Some of the reason why adult life can be
greyer and more miserable than it should
be is that our earliest years are generally made
up of a prolonged and highly formative encounter
with the idea of obedience. Throughout childhood,
there is little doubt that the path to maturity
must involve doing a litany of substantially
unpleasant things demanded of us by figures of
authority whom we cannot question. No one asks if
we would be particularly interested in learning
about the angles of triangles or what a volt
really is, but we obey in any case. We give over
our days and much of our evenings and weekends
to complying with an agenda elaborated for us
by people whose concern with our happiness is
at best highly abstract. We put on our blue
or grey jumper and sit at a desk and study the
plotline of Macbeth or the chemical properties
of helium – and trust that our boredom
and distaste must be substantially wrong.
We then become inclined to extend this attitude
into our dealings with the wider world.
We assume that what we particularly want should
never be the important factor. We opt for a career
on the basis that – to others – it looks like the
right thing to subscribe to. At parties we’ll be
able to answer the question what do you do? in
a way that – by consensus – is unobjectionable
or somewhat impressive. At the same time, we
learn to see freedom as both appealing and,
in a way, absurd. We’ll be free, we feel, when we
don’t have anything else to fill our time with:
on Saturday mornings or when we’re retired.
In the process, we become highly adept at
rationalising our frustrations. We tell ourselves
that we have no option. We have to stick with a
job that we resent or a marriage that has grown
stale because (we say) we need the money or our
friends would be disappointed or it’s the
kind of thing everyone like us has to do.
We become geniuses at elaborating excuses that
make our unhappiness look necessary and sane.
The mid-twentieth century British psychoanalyst
Donald Winnicott encountered many patients – often
high-performing and prestigious ones – who were
in acute distress because they were, as he put it,
‘too good.’ They had never felt the
inner freedom and security to say no,
largely because their earliest caregivers would
have viewed the expression of their authentic
feelings as a threatening insurrection they had to
quash. Winnicott proposed that health could only
come about from counteracting this tendency to
subordinate too quickly – and too trustingly – to
the preferences of others, including people who
might claim to care a lot about us. Being ‘bad’ in
a salutary way in Winnicott’s vision wouldn’t have
to mean breaking the law or becoming aggressive;
it would mean finding the inner freedom to do
things others might find disconcerting on the
basis that we, our authentic selves,
have a sincere wish to explore them.
It would be founded on a very profound
view that others can never ultimately
be the best custodians of our lives, for
their instincts about what’s acceptable
haven’t been formed on the basis of
a deep knowledge of our unique needs.
We tend to fantasise about freedom in terms of
not having to work or of being able to take off on
long trips. But if we dig into its core, freedom
really means no longer being beholden to the
expectations of others. We may, quite freely, work
very hard or stay at home during the holidays. The
decisive factor is our willingness to disappoint,
to upset or to disconcert others in doing so.
We don’t need to relish this – we may by nature
be inclined to get on well with as many people
as possible. But we can live with the idea that
our central choices might not meet with general
approval. At the party, we can risk someone
not being at all impressed by what we do,
or regarding our living arrangements as unorthodox
or our opinions as odd. But we don’t mind too
much – because we’ve become free. Our sense of
what our life is about is no longer so confused
with the notion of meeting the
expectations of others. To be free,
ultimately, is to be devoted – in ways that might
be strenuous – to meeting our own expectations.
How to overcome your childhood is a book that teaches us how character is developed. The concept of emotional inheritance. The formation of our concepts of being good or bad and the impact of parental styles of love on the way we choose adult partners.
