1.Many Meetings


We open the book of you and me and consider our opening chapters. We try to do justice to the complexity of our origin stories. In Chapter 1.1 we look in detail at the formative impact of our meetings with our early locality and the people and things that populate it. We see that the place and time of our becoming is just as formative of our world as the people within it. Our singular individuality is shown to be a complex equation of many factors. In Chapter 1.2 we look at how we are shaped by the turning of the genetic wheel of fortune. This gives us the material stuff that we are made of and we see that some of us are born with more of a tendency to tremble than others. The totally random and utterly formative nature of the meeting of our unique constitution with our particular set of circumstances is considered. The highly specific nature of the outcome of this meeting is illustrated by the presentation of particular cases. Throughout, the reader is invited to reflect on their own case.

1.1.

First Encounters

Opening Chapters

Tomorrow, Deary, I’m going to cut you in half.

Schoolgirl, Carluke, Scotland, 1975

Most of my early memories are of terror.

I remember hating transitions. Class to playtime, class to lunchtime, school to home. Dreading those straits where the agents of terror would waylay me. Even on the long, lonely, fearful and circuitous routes back home, even on the road taken to avoid them, they would be waiting, like trolls under bridges. People waiting around just to hurt me. Can you imagine? Maybe you can, maybe you even know how that feels. We’re all a little more familiar with terror these days.

Exterior, School Playground, Carluke, Scotland, 1972. Fade up on a gentle (effeminate) nine-year-old boy who is making a rare attempt to play with another group of boys. ‘That’s poofy,’ said the group’s dominant male. I retreat in confusion and shame. He had a point, of course. I didn’t talk or act like any of the other boys – or indeed anyone – at my school. They all had thick west coast Scottish accents; I talked like I was at posh school or came from a posh family. I wasn’t, and I didn’t. This was a working-class comprehensive school in lowland Scotland in the 1970s. Being gender non- conforming wasn’t on the menu then. So, I was ‘poofy’.

I was also usually near the top of the class, and in those days that was literal. We sat in single parallel rows that were ranked from front left to back right according to however our aptitude was measured. I was always top or near top left. As much as that was yet another thing that marked me as other, it also, eventually, helped. As our cohort moved from primary to secondary school, intelligence as a currency gained in value. It could sometimes buy you friends or freedom from persecution. But that was still a few years away for this poofy nine-year-old.

Mostly I hung out with the other misfits at school. There is always a group of those who don’t belong to any other group. I remember either entertaining them, charming them, or making them feel okay. This was a set of skills I had learned to use to survive at home. Goodness knows what the others were playing at. Us rejects and freaks are very caught up in our own games. We are forced to think about ourselves a lot. Forced to manage ourselves in those situations where we don’t fit in. If we fit, we don’t have to manage; it’s the fish out of water that struggle. Freaks have to learn to manage. We will always experience more resistance, more friction, more turbulence. And so we tremble more. Early on we experience a lot of difficult feelings and emotions, and we need to learn to manage them too, else break. Misfits are given back to themselves as work.

How about you, my unknown friend? How comfortably did you sit with your peers in those early years?

Sami is another case to compare notes with – we will introduce him more fully in the next chapter. Another misfit who became aware of himself definitively early, around the age of seven, as an object of desire and abuse for men and older boys. He had to learn how to suck their cocks. One of the men rewarded him for this and bought his silence by giving him a hand-carved toy animal every time they met. Eventually Sami had collected a menagerie that he used to spend hours playing with. The only part of this story that makes him sad as he tells it to me is what happened the day his family moved house. The wooden zoo was just suddenly gone. I form an image as he talks. There was, in the old house, a quiet upper room with a high shelf where he kept the toys. For a gentle boy, easily worn out by others, this room was a private space of play in a noisy and bustling South Indian family, a sanctuary made doubly private by the provenance of the toys he kept there. It was an oasis of peace begat by the storm. And then the sadness the day they were just gone, lost in the move.

It was a double privation: the loss of the animals and the inexplicableness of the weight and meaning of their loss. He’s trying to explain it to me now. It is one of those moments where my well-honed ability to enter into the world of the other left me profoundly moved. It was a weird kind of honour to be with him in that moment of profound loneliness. This, more than the abuse, was a definitive experience of aloneness for him, of not being able to explain to the family that surrounded him what it meant that these toys were gone. Now, as an adult, this loneliness is still a place he goes to, a permanent feature of his being. He will still take himself to his room and cry on his own when life is overwhelming. This is how he learned to manage.

And you? How did you learn to manage? What did life inscribe in your opening chapters that you can still see underwriting the rules and rhythms of your present day?

First Impressions

Every time these encounters are lasting rather than ephemeral, a world is born.

Louis Althusser, ‘Philosophy and Marxism’1

We are a record of our prolonged encounter with the world. But this record is also largely obscure to us precisely because it is embodied as habit, as just who we are now. This unique book which is within each of us, which is each of us, is the central preoccupation of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time:

That book, the most painful of all to decipher, is also the only one dictated to us by reality, the only one whose ‘impression’ has been made in us by reality itself.2

As we move forward into our futures, as we try to engage with them and rise to the challenge of new demands or crises, we take our legacy with us. We bring our old habits and stories to new situations, no matter how poorly they serve us. We are dogged by our legacy. The Fool in the Tarot tradition has no legacy, they are an absolute beginner. This is why their assigned value is zero, nothing has been written in their book yet. The Fool has no ‘was’, no inescapable legacy of pain, fear, damage, heartbreak, terror, nothing dogging their steps, nothing to tell them what to approach or avoid; they just are, completely open to life. The Fool walks forward into the world without fear or favour.

But not us. As we bring our old stories to new encounters, we feel the resistance. Uncomfortable feelings are the friction between our old book and the new world. ‘I hate feelings,’ said my daughter Vicky recently, with comedy but also heartfelt vehemence. But they are the cost of doing business, the turbulence of the journey. They are life making its impression upon us.

We don’t choose our first encounters, but they are definitive of us and our world. When you met your family and your circumstances, a world began, a world that is entirely your own. How did your early climate shape the working of your heart, mind and will? In the opening chapters of the book of us, we are shaped by much more than just our immediate family. We are born incomplete. As neuroscientist David Eagleman argues in his book Live Wired, our nervous systems are born ready to receive the imprint of the culture, language and values of our locality. It is the fundamental plasticity of human beings that means we are able to adapt to almost any earthly environment. Indeed, more than adapt to it, we become a living expression of it. Malleable things that we are, we embody the place of our growth as a grape does its terroir, the ground and climate of its growing.

We are made from our meeting with the place and time of our becoming as much as the people we meet there. It’s a harder thing to see the place’s influence though, because the tools we use to try to see it are the tools we get from it. This is the very definition of availability bias: our innate tendency to base our worldview on the stuff that is immediately to hand, the things we see and hear every day. That’s the world to us, not a world. The poet Wallace Stevens put it like this in his poem ‘Theory’:

I am what is around me

Also observing in Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction:

we live in a place

That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves

The apparent contradiction in these statements is resolved when we realize that we are composed from what is not us. We are a bricolage of what is to hand in the place and time of our formation. Psychological origin stories tend to focus on the influence of one or two main characters, usually the parents, often ignoring other players and the setting entirely, but these are key variables that need to be accounted for in the story of our becoming.

Complex Equations

I end up owing my soul to so many

Sharon Olds, ‘Mrs Krikorian’

We live in worlds of our own. Our formative encounters lay the foundations of those worlds. To tell the tale of how they do, we must try to do justice to our individual cases and at the same time try to see the more general laws of world building that we are all subject to. The origin stories we tell about ourselves are often rather simple tales. The multiple mess of our becoming is reduced to the actions and intentions of a few familial variables. In the classic Freudian story, our relationships to our parents often bear the explanatory load. It’s like the ‘great man theory’ of history, the simple story that historical events are shaped by a few significant individuals. But of course in the becoming of history, and the origin of us, it’s really not that simple:

Only by taking infinitesimally small units for observation (the differential of history, that is, the individual tendencies of men) and attaining to the art of integrating them (that is, finding the sum of these infinitesimals) can we hope to arrive at the laws of history.3

In my own becoming I see much more at work than just the parental configuration. A lot of my significant encounters happened outside of the home. For Sami too. My genetics and setup at home might have given me a valence for terror and alarm, but school established its reign within my being. We all owe our souls to so many, but this is not an easy story to tell. However, in the last few years in psychological and medical research there has been a renewed interest in the case, in the idiosyncratic way disease, distress and recovery manifest in a given individual. The case history is, of course, the sine qua non of psychoanalytic therapy. By a prolonged and detailed focus on the story of individual cases, the early analysts sought to derive universal laws of human being and breaking.

This approach illustrates the two ends of the research continuum. At one end there are the studies of large numbers of people that are designed to derive universal laws that apply to all people. This is known as nomothetic research, derived from the Greek word nomos, meaning ‘law’. At the other extreme is the detailed study of a single or a few individuals, aiming to specify what is the case for each, to hear their unique stories. This is known as idiographic research, from idios, meaning ‘one’s own’ or ‘private’. This latter approach of gathering rich data from a few individuals is undergoing something of a renaissance in mainstream science, and it is often when the two approaches complement each other that we can really understand the complexity of our human life.

For instance, we saw in the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic how the same pathogenic agent – the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus – could produce wildly different cases of disease. Like us, the virus’s self-expression was determined by whom it encountered. The virus, when it met us, didn’t just meet another identikit human body, it met a unique individual, with a unique constitution and a unique life history in a unique set of socioeconomic circumstances. It was in the meeting of those multiple interacting factors that a specific case of Covid-19 emerged. Only more idiographic research can tell us what factors make cases vary so widely, and how treatment will need to be tailored to each case. This idiographic understanding and tailoring are what psychological and medical sciences have become more focused on in the last couple of decades. There is a move towards personalized medicine and precision psychiatry, based on a recognition that the diagnostic category – be it Covid-19, diabetes, stress, social anxiety or depression – will manifest differently in different individuals. As such, we need differently weighted interventions to write and solve our complex equations. In therapy-speak, we expect our treatment to be based on an individualized formulation, on what is the case for us.

In a letter to a friend struggling with her own distress and seeing it reflected in those around her, Henry James advises her against becoming too transfixed by a story about life as a universal tragedy:

Only don’t, I beseech you, generalize too much in these sympathies and tendernesses – remember that every life is a special problem which is not yours but another’s, and content yourself with the terrible algebra of your own.4

To do justice to your own unique, complex and terrible algebra, to see what factors composed your idioverse – your own world – I would encourage you to see beyond the usual suspects. See what else was the case for you in those opening chapters, what other variables entered into your equation.

In my origin story, I met Carluke, Scotland, 1963–1981, its people, places and things. This is the ground I fell and tried to thrive on. I got given a name. As Marshall McLuhan observed, a person’s name is ‘a blow they will never recover from’. Mine was Vincent Arron Vernon Adrian Hugo Deary. This is not the kind of name you heard in working-class towns in Scotland in the 1960s. And this flesh I was heir to grew to have problematic features. I had a big nose. In and of itself this is just part of my breathing and sensing apparatus. This name and this nose are just incidentals, but nevertheless they became definitive, became two key variables in my terrible algebra. Both name and nose were taken from me and given back through the mediation of my peer group and its culture. My nose got taken from me and given back as ‘Concorde!’. My name got taken from me and given back as ridiculous. My gentle manner and soft, posh voice got given back to me as ‘poofy’. And so I met myself. I met myself mediated through Carluke, Scotland, 1963–1981. I learned what I was from it. Early on, I met shame, I met fear and from them I learned vigilance, hiding and avoidance. I learned to manage.

And you? See past the parents and guardians, notice the other players on the stage, and notice the stage, the setting and time in which you were formed. We are composed from the ground we fall upon. We become particular, become us, as we grow there, through our many meetings in that place and time with our parents, our peers, our names and noses, our flesh, our feelings, ourselves. We are the sum of these infinitesimals; these are the variables in our own terrible algebra; this is our case.

How I Met My Mother

Beneath every history, another history.

Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall5

But of course our algebra also needs to factor in the parents. But when we do, we need to try to carry over the complexity of their equations. Just like us, they are an expression of the ground of their becoming. They were also both constrained and determined by the utter randomness of where and when they happened to come into being. Too often our origin stories see our parents as just that, as parents, denying them the complexity of what they were beyond their role for us.

There is an adage in sexual health epidemiology that you have sex with everyone your current partner has had sex with. Every contact leaves a trace, and in terms of infection, they bring a trace of every contact to their meeting with you. And so it is with our case histories. We meet not only those we meet, but also the people they have met. The roots of our breaking can thus begin to form long before we were born. Let me give you another example, and introduce a key recurring character of this book: my mother, Isobelle Rosindale (Carluke, Scotland, 1934–2021). This sort of sums her up:

the mercilessness of her passion, hardest on her, leaving her no peace … a passion larger than her personality or her social role or any conflicts between them, with a passion larger than the possibilities in her life … She is stigmatised by her capacity for passion, not unlike the artistic genius, the great wildness of a soul forever discontent with existing forms and their meanings; but she, unlike the artist, has no adequate means of expression.6

This was Isobelle, in essence. An overwhelming fierceness of passion trapped by circumstances that offered her few adequate means of expression. Isobelle was not a good fit with her environment. She grew to have a profound distaste for the circumstances she was born into: Scottish working-class culture in the mid-20th century, with its stifling gender roles, lack of aspiration, religious divisions and grim parochialism. An example, one she told us many times: at the age of seven she had run up the road to her grandmother’s house to get help. Her father was, once again, beating her mother. ‘You don’t come between a man and his wife,’ she was told, and then sent back, without help, to the scene of the beating. So began her fury at injustice.

A couple of years later, the father abandoned them and her mother soon after died of tuberculosis. The four siblings, our mother the eldest, were divided and she and her brother Derrek were sent to live with her maternal grandmother and her husband. There Isobelle was forced to endure and conform to the slow and dour rhythms of this aged couple. Forced to sit at the dinner table for hours as they hogged the lion’s share of the rationed food, to sit until they were finished, to do their chores and to be beaten with a leather belt regularly for any perceived falling-short.


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