Freud, the Pandemic, and Our Emotional Well-Being

 One hundred and one years ago this weekend, on January 25^th 1920,  Martha and Sigmund, a bourgeois Viennese couple, received some devastating news. The phone call came at noon. Their pregnant daughter Sophie, mother of two young boys, a six-year old and a thirteen month old toddler, had died: Spanish flu (so-called) with pneumonia complications. She was the second youngest of the family’s six children, and her father’s favourite daughter.

The flu pandemic had swept through Europe in 1918 and 1919 - brought to Europe, ironically, by American troops who’d come over to fight, when America entered the fray, late in the war. The flu ended up killing more Europeans than the war itself. And 27 year-old Sophie Halberstadt, as she then was, would probably be just another statistic if it wasn’t for the fact that her father was then, and has remained, a rather significant figure in the history of ideas:  for Sigmund is of course - Sigmund Freud.

Because of Freud’s renown, all the correspondence to and from Freud, and between other family members, has been preserved and from it we can gain an intimate picture of the sadness, the grief, in one family, a century ago – but it could be yesterday, and will, for some, sadly, be tomorrow.

This Shabbat in the UK Jewish community was designated as ‘Mental Health Awareness Shabbat’. Freud spent a lifetime thinking about how the human mind works, and he was passionately – we might even say obsessionally - devoted to what wasn’t then called ‘mental health’.  One way or another we are all the inheritors, willingly or not, of the mapping of the human psyche that he pioneered. Many aspects of what later became a multi-faceted, psychotherapeutic and self-awareness and  psychological industry - much of which would be unrecognisable to Freud, and the self-indulgence of which he might well hate – nevertheless have their roots in that long-left-behind central European milieu.  

Having heard the painful news, the first person Freud wrote to was his mother. And he came straight to the point: 

Dear Mother, I have some sad news for you today. Yesterday morning our dear lovely Sophie died from galloping influenza and pneumonia… She is the first of our children we have to outlive. What Max [Sophie’s husband] will do, what will happen to the children, we of course don’t know as yet…I hope you will take it calmly; tragedy after all has to be accepted. But to mourn this splendid, vital girl who was so happy with her husband and children is of course permissible.

I greet you fondly. Your Sigmund.

There is a lot one could say about this letter: its tender yet austere tone, both compassionate and dispassionate, both empathetic and fatalistic: ‘tragedy after all has to be accepted’. And its concluding sentiment - that although the reality of the loss has to be accepted,  to mourn this splendid, vital girl …is of course permissible - what of that?

That word ‘permissible’ might sound strange to our ears now, a century later, maybe even slightly chilling. What do you mean it’s ‘permissible’ to mourn!? Who could ever doubt that? Who needs to be given ‘permission’ to mourn? And yet what Freud intimates here is worth reflecting on, because what he’d discovered after 25 years of working with patients with all kinds of mental and emotional distress, was the vital importance of mourning, of being given permission – and giving oneself permission – to grieve fully and deeply and truly, to feel and express the pain of loss. 

One has to remember that 19^th century emotional repression – active suppression of tears, the ethos of the ‘stiff upper lip’ - was not only a Victorian, British phenomenon, but a bourgeois belief throughout Europe. Particularly for men, but not only for men. Freud was one of the first to systematically explore the detrimental consequences of keeping a whole range of innate human feelings at bay, out of sight, suppressed: feelings that might be judged by oneself, or one’s society, or one’s religion,  or one’s parents, to be wrong; or to make you into a ‘bad’ person.

In that little word ‘permissible’ Freud is signalling to his mother something that he made the cornerstone of his revolution: it was permissible, indeed vital, to accept one’s deepest human feelings. Because every day of his professional life he was working with people who were blocked from doing that and were suffering from everything from depression to hysteria, neurotic anxiety to medically-undiagnosable bodily symptoms, psychosis to melancholia. And  a thousand other ‘mental health’ issues in between. Freud gave permission, gave space, for people to own up to, to own, their own feeling life. If this all seems simple and obvious now, it was a revolution then. But the journey that we have travelled in the last one hundred years so that this insight does now seem obvious is testimony to Freud’s contribution to our everyday lives.

The day after he wrote to his mother, on January 27th 1920, Freud wrote to a close friend, the Swiss pastor, Oscar Pfister, that our sweet Sophie in Hamburg had been… snatched away in the midst of glowing health, from a full and active life…all in four or five days, as though she had never existed. Although we had been worried about her for a couple of days, we had nevertheless been hopeful; it is so difficult to judge from a distance. And this distance must remain distance, we were not able to travel at once, as we had intended…there was no train, not even for an emergency. [This was post-War central Europe where transport links were still infrequent]. The undisguised brutality of our time is weighing heavily upon us. Tomorrow she is being cremated, our poor Sunday child!

So Sigmund and Martha aren’t able to be at the funeral of their daughter. We recognize distant echoes in our own times of how circumstances have forced us to lose out on so much - whether it is funerals and shivas, or hospital visits, or care home visits – there are so many losses we are suffering. I know that many people are feeling their own version of Freud’s sentiment: “The undisguised brutality of our time is weighing heavily upon us.”

A final few words from Freud before I switch from January 1920 to January 2021. From a letter a few days later to a Hungarian colleague, Sandor Ferenczi :

Dear Friend, Please don’t worry about me. Apart from feeling rather more tired I am the same. The death, painful as it is, does not affect my attitude toward life. For years I was prepared for the loss of our sons [During the War, Freud’s sons were away fighting and one of them, Martin, went missing in 1918 - it was a month until the family heard he’d been taken as a prisoner-of-war and he wasn’t released until mid-1919]; now it is our daughter; as a confirmed atheist I have no one to accuse and realize that there is no place where I could lodge a complaint….Deep down I sense a bitter, irreparable narcissistic injury.”

Actually I think Freud was in denial when he wrote that this loss hadn’t affected his attitude to life. You can’t suffer an “irreparable injury” and think it won’t impact your “attitude toward life”. The devastating loss of Sophie was in fact only compounded when Sophie’s younger boy, the toddler Heinele, whom Freud doted on, himself died - of tuberculosis - three years later. Freud mourned for them both for the rest of his life.

So where does all this history  leave us?

It’s clear that in these lockdown and pandemic times – and we are fast approaching a year now since our world was turned upside down – the question of how we are managing our day to day life is a major preoccupation. The newspapers, radio, TV and social media are full of advice on how to manage our emotional well-being: tips for survival, guides to lockdown living, how best to look after our mental health.  

And yet, when it comes down to it, and you dig into how each of us is bearing up, you don’t have to dig very far to touch into just how distressing we are finding this, how disturbed we are feeling, how frightened we might be, how insecure and uncertain we are about the future – and that is regardless of whether we have had the vaccine injection or not. We might not have emerged from a World War – but nobody I know is manging well, sailing through this, however brave a face we are putting on it.

Our mental health, our emotional well-being is being challenged, perhaps as never before in our lifetimes. And that is separate from those of us who might have actually lost someone to Covid over this last year. When somebody dies, however painful that is, we can mourn the loss. The loss is real, the grief is real, yet we sort of know what we are dealing with. But with the pandemic, what we are struggling with is a different kind of loss - and because we have never gone through this kind of loss before we don’t know what we are dealing with.

We just know that there are a variety of symptoms: be it an edginess, an unsettledness, an irritability, maybe sleeplessness, feelings of hopelessness or despair,  a low level anxiety, maybe we find we are being forgetful or tearful or finding it difficult to concentrate.

If there is one thing I would highlight here, it is something we may never have realised was so vital for our mental health, our emotional well-being: the real tactile contact we are used to having with other people. Live connection, sharing physical space with others, touching other people, being touched by other people, bodies in space together. How much we are missing this: the living, embodied  presence of other people, people we know and love, or people we see only once in a while, but also strangers, people in the street and in shops and on the tube and at football. Real people whom we mix with and interact with and keep us ‘in touch’ – what a powerful phrase this turns out to be! - keep us in touch with our own being alive, in our bodies, in our selves.

Zoom and the phone does not touch some deeper human need for embodied, kinaesthetic presence, a need we have never been deprived of before, and so never realised – and we are only just realising now – helps us feel alive. Breathing, sweating, smiling, grimacing, glowing humanity. We go out and interact and other people mirror our aliveness. And a lot of was happening at a subconscious level. And we have largely lost it.

Our sense of being fully alive – heart, mind, body, soul – becomes atrophied, slowly, if we have no physical connection with others. Why is solitary confinement the ultimate punishment in prison? In certain regimes it’s used to drive prisoners into despair or madness.

So we need to acknowledge that if we are abiding with the guidelines we are experiencing a collective bereavement. And maybe at some fundamental level that is why, psychologically, people might not be complying – it’s not just being anti-social, or bloody-minded, or perverse, or dressed up as libertarian ideology - it’s because unconsciously we all know that connecting to others makes us feel more alive. And aren’t we all determined, in our own ways, to try and feel and stay alive?

As Freud’s family tragedy illustrates in a small way, we are of course not the first to experience traumatic loss: the disorientation, dislocation, bereavement, anxieties about separation and loss that have to be endured month after month, sometimes year after year. It is part of the human condition.

In our situations there is much that we can do to help ourselves – as I mentioned, everywhere you look there are suggestions about how to survive lockdown. I imagine some of the things you do will help, some won’t. Sometimes you will just feel low, sad, morose, upset, disconnected from others, disconnected from your deeper more alive self. But for our own mental health it can be important, I would say vital, just to be able to accept those feelings. This is easier said than done. But - using Freud’s word - it’s ‘permissible’ to feel low: that’s congruent with what we are having to live through. Those feelings won’t last forever, they don’t last forever, even though when we are in them we sometimes feel as it they will.

We have resilience fused to our souls. In these weeks in our annual cycle of readings from the Torah we have arrived at that archetypal event, the liberation of the Israelite slaves from Egypt. It’s a universal story, and one for every era:  we will see this pandemic through, we will be coming out of Egypt. We may not have a Moses - but we will be coming out of Egypt, in God’s good time.

[based on a sermon given on Zoom for Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, January 23^rd 2021]

2021: "Stop The Pain"

 The  bright yellow graffiti spray-painted on the bridge was new. The local Council regularly paint over whatever gaudy images and casual obscenities habitually adorn the stonework. But someone had marked the New Year with an eye-catching face in profile (that also looked curiously like a £ sign). Yet what caught my attention – demanded attention – were the words arched up and round the image: “Stop the pain”

So this is how 2021 begins. Some much pain, for so many people, for so many reasons. And none of it likely to stop, any time soon. Least of all the deleterious consequences of enduring life under the inequalities of capitalism as we know it – my fantasy about the pound sign.  

As we begin a new year I have been wondering if it feels like a new beginning, or just more of the same? Do we begin the year with hopefulness, or burdened by anxieties? Or both? The news about the Oxford/AstraZenica vaccine has lifted our spirits in the UK, for sure, while at the same time the infection continues to spread and – at least in London – threatens to overwhelm the capacity of hospitals to function. Daily life as this new year begins is still fraught and constrained. We are living with so much uncertainty.

One of the challenges I find myself facing is whether to focus my thinking on the larger picture, or the small scale? The larger picture is our collective setting, our national picture, and that of course contains the brilliant scientific creativity and the exhausted-but-persevering health professionals and the dedicated care home staff and much put-upon teachers; and the neighbourhood support schemes and people contributing to food banks…and these are things we can celebrate and be grateful for, maybe sometimes contribute to on a local level.

But of course the larger picture includes too what has been revealed about the disastrous inadequacies in our social fabric in the UK – not just the systemic failures directly relating to Covid (the lack of government preparation for an epidemic, the cronyism afflicting the purchase and provision of PPE equipment, the bungling of the track and trace programme, the flipflopping over closing down and opening up  of shops, schools, gatherings in public and private) – but what’s been revealed too about the underlying societal fractures that have made this pandemic so much harder for so many: the endemic poverty in the country, the job insecurity, the food and housing scarcities, the cuts to benefits, the underlying fragility in people’s mental health and physical health and social wellbeing that all predate Covid. The skeleton beneath the nation’s skin has become frighteningly visible over these last nine months. And we probably sense that none of that bleakness – that “pain” - will disappear in 2021. 

Or do I focus on what I called the ‘small scale’ – which isn’t small scale to each individual. I think about the individuals in the synagogue community in which I work, each an irreplaceable soul, each one of us with our own rich inner worlds, our own private lives and memories and sensibilities, our own idiosyncrasies and insecurities and worries, our own secrets, our own language of feeling, our own history, all that we have shared with others and all that we have never shared with anyone…I think about the innate mystery of our own fragile, precious, being-alive-in-the-world – and how can that be ‘small scale’?  

But when I am called upon to speak, I still wonder: do I speak about the world outside – or about the individual, each of us an entire world in her/himself? Nothing is closer to us than our own personal inner world, in all its multidimensionality. How do I speak to this, the closeness of our worlds (you and me) - but also the distance, the untraversable space, between your world and mine?  How do I ever reach out of my world and speak to you in your world? It’s impossible, and yet I still attempt it, every time I write like this, (or speak on Zoom) - these curiously intimate and yet distanced contexts.

Large scale or small scale? We share the large scale – we all are witnessing and participating in this ongoing disaster of the pandemic. And whether we have had the vaccine yet, or are waiting anxiously for it, I imagine that many of us might be recognising the extent of the disaster unfolding with Covid in the UK, and what it is laying bare about our society. (For friends in other countries, I know there will be variations on this). It is revealing who we are and what we value – it’s showing us our generosity and our selfishness, our concern for others and our inward-looking-ness,  our solidarity with strangers and our head-in-the-sands-ness; it’s showing us what we are willing to protect and what we are unwilling to protect, what we can sacrifice of what we have grown used to and what we refuse to give up. All of this is being revealed, day by day. And maybe this is where the large scale meets the small scale.

We might feel shame at what is going on in our land, or outrage, or fear; we might feel inspired to protest, we might be clear and articulate about what needs to be transformed – or we might remain silent, we might just be intent on personal survival, just getting through this, ourselves and those around us we love. I am not judging, just describing.

We are all having to make these decisions – large scale and small scale. We might see the systemic vulnerabilities in our society, what’s happening around us in the streets and the hospitals, let alone what’s happening in the environment and to the air we breathe, the disasters of storms and fires and floods, we might see the large scale beyond our own city and land and continent - but still cling to the small scale, to our tender, precarious personal lives, where we shut our ears to the howling urgent cries of a planet under threat, nature tarnished, human nature despoiled, maybe we turn away from the larger world and just cling on – for dear life, as we say, ‘dear life’, yes indeed – hoping that gam ze yavo, as the rabbis of old used to say, “this too shall pass”. (Jews historically grew very accustomed to this resigned response).

As I said, I’m not judging this stance to events, I’m just trying to vocalise our choices.  This is where we are: caught between our own ‘dear lives’, and life itself in our country and on our planet. Large scale and small scale - and us, suspended between them, suspended over the abyss.

I wonder how it would be if we attempt to tell the story of these days we are living through - these weeks, these months, and it may be years – holding the large scale and the small scale in one picture, in one narrative? It may not be a sacred drama we are living through, but I wonder how we would tell the story of our times if we were modern day storytellers like the narrators of old, those inspired creators of the Torah who in the Book of Genesis (that we finished reading this week) were able to tell a story for the ages, a story that embraced large scale and small scale.

Just recall how they began their story, with the largest scale of all: the Creation of the world, the heavens and the earth and everything within it, including us – that’s how they began their sacred story, with a portrait of the natural world unfolding in all its majestic, evolutionary glory, stage by stage. That’s how Genesis begins, we know it well, with the largest scale of all.

And from there they created a story that moves through the ages, and the generations, focusing down stage by stage onto the small scale: the drama of a single family, Jacob’s family; and they focus in, with more and more detail, on the dramas of family life - the envy and the jealousy and the sibling rivalry; they  focus on those human interactions between Joseph and his brothers, and as the Book of Genesis draws to a close they focus on the worries and the fears in the brothers when their father dies; and the camera gets closer and closer and they focus in on  – how small scale can you get? – on Joseph’s tears (Genesis 50:17).

You see Joseph crying - “and Joseph wept” - though you don’t know if he’s crying because he is moved by what he hears, the brothers’ genuine wish for reconciliation; or because he is saddened, pained, that they have had to fabricate a story because they are terrified of him. (The story has no scene where Jacob tells his sons to ask Joseph for forgiveness – yet that is what they tell him nevertheless). But that’s the beauty of the Bible’s literary artistry- that we don’t know why Joseph cries, just as we don’t always know why we cry, but the tears come anyway.

And Joseph’s response – whatever those tears mean – is to say, in essence: ‘look at the larger picture, beyond our personal family drama, because there is a larger picture, a larger story, playing out through us: God meant all this to happen; all your rage and jealousy and murderousness towards me - it’s been for our collective good’ (see Gen 50:20). Well, that’s the age-old religious get-out clause right there. That we never see the whole picture. And that what we think of as something bad happening is actually part of God’s divine plan, that we can never see.

I think that kind of pious rhetoric is deeply problematic for us moderns. It’s rotten (and sometimes pernicious) theology – but it’s clearly the view of the Biblical storytellers, at least in this part of their grand narrative. (Though it might be more accurate to say that the storytellers have created a character who articulates that theology, while at the same time telling their story with their major character - God - completely absent throughout the whole of Joseph's life. 'God' is mentioned by characters but never present from chapter 37 onwards - a very dramatic change from the first 36 chapters of the book). 

But we don’t have to buy into that pious worldview to appreciate the intellectual and spiritual creativity – and daring - of those Torah storytellers of Genesis. Because what they created in this book was a grand beginning – the Creation of everything – and then they risked a narrative arc that takes us from that to...what? What are the last words of the book? That Joseph dies, is embalmed and his bones are put in a coffin. That’s the last image of the book. Joseph’s bones in a coffin (50:26). What a movement that is, from the beginning to the end, binding together the largest imaginable scale to the smallest scale! We end in the grave. The darkness of the coffin. From the darkness before creation, penetrated by God’s ‘Let there be light, and let there be life’, all the way to a narrative destination: the darkness of death, bones in a coffin. No light. No life.

What a radical piece of storytelling, a story retold through the ages, the generations: it’s our own story too, of course, a personal story – from our own creation and coming into the light of day, to our own death, the silence of the grave. 

That might be the end of the book, that desolate image - but it’s not the end of Joseph’s bones. Because they are kept safe during the long, harsh slavery years in Egypt, and then accompany the people in their desert wanderings and eventually are buried in the so-called Promised Land (Joshua 24:32).  

They are reminders that the small scale is always connected to a larger picture, whether we see it or not. Before he dies, Joseph makes his own bones into symbols of hope: ‘keep them as reminders of God’s promise, keep them as reminders of the larger story. Carry me with you. Carrying me will help you carry your larger story close to your heart’ (see Genesis50:24-5).

Let’s hope, during this new year of 2021, that - although we may not be able to “stop the pain”- at least we won’t feel like embalmed bones enclosed in darkness, that we  can keep sight of our larger story. Because there’s always a larger story. 

[Based on thoughts shared on Zoom for Finchley Reform Synagogue, January 2nd, 2021]