Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Nina Coltart

Author:Nina Coltart [Coltart, Nina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2020-10-20T00:00:00+00:00

8

WHAT DOES IT MEAN: ‘LOVE IS NOT ENOUGH’?

As many people will recognize, the statement in my title is taken from an early book of Bruno Bettelheim’s (1950). However, in that book he was writing about a very special project, close to his heart – the school for deeply disturbed children, especially refugees, that he set up and ran, with hand-picked staff. The school continues, and did not die with him. I thought it would be valuable to extend that title far beyond the boundaries to which he restricted himself, and to wonder whether our whole technique and philosophy of work might not be its appropriate context.

There is an angle from which it is possible to study all psychoanalytic papers whatever their subject matter; this is the angle which explores the implicit morality of psychoanalysis as a system. It is interesting to allow this viewpoint to predominate in one’s mind for a while, and then to read a number of different papers by different people addressing different subjects. One has to make a conscious decision to retain the viewpoint while reading, since it is not normally anywhere near the surface of our minds, and we are unlikely to appreciate papers which keep nudging us to remind us about it, when their subject matter is elsewhere. This small project consistently reveals a strongly moral infrastructure which informs both the theory and practice of our Impossible Profession: indeed, it is part of what makes it impossible. I am here using the subtitle of a readable book by Janet Malcolm (1981), which had the unusual distinction of being serialized in the New Yorker, though the phrase was first used by Freud himself (1937a, p. 248).

Neville Symington, a member of the British Psycho-Analytical Society who has now, to our loss, emigrated to Australia, often writes about psychoanalysis and religion. He brings to analysis a long and intimate experience of Roman Catholicism. He recently published a short article in the Bulletin of the British Psycho-Analytical Society, called ‘Virtue and mental health’ (Feb. 1990), which I am sure he will develop further. He talks about fundamental moral choices that we make, partly in the unconscious, and how such choices influence the very atmosphere we create. This is his last short paragraph:

To create a good atmosphere is to be virtuous. Its source lies in an openness and love towards people. To create a bad atmosphere is vicious. The former is concurrent with mental health; the latter with mental illness. In the desire for mental health there is concealed a desire to be virtuous. It is not possible to be mentally healthy but morally vicious.

Perhaps a very simple way of putting these teachings, and what Symington is saying, in a nutshell, is ‘Try to be good and you will probably be happy.’ Of course people have been telling us that ever since we were small! The problem is to make it fresh. I would also like, for our purposes, to reverse the shape of one of Symington’s sentences, thus:

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