Hanna Segal: The Distinction Between Lies & Truth...

At 90, the psychoanalyst Hanna Segal has spent decades probing the murkiest corners of the human psyche. She talks to Jon Henley about her search for truth, the healing power of art and what her years in practice have taught her about life

Segal is one of the most eminent psychoanalysts ever to have practiced in Britain.

Hers is rather a strange profession, though. All that poking around in the dark, walled-off corners of people's minds, hunting down explanations for bizarre adult behaviour in obscure childhood events that invariably involve breasts or toilets. A lot of people have no time for it.

Segal, obviously, does. "The more I think about it," she says, "the importance lies in seeking truth. Not 'The Truth' with a capital T, an omniscience, but truth that is the same as reality. All we are really looking for, in a patient on the couch, is a distinction between lies and truth."

The kind of people who came to see her were, she says, generally those who "seek to avoid truth, and so end up in delusion. What you are aiming to achieve is a change in the direction of the mind, a bend towards truth. And while all science aims at truth, psychoanalysis is unique in recognizing that the search for truth is, in itself, therapeutic."

The latter phrase is one penned by Segal and colleagues for the obituary of Melanie Klein, of whose work Segal is pretty much universally recognized as the most prominent postwar interpreter. Kleinian psychoanalysis is one of the two main schools within the British Psychoanalytical Society, the other being Freudian (after Anna, Sigmund's daughter).

The nuances between the two are not immediately apparent to the layperson, but if you ask Segal why, many years ago, she opted for the former rather than the latter, she answers that Freud's masterwork, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, read "like a textbook. It didn't speak to my imagination at all." Klein's Psychoanalysis of Children, on the other hand, "was a revelation. It opened up a whole new world."

It was in Geneva that Segal first read the works of Sigmund Freud. "I read Proust first, before Freud," she says. "And I think I simply realised that there was nothing, absolutely nothing, more fascinating than human nature. And human relations."

So when the time came to choose a career, psychoanalysis was almost a natural choice. It satisfied her interest in human nature, assuaged a powerful social conscience ("I have to feel I am doing something useful. Something that might help people"), and allowed her to explore the third great passion in her life: art. Segal's major contribution to the world of psychoanalysis is most probably in aesthetics and what is known as symbolisation. Two of her best-known books are entitled Dream, Phantasy and Art, and Delusion and Artistic Creativity.

"We cope with our anxieties and desires," she explains, "in symbolical ways. We all need a capacity for symbol formation, or symbolization: hopefully, we will try to find someone like our mother to marry, rather than try actually to marry our mother.

Artists exist on the borderline of severe psychotic anxieties: if they succeed in symbolizing them, then they can produce great art - but if not, they can be in trouble."

Segal indicates a painting on the wall of a rather chaotic vase of flowers, all violent purples, magentas and reds. "Look closer," she says. "Can you see the face of a dog?" It's there, sort of; a gloomy bloodhound, all drooping jowls and sad, tortured eyes. "The work of a patient," she says. " It Saved him from madness."

I must look dubious, because she comes back at me with Van Gogh, whose story you really can't argue with. She cites another case that, in many ways, first opened her to the possibilities of psychoanalysis: many years ago, on an evacuation train before the war, a girl had a schizophrenic fit, screaming what sounded like hysterical nonsense.

"She kept shouting, 'I shat my lover in the loo! I shat my lover in the loo!'" Segal says. "Later, after I read Klein, I realized that girl's words actually had a very obvious meaning; you could understand them. She was the one being evacuated, but in her mind she had reversed that situation: she was the one doing the evacuating. This, I understood, was the language of subconscious fantasy."

I'm still dubious. How can psychoanalysts ever really know they're right?

"We can't," she says. "There's no quick cure or absolute certainty. And the truth rarely stays the truth; yesterday's truth is not today's. But there is a sense of accumulating evidence. You mustn't concentrate, or try to remember - but in the mass of patient communication, you have to select the right fact, with an open mind. And you have to be sure that fact is not just your idea, your own, overrated idea. It's not easy."

"We're always told not to treat society as if it were a patient on the couch," she says, "but group psychology can be understood because it is a group of humans." The function of a group, she contends, is certainly to work together, but also to act as a kind of repository for our projections of all those bad things we cannot tolerate in ourselves.

"Groups contain our psychotic anxieties and delusions. Generally, we delegate what you might call the 'mad' functions - fighting, religion - to subgroups: the army, the church. But those subgroups must be under the control of the working part of the group. My point is that when mad things start happening, it's when subgroups get out of control, and particularly when they combine: God, money and the military is a particularly deadly recipe." The Iraq conflict was about "the need for an enemy", and "a religious fanaticism linked to, and covering up, mass robbery".

Today, Segal believes, our collective sanity is threatened by "a delusional inner world of omnipotence, and absolute evil, and sainthood. Unfortunately, we also have to contend with mammon." And since we tend to submit to the tyranny of our own groups, "speaking our minds takes courage, because groups do not like outspoken dissenters." The battle now "is between insanity based on mutual projections, and sanity based on truth". And all we, as citizens, can do is "struggle to expose lies, and strive for the preservation of sane human values".

She is not convinced she will ever see that battle resolved. But the important thing, she insists, adopting the vivid symbol she first found in Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic fable The Road, is to "keep a little fire burning; however small, however hidden. I find this extraordinarily helpful: we live in a mad world, but for those of us who believe in some human values, it is terribly important that we just keep this little fire burning. It is about trusting your judgment, and the power of love. A little trust, and a little care".

-Jon Henley ("Queen of Darkness: John Henley talks to psychoanalyst Hanna Segal," GuardianUK, 9.8.08. Image: In Voluptate Mors by Salvador Dalí & P.Halsman,1951).

Uncertain Certainty: The Nihility Of Knowing...

"Last week, I jokingly asked a health club acquaintance whether he would change his mind about his choice for president if presented with sufficient facts that contradicted his present beliefs. He responded with utter confidence. "Absolutely not," he said. "No new facts will change my mind because I know that these facts are correct."

I was floored. In his brief rebuttal, he blindly demonstrated overconfidence in his own ideas and the inability to consider how new facts might alter a presently cherished opinion. Worse, he seemed unaware of how irrational his response might appear to others. It's clear, I thought, that carefully constructed arguments and presentation of irrefutable evidence will not change this man's mind.

In the current presidential election, a major percentage of voters are already committed to "their candidate"; new arguments and evidence fall on deaf ears. And yet, if we, as a country, truly want change, we must be open-minded, flexible and willing to revise our opinions when new evidence warrants it. Most important, we must be able to recognize and acknowledge when we are wrong. Unfortunately, cognitive science offers some fairly sobering observations about our ability to judge ourselves and others.

Perhaps the single academic study most germane to the present election is the 1999 psychology paper by David Dunning and Justin Kruger, "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments." The two Cornell psychologists began with the following assumptions.

• Incompetent individuals tend to overestimate their own level of skill.
• Incompetent individuals fail to recognize genuine skill in others.
• Incompetent individuals fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy.

To put their theories to the test, the psychologists asked a group of Cornell undergraduates to undergo a series of self-assessments, including tests of logical reasoning taken from a Law School Admissions Test preparation guide. Prior to being shown their test scores, the subjects were asked to estimate how they thought they would fare in comparison with the others taking the tests.

On average, participants placed themselves in the 66th percentile, revealing that most of us tend to overestimate our skills somewhat. But those in the bottom 25 percent consistently overestimated their ability to the greatest extent. For example, in the logical reasoning section, individuals who scored in the 12th percentile believed that their general reasoning abilities fell at the 68th percentile, and that their overall scores would be in the 62nd percentile. The authors point out that the problem was not primarily underestimating how others had done; those in the bottom quartile overestimated the number of their correct answers by nearly 50 percent. Similarly, after seeing the answers of the best performers -- those in the top quartile -- those in the bottom quartile continued to believe that they had performed well.

The article's conclusion should be posted as a caveat under every political speech of those seeking office. And it should serve as the epitaph for the Bush administration: "People who lack the knowledge or wisdom to perform well are often unaware of this fact. That is, the same incompetence that leads them to make wrong choices also deprives them of the savvy necessary to recognize competence, be it their own or anyone else's."
The converse also bears repeating. Despite the fact that students in the top quartile fairly accurately estimated how well they did, they also tended to overestimate the performance of others. In short, smart people tend to believe that everyone else "gets it." Incompetent people display both an increasing tendency to overestimate their cognitive abilities and a belief that they are smarter than the majority of those demonstrably sharper.

Closely allied with this unshakable self-confidence in one's decisions is a second separate aspect of meta-cognition, the feeling of being right. As I have pointed out in my recent book, "On Being Certain," feelings of conviction, certainty and other similar states of "knowing what we know" may feel like logical conclusions, but are in fact involuntary mental sensations that function independently of reason. At their most extreme, these are the spontaneous "aha" or "Eureka" sensations that tell you that you have made a major discovery. Lesser forms include gut feelings, hunches and vague intuitions of knowing something, as well as the standard "yes, that's right" feeling that you get when you solve a problem.

The evidence is substantial that these feelings do not correlate with the accuracy or quality of the thought. Indeed, these feelings can occur in the absence of any specific thought, such as with electrical and chemical brain stimulation. They can also occur spontaneously during so-called mystical or spiritual epiphanies in which the affected person senses an immediate William James described this phenomenon as "felt knowledge."

Feelings of absolute certainty and utter conviction are not rational deliberate conclusions; they are involuntary mental sensations generated by the brain. Like other powerful mental states such as love, anger and fear, they are extraordinarily difficult to dislodge through rational arguments. Just as it's nearly impossible to reason with someone who's enraged and combative, refuting or diminishing one's sense of certainty is extraordinarily difficult. Certainty is neither created by nor dispelled by reason.

Similarly, without access to objective evidence, we are terrible at determining whether a candidate is telling us the truth. Most large-scale psychological studies suggest that the average person is incapable of accurately predicting whether someone is lying. In most studies, our abilities to make such predictions, based on facial expressions and body language, are no greater than by chance alone -- hardly a recommendation for choosing a presidential candidate based upon a gut feeling that he or she is honest.

Worse, our ability to assess political candidates is particularly questionable when we have any strong feeling about them. An oft-quoted fMRI study by Emory psychologist Drew Westen illustrates how little conscious reason is involved in political decision-making.

Westen asked staunch party members from both sides to evaluate negative (defamatory) information about their 2004 presidential choice. Areas of the brain (prefrontal cortex) normally engaged during reasoning failed to show increased activation. Instead, the limbic system -- the center for emotional processing -- lit up dramatically. According to Westen, both Republicans and Democrats "reached totally biased conclusions by ignoring information that could not rationally be discounted" (cognitive dissonance).

In other words, we are as bad at judging ourselves as we are at judging others. Most cognitive scientists now believe that the majority of our thoughts originate in the areas of the brain inaccessible to conscious introspection. These beginnings of thoughts arrive in consciousness already colored with inherent bias. No two people see the world alike. Each of our perceptions is filtered through our genetic predispositions, inherent biologic differences and idiosyncratic life experiences. Your red is not my red. These differences extend to the very building blocks of thoughts; each of us will look at any given question from his own predispositions. Thinking may be as idiosyncratic as fingerprints."

-Robert Burton (Excerpt: "My Candidate, Myself," Salon.com, 9.22.08. Image: See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil: Gnomes, SidelineCreations.com, 2008).

History's Hangover: King Alcohol & The Prime Minister...

"For centuries, our ancestors unleashed the dogs of war under the influence of a fog of booze

The conspiracy theorists were right all along – well, nearly. There was a single entity behind the course of Western history, a single force which has controlled the people and influenced the leaders and decision-makers for the past 12,000 years. This entity wasn’t a mysterious secret group – no Illuminati, no Knights Templar, and not even David Icke’s lizards get a look in.

It was alcohol.

Before the 19th century and the beginnings of a reliable and clean water supply, the Western world made its water safe by turning it into alcoholic drinks. The addition of ethyl alcohol to water kills many of the pathogens and thus, through the brewing and vintner industries, a clean and reliable source of liquid refreshment could be obtained.

Beer was almost certainly a staple of man’s diet before the arrival of bread, being produced for at least the last 12,000 years. It is usually noted that the beer or wine drunk on a day-to-day basis was generally much weaker than the beer or wine we drink today, although recipes exist for stronger ales. These have been recreated and found to have the strength of modern wine. This strong beer was not drunk on a day-to-day basis, primarily due to economic factors – it takes twice as much grain to produce the same amount of the stronger beer.

However, the fact that the daily liquid diet contained a regular supply of beer or wine does suggest that, before the 19th century, Western society spent much of its time in an alcoholic haze.

What effect would this have had on the development of that society? In particular, how could this affect the decision-making abilities of its leaders? After all, the economic constraints on producing stronger brews would not have applied to the wealthy and powerful. Why would a nobleman, king or emperor drink the same beer as the local peasants? He would certainly have been more likely to drink the higher quality, higher alcohol versions.

It’s interesting to note that China, along with other regions of the Far East, made their water safe by boiling it and making tea. Could the differences in the development of Chinese as opposed to Western European culture be due to the lack of alcohol in the diet of the Chinese? China, after all, has remained politically unified since 221BC. Contrast this to the constant state of political flux encountered in Western Europe over the last 2,200 years.

Whilst alcohol was discovered in China, and a certain, limited amount of drinking did take place, the Chinese did not actually have a choice in the matter. Half of the population lack the enzyme necessary for alcohol metabolism and therefore alcoholic drinks could never take their place as the safe alternative to water. Just as the development of Western culture could be rooted in the mind-altering affects of alcohol, so the insular development of China, which so puzzled Jared Diamond in his classic Guns, Germs and Steel, could be rooted in tea drinking.

Meanwhile, the leaders of Western society were fuelling their day-to-day lives with copious amounts of high-strength alcoholic drinks. In a curious reversal of current fortune, the Tennent’s Super and Special Brew brigade were once the men in charge!

Thankfully, the introduction of tea, coffee and cocoa in the 17th century allowed a shift away from alcohol as the primary source of safe water. Allied with later concerns over the health issues of drinking alcohol and a steady supply of safe drinking water, the powers that be were able to wean themselves from their daily fix.

Once we accept that the Western world was in the hands of alcoholics, it becomes easier to explain much of the behavior of our most famous leaders. It cannot be denied that our history is littered with selfish, violent, arrogant, stubborn, libidinous, unsteady, unpredictable and over-confident rulers. It is surely no coincidence that these character failings are the same ones as those manifested by people when drunk. The historians of Western civilization can no longer gloss over the simple fact that alcohol controlled all the decision-makers. Its grip on the current world is often considered dangerous, but this pales into insignificance when we look at the control it exerted over our ancestors. It’s high time history’s secret hangover was exposed."

- Paul Gilham,("The Hangover of History," ForteanTimes, August 2003. Image: -John Warner Barber, Engraving, "King Alcohol & The Prime Minister,"Library of Congress, 1800s).

Mirror Reflection: The Doppelgänger On The Other Side...

"For the bubble-headed young Narcissus of myth, the mirror spun a fatal fantasy, and the beautiful boy chose to die by the side of a reflecting pond rather than leave his “beloved” behind. For the aging narcissist of Shakespeare’s 62nd sonnet, the mirror delivered a much-needed whack to his vanity, the sight of a face “beated and chopp’d with tann’d antiquity ”underscoring the limits of self-love.

Whether made of highly polished metal or of glass with a coating of metal on the back, mirrors have fascinated people for millennia: ancient Egyptians were often depicted holding hand mirrors. With their capacity to reflect back nearly all incident light upon them and so recapitulate the scene they face, mirrors are like pieces of dreams, their images hyper-real and profoundly fake.

Mirrors reveal truths you may not want to see. Give them a little smoke and a house to call their own, and mirrors will tell you nothing but lies.

To scientists, the simultaneous simplicity and complexity of mirrors make them powerful tools for exploring questions about perception and cognition in humans and other neuronally gifted species, and how the brain interprets and acts upon the great tides of sensory information from the external world. They are using mirrors to study how the brain decides what is self and what is other, how it judges distances and trajectories of objects, and how it reconstructs the richly three-dimensional quality of the outside world from what is essentially a two-dimensional snapshot taken by the retina’s flat sheet of receptor cells. They are applying mirrors in medicine, to create reflected images of patients’ limbs or other body parts and thus trick the brain into healing itself. Mirror therapy has been successful in treating disorders like phantom limb syndrome, chronic pain and post-stroke paralysis.

“In a sense, mirrors are the best ‘virtual reality’ system that we can build,” said Marco Bertamini of the University of Liverpool. “ The object‘inside’ the mirror is virtual, but as far as our eyes are concerned it exists as much as any other object.” Dr. Bertamini and his colleagues have also studied what people believe about the nature of mirrors and mirror images, and have found nearly everybody, even students of physics and math, to be shockingly off the mark.

Other researchers have determined that mirrors can subtly affect human behavior, often in surprisingly positive ways. Subjects tested in a room with a mirror have been found to work harder, to be more helpful and to be less inclined to cheat, compared with control groups performing the same exercises in non-mirrored settings. Reporting in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, C. Neil Macrae, Galen V.Bodenhausen and Alan B.Milne found that people in a room with a mirror were comparatively less likely to judge others based on social stereotypes about, for example, sex, race or religion. Dr. Bodenhausen said.

“A byproduct of that awareness may be a shift away from acting on autopilot toward more desirable ways of behaving.”

Physical self-reflection, in other words, encourages philosophical self-reflection, a crash course in the Socratic notion that you cannot know or appreciate others until you know yourself.

The mirror technique does not always keep knees from jerking. When it comes to socially acceptable forms of stereotyping, said Dr. Bodenhausen, like branding all politicians liars or all lawyers crooks, the presence of a mirror may end up augmenting rather than curbing the willingness to pigeonhole.

How can we be so self-delusional when the truth stares back at us? “Although we do indeed see ourselves in the mirror every day, we don’t look exactly the same every time,” explained Dr. Epley, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. There is the scruffy-morning you, the assembled-for-work you, the dressed-for-an-elegant-dinner you.

“Which image is you?”

“Our research shows that people, on average, resolve that ambiguity in their favor, forming a representation of their image that is more attractive than they actually are.”

What is it about our reflected self that it plays by such counter-intuitive rules? The important point is that no matter how close or far we are from the looking glass, the mirror is always halfway between our physical selves and our projected selves in the virtual world inside the mirror, and so the captured image in the mirror is half our true size.

When we gaze into a mirror, we are all of us Narcissus, tethered eternally to our doppelgänger on the other side."

-Natalie Angier (Excerpt:"Mirrors Don’t Lie. Mislead? Oh, Yes", NY Times, 7.22.2008, Image:- Parmigianino (1503-1540), Self-Portrait From A Convex Mirror, Oil On Convex Panel, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, 1524).

NOTE: "In order to investigate the subtleties of art Parmigianino set himself one day to make his own portrait, looking at himself in a convex barber's mirror." The painting stunned Renaissance Italy. It shows the artist at the age of about 21, romantic, his unkempt face unmanly, even feminine. It emphasizes the fantastic nature of his talent, of his right hand that draws and makes a world. As a celebration of the artist as a young man. The painter looks at us, at the mirror, boldly - this is the artist as hero. But what makes the painting unique is its gimmick. Spectacularly, Parmigianino has not only studied himself in a convex mirror but reproduced what he sees." -Jonathan Jones, (GuardianUK 1.18.2003).

In Space: The Presence of Divinity...

"The biggest joy was on the way home. In my cockpit window every 2 minutes I saw the earth, the moon, the sun and the whole 360 degree panorama of the heavens. It was a powerful overwhelming experience.

Suddenly, I realized the molecules of my body and the molecules of the spacecraft and the molecules in the bodies of my partners were prototyped and manufactured in some ancient generation of stars. It was an overwhelming sense of oneness...a connectedness. It wasn't THEM and US. It was...That's me!...That's all of it! It's all one thing! This was accompanied by an ecstasy...a sense of "Oh My God!" Wow! Yes!...an insight...an epiphany. The presence of divinity became almost palpable, and I knew that life in the universe was not just an accident based on random processes. . . . The knowledge came to me directly."

-Edgar D. Mitchell, Ph.D ( Former member of NASA Astronaut Corps from 1962-1972. Piloted the lunar module during the Apollo 14 mission, from January 31 to February 9, 1971 and is the 6th man to have walked on the Moon. The capsule touched down on the Moon on February 5, 1971, at 8:37 GMT in a hilly area called Fra Mauro. The Apollo 14 crew was also made up of Admiral Alan B. Shepard and Colonel Stuart A Roosa. In 1973, freshly retired from the space program, he founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), an organization created to initiate and finance research programs on the nature of consciousness. IONS is an organization renowned worldwide. -Institute for Research On Extraordinary Experiences (INREES) Image: -L.Gordon Cooper: Pilot Charles Conrad Jr. photgraphed inside Gemini 5 cockpit while orbiting Earth, 1965).