BY

[This essay was originally called Decisions of Another Kind in deference to Charles Williams’s Prosperoan character, who mints that mighty phrase. As usual other people’s words are given in bold italic]

In this paper I intend to explore an experience wretchedly common in the therapeutic space, individual and group: and also in the lounge, pub, factory etc - the resort to fallacies. At this point, let me merely say ‘resort’ rather than ‘defence’. ‘Fallacy’ is a technical term from philosophy, naming a logically disallowed sequence of propositions that a person offers as a reason or explanation for an action or belief. The disallowance is logical not moral: though one might argue, non-fallaciously even, that it is immoral to use fallacious reasoning.

May I offer a tiny biographical detail. It was at twenty-seven that I understood, with Damascene clarity, two things which henceforth became as axioms for me:

i) Only bad emotion can support a bad argument.

ii) Emotional-understanding always lags behind intellectual-understanding: by at least some months, but more often years.

After that, what I meant by ‘understanding’ was the attainment of a unified emotional and intellectual understanding, the felt-known-truth, of something. Though I had done a Masters degree in philosophy some years earlier, I hadn’t got it then. I had to experience more arguments and fights with my family, my partner and my friends, and also to reflect on them in bitterness and in hope and, most importantly, in writing-out.

The first axiom makes a simple but powerful point. If one has exhausted one’s intentions & abilities to make an impersonal, intellectually powerful argument, then only deeply personal emotion is left. So when the other person isn’t persuaded and won’t be compliant to one’s wishes, then all one can add is bad emotion: words and gestures, pulling rank, threats of various kinds or, more rarely, ambiguous seductions of various kinds. (Many of these fallacious gestures have formal Latin names.)

The second axiom is differently subtle. Most things that are to be taught or learned in ethics (and theology) can be stated simply and intellectually grasped very quickly. One might within minutes or hours be able to say clearly that which it is good to know. But the tone of assent one gives after a few months of living with and assenting to (however ambivalently) the intellectually-understood proposition is importantly different. It feels different in one’s mouth and head. Can one says it feels truer?

Both axioms form a disposition to be vigilant in one’s avoidance of fallacies in ordinary life.

I have tried. So I got this at 27. Is that early or late? I’ve observed often that most people, even oldies, haven’t arrived at the disposition and periodically lay waste the desires and anxieties of those they say they love. What the psychoanalytic theory I studied a dozen years later did was offer new concepts that would help explain more profoundly the ideas of bad emotion, the reflex resort to fallacies, ambivalence, even laying to waste.

As in teaching, so in therapy, what Freud called the impossible professions, it is often difficult to know what is most valuable in what one is communicating, by word and gesture. There may be a significant difference in what the teacher/analyst intends and hopes is valuable and what the pupil/patient finds valuable, informative, or even healing. But a moment’s reflection on the cliche "It’s the singer not the song " will persuade one of the truth of a preparatory distinction. The teacher and the therapist must begin with the humbling awareness that the intellectual content, the facts about people & the world, in what she is communicating, is gettable by the pupil/patient in other ways, from other places and persons. What is unique is the way, the tone and the affect & affection, in which she communicates here and now. Years later, a pupil or patient might say "What really helped me was the way my teacher/therapist sometimes smiled for me. A lot of the time I was barely listening."

Whether we get to a live theatre or just see repeatedly in the non-virtual reality of the family lounge, we all grow up learning very fast that it is possible for someone to say to you the right words, with what seems like the perfect feeling that goes with them – whether sorrow or joy, or sincerity or anger - and yet for you to feel certain that there is a falsity to their communication. So what makes the communication both true and useable is the both the absence of guile and the presence of an irradiating goodwill. I don’t know if it is more emotionally (& physically) taxing for a theatre actor to try to have his being ‘in the moment’ night after night, rather than cruising on technique. I’d like to think that two-faced people, liars and cowards – whether pupils and patients or teachers and analysts - are more exhausted by their charades than if they told the truth. But I know this is not so: a defence is arrived at for ease! Those who don’t need defenses feel a different ease.

I will proceed in this informal first-draft by presenting more examples than argument either from philosophy or psychoanalysis. Each fallacy flagged-up will have the notation of an F-number: and subcategories will be identified by letter.

They are presented as they arrived by association to me. I hope there is sufficient coherence to the overall argument. Perhaps later I might arrange them more logically by type. I invite the Reader to comment.

I was studying in a Philosophy Department on and off for seven years. Here are my two mightiest experiences of philosophical learning.

The Logic and Scientific Method class was just starting. Our tutor was getting ready as the under-grads were shambling to their desks. There was a low murmur of inconsequential chat and I wasn’t really paying attention to anything. But then I caught the tutor’s voice, and something in his tone caught me: a mixture of mirth and pride at a great truth so easily refused by too many:

I remember nothing else of that class, perhaps because I was, in that instant, accepting a life-task to be wary of those two murderous bullies of human conversation – ‘always’ & ‘never’. I could think of scores of examples from family life and tv: which produce, within seconds, blind almost murderous rage.

You always show me up with your shabby clothes"

"You never listen or ask me how I am"

"You always come first and forget me"

My future task was to be alert to those bully-words on the tip of my tongue or bruising my ears: and then to wait for their nobler kin - ‘sometimes’ ‘often’ ‘occasionally’ ‘rarely’ ‘frequently’ – to get ready to enter the conversation with dignity and kindness.

By coincidence the same teacher features in the next story. I’d long left the Department but still met up with him. We were in a pub with my girlfriend and another philosophy student & his older wife, an ex-policewoman and now a lecturer in law. The conversation drifted towards running. It was surprising to hear the lawyer enthusing about marathons. When the philosophy teacher expressed some gentle scepticism about their worth, she said snippily "How can you say that! I’d like to see you run one!!" To which the philosopher responded in a tone which was strange and compelling, for it seemed more sad than triumphant "Oh! But that is the argument ad hominem". She was discombobulated: and the conversation moved on – to what I forget: for I felt I’d been given a new sword and shield that I must use wisely.

Philosophy and psychoanalysis meet in the shared project to separate fact from affect: to burn the received bridge between them and rebuild a new one that better connects and communicates with other people. Because reason is the slave of the passions, [Hume] and because many of these ‘passions’ are unconscious, passion will always rush to the side of reason to force it give weight to its projects of greed, seduction and violence. It is these passions which persuade one to unthinkingly say ‘always’ and ‘who are you to talk’.

So though it is good to leave university with scores of winning philosophical arguments from Plato to Wittgenstein on the tip of one’s tongue, one only begins to be a true philosopher-in-the-world if one has scraped these two fallacies from one’s tongue, mind and heart.

[Or perhaps it was not coincidence that it should be this teacher : for he told me last week that, though he’s long retired from philosophy circles, he’d just had a phone call from a woman whom he didn’t know saying that her nephew, who’d studied with him many years ago, was now dying and would he be so kind as to visit him in hospital. Such respect in articulo mori ! He was always as kind as Socrates to his students.]

Of course I know that sometimes people choose to argue fallaciously, because their ultimate (often psycho-pathological) desire is to have a fight, for perhaps the hidden defensive desire to discharge some unbearable and possibly still unconscious emotions in the predictable fight. The moral puzzle for the trainee-philosopher and for the well-enough ex-therapy-patient, in fact for all adults, is should they be complicit in other people’s charades of obliquely expressed ambivalent desires. Genuinely spontaneous energy for play and creativity is so limited in the Thoreauean desperation of most of our lives. Please don’t waste the golden moments of your heart on notionally adult people who seem to be inviting you to share joy, but in reality are so subverting their own pleasures they destroy yours.

Perhaps the fallacy of hasty generalisation – with its lavish misuse of the universalisation-words such as ‘never’ and ‘always’ has a corollary in the following fallacy.

This is to give a precise figure without giving its context & proportionality as precisely. Perhaps we know this best from government announcements and history. Let’s hurry with the examples – for I hear a 45-minute warning!

1. "This Government will give £1.13 million extra to the Youth Probation Service.

(A year-on-year 27% increase compared to the Opposition in its First-Term)"

This is almost meaningless unless we are also told:

1. How the figure was arrived at and, crucially, if it includes all the relevant factors and variables. At least two additional base-figures are needed.

i) Given the present number of offenders & the prediction of new offenders in the next 2 years, what is the ideal (but not ridiculous) additional amount of money required to provide sufficient probationary support to prevent re-offending?

Of course for the offenders to have interesting study/work, rather than just stuff & threats that keep them of the streets & out of the courts, would take even more money.

(ii) What is the minimum figure below which any additional money, is only coping with inflation, administration of the new money, old admin, sick leave etc.: and therefore near to useless, and would certainly would give the lie to the Government’s desire to be seen to be doing something useful and new ?.

This fallacy also rides on all adults’ default-drift towards magical thinking and childhood reference points. The childhood wonder at the concept of a ‘million’ and the aspiration to be a ‘millionaire’ is all around: milked by the Government lottery and TV Tarrant. Even when the adult now knows that a millionaire a generation ago had more real-money that today’s millionaires, she is seduced by the word – it means "ohhhh wotalot!!" : and so someone, even the Government, giving a million is giving a lot, and how good and kind of them.

No citizen can be as cynical as a Government: citizens need to have hope of truth whereas Governments just need power-saving lies. Even sixty years after the World War II, the Soviet contribution of many, many millions dead to the Allied war effort is insufficiently stated, precisely and often. Recently I have heard both a Pole and a German angered at this abiding unthinking Anglo-American anti-communist silence. But we all get the following riddle in childhood:

2 : Who killed a quarter of the world?

And as one is thinking – Crikey! Surely the history teacher would have told us this on the first day: the world is big, so an exact quarter-of-big must be bloody trizillions, and who did that - the Riddler laughs and says: "Cain!"

Of course at that age you don’t think – Ah different paradigms – history and revealed theology, with their different ideas of truth.

A few weeks ago, I read in The Guardian of a recently discovered novel manuscript. One line reads:

There is both false precision and ambivalence about it!

At 11, for a school task I did a short story about treasure. One line read :

The teacher wrote in red beside this "Unlikely!" I felt outraged. (Little changes!)

One can imagine a secret trunk in an adult story in which the owner kept precisely that amount, because he was part of a neo-Satanist group intending to revive a Canaanite cult and decided to get exactly that many coins to make the new Golden Calf in the Grand Canyon. (Compare Dan Brown’s mystery-history etc and the canonical Jehovah’s Witnesses’ belief in 144,000 souls only saved for Jehovah.)

But my precision was just because six was my favourite number, and then I knew nothing of the number of the Beast: it was mere innocent foolishness than fallacy. The detail in the newly found novel is weak from a literary point of view as well as illogical. It is in fact rather mad, as was the author : so the authorities didn’t let him adopt a young girl!

a) "Three people die of Aids each week in the London area"

My immediate thought, in 1987, was – In Shakespeare’s time, say 1587, the London theatres could remain open if 39 people died of the plague: and 39 was a far greater proportion of the then population, than 3 out of say 2 million people now passing through London each week.

b) "Sixteen elderly folk have died in a month from food-poisoning in State nursing homes in Fife in Scotland" After one mention, this story didn’t really come back on the telly. I remember thinking that if it had been in nursing homes in Hampstead, it would have been second item on the news for a month!

I propose a couple of new linked fallacies.

Let me introduce this with a story. When I was at Junior School, I joined the

St John’s Ambulance Brigade. The Sergeant & the seniors indulged our

age-group as cubs rather than as cadets. Little was expected of us, being tiny ten-year-olds, but a part of me was interested in learning stuff, and more than merely out of accepting the immigrant’s son’s destiny to be a doctor. I think I even owned a copy of the First Aid manual: I certainly had looked at it often: with its unusual colour scheme of black & white & red and strangely horrible dirty pink.

I remember this fragment. One evening, in the middle of the allotted period, two or three of us were standing by the Sergeant, an old miner. He suddenly asked in his usual friendly manner.

I immediately had a powerfully convinced sense of there being an uncountable, unknowable number. So I said "Oh hundreds!" I might even have added, "It’s impossible to know."

Sarge smiled. An older boy next to me said "205". ‘ No’, I thought, as Sarge said, "Yes, almost exactly". Then I felt baffled by my own memory. Part of the bafflement was an internal struggle: a part of me recognised the figure of 200 was about right because I must have seen it in a book: and yet, another part of me wanted to cling to the paradoxical certainty of an unknowable figure. I didn’t know why. I have an idea now. My child-Self wanted to argue, fallaciously, that the number must be imprecise. But first here is another story.

In her fine memoir of madness Girl, Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen describes an episode at Maclean Hospital USA (Poetry Central!) where she suddenly begins to doubt that she has bones in her hand. This feels different from whatever madness persuaded her, years earlier, to periodically bang her wrists against the steel arms of her chair. Now, she begins to tear at and bite into her own skin until she can see the bone inside. What was the meaning of the unbelieved-in bone? What or whom did it symbolise? She was twice my age at my bone-crisis.

I suggest there is a defensive mechanism which creates the believed ‘fact’ of imprecision or uncertainty. The paradox is that one was earlier certain of the opposite fact: but this was felt to be unbearable. Well, the first and most plausible defence is to assert the opposite. But this might require a psychologically impossible disavowal of what is still mostly believed. The stronger defence is the contrary : merely ‘not-first-fact’ which may also be expressed as ‘fact-unknowable’.

In my case, the fact that there are inside each human body, and so inside my body, 205 bones, felt deeply troubling. The exact reason for this is not important for the present account. No doubt, in play was some such sequence as :

i ) Ten-year-old me gets from somewhere an inchoate sense that finitude = death.

ii ) I see the picture of a skeleton with countable bones.

iii ) I know that when human skin has gone to reveal the skeleton there is death.

iv ) I conjecture, by false logic, when I didn’t even know what logic was, the ‘mad’ consolatory idea that if the number of bones is uncountable, then death is endlessly deferred. Not that I really know what death is or can believe what it is.

Kaysen is too old to be as dumb as me: so her actions express ambivalence. Her ego feels dead: and because the ego is ultimately a bodily ego [Freud] and so also ‘inside’ her, she is checking for physical proof of its aliveness within to reassure aliveness without.

An anxiety about death is far more potent and pervasive than the continual stirrings of sexual desire. The fear of not being able to start or continue a conversation, as opposed to the charades of time-of-the-day chat, is felt far more frequently than fear of limpness or dryness. These stumblings & silences feel like erasure and little-deaths.

All parents are proud when their nipper can play with pegs and holes. Isn’t it innocent and benign to know about shapes and their connections? Yes, the taxonomy of shapes is a good thing. The taxonomy of colours is also considered a good thing. So, sorting is a good disposition to develop in a young child. ‘Grading’ is often used as a synonym of ‘sorting’, but it usually also includes personal or moral evaluation. Some grading is considered necessary, universal and benign: this is good to eat and that is bad to eat, poison will cause death, a bad thing. Some grading feels necessary, partial and a mystery : why am I – but not everyone- irresistibly drawn to men of this type?

The Blue-Eye-Brown-Eye Experiment was a brilliant demonstration of how the sorting and grading of people by an arbitrary detail (eye-colour) carries the expression of some of the worst (grading concept) qualities in humans eg greed (based on a State-created misperception of scarcity) and violence (to protect greed-gotten stuff).

The capacity to analyse received taxonomies and to generate new taxonomies – to see how far sorting and grading is innocent, affectless and objective: and how far it is the expression of not merely human emotions but the expression of a limited & ascendant group’s preferences - is a significant maturational marker. It is an ordinary and good thing to propose new taxonomies and then present them to others in one’s community, requesting they comment and suggest refinements.

Klein proposed ‘epistemophilia’ the desire to find-out/learn, as a developmental consequence of the attainment of the marker of the depressive position. I propose the possibility of the defensive position of epistemophobia – not a

fear-of-knowledge as such, but partly a fear of keeping-inside one’s psyche something just learned and partly a fear-of-linking the new-knowledge with a piece of old-knowledge that is contentedly kept-in. As described above, the paradox is that the patient knows that he knows something new, Fact-F: and at precisely that moment there is terror of such intensity that defensive strategies are instantly sought – to as fast as possible unknow and erase rather than merely consciously deny. There is a cold-porridge comfort in being to assert:

1. (objective tone) It can’t be known if Fact-F is true.
2. (pleading tone) I can’t know & say that Fact-F is true: (or if it connects to Facts-DC).
3. (coercive tone) You can’t know and say that Fact-F is true : (and what it might connect to.)

These three statements comprise the Fallacy of False Imprecision. Patients often say "I can’t remember any more details of Experience-E" : even if it happened just before the session. Then, anticipating my scepticism, they add "I’ve got a very poor memory". Rarely do they make the obvious connection:

"Yes I know I’m at Oxbridge only because I have a very good memory at least in absolute terms: like Geoff Capes is very good at lifting". And of course they are brainy enough to work out the easy connection: "I cling to the idea of a poor memory to explain not-remembering Experience P, because I fear feeling the full horror of the half-memory, just one thought away, of Experience P from the past".

It is true that merely iterating or even re-iterating this fact about them is usually of little value: but it might be worth saying sometimes. If Experience-P is a terrible childhood trauma, the adult’s reflex defence is understandable. But I want to look also at recourse to this fallacy in other seemingly less fraught realms.

Consider the acres of news-print and hundreds of public media & private dinner-party hours spent annually on analysing GCSE (O&A) results. A moment’s thought - yes, oh deary-me, I know that is asking a lot! - will reveal that the debate will remain only a charade of fallacious imprecision and prejudice, until one includes the concepts:

1. Criterion-referenced marking/sorting.
2. Norm-referenced marking/sorting.
3. Using (a) & (b) to grade for economic worth - desired proportions of Medieval French scholars and doctors & plumbers and civil-engineers and dramatists and factory fodder & shit-jobs etc…. And the consequence of this for class-relations, including migrants and asylum seekers.
4. Using (a) and (b) and (c) to grade for social worth - desired proportions of the above: and likewise the social class consequences.

Isn’t a 98% pass rate in any skill-realm intuitively troubling? Can’t we all win gold medals if we mint enough ? Remember the crap 11+ grading in the 50’s & 60’s, and of not allowing football but only rugger in public schools and in their pale imitations, some state grammars. Consider the rubbish facilities for tennis and cricket as playing fields are sold off : and teachers, who’ve been humiliated by Baker Days, refuse to run after-hours school-clubs. Everyone can get Grade A at games but there is still no World Cup! Consider what precision there is in the ‘Honours’ system! Pay enough funds to the party in power! Baarrggh!

Of course with some skills, roles, ways of being&doing, that aren’t assessed or legislated by professional institutions - friend, boyfriend, spouse, mother etc - the scope of human affect involved is at its most varied and intense: and so the unconscious affect will also be varied and intense. Imagine someone saying, at a dinner party or in Parliament, "I say it is impossible to say what makes a good boyfriend or a bad mother. No one has the right to pronounce on such matters. We just don’t know precisely!"

I conjecture that there are two personality types:

i ) There’s more to it than that. Your breakdown of X leaves too much out.

ii ) In fact it can’t be known. We can’t know.

iii) You can’t know!

What can the taxonophile say to the taxonophobe but:

Or in Freud’s words:

A few pages earlier he had written.

Even a hundred years later, most people writing on comedy haven’t caught up!

I feel that in my Courage, Apology & Friendship essays I have caught up with infinitely greater writers than me and I have dared to conjecture a tweak. I also believe that most people in religions and media etc writing on these three concepts are miles/months/a long emotional progress behind the great writers and me. Of course I am not saying this omission invalidates their lives entirely! Though the Popes, Ayatollas and monarchs of the world do deserve endless thrashings for their hypocrisies with the received texts.

What earlier development begat these character-types? I am reminded of the old aphorism [anonymous]:

Sometimes in mid-series of sessions I ask a snap diagnostic supplementary question: I quote this aphorism, and say to my patient "Tell me instantly which you are". Usually they try to buy time (already paid for!) by pretending misunderstanding and then say ‘pessimist’. Strange to say, I knew that for most of my life 12-40 I was a pessimist, and since then I have known that I am more of an optimist – despite sickness and solitude. I don’t know how or why the change happened. I just knew I had changed self-ascription.

So to continue with some more fallacies and stories.

Half-way through a novel, a young woman, whom the reader knows to be crippled by a long-abiding anxiety that has recently become a terror, senses that a deeply sensitive and poetical old man is trying to en-courage her.

"It is either good or evil" he answered, "and you can’t decide that by counting incidents on your fingers. The decision is of another kind. But don’t let’s be abstract. Will you tell me what is bothering you?" ]

(Charles Williams : Descent into Hell : p.94 : my emphasis)

This extract is from the chapter called The Doctrine of Substituted Love. As Williams explains this original inflection of a received concept, one can see not only its echoes with the best in the Christian communion of believers, but a connection to the psyhcoanalytic concepts of ‘transference’ and ‘benign exchange of projections’.

All of us and children and Pavlov’s dog too, intuit or learn the value of inductive reasoning, without counting on fingers. This is, in Freud’s phrase ‘a great cultural achievement’. If one has the desire and patience, one comes to glory in its worth as the foundation of science. It is said

I will explain below why I was moved to use Williams’ phrase for the title of this essay. Next are two other modalities which ‘test’ one’s belief in knowledge, progress and human conversation & connection.

This is to attribute human emotions to things.

"The sun has got his hat on and looks so happy" .

The limiting case is to attribute to the thing the emotion one is feeling now.

As she pities Ferdinand hauling logs for the fire, Shakespeare’s Miranda remarks:

The pathetic fallacy is the residue of the child’s fantasy of limitlessness & omnipotence: His Majesty The Baby, I am the breast/mother/world. In the adult it is the inference from "I am full of feeling-X" to "The world is full of my feeling-X. Look!"

I now conjecture a fallacy connected to those we have been discussing

The basic idea and reasoning can be described using a scenario with two people: I and another person OP. OP has just said/done something. Here is a plausible sequence of my emotions. Emotion-1 will be disclosed below.

2) I feel puzzled.

3) I feel that I don’t know what the feeling in OP is.

4) I feel I don’t know what to feel about it.

5) I feel anxious.

6) I feel I should feel very bad for what I feel about OP.

7) I feel very bad

8) I feel I don’t know what I feel.

It is probable that the strongest and most abiding and conscious feelings will be 7,5,2. Feelings 3,4,6 & 8 may come in and out of consciousness. Tragically, the crucial feeling, Emotion-1a, "I feel angry at OP" has been had, but because it instantly produced terror, it has been repressed, lost. There is a feeling connected to this, which requires the connected Fallacy of False Imprecision be refuted. The fallacious thought is :

"It is impossible to say precisely that OP has behaved badly. Who could say, not me: and not you, the mere listener of this story"

The refutation of this would be:

"From my past knowledge of people, and from my recent conversations with a community of adults, I can say – as I believe they would too – that I judge OP to have behaved badly: and so by our values, OP deserves chiding, even punishment".

This would facilitate the feeling connected to (1a): (1b) "I feel justifiably angry at OP." Remember that feeling (1a) and (1b) require subsequent action in the world – daring to speak and do as adult moral agents must: whether alone, or with others, the person OP hurt needs to be rescued and helped and OP has to be chided and even punished . Whereas feeling (2) – (8) allow one to do nothing except feel mixed up: they also precisely preserve a world in which OP hurts me and others.

A PERFECT EXAMPLE

Cormo, a locum nurse, collars me by the water cooler in the Surgery Practice where I was temping, and in a jaunty conversational tone, with narrative enticement, begins;

[For this example, all one needs to know is that Cormo’s 80-year-old mother did a bad thing to an adult sibling. Let us agree that any cross-cultural community of adults would agree it was a bad thing.]

Me: (shocked tone) How spiteful!

C : (surprised, then immediately over-calm tone) Oh I don’t think it was spiteful.

Me: (shocked, disbelieving, testing tone) What is it then?

C : (flat tone) I don’t know. (with implication : It can’t be known! You don’t know!)

Cormo is bright, successful, powerful but right now is puzzled and very slightly upset: and so not well-enough to be challenged now by me. The conversation ends, as it must. The important thing to remember that there was a strong thought & its related emotion: "My mother has been a git again: and I feel so angry and despairing". For without these there was no story for Cormo to want to tell. There was a desire to share it and even test it with me. But as the impulse to tell was realised, a parallel terror was released: which disconnected and disallowed the inclusion of the strong thought & emotion in the tale to be told. Cormo knew instinctively that my response was to be negated to further prevent the terror. Perhaps afterwards Cosmo took refuge in the fallacy of imprecision & anaesthesia.

"That’s my mum! Who can say how awful she is at times? I feel numb. I can’t change her. I don’t know what to feel about it all. I feel nothing!".

Simultaneously Cosmo might ‘know’ that reading in a novel the exact tale he’d spoken, would cause him outrage at such a mother. As I say, the alternatives (1a) and (1b) require action:

1. Rescue and help the person mum has hurt.
2. Chide mum.

But Cosmo might also feel:

1. Cowardice at the thought of rescue and chiding.
2. Resentment at the mother for decades of poorish mothering
3. Resentment at the older sibling, hurt by our mother, for not supporting me in the past.

Here is a scene you might remember.

Now imagine this invented follow-up scene. The girl, let us call her Eyelids and remember that she is not a puppy, pursues him tentatively for several weeks: but doing nothing coarse or compromising to either of them. Then one day she asks to see him in his study, and there she declares her love.

At this, the audience might say with a sigh, "Ahhh!!!" or even "Ah! Bless!!!!" : and remember the wonder of innocent love, and the perfect mix of physical and intellectual fascination – Abelard & Heloise ….

But now imagine this still invented denouement. Indiana Jones – yes, it’s from the first film – on hearing Eyelid’s declaration of love, looks exasperated and says briskly: "Please wait here a moment". Then he goes into the bathroom, adjoining his study, and finds what looks like a rag: but is in fact his underpants from his recent trip to Borneo, worn for four days in the jungle and the long haul flight home. He marches back into his study, sticks the stinking mess under her nose and says loudly:

Of course Safety Speilberg would never dare to present such a provocative scene, even when it was true: as is the following tale.

Hypatia is reputed to have been the greatest female philosopher of Graeco-Roman times. She was also said to have been tall and beautiful. Young men, and only men could, queued and crowded to attend her classes. One day a pale diffident student begged a private meeting, and there he declared his love. It is said that Hypatia reached beneath her academic gown, pulled out an almost rotting menstrual pad, and then thrusting it in his face said "This is what you love".

I had spent months at the University Library trying to get some texts on this forgotten philosopher. From the first-met brief reference she’d seemed magical and mysterious and great: and tempted me to indulge in a what-if fantasy: What if she had founded a school like Plato, but for women too?! But when I read that story I was so upset at its emotional brutality and of course at her recourse to fallacy.

Tyranny proceeds by denying opportunity and then asserting the fact & value of supposedly eternal inequalities : don’t educate the people of tribe/country X: and now look how stupid they are, and so how fitting to be our slaves. (No State has ever achieved an economic ‘miracle’ or a cultural flowering without a slave class/caste.) These ethnic divisions are appalling enough: but far surpassing these brutalities is the tyrannical division by gender across the whole globe for seven millennia: and all the stories and the supposedly divinely revealed theologies to justify this. All have but two themes : women are incapable of learning to do what men can do: and women mostly desire to humiliate men.

When, as a teenager, I first read such stories and scriptures and aphorisms [as collected in the book Not in God’s Image], I thought they were disgusting and stupid and wrong. What was puzzling, even a little frightening, was that millions of people had believed such things for millennia, and in fact there were millions alive now who still did. It is important to add that I don’t wish to overvalue women by reversing the misogynistic essentialism: women are not naturally good or even kinder than men. Given the structure of the human body and the human mind/psyche both men and women are capable of great kindness and of great brutality. What kind of conversation could I possibly have with the misogynists.

I really just wanted to shoot them. Interestingly they are wrong by the very philosophy that they mistakenly believe supports their wretched paradigms. Hypatia is most tragic for having internalised such filthy ‘logic’: because in the end it didn’t save her from the boundless suspicion and wrath of the Patriarchs. Her Bishop was so anxious and jealous of her popularity he arranged for her to be arrested, tortured and murdered.

It might be more intellectually respectable to use the Hypatia true-tale: but I think it would make a more subtle point to go with my made-up-scene with Indiana Jones: adding only that Eyelids knows some philosophy as well as anthropology.

The scene is Prof Indiana Jones’s study. Just after he has re-entered with his underpants. Two players: IJ = Indiana Jones & EP = Eyelids Philosopher

IJ: (pressing the pants upon her) This is what you love!

EP: I don’t understand!

IJ : This [he points to the pants] is what you love.

EP: You’re mistaken – I love you!

IJ: And this is me!

EP: You are more than that, you always were, and you always will be. That was for the littlest while, a part of you, a tiny part of you….well obviously not the actual pants.. for I’m sure your mother didn’t leave a cotton-gin spinning in your belly-button. But even the matter of the matter on the pants –

IJ: (interrupting) That’s what I’m saying. That’s me, that’s what you love! All your legal phrases aren’t going to prove otherwise: I know women can be more cunning than Jesuits.

EP: (calmly resuming) Why do men think they can shock women with bodily matters! We live in our bodies more intensely than men: we carry inside our bodies new bodies and, not least, we have washed the clothes covering men’s bodies from birth to death, for scores of centuries. That smorgasbord of shit, piss, sweat and spunk that you brought in as if they were the signs of honour on the shield of a triumphant Spartan, and thrust in my face so brutally, was meant to prove what? They are the ordinary bits of an ordinary body attached to an extraordinary mind, now seemingly bent on pointless hatred. Seventy-two hours ago, all those smears were part of more substantial parts inside your body, where they then belonged. Some time later they were outside your body because they no longer belonged inside your body. Dirt, as the philosopher not the lawyer said, is (potentially-dangerous) matter out-of-place. Shit is not dirt inside your body or in the toilet bowl. Sweat, at first flow, isn’t dirt on your body or your clothes. Later it might become ugly, which is an aesthetic concept: or become poisonous, which is a medical concept: or a risk to others, which is a moral concept: but a little water can separate sweat from your body and from your clothes. You are a rational adult – whether you believe God-made or evolved – and you do many things with your body and your mind. That is the whole-what and the whole-who that I love. The you-ness of you isn’t summed up or reducible to one systemic function or to the actual waste-matter that the function processes.

IJ: Bu the whole body is born corrupting and dying. And I am nothing without my body.

EP: (laughs) Perhaps your priest would be shocked to hear you say that!

IJ: What you love will change and decay!

EP: I can live with and love a body that changes & decays - yours and mine - as long as the love between us doesn’t become corrupted. It’s life.

IJ: (almost screams desperately) It will die!

EP: (calmly) Even were you, in this madness, to dig up the corpse of your father and lay it on my bed, and say "That is what I will become (soon)", I would merely reply, "You are not identical with your father’s corpse, and right-now you are not even identical to your own imagined-corpse." Poor forked-creature with a fucked-up mind. Someone has poisoned your head with wicked rubbish. Those mad ideas don’t even have the integrity of the most famous philosophical paradox of identity. Imagine a small sailing ship called the Singularity. If one plank is removed, is it the same ship? Of course. If ten? Yes! If a Hundred? Yes. If over five years, but only at one item a day, every plank, sail, rope etc is removed and replaced by an as-good item, does the ship remain the much-loved Singularity? Well….. And what if all those removed items weren’t destroyed, but held in a safe warehouse and then five years later all used to remake a ship on the model of the Singularity, are there now two Singularities! Do true believers in a next life believe that they can only enter heaven with a suitcase or rather a skip containing a life’s-worth of waste and shed matter, because that was them always.

IJ: I feel wrecked.

EJ: Please let go of the comfort of those fallacies and stop tormenting me with them. You are never precisely-identical with a mere part of you. You are not now precisely-identical with your body at or before death. There are connections but they are not as merciless as you make them.

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

Such fallacious reasoning is cross-cultural but not gender-blind: it is nearly always men using it to viciously abuse women. Islam says its holy books give women greater respect, safety and power than Christianity. Hardly, just look at Saudi Arabia: it’s far, far worse than Catholic Rome, which is bad enough.

Or look at this slightly more benign Jewish joke. Judaism is distinguishable from both in having a longer tradition of jokes including those connected to the fallacy of which I am writing. (Freud 1905 p.53-4)

"Be! Here! Now!" was one of the hippy mantras – taken from Indian Gurus Inc coming westward, but really it is an axiom found in the mystical side of all faiths. The fallacy of identity or of hasty anticipation argues the opposite. Frued’s joke is a brilliant twist on the familiar sophistry of :

Instead of withholding a permission-to-enjoy as above, it permits a lesser joy :

All women will rot eventually.

You may enjoy this damaged woman right now.

Even in a more generally benign and less strident world faith, like Buddhism, there are familiar brutalisms. To the blandishments of Mara’s daughters, Buddha replies: (p.24)

"Beautiful you may seem….
You are nothing more than bags of skin
Filled with blood, pus, and filth."

Consider the logical, semantic and exegetical value of ‘seem’, & ‘nothing more than’. What of the tale of him auctioning the maggot-infected body of the courtesan Srima? (p.25). But though Buddhism does have its cautionary necropolis of wrecked female flesh, it is different from other faiths in having a reasonable number of tales of wrecked males, and crucially of comparative or rather shared example. Before that one must foreground a magnificent gesture of gynaephilia: (p.82)

It may be said Christianity has the mystic rose, but nothing as precise as this. Imagine St Anne educating the Virgin in that definition. Then remember the practice, even in the UK, of clitorodectomy.

The ageing Yuan-wu, remembering his lover, writes: (p.91-2)

There is profound sadness and regret here but neither mockery nor hatred of the woman. The ordinary natural evolution of the human genitals, both male and female, is noted in gentle but clear understatement ‘too wide’ & ‘too weak’ - but neither body is despised. The ‘adverb ‘too’ and the adjective ‘useless’ are used purely descriptively not with moral attack on the Self or the Other. Consider the unusual use of the typical Buddhist singularity phrases ‘one heart’ and ‘single-mindedly’: and the honourable intention to do-things-well in the adjective for their sex-style, ‘elegant’. One may infer that this couple didn’t go the Way of the Fallacy following Indiana Jones and Hypatia.

Last night I watched Joan Rivers talking to Jonathan Ross about her old body. I was so impressed by the generosity and raw truth of her humour. In the middle of night, woken by pain, I soothed myself by re-reading some of Gore Vidal’s scathing and witty critique of American sexual hypocrisy. For the first time I was struck by that similarity between them. I thought, I can’t think of any other present world-culture with an equivalent fearless pair: and how good that they are there. (Chomsky is for sure among the living immortals, but his jokes are rarer!) As Vidal would say, they were blessed by being young-enough during the high point of American integrity & hope in a secular liberal state. Though the Administration has been going hellwards in a SUV for decades, those two remain an ornament to values of the Justified & Ancient.

Aaahhh! Paris in the spring-time! Another pair of lovers made the journey. They were not great travellers and this weekend in France was an exception to the familiar beaches of Greece and Spain. So they were not even confident in negotiating the hotel and the restaurant. But when they arrived, everyone seemed so welcoming. They found a bistro near their modest hotel in the suburbs and settled down to their first night in France. The maitre-d was charming and fussed over the young lovers, the waitress brought the food with unhurried grace, but time seemed to fly: no doubt the good wine. It was gone midnight when they left. Neither seemed confident about where to turn for their hotel: but such had been the warm atmosphere in the bistro, and such a warm night it still was, that it didn’t matter. They knew even a long way round wouldn’t be without pleasure.

But after half an hour, the first trace of anxiety chilled the air: for it had only felt a ten-minute journey on the way out. Then, twenty minutes later, they were on the edge panic, having absolutely no idea how far they were, but certain that being near a dual carriageway wasn’t hopeful. And then just as they might have begun to feel the evening was ruined, and why didn’t they choose Rhodes again, a car pulled up. It was the maitre-d. Before they recognised him, he’d recognised them and the particular expression of desperate bravery on the face of a lost tourist. He laughed in sympathy and offered to take them to their hotel.

Sipping on their night-caps, they felt flush - for his miraculous appearance and great generosity had added to their sense of a good adventure in a new country.

The next day they took the Metro into the heart of Paris, wandered down the boulevards and through the gardens and then for their last night, they went into a fancy restaurant. Again the food was superb and again they left late, but this time, and to prevent a reprise of the previous night’s futile footfall, they decided to take a taxi. Astonishingly, they seemed able to hail one instantly: and clambered in, delighted that another traveller’s tricky task was fluently done. Before changing gear the driver asked them where they were going. She, being the elder, voiced as carefully and respectfully as she could in French, the name of their Hotel and its street. The one thing everyone had told them before they left was that the French, unlike most continentals, are very touchy about foreigners not-trying to speak French or, even worse, presuming English is good enough. So they were horrified when the driver immediately said "Engleesh! Ah! Non! Get out! Allez! Get out!". And knowing they were at the limits of their school-French, and more importantly, too shocked and humiliated, they quickly got out. After recovering some soothing expletives to blurt to the night air, they returned to the Metro.

This was many years ago, another tale told to me at a water-cooler in Hereford. My first thought of course was - what a surprising experience of racism, white on white. But the second and more powerful emotion was - how lucky that the experience of great kindness happened first, for it is a truth of common experiential psychology that subsequent pain cannot dilute prior pleasure to the same intensity that subsequent pleasure cannot dilute prior pain. It was clear from the teller’s tone that she felt that the memory of the hurt of the taxi-driver’s appalling insult couldn’t entirely displace the memory of wondrous delight at the maitre-d’s generosity.

Blanche du Bois famously remarked "I have always depended upon the kindness of strangers". The best example of the Foreigner-Shower is from Twelfth Night, when Sebastian, newly arrived in Illyria, is offered all that is worth having in life: a beautiful, cultured and wealthy woman suddenly offers marriage, home, position but most importantly, love. As the reader knows, this proves to be a misunderstanding: then there is disappointment, and danger, but finally, at the denouement, a recovery of the initial fantasy offer. Is this observation about dilution true or at least useful? But first, here is a digression from reckoning emotions to measuring things.

One of the basic instructions in the science labs at school was "Always Add Acid!". So if a task required arriving at a certain volume of water & acid, you must prepare the volume of water first, and then add the volume of acid. Of course you could (legally) add water to acid: but there would be a greater danger of being splashed by acid. So safety seems to be a crucial criterion. It is of course possible to put on acid-resistant protective lab-gear each time one wishes to use acid: though the lab-manager or factory manager might balk at such putting-on & taking-off of bulky gear. Then time comes into the equation as well as safety. To conclude, in this realm one is certain that one can accurately describe and quantify the things that are being compared and added or subtracted: and that given enough time there is no danger whatsoever.

The metaphor in this digression equates acid/poison with the painful experience.

Mr Dan Jones reminds me that we are genetically programmed to generalise: and that there might be an evolutionary advantage to hasty generalisation. Time & Safety fit into human exchange of emotions & desires differently to their presence in the human task of science.

Perhaps this privileging of the direction of generalisation – that the generalisation from a first good experience has more ‘weight’ ‘power’ ‘resilience’ than the generalisation from a first bad experience - has its roots in a good-enough early life. Do happy babies generalise or rather does the continuance of good experience confirm their ‘feeling’, ‘intuition’ ‘thought’ of their previously established sense of worth, loveability, even omnipotence? When and how does ‘thinking’ begin? When and how do babies/kids get an understanding of ‘causality’ ‘safety’ or even ‘generalisation’? Is the faculty of generalisation born as a defence against repetition of unhappiness/pain?

Let’s take a common test. People often use the distinction between those who see the glass as half-full, and those who see the glass as half-empty. Interestingly, this assumes a lateral perspective. Imagine looking at that glass vertically: from below, the glass one sees only-water: from above one can see the glass rim and so emptiness & water. Is the former judgement delusional and the latter realistic: which are different categories to half-full meaning optimism and half-empty meaning pessimism? The very minor ‘misperception’ is that each person sees the other as ‘ignoring’ the value of the less-privileged half.

The Shaolin priest, Caine, helps (yet again) another stranger. Later, feeling strengethened and comforted, the stranger says with some puzzlement.

"If you trust someone you know will you not be hurt."

To which our gnomic man replies:

Around the same time I came across Dylan’s mighty line:

"Everybody will help you.
Some people are very kind.
Come on, give it to me.
I’ll keep it with mine."

What ‘it’ signifies is never clarified. That is why this is a great Kantian aesthetic idea. As a teenager I received these examples, as intended, as great lessons of life. For so much of human hope and connectivity depends on trusting strangers. The generalisation is that there is some good in each human, and it might be that on this occasion you might find it and share it. I am reminded of Stanhope’s remark above about ‘decisions of another kind’. Of course this is not a fallacy like the others above, but there is a connection.

Years ago, I shared accommodation with a talented Eastern man of 25. He would often ask my help and take it. But I knew that fundamentally he didn’t trust me. One day he spontaneously told me this story.

He’d told me many stories of betrayals in his extended family: the stuff of ordinary life. But nothing in fifteen years had dented this appalling command. Tragic! As are the mothers in Lou Reed’s song Sweet Jane : my emphases.

The emphases are mine but isn’t he right to call such a generalising mother ‘evil’!

What about the concepts of ‘similarity’ & ‘difference’ - which logically & psychologically must precede generalisation and extrapolation?

Among Freud’s many famous phrases is this: "the narcissism of minor differences" . About the only remark that can stand by this is Geetz’s observation: "If anthropology is obsessed with anything, it is how much difference difference makes."

I suppose that the first modalities are the touch of, smell of, voice of, and then sight of the mother and, sometimes, the accompanying taste of milk. The infant learns that the same sensation is connected to relief of anxiety and comfort and pleasure: and the different sensation is connected to increasing anxiety, fragmentation, pain, and terror.

Now a story from the end of life. About thirty years ago, a friend told me this story:

"My grand-mother is forever saying things like – "Oh I saw that woman from ‘Coronation Street’ in the Market Square’ or ‘I saw Trevor MacDonald in the grocers’. She’s not really got dementia but she doesn’t get out much "

We laughed about her in a kindly way.

Years later, about six months after I arrived in Cambridge, by when I had got to be acquainted with a few people, I started getting the sense that I was seeing in the streets of Cambridge people I knew in Nottingham. There would be an initial sensation of surprise and hope, and then as the prolonged gaze proved it to be a stranger, I felt a bit foolish and troubled. But I also felt puzzled by the felt frequency: which though not numerically high for a period, felt intrusive. Then I remembered the old gran, now long dead and free of double-trouble. Is this my early dementia?, I thought.

Then I read somewhere ( that pre-Google anonymous source of crucial but half-remembered facts) that most ordinary people can only recognise and recall clearly half a dozen facial types. Of course police, forensic officers, spies etc will be more adept, as it is a requirement of their job. If I now conjecture an explanation it would be this:

a) We are ordinarily, not defensively, disposed to map the past on to the future, and expect similarities.
b) New situations create anxiety.
c) Anxiety causes the mapping in (a) to proceed faster & perhaps sloppily.
d) Desire might cause us to see a hoped-for, and comforting, face.
e) Phantasy might make one believe one is elsewhere, now.

After a few weeks that sensation passed. Perhaps I was able to use the new faces I had now seen more frequently to anchor my sense of contented-enough-being in Cambridge without a reflex belief and hope I was in Nottingham. That I had decided I wasn’t content in Nottingham and should move to Cambridge doesn’t alter this sequence of emotions: the point is the anxiety about newness and differences, and defensive patterns. By chance, I then came upon a Douglas Adams novel, in which a character in a panicky situation remembers that he had read somewhere that a person can only keep seven thoughts in his head, and so if he tried to focus on seven new facts/thoughts the one that was troubling him would drop out of consciousness and thereby bring relief. Of course it doesn’t work for him, but isn’t it an immediately appealing strategy?

These almost facetious examples are valuable in indicating how close to the consciousness of all adults are such defences and dispositions. People have learned them and learned to resort and rely on them because they work. If one says ordinary people are addicted to their defences this sounds rather ponderous, bringing in the image of the utterly messed-up junkie in the gutter. The more amenable analogy is the brilliant man or woman in the boardroom or theatre who also happens to be a nicotine-addict viz an ordinary smoker. If you’ve ever spent a few minutes with a person who’d even prefer a fag right now, let alone needs one, you will know how quickly they start generating all sorts of unmanageable emotions, anxiety, vexation, upset, rage….

One afternoon, my elder sister asked to speak to me. I was ten and she was no more than sixteen: but my parents, being less confident of their spoken English, had asked her to go to my class’s Parents Evening at Junior School and discuss my annual report.

"Your teachers said that you are very good at English, particularly spelling."
I smiled, inward chuffed.
"But your arithmetic is weak."
I bit my lower lip.
"So you’ve got try harder, and do more at home"
"I can practice my spelling." I said brightly, and it should be added innocently.
"What’s the good of that" my sister said slightly exasperated. It’s your sums you’ve got to work on!"

I was ten then. But looking back from fifty, it is tragic how often I, and most of the people I have ever met or heard of, have made that that same bright error, without the charming extenuation of childishness. An ancient variation of this error appears in the following Eastern tale.

Entering a new village, the first thing a Sufi Master sees is a man frantically scrabbling in the dust outside his house.

"What have you lost?" he asked.
"I’ve lost a most precious family ring"
"May I help you seek. Where did you lose it?"
"Inside my house."
The Master was puzzled. "Then why do you look here?"
"There’s more light" he, also innocently, replied.

A unjustifiably confident man is speaking with unnecessary enthusiasm to a room-full of some understandably jaded customer service managers from various backgrounds and professions in a top-hotel Conference suite in Paris VII.

Mr Corporation Trainer, almost waiting for applause, smiles smugly and asks ‘What does this tell us? What can we learn from this?

The managers are appalled. Well, some of them, the grown-up ones. They can see what’s coming. They barely know how to contain their sense of insult that someone younger than them is about to tell them, mostly middle-aged managers of decades of experience, as he does:

A patient told me this much-recycled story: adding how distressing it was that her senior manager thought the exercise was of Delphic newness and value. The amount of money spent by her Dept on such modish trainers was a further misery! She knew it was a trick. But hadn’t quite been able to say : "This exercise is a dirty trick!" : nor name it as a fallacy – of the extreme case. No ordinary person should be required to proceed through an ordinary day, at work or beyond, on the assumption, false generalisation, that most or any of the people they meet are reeling half-broken from immediate or recent trauma. It is the opposite generalisation that is sane: most people you will meet today will be living ordinary lives. Unless of course your job is with the emergency professions, with a reasonable assumption that every hour of your day will bring you people who bring you tales of emergency and horror.

This wretched exercise can be refuted by introducing another ‘behavioural’ fallacy.

Xenophobia may have survival value. But in times of great danger, the best creature to ask for help is another human adult, not a dog, horse or a badger or even Skippy! Most humans will help another human when children are involved. Perhaps a child is second only to the white stick as a sign of safe helpability. I am obviously thinking of the much-replicated research where strangers will not help a person apparently fallen on the subway floor with a bottle beside them or even a bag: but will if there is a white stick. In the public space the parent’s task is to protect their child from danger and particularly dangerous strangers: but it is also his/her task to protect strangers from his children’s excesses. The widower, as the adult in that family group, had the task to care for his shattered kids, and also not disturb other citizens. This might require him to find a way to say to the older traveller in an adult tone:

He has no sense of his connection as citizen to the older traveller. He needs help to control his kids but doesn’t dare ask for help. He only recognises the other man when he senses the latter is about to attack.

I too have been the man on the train….

Some weeks ago, on a Sunday, I caught for Cambridge, the late afternoon train or, as I call it, the Galleries & Sunday Dad’s Express. You know what I mean - earnest undergrads going up to see the latest ‘elephant’ in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern. Or weary paterfamilias dragging their excitable nippers from gawking at real elephants at the zoo to ritalin-smashing meals at Macdonalds. Modern life eh!

So there I was unfolding my newspaper when the riptide arrived. From behind The Observer I saw that the first was a party of three that settled into a four-seater diagonally to me. It was a very slender middle-aged woman with two girls – on the cusp of Junior School. One of the girls had an olive complexion, like her mother’s, and the other was the usual English pink-to-carrot. I could tell from her handbag and the bulging Science Museum carriers, that the kids immediately dived into, that this was a typical Cambridge clever-clogs family for whom mere leaf-kicking on Jesus Green wasn't enough..

Not long after, another group of three took the four-seater across the aisle from them and in front of me. These were three lads, all legs and new adenoids. What are stereotypes for – but to create time to snooze: though there’s no chance of that I thought with this trio of teenagers, seemingly biding the weeks until they could burst out of school forever.

But they were so quiet that I almost dared to imagine a relaxing journey home. Let me say I am not a complete old-git. I like kids and I don’t expect people in public places to behave as if they were in a chapel or a doctor’s waiting room. And yet I was unsettled by the somewhat manic energy coming from the female trio. Apart from the typical hand-slapping & squeals of little girls oblivious of where they are, there was a strange drift into a different naughtiness. It seemed they were playing the ‘dare game’ – the forfeit being that they had to stand on the seat or even the table and say something silly or rude. When I looked over I saw that the mother was strangely involved in the naiive transgressions of the kids: she seemed to be orchestrating the game rather than merely supervising its excesses.

I was thinking about the cause and meaning of this moral inversion, and still not-reading the paper, when suddenly, out of the quiet-boy-zone, there was an explosion of emotion and one boy was confronting the other two with a knife.

I sensed everyone instantly shrinking - the other boys lost their aspirations to cool, the woman drew in the two girls: and I felt my stomach flip. Then there was the familiar tableau of menace – the person with the weapon, having exhausted all his daring in getting the weapon from its place of secret darkness into the well-lit faces of everyone, was now paralysed. At such a moment the terrorist, who hasn’t followed through, waits upon the world, waits upon his imagined God, to blow upon him some releasing energy. He has lost his self-sufficient volition. If only the other person would insult him again, then he could embrace them in murder or at least hard-blood. But of course the preference is for the other person to release him from a homicidal rage he can no longer bear: and perhaps also cloak him in the shredded honour of belated compassion.

I got up, and shouted at the boy "Behave yourself!"

As expected, he suddenly came to life but only to reverse all the muscularities of a moment earlier: putting away the knife as he slowly sat down, in a posture of involution. His own sense of shock would keep him preoccupied for a while. The other boys had their own shock and relief to digest slowly: and I do not doubt were eager to find their mothers.

I could sense the mother let out a sigh of relief, and the girls return to quieter games.

The following few minutes of quietness were finally broken by the driver announcing the advent of Cambridge station. I decide to leave quickly, before both sets of strangers, but before I could, the mother came over and said: "That was such a strong thing to do. Thank you"

I smiled acceptance, and left thinking of the intonation she had placed on the word ‘strong’.

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

This story was told to me by a friend Dr S. after my story about the Corporate trainer’s story had come up in conversation. She was the naughty, regressing, briefly non-adult, mother on the train with her daughter and her daughter’s friend. I asked her to write down the story with reflections: but she couldn’t/wouldn’t. Because I was intrigued by it, I wrote the story from the man’s point of view. In fact, I have been such a intervening-man – once, at a railway station in Copenhagen in 93.

(i) We just don’t know how scarcity happens?

(ii) We just don’t know how that nation over there has become so rich so quickly.

I propose that guilt (basic guilt, and for the moment let us say pre - or non theological guilt) is the epiphenomenon of the meeting of three irreconcilable moments of awareness – the awareness of boundless desire : the awareness of insufficiency or scarcity of resources to satisfy them: the awareness that one is less powerful than the person(s) with the resources for one’s satisfaction.

One learns that power is the ability to satisfy desire. This leads to the conclusion that in a community of non-omnipotent humans, someone’s desire must fail to be satisfied and to the puzzle of how to live with this and them. Power is attained and maintained by the few appropriating enough initially common, un-owned resources and then using this advantage to limit and police the desires of the many by misrepresenting the scarcity of resources : and by misrepresenting the greed of the powerful as their inherited or ‘earned’ reward. It is very rare for there to be non-human-made scarcity. When, by war or colonialism, a State acquires a greater pool of cheap or even slave labour than its trading partners, then it flourishes much, much faster than them: there is no miracle.

Guilt is the King’s or the Pope’s or Ayatollah’s or the PM’s fearsome senior policeman, the ruffian in the agora, who introduces Sergeant Remorse as the good soft cop who will help you. Is it yet another foundationalist, and so invalid, axiom to state that a refusal to share resources is madness, and a desire for omnipotence is absolute madness? Or to ask a more ordinary question, how much politics should be embedded in psychoanalytic theory? To accept these axioms would be one of the maturational markers I speak of above!

[ Let us briefly admit God. In theologies, guilt - both in external fact and in internal sense - is only ever completely erased in the post-mortem state: and it is commonly the engine of the effort to get to that right (pain-free extra-virgin) state. Of course the pilgrim should behave well out of for love of God, and not out of fear of God, but God’s (self-)appointed administrators are happy enough with enough fear.

This again reintroduces the idea of the direction of explanation. Is it insultingly reductive or honourably true to present a secular account of human guilt : and then argue that theology merely offers a psycho-pathological extrapolation? Unfortunately, most people’s experience is of understanding guilt through the theological inheritance, and then perhaps acquiring, through life and philosophy, a belief in the power of Occam’s razor to lose some explanatory entities and concepts. Despite that, it might still be important to keep the two explanations separate in order to evaluate what psychoanalysis has contributed. We’ll see that its main contributions are:

1) It takes the paradigm act and sensation of guilt and places them as possible experiences much earlier in human development, and also outside consciousness.

2) It posits the occasional reversal of the paradigm causal sequence by arguing that a sense of an unconscious crime can cause a conscious agonising sense of guilt that is relieved only by a committing consciously an almost pointless crime. ]

Here are some examples:

1: "The world is a hospital"

2: "Wieczowiecz was more like himself than anyone else I know"

3:

1. A serious newspaper does not have a fashion column.
2. A serious newspaper does not have an astrology column.
3. Psychoanalysis is not a science (like physics).
4. Scientology is not a religion (like Christianity).
5. Christianity & Islam are merely pan-Judaism with neurotic frills.
6. A thing becomes holy only when desecrated.
7. There is only forgiveness, if there is any, where there is the unforgivable.

Definitions are intended to provided information and limit interpretation. They should have sufficient precision to perform this function. Are these examples all the same? How do they succeed or fail? Let us look further at these examples.

1: "The world is a hospital" (poem)

One gets the meaning of this quickly enough. It’s not a dictionary meaning but something is communicated. We don’t really need Eliot’s next line of the poem:

"We won’t get well". The structure of the definition is that part of an object is use to define the whole object.

Imagine similar definitions and consider their affective power:

The World is a school / stadium / theatre / pub.

With respect to the hospital, there is an echoing partiality: it is implied that a part-function of the object is its entire and only function.

["No one gets out of here alive" - as Jim Morrison said.]

But from the 18C, humans have been born in hospitals, and got out alive!

2: "Wieczowiecz was more like himself than anyone else I know" (biography)

Here all of an object, (including all of its functions) is used to define the object.

This is a tautology. There is no new information. But the implied comparison, and the statement that the comparison will fail, is an oblique & odd but arresting way to offer high praise.

A capacity to understand metaphors and to mint new metaphors is often said to be a criterion for assessing a person’s ability to benefit from therapy. Of course the facility for metaphor (metonymy, synecdoche ) can become another defense. Whereas 1 & 2 above don’t add new knowledge, the assertions in 3 are offering new information or at least hypotheses.

3a : "A serious newspaper does not have a fashion column."

A perennial assertion, most recently made in last week’s Guardian to the delightfully frivolous but knowledgeable correspondent of Ask Hadley. Even a cursory glance at the functionally unnecessary embellishments of military and ecclesiastical dress through the ages – the bench-mark of seriousness being God & War – reveals a powerful desire in human beings to express belonging and difference through clothes. Both Dante & Tolstoy were tragically obsessed with women’s cleavage lines! The complainant is wilfully defining ‘serious’ as ‘without fashion’.

3b: "A serious newspaper does not have an astrology column".

This is slightly more complicated than above. The journalist’s credo is to tell truth to power. Even the fashion correspondent tells the truth of the fact and meaning of the human desire for incremental changes in fabric. But a few years ago a hundred top scientists took out full-page adverts in the papers to state their belief that astrology’s pretension to science and worth had been refuted. So astrology can really only fit into a serious paper in the games section.

3c: "Psychoanalysis is not a science (like physics)."

This debate turns on the emotional valency one gives to the predictive element embedded in explanation (of causation). We would be afraid not to be able to predict how our cars and rockets and transfusions will behave. Though we know human affairs are complicated by the causal factors of desire and reason, we are not alarmed, for we know we can enter into dialogue with humans in a way we can’t with cars : just recall Fawlty birching his mini! In fact psychoanalysis has produced viable predictions with regard to attachment, loss etc.

3d: "Scientology is not a religion (like Christianity)."

To an atheist, and who better to judge, you can’t separate two belief systems both of which are predicated upon supernatural entities whose actions & forces are even less predictable than human desire: and so are distinguishable, by Occam’s razor, from as much rationality as an adult can bear. To assert the above is to axiomatically privilege Christianity and then use it to hammer all other supernatural beliefs.

3e: "Christianity & Islam are merely pan-Judaism with neurotic frills."

This aphorism that foregrounds the historical and theological fact that Judaism is not only necessary and but almost sufficient to define the other more vain & vaunting world religions. Judaism is essentially the beliefs :

Christianity asserts the divinity of the unifying Final Prophet and his invitation to all world communities of believers. Islam ‘regresses’ to asserting, like Judaism, the non-divinity of the Final Prophet, but keeps the Christian invitation to all communities. It also adds more binding social rules – like the pilgrimage to Mecca - & practices like the veil & cousin-marriage. Sikhism also asserts the non-divinity of the Final Prophet and locates it a Holy Book. (As one born into Sikhism, I see only familiar trickery in these too-loose definitions)

Freud, the famous Godless Jew, was much taken with the metaphor of archaeology to describe PA, but he was also fascinated by the ancient civilisations. He risked great opprobrium by suggesting that monotheism came to Israel from Egypt by one of its citizens, Moses.

It is always worthwhile repeating the aphorism heading this section: and to add another: "Anti-semitism is the rage of ungrateful plagiarists" . By history and definition, Islamic anti-semites are the worst – being twice as ungrateful as Christians. (See the recent pronouncements of Iran’s PM). Pagans saw and still see Christianity plagiarising and appropriating its festivals to shore up rather unbelievable tenets of faith. As Christianity crumbles, Crimble remains – mistletoe and wine.

3f: "A thing becomes holy only when desecrated."

A sacred text is a thing that all people in a group considers sacred: or at least that the most powerful people in a group insists that all must consider sacred. Even before the age of mechanical reproduction, the designation of a text as sacred was instantly followed by the making of copies. All printing did was increase the speed and volume of copy-making. ( I don’t know if copies were made of totems.)

History tells us that men and women have often brutally killed other men and women who were suspected of dishonouring, let alone destroying, the sacred text. There is a tragic poignancy to the fact that very often both killers and killed were illiterate: for the powerful definers of text also restricted literacy. Consider the deaths of illiterate peasants in Pakistan who rioted after being cunningly fed the unsubstantiated rumour that thousands of miles away in Cuba the Koran was being flushed down the toilet.

Now imagine a mono-faith society, which has a holy-day on which the community gathers to see the trashing & burning of a copy of its sacred texts: to remind all believers that holyness is elsewhere and elsehow to be attained. And what if the State of a multi-faith community instituted a State holiday on which all the faith communities gathered to burn copies of their respective texts, for the edification and good of all?

I am ashamed of the Sikhs who wrecked the play in Birmingham because of its virtual presentation of a holy place. I would prefer to live in a community where the holy-text is burned: for there are always far more copies of that text than any other more dangerous to the State & the Clerisy.

A Buddhist parable has a mendicant monk arrive at a temple in winter. It is so cold that he takes one of the small wooden Buddhas and uses it to make a fire. When the Temple caretaker sees him, he chides him for sacrilege. The monk merely replies "Where is Buddha not now"

But of course the Secular Sate or the Theocratic State won’t sanction such a unifying ritual for its citizens and believers : for the sacred text is also their policeman in the house.

I minted this aphorism to show the form of Derrida’s rhetorical evasions: as next.

3g: "There is only forgiveness, if there is any, where there is the unforgivable."

This is Derrida. In fact it is a rhetorical device he uses a lot.

It is an invalid argument. And it is so tiresome & morally worthless: for not only does it offer no guidance on how to proceed, it is anti-human – asserting a doomed counsel of perfection. It also includes the fallacy described above - of the extreme case.

Psychoanalysis is called the talking cure because it is predicated on two beliefs:

1. The symptom is a non-verbal communication of a distress: an anxiety about desire.
2. Finding words for the anxiety and desire, and for perhaps even the causes of the anxiety and desire, will dissolve the anxiety and clarify the true desirability and achievability of the desire.

The fallacy is a word-presentation that has come to feel valuable as a way of managing a thing-presentation of anxiety&desire. It may not even name the desire or anxiety and desire: but it is a successful defence of containment, and offers an experience of understanding that is experientially felt to be true. Because it is a verbal formulae, and involves reasoning, it is not as perfectly alexthymic as say (bodily conversion) hysteria. Is it a metaphor or hyperbole ( a fallacious extrapolation!) to say that in the resort to fallacy, reason is being used not merely irrationally but hysterically! In my pre-clinical days I often used the formula - only bad emotion can support a bad argument.

Psychoanalytic theory unravels the structure of bad emotion – explanations in terms of ambivalent desires, nameless terrors, attacks on linking, the pathological defence of psychotic pockets and the hope of health through talk and transference. At the least, one can say that the resort to bad reason/ fallacies is over-determined by ambivalent affect.

Bion’s brilliant concept of the ‘attacks on linking’ can be, and how aptly, linked to the ancient Aristotelean concept of akrasia – weakness of will: why do intelligent humans do what their practical reason has told them is wrong, and might also be against their own well-being. Reason is by definition predicated on linking : of statement with statement, of feeling with feeling and of feeling with statement. In the resort to fallacy, statements are linked (forceably and unreasonably) to produce a generalisation that produces the affect of containment and relief. The puzzle is whether this fallacious but allowed linking is predicated on a deeper attack on linking produced in the child by a Lou Reedian type mother: and which prevents a healthier development.

Of course the therapeutic space is not an occasion for seminars on logic: and I am also sceptical of the way reason is situated so called cognitive therapy. I keep as a guard Freud’s brilliantly cautionary remark on "offering menu cards in a time of famine."

But in this project we are trying to explore the following possibilities:

i) What kind of intellectual and emotional energy is bound within the therapist as he comes to be able to name/identify/ascribe the fallacies that puzzle/infect the client’s discourse outside and within the therapeutic space.

Is it important for her to keep in mind that though, long ago, she could & did intellectually assent to the fallacies in half-an-hour, the process of emotional understanding took months not hours viz that binding affect happens slowly?

ii) How is she able to use this energy, bound within her as unified (intellectual and emotional) understanding, to track the excess affect over-determining the patient’s communications?

iii) How might the therapist help the patient to relinquish the defense of fallacies?

Taxonomic refinements are intended to help by clarifying theory and easing practice. Do these suggested new fallacies make sense, and do they help?

I remember many years ago my good friend Mr J ( a trained -philosopher, nurse and group-therapist) spoke with great enthusiasm about Matte Blanco. So I put him on my to-read list, and then got side-tracked. But it wasn’t surprising when he replied to a first brief sketch of this ‘essay’ with a reference to Matte Blanco. What was surprising and reassuring was when he added that he felt that despite the similarities in importing certain philosophical moves into psychoanalysis, I was trying to do something slightly different.

Most of this entire draft was written before I finally entered IMB’s bi-logical world through Rayner’s clear and generous exposition. It is, as Rayner says, one of the few original and significant developments of PA theory. For me it was especially gratifying how he foregrounds the affect in all thinking. His ideas about sameness-difference, about transforming infinite-thinking into lower accessible levels and about the necessity of balancing predictability & unpredictability in human exchange, and the importance of poetics & rhetoric are very rich. I will return to him.

But as I have just said above, I wanted, here at my much lower theoretical level, to explore something slightly different and perhaps more easily teachable and useable in clinical practice or even ordinary conversation – to dare a different kind of thinking.

We are programmed to recognise pairs and singularities because we grow up seeing and knowing we have pairs of eyes, ears, hands, lungs, feet, breasts, testicles etc but only one mouth, nose, penis, heart etc. Though this might seem a weak argument it does offer a suggestive idea. I will use this idea to introduce another pair of ideas to deepen our understanding of the pair we have just highlighted - similarity & difference. The new pair is sufficiency & superficiality. No doubt some readers will balk at the former being yoked to the latter: and why I have omitted its ‘natural’ connector - necessity. It is true that the pair sufficiency & necessity do vital work in philosophy and law. (I’ve looked at the misuse of the phrase not-necessarily in another essay.) Perhaps all adolescents should be given six months rigorous tuition and discussion in this matrix: similarity-difference-sufficiency-superficiality-negativity.

It would be of infinitely more value than most of what is taught then and forgotten within six months.

I was very moved when I read that Wittgenstein had a fondness for a proverb from his childhood: Everything it is what it is and not another thing. One imagines Derrida and Yoko Ono calling Ludwig into the playground and saying "What’s the difference!"

One of the most powerful interpretations, suggestions, communications I can make to a patient is helping them to distinguish & see the value of distinguishing two judgement-positions when they are comparing two situations:

POSITION A : superficial similarity but sufficient difference
POSITION B : superficial difference but sufficient similarity

The linchpin concept in these manoeuvres is under-what-head or by-what-criterion.
a) Aristotle proposed abstract categories - shape, colour etc
b) There are functional categories - community usage of objects/people
c) Finally there are ad hoc categories - whatever I’m feeling now

EXAMPLES:

1. A banana is sufficiently similar to an orange - by the category ‘fruit’.

Both are sufficiently different from knife & gun - by the category of ‘weapon’.
But remember the Monty Python sketch of the evening-class in Self Defence against Assailants using Fruits.

2. An orange is sufficiently similar to a potato and to a stone by the criterion ‘circular shape’

PUZZLE - is a tomato sufficiently or only superficially similar to an orange or a marrow? Biologists and cooks will disagree.

3) An abused person has flashbacks: feeling right-now-present is exactly-past. In extreme, intense cases, the person has the sense of the abuse-moment utterly continuous with all times including now. Interestingly, one technique CBT or other directive therapists teach is - when you feel the flashback coming on, look down and watch as you stamp your foot several times, then hold both feet still. This is designed to persuade or counter-shock the person into seeing & feeling that they are in the safe-present and not the dangerous past: that there is sufficient difference between now and then. And because the ego is a bodily ego, it is important that this knowledge is felt in the body - in sight and touch - so that the fragmenting ego can reintegrate.

3. The psychoanalytic concept transference describes the experience of a patient when they perceive and respond to the analyst as if they were someone else, a parent, child, friend, manager etc. In their psychic reality they feel there is only a superficial difference but sufficient similarity between the analyst and their private person viz Position B. (The therapist’s version of this misperception is called counter-transference)

Note that this is subtly different from ordinary expression such as "You’re just like your mother!" The very comparison indicates sufficient awareness of the difference between the two persons. Perhaps we have an echo here of the difference between simile and metaphor : "He was like a lion" and "He was a lion". (As we are discussing people’s ability to use such simple concepts as ‘similarity’, it may be worth recording here the common psychoanalytic belief that one way of assessing a person’s ability to use psychoanalysis is their ability to understand & mint metaphors.) But the emotions involved in these domestic utterances can be of absolute intensity: the best and most poignant example is when a child or teenager says to his/her mother’s new boyfriend "You are not my dad!"

The therapist’s task is to facilitate patient’s passage from Position-B to Position-A. Ideally the therapist can quickly recover and return to Position A: or else needs his/her own therapist’s help.

I am reminded of another of Oscar Wilde’s great paradoxes: "Imagination is that faculty which enable us to see people in their real rather than ideal relations." Isn’t it perfect that Wilde says ‘imagination’ and not ‘thinking’ or ‘reasoning? For imagination is more frequently and more intensely inscribed with affect and emotion than is thinking.

It is no good the therapist ever saying "Look! See! I’m not your (mad) dad"

Just as the step-dad’s task is not to get into an abstract discussion about definitions, "I pay for your trainers and make up and so I am your dad!" but to recognise what complex mixture of emotions has produced the tone & gesture behind the proposition: so the therapist’s task is always to track the emotion and affect and gesture located in the patient’s body, and sometimes even floating in the room. She has to recognise it and then defuse, unravel, and explain it - thereby dissolving it, and hopeful preventing a repetition. Or to put it another way, she has to recognise the Id in the affect, and then transform that into Ego: or to help transform the beta elements in (supporting) the fallacious reasoning and misperceptions into alpha elements for thinking & linking and for benign emotional connections with others.

Here is an experience as common in ordinary life as in therapy. You are talking to someone and the conversation drifts towards argument and then you are both emotionally involved. Now imagine suddenly saying to the other person:

"But tell me this: what would you do if I showed you were wrong?"
OR
"I will prove you are wrong. Then what will you do with all your miserable emotion?"
OR
"You are so afraid of being wrong, you’re talking nonsense. When I have proved, for indeed I easily can, that you are utterly wrong, you will want to kill me, even as you smile politely."

I think this is one of the hardest things to be aware of in the lounge, pub and therapeutic space: how much affect & emotion (most unconscious) is supporting what is being said. So that any response must also be to the emotions not merely an intellectual riposte. This is acutest in the realm of uttered fallacies.

I conjecture that people sometimes keep a fallacious argument going for fear of winning and unleashing a reprisal. They know they are double-bound in that even withdrawing from a mad argument will lead to attack.

I close with another of Oscar’s insights:

Isn’t there a perfect subsidiary paradox in the phrase brute reason : reason distinguishes humankind from the brutes: and yet humans can manifest brute reason. And the phrase "hitting below the intellect" , by being an echo of ‘belt’ and implying stomach/testicles, reveals the physicality of reason and how often it aims to inflict bodily blows!

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Imagine not having the bad emotion, anxiety, envy, rage… that fuels such rarely defined non-classical, fallacies.

Who the fuck are you to make these big-mouthed assertions?

I think I am.

Consider the suggestion that there are there are 3 levels of thinking-talk.

1. LOW THEORY - The Sun, The Daily Mail, the pub….

Low cognitive content BUT high emoting.

2. MEDIUM THEORY – could be anyone , anywhere ( more below)

Significant cognitive content & Moral Daring

3. HIGH THEORY - The Seminar, Conference, lahdedah party…

High cognitive content BUT little emoting

So the two elements of a conversation are

b) Emotional & Moral Daring

One can explain this by the analogy of juggling & catch. This captures the physicality of understanding.

1. Basic Catch – one ball thrown to one Other and thrown back to Self.

Learnable and playable at 12 months.

2. Exchange Catch – two balls thrown simultaneously and caught.

Learnable & playable at 2-3 years.

3. Basic Solitary Juggling – two balls – learnable at 5.
4. Advanced Solitary juggling – 3 and then 3+ balls learnable at 7+
5. Juggle & Catch – 3 balls juggled and thrown & caught :

One can do this at 10 until 90 years……

Let us say that : one ball = one fact/joke/cliché/prejudice….

1. Vary thrown item – in the juggle and catch: by size, weight, danger:

eg – a sequence involving an egg, a bowling ball, and a sword etc.

(In the metaphor these correlate with complex, tricky facts: and the sequence is an argument)

b) Create New Gestalt

3+ new or disparate objects thrown up or thrown to – the aim being to see & hold in mind a certain configuration of all the objects at a certain moment during their fall viz a gestalt : and then use that to create a new move….

c) Imitate Gestalts

To reproduce a move done by another person viz to bend it like Beckham: to throw 3+ balls/items in exactly the same way to produce the same gestalt. To know is to reproduce/imitate. Consider the brilliant ability of Bryan Magee at summarising the thoughts of top philosophers, who are cleverer than him, more clearly than their exposition!

This is a way of committing emotion to the game, or in reality, to the conversation that implicitly, and explicitly, accepts the possibility of, hopes-for and so dares-for new understanding that makes new behaviours – as an individual and as a group-member – utterly ineluctable viz one must dare to change…..

Any other attitude than this is some variety of attempts to repeat a familiar and safe way of emotional engagement, however miserable and suffocating.

1. Both Low Theory Conversation and High Theory Conversation mostly intend to and succeed in an absence of emotional & moral daring: the emotionally boisterous man spouting nonsense in the pub, and the cold intellectual minting brilliant new concepts are similar in this attitude. A constructed & detached (false) persona stands behind what is being said. If challenged, the ‘real’ person can say "It’s not really me".
   
2. I don’t think there is a logically or empirically necessary connection between daring and Medium Theory Conversation. It just happens a lot.
   
3. One observes High Theory Conversationalists arrogating to themselves all virtues, simply because they have produced more complex & tricky concepts.
   
4. I’m not saying, with the Philistines, that High Theory isn’t more cognitively valuable than Low Theory.
   
5. I am saying that at the moral interpersonal level High Theory Conversation is as full of cul-de-sacs and weak defences as Low Theory Conversation.

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ALAS, I am not clever enough to write High Theory. I am also slower than most of my friends in understanding High Theory eg Hegel, Wittgenstein, Lacan, Tarski, Godel. But I am vain enough to want to write more than Low Theory.

Reader, your move!