic good-feeling of family life: play, connectedness, freedom, safety.  At worst it can remind one of the horrors of family life:  work-only, disconnectedness, invasion, abuse, imprisonment, danger.  One carries into the outside world whatever good or bad was created in the crucible of the family.  Just as one's family remains one's reference point, so adult friendship - by the criteria above - becomes another (complementary) reference point by which one will, can and must judge all other types of adult engagement.  For people from dreadful families, friendship is God's apology: a second chance to get a first reference point.

 

There is of course a risk with any attempt at emotional intimacy.  Occasionally things can become messy.  One may be reasonably or even unreasonably, annoyed by friends: one may have dark thoughts and feelings about them.  This may prompt one to the thought that they also might have dangerous thoughts and feelings about oneself and they might have more ability and willpower to attack.  One might fear their chiding is true and just. If one has accepted them as a friend, one cannot easily ignore the truth.  I have tried to capture the value of this in Criterion 7 - Chide-AID.  But as I remark above, the fact of this may never have to be demonstrated.  What must exist though is the awareness in both friends of it being between them in-potentia.

 

To say that one's engagement with the people one MUST engage with (be it family and/or friends) provides the ABSOLUTE REFERENCE POINT for judging the quality of engagement in the engagements one CHOOSES is only to state the obvious.  What is very rarely acknowledged is that some people so arrange their adult lives that there is NOT ONE person on the planet with whom they feel they must engage with respect to life's moral dilemmas - work, play, love, politics, religion.  For me such willed isolation is a symptom of moral collapse. There are far more of these people than you think.

 

Such a person will have already distanced her parents.  It might be understood between her and her parents that she is capable of physically attacking them now.  She will also ensure that all her colleagues, acquaintances, `friends', sexual partners even, are kept at bay.  There will of course be gossip, chat, discussions, arguments, dinner-party froth and confessions and `debates'.  But she will know that somewhere deep in her heart she is not letting anyone in.  The past weights her heavily upon that heart.  For she will have come from a very un-Winnicottian family.  There will have been bad-enough experiences and memories of parents, siblings, teachers.  She will have marked her adulthood, the becoming of a big-person, with an inner resolution:  "I will never again let anyone tell me I am wrong, nor what to do!"

 

If you are attuned to these things, you can tell that you are in the presence of such a person quite quickly because within a few sentences you can feel their anxiety and then their slow disengagement. On the surface there may be clever and voluble, but you will feel it is sterile and that the person is resisting your comments let alone implicit criticisms and chiding. You may even have a strong sense that they let no one in.

 

[Serendipitous Support.  Later that evening, (in 99), after I’d written the above passage, I was watching Channel 4 TV documentary about Magdalen Homes, in Ireland.  A truer name would have been Nazi-style Labour Camps.  A woman, now 60, was talking about her experiences as a young girl.  The nuns had tortured her and many of the other girls.

“I was rescued, after many years, by my cousin Jim.  After... Outside...  All I'd wanted to do was to do a job and be independent.  But I had never wanted to marry or make a commitment to anybody.  Because I never wanted anybody to have power over me or chain me ever again.” ]

 

 

 

20: THE GOLDEN RULE OF FRIENDSHIP

 

Unlike family life, even good-enough family life, which always necessarily carries asymmetry in authority, friendships are necessarily defined by symmetry.  The risks are absolutely symmetrical. This is in fact the first duty of friendship: to truly and honourably state one’s preferences, and to invite one’s friend to state theirs, and then to negotiate on the basis of these a shared action that is sufficiently agreeable to both. There should be no sense of coercion, manipulation or resentment of the kind that one might have to submit to temporarily or permanently in one’s family, at work, or even in society. You know you don’t have to be friends with this person!  One can always withdraw from any dialogue and negotiation, anywhere. But then, if one does withdraw from a dialogue or negotiation with a friend, then that is the first mark of the collapse of the friendship.  When it collapses completely, one will be an ex-friend in a way that one can never be an ex-daughter or ex-sister.

 

People risk relationships because somewhere in their development they have experienced it as a worthwhile risk.  My conjecture is that for a physical-adult to also be an emotional-adult it is necessary to be in and to sustain at least ONE friendship by the criteria above:  which includes the criterion of regular engagement - here and fortnightly.  It provides a reference point for all other types of engagement: and it also gives one the experience, emotional and intellectual, of how a community standard is developed and sustained viz. how to be a (Winnicottian) democratic citizen.

 

 

 

21:  THE GROUP IN FUSION

 

Derek Malcolm, The Guardian film critic, wrote of the Polish director Kieszlowski:

"While making films, he never hesitated to ask everyone concerned, right down to the humblest technician, how he could improve them.  For him, film was definitely a collaborative art, and he surrounded himself with a group of people who knew they could argue with him until the cows came home".

 

This is a lovely example of an adult ‘work-group’. Here the job is to make a film. When the job is to make a community or city, the best materials are still these: adults who know how to talk and listen, to negotiate and then act. They may not be in kinship, or even in friendship, and it is possible to be in work-colleagueship without being a kin or friend, but they are connected by citizenship. The term group-in-fusion, contrasting with the group-in-series, comes from Sartre. But I know little beyond his example of people at a bus stop becoming a revolutionary ‘mob’. I know a little more of the great psychoanalyst Bion’s analyses of how and why the ‘work-group’ might fail to get work done.

 

Life is lived in the present, where one's body is.  One carries in one's head and heart the good and bad from earlier relationships, and from contemporary distant relationships.  But one is only (morally) tested by what is happening here, now and tomorrow.  That is why someone who has chosen at least ONE relationship in which she MUST engage with moral dialogue, at the core of her being, from week to week, is fundamentally different (and I would say morally better) than someone who, for whatever reason, is too cowardly or arrogant to risk such a continuing effort.  That is why I propose friendship as one of the absolutely necessary criteria of adult maturation and argue that it is also necessary for one’s understanding of the responsibilities and obligations of citizenship.

 

 

 

22:  CRONEYISM

 

The first draft of this essay was written as New Labour came out of the wilderness. Perhaps mildly refuting my point about the shocking lack of terms, the currency of the neologism croneyism is very interesting. It is most commonly used in the phrase ‘Tony’s cronies’ to mock or satirise or even insult the PM. Because it might also be called bloodless nepotism, it is important to state the obvious that it is not friendship, let alone good-citizenship. By facilitating dubious, immoral if not illegal actions, actions that place the other person under a potentially coercive obligation, it fails my Criterions 4 & 7 Inspiriting and Chiding.

 

(It is well known that dictators rarely have true friends. Almost by definition a dictator will not submit to chiding by anyone. I’ve often wondered why Clare Short resigned so late: and if she had had a true friend, wouldn’t she have got the timing of her citizen’s rage right.)

 

 

23:  THE GEOMETRY OF FRIENDSHIP 

 

People talk of their ‘Circle of Friends’: lovers speak of  ‘the eternal /dangerous triangle’ : and philosophers scorn  ‘circular argument’. So what is going on here?

Alpha is friends with Beta.

Beta is friends with Gamma.

 

Everyone is tempted, by syllogisms and school geometry, to say that Alpha and Gamma, who’ve not yet met, will - when finally introduced - become friends. Isn’t it obvious, logical?! We say this because we would like it to be, and it often is. But often it isn’t. Why? One simple answer is that Beta shows to Alpha and Gamma different aspects of herself: and it is the aspects withheld from Apha and Gamma respectively, that will infuriate them when they meet. All three are dismayed at this because it reveals instantly that there are hidden aspects: and in fact aspects one finds fairly intolerable. A tricky moment!

 

The other version of this flawed reasoning is given by the old stratagem:

“My enemy’s enemy is my friend.”

This piece of realpolitic is also usually doomed to end in disappointment, or worse. In the 1930s and 1940’s some members of liberation struggles in the East were tempted to support Hitler - the enemy of their British/French enemy at home. Little did they understand that had Hitler got East of Suez, he’d have been flinging them, his political ‘friends’, into the ovens first. Perhaps the use of ‘friend’ here is unusual, and only as an opposite to ‘enemy’ - there being no plausible contrary. Again why? (The opposite of ‘sink’ is ‘rise’ - not ‘float’, which is the contrary)

 

What is the contrary of ‘friend’? Is it ‘stranger’ or ‘acquaintance’ or what? Friends do become enemies: and when they do how should onlookers judge and respond?  (The response of mutual friends, I will address later.) A sense of integrity and honour (eg outrage at a betrayal) might require the ending of a friendship and the advent of the distressing state of enmity. But this state should eventually be calm and allow space for new friendships. If, to take our trio again, Beta is in a calm state of enmity with Alpha and she knows Alpha is the enemy of Gamma, then it still might be the case that Gamma is in such a hot state of enmity (with Alpha) that his mind/heart/spirit/soul is too clouded/sullied to be able to manage the sort of risk and trust friendship requires.

 

The metaphor of geometry is useful when trying to determine if there is an ideal state of human connectedness. The healthy, emotionally/mentally/spiritually healthy adult (person over twenty-one) is in what kind of configuration/constellation of friendship?

 

I stated above as an axiom that: One’s LPS (lover/partner/spouse) cannot be one’s friend. The corollary is that the quality of one’s relationship with one’s LPS in fact depends on the presence in one’s ordinary life (in contact at least fortnightly) of one’s friend. So from Efi’s point of view, her benign triangle would be:

 

                                EFI

 

        EFI’s LPS                   EFI’s Friend

            MAL                            SLEH

 

From Mal’s point of view, his benign triangle would be:

 

                      

 

                               MAL

 

     MAL’s  LPS                    MAL’s Friend

              EFI                                DOST

 

 

So we now have two triangles: which are congruent!  When they are aligned to show connections what the primary couple Efi and Mal have is a square:

 

             EFI                                   MAL

 

           SLEH                                DOST

 

It is possible that Efi’s friend and Mal’s friend is the same person: we’ll name Groo. In such a configuration one has a triangle:

 

            EFI                                    MAL

 

                              GROO

 

But it is not benign: for it carries the danger of divided confidences. Efi will hesitate to confide in Groo if she feels he will tell Mal and similarly for Mal. And it might end up with both Efi & Mal growing so suspicious of  Groo, that poor Groo is dumped by both of them. So it is better to have a square with Efi and Mal having different  friends.

 

What should the relationship between Sleh and Dost be: that is from Efi & Mal’s point of view? Some would say that it is best that Sleh and Dost are friends, perhaps best friends, and ideally LPS. Imagine what the configuration of their mutual connectedness would be like: some elegant Escher like mixture of triangles and squares. Try drawing it! In a different metaphor, this quartet feels they are like a suspension bridge that can bear the winds of time and fate: and save those who are crossing from the wild waters below. Others would say that it is best if Sleh and Dost are consistently civil, even warmly civil to each other: but not any kind of friends: and absolutely not LPS. They fear the shapes are as fuzzy as Fauves. They fear that what looks like a steel suspension bridge is in reality only a spider’s web. I’m not legislating which is the morally better attitude: perhaps the difference merely reveals the difference between optimists and pessimists or even the paranoid.

 

 I am intrigued by a different configuration of maturity. Let me state it boldly. Consider Efi or Mal at 21: they are physically arrived at their adult state: and in most cultures, they would have by this age have completed their qualifications/apprenticeships - agricultural, artisan, artistic, scientific, medical, military, religious etc. But what level of emotional maturity have they attained and how are they sustaining that level. I spoke above of the absolute necessity of having a friend as well as an LPS : : that in fact it is one’s friend who protects one’s LPS from one’s unfulfillable emotional demands, the making of which might enrage one’s LPS to the point of leaving the relationship: and who is able to help also one bear the rage of one’s LPS that one is failing their unfulfillable emotional demands and almost persuading one to leave him/her. 

 

In Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece The Waves one finds the elegant & profoundly moving symbol of connectedness between friends - the seven-sided flower. Near death Bernard puzzles over his sense of self as ineluctably defined by the matrix of his six friends - five given contingently in that pre-pubescent summer-school and a bit later assimilating Percival. Nothing, no experience, no action, outside this matrix seems to have as much emotional force as what is held alive within it for each character’s lifetime. It is difficult to know what is meant by this holding. But that is a matter for a different essay. 

 

 

24: A COUNSEL OF PERFECTION

 

The 21 year old Efi, let us say, is in the state of  IDEAL adult maturity if and when - and only if and when - she has been able to attain and sustain the following configuration of friendships. Ideally this is the Efi that is looking for an LPS.

 

                                                             NN-F 

  

                                                              N-F

 

                                   W-F                    EFI                         E-F

 

                                                              S-F

 

                                                              SS-F

 

I am of course using the directional markers N.E.W.S. (north etc) : and using them to indicate time: so N(north) is older than Efi: S(outh) younger and E/W peers. N and NN mean one and two generations  away respectively from Efi as reference point: and S and SS are two half-generations away from her. Well, let us say S is puberty and SS infancy. F = friend.

 

In an earlier essay on the experience of time in the counselling space, I took as an axiom that there is an economy of the human heart , a zero-sum of attention and genuine affection. If in any given day or week one gives Harry, Sally and Larry a lot of one’s emotional energy there will be less to give to Holly, Sol and Lola. So though I am proposing that Efi forms ands maintains a connectedness to SIX persons OUTSIDE her family, even BEFORE she meets her LPS,  I am mindful that she is not to be emotionally exhausted before she gets introduced to him(her). The perfect emotional context for the 21 year old Efi is :

 

NN-F : a man/woman two generations older, viz over 60years old.

N-F    : a woman one generation older,viz over 40 years old.

E-F    : a woman the same age as her, viz 20-22 years old.

W-F   : a man the same age as her, viz 20-22 years old.

S-F     : a girl-child half-a generation younger,viz 10-13 years old.

SS-F   : a baby - male or female.

 

Does it help to imagine Efi as a moon to each of these six, or these as six moons to her, or  as a hexahedronic planetary cube?!  For a 21 year old man, the gender adjustments are, I’m sure, easily imaginable. But imagine Miranda’s amazement :

 

O, wonder!

How many goodly creatures are there here!

How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world

That has such people in it!

 

How would my Counsel of Perfection,  that Efi is able to sustain a connection with these six persons, work out in practice. The intensity of connection will of course vary. The lowest level is just above the necessary common civility of ordinary life: it is more than the attention, good-manners etc one offers to the anonymous shopkeeper, or even distant colleagues. Efi is genuinely interested in and concerned about the person’s point-of-view and well-being viz. thoughts, desires, joys and sorrows. It is not simply a matter of how many hours per week or month you share the same house/room/sofa and the same stale silent air. But of HOW you are WITH someone else - in your head and your heart - when he/she is BESIDE you. It will be remembered that this includes an absolute acceptance of a moral dialogue: and some genuine contact at least once fortnightly. Let us say the lowest level is 1 unit of intensity and the highest level is 10 units. What is the ideal amount of respective intensity Efi should show for these five persons? I would suggest:

 

E-F   (female peer)                 : 10

W-F  (male peer)                    :   9

N-F   (older woman)               :  7

NN-F (old woman/man)         :  5

S-F    (younger woman)          :  3

SS-F   (baby:boy/girl)             :  1

                                                              

25: BARE NECESSITIES AS  THE  FRIEND OF PREVENTION

 

At the heart of the above schema there is the absolute requirement for Efi that she maintains a high-intensity level, non-sexual relationship with both a male and a female peer. Why do I insist on this?  It should be obvious - but then let me state the obvious. On this planet there are males and females : and humans grow from babies to old corpse-like entities. Other men and women have stated these things better. Marx’s favourite saying was from Terence:

“I am a man: therefore nothing human is alien to me”. The young Germaine Greer aspired, like Erasmus, to be ‘a Citizen of the world.’  By analogy with the old saying ‘there is no hermit without a community’, Winnicott famously reminded us ‘There is no baby without a mother’. One’s sense of individuality is created by, shaped by and remains ineluctably connected to the sum of people with whom one engages - firstly family, then friends, colleagues, acquaintances and even some strangers. Truly ‘No man is an island’.

 

“What the hell do women want?!” men wonder, bewildered by the seemingly impenetrable mystery of the Other gender.

“Men! - babies, mummy’s boys or psychos the lot of them.” women sigh.

 

“Can’t live without them”   the Leaden Echo of both men and women down the generations. And yet, and yet, there is a Golden Echo answering :

“Ask the Other his/her point of view, preference, desire, ambition, hope.”

 

No true negotiation between two human adults can begin until there is a statement of a true point of view, desire and preference and also a statement of limit of tolerance. One’s point of view may change - perhaps it should change sometimes - but the crucial POINT is what is my point of view now - here, now if not always: for that is the person I am and also the person who is hoping to meet and negotiate with another person. If you don’t ask the Other person the open question: “What is your point of view: what is your preference, what is your limit?”  then the Other person will remain in some way a mystery to you. You might choose not to ask, that is your choice : but no grown-up will let you get away with such a pretence of mystery forever. Marx himself put it most clearly when he wrote: “All mysteries find their resolution in social practice, and the comprehension of that practice.”

 

(a)  THE NECESSITY OF GENDER PEERS

Wouldn’t it be naiive for me, a man, to say:  “I am a man: so I know enough about what it is to be a man.” It would be only fear and envy, and sometimes terrifying fear and envy,  that would persuade me to avoid forming and keeping proper-friendships with male peers. There is a specificity about male-male friendships which contributes significantly to any definition of what it is to be a male. Similarly with respect to females. I take it as axiomatic that a human being cannot get from one gender only all that he/she needs - emotionally/intellectually/spiritually - to be fully human.

 

I say above ‘terrifying’ fear and envy: but hatred and terror- really? Well yes. Consider this ordinary snatch of dialogue from the brilliant 1990s tv comedy of manners Seinfeld: a quartet of thirty-somethings - three men and one woman  - are chatting:

 

Elaine   :  (surprised tone) You  know I have NO female friends.

Kramer :  (stating the obvious tone) Well yes. You are a man’s woman. You hate other women and they hate you.

Elaine    : (silence: assent)

 

Returning to Efi, if she desires or expects from men what can really only be got from other women: and also if she brings to men anxieties or fears that would be best contained, processed and healed by other women then her relationships with BOTH men and women will be partial, stilted, broken-backed, volatile, dangerous and futile.

 

(b) THE NECESSITY OF  ELDERS

 

One of the realisations that comes with leaving adolescence and standing on the threshold of adulthood is that one’s parents and all the older people one has known all one’s life as ‘the (eternal) grown-ups’ were in fact once young like oneself. One imagines the world and their point of view in that world when they were young. And now that one is a grown-up oneself, it seems possible to have an adult-to-adult engagement with the adults one will meet henceforth.  It seems that one might ask them questions - whether about their world when they were young, or their world when one was young oneself, and of course the shared world now - and that one will get grown-up answers for grown-ups.

 

I take it to be a necessity, rather than a counsel of perfection, for genuine adult maturation that at sometime in one’s twenties one re-negotiates one’s relationship with both one’s parents; that one agrees with them that both sides will maintain (or try to attain) the healthy and life-sustaining dynamics of  respect, trust and love and open-ended dialogue: and to dispense with  the (more) pathological dynamics such as disrespect, abuse, infantilisation, self-infantalisation, parentalisation, scorn, hatred. It cannot be done by proxy, by the other-parent or grandparent or sibling or friend. It is one of the most subtle and hardest tasks that one will accomplish in one’s whole life. It is far more frightening than sky-diving,or going on stage or whatever. The sense of freedom and new connectedness achieved by it is worth millions of pounds, minutes, brain-cells, pints of blood, planets of spirit.

 

A friendship with a non-family elder has its own absolute value. But it is perhaps also a useful preparation for the necessary renegotiation with one’s own family elders that I have just spoken of. On a darker note, perhaps the friendships with NN, the people over 60 & so bio-logically nearer death, will enlighten one as to the scope & worth of life. Among the many frightening things in Macbeth is the state of utter friendlessness in his old age.

 

In a time when the span of life was rarely three score and ten, the young Shakespeare has one of his mighty heroines, Rosaline, educating the typically lippy male protagonist, Berowne, as to the difference between the ‘wormwood and gibing spirit’ allowed by ‘loose grace’ and the adult perspective and spirit. He is to do a twelve-month stint of stand-up comedy in a hospice! By a typically lovely coincidence, it is another Rosaline/d whom the older Shakespeare has seeing through the shallow ‘maturity’ Jacques, her elder, has attained through his travels and experiences. 

 

(c) THE NECESSITY OF CHILDREN & BABIES

 

The other realisation that attends the attainment of the threshold of adulthood is that one was once a child, even once a baby: and if one continues to have the blessings of ordinary life this will probably include a child of one’s own in the coming years. There is a specificity to infancy and childhood, a concentration of open-hearted grace, joy and wonder that is rare later in life : only children chortle and skip. I would say it is vitally important to maintain a connection to the presence of those precise human emotions that are found only in babies and children. To be able to play with children - and not at or for children however worthily  - is one of the finest human qualities. It keeps alive something that is precious throughout ones life and one’s relationships with all human beings, young and old. When I first read Opie’s The People in the Playground, mostly transcripts of conversations with children, I was struck by how sometimes the tone of the children’s utterances reminded me of the tone of high-wonder that infuses much of  Scott-Fitzgerald’s inimitable prose.

 

If your heart doesn’t lift when you hear babies chortle and see children skipping then you are emotionally immature and mentally sick, if not quite mad. This joy in children, this kind of friendship with children, doesn’t always mean having or adopting children of one’s own. But the corollary doesn’t follow: for one shouldn’t have or adopt children unless one has experienced this sense of delight and wonder. Those who have not been able to be with and delight in children and babies who, let us also remember, can sometimes be more demanding than tyrants, will be ill-prepared for their own children.

 

The debate in recent years about the definition (& so prevalence) of child-abuse and the delineation of its consequences shows how even after seven millennia of civilisation, adults find it hard to even talk about why they sometimes feel such hatred for or at least indifference towards children. Psychoanalytic theory shows us that what parents as individuals or as a couple can’t contain of their conscious and unconscious thoughts and feelings will be visited upon their children.

 

d)  ELIMINATING THE NEGATIVE

 

I could go on: but then one can only take so much of the obvious. I am not saying that Efi must meet with each of these six person-types every week for a serious hours-long encounter. I am saying that one’s emotional health and maturity are linked to the way one chooses to integrate such persons into the rhythms of one’s ordinary life - over the weeks and months: how one carries them in one’s heart and memory. And I am of course arguing that to the extent that one does not (because one dares not) maintain a connection with one or more of  these types then one is to that extent emotionally immature and perhaps even dangerous to ALL human beings.

 

That is the Counsel of Perfection. But life has flourished with imperfect people for millennia. The questions are: What imperfections or absences are least damaging & When does the danger really begin?  Again for Efi at 21:

 

a)  S & SS : babies and pubescent children. I suppose not being good with kids can remain, for a long time, a merely minor imperfection in a rounded

human-being: but only if one’s life is so restricted that one  doesn’t have to deal with kids.

 

b) N & NN : elders and the old. I suppose one of these might do the office of two. The point is that one’s dialogue with a 40 year-old or a 60 year-old does

remind one that the world didn’t come into being just for oneself alone.

 

But I do feel that the absence of a male-peer and a female-peer as non-sexualised, proper-friends causes an almost irreversible stunting of one’s emotional identity & maturity: and that this will be dangerous to one’s eventual relationship with a sexualised friend viz.  one’s LPS, and will create difficulties with one’s various so-called friends.

 

Being non-English, I understand  clearly that there are cultural prohibitions or at least hesitations about cross-gender friendships. These are mostly predicated on the dangers of sexual attachment: and more often on the consequences of unplanned children for money, property and inheritance - so much so that the possibility of homosexual attachment is barely allowed for.  But it does seem possible to show by character and discipline that one is not going to initiate or respond to sexual opportunity or invitation: precisely because one holds it to be an absolute personal and moral value to be able to maintain an unsexualised intellectual and emotional dialogue about respective points of view.

 

The point of defining this Counsel of Perfection is simply to become aware as possible of what kind of attention - thought & feeling, desire & hope - one is offering to the Other: and similarly to appraise what the Other is offering to oneself: and  on the basis of these precisely-defined, shared-attentions to be clear as to the status of one’s relationship with the Other - both at the level of felt experience and cultural nomenclature viz.is the Other my acquaintance, friend, partner, lover,ex-friend, enemy etc?

 

At the least this might have supreme negative utilitarian value: one does not harm Others by seeming to offer more than one is in fact intending to offer. I feel : It is absolutely essential to know - intellectually and emotionally - the difference between minimal civility, ordinary (open-ended ) civility, graciousness and cordiality: and to offer each of these tones in the appropriate contexts: personal, social, professional etc. One learns such a difference through taking the emotional risks required to attain a genuine friendship: and one refines that knowledge by taking the risks required to maintain that friendship. You may think you have good manners, but how many people do you know who have excellent and charming manners, a perfect range of these connecting-emotions and tones?

 

I don’t know French but I’m struck by the fact that French has so many more terms in this spectrum: complaisance, politesse, noblesse, empressement, je ne sais quoi .

 

 

 

25: FRIENDS AS THE BEST THING

 

The tragedy is that even those without friends know - albeit only intellectually - the cultural importance of friendship and the supreme strategic value, in social and professional life, of the tones and terms of friendship and cordiality, and so will always feel tempted to pretend. I conjecture that this is one of the main reasons for the recent shifts in the formulae of formal, if not impersonal, discourse in shops, factories offices etc. Corporate gurus cynically suggest that there are better sales if the customer feels they have had a friendly rather than a merely polite exchange during the formal transaction of buying, getting or giving information, requesting etc.  Thus we have: “I’m here to help you”, “Have a nice day”, “Missing you already” spoken in tones of palpable falsity and obsequiousness. Anyone who has genuine friends can only feel distressed by such misplaced and shallow attempts at friendliness and cordiality. They are an emotional cancer on the languages of  the heart as well as on civil society’s institutions. For what they do is stain those words with commerce and opportunism so that when they are offered in the appropriate contexts they also carry a trace of irony and pretence. I’m not being naiive about the eternal tricks of business: what I am arguing is that unless one maintains an alertness in one’s own personal life about the definitions, one will easily slide into the confusions which leave millions thinking shop assistants really care about their sorrows and joys.

 

 

 

 

26 : STORY: UNTHINKABLE

 

Twenty years ago I had a temp job as a clerk in Norwich. My two female supervisors L & F had been great friends, for years. They both had partners and busy lives but were astonishingly kind to me, even in the early months of our acquaintance. We all moved away but we’ve not lost touch. They are now middle-management civil servants.  Recently I told them the story about my dad and his friend. [see below]. I added that I had always been impressed by their friendship with each other: and was interested in what they might say about my old essay on friendship.  

 

L wrote:

“I am very flattered that you compare the friendship F and I have with that described in your essay. I am blessed with two of the best friends you could have and a sister who I also count as a friend. One feels with those three I could face anything life throws at me. They are a joy to be with. I respect and admire their intellect and the advice they give. Life without them is unthinkable and as described in your paper there is never a week goes by when we do not talk or meet. I will always do my best to make sure I never let them down.”

 

F wrote:

“I was really interested in your essay – I scored my friendship with L against the seven criteria and I think it passed the test of being “A Proper Adult Friendship”. The point about regular contact really struck me. L and I speak at least every week and I really do think it makes a huge difference to whether a friendship lasts and grows. You’re right too that it’s very easy to say glibly “I’m friends with X and even if we don’t speak for years, we can meet and take up where we left off”. I’ve done that with several ‘friends’ but in truth they are no longer really friends and when we do meet we have circular conversations which rely more and more on an ever more distant shared history.

Do adults have imaginary friends in the way some children do? Perhaps your example of the man and Diana is a sort of manifestation of that -  I’ll take in friendship a well-known figure and make a friend of them because I think I know them so well.”

 

 

It was so comforting to read these lovely responses. For generations, perhaps centuries, the highest intimacy marker between the unkinned was to confer quasi-kinship upon each other: the making of blood-brothers ritual, or the ascription of sisterhood: “she is like a sister to me”. Perhaps when kinship is fragmenting in a culture, then friendship becomes the higher intimacy marker: so L who clearly knows what a perfect friendship is, can add “a sister who I also count as a friend’.  Interestingly, kinship terms rarely require or use intensifying adverbs and adjectives, tone is enough. “She is my mother”, or “He is my brother.” can be spoken and understood to mean that the mother and brother are all she or he should be. Though they are in common usage – remarks such as “I count my sister as my friend” or “I’m best friends with my dad” always seem to me quite odd. As are “my brother/dad/ isn’t my friend anymore”.

 

We are of course in the psychoanalytic realm of transference and counter-transference. But it is important to protect the conceptual difference and asymmetry. Kinship precedes friendship, and so it is more logical to say ‘my friend is a like a brother’, than to say “my kinsmen is like a friend.” Such usage is quasi-metaphorical reversing development and causation. What was especially touching, and perhaps transference is at play here also, was the mixture of adult and childlike tone in the L’s coda: “I will always do my best to make sure I never let them down”

 

I’ve always thought that one marker of whether one has accepted criterion 7, chiding, is that one spontaneously imagines letting down one’s friend, and then imagines one’s utter desolation were they to respond not with barking anger, but a very brief dignified judgement “I’m very disappointed with you”. The opposite is of course never to do such thought-experiments and to know that one will can respond to chiding with “Who the fuck are you! You’re not the boss of me now!”

 

 

 

27 : STORY : THE LIVING HAND [written 2004]

 

One evening three men returned to an empty house: the eldest turned 81, his fifty-year-old son, and the older man’s friend, himself in his seventies, and who had only the previous week left after a week’s stay. It had been a long day, beginning in the middle of the night.

 

I’d got the call at 4am in Cambridge, and then taken the taxi north, arriving at the hospital at 7am. Avtar, my dad’s friend, had come up again from Birmingham. At 11am, the consultant told my sister and I that our mother was dying. But three hours later another pair of consultants said they would try another intervention and suggested we all ‘keep an open mind’. My siblings went to their own local flats. Avtar, my dad and I went back to my parent’s house, dazed.

 

It was high summer, so it was raining hard. Even in exhausted terror, one must eat, so while Avtar went off to have a shower, my dad and began rustling up a lean supper. Suddenly my dad grabbed the kitchen-door frame, and crumbling slightly said “It’s over isn’t it”.

Though I was shocked, I managed to say steadily “Let’s wait”.

My dad didn’t move, but just said wearily “What is there to wait for?”

“Let’s wait”  I repeated. To my great relief my dad straightened up and we started putting out the food. A few minutes later we were all quietly eating. I was sat opposite Avtar, with my dad next to him. All of a sudden my dad stopped eating, and said in a faltering voice: “What will I do in this big house, all alone?”.

Avtar didn’t alter his rhythm of fork to plate & mouth, nor did he turn to my dad when he said, in a tone just softer than level, “Chanchal, you know many things. Remember what you know.”

I was struck by the gnomic aptness of this. My dad seemed to take this in and picked up his spoon, but two minutes later it felt he was pleading to Fate when he said “But we’ve been married over sixty years!”

Again Avtar didn’t stop his fork, or look at my dad when he said, this time a rare tone of almost benign chiding – “Chanchal, be strong. Be strong!”

We all finished the meal and moved into the lounge.

 

My dad was still restless. “Should I have a shower” he said to no one in particular. Avtar said “Yes, have a shower”. We were still half-looking at the papers and the telly when my dad returned twenty minutes later and said in a surprisingly buoyant voice “I’ve had a shower. I feel great. Kalu, will you make us all some hot milk, then you get to bed, you’ve been up ages.”

 

I slept better than I could have hoped, knowing we might get the death-call from the hospital. Avtar and my dad had already had breakfast. “There’s some eggs and toast on the table for you.” my dad pointed. “After you’ve finished, you and I are going to the hospital. Your uncle will stay and take the phone calls.”

 

On the way my dad told me he had slept very well. He was palpably calm though like me, in deep ordinary anguish about what might happen next. Perhaps because of an armchair philosopher’s indulgence in counter-factuals, or perhaps because of the abiding sense of amazement at Avtar’s revivifying grace, I kept imagining what would have happened if he hadn’t been there. My dad might have crumbled completely within minutes of the two of us arriving at home. I did not doubt that he would have responded a little to my, his son’s, comforting and consolation, but not enough. He would certainly not have eaten more than a mouthful, nor had a shower, nor slept much, and then not felt like breakfast the next morning. So as we prepared to go the hospital, he would have been physically as well as well emotionally exhausted.

 

I was filled with admiration for both of them: that they had done for decades whatever it takes to sustain an intensity of friendship such that in the hours of expectation of death, they could give and receive consolation, benign chiding, direction, counsel, and of course a friend’s love. My counselling theory would talk of perfect containment and holding, but any ordinary adult could see what was achieved.

 

My mother rallied but alas was never well enough to come home, not even to die. So it was in hospital that she died three months later on 1st November.

 

I have the strength to write in the mourning period because I want to honour both my parents and their friend Avtar, who in the death-week rose to yet another level of friendship. I wrote the following passage two days after the funeral.

 

We had all slept surprisingly well the night after the funeral. My abiding feeling now is an exhilarating sense of wonder - of an engagement with the moral sublime perfectly containing the volcanic emotions sparked by seeing the flames leap upon the wood and roses containing my mother's corpse.

Arriving at that moment, through the greeting to the mourners, the minute's silence, the eulogy by Avtar, my father's best friend, the thanks to the mourners, the family's final laying of roses upon the coffin, and the farewell to the mourners, had taken less than fifteen minutes. It was an astonishing display of almost nuclear compression of emotion and gesture - without repression or residue.

Both my sister-in-law from Birmingham and my niece from Sunderland had taken annual leave to attend to the food and drink and bedding for the visitors. Day after day, we ate well, almost indecently well, the piles of their grace-laced food.

But it was Avtar, a man seemingly fashioned in a more noble age, who held us all, day after day. He took the scores of phone calls from here and abroad, he did the irksome admin that one can't escape even in death: and by a literal and metaphorical hand on my father's shoulder kept him steady, and relieved us from the unspoken terror of another parent falling. I said to my sister that I can't think of anyone from world literature, history, psychotherapy, film, drama, tv or a conversation, in all the years of my adulthood, who has supported his friend, and family, through such a journey with such grace, love and poise. I found myself thinking of my old essay in which I argue that it was a fundamental task of adulthood to know how to live at and to regularly traverse each of the positions of basic human connectivity: kinship-friendship-citizenship. After forty years of friendship and shared political engagement, Avtar and my father recently established a kinship connection by typically Indian circuitous marriage arrangement of a distant great-grand-niece and nephew. In this wormwood week, my father took direction and chiding from him in away he obviously couldn't from his own children. I say 'obviously' but my experience is that most people in most cultures never attain to the benign submission of that intensity of connection. In fact they don't ever see the obvious necessity of it to a truly adult maturation: and their partners and children pay for this by the hour. I feel I am barely grown-up besides such adulthood. My life as a citizen has been amoebic.

[What follows was written later in the same month, November 2004]

 

Thinking about the chiding criterion, I remembered that on the morning of the funeral I had asked my father whether my niece, who’d just come from Canada, was going to the undertaker’s chapel before the funeral. “No she’s not.” he said “If she had, I’d have gone again. But your uncle forbade me to. And how can I go against my friend?”

 

A fortnight after the funeral, I was visiting home. My cousin from Brum was there. At one point my dad said “If Avtar hadn’t have been there, I’d have gone insane”.  We both knew that his tone wasn’t one of conversational hyperbole, so we both felt a mixture of awe and relief, as we imagined the madness of grief that never happened.  Though my brother and sister and I had our own distress to manage, we all knew we were more anxious for our father in those first few days after our mother’s death. We all felt the unspoken terror that he might just collapse and die in his grief. We did not feel this remark meant he thought less of his children. It simply acknowledged a limit to what a child, however old, can offer his or her elderly parent: and in the absence of his own

long-dead parents, the good-friend is the only person on the planet who can receive his un-restrained emotions.

 

I think my father’s remark can stand with dignity beside the two mightiest lines about friendship.

a)     “Greater love hath no man than he who laith down his life for his friend” (Christ)

b)     “Why did I betray my friend? Because I didn’t want to die alone.” (quoted by Kott)

c)  “If my friend had not been with me when my wife died, I’d have gone insane.” (dad)

 

 

28:  LIT-CHAT

 

The title of the previous section alludes to the chapter in Middlemarch titled The Dead Hand. Weary old Macbeth remembers he once had friends, but that old ‘bat of erudition’ Casaubon really has never had that human connection at all: one of the many mysteries to which his vanity, envy and malice would never allow him to find the key.

 

In this essay I have rarely quoted from the ancient and modern texts on friendships that have shaped my understanding. Nor am I going to now. What I will close with are some reflections on how such definitions and the counsel of perfection advocated above might help one in the differently personal and impersonal task of appraising characters in literature.

 

Years ago, my tutor Dr Poole said to me - with surprising feeling - “betrayal is the quintessential Shakespearean theme - ‘I thought you were my friend!’”. What strikes me now is what apart from loyalty was being expected, and described?

 

How to begin such discussions - other than by saying “Who is the most mature young man or woman in Shakespeare and why?”.  Rather than that, let me suggest : take any narrative - play or novel: consider the protagonist on his/her way to noble suffering or to exhilarating courtship: now ask - Who is his/her gender-peer friend? How does this friend’s friendship - thoughts, feelings, actions - impact on the protagonist’s progress to death or marriage?

 

Immediately the questions seem strange - stagey even! Why? Isn’t friendship, after marriage, the most ordinary relationship in humankind. Surely it should be easy to talk about. It is difficult to know what is meant by friendship in Woolf’s The Waves. With every re-reading I’m struck more plangently by the sense of failure and loss; the most poignant destiny being Rhoda’s: she spends her life in terror, waiting for darkness : and there is a final insufficiency in her friends to keep her from the abyss.  Let me close with, unlike Miranda, a real person:  a man also in a blessed state of connectedness, Traherne:  

 

“The men! O what venerable and reverend creatures did the aged seem! Immortal cherubims! And young men glittering and sparkling angels, and maids strange seraphic pieces of life and beauty! Boys and girls tumbling in the street and playing were moving jewels. I knew not that they were born or should die. But all things abided eternally as they were in their proper places....The streets were mine,the temple was mine, the people were mine…the skies were mine……”

 

29:  CODA

 

Glib social theorists speak of the 19C taboo being SEX:  whereas the 20C taboo is DEATH.  So is one of the 21C taboos speaking at length on FRIENDSHIP?  I am interested in how the reader :

 

i) Receives and challenges my seven criteria.

ii) Answers the two questions in (9) above about the criteria of friendship one has received, and one has passed on.

iii) Might use the Structured Dialogue in the Appendix.

 

I also wonder what diagnostic value these criteria have in counselling/therapy.  When people - often still in their late adolescence - speak of `friendship' I usually feel sad for them:  especially for those who seem to have lots of people they call friends. In my own personal life I wonder if the delineation of these criteria will help protect me from keen strangers who are probably saddos or whackos:  and even from once real and true friends who are now teetering on the brink of ordinary ambivalence, however unconscious, that will soon flash out at me as malice and end in separation.

 

30: AD HOMINEM

 

I wrote this essay partly because I was so disappointed and vexed that an old literary friend, then abroad, would not make time to write to me regularly. He responded with high indignation & scorn and the friendship ended. Another scholar friend, also abroad often, once said that this essay was, for him, my best piece of writing. He too was dilatory and silence fell.

 

Yes, I will fight for & with my friends. But I won’t manufacture fights in the pathology of cheap emotional discharge. I hope it is to my credit as well as theirs that I have not had a single argument with D or M or W in an aggregate of over forty years. And I remain mindful that most of what I learned about the stakes of friendship I got from my parents: who had to rely absolutely on friends in politics, migration, poverty and near fatal illness.

 

 

31: 2008

In the last year I have been thinking a lot about the idea of the necessity, at all ages, including middle-age, of protecting the realm of play.

Friendship shouldn’t reduce to mere insurance for possible miseries: it is best fed from shared-play – conversation, jokes, music, games …..

As Aristotle insisted, friends help each other to live the good life - in all its aspects.

 

 

===============================================================================

 

APPENDIX  1 :  TALKING ABOUT MY REGENERATION

 

I believe that this is an interesting piece and I would be interested in talking about it. This might happen in many ways.  The following suggestion is my preferred way.  Of course I will have to negotiate with the other person in the dialogue/conversation - hereafter `called D' - between my way and theirs:  both of us reserving the right not to talk if the singularly-preferred or jointly-compromised proposed setting and structure feel uncomfortable.  The preparation may take a few days; and the writing half-an-hour.  Is it worth it?

 

 

THE PREPARATION

 

(Reminder:  The proposed dialogue is not an occasion for myself or D to talk about our relationship.  So it is not necessary to spend any time thinking about that.  I hope this removes one sort of anxiety. D notes his/her responses – mentally or in writing).

 

1)         D reads the piece once.

2)         D notes his/her initial response.

3)         D re-reads the piece.

 

4)         D notes answers to the questions in para (9):-

 

a)  What criteria of friendship did your parents pass onto you - directly, indirectly and at what ages?

b)  What criteria of friendship have you passed on to your children - directly, indirectly and at what ages?  Why these criteria?  If they are not the same criteria your parents gave you, how did this happen, and why?

(If you are childless, what criteria would you give to your hypothetical children?).

 

5)         D notes answers to the connected questions:-

 

a)  Name the three principal written texts that have shaped your understanding and belief about friendship?

b)  How, and what age, did you come across these texts?

c)   For conciseness, provocativeness and truth how does this present piece compare?

 

6)  Name any other persons, films, whatever from which you drew significant understanding about friendship and which influenced your behaviour?

 

7)  Has it been, and is it still, important for you to have clear criteria of friendship: and why?

 

8)   (Therapists) How might one use a client's account of friendships, and one's questions to him/her about friendship, as a diagnostic marker of maturation?  Does this presuppose one has a clear understanding of one's own criteria: and also real friends?)  Would using the criteria above to probe the client's understanding of the specific relationship or friendship be considered too formal or invasive - or useful?

 

 

THE CONVERSATION

The usual conditions : a clean, quiet, comfortable and uninterrupted room: with coffee/tea. The exact order of speaking & listening is to be arranged.

 

(This is the structure used in 99  when I discussed the 98 draft of this piece with my friends D&M that is glossed in Para 16. I have discussed it with others in less formal ways.)