In the previous section it was discussed how families screen off
certain emotions, and that unconscious attractions works on the
principle that we tend to pick partners that have the same emotions
screened off and hidden, even to themselves. In this section Robin
and John talk about the screen and how it sometimes slips to let out
repressed and 'taboo' emotions.

John: In what way does the screen not work?

Robin: In several ways. First, it slips up now and again, and lets the
forbidden feelings out for a bit. Second, trying to keep the screen
firmly in place takes up a lot of energy. And third, well, you can't
just cut off a bit of human personality without unbalancing the whole
system - the whole human being.

John: Very glib, Doctor. Could we take them one at a time, please? The
screen can slip?

Robin: Yes, especially if we're tired or ill or have a bit too much lo
drink. Then the emotion can escape. And because we're out of touch
with it, it takes us by surprise and isn't easily controlled if it
does. So we might suddenly say or do something very nasty, something
that seems 'not like us'.

John: Yes, I'll never forget that happening to me once in the group
you ran. It was as though someone else had said the words, someone not
connected with me. And I was quite shocked when I realised that I'd
said it. I can recall how ashamed I felt, because it contradicted the
image I had of myself as someone who wasn't snide.

Robin: That's exactly what I mean. Because it's behind the screen
normally, it doesn't feel like 'you'. And sometimes the feeling will
suddenly erupt over something very trivial - it's been building up
behind the screen for some time and suddenly bursts out. But because
the cause is so petty, the eruption seems ridiculous, so we're ashamed
and embarrassed and there's even more reason to cram it back behind
the screen again. Or the feeling can escape in much more disguised
forms. If we resent someone, but have screened that off, we might
forget their name, or their birthday, or drop an 'accidental' brick.
Or we might have a destructive fantasy about them. Or even disguise
that as a worry about them.

John: A worry?

Robin: Oh yes. If a wife's angry with her husband for being late for
dinner and not 'phoning, she may imagine him in a motorway pile-up, as
a way of expressing her natural disguised anger at him. But at the
same time, the way she's imagining ringing the ambulance to get there
in time expresses her positive feelings too. But the repressed feeling
can escape in all these forms because we're not in touch with it. So
it operates a bit like a bandit, something out of our control.

John: Next, you said it takes up our energy trying to keep the screen
firmly in place?

Robin: Yes, because of the danger we somehow sense that the feelings
behind it - anger, jealousy, fear, or whatever - may slip out if we're
not on guard. So a bit of you is always keeping a sharp look-out for
an enemy you can't see. Even though you don't know why, you can never
completely relax, and that makes you tense and tired. The feelings are
always lurking there behind the screen and the effort to keep them out
of sight, out of mind, is connected with all kinds of psychosomatic
illnesses -headaches, stomach-aches and indigestion, high blood
pressure, some kinds of rheumatism, and so on.

John: Well, I first went into therapy because my doctor simply
couldn't find a physical explanation of why I was suffering low-grade
'flu symptoms a lot of the time, and also because I couldn't
understand why I carried so much tension.

Robin: Do you remember what happened?

John: The 'flu symptoms disappeared quite rapidly and never returned.
The tension level dropped steadily, but really quite slowly. I think
it took about three years to get to about the normal level. Even so,
it's fascinating, isn't it, to talk to physiotherapists and masseurs
and to realise what a high degree of tension is regarded generally as
'normal'.

Robin: And it's common for families to have quite a lot behind the
screen, as I said.

John: Now, what about the third reason you gave why the screen didn't
work - that it 'upsets the balance of the personality'?
Robin Well, all our feelings have a useful function.

John: All of them?

Robin: Yes, even the ones we sometimes think of as negative, provided
that we've got some control over them. So in a healthy person all
these feelings are balancing each other out. But if we screen off some
emotion, then our overall balance will be affected. To put it another
way, that screened-off emotion isn't available to us when we need it.

John: Well I see that in a way, but I find it very hard to imagine how
anger, envy, cruelty, and so on, can be useful.

Robin: If they're screened off, they're not. Then we're not in touch
with them and we never learn to handle them anyway. So when they break
out, they're out of control and destructive. But if we haven't
screened them off, if we're aware of them and reasonably comfortable
with them, we're then able to get some control over them.

John: I can see they're not so destructive then, but how can they be
useful! Take anger.

Robin: You'd use that to stand up for yourself if someone tried to
push you around or take advantage of you. Without it you can't defend
yourself when you need to. So someone who's put it all behind the
screen will seem passive and timid and will get bossed around a lot,
because his anger's not available to him. He won't be able to stand up
for himself.

John: He'll be too nice for his own good?

Robin: And 'too good to be true' as well. People won't quite trust it,
because they'll sense the anger is there somewhere. As of course it
is, behind the screen.

John: All right. But how can envy be useful?

Robin: Envy is all right if we're aware of it, and it's therefore
under control and balanced by the other emotions. Then it can be
positive, because we can use it to compete in work or games, and try
to emulate someone we admire.

John: ... Yes, actually that's true, isn't it? I'm envious of Tom
Stoppard's work, and Michael Frayn's and Alan Ayckbourn's, but in the
sense that I'd like to do something as good one day. But envy can
easily turn nasty, can't it? Then you just sit around resenting
everyone's success.

Robin: Envy only gets nasty when you want something very badly, but
the gap between what you've got and what the other person's got is so
great there seems no hope of reducing it and eventually sharing in the
good thing yourself.

John: That's exactly why I can't stand Mother Teresa. Anybody that
much saintlier than the rest of us ought to be taken down a peg or
two. I wish the gossip columnists would get after her.

Robin: They'd be wasting their time.

John: That wouldn't stop them. Which brings us to cruelty. Can that be
useful?

Robin: Yes, because sometimes we have to hurt someone for their own
good. That's necessary even with the people you love most. Or perhaps
especially with them. For example, parents need to help their children
gradually to become more independent. But that always entails a
certain unhappiness on the part of the child, since his first taste of
independence usually makes him feel rather anxious and frightened.
However, if the parents get it right, they can allow the child to
suffer a little more discomfort each time so that he can learn, bit by
bit, to face and overcome his fear, and grow in confidence.

John: They have to be 'cruel to be kind', in other words.

Robin: And if they'd screened cruelty off, they couldn't do that and
the child could never achieve real independence. Then what about a
surgeon who has to cut human flesh? He couldn't do it if he was too
squeamish. And, as a psychiatrist, I sometimes have to put people
through very painful experiences if they are to face their problems
and get over them - and I can't use an anaesthetic. I used to find
that much more difficult than I do now because I didn't like being
thought cruel by others, or feeling I was being cruel.

John: You mean you had cruelty behind the screen to some extent, but
becoming more aware of that helped you to become a more effective
therapist?

Robin: I think that's right. If a patient really needs to face up to
something painful, I'm less likely now to shrink away from getting
them to do so. But, of course, if anyone defines cruelty as the desire
deliberately to inflict pain for its own sake, that could never be
right.

John: How about anxiety?

Robin: That's vital. John How?

Robin: You wait till you get into a car driven by someone who doesn't
have any, then you'll see!

John: Yes, all right. So all our feelings are useful if we're aware of
them and reasonably comfortable with them, because then we r,m handle
them. But if we screen them off, first, they're not available when we
need them; and second, when the screen slips up and they escape, they
may do damage because we've got no control over them.

Robin: That's about it.

John: Now you say we've all got all these emotions in us.

Robin: Yes, I think human nature's pretty much the same everywhere, in
the sense that all human beings are made up of the same range of
feelings, just as our bodies are composed of the same range of
chemicals. We've all got affection, jealousy, courage, sadness,
determination, joy, cowardice, kindness, cruelty, sexiness, shyness,
and so on and so on.

John: And we've all got some of them behind the screen. All of us.

Robin: Yes. To some extent, anyway. Different combinations of emotions
are screened off in different people.

John: Well, does that mean you think that it's the way that we each
learn to screen off our emotions that helps to give us our particular
personalities?

Robin: Exactly. So someone who's got rid of affection looks
unfriendly. Someone who's screened off anger is too good to be true; a
loss of courage makes us timid; the loss of envy means we can't
compete; the loss of sexiness makes us up-tight; the loss of sadness
makes us a bit manic; and the loss of anxiety can make us terribly
dangerous!

John: One last question. Is this screening-off what Freud calls
'repression', and is the stuff behind the screen 'the unconscious'?

Robin: More or less. We're expressing the same ideas in a different
way.

John: Why different?

Robin: Well I'm trying to link up not just Freud's ideas, but also
those of other analysts and psychologists with a lot of new ideas from
family therapy and behaviour therapy. They're only very rough images
but I think they convey the idea that keeping part of ourselves out of
our awareness is a very active process; that it usually begins as a
deliberate hiding of some feeling from our family; that it's only
later that we lose sight of it ourselves; and that the feeling's
nevertheless always there, threatening to appear again at any moment.

John: And that the screen - repression - doesn't work.

Robin: I think we now have enough ideas to go back to the original
question of why couples who are attracted to each other have similar
family backgrounds - that is, tend to have missed out on the same
developmental stage.

John: Well, if they've both missed out on the same stage, they'll both
have problems with the same emotions, won't they? That is, with the
feelings that they should have learned to handle at the missing stage
- but didn't.

Robin: Right. And if they've both had trouble with the same
feelings ...

John: ... they've put the same ones behind their screens?

Robin: Eureka. That's why they're attracted to each other. Because
they've got the same things behind their screens, and the same things
in front.

John: Why the same in front? Human nature minus what's been screened
off, you mean?

Robin: That's right. So they see each other and ... it's a perfect
match. They're made for each other! It's quite amazing how much they
have in common. And they have. They've divided up lo fit each other
beautifully. The perfect mate!

John: But hang on a minute. They're not attracted by what's behind the
screen, are they? They'd be repelled by that - that's the taboo bit.

Robin: No, you're right. It's the front that attracts them - the shop
window. But the front's the way it is because of what's behind.

[Next - more on attraction...]