Is cyber love possible?
PsychologyOnline.
I was very sceptical at first. Cyber psychology? No way, I thought! I warmed to the idea, however, and recommended that the institution involved make their investment.
What changed my mind were discoveries I made in research at the time. One finding I made that caused me to turn the corner was the fact that people were frequently (but not always) inclined to be more open and honest when engaging in anonymous dialogue with their computer screen than they were in a face-to-face encounter with a therapist. This was a salient and important fact in treating some conditions like alcoholism and addictions. “How many drinks have you had today?” asks the therapist. “Oh just the one, doctor,” says the client swaying in his seat breathing fumes that would slay a dragon.
I was reflecting earlier about the nature and type of relationships one makes on the internet. I’ve made some very interesting friendships here, some of which I have confidence, faith and trust in. I even have a couple of friendships that have extended into other dimensions like voice communication, but that’s all for now. I’m sure I will meet one or two of the people I talk to here one day. I’ve been struck by the honesty of most of the people I speak to here on my blog.
I believe that certain forms of cyber attachment are possible. Cyber infatuation is commonplace. So what of cyber love? Is that possible?
Before I attempt to answer that question I’m going to go off on one of those doodling excursions that I’m inclined to do from time to time. Unlike some areas I write about here I don’t profess any real depth of expertise in this subject, so the doodling will take the form of an exploration of ideas.
I’m not wholly convinced that people are more inclined to be honest, or expose their true self (whatever that is) when talking to a computer screen. People in cyberspace say and do things they would not do face-to-face. They lose their inhibitions. This is called the “disinhibition” effect.
Disinhibition can cause people to be more trusting, intimate, share secrets and personal truths far more quickly and readily than they might do in face-to-face encounters in their daily lives. They can also make spontaneous acts of generosity and kindness.
In our consideration of love, therefore, we might say that cyberspace is an accelerant of intimacy.
But disinhibition can run two ways, people can be harsh, critical, rude, aggressive, blaming, angry or even hateful and threatening as easily as they can be trusting and intimate on the net.
I’m something of a cyber-veteran. I’ve had access to the internet since its creation although this is my first personal web-site. In that time, I’ve observed a number of behaviours some of which I can explain in psychoanalytic language and some I can’t.
Cyber relationships can be high on transference. The nature of cyberspace means that in social encounters we can exercise fantasy and our imagination in a way we couldn’t in-person. We can ascribe all sorts of qualities to another that we would wish or hope to exist in a friend or loved one. Transference, however, is about the transfer of a normally powerful emotion from someone in one’s past onto another in the present. It is common for people to transfer feelings from their parents to their partners or to children. For instance, one could mistrust somebody who resembles an ex-spouse in manners, voice, or external appearance; or be overly compliant to someone who resembles a childhood friend or former lover.
Transference, like disinhibition, can be positive or negative.
That’s all conventional stuff.
Also I believe that we all carry some sort of image inside us of the idealised woman or the idealised man to whom we might be attracted.
The sources of this contra-sexual image are complex. They may come from infancy, childhood, our cultures, art and literature, media and the church…from everywhere in fact. Some of these images are archetypal, they’re embedded deep in our culture (and they might differ between cultures). I feel there is no doubt that experiences in infancy and childhood have a differentially powerful influence in how we construct these images. I also believe they are, to some extent, subconscious or perhaps, unconscious. They are what we might experience as the mysteries of interpersonal attraction.
As an aside, I do believe that children who suffer abuse might internalise idealised images of the perpetrators of abuse at an early age that later in life causes them to select abusive partners.
This, in itself, is an interesting subject for me and one about which I’ll write further, but having suffered emotional child abuse I’ve been more than curious to determine what effect infantile and childhood attachments have had on my adult relationships. I subjected myself to a whole battery of psychological tests to determine the extent of their effect. I’m delighted to say that I’ve moved on to an amazing degree, and that my test results indicate a low degree of correspondence between childhood attachments and adult relationships now, although this has not always been the case. I’ve made some very big mistakes in the choice of intimate partners in the past. I’m still learning my lessons.
Coming back to cyberspace relationships, I believe that it offers great scope for something that I’ll call projective idealisation. When we cannot see, hear, touch or smell the object of our attention, we can ascribe whatever qualities we like to them. They can become the man or woman of our dreams. Our computer screen is like a blank canvas on which we can project whatever qualities we seek and desire of another at will.
There is another aspect of cyberspace interaction that I’ve observed and I believe it can be intuitive, conscious or manipulative. I’ll call it “mirroring” here. Idealisation in love generally involves taking the best qualities of ourselves and projecting them on another. Mirroring involves the rapid absorption or assimilation of another’s personality then playing it back to them as one’s own. The mirror plays back a reflection of another’s feelings, interests and values. It can feel seductive and attractive. We might say, “This person and me are so alike,” or “How well this person understands me!” Frequently, it’s the cyber-tactic of the internet Lothario or Casanova. I doubt somehow if it’s a practice that one could get away with so easily in-person. For me, body language, gestures, inflection in speech and eye contact would give the other person away.
No doubt, cyberspace has pushed our social frontiers and changed our working habits, but I don’t feel yet it offers a sensory alternative to love, nor do I believe it will ever. I believe that cyberspace has opened all sorts of wonderful possibilities as a place for making friends and, possibly, even finding lovers, but in order to experience true intimacy with another, one sooner or later has to meet.
If we consider how we bond and interact in human relationships then the limitations of cyber relationships become evident. There’s sight, sound, touch, smell and taste (Yum! Get a grip, Geoffrey!)
None of these are easily possible in the cyber world, although the defenders of internet relationships might point to communication using webcams and the internet’s to transmit and receive voice messages.
These still lack the three-dimensional qualities of human interaction. Audio and video streaming are getting better but they lack all the subtle qualities including those of body language of in-person meetings.
Something that brings this home to me is my life in France. I speak some French but it’s not that fluent nor is it good enough to engage in more complex social relationships. Most of those I know here speak English too or else we manage to communicate more deeply by speaking in Franglish, a clumsy combination of our two languages that often makes me laugh. I find that the French speak very fast too. Often they say I do the same in English. I have sat in the middle of a crowded café surrounded by French people gabbling at enormous speed where I have been unable to understand a word being spoken. Nevertheless, I have understood much of what has been going on between people by their gestures, expressions, intonation and body language. My good French accent will sometimes get me into trouble too. People will talk fast at me and I struggle to understand the odd words. Frequently though I can fill in the gaps of what’s being spoken by their facial expression and tone of voice. The complexity of human communication has so much richness and subtleties beyond language, our main means of communication in cyberspace.
Touch, I believe is a very important human need, and one that we as adults in our often reclusive technological living worlds do not give sufficient attention. Infants deprived of touch can get depressed, ill and die without touch and physical comfort. How adults interact physically with their children becomes a cornerstone in their wellbeing and their development as fully-formed human beings. Being deprived of touch and tactile sensations as an adult can cause insecurity and anxiety. Don’t whatever you do, underestimate the power of touch. A hug, a kiss or simply a pat on the back or a handshake can do so much for another. So get kissing, hugging and touching now! (There I go again!)
Smell and taste are two very powerful, primal and even primitive ways we connect intimately with others. It is through touch, smell and taste that the infant bonds with its mother. They are the stuff of loving intimacy too: The sweet smell of hair, the touch of skin against one’s cheek, the scent of another’s body. Smell and taste draw us very close to another; they stir up strong emotions. They are essential and fundamental in loving intimacy.
So what else happens in potential cyber love relationships? I believe that because of the disinhibition effect that it is possible to attain a level of intimacy and trust very quickly. My question is therefore, then what? How does intimacy grow from there? I do not believe that love can grow from typed words alone.
The danger that lies in the speed of intimacy attainment is that disenchantment can set in equally quickly when intimacy has nowhere to go. You can’t go for a walk, share a meal, or hold another close in cyberspace. I believe that often unless a real life interaction takes place at some time then anxiety and disappointment will come to fill the space in which intimacy once existed. You can take steps and make moves along the way, exchanging photographs, speaking on the phone can help you on your way, but if love is the outcome you are seeking then sooner or later you will have to meet in-person.
Acknowledgements to John Suler PhD, Professor of Psychology at Rider University for his work on "The Psychology of Cyberspace"
Transference and Projection - What are they?
Transference is the unconscious redirection of one’s feelings from one person onto another. For example, we might redirect feelings for say, a past spouse or past lover, onto a person in one’s life because of something they say, a mannerism, tone of voice or aspect of their appearance. In therapy, transference may occur when the client redirects a feeling from a significant person in their life onto the therapist.
Transference is very common. We all do it.
Projection is different. It’s where we attribute (project) our own unwanted, difficult, shameful or unacceptable thoughts and/or emotions unconsciously onto another person.
For example, Doris does not like Jack. Doris for whatever reason is unable to face that she does not like Jack. Her unconscious mind prevents her from admitting her feelings towards him. Her conscious thought is not “I don’t like Jack” but “Jack doesn’t like me”. In a way this projection is similar to denial.
The reasons and motivations for projection can be complex and specific (to individuals) so I cannot cover them here.
Ahah! That was easy, wasn’t it? Next there’s projective identification. I know I’ve confused some friends with this one! I have felt this one happen to me too in personal relationships.
This is a really tricky one! It’s where a person engages with another and projects a false belief onto another in such a way that the other person alters their behaviour to make the belief true. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Clear as mud? I’ll try one or two examples:
Doris and Jack are lovers. Doris has become disappointed with Jack whom she unconsciously feels is not the man she wants. Her desire for Jack is waning fast. Unable to face how she feels for Jack, she projects on Jack that he has no desire for her anymore. Night after night, she flounces into bed and says to Jack, “You do not desire me anymore” or “I know you no longer want me.” What she feels about Jack, she attributes to Jack through projection. Jack has always wanted and loved Doris and he does not understand her behaviour. Doris makes these assertions repeatedly in bed at night, then turns her back on Jack, pulls away from him then goes to sleep. Jack, however, experiences Doris’s behaviour as an outright (sexual and emotional) rejection of him and starts to pull back from Doris to avoid being hurt. Doris now has proof positive. Jack is moving away from her. She can now say, “I told you so!”
Was that complicated? Another example might be a paranoid man who develops a delusion that he is being persecuted by the police. Fearing the police, he starts to behave in a way that is uneasy, anxious and furtive when he is around police officers. The police officers observing what they construe as “suspicious” behaviour perceive that he might be involved in some criminal activity and start to look for reasons to arrest him, thus reinforcing his paranoid notion that he is being persecuted.
One more: Identification. This one is simple. It’s also a normal stage in human and emotional development but it’s here for another reason. Identification is the state or process of merging with another through imitation. Why I mention this is that occurred to me in talking with another blogging friend earlier that identification and transference happens frequently in cyber relationships. For example, I have known people who, when engaging in internet relationships, shroud their identity and instead present in a process of “mirroring” (imitating) the other person. This distorts the relationship since the other person starts to believe that the “mirror” that is reflecting back at them is, not surprisingly, very similar in personality and interests to themselves. They are not. It’s a psychological device of which the “mirror” may be conscious or not. We all do identification to adapt to different social circumstances. But in the context of this virtual world I find it scary sometimes. It can be a form of dangerous manipulative behaviour too.
Synchronicity - Part 2 - Fate, Destiny and Jonah and the Whale
There is a difference between fate and destiny. The words fatal and fatality come from the same root as fate. Fate implies no choice and ends with death. Destiny requires our wilful participation in achieving an outcome that is desirable for ourselves and for others. In normal usage the words may be used interchangeably but they do have distinct and different meanings. In the Old Testament, destiny is linked to good fortune.
Jung wrote, "We are dragged along by fate to that which we refuse to walk upright…"
The culmination of synchronicity is the revelation of one's destiny, of the path through life that gives meaning to our existence, of our essential selves. That which we refuse to bring into consciousness or deny comes back to us as fate. Fate strikes us from without when we fail to heed its summons from within. Attention to synchronicity, to the meaningful details of our being, no matter if they appear chaotic or disorganised, helps us join and make sense of the unfolding processes of our lives consciously.
Destiny is frequently connected to our career. Our work in the world is often our means of actualising our potential.
Frequently I go through streams of thought and talk about them with my friends, and with one of my male friends in particular. We were chatting about this blog and I mentioned that my next short piece would be about destiny, fate, synchronicity and Jonah and the whale. Perhaps my friends think me a little eccentric but they do seem to have unending patience with my unravelling this story. But I suspect I may have seen my friends eyes raised heavenwards as I told him about what I intended to write here.
Many biblical stories are interesting to me in their portrayal of cultural archetypes and their value as fables or parables: Stories that exist to teach lessons and contain within them ancient mythological images that inform our culture and our consciousness, as well as our moral conscience. Why I like the story of Jonah is that it seems to be the biblical archetype of the refusal of one's destiny where fate and the reversal of fate occur through acceptance of destiny.
I shall retell that story without any religious embellishments as a secular myth. Jonah is called to be a prophet and refuses his calling. He runs from destiny, hopping off on a boat headed for Tarshish (thought by some to be Minoan Crete). But he is simply running from himself from which there is no escape. While at sea a huge storm brews up and tosses the boat wildly. The sailors pray to their gods, to several gods to be saved from calamity and death.
Jonah sleeps through the storm below deck until he is dragged from his bed by the boat's captain. The sailors decide to draw lots to divine who might be the cause of their problem and the lot falls on Jonah.
The sailors question Jonah who confesses that he is running from destiny, from his own special calling. Jonah in a moment of self-destructive guilt tells the sailors to throw him overboard, telling them that if they get rid of him then their lives will be spared. Perhaps this is an acknowledgement of the psychological death that occurs when we fail to be true to ourselves. The sailors cast Jonah into the sea.
As Jonah is about to sink, to drown and die, a whale swallows him. He remains in the dark place of the whale's belly for three days and three nights. It could be any dark place and most of us have known those places of being in darkness and struggling over our future lives in one way or another. But he remains in that dark place meditating his destiny; of his purpose in life, Jonah eventually accepts his purpose with truth and sincerity and the whale spits him out onto the shore.
What a wonderful allegory about fate and destiny. Of course, there are one or two further twists in this particular tale since Jonah accepts his purpose then feels resentment about doing so. For a second time he is beset by misery and grief together with the desire to die yet again. Perhaps this is the reinforcement of the consequences, of the feelings of inner deadness that we feel at times when we are not true to our feelings and to ourselves.
It is a very good story!
There is something about synchronicity that I feel helps us to forge a lasting relationship with the universe and with life all around us - not just other people but a relationship with nature, the environment and the physical world around us. It is a peculiar aspect of our culture that encourages us to see ourselves as individuals serving self-interest but without any connection to the universe we inhabit. Many writers use the word "spiritual" here. Sadly, even though I have enquired of many people, I do not know what the word "spiritual" means! I did have one friend, now dead, who helped Chad Varah establish the Samaritans, a national charity in the UK that provides help and support to those who are despairing and suicidal. She was a committed Christian. I asked her what "spiritual" meant. She replied, "Don't you know? You are one of the most spiritual people I know." But I'm none the wiser. Still I don't have a clue. I do have a sense though of our existence being inextricably connected to and part of the cosmos we inhabit. I have a deep fascination with quantum physics that shows the infinite inter-relationships of the atomic structures that constitute our universe. It would be foolish to suppose that the world we inhabit in ourselves does not form part of that same universe.
Jung said, "We find our destiny on the path we take to avoid it." The greatest of human tragedies is to lose our power and potential of actualisation because of addictions or our involvement in relationships that are abusive, untenable or depleting. Great potential in us can simply fade away and no one will do anything to halt its waste or dissolution. The world will stand by as we throw away or reject our life's good fortunes. There is no guarantee that the whale may intervene for us as it did for Jonah. To take up Jung's words, they mean that we should look for our destiny in those parts of our lives in which we are refusing to engage. That is no easy task. I am not even sure, even at my age, where to start. Perhaps we should stop and look while we are running in the opposite direction! "Is my destiny scribbled on parchment, twirled in a bottle and hurled into the sea, to be stumbled upon only long after I am gone?"
Chance, chaos and randomness may all play a part in showing us our destiny. As chaos theorists have shown even its apparent disorder may be susceptible to a form of implicit organisation. Perhaps it is synchronicity that integrates the irrational, that which lies beyond our understanding, with the essence of our universal selves. Perhaps the trick is to perceive the sense in events despite their apparently random display.
Mahatma Gandhi may have expressed this tension between our existential reality and our universal truth most accurately. Humankind does after all appear on the one hand to have been ignorant and destructive, yet on the other, wonderfully responsive and restorative: "I see that mankind still survives after all its attempts to destroy itself and so I surmise that it is the law of love that rules mankind."
My acknowledgements to Dr David Richo whose book, "Unexpected Miracles: The Gift of Synchronicity & How to Open it" inspired this piece and also to the work of Carl Gustav Jung on which my thinking about synchronicity is based.
Synchronicity - Part 1
For a very long time I have struggled with Jung's notion of synchronicity. Simply put synchronicity is the concept of meaningful coincidence, of the acausal connection - a connectedness between apparently disparate phenomena and events.
For me, the problem of synchronicity is that it is riddled with so much mystical jiggery-pokery on the one hand and ideas about fatalism and divinity on the other. There are so many esoteric deterministic elements that might be thrown into the synchronicity melting pot including ideas about pre-destination and pre-ordination. Who establishes that these coincidences have meaning or significance? Are events and phenomena not open to subjective re-interpretation in order to show their coincidental significance? Is the construction of the meaning and relatedness of phenomena and events simply an act of creating their subjective correspondence?
I shall suspend my scepticism and go off here on a short excursus, a voyage of discovery in words to see if I can articulate what I feel about synchronicity.
In case I am being too abstract, perhaps I should attempt to give one or two examples of synchronous events: A woman orders a red dress for a party but a black dress is delivered to her in error. As she is about to phone the shop where she bought it to advise them of the mistake, the phone rings. It is her sister, "Mother has died. You need to come for the funeral." The woman thought she was in control of her life; she believed she knew what would happen next. The synchronous event told her otherwise and outfitted her for what was actually coming next, something much deeper had occurred.
That is a powerful example. I know in my own life, there feels to be other purposeful connections that have been made that may not happened had my life followed its planned course.
We seek to understand our world in terms of cause and effect. I do not believe that everything can be understood in those scientific and rational terms. Cause and effect are the rationale of industrial man. It is a form of cultural and intellectual arrogance of the worst kind that maintains that the scientific mode of understanding is the only valid way of knowing and understanding our world. The obsession with rationality pre-dates industrialisation, but perhaps rational consciousness was a social pre-condition or a cultural pre-requisite of the change to be brought about by the industrial revolution. What is interesting is that it was the Catholic Church who seized upon rationality as the only way of knowing. During the inquisition and beyond, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of women were put to death by the Catholic Church for so-called witchcraft. To be a witch was to have a "heretical" belief either good or bad that could not be substantiated by rational proof. Of course, the only heretical beliefs one was allowed to hold were those religious beliefs proselytized by the Catholic Church itself. Inquisitions happened everywhere throughout the Middle Ages. To have non-rational beliefs was to risk being put to death; it is no small wonder that rationality has a stranglehold on our consciousness. But I digress.
Back to synchronicity: I am going to try and drop rationality for a while too and simply share the sense I have of synchronicity.
Synchronicities appear to cluster around significant events. Many meaningful coincidences occurred, for instance, when the Titanic sank and when Kennedy was assassinated. Also personal disasters or crises in our personal lives seem to invite synchronicity.
Perhaps synchronicity is the surprise that something suddenly fits! Synchronous events are meaningful coincidences or correspondences that guide us, warn us, or confirm us on our path in life. Coincidence happens at a specific moment. In this sense it is existential, tied to the here and now. Correspondences may continue. This is how synchronicity is essential, always present, in our human experience. Synchronicity may also be found in a series of similar events or experiences. It can appear as one striking event that sets off a chain reaction. It is always unexpected and somehow uncanny, almost eerie in its accuracy of connection or revelation. This is what makes it impossible for me to dismiss synchronicity as mere coincidence.
There may be synchronicity in the fact that our knowledge of our real issues, of ourselves and of our relationships, comes simultaneously with the strength to face them. We are usually in denial for a long time before we finally recognise and acknowledge our own truth. Synchronicity is in the fact that we often only let ourselves know when we can deal with what we know.
Synchronicity also occurs in looking back at one's life and seeing how it all prepared or instructed you for the realisation of one's full potential. A hidden feeling or truth may have waited to be awakened by the right person or circumstance, sometimes painfully. My destiny, perhaps, was to have had such a beginning. My neglectful and abusive father helped me practice for the independent and loving life I lead now. James Hillman writes: "This way of seeing removes the burden from the early years as having been a mistake and yourself a victim of handicaps and cruelties; instead it is the acorn in the mirror...." This may be light years ahead of what I wrote earlier.
Everyone and every event in life's drama is part of the metaphor of our personal development. The issue from an old relationship may not be: "how bad she was" but "how much I needed to learn." Most of us keep meeting partners who show us exactly where our we need to work on ourselves in order to become ourselves, e.g., men who abuse, women who are unfaithful. The wounds are openings into our missing life. Often, the only way in which a lost piece of ourselves or of our history comes back to us is through another person. The unknown is scary so people and events come along that help us go there. This is synchronicity. The only mistake we make is hanging on to some people too long or too briefly. We ask, “How, why and with whom did I do that?” We fall into the trap of taking them as literally themselves instead of metaphorical forces that have come to boost, chide or light our way in life. “Who finally pointed the way beyond my limitations?”
My personal jury has been out on synchronicity for about 15 years now. It looks like it just walked back in and voted in its favour. “Now who or what took me there?” I wonder. Time will tell me all I need to know so long as I listen carefully and pay attention.
My acknowledgements to Dr David Richo whose book, "Unexpected Miracles: The Gift of Synchronicity & How to Open it" inspired this piece and also to the work of Carl Gustav Jung on which my thinking about synchronicity is based.