“The Selfish Society – How we all forgot to love one another and made money instead”

In her book “The Selfish Society – How we all forgot to love one another and made money instead” Sue Gerhardt makes an intelligent and compelling link between British politics of the past 30 years and the general decline in our sense of community and compassion for others which has undoubtably left many people deeply unfulfilled in life, struggling to form meaningful relationsips and resorting to filling their homes with attractive objects rather than the warm smiles of family and friends.

This publication is a natural progression from her earlier, highly acclaimed book “Why Love Matters – how affection shapes a baby’s brain” in which she explains that the type of environment an infant grows up in, will affect the physical architecture of his brain, so that babies who receive a constant supply of nurturing attention will have enormous advatages, in terms of things like emotional intelligence, over children who were ignored, neglected and abused through their early years; synapses grow in certain areas of the brain in response to what the baby is experiencing. Serotonin and dopamine are produced in high levels in the infant that is frequently cuddled and generally doted on and the hormone oxytocin turns off his stress system – this is the beginning of learning how to manage his emotions. Infants who’s emotional needs are not met, produce high levels of the hormone cortisol which interferes with the pathways which allow the child to sooth itself and the baby is unlikely to develop this ability to manage extreme emotions successfully. The current trend of controlled crying, where parents are urged not to meet their baby's needs but to leave him in a distressed state for a specific period of time, is simply teaching the child that his emotional wellbeing is not important and that he cannot rely on a responsive human being to provide comfort when he is upset. Such children are unlikely to develop trust in adults and will seek the comfort they need from objects –dummies, toys and food for example. In later life these pacifiers will become material possessions, alcohol, drugs, gambling, pornography and so on.

In many ways this model of parenting creates the ideal capitalist child – Crave things, things you can buy when you are feeling low, not people, not love and kindness; People will constantly let you down, but there will always be an endless sea of objects you can buy!

Gerhardt explores different parenting types in terms of the traditional classes; working-class parents have tended to favour a strict approach to parenting, with physical punishment – smacking – very common as a way of managing the child’s behaviour, intimidating the child into submission with the lesson that the world operates by bigger people with lots of power bullying smaller people with little power and the child internalises this model. This ‘worked’ in a sense when the parents themselves displayed traditional working-class behaviours like outward self-restraint, modesty and an acknowledgement of their own place in life (behaviours often associated with religion) but since Thatcherism arrived in 1979 the culture of self-restraint and caring what other people think of you has largely gone out of the window, and so more and more working-class children are growing up in families where parents consume on demand – from mobiles, laptops and giant TVs to drink, clothes, hair and nails, all fuelled by celebrity magazines promising happiness if you just have the same shoes as some footballer’s wife.

Children raised in traditional middle-class families have previously tended to enjoy a more relaxed, accepting type of parenting with the child being encouraged to develop his own individual personality, rather than being beaten into submission and expected to conform without questioning those who discipline him. This largely existed because middle-class mothers did not need to work and so were able to give their children more time; and being better off financially meant they didn’t have a lot of the pressures on them that working-class parents had to endure - they naturally experienced a more relaxed way of life. But when property prices soared from the 1980s onwards, this left even middle-class couples needing two incomes to maintain a mortgage – in fact the idea of the two income family with babies being cared for by a live in nanny or a private or state run nursery – was promoted as the new ideal. The Thatcher administration seized an opportunity to exploit the women’s movement from the 70s so that 40 hours a week working on the till at Tesco’s was portrayed as a modern lifestyle choice which somehow allowed mothers to be more fulfilled than if they were at home baking brownies with their toddlers. It has often been said that, on reflection, women’s lib ultimately did very little for women and even less for children. New Labour was just as capitalist in spirit as any Conservative government and saw no reason to reverse this trend which has become so much a part of modern culture that people like Sue Gerhardt (and myself) who advocate one or other parent staying at home for the first 2-3 years to look after their babies are seen as completely out of sync with what modern women want and need from life. If this is really so though, how come so many women report feeling guilty and anxious at leaving their infants with strangers all day; how come so many express feelings of regret that they might be missing out on the most important stages of their children’s development? In truth, I think mothers are often quite confused about what they need out of life, they're more exhausted than they ever dreamed was possible and can feel extremely emotional for months after giving birth. Many probably go along with what society is pushing at them because they don't feel strong enough to challenge any of it.

The concept of nursery care is also explored extensively in this book and the author encourages you to think about what babies actually need most in that first one or two years of life. Newborns are programmed to seek out an emotional connection, explains Gerhardt, they will focus on a parent's facial expressions and often copy them. If you stick your tongue out at your infant it's striking to observe him sticking his tongue out back at you! The baby’s brain is hardwired to mimic the behaviour of its carers, to internalise the behaviours of its parents from the word go because survival depends on learning the rules of the culture it’s growing up in. Fail to adopt these patterns of behaviour and that tiny vulnerable child risks being rejected, it simply can’t survive in those early years without the care of adults. So the child is programmed to adopt the same habits as its parents, including emotional responses as previously mentioned; this emotional development is the earliest learning in the child’s life and it needs a lot of one to one contact to successfully achieve this.

The main problem with nurseries is, they just don’t have the staff levels to offer the extensive one to one attention babies brains are geared up for. Indeed if nurseries were to offer this required level of care they wouldn’t be commercially viable! And as if that wasn’t bad enough, staff members come and go in organisations; there is absolutely no guarantee that the people your baby is desperately trying to form an attachment with will be around for very long. Add to this the fact that nursery staff are often quite young and inexperienced in life and perhaps not fully emotionally mature themselves yet, and the complications become obvious. The ideal nursery worker would probably be an experienced mother already herself, but how many women in their 30s and 40s would be enthusiastic about changing other people’s babies’ nappies all day for minimum wage! So it’ll continue to be 18 year olds with a basic NVQ in hygiene and nutrition who continue to provide a service in day care centres. And of course the bottom line is, how can this person genuinely convey love to your child, because in all honestly they do not love the babies they’re looking after - a nursery worker is not biologically programmed to love your baby - you are.

“The Selfish Society” successfully ties these aspects and many others together to present a really good argument against the trend of treating babies more like pets than the complex, vulnerable little human beings they actually are and it concludes by even offering solutions, rather obvious solutions when you think about it. The author makes a good case for encouraging parents to share the responsibility for childcare, with both working reduced hours to fit around their children’s needs – if neither feels they can be fulfilled being a fulltime stay at home parent. She suggests investment into community centres where parents can meet other parents to get support and adult company while their children play together in a safe environment; she recognises that existing in a house or flat day in day out, is incredibly isolating and with families being less extended now than in years gone by, this is one reason many women give for returning to work. Being alone with a crying baby all day and having no-one to offer help and to meet some of your basic needs is just too stressful.

I have only touched on the big topics the book focusses on, but it covers much more, from the impact of religion on childrearing over the centuries to the personality problems some of the famous world leaders undoubtedly had and their resulting narcissism and paranoia that has driven society increasingly towards a collective state of fear and bigotry, hostility and war.

I would urge every parent and prospective parent to read this book, I’d urge everyone who cares for others in their work to read it – from teachers to nurses to therapists to dinner ladies. And I’d implore politicians and health and welfare policy makers particularly to buy a copy and to study its chapters at length…

You can buy "The Selfish Society" here:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Selfish-Society-Forgot-Another-Instead/dp/1847375715

'When we sit down opposite someone on a train......................... (transference... part two)

So... we're standing on a station platform... our train pulls in and as the carriages pass before our eyes, slowly they come to a stop. We board the train, it's half full... we walk down through the aisle and eventually take a seat.................

For this example let's be a young woman, but of course this situation could happen pretty much the same for a guy...

So we put our bag/jacket on the seat beside us, the guy sat opposite is busy concentrating on his laptop screen and it suddenly occurs to us - wow... he's pretty dishy!

So here's the question, did we actively choose that seat or did we just randomly happen to sit there? And if we chose that seat, at what point did we choose it? Just before we sat down? As we walked along the carriage? Before the train had even stopped???

OK.....

In the virtual world of online chat ups/dating/cybersex and other peculiar activities... there is an inevitable limit to the information we can gather about a person we're getting to know. In truth we probably get more information than we realise (things like their style of writing, the way they address us, how quickly they reply to our e-mails and so on, will all provoke responses in us, though these will probably be mostly unconscious responses and the 'relationship' is likely to be doomed to failure within a few exchanges) but, all the same, it won't be an awful lot to go on.

In contrast, when we meet someone in the flesh, in the 'real' world we're swamped... overwhelmed with information - but again most of this will be absorbed and processed unconsciously - our conscious mind will focus on surface stuff like, this person's appearance, their voice, how friendly or hostile they are towards us... while unconsciously we're busy processing EVERYTHING ELSE... and that's a lot of everything, believe you me....

Let's explain that, with the help of our lovely girl on the train....

So she's sitting there, trying not to stare at the guy opposite but consciously she's attempting to ascertain some basic information as he taps away on his keyboard. At the same time as that's going on she's also considering unconsciously.................his smile, who he reminds her of from her past... his teeth, how does he feel about the dentist, what does he fear in life... is he a first child?..a youngest child? ..an only child? How does he get on with his brothers and sisters? Is he losing his hair yet, did his dad lose his hair? How would he deal with it, if he did lose his hair, what was his dad like? violent? kind? Is he married, is he gay? How old was he when he lost his virginity, how big is his penis, how does he feel about his penis, how does he feel about porn, what turns him on, when was the last time he had sex, is he in love at the moment, how does he cope with rejection, is he romantic, how physically fit is he, how psychologically fit is he, how intelligent is he, what does he do for a living, has he got a degree if so what in, does he prefer tea or coffee, lager or beer.. wine? ..scotch? does he have a drink problem, does he smoke cannabis, what other drugs has he tried, where does he go on holiday, what sort of place does he live in, does he drive if so what does he drive, does he own an ipod, does he go to the gym, is he vegetarian, vegan?? Does he like Kasabian?.. Led Zeppelin?.. The Carpenters!? Does he like golf? football? rugby? snooker?? horseracing? ice hockey?? is he religious, is he superstitious, what are his political views, what books does he read, what newspaper does he buy, who buys his socks, what underwear has he got on today..... does he fancy me??????? And a million other factors besides and all this takes minutes, probably only seconds to process all that information.....

And an awful lot of what our girl will gather, in her unconscious will be pretty accurate because it's not just guesses she's making, she's using all her life experience of men like him, men not like him, to compute this wealth of information. She probably won't be aware why within a few minutes she does or doesn't fancy him, and whether it's worth smiling back at him as he eventually looks up from his work.

Nine times out of ten, she'll come to the conclusion she doesn't fancy him after all, but she won't be aware why exactly her intuition tells her to let this one go. And even if she does fancy him and they do get talking over the next hour of the journey something is likely to tell one or other of them, pursuing this isn't really an option, so as he gathers up his belongings they'll politely say goodbye and that will be that......................

Transference/Countertransference - The Void... and online relationships... (part one?)

Transference - the phenomenon by which feelings, perceptions, responses attributable to past significant relationships (parents, siblings etc) are re-experienced inappropriately in relationships in the present.

I was writing an essay a few years ago on Transference and Countertransference... and as I was writing I began thinking about online relationships. Dr Sigmund Freud identified the existence of transference in his early psychoanalytic work, though he only recognised this as occurring within the therapeutic relationship. We now understand that some level of transference probably occurs in most, perhaps all of the relationships we form.

It's basically about responding to someone in the here and now, as if they were a person from our past - reliving feelings from the past - so a simple example might be - the policeman who pulls us over to tell us we have a back light out becomes the over-critical father from our childhood - and the sensations we experience as we see him approach our car will be the same as those we felt as a child when we got something wrong and had to face our father - so we might feel guilt, shame, a sense that we're being unfairly judged - all this, even before the policeman has said a word. And it happens because these powerful feelings remain unresolved yet suppressed within us and certain triggers at various times will reawaken them.

Psychodynamic therapists are mindful not to bring anything of themselves into the client/counsellor relationship - to actively avoid self-disclosure, to keep the therapist's own personality completely out of the working relationship, to be the proverbial blank screen, and this creates a void which the client will unconsciously fill with their own fantasies (both positive and negative) - the therapist can become the representation of mother, father, sister, lover, teacher and so on.

Thinking about the encounters we have online - there is always an inevitable and undeniable void - however much a person writes, tries to convey who they are and what they're like, it's just words on a screen - there's no physical presence at all for us to pick up, interpret, get a sense of how they are responding to us - there's no energy. And because it's hard for us as human beings to acknowledge that void, just as in counselling, we fill it with our fantasies - all the bits we don't know we fill in for ourselves.

So for instance with online dating, we have a picture of this person - often just one single image of them, usually just a head and shoulders shot. That gives us an idea of their face but it doesnt really show us how tall they might be, how large they might be, what sort of hands they have or how big their bum is! And yet as we get to know this person - we start to form a more comprehensive picture of what they might look like in our minds, what we'd like them to look like. How often have I heard people say they'd got to know someone from an online dating website, felt really comfortable with them - things progress and they decide to meet up and.............. the person sitting there in the restaurant or waiting outside the cinema is NOTHING like they imagined. Sometimes that can be quite extreme and shocking - the woman is clearly 10 years older than her picture, the man who had a full head of hair in his profile is suddenly bald! And at that point all the dreams, all the fantasies come crashing to the floor - we feel betrayed, foolish, embarrassed etc etc... In fact even when a person has been careful not to mislead, the character standing on the other side of the road waiting for us will not be the man or woman we've dreamt up in our head - they cant be, because the picture was painted by ourselves, with relatively little to go on except a lifetime of past experience to be influenced by. And the same thing is true of personalities - it's impossible to form an accurate understanding of what this person is like, their mannerisms, their strange little ways... just from words on a screen.

But perhaps that's the appeal of it - while we're getting to know 'John from Exeter' he can become our ideal man and for a while we can live the dream - perhaps we always know it's unlikely to go beyond a couple of dinners or trips to the movies - because he's going to have an irritating laugh or a wandering eye or a habit of looking at his watch every 10 minutes??

Now in contrast, first encounters when we meet someone on a train for example are completely different to that. Almost never do those first meetings extend beyond the duration of the train journey however appealing this stranger opposite might be, and there are many good reasons for that. Perhaps part two of this piece should start... 'When we sit down opposite someone on a train........'

Human sexual promiscuity (...in comparison to that of our ape cousins...)

A while ago I heard an interesting statement from a guest on a BBC programme... I think it was the 'The Big Questions' show hosted by Nicky Campbell on Sunday mornings?

The suggestion was that human beings were 'designed by God' to be naturally monogamous, to pair up for life and to remain faithful... and immediately I felt my bullshit antennae twitching...

As I've said before, when considering these big social questions about our species, I like to look at social structures in the ape world, which can offer clues about our more animalistic behaviours, the stuff going on in our unconscious, and of course the compulsion to have sex and produce offspring is one of our most basic drives, perhaps THE most primal instinct we have.

Traditionally in our culture, we have tended to believe that while men do find it tempting to sleep around, women are on the whole faithful to their partners. And even though young women now do seem more sexually promiscuous than the generations who came before, once they marry or settle down with a man the general presumption seems to be that they are far less likely to have an affair than their husband. But human biology doesn't really back this theory up...

Let's think about our ape cousins then. A male gorilla has a harem of females dedicated to him and him alone. There is very little chance that his females will be impregnated by another male and consequently his testicles have evolved to be very small in comparison to the size of his body. He doesn't need to produce a lot of sperm because there's no competition from other males to fertilize the female gorilla's eggs...

Female chimpanzees aren't remotely faithful and males have evolved to ejaculate as much as possible into as many females as possible to try and ensure their sperm creates a baby. And consequently, male chimpanzees have huge testicles in comparison to those of gorillas...

A human male's testicles are somewhere in between the size of a chimpanzee's and the size of a gorilla's, suggesting that while female humans are not as promiscuous as female chimps, unlike female gorillas, they're not entirely faithful either......

'Big Society' - Accident Waiting To Happen

One of the fundamental flaws of the government's 'Big Society' idea is that it's essentially encouraging people who might be armed with nothing more than good intentions, to get involved with assisting other people in the running of their lives - be that supporting individuals in the community or getting involved with organising projects for specific groups such as children, the disabled or the elderly. Many of the people this help would be directed at might well be vulnerable and therein lies the danger...

There are very good reasons why in our society we have professional, legitimate organisations which run services for people who might be vulnerable. Service providers need to be trained to a high standard to understand all the complexities of the situations they might find themselves working in and also society needs to feel confident that those offering support comply with expected standards of professionalism and have been officially passed as safe to work with vulnerable people. Good intentions are simply not enough, nowhere near enough.

Without the funding and structures in place to ensure everyone working in those services has been thoroughly checked, you always run a high risk that people who pose a serious threat to service users, will slip through the net and find themselves presented with an endless stream of potential victims. And if a support worker discovers one of their colleagues is behaving inappropriately, where would they voice their concern about that? - There wouldn't presumably be a union to turn to for advice or established procedures to follow to have people struck off, because they won't have been registered with professional bodies in the first place!

There is, without doubt, a level of cynicism about the efficiency and perhaps even work ethic of various areas of the recognised support services. Although tragic and high profile cases of neglect and abuse by professionals are rare, they often reveal a culture of incompetance and nonchalance which evolves over time, when management is poor. The answer is not to ship in a load of untrained do-gooders who can offer a similar type of service (on the surface at least) for a lot less money, ideally for free. The answer has always got to be better training, better continuing assessment, better committment to the service and the people it's seeking to support.

I want my money back!!! I didn't even need this Cravendale finely filtered milk!!!!

Ok so.... I kept hearing from everyone how I just MUST go to the supermarket on a Friday evening.. any supermarket people said, but it must be Friday evening... Single dishy men, people told me, do their shopping on Friday evening... loads of them... the place is awash with them.....I don't even want a single dishy man... but I'm kinda curious right, I mean who wouldn't be........

So I dash down just before 7pm.... Just to have a look..... I walk through the doors thinking how can I whittle this down a bit, there's probably going to be hundreds in there and I've only got 15 minutes... I decide I'll ignore the blond ones.. as I don't really fancy blond men... well, not since I was about 15 and swooning over the amusingly named Johnny Rep anyhow.. so... blond men are out.. also beards... quite like a bit of designer stubble I'm thinking, but not keen on the whole Peter Sutcliffe look. Ok fab, that's reduced it down a bit..... pick up a basket and in we go.... Here I am boys!!!!

Go down the salad and vegetable aisle.... nothing much going on there, a mum shopping with her teenage son... right.... next aisle then... that's rice, pasta tins of soup.. olive oil and stuff.... There is a man!!!! But I just don't feel there's any chemistry.... he's about 80, arthritic, and I didn't like the look of his stick.. I said STICK! Don't completely reject him though... I might come back to him, depending on how the rest goes... Next aisle.... cereal, tea, coffee and so on.... there's a couple of guys down there.. one has a massive scary beard.... the other looks promising, looks a bit like Anthony Perkins in Psycho.....which, you know.. is not without it's appeal...... BUGGER!!!! His girlfriend arrives with a bottle of red wine..... next aisle is milk... This is much better... more people at least... one I think is a man, quite a stunning man... but on reflection it's definitely a women... quick rethink about that whole bisexual thing.... no I came here for a dishy single man and that's what I'm gonna stick with... can't just chop and change like that.. commit to the original plan I'm telling myself... Another guy .. really nice pink T-shirt... LOVIN' the T-shirt I am...he turns around and looks a little alarmed at me staring at him... No, a lot alarmed, I pick up 2 litres of milk and rush onto the next section... meat..... absolutely nothing going on down there.. a couple of pensioners arguing about whether to have lamb chops or pork.. God this is harder than I imagined.... cleaning aisle? There's one guy... looks like he could be Peter Crouch's less attractive twin... and buying every cleaning product in the store and placing them with alarming regularily in his trolley.. exactly 1 finger space between each bottle.. This man does not need me in his life analysing him I conclude..... next is the frozen aisle then the bog roll aisle... then the biscuits aisle... God... so depressing... none.. not one vaguely attractive-ish single man..... so I pay for my milk and leave...

Walking past the customer services bit where they 'Welcome your feedback!!' I felt like complaining and asking for my money back, I didn't even need the milk! Ahhhh well, that's the way the bee bumbles.. as Ian McCulloch used to sing...... and honestly I don't even want one.. a man...