Friends and Enemies
Dorothy Rowe
552pp, HarperCollins
£19.99
Buy it at BOL
The multiple, infinitely shaded meanings of psychology vanish without a poetry of language. In behavioural science as in art, banality of expression can falsify lived experience as thoroughly as can ignorance. Dorothy Rowe is a clinical psychologist who made her reputation writing accessible, practical studies of depression and mental disorder. Her skill was to strip long-accustomed disguises from our common emotional behaviour, to take familiar domestic frustrations, blockages and antagonisms and reveal the underlying, often infantile psychological mechanisms that in practice made them self-perpetuating and self-defeating.
At their empathetic best, her books were some of the most sensible the proliferating self-help shelves had to offer: they radiated a kind of wise, Good Fairy perceptiveness. Yet what was moving about her work was what also rendered it limited and naive. Rowe wrote about suffering enthusiastically, with a brisk, crisp, benign, problem-solving definiteness of tone and an almost evangelical faith in the achievability of psychotherapeutic healing.
Her optimistic conviction that the world's pain and distress might be resolved, if only we could be made to understand the processes by which we set about creating it, brooked no disagreement. Sceptical of the efficacy of drugs, ECT and any form of biological or genetic determinism, she put her trust in our innate ability to change, and in the central, governing goodness of the human heart. What she taught was the age-old remedy for human sorrow once offered by the popular Christian apologists - "hell is a prison locked from within but open your heart to God and you can be free" - expressed agnostically and applied to the management of mental illness.
Hatred is what vexes her most, and what she thinks she under stands best. She argues that in order to salvage our own accumulated psychic hurt, we create "meaning structures": ways of giving the world mental coherence that suit our immediate emotional needs but are at variance with reality. By refusing to dismantle or modify them out of what Rowe terms "primitive pride", we fuel an inner anger of disappointment, which we either turn against ourselves as depression or direct outward as hatred toward others.
Her latest book, Friends and Enemies, ventures into territory normally annexed by political writing or philosophy. Although it contains flashes of profundity, it also magnifies her most serious weakness - the elevation of a robust emotional common sense into doctrinaire platitudes, pious simplifications of language that assume an authority they do not possess. As she travels the world, attempting to anatomise the enduring animosities and allegiances by which the peoples of Bosnia, South Africa, Northern Ireland and the Lebanon define and tear themselves apart, she circles a profoundly serious subject - the origins of our basic human hunger for hatred as well as for love. Yet the realities she is interested in, which engage her emotionally, defeat her stylistically.
For all its admirable ambition, Friends and Enemies is fundamentally inarticulate. Faced with inconceivable brutality, Rowe never reaches beyond the elementary psychological language of her studies of domestic depression: there's a comic hubris in the scolding deadpan of her Mother Superior tone. Of the intricate family loyalties of the Hezbollah in Lebanon, she observes tartly: "Many people stay close and loyal to their family. Their upbringing has not given them a broad perspective on society." When she's in Drumcree grappling with the mentality that sets Protestant against Catholic, and saying things like "having an enemy who is immensely wicked is a great comfort because, no matter what you are, your enemy is worse", it takes a quotation from Richard Hofstadter properly to shape her meaning: "Anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritan."
Rowe carries her wisdom like a shield, and it armours her against any threatening complexity, any conceivability of error or qualification. Instead of asking questions that extend by emotional broadness the scope of our understanding, she gives answers that are banal not because they are completely wrong but because they aren't sufficiently right. The leitmotif of her book is the declaration: "We were born just being. We looked around and found the world an interesting place. Then adult voices began instructing us. We took what these voices said inside us and lost the ability to just be. But it can be found again."
Not if infancy is a process, a development, in which the child learns to play in order to reconcile itself to the potentially lonely world where it must learn to live, as it gradually separates itself from the sanctuary of its mother's love. And not if there is anything desirable in the goal of a mature adulthood, the acquisition of moral responsibility. Better, surely, to see the accepting stillness of the human mind as a striven-for equipoise rather than as the recovery of an alleged pre-adult, pre-neurotic calm, a happy, infantile passivity. What is lost in depression and in states such as schizophrenia isn't happiness or contentment but that resilience, that balance, that faith in our own self-correcting psychic integrity that the afflicted, to their great distress, find unattainable.
One of the troubling things about Rowe's book is how intolerant her creed can sound. Is it enough to say to those in the grip of annihilating psychic agony, "just be", and then to blame them for "wanting to stay in their prison" if they fail to respond? When Jorge Luis Borges writes of "the horror of being and going on being", he touches the annihilating weariness of depression with a recognition of its stone-like intractability which is completely outside Rowe's structure of comprehension. The punitive fallacy of popular psychology, and of the whole self-help genre, is an ecological one - that if the soil is right, then the plant must grow straight. To suggest that happiness and satisfaction are not necessarily our spiritual birthright is heresy.
Why do we hate? To keep the eternally fragile identity intact, as Rowe rightly sees. When we hate, our minds become simpler. But there's also a restlessness, a need to assert, in the dynamics of enmity, that lends it a paradoxical creativity. WH Auden understood this when, in The Sea and the Mirror, his meditation on Shakespeare's The Tempest, he had the benign magician Prospero's hard-won doctrine of reconciliation tauntingly rejected by an unrepentant and evil brother, Antonio, who refuses to cooperate with the prevailing spirit of holistic harmony: "While I stand outside/ Your circle, the will to charm is still there."
It was Auden's theme and it is Rowe's too: this creation around us of a magic circle of love, and our reluctance to abandon its protective power - to open ourselves to the world as it really is, not as our fantasies wish it to be. Yet, because he was a great poet, Auden captured in a stanza what Rowe cannot adequately describe, even in a long book: "Our tears well from a love/ We have outgrown; our cities predict/ More than we hope; even our armies/ Have to express our need of forgiveness."
