By Alan Rayner
From an early age, I was brought up with the expectation that I ought to
be faultless, both morally and intellectually. Never mind that this was an
unrealistic and ultimately meaningless aspiration for any human being, my
duty as a genetically and culturally privileged offspring of the British
Empire was to try as hard as I could to achieve it. If I failed, the suffering
for myself, my family and others in my neighbourhood would be great. That
was the message I received from all around me as I endeavoured to work my
passage through to adulthood and beyond.
The problem was, my childhood got in the way of this aspiration. There always
seemed to be something wrong with me, whether it was one of the many ailments
that confined me to bed for days and sometimes weeks at a time, my thumb-sucking,
temper, jealousy, impishness, hungriness, loneliness, slow-wittedness, naivety,
obesity, weak bladder, yearning for affection or whatever. Pained, punished
and humiliated on account of these inadequacies I needed desperately to grow
beyond them, the sooner the better.
I had to become a scrupulously honest and dutiful paragon of virtue who always
put others’ interests and welfare before his own needs, whilst paradoxically
being supremely competitive when it came to any kind of performance deemed
to be important by those in my vicinity. After a slow and faltering start,
I began to succeed.
I gained entrance to my father’s famous old school, Latymer Upper, in London.
I soon found myself in the top ‘A1’ stream for those elite pupils singled
out as the most academically gifted, where teachers told us we were ‘the
cream’ and that anything less than top marks was failure. Every exam began
to acquire ‘life or death’ significance. The penalty for failure would be
demotion to a lower stream, loss of the camaraderie of my peer group and
a humiliating sense of return to the base indignity of my childhood.
I took my ‘O’ level (‘Ordinary Level General Certificate of Education’) exams
a year early. I didn’t do quite as well as expected, however, especially
in physics, a subject in which my self-confidence had been undermined by
a bullying teacher, and chemistry, because I had made the silly mistake of
muddling up ‘anions’ and ‘cations’ in the stress of the practical exam. Once
in the sixth form, however, I really did begin to excel in both these sciences
as well as in my favourite subject, biology, where I benefited greatly -
but was also said to have an ‘unfair advantage’ - from my father’s influence
as a professional botanist and mycologist.
Two months into my second year in the sixth form, my father suffered a heart
attack and I had to change schools and ‘A’ level subjects, dropping physics
and splitting biology into botany and zoology. My father claimed dolefully
from what might have been his death bed (but wasn’t) that his illness would
stop me getting the grades I needed to follow his footsteps to King’s College,
Cambridge, an ambition he had long cultivated in me. I was determined to
prove him wrong and give him something to live for by preventing his disappointment.
I succeeded. Not only did I get the requisite ‘A’ grades in ‘A’ levels and
distinctions in ‘S’ levels, but I also gained a Bedford Scholarship into
King’s and was told that my performance in botany was the best anyone could
remember.
I studied at Cambridge for six years, gaining a triple first (i.e. a first
class exam mark at the end of each of the three years of undergraduate study)
bachelor’s degree in Natural Sciences, followed by a PhD in fungal ecology.
After a brief period of employment as a research demonstrator at Exeter University,
I moved to Bath University as a lecturer and within 7 years had accrued sufficient
academic recognition to be promoted directly to a Readership when only 35
years old.
By the time I became President of the British Mycological Society at the
age of 48, I had published six books and over 120 scientific papers. My academic
colleagues, however, did not generally see this as good enough reason for
further promotion or celebration. My research by then was not only becoming
increasingly unfashionable but was producing findings that challenged orthodox
schools of thought concerning the fundamental nature of evolutionary creativity
and the legitimacy of scientific method. It was becoming neither publishable
nor fundable through channels acceptable to the mainstream. Feeling unsupported
and unvalued, I felt ever-present tensions and anxieties grow within me to
overwhelming proportions. Long-withheld self-destructive and self-reclaiming
processes took over my life. After 6 months ‘sick leave’, I somehow managed
to return to work, and set about radically changing the course of my teaching
and research so as to include artistic and philosophical themes relevant
to what I perceive as a global social, environmental and psychological crisis.
All along, despite what might have been outward appearances, all was not
well and had never been well for me. I had never got over my feeling from
childhood that there was something fundamentally wrong with me, some gap
in my make-up, which, when exposed, would prove both catastrophic and profoundly
humiliating. My experiences of school and university education, with its
many cruelties, iniquities, absurdities and pretences, did nothing to alleviate
and much to reinforce this feeling. I never felt more than temporary relief
as the result of any of my academic ‘successes’. All that these served to
do was cover up and delay recognition of my underlying deep inadequacy, until
the next fearful ‘test’ came along that could finally show me to be the dreadful
fraud I really was. Neither was this sense of fraudulence confined to my
academic performance. My personal life of loving and caring for others also
felt like a dangerous charade. I felt filled with the potential to bring
about terrible harm to others through some oversight, brainstorm, incompetence
or need to protect my own interests when these were threatened.
I endured an endless round of desperately seeking reassurance that I was,
after all, the person I was cracked up to be, that I really did have exceptional
talents, I really had made important discoveries and I really hadn’t brought
about any terrible harm to anyone. Every now and then I would begin to feel
reassured, but the ensuing elation would end only in the bitter disappointment
of realizing that I hadn’t really developed or been recognized to ‘my full
potential’. More often I would find some actual evidence of a self-interested
action, oversight or silly mistake that would compound my doubts, only to
induce feverish efforts to prove to myself that these weren’t really as significant
as I feared they might be.
I would make great efforts and go to extraordinary lengths to avoid situations
in which I could be exposed to evidence of my fallibility and the despair
and panic this would invoke. But this avoidance only strengthened my feeling
of pretence and insecurity, and inhibited me from participating in any potentially
humiliating learning experience. Moreover it didn’t stop tormenting thoughts
and recollections from striking me like arrows from the blue, sometimes triggered
by the most seemingly innocuous experiences or comments made by others. All
in all, I was well and truly haunted by the fear that terrible confirmation
of my irredeemable inadequacy would ambush me as soon as I let my guard slip
or allowed myself to take credit for any accomplishment.
Yet at the same time I had the feeling of being possessed by an exceptionally
inspiring, creative, knowledgeable, perceptive and empathic spirit, capable
of seeing through the obstructions that everywhere block our human understanding
and enjoyment of the flow of nature. This feeling would fill my heart with
enormous enthusiasm and joy in sharing my experience and learning whenever
I could just let go of my fears and not be painfully reminded of them. If
only I could find a way to bring this feeling more widely into the world,
I dreamt its influence would be transformational and profoundly healing.
But with this dream came also a burdensome feeling of messianic responsibility.
This both distracted me from my family and led me to become increasingly
frustrated by my inability to communicate in a non-esoteric way across the
gap between my rarefied academic experience and a wider public. My supposed
academic giftedness was a real dead weight and obstacle, excluding me from
my human neighbourhood that I so wanted to contribute to and belong within.
How is it that I can combine such feelings of exceptional fallibility and
prowess? Surely these feelings are mutually contradictory? Or do they in
some strange way derive from the same root? Perhaps their presence together
is telling us all something about what it really means to be gifted, each
in our own exceptional way, as different but not isolated individuals pooled
together in the common space of our natural human and non-human neighbourhood.
By the same token it may teach us something about how we can abuse and squander
our giftedness by making objective comparisons and singling out what we judge
to be ‘best’ whilst alienating ‘the rest’ in a futile parody of the grotesque
and evolutionarily unsustainable idea of ‘natural selection’. For the notion
of ‘survival of the fittest’ is a prescription for a concrete Cyberworld
of rigidly defined structure and powerful machines dedicated to fixed objectives,
not a fluid dynamic, evolutionarily creative, ever-transforming world of
the living, loving and dying. It is a diabolical prescription for the concrete
cancer of all kinds of totalitarianism, alluded to by Darwin and embraced
by Hitler as ‘the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life’.
My quest to understand and hopefully heal the seeming contradiction within
myself began with the supposition, in line with much modern thinking, that
my childhood perception was correct: there is indeed something fundamentally
wrong with me. But I had great difficulty identifying what this something
was. Few people would take me seriously, pointing to my seeming successes,
saying how important these were for my career, and thereby making it all
the more difficult for me to own up to my fearfully childish insecurity.
Others perhaps took me too seriously, reinforcing my grounds for doubt and
thereby perhaps contributing to my eventual collapse of faith, withdrawal
and renewal. Though they helped me profoundly in some ways to deepen my insights,
never did any doctor or psychotherapist I consulted, over many years, identify
my trouble in other than such vague terms as ‘stress’, ‘anxiety’ or ‘fragile
self-esteem’.
It wasn’t until I was 54 years old that prompted by some family members I
bought and read a book about ‘obsessive compulsive disorder’ (‘OCD’). It
was no less than a source of revelation, much though I disliked the label
for this condition (‘openly creative disorder’ seems more apt), along with
the idea that it is ‘something wrong’ with individuals that can be ‘controlled’
by anti-empathy drugs (serotonin reuptake inhibitors) and behavioural therapy.
The ‘case studies’ described were all uncannily familiar to me and when I
took the ‘diagnostic test’ in the book, I scored fifty points above the average
(80 points) for those receiving treatment for OCD.
Here, laid bare, were all the fearful thoughts that would have me indulge
in endless, physically exhausting, mind-sapping, deeply embarrassing cycles
of compulsive checking, rumination, avoidance and reassurance-seeking. At
the heart of these thoughts was a profound uncertainty in my own worthiness
and others’ welfare that could all too easily be translated into believing
in the high likelihood of bringing about catastrophe, agony and humiliation.
Not much fun, really. I sought, and eventually received help, by way of ‘cognitive
behavioural therapy’ (CBT), which provided me with some useful coping techniques
and insights into my underlying fears and ‘core beliefs’, as well as much
needed recognition of what I was actually contending with. But it would not
and could not remove the source of my uncertainty and vulnerability. Nor
did the generally held ‘genetic explanation’ of OCD as the result of a deficiency
in brain chemistry help me to understand how my educational experience and
cultural circumstances had contributed to the severity of my fears of catastrophic
failure. Above all, the core belief of the treatment industry (though not
my personal therapist) appeared to be that OCD was my problem, something
wrong with me, which I had to control. In other words, I am held responsible
for my excessive sense of personal responsibility and its attendant anxieties
in an uncertain world and adversarial culture.
Even more recently, my wife, Marion, brought home a book she had come across
by Petruska Clarkson, entitled ‘The Achilles Syndrome - Overcoming the Secret
Fear of Failure’. Reading it proved if anything to be even more of a revelation
than my encounter with the book on OCD. I had already vaguely heard about
and related my experience to what has been called ‘Impostor Syndrome’, but
Clarkson’s book went to my mind further and deeper in identifying a psychological
‘archetype’, epitomized by the myth of Achilles. If ever a character combined
exceptional prowess with exceptional vulnerability arising from a gap in
his upbringing, here is the one. Moreover, this character was not only a
great warrior (and worrier), but also expressed enormous creativity, compassion
and healing power, notwithstanding his early and tragic demise.
Here are seven characteristics of the ‘Achilles Syndrome’, as described by
Clarkson:
1. A mismatch between externally assessed competence or
qualification and internally experienced competence or capability, leading
to feelings of ‘I am a fraud’.
2. Inappropriate anxiety or panic in anticipation of doing
the relevant task.
3. Inappropriate strain or exhaustion after the task.
4. Relief instead of satisfaction on completion of a task.
5. Inability to carry over any sense of achievement to
the next situation.
6. A recurrent conscious or unconscious fear of being found
out, and of shame and humiliation.
7. A longing to tell others about the discomfort but the
fear of being called weak or unstable. This sense of a taboo adds to the
strain, loneliness and discomfort.
In identifying the origin of this syndrome, Clarkson has no hesitation in
pointing to over-expectant forms of upbringing and education in a competitive
culture, which neglect basic lessons and human needs for love and respect
in the quest for fast-tracked superiority. The result is what she calls ‘pseudocompetence’
- apparently advanced skill built on fragile foundations: in another word,
‘bullshit’. This tallies strongly with my own educational experience both
as learner and teacher. How many times as a learner was I told not to concern
myself with elementary questions in order to ‘get on’. How many times did
I actually take short cuts that left huge gaps in my knowledge and understanding?
How many times as a teacher have I found myself expected to encourage learners
to do the same?
There is no doubt in my mind that there is enormous room for doubt in our
competition-based educational establishment, which promulgates pseudocompetence.
The more sensitive amongst us are aware of our pseudocompetence and can suffer
from Achilles Syndrome. The less sensitive assume positions of authority,
which they protect with the utmost zeal against any deep form of enquiry
that might undermine their fragile foundations. And so the façade
sustains itself, cloning students in its own image.
Both OCD and Achilles Syndrome appear typically to be described, explicitly
or implicitly, as unrelated ‘problems’ that need to be overcome by the individuals
concerned. In accordance with conventional rationalistic thinking, which
regards individual identity as a definable product of internal genetic and
external environmental influences (‘nature’ and ‘nurture’, respectively),
the one is seen primarily as a consequence of brain chemistry, the other
as the output of inapt and inept educational practice and/or upbringing.
A hard line is drawn between inner world and outer world, notwithstanding
that there is no modern scientific evidence for the existence of such discrete
boundaries and much evidence to the contrary, implicit in relativity, quantum
mechanics and non-linear theory.
I think it is just this kind of objective rationality, however, which creates
the divisive cultural context that makes the sense of vulnerability underlying
both OCD and Achilles Syndrome seem like something wrong with individuals,
rather than a source of creative solution for global crisis. For there is
no doubt in my mind that the root of this crisis lies in our human propensity
to try to remove doubt from our minds by imposing unrealistic definitions
of ‘is or is not’ upon the fluid dynamic evolutionary geometry of nature.
We embed such definition deep within our philosophical, mathematical, scientific,
linguistic, educational and governmental foundations. We strive to be complete
and perfect individuals who will be preserved (if not pickled!) in the struggle
for life, whilst not appreciating that any form of completion rings the death
knell for evolutionary creativity. We render ourselves mentally into discrete
subjects and objects capable only of transactional, competitive or co-operative
interaction rather than being lovingly receptive and responsive inclusions
of one and another. We don’t recognise that evolutionary perfection can only
be a property of all in dynamic relationship, not one in isolation, and so
try to live out our lives as paradoxical singularities, alienated from our
natural neighbourhood.
In these terms the gaps in our individual make up are not the problem. The
pretence that these gaps can be eliminated or covered up is what makes us
pseudocompetent. We cannot breathe or move or love or live without gaps in
our bodily boundaries. These boundaries are necessarily incomplete, distinct
and dynamic, not discrete and fixed. As William Wordsworth said, in challenge
to Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin’s grandfather, ‘in nature everything is
distinct, yet nothing defined into absolute, independent singleness’. There
is therefore very good intellectual reason for feeling compassionately that
what we might deem in a perfectionist framework to be a flaw in human nature,
our vulnerability and proneness to ‘error’, which comes through the inclusion
of immaterial space in our make-up, is actually vital. It is the source of
our creative spirit. It is an aspect of our nature that enables us to love
and feel love and so work co-creatively in dynamic relational neighbourhood,
celebrating and respecting rather than decrying our diversity of competencies
and appearances.
Perhaps this is why my personal response to my Achilles Heel has been to
develop, with the help of a few like-minded companions, a form of awareness,
which we call ‘inclusionality’. This form of awareness does not replace but
utterly transforms objective rationality into a far deeper and more encompassing
appreciation of all form as flow-form, a dynamic inclusion, not an occupier
of space, which cannot be defined completely in an unfrozen world.
With this awareness, the brute force of ‘natural selection’ or ‘external
creator’ is transformed into the receptive-responsive immanence of ‘natural
inclusion’. The brute ‘to be or not to be’ objective logic of the ‘excluded
middle’ is transformed into the fluid dynamic ‘to be and not to be’ logic
of the ‘included middle’. The brutal, possessive sovereignty of the individual,
‘I alone’, self is transformed into the complex identity of ‘self as neighbourhood’
with both local (particular) and non-local (everywhere) aspects. The brutal
occupation and fractionation of territory is transformed into natural ‘pooled
togetherness’. The brutal exploitation of other by one is transformed into
sustainable attunement of one with other. The brutally imposed ‘box’ of three-dimensional
geometry - with space and time abstracted - is transformed into an infinite,
dynamically nested, ‘holey communion’.
Maybe Achilles Heel is Achilles Heal, our naturally creative solution, a
gap that opens the possibility of agape. You might say I’m a dreamer, but
I’m not the Only One.
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