Growing Into Medicine (32 page)

I had asked much the same of my father in a letter during my first term at school. I wish I had kept his reply for it was typical of him. He explained in very plain language about his Quaker background, the difference between his view as an agnostic and that of my mother, a fervent atheist. He made it plain that when I was older I would be free to make up my own mind, and that whatever I decided to believe, or do with my life, would make no difference to the strength of their continuing love for me.

My response was to be confirmed into the Church of England at the age of about sixteen and to try to find some way to pray and find meaning in the teaching and services. I failed in both, always feeling self-conscious and haunted by my inability to know what I believed. I had absorbed my mother’s abhorrence of humbug and insincerity so that I could never enjoy the beauty of church music and buildings without feeling a fraud. The idea that one could see the teaching as a metaphor, which could contain truths without being ‘the truth’, is something with which I still struggle.

On marrying Ralph I met a philosophical outlook very different from that of my parents. Their beliefs were in the practical values of honesty, hard work and conscious attempts to live a good life. Ralph mistrusted words and never discussed moral codes or how to live an ethical life. He had no time for the Christian teachings I had been exposed to at school. Instead he had developed an interest in eastern thought, and especially the ideas of Zen Buddhism, several years before they became fashionable and were taken up by the New Age movements.

I did not understand his outlook, at times finding it cold. If I began to agonise too much about some passing upset he would say, ‘You take your emotional temperature too often.’ His belief that one should ‘do the next thing’ made him appear somewhat uninterested
in making plans or in reminiscing about our shared holidays. He told a story where a professor held up a box of matches and asked what it was. When someone called out, ‘A box of matches, Sir,’ he replied, ‘No, no. It’s
this
. . .’ and threw it across the room. ‘
Matchbox
is a noise. Is
this
a noise?’ Ralph took pleasure in the story but I found the demonstration that a Word was not the same as the Thing difficult to understand.

It took me many years to appreciate the strength that he gained from his beliefs. When Helen drank the cough medicine, and when she developed vestibular neuronitis, he was strong and supportive as he ‘did the next thing’. When he was in hospital for the operation on his hand, and later to have his diabetes stabilised, he was cheerful and uncomplaining. Most impressive of all was his acceptance of his heart attack and the restrictions it placed on his life for the few weeks before he died of the second attack. Now, when I open
The Way of Zen
by Alan Watts – one of his simpler books on the subject, bought in 1958 according to a note inside the cover – I find much that resonates with ideas that I am exploring again. The phrase ‘to see the good without evil is like up without down’ (p. 115) chimes with Jung’s Yin and Yang.

One of the most difficult things for me to accept was Ralph’s scoffing at my efforts to be good. Following his death I discovered an enthralling writer, Marion Milner. She was a psychoanalyst but her technical writing is very dense. However, a three-volume autobiography, based on ideas about keeping a diary, had me spellbound. The first two were written in the 1930s and she was much admired by some of the Second World War poets. I read the second volume
An Experiment in Leisure
first, in an edition published by Virago in 1986. She writes, ‘. . . the observation that if I did my job with any uplifting enthusiasm for “doing good” what I did was badly done.’ For many years I have felt that good should be performed, rather as my father felt about helping people to die, with the left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing. (With greater openness and more people involved in the dying process this option is, perhaps rightly, no longer available to doctors.)

Milner also writes about ‘. . . the long struggle to develop an inner life that was not just an escape from reality, but the only means by which I could face it.’ Recently, when starting on a holiday with a group of people who did not feel immediately congenial, I found myself thinking, ‘I must go inwards if I am to survive this.’ The thought helped me to distance myself from the company and freed my senses to look and feel and smell the new experiences. I remember aping a mantra that Milner used, a gesture of inner poverty, ‘I am nothing, I have nothing, I want nothing. The readiness is all.’ This helped me to cope with the conflicted feelings of unworthiness and superiority that had been so crippling before my analysis.

Another of her phrases that has stuck in my mind is ‘the eye has interests of its own’. In the same way that I found facts boring, I have always been blind to the world about me, absorbed in the feelings aroused in myself and others rather than in the things themselves. Milner described her technique of deliberately adjusting the focus of her eyes for near or far vision. Even at this late stage in my life I would like to be able to train myself not only to look in these different ways but also to allow my eye to have interests of its own.

My friend Elizabeth Forsythe is determined to give things up while she still has the choice to do so. She recommended a book by Helen Luke called
Old Age: Journey into Simplicity
. The author reexamines some great literary texts and her conclusion, reached with immense artistry, is that we must learn to let things go.

With my wish to be less stupid, present since my earliest days, I find it difficult to give up the battle for wisdom. But Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig, in
The Old Fool and the Corruption of Myth
, draws attention to the gap between reality and some of the myths of living. He says that the old are not necessarily any wiser than the young, for their experience is not always relevant to the present day. He maintains that the myth of the wise old man or woman should be complemented by the myth of the old fool. Our role is to accept the limits of our decline and learn to play and enjoy doing nothing. In
this way we renounce any claim to power and avoid becoming self-righteous and vain. I am reminded of my pleasure on seeing my eminent godmother Sylvia sitting up in bed enjoying the Famous Five with no medical journal in sight.

But the lesson to stop striving is a hard one. I want to live each day as fully as possible. During one session with my analyst I had a vivid image in which I was holding his brain in my hands. The object, with its convoluted surface and inner mystery, became the world – and I was determined to explore its fullest depths until it was time to die. Then I wanted to be able to open my hands and let it go. This need to keep exploring, to keep trying to understand, is something that I am not prepared to relinquish. Yet I am filled with a curious relief on reading that I have a place in society as an old fool. I can relax when my energy level is low. I do not want to take my own life too seriously and in old age I can occasionally tell a snippet against myself that raises a smile. But as I do so I feel the danger that I am ‘showing off’, that most heinous of English middle-class sins. I cannot tell if the act of writing this memoir has worked for or against my aim to touch my memories lightly.

Helen Luke and other authors suggest that myth and metaphors help to develop an inner life. I have always found the Greek myths difficult to grasp, their Gods are so complicated. Metaphors from Christianity come embedded in beliefs I cannot embrace. New Age writings and even some respected organisations appear to denigrate the scientific approach. My experience at Schumacher College, where I was vilified for being a reductionist scientist as opposed to the holistic virtues claimed by the other members of the group, was discouraging.

But I am attracted to the idea of mystery, to those things that are explained better in poetry than in methods dependent on measuring. Jenny and I always agreed that, rather than God making man in his image, mankind had created a God in his own image, projecting the best and the worst of themselves into him. The best, as seen in architecture, music and ethical behaviour, the worst in religious genocide and torture, seem too large to have originated within the human brain.

If I am to continue to explore the sense of mystery, within myself and the world, I may have to re-evaluate the word Soul. However I have recently discovered another word that I find more acceptable. In James Hillman’s
The Force of Character
I read the words Soul and Character as synonymous. I would recommend the book to anyone who feels his or her old age serves no purpose. While looking with clear eyes at the disintegration of our bodies and the growing confusion of our minds he reclaims this time of life as having value. I particularly liked his definition of memory as imagination – that is, images – qualified by time, which resonates with Wordsworth’s definition of poetry as ‘Emotion recollected in tranquillity’.

Many of those who write about soul use the concepts of archetypes and the collective unconscious postulated by Jung. My understanding so far has been based on a misunderstanding – that his ideas thrust people into categories instead of seeing each as an individual. With the help of Anthony Storr’s primer on Jung in the Fontana Modern Masters series, I can see that the archetypes can be equivalent to the internal objects of later analysts. Their language, with which I feel more comfortable, puts more emphasis on nurture rather than nature, although with the explosion in genetic understanding the balance is shifting again.

Storr suggests that the purpose of myth is to give shape, form and often artistic expression to emotional experience, to make it more coherent, and that every man needs a myth to live by. A friend recently asked me how to change one’s personal myth. For me the myth that I was stupid, ignorant, no good etc. was changed by the ‘love’ during my analysis, using the word in its special sense in that setting. But I am sure there are other ways of changing the story. These include the use of the body, for instance in dance, or even with techniques such as
focusing
. Gendlin, in his book of that name, describes a method of learning to listen with one’s whole body and find words to describe what it is telling you. The claim that the method will change the world appears overblown, but my experience of trying to help patients find words for their body fantasies makes me hesitate to rubbish his ideas. The brain imaging described
by McGilchrist suggests that the ability to use words is located in the left hemisphere but the concepts are conceived in the right side, with complicated connections between them. I can imagine that striving to find a word that exactly matches a whole body feeling might in some way reduce its intensity.

The concept that we live by myths without fully realising that we do so makes me wonder if my fictional characters are hollow because they do not embody archetypes that resonate with the reader. It has been suggested that such archetypes are different energies that are not part of a system of right and wrong. Perhaps imagining my characters from a different archetypal view would give them more body and help them to be less ‘nice and naïve’.

Thus I am brought back to the power of the imagination. For me, the creative work of writing, an activity released by my analysis, has brought immense pleasure in my old age. Any creative act does, I believe, feed the soul, as does experiencing the natural world with one’s senses alert. While accepting that one should no longer strive to achieve or be clever, I see no reason why one cannot continue to enjoy exploration in old age. McGilchrist’s book
The Master and his Emissary
excites me and the experience of being excited is particularly rewarding when it is comparatively rare. I wonder if old age has to be an either/or choice. One could aim for a ‘betweenness’ as suggested in his book – something between giving things up and continuing to strive. The process of individuation is said to be circular, not linear. The circles may get smaller as the world contracts but if the right side is allowed space perhaps the circles will be no less valuable. As I regress back to a second childhood, when the reliability of balance, breath and bowels is more problematic, perhaps I can also regain some of the wonder of the growing child, and with Blake ‘Kiss every joy as it flies’. This may be the reward of
growing
old, with the acceptance of pain that Helen Luke describes, rather than merely sinking into the ageing process.

I hope to go on exploring ideas, perhaps now with the help of myths, and reading poetry, even trying to write some. At the same time I know that when life gets really tough I will return to those
maxims most deeply embedded within myself. ‘Stop taking your emotional temperature, do the next thing,’ from Ralph. ‘Try to get a good night’s sleep, you will feel better in the morning,’ from my practical and loving father. So with T. S. Eliot:

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of our exploration

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

‘Little Gidding’

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(1983)

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from
Collected Poems
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