Table Of ContentILLUSION AND REALITY
ILLUSION AND REALITY
The Meaning of Anxiety
David Smail
KARNAC
First published in 1984 by J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd
Revised edition published in 1997 by Constable and Company Ltd
This edition published in 2015 by
Karnac Books Ltd
118 Finchley Road
London NW3 5HT
Copyright © 1984 by David Smail
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A C.I.P. for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-78220-285-1
Printed in Great Britain
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Contents
Preface to Constable edition vi
1 The Myth of Normality 1
2 The Reality of Threat 17
3 Shyness and the Self as Object 33
4 The Domination of Words 59
5 The Language of Anxiety 81
6 The Magic of the Machine 99
7 The Experts 123
8 The Possibility ofUndeception 147
9 The Confrontation of Reality 162
Index 181
Preface to Constable edition
Illusion and Reality is the first of a series of(so far) four books which attempt
to place the experience of psychological distress within the social environ
ment which gives rise to it. The other three are Taking Care, The Origins of
Unhappiness and How to Survive Without Psychotherapy. With hindsight
(and in reassuring confirmation of the psychological theory they elaborate!)
it is possible to see how each of these books is shaped by the context in which it
was written.
Being the first, Illusion and Reality examines the predicament of the
individual person from the perspective of the person him/herself (the later
works travel progressively further out into the social environment in order to
pinpoint the origins of distress). Above all else it is about the individual's
subjective view of the world and the injuries done to his or her subjectivity by
the world into which (as the existentialists would say) s!he is thrown.
Being conceived and written in the early nineteen-eighties, it is also, I now
see, about the predicament of people (i.e. all of us) who were caught up in the
disintegration of 'old' certainties (the 'post-war consensus') which were in
any case largely illusory (hence, in part, the title) and at the mercy of brutal
market forces which were about to sweep them up and toss them into a
torrent of change and insecurity. Although I would change very little in my
analysis of subjectivity, I think perhaps I do accord it a little too much inde
pendent power. What the later nineteen-eighties and the nineties have made
starkly apparent is just how vulnerable we are to social forces operating far
beyond our personal spheres of influence, and though some of the more
obvious threats seem to have changed (the nuclear threat, for example, seems
to have receded) the subjective person is if anything even more embattled
against apparently irresistible, largely economic, pressures than was the
case fifteen years ago.
But if our subjective voice is weaker, it is all the more important that we
should be able to recognize its cry, and the kinds of pointers to the signifi
cance of subjective experience and its expression, the clinical examples of
which I made use, are I think as relevant now as they were then.
Anxiety is a sign, an indication of a sometimes terrifying disillusionment
in which safe myths about the conditions of our existence become peeled
away to reveal an altogether less reassuring form of knowledge about the
world. The point of this book, though its outlook may at times seem rather
bleak, is, however, precisely one of reassurance: that the unnerving knowl
edge we may possess of a hard and painful reality represents in fact a true
insight into the way things are and not a form of craziness.
If anything, illusory ideals of living envelop our subjectivity even more
oppressively than they did at the time this book was written. The triumphant
progress of 'marketing' - the colossal investment of intelligence, ingenuity
and technical sophistication which perfects the arts by which we are seduced
into consumerist culture-has put significant sections of a whole generation
out of touch with the social and biological bases of reality. I have accordingly
been struck in very recent times by the number of young people I encounter
(people for whom the late seventies to the mid-nineties constituted the
formative years of their lives) who have not just, so to speak, fallen for the
Preface vii
advertising, but have invested their lives, energies, ambitions-have indeed
put their faith - in a glossy, fashionable world of apparent social ease and
affluence which they have helped to create and come to inhabit, but in which
they are at the same time assailed by a profound insecurity about who they
are and how they figure in relation to others.
These are not people who function poorly or, as the psychiatrists like to say,
'inadequately', in the modern world-indeed they are often socially, educa
tionally and vocationally very successful-but they suffer from what is to me
a new form of anxiety (new, anyway, in its pervasiveness). Deeply troubling
though not disabling, the discomfort and unhappiness of their actual experi
ence of themselves contrasts strangely with the apparently ideal existence
they have managed to achieve. Fulfilled ambition and a kind of biological
unease exist side-by-side; realized ideals bring no gratification but only a
sense of being cut loose from embodied reality-far from being buoyed up by
success the body may even seem to collapse under an invisible strain, giving
rise, for example, to pains in the back or the bowels.
These are, so it seems, young people who have received too little instruc
tion in what it is to be human, how to recognize and take account of what their
own bodies tell them about their relations with the world. As a result, they
are not able to interpret the promptings of their own subjectivity. For them,
'reality' has become the production of a 'postmodern' apparatus of media
generated images with which no embodied relatedness is possible. But the
body, even if rendered irrelevant to the fashionable universe of discourse,
still has to be lived in.
Central to this 'new' form of anxiety is the sense that achievement is empty
of satisfaction - what the person is supposed to want, and so acquires, he or
she simply does not desire. A life conditioned by marketed ideals of'success'
can become so detached from subjective bodily desire that the person simply
finds it impossible to say what he or she wants, and 'pleasing oneself, even (or
rather especially) in such basic wants as food or sex, can become something
which has to be assiduously learned from scratch. Such anxiety is reduced
through coming to experience, refine and elaborate the desire which links
body to world. As always, however, the cost of becoming free from marketed
illusions is the possibility of exposure to real pain, i.e. pain which is instantly
identifiable as stemming from the injuries inflicted on embodied individuals
by a far from perfect social environment. In other words, 'disillusionment' is a
precondition for true experience.
The 'official' institutions through which people may seek to understand the
experience of anxiety have, sadly, gained in neither sophistication nor
validity since this book was first published in 1984. Psychiatry has if
anything retrenched to its traditional position of biological explanation and
physical treatment, with a touch of social Darwinism thrown in. No doubt
such retrenchment is in response at least partly to financial starvation and
pressures to contain the politically defined 'seriously mentally ill' who might
otherwise become too conspicuous a blot on the landscape created by 'care in
the community'. The deregulation of the market in health care has let loose a
flood of 'alternative' approaches to therapy and counselling which are re
markable only for the illusoriness of their promises and the childlike wish
fulness of their 'theories'. With counsellors on hand, apparently, to soothe
away the ravages of reality in almost any eventuality, the authentic voice
viii Preface
of the subjective person has become muffled to the point of extinction.
There is a tragic irony in the fact that the vast majority of people who come
to consult clinical psychologists like me tend to be those who find it most
difficult to abandon their personal conviction in the truth of their subjective
experience. Not that this is an intellectual process that they themselves
would recognize; it is an emotional one. The inability to abandon a funda
mentally true insight into the nature of the social world in favour of a
convenient illusion is reflected in psychological pain-though 'psychological'
here is too abstract and insubstantial a word for something which is so firmly
embodied. Emotional distress, far from being an indication that something is
wrong with the person, is far more likely to point to something wrong with
his/her world. As much as anything, this book is about the possibility of
understanding the 'language' of pain.
Perhaps all distinguishable eras of social development are characterized
by their regnant ideological illusions. It sometimes seems to me that maybe
'psychology' is one of the principal illusions of the twentieth century. The raw
materials of emotional distress are much more bodies and worlds than they
are psychologies. Distress arises from the subjection of the embodied person
to social forces over which s/he has very little control. 'Psychology', such as it
is, arises out of the person's struggle to understand and conceptualize the
nature of his/her experience. It is a matter of meaning. But changing the
experience of distress cannot, either logically or practically, be achieved
purely by trying to operate on the meanings to which the body-world
interaction gives rise. Yet this is precisely the mistake psychology, in
particular of course therapeutic psychology, has made. It is as if we can
eradicate the experience of distress by changing the way we think or talk
about it. Pure magic.
This book spells out the beginnings of an alternative understanding. Even
so it is undoubtedly not without its own illusions. One that I can discern quite
easily after the passage of thirteen years is my misplaced deference to
Freudian theory and my too sweeping condemnation of behaviourism. Psy
choanalysis (as Richard Webster's comprehensive refutation of Freud dem
onstrates*) derailed us right at the beginning of the century from developing
with anything approaching scientific validity a view of the way people suffer
emotional distress not because of who they are but because of what is done to
them. Behaviourism - in, admittedly, a hopelessly inadequate and lu
dicrously over-simplified manner-at least made some kind of effort to put us
back on the rails. In any event, the only possible ground upon which our
illusions can be stripped away, upon which we can start the essential process
of disillusionment, is that of our subjective experience. For it is here and only
here that reality reveals itself to us.
David Smail
Nottingham, March 1997
* Richard Webster, Why Freud Was Wrong, HarperCollins, 1995.
1 The Myth of Normality
This book is written in the hope that it may help remove some
of the mystery which surrounds psychological distress, not just
from an abstract point of view, but in terms which make con
crete sense to people who are frightened or anxious about
aspects of their lives which they experience as abnormal. My
choice of the terms 'abstract' and 'concrete', rather than
'theoretical' and 'practical', is deliberate, because it seems to me
that it is precisely through a theoretical framework that the
nature of psychological distress can best be confronted, and to
some extent alleviated. For reasons which I shall discuss in a
later chapter, it seems to me that an adequate theory- i.e., an
explicit set of ideas or concepts -is exactly what most people
have no access to when trying to get to grips with 'symptoms' of
their psychological malaise, and this is why such 'symptoms'
seem, often, so mysterious: while one may concede that there
are 'experts' who do understand them, one cannot, it seems,
understand them oneself, and, without recourse to these ex
perts, cannot expect to.
I have been careful not to raise my sights higher than ex
pressing a hope that this book may contribute to a 'demystifica
tion' of psychological distress, and that is because I certainly
do not believe that it could 'cure' such distress in individual
readers. Although the popular culture, as well as many 'experts',
makes an equation between psychological 'symptoms' and ill
ness, with the implication that individuals play host to such
symptoms in the way they might to symptoms of, say, appendi
citis (with similar possibilities for 'cure') it seems clear to me
that human misery, of which psychological distress forms a
significant part, does not crop up, as it were, within individual
people, but arises out of the interaction of people with each
other and from the nature of the world we have created. Until
we change the way we act towards each other, and the social
institutions we have constructed, we shall not get much relief
from the symptoms of anxiety, depression and despair which
beset all of us at some times in our lives, and some of us nearly
all the time. The 'experts' will not change the world-they will
simply make a satisfactory living helping people to adjust to it;
the world will only change when ordinary people realize what is
making them unhappy, and do something about it. To arrive at
such a realization, they will first, I believe, have to develop a
