As prime ministers and
presidents, state governors and city mayors, doctors and non-doctors in the
pursuit of "flattening the curve" rush to close down whatever
they can lay their eyes upon, and the populace, at least a subsection, nay the
great majority, not to be left behind in this race to quell everything,
as long as it is happening to others at least as much as to oneself, and one's
survival is not yet at stake, urges them to do even more, one wonders whether
behind the noble motive of saving lives there are not other ignoble ones,
riding on the coattails of the highmindedness.
Even if such baser
motives exist, you may want to ask, why even think in those lines and weaken
the resolve of mankind to wipe out this scourge, especially when I know for a
fact that the more rigorous the social isolation the more rapidly the pandemic
will end?
I have nothing against
containing the virus as aggressively as possible, but when it begins to border
on the absurd like a state governor telling family members living under the
same roof to socially distance themselves from each other, or when the Wuhan
Chinese, amongst whom the virus first emerged, start persecuting the African
students in the region, prematurely ending their leases and forcing them to sleep
on the streets, as if their black skin itself were the virus, or when my two
secretaries lock the entrance to the office even when they know other than the
three of us nobody comes through it - it is all telehealth now - as if the
coronavirus will creep through an unlocked door faster than a locked one, or
when the head of the security at my wife's hospital, who has been seeing and
greeting her for 30 years, on her forgetting the hospital keys and not having
her ID badge on her person does not let her in the doctor's lounge with his
master key as if such harrassment - racial at its core because of her brown
skin - will flatten the curve faster, or when one obsessional neurotic patient
after another tries to convince me that it is a man made virus, designed by the
Chinese to get even with Donald Trump and in the very same breath expounds the
theory that it is a Big Pharma conspiracy, hatched in cahoots with Donald
Trump, to vaccinate us all, with the vaccine already in the vaults, ready
to be released when the moment is right for the greatest financial killing of
all time, and as icing on the cake adds that in the vaccine there is also a
tiny chip that will store our medical records and keep a minute-to-minute tab
on our movements through 5-G towers, or when a hysterical patient tells that
for three months before the virus emerged she was regularly dreaming of flying
over that ocean all the way to China and seeing there her deceased father
chatting with those people (did not clarify in Chinese or English), and when
the virus hit the American shores the recurrent dream disappeared and it was
certainly an attempt on the part of her father from the beyond to forewarn her
of the coming danger, or when my wife starts to instruct me as to how I should
tell the police I am a doctor if I get stopped as I prepare to leave my house
to visit a rental property which is an "inessential activity" and I
tell her that I rather pay the 1000 dollar fine than abuse my medical privileges
and she comes back with "for a 10,000 dollars I bet you will, and it is
not just thousand dollars but your behind that may go to jail too for 90
days", it is time to examine what lies behind these behaviors which
basically are not so much driven by medical considerations as to make each
other's life miserable.
If the above examples
are not sufficient to convince that behind the medical there are a
multitude of other agendas, driven by schadenfreude, jockeying to find
expression, let us consider the immense elasticity of the social isolation that
I practice. I am more lax with women than with men. With the former, if
she impulsively moves towards me, abrogating the six feet rule, I am left
speechless while I do not hesitate to sharply check a man if he invades that
personal space. And if the woman is young and pretty I am quite
likely to forget even to don on my mask. A white man is more likely to be
viewed as free of the virus while a black man, especially if he is burly and
towers over me, I may reach for the gloves in addition to the mask. A person
whom I dislike does not matter man or woman, black or white, I feel like
wearing a hazmat suit in addition to the mask and gloves and the thought creeps
up as to what social distancing would be like if it is made say a mile or
longer. So the strength of social distancing has less to do with medical
science than the attraction or hate we feel towards the person we are dealing
with.
Is hatred in humans more
powerful than love? Hate definitely is older than love. The newborn, if he had
a choice, would have nothing to do with the world, which, at least in the very
beginning, he finds as an unwelcome disturber of the cocooned peace that
he was used to until then. This was driven home to me with no uncertainty when I
watched my nephew Derek Hall, four-hours-old, lying content and happy next to
his mother, getting stabbed in his heel with a needle for a blood test,
and as he squealed and opened his eyes in shock, the expression was
unmistakable, "What the f*** is going on? What was that for? Why I am
here? Whose idea is all this anyway? Why did you all poke me so cruelly? If
this is the harbinger of what living will be like for I don't know how long I
rather be beamed back to my mother's womb; adieus."
It is only gradually
that we begin to love others and at first only those aspects of them that
satisfy our needs. It begins with the mother's breast - which we probably see
as an appendage of ourselves than a part of the outside world - gradually
extending to her entire person. It does not matter if the caretaker is not the
biological mother and the baby is bottle-fed, for the phylogenetic memories
(what our ancestors did countless times for millions of years) patch up the
ontogenetic gaps. The love then broadens to include the father and others in
the household, as they increasingly share the responsibility of our care with
the mother. And we begin to realize that there are aspects of the world that
are not painful and violators of our peace, but whose appearance means
relief from the tensions that relentlessly arise - hunger, thirst,
wetness, cold, and other unpleasant body sensations. And the calming (pleasure)
that follows from the abatement of these stimuli by these entities makes them
deserving of love, not rejection.
The next step we take is to start loving our brothers and sisters, rather
unwillingly, and at first only because doing so earns the love of the parents
and avoiding spells its loss if not outright punishment. As rivals for
the love and attention of the parents, and whose presence means less food and
toys, they are an annoying nuisance; objects of intense jealousy, and,
initially, we can find no good reason for their existence, for they do exactly
what we were doing just yesterday for the parents' admiration; superfluous
copycats. But that is not entirely correct, for when we see in them so much of
ourselves, it compels us to share our narcissism (self-love) with them. The
bond strengthens as they turn into readily available playmates and
comrades-in-arm in our struggle to understand and master the world outside and
the instinctual needs from within. They also provide us a template to model our
behavior if older and to be a surrogate parent if younger. The march of love
continues its stride, from the family to extra-familial objects - aunts and
uncles, neighbors and playmates, teachers and impersonal ideals, and thence to
the world at large.
But all this love is
still on shaky grounds. It is not like the ever-expanding sphere of love keeps
pushing the hatred out the window until we are full of love for the entire
creation. This, of course, is what society, especially through the agency of religion,
exhorts us to achieve, but we know with how little success. And the reason is
not difficult to discern. Antithetical forces are in action from the very
beginning. While others satisfy our needs, they also hurt and disappoint
us. The mother's breast, while deeply satisfying, leaves a bitter taste
whenever the nipple is pulled out. Other frustrations follow and knowing
nothing but the mother at that stage, she is held responsible for every
thwarting of our will. Whether she nurtures a lot or a little (often she has
her own ambivalence and aggressive impulses towards us), we always have varying
degrees of grudge against her for not doing enough. In cultures where babies
are routinely breastfed, it is not uncommon for girls, even long after they are
weaned, to complain that they were not given enough milk (love) by the mother
in comparison to their brothers [and that is the reason they became the weaker
sex; the reasoning, though, soon gets repressed into the unconscious]. This
complaint that my mother's milk (love) was not pure pleasure but also a source
of pain becomes the soil from which a number of eating disorders arise if the
life trajectory does not go according to schedule. Fear of contaminants in food
and water, eating of strictly organic fares, obsessive filtering or
boiling of drinking water, religiously watching "bad parts" of food
like gluten, egg yolks, processed meat, refined sugar, and in some eschewing
meat altogether, all these fads at bottom are attempts to convert one's past passive
and helpless feeding role with the mother to an active and controlling one,
where the bitter aspects of the mother are rejected. Even the current obsession
with wearing masks and taking so many similar precautions against the foul
virus has as a secondary motive to block out all the negative aspects of the
mother, allowing only the pleasurable ones, now projected upon the world at
large which becomes a substitute for the mother. In paranoid
psychosis, this memory of the mother's love being admixed with hatred leads to
the interesting delusion that the illness was caused by some trusted person
secretly putting LSD or some similar poisonous drug in one's drink. Paranoid
people's subtle rage at the world with the fantasy of annihilating it for being
fed bullshit (poison with nourishment) by it was most amusingly portrayed
in the movie Dr. Strangelove where General Ripper, convinced
that America is being slowly poisoned by the Russians through the adding of
fluoride in its water supply triggers a nuclear apocalypse. It is unclear if in
Anorexia Nervosa also it is not this hatred/rejection of the mother (food) for
not doing enough for one that underlies the illness.
Even more painful than
the nipple getting withdrawn from one's mouth is seeing it being put in a
sibling's mouth, and we never quite forgive our mother for having other
children, and instead of devoting all of herself to us, dividing it with them,
her husband and her other interests. Soon the grudge extends to the father. He
too disappoints us. He disciplines us, sometimes cruelly, and not just because
the culture has brainwashed him into believing the doctrine of spare
the rod spoil the child, but it is so easy to overdo one's duty if it
entails exercising power over somebody much weaker than oneself. Furthermore,
it seems that nature has its own agenda towards making father in some ways
harsher towards sons than their transgressions justify. Cultural advancement
depends in no small measure upon the antagonism between the generations. And
mother and father both also earn our resentment when they favor or seem to
favor some other brother or sister over us, even if it is done for short
periods and done only to groom his or her competitive spirit. Our rejection
sensitivity is so overarching that even a shift of attention from
ourselves to another is sufficient to trigger a murderous rage.
During the Oedipal
phase, the ambivalence towards parents enters into an entirely new dimension.
Erotic love emerges alongside the affectionate one and is naturally directed
towards the mother for she is the only truly beautiful one around. To make
matters more complicated, it is coupled with a virulent hatred for the father.
The emergence of this hatred does not mean the love for him ceases. It
continues to play its role in the background, tugging the mind in two opposite
directions. The hatred spawns myriad fantasies on how to get exclusive
possession of the mother through getting rid of the father, and doing it in
such a way that nobody would guess who did it - the basis of our species
endless fascination with tales of triangular romances, murder mysteries, and
perfect-crime plots. With the end of the Oedipal phase, these fantasies go into
repression, but from the unconscious continue to be the fountainhead of
literature, drama, cinema, and other arts. The projection of
our evil intentions towards the father - it is not me who wants to kill
him, but it is he who wants to do away with me - is the wellspring of all
the bizarre and ingenious conspiracy theories. For while we are putting
together a plan of action to do him in, we are also making preparations to
defend ourselves from his anticipated reaction to it, and with time the
defensive preparations become more elaborate and stronger than the plans to
harm him.
The fear of giant organizations
like the Government, the IRS, the FBI, Big Pharma, even smaller ones like City
Hall, one's Home Owners Association, next-door neighbor, secret societies
like the Illuminati, the Free Masons, abstractions like 5g-towers, Fate, they
are all the result of this dread that the father is conspiring
to kill us, having become privy to our treacherous thoughts against him. These
entities become a proxy for the father because of their size, strength, and
authoritarian mantle.
But the oedipal phase is
not all just about hating the father and loving the mother. There is the
negative Oedipus Complex too - the craving for love and sexual satisfaction
from the father and hatred and doing away with the mother. Since it is in
direct conflict with the positive Oedipus Complex - loving the mother and
hating the father - it is vigorously suppressed by the society's vested
interest in cultivating masculine impulses in the male sex and opposed by the
boy's own pride in his masculinity and the fear of it getting submerged by the
feminine trends. The derivatives of this Oedipal hatred of the mother [strengthened by the discovery that she lacks the penis, which due to the eroticism at that point being almost entirely phallocentric, causes a severe devaluation of the female sex] transform
into different forms of misogyny. The denial and rejection of passive erotic
impulses, taking the role of the mother and abjectly submitting oneself to the
father is handled by reactionary exaggerated masculinity (machismo),
hair-raising bravado, logic-defying brinkmanship, pursual of dare-devil sports
and stunts, arrogance towards authorities and gaudy masculine
flamboyance. The projection of the hatred towards the mother (it is not I
who wants her out of my way but it is she who wants to get rid of me) is the
soil from which arises the dread of witchcraft, sorcery, black magic, voodoo,
and other fears of female subterfuge, trickery, and duplicity.
While the content and the outcome of the Oedipal phase described above is from the vantage point of the
boy, the girl's love and hatred towards the parents also undergo similar,
though not identical, vicissitudes. Here also the hatred of the father is
coupled with a love for the mother, and hatred of the mother conjoint with a
love for the father. However, the processes are not exactly alike and not as
well studied. We do know the outcome in the rough though. Her Oedipal phase
begins too with erotic love for the mother and a hatred for the father but it
comes to a roadblock on realizing that her fantasies cannot be fulfilled
because of the inferiority of the clitoris in playing the active role
in the relationship with the mother. Her love for the mother takes a big hit.
She is filled with envy towards the brothers who will have an unfair advantage
in loving the mother in the way she can never do and fury against the mother
for shortchanging her. She deduces, and correctly, the extent of the
drawback she will face in the future because of this handicap. Thenceforth in
her relationships with her own sex, behind the narcissistic love and pride for
common feminine beauty and attributes, there will also be back-stabbing malice
as a revenge for the underhanded betrayal done to her by the mother. The shift
of love from the mother to the father, from whom she now expects to receive the
penis (which soon transforms into the wish to receive a child) is also not free
of ambivalence. Her first love, after all, was her mother and much of that love
refuses to abandon its first dwelling place. The erotic love for the mother,
and her own sex by extension, continue to exist in the background and all
through life will undermine the attachment for the opposite sex. This
homosexual love (attraction towards women) will often be projected upon
her lover/husband (it is not I but he who lusts after this or that woman), and
she will accuse her partner of having affairs with other women with or without
justification. She may even drive them to have affairs. There are other factors
besides this lingering homosexuality derived out of her strong attachment to
the mother that will interfere with her ability to love heterosexually. The
girl never quite accepts the genital injustice done to her, convinced that she
once did have genitals like her brother, but because of some naughtiness on
her part, they were violently mutilated. The dysphoria that
women display during menstruation, besides the hormonal causes, is due to the
rage generated from the memory (even though in actuality it is a false
memory and not even present in the conscious mind beyond the Oedipal
period) of such a trauma. Somatization Disorder, where the woman cannot tire of complaining of body aches and pains, caused by multitudes of illnesses festering within her, also perhaps arise from the false memory of a painful castration that she feels she was subjected to before she became properly aware of her self and her surroundings. Women's fascination with crime dramas like Forensic
Files, biographies of serial murderers, especially those rare females who serially
poison their victims, arises from these revenge fantasies of having suffered
genital mutilation. Growing up experiencing humiliations and other
disadvantages because of her sex, she becomes hyperfocused on men's defects and
their follies, always quick to point to their missteps, and in some marriages
all the woman does is to criticize her husband from dawn to dusk and sees to it
that he gets no pleasure out of their relationship. Behind the constant
complaining lies just one gripe - an appeal to the world to notice that it is
my husband who is the defective one and deserving of genital mutilation, not
me, and I should be in his shoes and he in mine. This complaint that I have
been unfairly treated accompanied by scapegoating of some random person or organization
as the cause may result in others taking up the cudgels against the
targeted one, especially if the woman is exceptionally pretty and hysterical (a
drama queen). Many great family and community disputes occur because of this
grudge in the woman for her lover and a good example of it would be Salome's
request for John the Baptist's head on a platter (beheading as a quintessential
symbol of castration). The enigmatic nature of women, which men cannot complain
enough about, also lies in this same complex, in that she helps her man with
one hand and undermines him with the other. She helps because she identifies
with his ambitions - her own ambitions dependent upon his success - but
on seeing that he is fundamentally no better than her and undeserving of the
superior role in the partnership, she acts as his enemy, cutting his leg from under him in
small and big ways, subtly and overtly, from mild uncooperativeness to taking
up the knife and outright castrating him as Lorena Bobbit did. Sudden switches
of women's mood from loving and friendly to "bitchy" and
contradictory owes to the same complex. This vengeance of women for being the
second sex, the one who has to play the passive subordinate role only because
of her biology and which generates different degrees of rage after the
intoxicating sex act is over, is best illustrated in Euripedes's play
Medea. Medea after loving her husband Jason for a period, and only because
Aphrodite instigated Cupid to strike her with his arrow (mythological depiction
of how the rise of sex hormones can override the antagonism between the sexes),
on seeing that he wants to bring another woman into his life, kills their
two sons and through that grievous act him. That it was a revenge for her
belief that she was violently castrated in her early childhood by her father is
supported by the storyline that she kills her brother and King Pelias (a father
substitute) by cutting them into pieces. As the Hindi saying goes, "Triya
charitra koi naa janey, khasam maar, sati ho jaye" (woman's character
no one can fathom, will kill her husband and then jump on his funeral pyre to
be a sati). One of my patients agreed to marry her boyfriend only
on the condition - and mind you this was after years of dating him - that she
be allowed for three months to go wild and sleep with whomever she felt like
before she could accept his proposal and left for California from Detroit so
that she could do so with complete abandonment. Behind it was her rage that if
I am going to marry him and be subordinate to him as the wife, which is unfair
for I am superior to him, I should make up for the injustice by making myself
less valuable through sleeping with other men besides him, and also enjoy a
wild sex life that traditionally has been the prerogative of men, even if for
just three months. On being asked whether such sowing of her wild oats would
hurt the success of her marriage, she replied no it is better for me to get
even with him now than to hurt him and the marriage by cheating on him once we
are a family. Many a woman marry much below their social status to take
vengeance upon their father and brothers for acting superior. Many interracial
marriages, besides finding a partner whom one can treat as inferior, discharge
one's aggression upon him with less fear of retaliation and perhaps find a way
to steal his penis with less difficulty, are motivated by the same complex. A
refusal to marry someone of the same background as oneself out of anger for the
family constellation of one's origin where one was treated like a second class
citizen.
The ambivalence towards
siblings and non-family members is much more straightforward. Love for siblings
mostly forged out of fear of parents is further tempered by the realization
that they are our competitors in every way. They steal our toys, they malign us
to exculpate themselves, they bicker, they argue, they fight, and they upstage
us whenever they get the chance. But then there are always such endearing
similarities between one's siblings and oneself that one cannot help but invest
some of one's narcissistic love in them. People outside the family first become
worthy of our attention and libidinal ties while acting as substitute family
members. Later, as our critical faculty awakens, we cannot help but realize
that our parents, who once appeared to us as the most beautiful and wisest of
all, are really quite ordinary Joe Blows. To punish them for the earlier
overestimation, for a while, we shift our filial and fraternal devotion and
loyalties to outsiders, convinced they are more worthy of emulation. A church-going suburban all American kid may suddenly join the ISIS, a girl with midwestern values may become francophile and dropping her earlier resolve to become a physician move to Paris and make speaking French like the native her primary goal in life. However,
we soon learn that outsiders do not reciprocate the love with the same
sincerity and have little or no scruples when it comes to taking advantage of
us. They definitely belong to the troublesome outside world more than the family
members do. Then the outsiders, by their sheer numbers, become a constant
source of narcissistic humiliation. There is always somebody out there better
than we are no matter the area in which we match our ability against his.
The original hatred of
others, therefore, never quite dies down no matter how much love blossoms
between us and the world. Even with the advent of puberty, when there is a
tremendous surge of sex hormones, and thus everything regardless of its defects
and shortcomings becomes attractive and we are pervaded with the spirit of
love, altruistic strivings and socialism (the basic psychology of which lies in
the impetuous juvenile demand for the right to make love to anybody no matter
what their socioeconomic status), hatred goes into hiding only temporarily. It
continues to smolder in the subterranean, ready to erupt whenever there is a
breach in our love relationship. Even after the deepest carnal love, where all
boundaries between self and the loved one are dissolved, once the ardor is satisfied
the ego feels the pressure to repudiate the other for self-assertiveness. In
fact, the more attractive the loved person and the more fervent the love, the
greater is our hatred right behind, as if to prevent us from getting too
blinded by the passion. The greatest lovers are the greatest adversaries. This
may explain why people who are deeply in love have the most tumultuous lovers'
spats and when they divorce they behave like Kathleen Turner and Michael
Douglas in the movie War of the Roses - they rather kill each
other than give up their attachment now tethered with pure hatred.
I seem to be spending
way too much time describing the struggle between love and hate towards fellow
beings than on how it is shaping the pandemic, yet it may not be out of place
to examine further the vicissitudes of hatred as it compromises love. Many of
us cannot even talk with loved ones without an unpleasant tone of voice or
without subliminal contempt, teasing, and bullying. Many families cannot
converse but through screaming at each other. While in most of us there is time
to love and time to hate, in some of us the love and the hate cancel each other
out, making us emotionless (alexithymic). Many marriages after a while become
asexual. All the hurt feelings from years of negative exchanges leave so much
unexpressed hate that it can only be contained by withholding sexual love from
the partner. Finally, every sling and arrow that life throws our way provokes
an immediate impulse to wantonly destroy - the primal aggression - without
taking into account whether that means a frustration of sexual satisfaction or
of the satisfaction of self-preservative needs in the future.
Now that we have taken a
survey of the extensive and complex origins of human hatred and have developed
an appreciation of how strong it can be, it should not feel too strange when I
make the claim that the embracing of the Coronavirus shutdown is as much driven
by medical prudence as by finding in it a great opportunity to release the
bottled up collective aggression of mankind.
The human species
currently is at the high watermark of malcontent and resentment because
of the changes in the cultural standards of the last century that demand
far greater renunciation of aggression than humans are capable of. All through
history whenever we felt that the aggression seething within the group that we
belonged to needed some letup we started a tribal squabble with some other
group, which, as we became larger units of religions, ethnicities, nations,
etc., evolved into wars with similar neighboring units. When travel to distant
lands became a reality, colonization and the treatment of the subjugated
people as second class citizens turned into a good way to rid the surplus
hatred. With the horrifying carnage of the two world wars and the advent of
weapons of mass destruction, wars as a way to get hatred out of our systems
have become impractical. An equally grave injury to our time-honored ways
to release aggression from our systems has been the new cultural demand that
prohibits picking on each other on the basis of sex, race, color, religion, and
national origin. With all these modes of discharging aggression blocked, there
has been a paralyzing effect upon our capacity to love as well. Love and hate
are like two entwined snakes that keep a check on each other's movement. Only
when one of the two finds a discharge through some change in external
circumstance or internal neurochemical balance does the other one finds an
outlet too. This phenomenon is best seen in many marriages where the couple can
make love only after a good fight. It may be worth mentioning in passing that
by making all forms of aggression between married couples domestic
violence, modern culture is destroying the institution of marriage. Marriage
is not only about having guaranteed sex but also a guaranteed whipping
boy.
This principle that love
and hate hold each other back until one gets a sudden unexpected discharge
explains why the Roaring Twenties could only occur after the massive
bloodshed of the First World War, and the sexual revolution of the Sixties was
an attempt on part of the baby boomers to put scabs on the wounds of the Second
World War, aided of course by the wish to reverse the trauma of
witnessing through television (as if one were right there) the daily
killings in Vietnam.
It may not be too
farfetched to claim on the basis of how love and hate are interlocked, and the
release of one brings the release of the other, that the Iraq and Afghanistan
wars gave birth to the Arab Spring; that the 9/11created Homeland Security
and its byzantine procedures (which incidentally have less to do with the
catching of terrorists than with the expanding the power of the
government, creating a department that does nothing but pseudo-work, and above
all forging a new means to humiliate people). However, this circumscribed
and subtle bullying never crossed the critical threshold that leads to
provoking a massive counter hostility, and to the subsequent outpouring of love
to balance it.
The world had to wait
for the Coronavirus to provide that vent for the hatred that had been
accumulating for decades with no Vietnam War, no Desert Storm, and no Cambodian
Killing Fields happening. In its basic style, it is an extension of the sadism
that Homeland Security practices at the airports. Even the recorded messages
that one hears every few minutes at Kroger and Home Depot and other superstores
as to how we must wear the mask, wash our hands, cough and sneeze into our
elbows, stay safe, stay healthy, stay six feet away, have the same patronizing
tone and the attitude that you all are idiots and this message must be drummed
into you every five minutes, 24/7, that
is blared at the airports. The uselessness and redundancy of checking people's
temperature - in a hospital ER where a patient of mine works, he tells me,
every time he goes in and out of the building, which he does a dozen times a
day for he is security police, his temperature is checked anew - is modeled
after the same subtle abuse practiced via airports security rituals.
When we don the mask, glower at those who don't, get disturbed when others
forget and cross that hallowed 6-feet line, refuse to shake hands, tell friends
no we cannot accept their invitation and sorry we do not want them to drop
by, pay more attention to rubbing the sanitizer on our palms than what
someone is saying, they are all microaggressive messages as to how I rather not
be dealing with you. Of course, we don't go so far as to tell the other
to get out of my face, don't touch my belongings, don't touch my
food, don't gross me with your bad breath, nevertheless what we are
telling others to do in the name of preventing the ravages of the pandemic,
comes quite close to it. The cruelty practiced through frightening each other
as to what the virus will do through permanently affecting one's smell, taste,
brains, lungs, cognition etc., with the aim of limiting each other's mobility -
one mother jealous of her 21- year-old daughter's blooming sexuality and
budding independence banned her from seeing her boyfriend but once a week
instead of three times which was the norm - is less based upon the lethality of
the COVID virus than the degree of jealousy we harbor within us. A patient of
mine who is in his early seventies, but still vigorous and lively, complained
that since the virus he has been virtually imprisoned by his family. They won't
let him leave afraid the minute he steps out he will catch the virus and before
you know he will be dead. He lives alone. He has not interacted
with anybody in months. The family. afraid that they will cause his death if
they enter his house, talk with him via cellphone from the driveway. He calls them
weirdos and their concerns a pretension. "I was their inconvenient
father, who had to be visited as a necessary evil, thanks to COVID now they are
free of that obligation. How little they want to visit me is an
indication of not how much they want to protect me from the virus but how much
they want me dead so they can be free to live their lives without any fear of
my disapproval."
Even in normal times
besides the affection and camaraderie that we feel in the company of others,
there is always a counter impulse to tell them to get lost. Granted this
impulse rarely breaks into consciousness while the person is there, emerging
only in muted hostile thoughts after he leaves or less directly by
feeling slightly irritable, or through the impulse to indulge in displaced
motor actions like lighting up a cigarette, obsessive straightening of objects
or pacing. But it is an impulse that is ubiquitously present no matter how fond
we are of the person in general. Now, with the pandemic, we can discharge
this antithetical impulse in-your-face instead of behind your back; and
what is most wonderful, indulge in this antisocial impulse without a trace of
guilt. In fact, we can feel good and moral in doing so. And this is
accomplished through exclusively focusing upon the idea that it is being done
for the other person's and community's sake. The other person has no recourse
but to accept it as such, too, and ignore the underlying malice because of all
the loud proclamations being made "stay safe, stay healthy, drive carefully,
etc."
The people who have
found the greatest bonanza from this pandemic are the OCD folks, and we are all
OCD to varying degrees. The obsessional neurotics are troubled by their
aggressive impulses. The source of this aggression is the resentment that
builds inside us from years of our will getting thwarted at the crossroads of
life, giving rise to wishes and designs for others' death. It is the
obsessive-compulsive part of our nature that keeps us glued to the TV,
fascinated as to how many got sick and how many died, locally, nationally,
internationally. And when not tethered to the TV we are checking these morbid
statistics on our smartphones, keeping up on the latest like the sports fans do
with their favorite players' scores. A patient of mine who rushed
from one TV channel to another all day long to know anything and everything on
the subject of COVID ostensibly to keep herself, her children, and the world
protected, confessed that behind it must be the desire for their destruction
because while doing so she had to keep clutching her hair strands, sometimes
pulling them out in clumps, to prevent her dear ones coming down with the
virus. As she showed me the bald spots on her scalp she said: "while I can
relay the stats on COVID probably better than Anthony Fauci, and keeping a
continuous tab on the numbers keeps me calm as if I have got the virus by its
tail, I cannot turn a blind eye to the fact that deep down there is a
satisfaction from savoring those numbers of millions dying while I am triumphantly
alive."
Now the
obsessive-compulsive not only enjoy others' suffering and death they take
responsibility for it too. It arises from the guilt generated from their death
wishes coming true. As the guilt accumulates they start quivering with fear
whenever disaster happens no matter how remote from themselves. Even if they
live in America while deaths are occurring in Brazil overestimating the power
of their thoughts to affect others, they take the blame for the telekilling.
OCD people, therefore, are big into expiation of the troubles they believe they
are authors of. Like Lady Macbeth, they wash the blood of others from their
hands. But their handwashing is not just repentance and penance for the past
misdeeds but also to prevent it from happening in the future, especially from
germs they will introduce and contaminate others with. Excessive washing of
hands soon spills into stopping shaking the hands of others, the checking and
rechecking of stoves and doorknobs, and in extreme cases, the touch phobia gets
so strong that, like Howard Hughes, the world's most famous agoraphobic, they
lock themselves in some hole and refuse to have any contact with the
outside world.
These OCD behaviors thus
far have mostly been objects of ridicule. The endless rituals and obsession
with numbers, counted in some symmetry, to prevent death, was looked upon as
silliness. But with the pandemic things have changed. The OCD folks are now
gloating with superiority. Their fear of germs, after all, was not
neurotic but scientifically justified. They can look contemptuously upon
those who only recently have come into the fold as Johnny-come-latelies and
take satisfaction in seeing everybody else also suffer the same
restrictions that they have for years without reward. They have also begun
to invoke the psychobiological reasoning - it gave evolutionary
advantage the catch-all and practically useless answer for every human
puzzle: - as something our ancestors did more than the competition and
therefore we became humans.
This contention,
however, is a bunch of nonsense. Neurosis does not bestow any evolutionary
advantage. On the contrary, it hampers our chances to reproduce.
Obsessive-compulsives not only fear causing death by touching, but touching
also has another meaning to them, and one that is no less momentous in
derailing their life goals and having children. In their unconscious, all
touching starts signifying sexual touching. The process is
interesting and deserves elaboration. Because of their extremely competitive
nature, sexuality of those suffering from OCD, regresses from genital,
where it has to best others, to the anal-sadistic level, which being
auto-erotic takes away the tension of competition, seeking discharge through
coprophilic drives. The ambivalence towards seeking satisfaction through
pregenital sources results in the compulsion to avoid touching anything
that can be associated with feces and the anal zone. Soon the person spends
lesser and lesser time in wooing and mating in favor of washing hands, cleanliness,
and avoiding all forms of contact. The more civilized and obsessively clean a
culture becomes, the more repugnant its members find the sexual act, and even
having and bringing up children because of the latter's messy ways. So there is
no evolutionary advantage for the individual or the culture to embrace OCD
ways.
The running away from
the emerging sadomasochistic sexual drives in the OCD has another
interesting consequence. First, sex becomes off-limits and then other forms of
pleasure meet the same fate. And since misery loves company, what becomes
forbidden to them they want it to be denied to others, too. OCD folks at heart
are killjoys and are having a field day in this pandemic. It does not matter if
they lose out too with there being no activity, no enthusiasm, no triumph, no
romance in the world as long all this is happening to others as well. The
closing down of courts, reducing store hours, subjecting people to endless
rituals before giving service, sometimes denying services altogether, postponing
elective medical procedures, are all less dictated by safety concerns than
finding in the pandemic a justification to frustrate and delay others' needs.
Not unlike how the financial industry in the name of protecting your privacy
gives you a third-degree before doing the thing that you asked in the first
place. We can now be as much of a pain in the ass to others as we like as
long as we can show it is at least partly arising out of concern for their own
good.
How strictly one is
following the restrictions imposed or suggested by the authorities, and how
scared to death is one of catching the virus - some don't open their
home-delivered Amazon packages for two weeks and only after sanitizing the box
with gloved hands - is a good indicator of the strength of one's obsessionality
and unconscious hatred of the world. How enraged we feel at others who do not
go by the book is another good indicator of one's obsessionality. Some of my
OCD patients have not seen their parents even once in the last five months, so
afraid they are of causing their death through giving them the infection even
when they have hardly left their own house but for minimal periods, taking
every precaution to avoid getting infected, and there is no possibility of
their passing the COVID to their parents. It is this type of obsessive
characters who are having the greatest difficulties in handling the
pandemic. They are the ones who are getting morbidly gloomy, and dreaming of
weird and scary dreams in the wake of the Coronavirus that the psychologists
and psychiatrists are making so much fuss about.
These pandemic dreams
deserve some analysis. OCD people are constantly murdering others, or at least
doing away with their existence, for the littlest of transgressions, not unlike
how the Queen of Hearts does in Alice in Wonderland. She orders people's heads
to be chopped off for the slightest offense. At daytime, these murderous wishes
can only emerge as trying to be one-up on whoever crosses one's path, but in
sleep and dreams, they can display their full intensity and glory. It is
not uncommon to dream of suddenly being in a world where there are no humans
left. A doomsday scenario where some nuclear catastrophe or alien invasion has
wiped everybody out or the zombies have taken over the world and are
annihilating all humans by turning them into zombies as well. The zombies are
nothing but a projection of the murderous aspect of us. Zombies are us without
our conscience (superego), our moral part, restraining us. The pandemic has
made it possible for this fantasy to emerge out of our dreams and into the real
world. One looks with secret satisfaction at the parking lots of malls which
until yesterday were overflowing with cars and people, now ghost towns. The
Obsessive-Compulsive's dream of doing away with all competition and getting
one's hatred avenged is now being fulfilled in the real world. It is not
surprising that while we lament at these empty streets, beaches, movie
theaters, strip malls, we also find a subtle evil pleasure in the emptiness, in
the fall of these mighty entities, in contrast to which we were nothing at all
until yesterday. When we declare it is all so surrealistic, it
is a euphemistic declaration of the feeling of depersonalization that emerges
to cover up showing the joy at the mighty world's big fall, which would be so
wrong to consciously feel with full emotional intensity.
Coronavirus as a
great equalizer deserves a couple of comments. With social distancing mandatory
to all, everyone can be on the giving end. The pauper can tell the king to not
invade his space and the Shudra (the untouchable) can tell the
Brahmin (the pure one) whose touch phobia, like that of the Jews, is so
great, or at least it used to be, that even if the shadow of some low life
(lower castes) who indulge in carnal pleasures with little restraint, fell upon
him, he has to practice penance and social isolation for a prescribed period of
time, to keep his germ-laden butt six feet away. At heart, we never give up the
illusion that we are the ultimate human being who should be the model for
everybody else to emulate. At the core of our being, we are superior to
everybody else. Since the coronavirus does not discriminate between the rich
and the poor, we can practice untouchability, like the holy Brahmin.
Coronavirus has greatly disturbed the balance of discrimination between the
privileged and the run-of-the-mill.
And this may be the main
factor behind the Black-Lives-Matter protest that arose as one of the reactions
to the Coronavirus. It is a grand attack on the part of the have-nots to
bring down the well-to-do of the world who have become way too wealthy with the
advent of computers and the Internet which allows money to move much faster
than it use to and money always flows in the direction of the rich from the
poor. Coronavirus lockdown served as a great way for mankind to get rid of its
surplus hatred. However, it was quite one-sided in that most of the hatred was
being discharged through the agency of the government disproportionately upon the
lower echelons of society. While everybody was restrained from doing anything
much it was financially impacting the poor more than the rich. The BLM protests
and Cancel Culture movement ostensibly an outrage at the callous way in which
blacks are treated in reality is an outrage at the way young and poor people,
black and white, are treated. The young whites see in blacks the
disenfranchisement present in their own lives. Society has become way too
intolerant and is penalizing normal human foibles extremely harshly. For the
smallest transgressions, the punishment that the establishment now wants to
mete out is unfair. A DUI at the age of 17 or 18 can cost thousands of dollars
and an inability to obtain a license for ten or more years and a handicap for life
in career choices and advancement. A minor fight between husband and wife is
sufficient grounds on the part of Child Protective Services to take away one's
children and all in order for CPS people to keep their business going. The
power of the government, the rich and old of the society at the expense of the
poor and the young has been expanding quite rapidly in the last few
decades. The young and the restless, living under the lockdown, their
personal, economic, and sexual freedom restrained, unable to contain the rising
counter hatred, found in the death of George Floyd an ideal opportunity to turn
around that hostility from the poor to the rich.
