Past toddlerdom, virtual friendships have the potential for encasing us in prolonged immaturity. We over-idealize our ‘imaginary friends’, provide them with ‘angels’ wings’: they’re easy to love since they don’t frustrate us by not complying with our wishes in the way that embodied others do. When the latter are engaged with and then, being real, inevitably thwart our grandiose desires and expectations of them, love too quickly turns to hate. People lash out, unable to control their impulses and their rage. Anxiety can set in. This latter can also be a defence against a sense of fundamental weakness: the helpless inner child has never grown up enough to bear the contrariness of really existing others.
For Better or for Worse
The friendships of the years after toddlerhood provide the first we can fully remember. Like first loves, they imprint themselves on us. A best friend becomes someone we can share with and be recognized by. She or he can also possess wished-for aspects of ourselves: abundant curly hair, the ability to ride or swim or to talk back to teacher. Her family may present a hugely informative contrast to our own–an at-home or working mother, brothers, pictures on the walls, books, exotic food. The friend’s family can indeed be a major component of the ‘bestness’ of our friend. Alternative models of love and living arrangements stretch the child’s vision of the world and may also provide succour if life is difficult at home.
In the flux of the playground, early friendships also mark out our first wounds outside the home. The rivalries of school, the loss of best friends, the pain of rupture, may play into our sense of injustice: a demand for equal treatment for all.
During those labile and libidinally charged years which are adolescence, the young grow notoriously promiscuous in their friendships, locating in each often short-lived relationship something that they lack and as a result idealize in the other and will defiantly defend if they encounter parental opposition. Winnicott attributes this to the fact that teenagers are basically ‘isolates’, in part repeating a stage of earliest omnipotent, excited, yet utterly helpless infancy, before the recognition of fully existing others had come into being. In an essay entitled ‘Adolescence: Struggling through the Doldrums’, he notes that adolescence is characterized by a radical combination of ‘defiant independence and regressive dependence’, the rapid alternation between these states, and ‘even a coexistence of the two extremes at one moment in time’–a description struggling parents will recognize.
These isolates collect together, finding comfort in shifting numbers. Themselves as yet unformed, without moorings, yet propelled to break away from the family, they find their anchors in a group where identities are forged on the basis of partial identifications. A shared activity or interest, love of a particular band or star, a mutual interest in a political issue, a mutual injustice, provides a group identity, often under a leader who, as Freud might say, represents an ego ideal, a combination of the desired characteristics. In the aura of the charismatic leader or the cultural ideal, individual rivalries can be put to rest. Pop stars often serve the purpose admirably.
Winnicott also posits that in the libidinal defiance of the adolescent there is an antisocial core, which most young won’t live out for themselves in any radical way. But if a member of their group is indeed wildly antisocial, ‘delinquent’, and enacts a ‘crime’, they will bond around him, since he has given expression to their defiance. Through his act, they ‘feel real’. Even if individually they may not approve of the act, they will remain loyal to him and defend him.
Like all our emotional attachments, early friendships have their dark sides and bitter sequelae. Pre-adolescent groupings, like later ones, are often consolidated by marking out an enemy or a scapegoat on whom all our own undesirable or spurned characteristics–our very helplessness–are projected. The narcissism of small differences takes hold: tiny divergent properties of dress or appearance stand in for our own often unconscious fears and hates. These are suddenly made living flesh in another whom we can detest. Vicious bullying may ensue.
In Cat’s Eye, Margaret Atwood details a girl’s friendship in the 1950s with devastating accuracy and shows its lasting force.
Eight-year-old Elaine moves from an enchanted, wandering rural existence with her entomologist father, unconventional mother and dear older brother to take up life in a half-finished house in a conventional 1950s suburb of Toronto. The rituals of school and the whole complex, ordinary world of ‘girls and their doings’ await her. She has not been well prepared. Her parents have been keeping things from her. Other families, she quickly realizes, when she makes her first tentative friendships with Carol and Grace, are not like hers. Nor does she know how to be a girl. She is both tomboyish outsider and vulnerable misfit.
Enter Cordelia who lives in a large two-storey house, with egg cups, napkin rings and a powder room. Her mother not only has a cleaner, but paints. Cordelia’s two clever older sisters banter, as she does, in a mocking way. Elaine adores her brazenness and certainty, her scornful tones, her wild impropriety.
But Cordelia, who has the other girls, too, in her thrall, declares that Elaine needs improvement. A reign of terror is unleashed in its name. The girls mock the way Elaine dresses, eats, walks and laughs. They draw attention to her failings, her looks. They enact her burial. They torment her. Persecute. Elaine submits: ‘I am not normal, I am not like other girls. Cordelia tells me so, but she will help me… It will take hard work and a long time.’ Terrified of losing ‘my best friends’, wanting to please, to hold even their perverse attentiveness, Elaine with increasing desperation endures a final long winter of nightmarish cruelty. ‘Hatred would have been easier,’ she later reflects. ‘With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.’
Out of this thing called love, in her desire to please and appease, Elaine succumbs to a self-annihilating task. Devilish Cordelia has thrown Elaine’s ‘stupid’ winter hat into a steep ravine where ‘the bad men are’ and the girls are forbidden to go. Elaine is ordered after it. She overcomes a last vestige of inner resistance and creeps down the hillside, into the half-frozen creek. Icy water fills her boots, weighs down her snowpants. She reaches for her hat and when she looks up at the bridge, her ‘friends’ have gone. She is alone. The cold chills her to the marrow. She can’t move. She lies down at the edge of the stream, her head ‘filling with black sawdust’. Death invites, ‘peaceful and clear’. A woman appears, holds out her arms to her, urges her up, wraps her in warmth, tells her: ‘It will be all right. Go home.’ Elaine knows the woman who has saved her is the Virgin Mary. When she returns to school, freed in a sense because the old submissive self who wanted to be loved has died in the ravine, she finds she can now stand up to the bullying. It’s easy. If they’re not her friends, nothing binds her to them. She recognizes that they have needed her to enact their dominance and now she doesn’t need them. She is indifferent.
In that indifference, Elaine is strong. In high school, the balance of power shifts and it is Elaine who knows how to get on with boys, who grows cruel towards an increasingly helpless and friendless Cordelia. The last time she sees Cordelia as an adult, her one-time friend and persecutor is confined in a ‘discreet private loony bin’. Behind her ‘locked, sagging face’ is a ‘frantic child’.
It is her friendship with Cordelia that haunts Elaine’s return at the age of fifty to Toronto as an accomplished and successful artist embraced by young feminists. In her canvases, it is her childhood friends and their shared world that figure large.
Buried early friendships with their see-saws of love and hate, power and helplessness, under this spotlight, are as formative as later sexual passions. They endure within us. In Elaine’s case, her relations with Cordelia make her distrust women: ‘Women collect grievances, hold grudges and change shape,’ she reflects. ‘They pass hard, legitimate judgments, unlike the purblind guesses of men, fogged with romanticism and ignorance and bias and wish. Women know too much, they can neither b
e deceived nor trusted. I can understand why men are afraid of them.’Yet Cordelia is her twin, the one who holds a key to her reflection, and at the novel’s end, when the Cordelia she was hoping she would once more confront fails to turn up–may indeed be dead–Elaine addresses her aura: ‘This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over tea.’
CODA: The Love You Make
The ordinary virtue of friendship, the ability to laugh at life’s vagaries over a cup of tea with a compatible other, is what many, once early passions have been spent, hail as one of life’s great gifts. Amongst my interviewees, one fifty-five-year-old man confessed–as if it were a deep secret, so unfashionable that it was difficult to share–that after the break-up of his first and only marriage, he had decided he was simply better at friendship and enjoyed it far more than any libidinal pursuits.
In fact, long-standing couples, after the hurly-burly of those days of getting and spending, lusting and rearing, also attest that it is the friendship between them that counts for most. Kindness, loyalty, the pleasure of having one’s views or outrage shared, reflected, replied to by a familiar, buoys one through life. Cupid’s searing arrows, the turmoils of passion, can feel, in retrospect, like rampaging tornadoes that lifted one savagely up and away from the more beneficent calms of steady companionship. Love here may be a more temperate zone, but it is love for all that.
It may be a wish to rebalance the prevailing contemporary ethos which makes me want to stress and end on this temperate zone of love. We are what was once called ‘old’ far longer than earlier generations. The assumptions underlying our world are that we are isolated, selfish, self-gratifying creatures, with rampant needs that demand satisfaction and protection. Yet looking around, it is also clear that what makes life worth living, what makes us feel alive and gives us hope from day to day, is the ordinary kindness to one another that we are capable of. It is unromantic civility and quotidian generosity that encourage our intimacies to endure. If in the name of love, we long for Himalayan peaks of rapture and find ourselves enmeshed in grand and unruly passions and their accompanying anguish, it may not come amiss if, in the name of common humanity, we also stretch our ways of loving into those foothills where it’s good to walk and talk with friends.
There is more, though it is perhaps the subject of another book. In our imagining of the good life–a society worth living in and in which we and our children flourish–it is not only the fundamental rights of security and freedom the state is able to enshrine that are essential. We also need love. We need to give as well as take it. We need solidarity with our fellow beings. Happiness is not the question here. Love can bring that, but often does not. We need love because it confronts us with the heights and depths of our being, shows us what we can and cannot endure and reconciles us to what we discover in ourselves and others. We need love so as to be the human creatures that we are at our best, at once great and greatly fragile.
Notes
ABBREVIATIONS
SE The Standard of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols, ed. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953–74)
PART ONE: OVERTURE: THE RIDDLE OF LOVE
or failure See, for example, Helen Fisher, Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love (New York: Henry Holt, 2004) and Why Him? Why Her?: Finding Real Love by Understanding Your Personality Type (Oxford: One World Publications, 2009)
or heterosexuality Sigmund Freud (1920), ‘The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman’, in SE, vol. 18 (1920–2), p. 170
PART TWO: CONFIGURATIONS OF PASSION: FIRST LOVE, YOUNG LOVE
may provide Stendhal, On Love (London: Penguin Books, 1975), p. 50
Is that normal? Peter Fonagy, ‘A Genuinely Developmental Theory of Sexual Enjoyment and Its Implications for Psychoanalytic Technique’, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 56. 1 (2008), pp. 18–19
at their core Part of this formulation comes from a personal interview with the psychoanalyst and writer, Adam Phillips, 17 June 2009
has come Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, vol. 2: The New Kingdom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 182–93
with joy Bronislaw Malinowski, The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia (London: G. Routledge & Sons, 1929), p. 283
parental features See, for example, website on Face Research, available at http://www.faceresearch.org/and Suzi Malin, Love at First Sight (London: Dorling Kindersley, 2004). For information on resemblance to parents, see T. Bereczkei, P. Gyuris, P. Koves and L. Bernath, b‘Homogamy, Genetic Similarity, and Imprinting: Parental Influence on Mate Choice Preferences’, Personality and Individual Differences 33.5 (2002), pp. 677–90
always blurred Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 1, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (London: Penguin Books, 1981), p. 528
painful intermesh Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H.M. Parshley (London: Picador Classics, 1983), pp. 418–19
appropriate passage Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 1, p. 214
as his Fate John Updike, ‘More Love in the Western World’, Assorted Prose (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965), p. 170
completeness Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Shakespearean Criticism (Hebden Bridge: Pomona Press, 2008), pp. 430–1
life again Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, trans. James Kirkup (London: Penguin Books, 1984), p. 345
prostration Alice Munro, Open Secrets (London: Chatto & Windus, 1994), p. 10
element Daniel Bergner, ‘What Do Women Want?’, New York Times Magazine, 22 Jan. 2009
winged state See Martha Nussbaum’s discussion of Phaedrus in The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 213–23
simple idyll Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951), p. 26
were love Howard Jacobson, The Act of Love (London: Jonathan Cape, 2008), pp. 12–13
blinding myself Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 2002), p. 24
delirium Ibid., p. 39
sense of self Ethel Spector Person, Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion (London: Bloomsbury, 1990), p. 57
in play here See Natasha Walter, Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism (London: Virago, 2010)
planning centres Neir Eshel, Eric E. Nelson, James Blair, Daniel Pine and Monique Ernst, ‘Neural Substrates of Choice Selection in Adults and Adolescents: Development of the Ventrolateral Prefrontal and Anterior Cingulate Cortices’, Neuropsychologia 45.6 (2007), pp. 1270–9
disappointment Quoted in Rebecca Camber, ‘Why You Should Forget Your First Love: The Memories “Can Ruin All of Your Future Relationships”’, Daily Mail, 18 Jan. 2009, which references Malcolm Brynin and John Ermisch (eds), Changing Relationships (London: Routledge, 2009)
if they could Luisa Dillner, Love by Numbers: The Hidden Facts behind Everyone’s Relationships (London: Profile Books, 2009), p. 177
instantaneous John Berger, G. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1985), p. 142
dreams or art Robert Stoller, Observing the Erotic Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 47
hormonal patches Martin Portner, ‘The Orgasmic Mind: The Neurological Roots of Sexual Pleasure’, Scientific American Mind, 20 April 2008
towards thirty See ‘Facts on American Teens’ Sexual and Reproductive Health’, Guttmacher Institute Report, Jan. 2010, available at http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/fb-ATSRH.html; ‘Sex Uncovered’, Observer, 26 Oct. 2008, available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/series/sex-uncovered; ‘Facts and Statistics: Sexual Health and Canadian Youth’, 2009, available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/series/sex-uncovered
earlier period See, for
example, Peter Laslett, Karla Oosterveen and Richard M. Smith (eds), Bastardy and Its Comparative History. Studies in the History of Illegitimacy and Marital Nonconformism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), passim
All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion Page 43
