Another Year, Another Birthday...

This year my birthday falls on 'Black-Eye Friday', aka the day/night where most work colleagues will go out and celebrate Christmas together and try to shake off the year in preparation for Christmas. I'm unlikely to see most of this type of behaviour this year, with increasing Covid restrictions. But, I thought it was an interesting premise for a post.

So, yes, I turn 41 tomorrow. This time last year I was in the middle of changing jobs and I had just unpacked from a weekend in Newcastle knowing full well lockdown was about to hit again. This time 2 years ago I was packing my bags to leave Ecuador and return to Scotland when we didn't even know Covid-19 existed. Today, I have repeated some of the pattern. I have just spent over a week having a 'staycation' with my boyfriend, after we re-booked our week-long holiday in Fuerteventura due to the rising Covid cases. I have returned to my flat in Leith and unpacked. A life still in movement but also in stasis. 

I want to come away with something crass like 'I don't feel 41' but then again, what does 41 feel like? All I really know is that I am here and I'm about to go through another milestone. This is where you feel the liminality, even if it is artificially constructed. You look back to look forward, standing at a vantage point that allows you to see both in particular ways. I feel both content and a sense of foreboding. The contentness comes from the cumulation of life choices I have made sequentially throughout the years, not knowing for sure if I was moving in the right direction but buffered by a core belief that it was. I do think I was. Each year I remark at how much I have grown and how much I have learned, about myself, others and life. This has been a real growth year in terms of my career, self-knowledge and interpersonally. I'm a more rounded version of who I was even a year ago.

Still, there is trepidation. With Covid I have had to 'ground'. I have had to accept additional responsibilities and live in, and appreciate, the moment, rather than shoot arrows off in multiple directions. It has been a revelation in many ways but also disconcerting. In sitting down with the 'howl' and in partial 'shackles', I have learned a lot about who I really am through slowing it all down. I have often been advised to live in the moment and to appreciate what is around me. I think I'm finally learning this lesson. It's been a struggle and it has taken it's own time, but I'm finally learning.

Plans give us motivation and goals, but sticking to them and achieving them is not the benchmark I once thought it was. The pandemic, amongst other things, have taught me that. It is important to love what you have now and that includes who you are. Because, that's all most of us have had in the last two years, and it looks like this will be the foreseeable future also. I do love what I have now. I love where I live and I love the relationships I am embedded in. I also love almost-41 year old me and I'm proud of her. That is a good place to start. 

Here's to another year of growth in whichever way it goes :)

Othering, Splitting or Projective Identification?

Officially, I am a Sociologist. 'Officially' here represents formal studying which resulted in gaining formal qualifications, i.e. an MA (Hons) in Sociology. But, I also did a BA in Applied Social Sciences before I gained my MA (Hons). In that BA I studied both Psychology and Sociology for three years, along with a year of Politics, Philosophy, English Literature and Anthropology - the latter I picked up again in my MA studies.

I have always wrestled with the nature - nurture debate. When I was studying Psychology many moons ago the arbitrary percentage / ratio was 66:33 nature - nurture. This means that your genetics / genetic predispositions are more likely to be dominant in your life, and will have more influence in your actions and the life choices you make. That didn't work for me; it jarred with my own (growing) experiences and with what I was learning in Sociology. I quickly ended up paying more credence to Sociology although I did use my studies in Psychology to pursue the avenues I was most passionate about, i.e. Social Psychology, Abnormal Psychology, Personality and Language. I have remained interested in these avenues although I stopped officially pursuing them, and I'm thankful for the training I received all those years ago.

My poststgraduate studies have been more rooted in Sociology, but Psychology has always reared its head at key points. Crossroads in a way. I've tended to follow my own 'expertise' and the expertise around me and chose the more Sociological roads when this has occured. But, I've always taken these turns and recognised that I'm not seeing the 'full' picture; that at some point I will need to bring Psychology back into my work (just as I have done with Politics, Philosophy and Anthropology). The most memorable of these crossroads was during my doctorate studies where I had to make the choice between adopting Laclau & Mouffe's political subject or Lacan's split subject in poststructuralist discourse theory. It was never quite as binarised as that, as Laclau wrote the Lacanian split subject into his conceptualisation of the political subject / agent. But, when it came to the seventh tenet of Laclau & Mouffe's (1985/2001) poststructuralist discourse theory, I explored the threatening 'Other' (see International Relations) rather than the radical 'Other', thus I never got to the psychoanalytic roots of how a radical 'Other' is needed to 'complete' the Self, and how the Self turns constructions of difference into Otherness to hold its fractured Self in place. I committed to 'Othering' using Politics and Sociology as toolkits; traversing how gender, 'race', social class and other socio-cultural characteristics were central to 'Othering' practices.

I don't regret this decision per se. I got a doctorate out of it and, with hindsight, if I had gone the other route it would have taken me much longer to complete said doctorate (and, quite frankly, it took long enough). But, deep down, I know I only gave 'half' of the story. Since completing my doctorate, I have continued to read psychoanalytic theory and popular Psychology and I think it's time to explore the other side. 

Although, in fairness, I should also point out that during my doctoral studies and afterwards I also gained some uncomfortable life experiences in this other side. Which, now, I recognise may have been a more unconscious - and frankly devestating - way of exploring the Lacanian split subject. I experienced and witnessed 'splitting' which, on the surface, could be explained by Sociology and Politics; intersectionality especially. Although it would be called 'othering' rather than splitting from these perspectives. But, it had psychological roots, particularly as some of these individuals I was involved with had recent diagnoses of either Narcissistic or Borderline Personality Disorder. 

There is a whole other conversation here about the rise in pyschiatric diagnoses of personality disorders in societies that are embedded in hyper-capitalism, patriarchy, racism and neoliberalism. But, I'm going to focus more on Psychology here as I have let the Sociologist in me run rampant enough. Through these individuals, I saw something else occur that wasn't just 'othering'. I saw and experienced 'splitting' - an inability in some individuals to process both good and bad aspects in a person and be able to reconcile them. Thus, when someone did something 'bad' all the good aspects of the person were forgotten and they were judged as being 'all bad' and the 'good' had just been an act and/or were no longer present in the individual - the 'bad' was dominant if not all pervasive. A line had been drawn and, using poststructuralist discourse theory, you could argue that the recipient was now being identified using the logic of difference rather than the logic of equivalence. But, those logics, for me, only identify what happens, they don't identify what goes on in the individual to make this happen.  

Being on the receiving end of 'splitting' is frightful. One minute you are the greatest thing since sliced bread, the next you are not even worth talking to and/or, in worst cases scenarios, you end up on the shit end of a smear campaign. If you are a fairly empathetic person, you naturally turn inwards and question if you truly are a 'bad' person; beating yourself up in the process. This can be devestating. But, eventually, you start to realise that this is a pattern. Others come out of the woodwork and, usually shamefully, discuss how they had experienced something very similar from that same individual. Social class, gender and the intersectionality of socio-cultural factors just don't cut it to explain how this has happened. This is where I think an understanding of Psychology is paramount, and fills in the gaps of what actually happens when people are 'othered'.

I'm lucky in the sense that I've been involved with individuals guilty of this who have received diagnoses, and that I was re-idealised in time to be privy to this. I just want to say, before I continue, that I am not condemning people who have been diagnosed as having personality disorders. I have a very good friend who has been living with this for a long time and has been working, with others, to overcome some of the more debilitating aspects of this. One such apsect is splitting and it is something they wrestle with on an everyday basis. Fortunately, we have a strong enough friendship were I can call them out on it if I end up on the receiving end and we work, with respect, to reconcile it. The discussions we have had over recent years have helped me to understand how pervasive splitting is and where the roots of it can come from. We've openly weighed up the pros and cons of object relations theory and discussed the lived experience of 'lacking' object permanence. It has been a revelation, and healing, for both of us although I did get to the point where I thought I was guilty of this as well. Thankfully, I don't meet the criteria. But, it has shaped my academic and personal interest in understanding how psychological processes can also shape 'othering'; and kept me mindful of the importance of recognising and accepting both the 'good' and 'bad' in others to form deeper, and more intimate, relationships.

There are other psychological theories to which I am attracted. For those who have read some of my earlier posts, you will know that I am quite passionate about astrology. There was a famous psychoanalytic theorist who was also equally passionate about astrology and I have been reading his work, on and off, since I was a teenager. His work around the shadow and projective identification has always fascinated me and, throughout my life, I have done quite a bit of shadow work with the aim to understand where I feel shame, guilt and self-loathing so that I can integrate that within myself rather than project it on to others. I haven't fully integrated my shadow, but at least I recognise it is a life's work and I am at least partially aware of where my own feelings of shame come from and I try to unbind its ties with self-loathing. With some conviction, I do believe that Jungian concepts of the shadow and projective identification can help us to understand why we 'Other' and, crucially, assist in overcoming it.

At its most basic, the shadow is parts of ourself we have either disowned and/or that we were not permitted to explore. For Jung and Jungian psychologists, failure to integrate our shadow is often at the root of our interpersonal problems, and can fuel, if not outrightly be responsible for, prejudice and discrimination at the societal level. It is also strongly linked to Klein's projective identification which, in psychoanalytic theory, is a defence mechanism where individuals project qualities that they cannot accept within themselves on to other people so that it keeps their fractured sense of 'Self', as 'good' and righteous, in place. With more awreness of our shadow and in gradually integrating it into our 'Self' we become less susceptible to 'othering' and more conscious of why we, and others, do it. 

As a Sociologist, I am very reluctant to individualise societal issues. I recognise that we live in a divisive world where various social groups are oppressed and are systematically excluded from full participation and recognition. But, I do think Psychology, in tandem with other social sciences, has a role in combating this. This is what I am now committed to exploring.

Creative Writing, Writing Characters and the Journey of the Self

I've more than likely discussed some of this in an earlier post, but just over two years ago I started writing a fiction novel fairly seriously. Things got in the way of it (mostly work, travelling / moving and relationships), but I managed to write 1/3 of the novel with sketches of how I wanted the rest of it to pan out. Thus, I knew how it was going to end but I was novelly excited by the writing process and just seeing if it went there naturally or went somewhere else. About a year ago, I stopped writing it seriously. 

There are a number of reasons for this. First, my worldview was starting to significantly shift. I had just lived in two countries very different from my own, had become an unpaid carer for a parent due to a pandemic, and was now living in the small town I grew up in. I also made a culmulative but massive change in my career due to, unsurprisingly, not 'fitting in' when I returned after my travels. Buried underneath all this, what really happened was that I had matured. At the ripe old of age 39 (soon to be 40), I was starting to see a spectrum of colours (or monochrome depending on your viewpoint) in the things that I had previously taken for granted. Thus, the foundations I was building this novel on were no longer as stable as I had previously surmised. My novel was in danger of becoming a caricature, with characters who all served a purpose in getting the story to where it should end; but weren't decent representations of the complexity of human nature and how we all struggle in our daily lives. I had a tendency to 'write off' people and see them as cogs in the machine of their own lives. I was underestimating the malaise in all of us that pokes and prods until we become cognizant of the structures in our lives that aren't working and take action to change them.

By changing up my surroundings, I saw 'people' in a very different way. I started to truly understand that, deep down, most people do their best in the situations they find themselves in. There are some people out there who are very damaged due a variety of different factors, including unhealthy societal structures that put excessive pressure on everyone to be in particular ways. But, I do think that most people do their best, however misguided some of their actions and conclusions are about particular situations. As a writer, this is a major pain in the ass, because you have to go back and re-sketch your characters and, in doing so, your plot changes. Then you realise that this may be the shape of things to come - how you feel about particular events in the world and your place in them may be very different in two years time. So, do you change the novel again, or do you just put it out there recognising it is flawed but still relevant to a previous version of you that once existed?

There is an acceptance there that how you think once may not be how you think in the future, but there is also a fear in putting your creativity out there in a way that you yourself may ridicule in years to come. It has eventually dawned on me that this is part of what it means to be human. To be flawed and to make conclusions that best serve you in the cirumstances you are in, but that these may change through time. The key is in accepting that and not become paralysed with it. Which is what happened to me. Yet, I also recognise that, perhaps subconsciously, I have always recognised this which has contributed to my fear of publishing. Of putting my nascent ideas into print. The fear of not only being ridiculed by others, but being ridiculed by my future self. Or I could just not ridicule and accept that this is part of the journey of the self, and commit to that. Openly and without fear.