Why we lurch from crisis to crisis

When Elizabeth M. first came to see me she was sixty-six years old and had recently lost her husband to pancreatic cancer.

She was very late to her first session because, shortly before leaving her house, she had cut her finger picking up a piece of broken glass. She’d been pushing the plunger on her cafetière when it slipped and shattered. ‘The bleeding’s stopped, but do you think I should go to my doctor?’ she asked me.

When I saw her the next week, she told me that she had just lost her handbag, which contained her mobile, wallet and keys. ‘Should I have all the locks replaced?’ she wanted to know. The week after that, she accidentally spilled red wine on a friend’s beige sofa, ruining it. She asked me, ‘How can I make this right?’ Week after week, month after month, Elizabeth began each session by recounting her latest misfortune and asking my advice.

We worked together, carefully considering her options, but I often felt less like a psychoanalyst than like a fireman coaxing kittens out of trees. During those early sessions, Elizabeth never reported a dream, or talked about her feelings – there wasn’t time; there was always some new problem that required urgent attention. I would think to myself: ‘What terrible luck!’ or ‘When she gets such-and-such sorted out, then her psychoanalysis will really begin.’ After several months, it finally dawned on me that these disasters would never end – that this lurching from crisis to crisis was at the heart of her psychoanalysis. I would have to understand it, if I were to understand her.

After about six months, Elizabeth confided that the first thing she felt in the morning was ‘a depressed, choking anxiety’. She woke frightened, sometimes shivering with fear, until she remembered a problem, some urgent situation that required her to get out of bed and face the day. There are various ways to circumvent depressed, anxious feelings. It’s not uncommon, for example, to exploit sexual fantasies, or to use hypochondriacal worries. Elizabeth employed her disasters to calm herself – they were her tranquilliser.

It’s also not uncommon to use some large-scale calamity, or someone else’s personal disaster – the newspapers are full of both – to distract oneself from one’s own destructive impulses, and I soon noticed this tendency in Elizabeth. When Elizabeth told me that she’d completely forgotten her sister’s birthday lunch – ‘It was in my diary. I don’t know what happened. It completely slipped my mind’ – I suggested that she might be cross with her sister over a particular recent incident, when she felt her sister had snubbed her.

‘So you’re saying I forgot her birthday on purpose,’ she said.

‘I don’t think it was conscious – but it would explain why you forgot. Tit for tat.’

‘I don’t know.’ Elizabeth was quiet. Looking around the room, she said, ‘I’m going to have to bring you some energy-saving bulbs. You really ought to start thinking more about global warming.’

In 1956, the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, in an essay on unconscious guilt, pointed out in passing that a melancholic patient may irrationally confess to starting some major disaster, one to which he has no connection whatsoever. ‘The illness’, he writes, ‘is an attempt to do the impossible. The patient absurdly claims responsibility for general disaster, but in so doing avoids reaching his or her personal destructiveness.’ In other words, sometimes we might try to assume responsibility for a major disaster in order to avoid responsibility for our own destructive behaviour.

I began to understand that Elizabeth’s oft-repeated question ‘How can I make this right?’ concealed a calamity that she knew she could not make right.

In the last year of his life, Elizabeth’s husband had known that he was dying. He’d become increasingly frightened and could not bear to be alone. The more he needed Elizabeth to stay with him at home, the more claustrophobic she’d felt. ‘I had many offers of help – I didn’t need to go out to the shops as often as I did. And obviously my friends would have understood if I’d cancelled a lunch now and again. But I didn’t.’

She’d told herself that going out helped her to keep her equilibrium, that she was better able to take care of her husband if she gave herself these little breaks. But there were other changes in her feelings too: she found it more and more difficult to touch her husband, let alone have sex with him. Frightened of his death, reminded of her own mortality, and angry about being left to someday face her death on her own, Elizabeth found herself rejecting her husband in his final months.

After a year of analysis, Elizabeth started to talk to me about her husband’s painful last months. For the first time, she remembered a dream: ‘My husband is dead but he telephones me at home. I’m so relieved he’s finally ringing me. I go to answer but the phone isn’t where it usually is. I can hear it ringing but I can’t find it. I pull the cushions off the sofa, and then I pull the books off the shelves, but I still can’t find it. I’m in a frenzy. I try to pull up the floorboards with my bare hands, breaking my nails. When I wake up, I’m sobbing.’

As she told me the dream, Elizabeth cried. She’d cried often enough about some disaster that had befallen her, but this was the first time I’d heard her cry because she’d hurt someone who loved her, and whom she loved.

In the immediate aftermath of a major disaster, politicians and journalists typically declare: ‘This changes everything.’ Disasters can change quite a bit. Even an uninjured onlooker can be moved to a new empathy or a new fear. The political context we live in can, and has, changed. But we can sometimes exploit a disaster to block internal change. Like Elizabeth, we can take on a catastrophe to stop ourselves feeling and thinking – and to avoid responsibility for our own intimate acts of destruction.