The Fear Paradox Read online

  We might say that the anger which eventually burst through for her was a form of health—a reestablishing of her right to have her needs and desires. And while this conception makes sense, it didn’t work so well for her in reality. So strong was her form of psychological captivity that following the anger outbursts, Robin would become flooded with guilt and shame, and retreat back to the security of her padded cell, locking the door with her own key.

  From this example with Robin, we glimpse several aspects of difficulty that emerge in the relationship between Fear and Imagination. Most broadly, we see the central flaw in human security. Human security is dependent upon an attachment system that is at best subjective and at worst prone to distortion. The life experiences of the caregiver shape the subjectivity of threat assessment, and this not only guides parenting but also becomes internalized as part of the infant and child.

  The subjectivity in threat assessment has been useful to us as a species in that our security in infancy and childhood does not solely rest upon our innate fears, but also relies upon previous experiences of fear learned by our protectors. Our species survived because we were able to adapt, an adaptation built upon a flexibility in assessing how to survive. But unfortunately, this same flexibility in threat assessment is vulnerable to becoming distorted by a caregiver’s traumatic life experience.

  Take, for example, the experience of parents holding their children’s hands while crossing a street. How different would it be for a parent, and ultimately for their child, if that parent had previously witnessed a child being hit by a car? Even though we all know that children every day are hit by cars, our grip on our child’s hand would be inestimably tighter if we had personally suffered such a trauma.

  Trauma shapes us in profound ways, most notably around Fear. And what we often find is that the effects spread across domains. In other words, the parent who witnessed a child being hit by a car might not only be hyper-controlling while crossing streets, but also be hyper-controlling in life, in general.

  In this, we see another difficult aspect in the connection between Fear and Imagination—the relational lengths we will go to maintain security. And if our security is tied to relational harmony with our primary attachment figures, then our vulnerability to those relationships becomes quite high. For many, like Robin, this brings with it an impossible task: maintain harmony in attachment while furthering personal fulfillment. This is where Imagination becomes most vulnerable.

  Because our sense of security has roots in developmental experience, what we go through in infancy, childhood, and adolescence not only directly contributes to our learning about danger, it also directly contributes to who we eventually become. Psychological security is fundamental to a sense of self. If during childhood we were insufficiently supervised, neglected, or abandoned, we might never have fully internalized a balanced sense of attachment, what is called “secure attachment.” And without this, we remain in a continual state of attempting to restore what was missing. The problem with this is that Fear changes everything it touches. Our unresolved insecurities drive us to tighten our grip on life, to the point where we literally choke the very breath out of life. We might be able to keep our child from being hit by a car, but if in the process we corrode our child’s sense of freedom and Imagination, what have we actually gained? And as we saw with Robin, Fear can demand of us a form of submission in which we must sacrifice our Imagination and our vitality on the altar of survival.

  Sadly, a human being can remain in such a state of deprivation for his or her entire life. Meaning and fulfillment are lost; curiosity and Imagination barely function. How many of us live with subtle forms of this? But what we now need to wonder about is what happens to Imagination when it is psychologically marginalized in this way. Is it lost to us? Is it damaged? Can we ever find it again? And if so, what healing does it require?

  Chapter Seven

  Imaginative Revolution

  “Science was destined to remake the world, but in its early days it inspired laughter more often than reverence.”

  —Edward Dolnick

  In the previous chapter, we looked at the oppressive nature of Fear both personally and societally. We saw the ways in which discomfort with curiosity, and ultimately with Imagination, led our minds during the Middle Ages to shut down. And, while it is certainly true that this was a result of restrictions on education and publishing, there appears to be more to it. Our minds collectively submitted to the forces of Fear. But as we know from where we stand today, this darkness did not last forever; something eventually did shift for us as a civilization.

  This change might seem to have been inevitable, that the oppression of the Middle Ages quite naturally would have come to an end. I say this because much of what drives us as a society rests upon a bias that growth is endemic to our species. Science, culture, medicine, and even the randomness of evolution seem to operate from an unwritten law that progress marches forward from less to more, from bad to good, from low to high, and from dark to light. Our desperate need to believe in growth is so woven into the fabric of who we are that it is difficult to see that Fear is unquestionably driving the bus.

  In his book Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, Douglas Rushkoff supports this notion with a caution about our compulsion toward economic growth and its potential for catastrophe. In his most recent work, Team Human, he goes further to say that these blind propensities are not only impacting us economically, but might be threatening our very humanity.97 I would add to Rushkoff’s warning that, even though we as a society believe Imagination has triumphed in the form of progress, the reality is not so simple.

  The forces of Fear that brought about societal collapse after Augustine have not disappeared. Imagination may have broken free, but a look at our history makes clear that Fear is still at work.

  For a number of my patients, looking back at their developmental histories seems like a waste of time. As one recently described it, “I have so much trouble with the present, why should I bother with the past?” While I do understand the importance of dealing with the present, it is often difficulties with the present that require us to look back in time. For each of us, events during early development necessitate a need to adapt, and sometimes these adaptations send us on life trajectories that don’t end up working for us in the long run. For instance, if I mention to a patient that they seem to exclusively favor self-reliance and are unable to ask for help, and wonder with them how this tendency came to develop, they will say something like, “I’ve been this way for as long as I can remember.” Now, it is true that each of us might have come into the world with temperamental differences in this regard, but most likely, an inability to ask for help would be the result of early experiences in which asking for help was less than successful. Looking back at our developmental histories can help us identify what we needed to do to survive, and figure out the long-term cost of these adaptations.

  It is the same with us here in this book. In my view, examining the historical cycle that was enacted between Fear and Imagination five hundred years ago gives us an opportunity to understand, not only what shaped us as a species, but how we might readjust today to keep the dysfunctional patterns from repeating. I would argue that the history of Fear and Imagination is anything but dead. Fear and Imagination continue to do battle within each of us, and they continue to shape our society. For this reason, I would like to take a deeper look at what happened to move us out of the Dark Ages and tip the balance back toward Imagination.

  Humanity Then

  It is difficult to imagine what life was like as we emerged from the Dark Ages. It was a time in which no one bathed, human excrement piled up in gutters, accused witches were executed by the hundreds,98 and the London Fire and Plagues of 1665 and 1666 were taken as evidence of God’s displeasure.99

  So little of nature was understood that fantastical ideas filled in the blanks at every opportunity. The animation of life,
the movements of matter, the workings of the body, all were understood through what today would be called superstition. Rene Descartes himself is reported to have believed that the guilt of a murderer could be determined by bringing him into close proximity to the victim. When this was done, so Descartes believed, the victim’s wounds would gush blood anew, thus proving guilt.100

  Life for the newly emerging artisan class in the 1600s, what we might call the middle class today, although a step up, still provided little opportunity for mobility. Everyone knew their place. Tradespeople learned their craft through apprenticeship or through work in a family trade. There was no need for formal education. Reading and writing were not necessary for most people, certainly not for the masses of peasants and wandering laborers. The first paper mill opened in England in 1600, and printed material was almost nonexistent.

  In the cosmology of the seventeenth century, the earth and human beings were understood to be just about as far from heaven as you can get. And even though the earth was thought to be at the center of the universe, such a distinction did not carry honor with it. It was, perhaps, a bit like an alcoholic patient of mine who described himself by saying, “I am the piece of excrement at the center of the universe.” This lowly place we held at that time, the still center of the cosmos, was reinforced not only by the Bible, but also by the filth and depravity in which we lived.101

  What Changed?

  The change that eventually transformed the Dark Ages into the Age of Enlightenment is tied most notably to events in the seventeenth century. As a cluster, these events are referred to as the Scientific Revolution, and Isaac Newton is thought to be the father of this transformation. This was a period in which great discoveries in mathematics, astronomy, and the life sciences brought us to a new, more accurate and rational understanding of ourselves and the universe. The invention of new lenses allowed us to see the life hidden in a drop of water and to extend our vision out into space. We discovered the intricacies of anatomy and learned that the earth was not the center of the universe. Newton was able to uncover the nature of light and color, to invent the calculus, and to give us the foundational laws that govern all existence. He “mathematized the world.”102 Without a doubt, we can see from this that Imagination found a way to break free of its prior confinement.

  Long before Newton came on the scene, however, a group of men in the early 1600s were laying the foundation for his work. They approached the monarchy of Charles II with a request. They wanted to form a society for the advancement of knowledge, and they wanted the king’s blessing. They would call it the Royal Society.

  Needless to say, the inception of the Royal Society went unnoticed by all but a few. Those who attended the meetings were members of an elite upper class that came to enjoy the oddities and wonders that were paraded before them. As noted by historians of this period, the initial experiments of the Royal Society were often nothing more than displays of nature’s deformities or demonstrations of barbaric torture.103 Animals were cut open without anesthesia, their lungs inflated with bellows. Transfusions were done between unrelated species of animals. Poisons were given to cats and dogs while onlookers marveled. Newly invented vacuum chambers suffocated dogs and cats, and all varieties of the grotesque were studied beneath the lenses of the newly invented microscope.104 In one entry of his diary, Samuel Pepys, a frequent visitor and eventual president of the Royal Society, reported somewhat gleefully, “I also saw an abortive child preserved in spirits of salts.”105

  The Royal Society was indeed a strange mix of entertainment, science, and sadistic pleasure. The fact that its work had touches of a sideshow is not surprising. The Middle Ages out of which it grew regularly hosted public executions, punishments, and dissections. It would be wrong to suggest that the inception of the Royal Society brought with it an instantaneous change in the societal mind of the seventeenth century.

  As I’ve argued earlier, societal change is dependent upon the collective psychological state of the individuals that make up that society. Although Newton gets the credit for the big discoveries, and the Royal Society the credit for providing him a platform, it is someone far less known who managed to shift, ever so slightly, the mind’s right to wonder.

  Sir Francis Bacon was born into the aristocracy in the middle of the sixteenth century and received formal education up through his time at Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. He became first counselor to Queen Elizabeth in 1597 and was influential in much of political life at that time. Bacon also began to question the validity of the imposed limitations on science. He believed that empiricism had much to offer society and its prohibition was holding us back from improving the world. Bacon, it seems, had found a way to imagine.

  Specifically, Bacon laid out a new plan for our relationship to nature and to experimentation. He refuted the many criticisms against learning, such as that it invited sloth or made people uncivilized, immoral, or unlawful. He offered us a new vision, not just of science, but of our relationship to knowledge. The prohibitions against learning, the caution around hubris, he believed, were unnecessary and inaccurate.

  While Bacon held to the notion that all of science was a demonstration of our love of God, unlike Augustine, he rejected the idea that, because of our devotion to God, we needed to stay ignorant. This was demonstrated in his 1620 work where he quoted Proverbs: “It is the glory of God to conceal a thing, but the glory of a king to search it out.”106 The historian Peter Harrison has questioned whether we can reasonably believe that Bacon was sincere in his reverence for God in relation to science.107 Of course, it is difficult to answer this question. But, regardless, Bacon was able to avoid a direct assault on the Church, the Bible, or Augustine. Rather than defend the sinful nature of curiosity, Bacon brilliantly pivoted the argument and offered an alternative to curiosity as the originating motivation for science. Charity, he suggested, and not curiosity, should motivate the desire for knowledge and scientific innovation. By charity, he meant a recognition that the fruits of scientific endeavors would benefit God’s creatures and that to pursue science was to pursue God’s work. He said, let scientists be “like bees, which extract the goodness from nature and use it to make useful things.”108

  Bacon ushered in an optimism through an approach built upon experimentation and documentation. The motto for science would change, he proposed, from ne plus ultra, no further, to plus ultra, further yet.109 With an imaginative bravura, he said, “Thus we cannot conceive of any end of external boundary of the world…there must be something beyond.”110

  Through his invitation to experiment and innovate, Bacon was opening the way for people of the seventeenth century to think more for themselves and of themselves. And what is most important for us to understand in this is that Bacon began to elevate the potential of the human being.

  To my mind, Bacon was like a societal therapist. He held a vision of change long before his patient could. Like Bacon, as therapists, we help to recognize what the psychoanalyst James Fosshage and others have called the “forward edge” of the patient.111 This is the place where the natural development of the patient is taking them. This is what Bacon helped do for the seventeenth century. Not only did he caution against accepting outdated philosophical foundations for knowledge, he affirmed that the human being, although ignorant and covered in filth, had value. The imagination, he told his peers, was excited by “that which strikes and enters the mind at once and suddenly.”112 Beneath the superficial filth, Bacon saw the beauty of a mind capable of Imagining. He pulled us out of the filth and dried our soggy brains.

  Imagination, as Bacon realized, is profoundly involved in the experience of self and self-worth. But more than this, his plan for freeing Imagination placed human beings in a new relationship to nature and to light. Nature, Bacon believed, was ours for the taking and could be rightfully mastered “by the mind, which is a kind of divine fire.”113 And all the while, Bacon proposed that the work of the scie
ntist was ”not for gold, silver, or jewels…but only for God’s first creature, which was light. To have light, I say, of the growth of all parts of the world.”114 While Bacon fought back against the ascription of unworthiness through his allegiance to light, God’s first creature, we will see in the next chapter how this dynamic reveals his own vulnerability to Fear. Bacon’s devotion to the light was equally a declaration of our independence and a manifesto of our insecurity.

  Chapter Eight

  The Fear Paradox

  “The trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.”

  ―Erica Jong

  Marianne Williamson, the New Age spiritual author, wrote, “It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.”115 Notably, this quote is often falsely attributed to Nelson Mandela. I say notably since Mandela is so firmly linked to the world’s fight for freedom, and light, as we have seen, is metaphorically integral to this fight.

  The quote from Marianne Williamson is a favorite of mine, but not, perhaps, for the reasons you might imagine. Although I cannot say with certainty what she intended, my sense is that Williamson was attempting to communicate that we as human beings suffer with an unfounded fear of our own unique magnificence. She is communicating her belief that light as a power within us is not to be feared, that false modesty is no substitute for an authentic right to be ourselves. And, finally, that letting our light shine is more than a right, it is an obligation.