Author: Dr Jean Pain

Categories
Behaviour

Strangers

Some thirty years ago I opened a shop for prints and posters in Cambridge in King’s Parade. A wonderful site. Every now and then I held exhibitions for new artists whose works I liked. As a result the shop became enormously popular. My customers said “Why can’t I find such an interesting collection anywhere else?” The answer to that was clear. I only ever bought work that I liked myself. Whenever a rep came to show me his wares I would look through his books very quickly since I always knew at once when I liked something and when I didn’t. It got to the point when I badly wanted to paint again. I began to feel that I could paint well if I could find the right teacher.

Sadly, I had to give up my business for reasons that had nothing to do with me. However this,was one of those blessings in disguise that Jung called synchronicity. Much as I had enjoyed my three shops which enabled me to help bring up our three children, I felt it was time for a change. I had always wanted to be a psychotherapist and I set myself up in private practice.

Once again I had made a choice that I badly needed and I soon began to enjoy my new career and earn money. Now was the time for me to find a good art teacher. I saw an article in The Daily Telegraph about a man who had achieved remarkable results as Head of Art in a well-known public school in Wiltshire. He wanted to retire early to teach older people privately. I wrote off to him straight away and so did some 400 other people. I regularly went for art lessons with a remarkably able teacher. over a period of five years. I had always believed I could be an artist if I could ever find a good teacher. I was right.

Robin would sometimes run a weekly course away from his base. He chose to do one in Cambridge to give his students the chance to paint some beautiful views and architecture. Of course I went.

Our easels were set up in a room in one of the colleges. After a while I went out to get myself a drink. Outside in an adjacent smaller room than ours sat a solitary lady painting. Following my usual habit of wanting to know what was going on around me, I asked her if she was one of us. She looked up at me with a face that reminded me of a stuck-insider. She just said “Yes.” Curious as ever I said “Why aren’t you painting with us?” A pause. “Well I came in late.”

“You have a foreign accent. Would you mind telling me where you come from?”

She frowned and said “I come from Germany. “Why do you ask so many questions?” I felt that she didn’t want to tell me. After another pause I said “Why did you come to England?” Her face tightened up a few notches. “Well, I am Jewish”. Her words were delivered in as much of an aggressive way as she could manage.

Now I had got my answer and understood why she guarded her privacy. Like most of the rest of us she was old enough to have had to get away from Germany in time. “I am getting a cup of tea. May I get one for you too, or coffee if you prefer?” We drank together and she softened. We had a pleasant chat and her manner changed.

I was pleased that she opened up to me. It was worth the trouble. The more I start a conversation with one of these outsiders the more confident I feel. When you meet a stranger and speak to him or her first you never know what will happen and what locked doors may open. My research is not all reading and studying at home, I keep my eyes and ears open in all kinds of places I learn more and more about people and I know not to hold back when I see something interesting. Research isn’t only reading and thinking it is also learning from everyday experiences with other people.

Categories
Autobiography

Lucky for Some!

There are two kinds of luck: the kind that hits us out of the blue and the kind that we create for ourselves. The first kind is very rare and we have no control over it. This is the sort that most people believe in. That is why buying lottery tickets is so popular.

When I was very young, every Saturday night at tea-time we all had to keep quiet while my father

listened to the football results to see if he had won a prize. After each check of his completed entry forms he threw down his pencil and recited the same words: “They’ve let me down again!” We all got on with our tea and he got on with his disappointment. I was only five or six at that time but I formed a lifelong promise to myself that somehow or other I would learn how to make my own luck. Talk about role-models! Mine were not of the usual variety, I didn’t copy from my elders, I learned from their mistakes.

After my husband died a few years ago, I moved to a rented house close to my daughter. I looked for a new hairdresser. We chatted together and she asked if I had retired. “Certainly not!” I said “I shall retire the day I die!” I told her I was a writer. “We have a writer in our village. She, too, is an older lady. She is German and has written the story of her life during World War 2.”

“How surprising!” I said. “I have also written a book about my experience during the war.” My first thoughts were “I must meet this lady”. I met Heide Elfenbein and her husband Josef, a professor emeritus and soon made friends for life. I don’t make friends easily. We had so much in common that it was uncanny.

Our discovery of each other could hardly have been a coincidence. It is an excellent example of synchronicity , a discovery of C.G. Jung. We not only have an awareness of our own inner being but there is also such a thing as a connected, or universal unconscious. The more we keep our eyes and ears open the more we increase our creativeness and notice opportunities and most important of all, we feel we are in touch with all living people and all our ancestors.

Our stories were about the same length. Our lives had been so different that I thought if we published the two books in one, they would make a powerful contrast with each other. Heide is well-known in Germany and has published many books including poetry. I was not well known in England. Heide wanted her book to be published in English. I suggested that we should translate her story together. I knew a little German, but I am also a linguist and had some experience of translation from Spanish into English. Heide speaks enough English to get along, but not enough to put her book into a literary style.

We worked together very well and liked each other’s stories. In six months we completed her book into English. Heide had published her book in Germany already some few years ago. We set about looking for publishers in England and Germany. This is not a good time for publishing. So far I have been unable to find one, but I keep looking. Heide found a renowned publisher in Germany and our joint book will be published in March, 2011. As she is well-known in her own country, we have both been invited to Germany for the day of publication so that we can talk to people and sign books. I am learning German as fast as I can.

Heide and I are both entrepreneurs. We both write and paint. We have become very good friends and work well together. Moreover, our outlook on life is very similar. Because of the inevitable influence of propaganda in all countries when wars break out, it has often been taken for granted that the entire German population was firmly supportive of Hitler and his party. Not so. We agree that wartime propaganda lingers on and everyone should know about all those brave German people , including some who were members of the Nazi Party, who risked their own lives because they did not agree with all of Hitler’s ideas, especially the Holocaust.

Categories
Children

Changing my Mind

Before I was 6 or 7 years old, I had already decided that I wished I was a boy. It seemed that men had all the fun. Father went off to his office in the Civil Service in London and spent most of his day with his colleagues whilst Mother had to stay at home with boring and tiring things to do and babies to look after. I did not like babies at all. They were either screaming for attention or emitting unpleasant smells.

Mother never had enough milk so we were fed with bottles. One day, in someone else’s house I saw a baby breast-feeding. I knew something about cannibals and felt quite sick. Was that why I didn’t like dolls? They seemed like dead things to me. However, I liked making things. I created effigies of dolls with a stick, crayons and bits of cloth. I made a small theatre out of a cardboard box with cardboard figures as actors. And I wrote simple plays with an old typewriter. That was fun. I made up my mind that I would never marry nor have children. I knew I loved learning and wanted a career. Above all, I wanted to go away from the house every day. Though school was not ideal I could learn things there in a less depressing environment.

When I was at grammar school and getting ready to try for a scholarship to university, a teacher suggested I take some lessons in typing and shorthand. “Why?” I said, “I don’t want to be a secretary.”

“It could be a stand by” she said. “No” I said “I do not want to do what other people tell me. I want to be in control with responsibility for myself.” I started the course but I didn’t finish it. I did not know how useful typing could be. How could I know that things would change greatly and computers would come into being with so many possibilities.

Since I was very small I wanted to learn Spanish and go to South America. I don’t know why but I had strong feelings that my ancestors must have come from there. With a four-year course in Hispanic Studies at Liverpool University I was well equipped. I met my husband there. We read the same course. We married when I finished. He took a job in Maracaibo with Shell.

I loved Maracaibo and a maid to do the housework. I couldn’t find a job because the only things I could do were secretarial work or teaching. The people around me in England puzzled me. I never knew why they said what they said to me and I had no idea what to say back. On the whole I came to the conclusion that they didn’t like children very much. It was unnerving.

There was none of that in South America. The Venezuelans were very much my kind of people. They said what they meant and held nothing back. They loved their children and let them stay up late. I was even more convinced that I had some of their blood in my veins. The change from the squalor of post-war England to the country overflowing with milk and honey was ecstatic. I soon had two babies, both boys and to my amazement I found them fascinating and became engrossed in watching them learning to walk and talk. Mother Nature got the better of me and I was delighted.

It just goes to show that when we are children we rarely have any idea about what we really want to do.

We need to learn more about ourselves to be able to think more clearly. That was the beginning of my real life. I had no idea of what lay before me. One thing I learned but it took me a long time. I realised that I was glad to be a woman and not a man. What helped me very greatly was my enthusiastic readings of most of the work of Carl Gustav Jung: the best psychologist and the best philosopher by my standards.

Categories
Good and Evil

Good and Evil

Ever since our ancestors learned to develop and use words, our species made up stories, poems and plays to help them to understand the mysteries of nature. Carl Gustav Jung, one of the greatest psychologists, spent years travelling to remote groups of people to study what kind of fairy tales and folklore he could find. To his surprise, however remote the tribes might be and at whatever times the stories emerged there were strong similarities between all of them. Can you imagine how terrifying the forces of nature must have been to people who knew nothing about how the world works? Since they only knew live, talking beings and the rest of the animal kingdom, it must have seemed obvious to them that there must be much bigger and stronger versions of themselves hidden away in the skies, who caused all the phenomena of such events as thunderstorms, lightning and fierce winds that could help them or hinder them.

“Jung claimed that all religious systems contained a hierarchy of different gods, each one of whom had powers to oversee certain aspects of human nature. All systems contained a heaven and an underworld.

All gods required to be worshipped and to be offered sacrifices. All gods reflected human beings’ ideas about themselves. They were capable of all kinds of human feelings and responses: love, anger spite, jealousy, revenge and mercy. They were capricious and unpredictable. Failure to worship and sacrifice would incur their wrath and bring down punishments on the offender.” -Quoted from my book “Not Just Talking”

Thus gods and religions came into being, but could not be seen, which must have made them even more frightening. What could they do to get into these creatures’ good books? Why, they must make sacrifices to please them by delivering to them what they valued including some of their own people.

Jung made a great discovery; that the same stories turned up again and again and the same characters. Every distant tribe recognised the same kinds of people and habits everywhere Jung went. The same selection of stereotypes turned up everywhere: wicked stepmothers, cruel people of all kinds, witches and giants on the side of evil and good fairies, nauseatingly beautiful children being ill treated by the envious, on the side of good. Everything had to have a happy ending. Everything was black and white. Jung gave these categories the title of archetypes. Some are female and some male. They are useful because they can be used for benchmarks when we are trying to understand what kinds of people there are in the world. Each archetype represents a particularly strong human characteristic. It is a rule-of-thumb way of getting some kind of idea of someone we don’t know.

Categories
Behaviour Meaning of Words Your Dark Side

Understand Your Dark Side

Dreams have always fascinated people because they feel that something is happening to them over which they have no control. There have always been people who will try to interpret other people’s dreams. The fact is that dreams are made by the people who dream them. They are the only ones who know what they mean but they don’t consciously know.

I have been trying to interpret my own dreams for many years. When I got it right I always knew and when I got it wrong I also knew, because there are many aspects of ourselves that remain unconscious until we work on them. Sometimes we can get help from a psychotherapist or someone who knows you very well, but if you can, it is better to find out for yourselves. It is a worthwhile task because the better we know ourselves the more power we have over our lives, especially in decision-making.

Freud was very interested in dreams. Quite a few of his ideas turned out to be wrong later: in particular, wishful thinking. It appears that we don’t dream for what we want but for who we are.

Here is a short list of some characteristics of dreams:

Everyone in our dreams is ourself, just as when we are awake we see others through our own lenses.

Our dreams are directly related to what we unconsciously noticed the day before. We all do this when we talk with other people. We don’t just talk but also may have deep emotions brought about by the talk. Have you noticed that you react very differently to different people? How we are affected teaches us more about ourselves. Dreams can do this, but it is all in a coded form. The unconscious won’t give up its secrets so easily.

Time and places get distorted. I once had a dream just like a story, about me of course. When I woke up I remembered everything vividly and I felt as though a year had gone by. I gleaned rich material from that dream.

Violent and frightening dreams are not uncommon. When we remember that most of us are taught to be ‘good’ one way or another it is hardly surprising that we tend to push our anger and hatred underground.

Dreams set them free. We all need to accept every aspect of ourselves. We are less likely to behave badly and criticise others if we have acknowledged our own dark side.

One of Freud’s best findings was how humour works in dreams, especially puns. Here is a short story:

Arthur, a gay man and Jane, a straight woman, very quickly became very good friends. They went out together and spent hours talking about music and books. One day Arthur said to Jane “This must be hard for you because you are attracted to men ad I am not attracted to women.”

Jane felt angry. That night she had a dream:

They were having dinner out together. Arthur chose plaice. Jane said she would like plaice too. “No” said the waiter “There is no plaice for you here.” The message of this dream is unusually clear.

Categories
Behaviour Friends

Where's my Dad?

Simple speech exchanges are easy to manage on the whole. None of us really want to be stuck-insiders. We are pack animals. We cannot come into our own as individuals without learning about how other people live. We have to have a benchmark against which we can find out who we are. After all, we are all in the same boat and have many things in common. Whenever I open a conversation with someone I’ve never met before I am very careful about what I say until I have begun to understand him or her better. I stick to small talk until then. When I was much younger and wanted to find friends of my own I relied on my first impressions and made lots of mistakes.

My judgements were not good and I didn’t know why. I wished I had had an identical twin. Why? Because what I most yearned for was to be able to share my thoughts and ideas with her. Looking back I realised how much better I understood myself. Would I have been able to be best friends with her? How would we deal with the dark side of our natures? That would not be something I could anticipate. One of the joys of a good friendship when both people have much in common, including the same kind of intelligence and attitudes to life, is to be able to learn from each other.

It wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I began to make friends. I was sitting in my bookshop in Bedford with my name over the window. The door flew open and a six foot four giant strode in. His personality was overwhelming, he had sparkling and penetrating brown eyes and a mass of black hair. He looked like my idea of a pirate. “Hello Jean Pain” he said. “I’m Jerry Planus. Put the kettle on and make us a cup of tea.” There was nothing conventional about him. He might have come out of a picture book. We talked non-stop for a good hour, exchanging a brief outline of each others’ lives. I felt as though I had known him for years.

That was the beginning, I made five more men friends, equally unusual, when I opened my shop in Cambridge. It felt like a band of brothers and I was treated as such. When I finally decided to get myself analysed with a Jungian analyst, I discovered something very important. One day he said to me “You tell me about your men friends but you never mention anything about a woman friend. Why is that?”

“I don’t know” I said. “I don’t understand. I am a normal woman in as much as I am married and have three children I love dearly.”

“Well” he said. “From what you have told me about your father and brother, it is clear that you had little respect for them.”

“That is quite right” I said. “Both are dead and it saddens me that I haven’t missed them. They played no real parts in my life.”

“So this looks as though you are trying to do some repair work by making men friends you do respect.”

I knew at once that he was quite right.

Categories
Behaviour Friends

Where’s my Dad?

Simple speech exchanges are easy to manage on the whole. None of us really want to be stuck-insiders. We are pack animals. We cannot come into our own as individuals without learning about how other people live. We have to have a benchmark against which we can find out who we are. After all, we are all in the same boat and have many things in common. Whenever I open a conversation with someone I’ve never met before I am very careful about what I say until I have begun to understand him or her better. I stick to small talk until then. When I was much younger and wanted to find friends of my own I relied on my first impressions and made lots of mistakes.

My judgements were not good and I didn’t know why. I wished I had had an identical twin. Why? Because what I most yearned for was to be able to share my thoughts and ideas with her. Looking back I realised how much better I understood myself. Would I have been able to be best friends with her? How would we deal with the dark side of our natures? That would not be something I could anticipate. One of the joys of a good friendship when both people have much in common, including the same kind of intelligence and attitudes to life, is to be able to learn from each other.

It wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I began to make friends. I was sitting in my bookshop in Bedford with my name over the window. The door flew open and a six foot four giant strode in. His personality was overwhelming, he had sparkling and penetrating brown eyes and a mass of black hair. He looked like my idea of a pirate. “Hello Jean Pain” he said. “I’m Jerry Planus. Put the kettle on and make us a cup of tea.” There was nothing conventional about him. He might have come out of a picture book. We talked non-stop for a good hour, exchanging a brief outline of each others’ lives. I felt as though I had known him for years.

That was the beginning, I made five more men friends, equally unusual, when I opened my shop in Cambridge. It felt like a band of brothers and I was treated as such. When I finally decided to get myself analysed with a Jungian analyst, I discovered something very important. One day he said to me “You tell me about your men friends but you never mention anything about a woman friend. Why is that?”

“I don’t know” I said. “I don’t understand. I am a normal woman in as much as I am married and have three children I love dearly.”

“Well” he said. “From what you have told me about your father and brother, it is clear that you had little respect for them.”

“That is quite right” I said. “Both are dead and it saddens me that I haven’t missed them. They played no real parts in my life.”

“So this looks as though you are trying to do some repair work by making men friends you do respect.”

I knew at once that he was quite right.

Categories
Behaviour Parents

Are You Afraid?

What should we be defending ourselves against? All the things that have happened to us that have caused us pain and unhappiness starting from the beginning of our lives. The earlier the experience the greater the effect on the rest of our lives. I have often been asked “How could something that happened such a long time ago still affect our lives by making us suffer?” The answer is simple. When we are born, all we bring with us are the genes we inherit from our ancestors: not just from our parents but all the rest of the people who came before them. Are you a musician and surprise your family because they have no interest at all in this art? If you could go back far enough you would find a musical antecedent.

I was so different from both my parents in so many ways that I was convinced that my real parents were somewhere else. From a very early age, say about three or four years old I discovered that my parents could not answer the myriad of questions I put to them. Decades later I was listening to an interview on the radio to celebrate the seventieth birthday of the pianist, Alfred Brendel, one of my favourites. To my delight he said that he had almost nothing in common with either of his parents. His experience was similar to my own. The only time his mother was delighted about his music was when he was presented to the Queen of England.

He said that he was fortunate enough to have managed to forget everything his parents had tried to teach him! My experience was identical. My interests meant nothing to my parents. I cannot remember any words of wisdom coming from either of them. Everything I learned was in the books I read. All my friends were therefore dead ones. I developed a powerful gift for self hypnosis that enabled me to go into another world of my own where I could cut off anything I found disagreeable. That was my defence mechanism, to work things out for myself and to question everything teachers tried to teach me, except for the ones that interested me.

Defence mechanisms can be positive or negative. The positive mechanism is much shorter than the negative one, which is much longer, laden down with phobias of all kinds. They are negative because they don’t give you something you can take away. For example, claustrophobia is a good excuse for getting out of any groups of people in restricted places, but that can cause you to lose something that might be useful to yourself.

There are effective ways in psychotherapy to deal with such things, but it takes courage and cooperation from the clients to overcome such useless fears.

My defence mechanism prevented me from talking and making friends from fear of having nothing in common with anyone else. I went into another world when I was studying and thus I developed from a very early age a very useful skill. I learned to concentrate deeply on everything that interested me. In addition, as I grew older, my curiosity about people and their strange ways led me into making myself meet people I could talk with about my work.

Since then my main interest is human behaviour and thought. Unwittingly, I learned to think logically and keep my strong feelings under control. Just the kind of temperament that makes a good psychotherapist.

The best thing I learned from my strange childhood was to be independent and to trust my own judgement, whilst at the same time I maintained an open mind. Difficulties in childhood, as long as we have parents who are basically kind and do not try to force their opinions on us, as my parents were, can be overcome by ourselves. The help I got was from books and not from people.

Categories
Behaviour Health

Is Anorexia Nervosa a Weapon?

The great majority of we human animals want to live in communities and follow the same lives as others with the same rules. There have always been a much smaller number of rebels who do not want to follow this example. They consist of leaders, stuck-insiders and creative geniuses. Leaders are those who have their own ideas and their aim is to teach them to groups of people who want to be told what to do. If they don’t want that then the leaders will coerce them by brute force, i.e. rulers who need to raise armies. The rest of the outsiders consist of two species. The first are the stick-insiders who want to do their own thing or nothing, but don’t want or cannot because of their retiring nature show it to anyone else because they are fundamentally terrified of their fellow creatures. (more of this later). The second kind are those who are the imaginative geniuses that prefer to educate themselves and spread the fruits of their research to all of us. Einstein is a good example. Although he could mix with the people he loved, he himself admitted that his work came first.

When people’s lives become unbearable, the bravest of them go on strike. When the suffragettes were imprisoned the only way they could make themselves noticed was to go on hunger strike. This is a very effective way of drawing attention to their plight. Nelson Mandela did the same for the same reason when he was in prison. Their enemies knew they would get blamed if they died and that would rouse wrath outside.

Whenever a large group of people feel they are not free enough to do what they want and say, a new outbreak of strikes emerge. Today there are many young people, mostly women, who go on hunger strike. Only we don’t call it that, it has been dubbed as an illness: anorexia nervosa. Why? For the same reason that Russian politicians had their political prisoners diagnosed as mentally ill which gave the authorities a right to take away their freedom. How can anything be an illness when it comes into being as the result of deliberate action by a person?

What do we do? Put them in a different kind of prison: hospital. Unbelievable!! Here are two good reasons why girls go on reduction dieting and put their lives in danger. First, they want to follow the fashion of being very thin so they can wear certain kinds of clothes that most other girls are wearing. The other reason is to rebel against their parents. You won’t believe this, but it is treated in the same way as the suffragettes were treated, but in a less brutal manner.

One of the reasons I gave up being a therapist is that the usual method is to try and get them to eat again or to go into hospital in extreme cases. There is only one thing to do. Help them to win back for themselves the right to care for themselves properly and to work out for themselves a regime good enough to keep them well and prevent them from dying. You have to have a will of iron to give up eating. This means that when they finally see what they have been doing to themselves, they are in a position that enables them to solve the problem for themselves by learning to give up their illusions and come to terms with reality which means accepting their true selves, not anyone elses.

Categories
Talk

Stuck Insiders

Why do we have conversations? There are many different purposes. A great deal of talk interchange has very little or no meaning: it consists of what David Rosenthal calls ‘mindless, recited utterances’ because it involves no thought: for instance:

Greetings: A.Hello. B.Hello

Questions and Answers: A, What time is it? B. Two o’clock. It also encompasses exchange of information at work, when shopping and seeking directions when in a strange place.

Either of these two interchanges can be followed by enquiries for each others’ states of health and comments on the weather..

These words requires no thought whatsoever. The purpose is to demonstrate that we are friendly.

A particularly tiresome kind of mindless, recited utterances is when one person talks at another and never stops in an endless stream of phrases and sentences that are known by heart. This person starts to talk as soon as they see you and finally says goodbye and vanishes.

I once had a stepmother-in-law who did just this. It was hard to get away from her when she came to stay. She never looked at me but kept her eyes fixed to the ceiling corner. I tried an experiment by leaving the room and reading in the kitchen. After an hour I could hear her voice droning on. I went into the room where she was and walked out again. She was utterly oblivious of my presence. She was one of the people I call ‘stuck insiders‘. I still haven’t worked out what was the purpose. She said she loved children, but there was very little proof that this was the case.

I met another stuck insider when I was up at university, the only student in my year who was foolish enough to want to learn Catalan. My tutor walked into the classroom, raised his eyes up to the ceiling and recited a monologue in his own language. I never absorbed a word he said. I can recognise stuck insiders by the faraway look in their eyes. You would wonder how he (or she) managed to cross the road without being knocked down.

Yet I have had one or two of them come to me for help. They all said that only if they could find a partner all would be well. They think only of what they think they want. It never occurs to them that they need to have something of themselves to give. Once I recognised this type I refused to work with any of them ever again.

Conversation at cocktail parties or that sort of thing is, I find, quite impossible. Myself and others who have hearing aids avoid them like the plague. We are cursed by background noise and are constantly on edge for fear of answering a question inappropriately.

Oh for the bliss of a real conversatiom about real topics like art, books, music, philosophy or even politics when i’m in a room of very few people. But such encounters are rare.