“No man is an island, entire of itself”. These famous lines by the ‘metaphysical poet’ John Donne reverberate through centuries of political and social thought.
To conceive of the human being geographically, not as an ‘island’ but as a “piece of the continent, a part of the main”, opens up a perspective that views the individual in its relation with other individuals and the world they inhabit.
The message of Donne’s words,which were penned over 350 years ago, has a liberatory power which is often disavowed: even though we understand the ‘ring of truth’ behind them, so many of our everyday activities and systems within which we operate do not observe their guidelines.
We ‘know’ at one level that life is much better when shared and enjoyed with others, that part of being a flourishing human is the ability to be both vulnerable with, and supportive of, those around us, and yet we are so often driven to act ‘for ourselves’ and ‘in our own interest’. There seems to be a strange anomaly here. Why do we so often act in ways that are counterproductive?
George Eliot’s novel Silas Marner, a story of an embittered old man who is driven through false accusation to become an ‘island’ in Donne’s sense of the term, and who later becomes a ‘continent’ through the adoption of a young girl, is a paradigmatic tale of the power of ‘relationality’; of finding meaning and enrichment in the relation with others.
The isolation that Marner enters into, with its ‘substitutive satisfaction’ of the enjoyment of hoarding gold, is brought about by the initial trauma of false accusation.
The same pattern can be traced in Benjamin Britten’s operatic masterpiece Peter Grimes, which centres around a morose and isolated fisherman who is ostracised from his community under false accusation and driven to prove his (self) worth through extreme accumulation, by ‘fishing the sea dry’.
Both Marner and Grimes become metaphorical islands through suffering trauma, and in both cases, they seem to be driven by destructive and ‘unconscious’ forces that compel them to compound their suffering through repetition.
No man is an island, and yet we continually imagine ourselves as such.
Redemption through connection
Whilst Marner is able to find redemption connection, Grimes’s isolation intensifies with tragic consequences. Trauma and unconscious motivation are the staple diet of psychoanalytic
therapy, so perhaps by engaging with psychoanalytic theory we might gain some form of understanding of the origins and efficacy of ‘island’ mentality, of the rejection of relationality.
By taking a brief look at two separate psychoanalytic ideas, I will seek to show that this seemingly ‘irrational’ behaviour is rooted in an unconscious rejection of dependency, and a subsequent inability to develop the tools to trust.
The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan conceived a striking ‘psychoanalytic parable’ of how the infant first discovers that they are a ‘separate’ person and exist ‘independently’ of the world and other individuals around them. He imagines the child, standing unsteadily, recognising its own reflection in the mirror, and, in a moment of joyful illumination, understanding that he is complete, independent and separate from the object world in which he exists. But this moment is in fact a tragic misrecognition.
The child is in fact neither self-sufficient nor independent but is propped up by the supporting hand of the mother, steadying and caring for the child at the same time as she acknowledges ‘what a big boy’ he is!
We might chuckle at Lacan’s parable, and question whether or not this ‘scene’ can be described as universal, but one thing that can’t be denied is how compelling the vision is. It also accounts for how the mechanisms of dependency and trust can be described as ‘unconscious’.
Whilst the child is convinced and encouraged that he is ‘big’ and ‘heroic’, the ‘supporting arm’ of the mother becomes invisible. The child trusts in the support he will receive, but never acknowledges it consciously, rejecting the dependency of his position.
To be able to trust depends on our capacity to feel vulnerable and to acknowledge our own dependency, even though so many of the presuppositions underpinning our ‘achievement’ culture seek to ignore or even disavow this fact.
This attitude, so the story goes, becomes embedded in an illusion of independence, whereas the reality of the situation reveals that the child, and by inference, the grown-up, exists and finds support and meaning in its relation to others. No man is an island, and yet we continually imagine ourselves as such. It is in recognising our own dependent natures, by appreciating our own vulnerability, that we can develop the empathy and understanding that are key to creating a more trusting and honest society.
The importance of trust
The capacity to trust is something that the child psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott observed at the very root of the child’s entry into the world.
For Winnicott it is the fact that the mother holds the baby, both literally and metaphorically, that allows it to develop a sense of its own selfhood and a trust in its environment. This process begins with the child developing a feeling of continuity and coherence in a safe environment and continues as the child experiences a feeling of ‘omnipotence’- that it is at the centre of the universe, which it experiences via the early care of the mother.
The child will eventually have to give up its illusion of omnipotence, and deal with what Winnicott called the ‘insult of reality’. It is the experience of complete trust that the child has in the mother’s care that helps it to develop the ability to deal with this ‘insult’, and the potential to ‘imagine’ its own omnipotence, through the development of fantasy and play. However, if the early care of the child does not cultivate this initial sense of ‘omnipotence’, the adult will not develop an effective capacity to play and imagine, and therefore will develop a ‘false self’, which will attempt to transform reality into a fulfilment of its own fantasy.
This ‘inflated narcissism’ which treats the world as an object to be used and abused, disguises a tragic scenario: the baby terrified at the unpredictability of life and unable to risk its own vulnerability in the face of the other, who will always be feared rather than loved.
Psychoanalysis sheds a light on the often obscured relationship between trust and vulnerability. The possibility of trusting is predicated on allowing ourselves to be vulnerable, on acknowledging our own dependency and understanding our own inter-relatedness. No man is an island, although this illusion is often projected upon us.
We are all, at times in our lives, the vulnerable baby, reaching out to the other for support and recognition, who in their turn is equally vulnerable. It is in recognising this mutual vulnerability that an attitude of genuine trust can be established.
About Tom
Tom works at The Freud Museum, the final home of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, and his daughter, Anna Freud, a pioneering child psychoanalyst. The Museum promotes the relevance of psychoanalysis in the arts, in culture, in ideas and in contemporary life, and works in partnership with organisations connected to mental health and well-being.
Tom’s research explores the cultural influence of psychoanalysis and the philosophical implications of Freud’s theories for contemporary life. His most recent publication is ‘The Battle for the Voice: Psychoanalysis and Music’, in ed. Tambling, The Bloomsbury Handbook to Literature and Psychoanalysis (Bloomsbury, 2023).
You can reach him at: [email protected]
Nothing on this website should be construed as personal advice based on your circumstances. No news or research item is a personal recommendation to deal.
The island of illusion: on trust and dependency
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