Emotional incontinence

Lucy Beresford examines the national psyche of 2005, and hopes for a more balanced and self-confident New Year This year will be remembered as the one in which the psychopathology of Britain slipped down the toilet. Just last month the imagination of the nation’s television viewers was captured — some would say hijacked — first by the comedy show Little Britain, with a series of sketches about a geriatric woman who is oblivious of her own urinary incontinence, and, secondly, by the sight (courtesy of infrared cameras) of Carol Thatcher taking a night-time pee beside her camp bed on I’m a Celebrity — Get Me Out of Here! And there’s no point in telling yourself that I’m the sad one for watching these programmes, or that they are fringe entertainment. Nearly ten million people tuned in to see Thatcher junior — the eventual winner of the shockingly compelling jungle ‘reality’ contest — whip down her Firm Control Low Leg panties and flout camp hygiene rules.

The significance of examining such preoccupations is that it enables us to build up a picture of the national archetype particular to the time. Thanks largely to a way of looking at the world first calibrated by Freud — the 150th anniversary of whose birth will be celebrated this coming year — we can analyse the national psyche through catchphrases, hero-choices, medical syndromes and reactions to events both serious and trivial. Sadly for 2005, the findings are deeply unattractive. In addition to an obsession with things scatological, we observe inner impoverishment, florid paranoia, and indiscriminate worship at the altar of celebrity.

Britain’s confused relationship with celebrity is an addiction compensating for an inner emptiness. A hundred years ago, this may have been filled by our interest in the goingson of our own extended families. True, the cult of celebrity has been around for centuries: pilgrimages to shrines in the Middle Ages worked on the same basis of part manufactured myth, part personal benefit. Yet the national personality has become increasingly narcissistic. Narcissists see themselves as superior, and often identify with the ‘elevated’ lives of the rich and famous. It’s a form of displacement whereby people live their lives through the antics of other people.

The danger with this form of attachment is that modern celebrity is so disposable. Fame has become so short-lived, and so accessible. In the past, celebrities were remote and accomplished. They conquered Everest or won the World Cup. Today fame comes from eating kangaroo testicles. Forty years ago Warhol predicted 15 minutes of fame for us all. Today reality TV shows rely on the general public for their material. Lo and behold, instant fame for zero effort. No wonder so many celebrities feel compelled to up the ante, relentlessly offering titbits (marriages, children, divorces, rehab) to the fickle audience that aspires to ape them.

Unsurprisingly, our psychological attachments to such short-lived objects are inadequate. You fancy Brad Pitt? That’s so yesterday! Pity the poor dying footballer whose final weeks of medical decline are broadcast hourly in lurid detail. My sense is that some of you, on reading that last sentence, will be thinking, ‘Oh yeah. Him.’ He’d slipped your mind already, and he died only five weeks ago.

And if all you know about the world is the air-brushed artifice neatly packaged for the media, your own life can feel mundane in comparison. A deep personal dissatisfaction can ensue. This, alongside the price paid for inadequate attachments, can lead to a very shaky sense of identity.

Personal identity is crucial. It’s what contributes to meaning in life. Consulting rooms are full of adults who have felt compelled to ‘experiment’ in an attempt to work out who they are — by having affairs, drinking to excess or taking cocaine. At one end of the spectrum is someone who merely asks for a Sienna Miller haircut. At the other end is someone who sleeps around because ‘it’s what that bloke Jude does’.

This inner rootlessness leads to insecurity. In 2005, insecurity led to paranoia. The words ‘flu pandemic’ or ‘pensions crisis’ pepper current conversation. A few months ago I wrote about the stress inherent in working in the City, where money (and what it can buy) has replaced identity and conditions behaviour. Dr Richard Penrose, consultant psychiatrist at the Priory Hospital, Roehampton, identifies ‘the Sword of Damocles hanging over every individual’: will it be a hefty bonus this year, or a P45? After that article appeared I was contacted by people from a variety of professions, all overstressed and weary from a similar lack of contentment.

In an attempt to create meaning, labels are appropriated much as people wear namebadges at conventions. Fussy eaters are ‘gluten-intolerant’ or even ‘anorexic’. Children can no longer be naughty; instead they have Attention Deficit Disorder. And when those with weak egos live vicariously through the famous, there is alarm when stars placed on pedestals, such as Kate Moss, fall from grace. We have invested so much emotional energy in their existence that a collapse appears to diminish us too.

Death has also exacerbated national anxiety. Death issues are a ubiquitous element of the human condition. The terrorism of July 2005 and the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes brought this home with terrifying clarity, provoking a resurgence of survival instincts and prejudices. Personal security trumped political correctness.

Six months on, the collective psyche still bears the scars. Paranoia latches on to every anxiety trigger. Bird flu? MRSA? Terrorism? It’s as if no one expects to die of old age any more. Death has replaced sex as the national taboo. As a Jungian psychologist said to me, ‘In order to triumph over the terror of death, it’s as though anyone who dies publicly Pope, footballer, schoolboy or policewoman — must be canonised. The level of reaction is careering out of balance.’ Because the national psyche is bruised, people crave safety and approbation. But as the Jungian went on to explain, people have lost touch with obtaining their riches ‘from within’. What they struggle to provide for themselves they project on to external ‘objects’, such as the state. People want politicians to display the empathy gene because they have lost touch with how to nourish themselves emotionally. But politicians nowadays only have time to react, not reflect.

The personality of 2006 will evolve with the events of the year. But, psychologically, each year does not have to be like the last one. If this season’s bestseller is a book entitled Is It Just Me Or Is Everything Shit? — just outselling a spoof volume called Shite’s Unoriginal Miscellany — the time seems right for a national emotional shift of Cameronian proportions.

My guess is that many books unwrapped this Christmas will have been biographies, often describing a triumph over adversity and often, to reinforce the thesis above, ‘written’ by a celebrity. These tales appeal to the reading public because, unlike life, they contain a coherent narrative. They fulfil a human need for a universality of experience, and provide a context in which readers can understand their own lives.

Which brings me back, rather surprisingly, to Little Britain. You might be appalled at the lewd picture it paints of Britain today and at its pushing of comedic boundaries. But the way friends and strangers use it as something to talk about, on the bus or round the office watercooler, is also an emblem of how human beings long to connect with each other.

In 2006, it’s time to stop living life at one remove. Put down your iPod, stop texting, stop modelling yourself on some D-list celebrity you’ve only just heard of, and start living in the real world.

Lucy Beresford is a practising psychotherapist.