Othello, however well endowed physically he may have been, is inevitably more prone to suspect his wife’s fidelity than if he had been white. Although he had “done the state some service,” and taken the Christian side against the Turks, it was nevertheless a state in which his black color labeled him as an inferior and a probable infidel.
Another reason prompting Othello’s willingness to believe Iago is his trust in the latter’s honesty. Bradley says: “‘Honest’ is the word that springs to the lips of everyone who speaks of him. It is applied to him some fifteen times in the play, not to mention some half-dozen where he employs it, in derision, of himself.”30 Whom is Othello more likely to trust? A newlywed Venetian bride or a tried comrade-in-arms whom everyone calls “honest”? The state of being in love is one in which it is accepted that illusions flourish; but battle tests what a man is really made of.
I conclude that Othello does not exhibit the “extraordinary credulousness” which Ernest Jones attributes to him. There are good reasons why he should trust Iago more than Desdemona, and good reasons why he should be uncertain of his place in her affections. There is nothing approaching delusional jealousy in Othello’s attitude. Although Iago threatens, “Othello shall go mad,”31 Othello shows no sign of doing so. His momentary loss of consciousness is evidence of stress, but not of insanity. There are none of the other signs or symptoms which are generally found together with delusions of jealousy in people suffering from mental illness. And, although Othello commits murder, and although a high proportion of murderers are suffering from mental illness, his crime is surely to be rated as a crime passionel, which, it is generally believed, is the type of murder most likely to be committed by normal people. We must remember that notions of male honor, in Shakespeare’s day, more closely resembled those which, in quite recent times, provoked murderous family vendettas in Italy and other Mediterranean countries.
It remains for me to consider why sexual jealousy releases such powerful emotions of anger and hatred. Most people take this for granted, and assume that everyone feels the same; but this is not actually the case. My experience leads me to believe that people vary a good deal in the extent to which they experience jealousy. I do not believe that, in most instances, jealousy is merely based upon fear of losing a person who provides sexual release and satisfaction. There is one form of jealousy in which this may be true, but it is rare. I refer to those cases in which the person, usually a woman, who has had previous lovers, is submitted to relentless questioning about the actual details of her sexual encounters. Such questioning may go on for hours; and whatever the victim admits she has done with her lovers never satisfies the questioner. In his distorted mind, there are always closer intimacies or perversions which she has practiced with other men and has not practiced with him. This obsessional type of questioning is really a sign of profound sexual insecurity. The person suffering from it has carried into adult life some of the uneasiness typical of early adolescence, when a shy boy may easily feel that grown-ups or “real men” possess sexual secrets to which he has no access. This kind of retrospective jealousy is seldom, if ever, found together with delusions of infidelity in the present.
In more normal forms of jealousy, such an emphasis upon the sexual relationship to the exclusion of everything else does not occur. Sexual intimacy, though an important part of an intimate attachment, is only a part. And sexual infatuation, though temporarily threatening, is often transient, whereas intimate attachments tend to persist. When dangers like illness or poverty or war threaten a relationship, sexual desire is often diminished while the need for attachment and mutual support becomes enhanced.
In recent years, the human need for attachment has been emphasized by John Bowlby, whose studies of the ties between small children and the mother have proved so fruitful. In the third volume of his book Attachment and Loss, Bowlby writes:
Intimate attachments to other human beings are the hub around which a person’s life revolves, not only when he is an infant or a toddler or a schoolchild but through his adolescence and his years of maturity as well, and on into old age. From these intimate attachments a person draws his strength and enjoyment of life and, through what he contributes, he gives strength and enjoyment to others. These are matters about which current science and traditional wisdom are at one.32
Freud’s instinct theory was primarily concerned with the individual’s search for pleasure in the form of sexual gratification, and human relationships assessed chiefly in terms of their potential for providing such satisfaction. Bowlby conceives that the need for intimate attachments extends far beyond sexuality. As the sociologist Peter Marris puts it:
The relationships that matter most to us are characteristically to particular people that we love—husband or wife, parents, children, dearest friend—and sometimes to particular places—a home or personal territory—that we invest with the same loving qualities. These specific relationships, which we experience as unique and irreplaceable, seem to embody most crucially the meaning of our lives.33
It seems to me that this view of intimate attachments can help us to understand why jealousy is such a powerful feeling. A person who has achieved a modicum of sexual satisfaction with one partner can reasonably expect to find another. Most people have had more than one sexual partner during the course of their lives and have not necessarily found that losing one and taking on another is desperately traumatic. But losing the meaning of one’s life is another matter. This is why bereaved persons so often feel that, for a time, life has become meaningless. As Marris puts it, “Losing someone you love is less like losing a very valuable and irreplaceable possession than finding the law of gravity to be invalid.”34 Jealousy occurs when loss of the loved person is threatened by their forming a new attachment. Transient sexual infatuations do not necessarily threaten long-term attachments; and it seems to me doubtful whether adultery, in the absence of other reasons, should be a ground for divorce. The threats that really count are not so much to sexual pride as to the central meaning of a person’s life.
This seems to be the case with Othello. Why, otherwise, should he believe that Desdemona’s supposed infidelity should threaten the end of his career as a soldier? One can surely lose a wife without losing one’s job as well. Yet, in his famous speech in Act III, Othello bids farewell not only to the tranquil mind and to content, but to “the pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war! … Farewell, Othello’s occupation’s gone!”35 This surely implies that, because he can no longer trust Desdemona, the whole meaning of his life has been put in jeopardy.
But, you may argue, although intimate attachments may constitute the meaning of life for the majority of people, they do not do so for all. What about monks and nuns? What about isolates like Isaac Newton or most of the great philosophers of the Western world, whose wish or capacity to form intimate relationships is conspicuous by its absence?
I am sure that Peter Marris is right in thinking that intimate relationships constitute the meaning of life for most people. However, human beings are wonderfully various. For some, meaning appears to be constituted by something far more abstract than relationships with other human beings. For example, Newton showed passionate jealousy about his discoveries. He was reluctant to publish them for fear that they should be stolen, and had numerous quarrels, throughout the creative part of his life, with other scientists, such as Leibniz and Hooke, over questions of priority. It is clear that, for this isolated, suspicious man, the meaning of his life was to be found in scientific discovery, in his alchemical, religious, and historical research, and not in relations with others.
Newton was, for definable psychological reasons, pathologically incapable of close relationships. When, in mid-life, he suffered a depressive breakdown, he exhibited paranoid delusions, broke with his friends, and accused them of plotting against him. He exemplifies the fact that jealousy need not necessarily be based upon love, if love is not the prime source of self-esteem. Along a scale from the extreme represen
ted by Newton to the so-called normal may be found all kinds of human beings, from those to whom relationships with others mean very little, to those for whom relationships are all-important. It is, I think, this kind of difference between people which may be one reason why the capacity to feel sexual jealousy seems also so widely to vary.
NOTES
1. Ambrose Bierce, The Enlarged Devil’s Dictionary, ed. E. J. Hopkins (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 195.
2. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols., ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–64), 13:89.
3. Freud, Standard Edition, 23:223.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., 23:224.
6. Ibid.
7. James Pope Hennessy, Anthony Trollope (London: Cape, 1971), p. 292.
8. Anthony Trollope, He Knew He Was Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948), pp. 257–58.
9. Freud, Standard Edition, 23:225.
10. David Enoch and William H. Trethowan, “The Othello Syndrome,” in Uncommon Psychiatric Syndromes (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1979).
11. Seymour Fisher and Roger P. Greenberg, The Scientific Credibility of Freud’s Theories and Therapy (New York: Basic Books, 1977), p. 268.
12. Norwood East, Society and the Criminal (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1949).
13. D. Abrahamsen, Crime and the Human Mind (Montclair, N.J.: Patterson Smith, 1944), pp. 161–63.
14. Ronald R. Mowat, Morbid Jealousy and Murder: A Psychiatric Study of Morbidly Jealous Murderers at Broadmoor (London: Tavistock, 1966).
15. Norval Morris and Gordon Hawkins, The Honest Politician’s Guide to Crime Control (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 57.
16. Quoted in Jonathon Green, ed., The Cynic’s Lexicon (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 36.
17. Quoted in Herbert Weinstock, Rossini (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 66.
18. Quoted in ibid., p. 67.
19. Ernest Jones, Hamlet and Oedipus (London: Gollancz, 1949), pp. 116–17.
20. Act I, scene 2, lines 62–71.
21. Act I, scene 3, lines 292–93.
22. Act III, scene 3, line 210.
23. Ibid., lines 205–8.
24. James Morris, Venice (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), p. 69.
25. Ibid., p. 70.
26. Act III, scene 3, lines 233–37.
27. Anthony Burgess, Shakespeare (New York: Knopf, 1970), p. 146.
28. Act I, scene 1, line 126.
29. Act II, scene 1, lines 224–34.
30. A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Macmillan, 1924), p. 214.
31. Act IV, scene 1, line 100.
32. John Bowlby, Loss, Sadness and Depression, vol. 3 of Attachment and Loss (London: Hogarth Press/Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1980), p. 442.
33. Peter Marris, “Attachment and Society,” in The Place of Attachment in Human Behavior, ed. C. Murray Parkes and J. Stevenson-Hinde (London: Tavistock, 1982), p. 185.
34. Ibid., p. 195.
35. Act III, scene 3, lines 360, 363.
6
Aspects of Adult Development
WHEN I WAS a young doctor, starting to specialize in psychiatry, the notion of adult development scarcely impinged. Those of us who were psychoanalytically inclined were particularly interested in early childhood development and its supposed effect upon future mental health and character structure. We accepted the Freudian postulate, shared by the Jesuits, that the experiences of the first five years of life and the emotional influences affecting the child during that early period were all-important in shaping adult personality. Some of my contemporaries, strongly influenced by the ideas of Melanie Klein, went still further. They supposed that accurate reconstructions could be made of the infant’s experience from birth onward, and alleged that the first few months of extrauterine existence shaped the child’s fate for good or ill.
This concentration upon the individual’s early childhood, accompanied by the assumption that recall and reconstruction of the events of that period were essential to the restoration of psychic health, had the consequence that psychoanalysts showed little interest in later periods of life. The early psychoanalysts, although oversanguine about their ability to disinter the infant vicissitudes of their patients, were not at all confident about ameliorating the problems of older people, and could seldom be persuaded to take them on as patients. Freud himself wrote in an early paper:
The age of patients has this much importance in determining their fitness for psychoanalytic treatment, that, on the one hand, near or above the age of fifty the elasticity of the mental processes, on which the treatment depends, is as a rule lacking—old people are no longer educable—and, on the other hand, the mass of material to be dealt with would prolong the duration of the treatment indefinitely.1
One implication of this statement was clear. If the powerful tool of psychoanalysis was unable to affect those approaching middle age, they must indeed be fixed in their ways.
This impression was, in the 1940s and 1950s, reinforced by clinical and educational psychologists who told us that optimum performance in intelligence tests occurred at about the age of sixteen. Following this peak, all we had to look forward to was a daily loss of some thousands of brain cells, accompanied by a progressive decline in intellectual ability. When, at the age of twenty-seven, I was in training at the Maudsley Hospital, I recall my gloom at realizing that I was already eleven years past my best.
Nor had the zoologists any comfort to offer. Students of animal behavior were interested in the development of animals from birth to sexual maturity, but showed little interest in any period, when such existed, beyond that at which the animal had fulfilled its reproductive potential. Once an animal had produced a family, or several families, and given them enough support and protection to ensure their own capability of reproduction, there seemed little left to live for.
When I was still an undergraduate at Cambridge, my tutor, C. P. Snow, introduced me to A Mathematician’s Apology, by his friend G. H. Hardy. In this classic account of the pleasures and rewards of being a mathematician, Hardy affirms that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man’s game.2
Hardy reinforces this statement by pointing out that Newton’s greatest ideas came to him at about the age of twenty-four, and alleges that, although he continued to make discoveries until he was nearly forty, he did little but polish his earlier ideas after this, and gave up mathematics altogether when he was fifty (but see Chapter 3). Hardy states that “Galois died at twenty-one, Abel at twenty-seven, Ramanujan at thirty-three, Riemann at forty.… I do not know an instance of a major mathematical advance initiated by a man past fifty.”3
Hardy’s book appeared in 1940. Had it been delayed for sixteen years, he would certainly have included Einstein in his list. Einstein’s greatest work belonged to his early years. He was born in 1879, published the special theory of relativity in 1905, and followed it with the general theory of relativity in 1916, when he would have been thirty-seven. The last half of his life was spent in searching for a unified field theory which would cover all the forces of nature at once. But he took a wrong turning. C. P. Snow records, “Einstein’s tremendous instinct for physics had sadly gone astray, and led him up a blind alley for the last forty years of his life.”4
When people so diverse in temperament and interests as psychoanalysts, zoologists, experimental psychologists, and mathematicians all concur in giving the impression that life, if not actually over at forty, is so ossified that not much change can be expected, a climate of opinion is created in which the concept of anything called “adult development” can scarcely be entertained. The study of adult decline, although it may be of interest to a few specialists working on dementia, is not an alluring topic.
However, this predominantly gloomy picture was gradually modified. A few bold spirits had the temerity to suggest that it was untrue to suppose that,
from forty onward, life ground slowly to a halt. Some claimed that interesting changes took place around the mid-life period. Others proposed that even psychological developments proceeding into old age were well worth studying.
Various attempts were made to subdivide the life cycle into a series of stages traversed by the individual in the course of normal development. Erik Erikson, whose first book, Childhood and Society,5 was published in 1950 and became a best seller, postulated “Eight Ages of Man,” the last three of which pertained to adulthood. All these stages are characterized by antinomies representing different psychosocial tasks or problems, each of which Erikson believes to be characteristic of a particular age period. The first stage, for example, is “basic trust versus mistrust,” a concept which is relevant to the understanding of the people whom psychiatrists label schizoid, and which fits quite well with Melanie Klein’s notion of the “paranoid-schizoid position” in infantile development. Erikson proposes three adult stages. In early adulthood, he suggests, the main issue to be resolved is that of “intimacy versus isolation.” He compares this stage of development with Freud’s end point of “genitality,” that is, the capacity to make a mature heterosexual relationship which is likely to progress toward creating a new generation.
Erikson’s next stage, which pertains to middle adulthood, centers on what he calls “generativity versus stagnation.” He defines generativity primarily as concern with establishing and guiding the next generation, but extends the concept to include productivity and creativity. Whether or not such a stage can be objectively demonstrated, the notion is still well within the bounds of a biological, evolutionary schema. Man’s infancy and childhood, relative to his total life-span, is considerably prolonged as compared with other primates. This extension of dependency is adaptive because it provides time for learning. The development of speech has made possible adaptation by means of the transmission of culture. For this to be effective, postponement of the age of attaining sexual maturity is desirable, since the child is thereby kept dependent and teachable. If the human child’s rate of development kept up the pace of the first five years, sexual maturity could be expected around the age of eight or nine; but the intervention of the so-called latency period postpones puberty for some years after this. If human adaptation requires the prolongation of childhood in order to provide time for learning, it is obviously desirable that adulthood should also be prolonged in order to ensure a supply of teachers: more especially, of teachers who have finished the task of reproducing themselves and who are therefore able to spread their attention beyond their own immediate families.
Churchill's Black Dog and Other Phenomena of the Human Mind Page 14
