On Knowing Where You Stand¹

David Cooper

Mental hospitals flourish on uncertainty - what treatment one is going to receive, what ward one is going to be transferred to, whether or not one is going to be discharged - or if one is ever going to be discharged. It is something like certain Jewish prisoners in the last war who were told, to induce submission, that they were going to be castrated at the other end of the journey (in fact what they got was death). The same thing happens to political prisoners in South America by constant transfer from one gaol to the next. In prison they take away one's watch and put one in a dark cell so that one knows neither the time of day nor which day it is - also one does not know which prisoner is going to be taken out of the cell next for interrogation or torture.

In the case of two-person uncertainty: in woman-man relations the man often does not take the 'trouble' to define the erotogenic zones of the woman and therefore simply uses her sexually. There is no mutuality of experience in this penis-centred pseudo-sexuality.

Another form of two-person uncertainty arises from the importation into the relationship of unresolved problems derived from the 'family of origin'. This is different from the problems produced by 'internalized' family figures that I shall discuss later in this chapter. In this case the actual mother, father and siblings are present usually the mother being more subtly active in undermining the woman-man relationship - because of her envy, jealousy, distrust of men and her feeling either that women should stick together in the case of a mother-daughter relationship, or, in the case of a mother-son relationship, that her son is an indispensable part of her body-mind.

The whole point about the simple uncertainty principle in human relations is that of relativity to the other. If one defines oneself in terms of the attributions of others one will never know where one stands. It is only by discovering the true single and singular ground of one's being in aloneness that one might find out where one stands. All relative being is being that must inevitably be destroyed by uncertainty. Self-centred being progressively withstands all attempts to undermine it by uncertainty, but becoming self-centred (the opposite of egocentric) is a long and arduous battle. Many people think that they act from the centre of themselves when it is clear that they do not. The slightest breeze of uncertainty will blow them off their ontological feet.

I have so far stressed uncertainty between persons. There is of course also uncertainty that arises within a person due to the action of 'internalized' past or present people or bits of people or due to an autonomous otherness that has nothing to do with actual others. Autonomous otherness is proven by exhaustive analysis of individual persons where one finds an irreducible care - a core of being that cannot be reduced to the more or less easily intelligible machinations of internalized others. The autonomous otherness that generates this sort of uncertainty can only be understood as an internalization of the mystifications and the mysteries by the whole society, world, cosmos. In these terms there is evidently quite enough to be uncertain about. The 'persecutory superego' may not be intelligible in terms of experience of parental or ancestral persons, but may only be intelligible in terms of a profound internalization of the oppressive and repressive aspects of the whole society.

Also, certain people generate uncertainty in themselves (and, or not, in others) because they need it to avoid some greater feared catastrophe. They just do not want to know where they stand because they fear that the ground they find themselves standing on might be too precarious a promontory. One problem is that they may be right and the therapeutic risk is to help the person look down at where his feet are - and hope for the best. Many fears brought to therapy are only too justified objectively and cannot be reduced to the operations of 'unconscious phantasy'. Therapists work in bad faith if they try to 'interpret away' such fears - interpretation is then simply a defence against the therapists' own fears that have become confused with those of the other. The fears of 'not being able to help' and 'not being able to be helped' can be mutually destructive. But we have to face it: many people have the original project of not being able to be helped, and many therapists lack the capacity to help in a socially effective way, i.e. a way in which micro-politics and macro-politics form a continuum with no ideological interruptions of this continuum.

Most basically, uncertainty arises when limits are placed on our actions by others - with the best intentions in the world. This loss of autonomy may prove fatal unless one can switch it into self-election, defining one's own limits and the territory on which one stands. No compromise is possible. All the well-intentioned acts of others vitiate essential autonomy. Ultimately everyone else matters but no one else counts - the score of one's life. I have written in this and previous chapters about the modes of mystification induced by mental hospitals. I would like to deal now with the uncertainties generated by 'therapeutic communities'. The mystification here is immense. There seems to be free entry and exit but in fact there is a subtle control of these movements. Sexes mix freely but there is a (usually) unspoken taboo against sexual relations in direct body terms. This springs from the staff's fear of their own sexuality, from the staff's need to infantilize the 'patients' by regarding them as irresponsible children for whom they are in loco parentis and by the conscious need to stop the propagation of 'psychosis', 'neurosis' and 'psychopathy' in terms of some vague eugenic attitude. In each case there is a perpetuation of the false sickness/health dichotomy and the perpetuation of the condition that is supposed to be 'treated'. This more or less subtle perpetuation of an original damage serves the society in which the therapeutic community functions very well despite occasional conflicts with outside authority. The equation is simple : social madness perpetuated = normality perpetuated. So the patients get anti-sex drugs, phenothiazines and barbiturates etc., and any sort of 'good normal' (not 'normal normal') life is lost forever. Forever because patients, like pet dogs, are trained to be faithful to their medical masters. There are sexually mixed wards but this is merely a sort of male and female prick-teasing because the prohibitions against sexual relations remain as strong as ever - between patients and patients, patients and staff and patients and visitors. Time and time again I have heard indoctrinated patients defend this vicious system. They don't know any longer for one instant where they stand.

Another area of basic uncertainty is suicide. This is an area hedged with binds of all sorts. There seems to be no purity in suicide as an act which is why so many kill themselves 'by accident'. There are a host of possible interpretations as to why one might kill oneself. No freedom is left for the act. Also it seems virtually impossible to kill oneself without aggression against someone. There can be no suicide free of guilt or 'self-indulgence' and while many people will tell you why not to do it no one will advise you, without a trace of aggression, on the best way for you to do it. At the last moment of your life you stand alone and you don't know where you stand. The right to kill oneself should be absolute and there should be suicide accompanists to help clarify (not negatively interpret) why one is killing oneself but not stop one. I happen to think that, even in situations of torture and terminal cancer, suicide is always a mistake, but the right to kill oneself must remain absolute. The mistake lies in the deprivation of even painful experience and in the fact that one is acting without knowing where one stands.

In short, the induction of uncertainty, not knowing where one stands, is easily come by. It is precisely in these moments, when one is most 'down', oppressed and depressed, that one has to find the courage to struggle on from the obscure moment to a clear moment.

When one knows where one stands one is in a position to realize the importance of acting without thinking. This means acting without deliberation (which leads one away from liberation) but acting from a base of preliberation. The liberation of preliberation issues from the gratuitous choice (gratuitous in the sense of the negation of all restrictive conditioning) to know that where one stands is Where One Is.

"On Knowing Where You Stand"
by David Cooper
from The Grammar of Living (Allen Lane, 1971)


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