Reactions, overreactions, culture and psychoanalysis

Clarissa and I have been debating whether there is something a little strange about psychoanalysis.  From my point of view, there is, but from hers not so much.

She argues that I would need to enter therapy to be able to judge its merits.  I don't need to enter psychoanalysis, actually, because I have spent a several years, possibly about fifteen, discovering how my mind words, what my preconceived ideas are, and where I fit in the world.  This has taken me so long because there was nothing that could function as therapy for me, apart from reading and learning.  Indeed, a great deal of my attempts to get help from others turned out to be the most stringent counter-therapy imaginable.

You see, I don't "overreact".   I have the capacity to absorb a lot of pain, a lot of punishment, before I even begin to react.   If you imagine the British ideal of the stiff upper lip, as British colonials we took that tendency to the final degree.   A war was going on around me for all of my early life, and my family and those around me barely reacted.  We turned on the TV every night to hear how many of our own might have been killed.   Sometimes the names mentioned were those known to my family.   We still didn't react.   When my father's brother was killed in action, we received a phone call from my granny as we were just preparing to go out.  I answered the call and passed the receiver to my father.  He heard the news and fainted whilst still clutching the receiver.  He said, "Philip was killed," and then we went out just as we had planned.  There were no tears.   We just walked quietly, looking at  flower gardens in the pale summer sun.

The matter was never mentioned again.  We don't speak of it. Just like very little of emotional value is shared between me and my family.   We are still colonials, in that sense, holding ourselves to a different standard of emotional propriety than everybody else.

I tend to be naturally reticent because I want to be sure I've analysed a situation accurately before I speak.   That's why it can take me ten or twenty years to formulate my views and express them in what I take to be a balanced way.

Suppose I do eventually speak, that is, "seek therapy", after numerous years, what I have to say will have been very carefully thought through.   The typical ideological formulation, that women simply "overreact" to everything, simply won't cut it.   I don't overreact to anything.  I under-react.

A system that is looking for reactions, to analyse them, will not find anything I have not already analysed over a twenty years.   I've analysed everything to death.  I've understood that the way I express myself is almost always subject to misinterpretation, because considered analyses I've made over a couple of decades are easily treated as if I'd just come up with them on the spur of the moment.  They're presumed to be "emotional", hence overreactions, when in fact it has taken me altogether too long to come up with any emotion at all  -- even longer to begin to understand what the emotion points to.

To be treated like I'm trying to escape the issue, as if the meanings of my distress over the years are self-evident, is not only presumptuous, but intellectually and ethically demoralizing in ways that I cannot begin to express.  How does one become emotionally engaged with anything if someone is always ready to tell you that your ideas and experiences have a different meaning from those you have discovered?

That is my experience in Western culture.   Africans understood this form of emotional repression and conditioning implicitly, but Westerners always want to tell me that I mean something else -- something insidious, something more veritably "colonial" and, consequently, evil.

That has been my finding over twenty years or so, in situations where I have sought to discuss issues arising from my past in therapeutic or social circumstances.  To say I haven't experienced this kind of attitude, or that I am "overreacting" is the response I would expect. I don't overreact.  Westerners may do, when they express their emotions in reaction to events that befall them.  Western women may be the quintessence of overreaction, for all I know, according to how they are viewed by Western men.  One can't defend oneself against an accusation without first pinpointing the nature of the misreading.  However, any focus on the enduring cultural misreading of my views and attitudes is taken to confirm the thesis -- that I must, of necessity, be concerned with what others think, if I am going to the trouble to address this.  This is the dead-end of psychoanalysis.

I don't need to discuss anything in terms alien to me.   I'd prefer to enjoy the company of those who do understand what I'm getting at implicitly, without it having to be explained.  Consequently, I won't try to explain emotional repression, or prolonged endurance of trouble, or the madness of African experiences to any who do not already understand these.

This is a practical solution to a problem I've been unable to fix over many years.  It's not a moral solution and it's not a cry for attention -- by that, I mean, "It's not a moral solution.  It's not a cry for attention."  It may seem so when translated into Western terms.

But, if I was to say, conversely:  "Avoiding too much emotional engagement with Westerners is really a moral solution for me, and it's a cry for attention," I would all the same still prefer the option of a simplified and culturally easy life where I didn't have to make sure everything I said wasn't being constantly bent out of shape and made to mean its opposite.  So, take it whichever way you like it. It's either one or the other, or perhaps both, and surely I have failed, once more, to communicate at all.

From now on, I will be resting and residing with those who know me, because they are like me.