A Flying Visit
A recent visit from the Royal Hospital School in Ipswich was marred by the unruly behaviour of Mrs W, the teacher in charge. Without going into details I shall only say that her behaviour was so disagreable that some of her pupils felt obliged to apologise on her behalf. Her equanimity was disturbed by news that the museum education director was ill and was therefore unable to carry out the session as originally promised. Having turned up an hour late, this would have been the situation in any case, but instead of making the best of the changed circumstances she flew off the handle and erupted into an aggressive hysterical outburst, demanding the impossible and, in a storm of righteous indignation, refusing to pay the entrance charge for the museum. The caretaker had been waiting for over an hour to open the museum especially for her group.
Having often embarrassed family members or team mates with my own histrionic outbursts, I was intrigued when I heard of the unfortunate episode and wondered what lessons could be learned. In Freud's day hysterics were regarded not only as malingerers and attention-seekers, but also as people with fatal flaws in their character. They were often regarded as 'obnoxious'.
What Freud did was to take these despised characters with their despised pretend-illnesses ... and see himself in them. In this extraordinary act of empathy he came to appreciate the psychic pain, the unbearable trauma, that the hysterical personality is trying to obviate.
Most of us do not have Freud's patience (or perhaps masochism), and when faced with an hysterical onslaught we do not immediately consider the mental anguish of our attacker.
In his paper in the British Journal of Psychotherapy Winter 1992, psychoanalyst David Bell describes the difficulty that patients suffering from hysteria have in seeing different points of view. If their view of the world is questioned or thrown off balance, if the world does not fit their expectations, then a deeply aggressive reaction is unleashed.
"I am reminded of a patient who spent years trying to force her therapist into having her (the patient's) point of view and to alter the arrangements of the session. On purchasing a bath that did not match the space in the bathroom she did not return it but instead furiously bent and twisted it until it fitted - breaking it in the process. This story accurately captured her way of dealing with the therapist's interpretations." ('Hysteria: A contemporary Kleinian perspective' BJP Vol 9 No2, Winter 1992, p175)
Pity the plumber who has to deal with Mrs. W.
While thinking of this episode, a phrase came into my head from Milton's 'Paradise Lost'. Milton depicts Satan as beaten but unbowed. Full of "high disdain, from sense of injured merit" he says. Mrs W., too, got on her high horse, and in a strange way confronted a disagreeable reality as if it were a personal insult ('What do you mean he's ill? He said he would be here!'). The word 'insult' has a medical and everyday use. It describes a traumatic rupture of the skin's protective barrier - a wound - and a disparaging comment designed to humiliate us. Freud took over the word to identify a psychological trauma. Hysterics often complained of being insulted, of suffering unbearable affronts to their dignity. In some cases we might say that reality itself becomes an affront.
Underlying 'the sense of injured merit', there is a deep sense of injustice. The hysteric may make impossible demands on everyone around her because she feels that an impossible demand is being made on her. She feels under constant attack - nothing is good enough, she lives in the shadow of painful humiliation - and may attack others in turn. Where does this sense of injustice and humiliation come from?
Avid readers of the "Freud Today' pages will know the answer. It is the female castration complex - which Freud unwisely called 'penis envy' - that lies at the root of this behaviour. The woman in the grip of penis envy, who has not been able to progress psychologically beyond her infantile beliefs, finds herself in an intolerable position, at odds with the very structure of the world. By focusing on the 'envious' aspects of the phenomenon, Freud missed the dreadfully depressive effects that penis envy can generate. But imagine what it must be like, to put it at its simplest, if you were born a girl and believed all you life that your dad wanted a boy.
No, I mean REALLY imagine it.
Schools Question
What positive benefits might result from insult and humiliation? Use
the managerial style of Alex Ferguson as an example.
What positive benefits might result from being born a girl and having
your dad wish you were a boy?
Freud today | education page