Back in my social work days, I was often involved in the placement of children in foster-homes who were from abusive, neglectful or otherwise messed-up backgrounds. Such children are often difficult to look after: closed off, self-destuctive, prone to challenging behaviours. If you didn’t know better, you might think that all their carers had to do was to provide whatever was missing from their own families -love, stability, safety, boundaries- and those children would cease to be sad and difficult, just as a hungry person ceases to be hungry when given food. But in fact closed off and challenging children tend to remain so for many years and few, if any, completely get over early traumas.
I have some personal experience to draw on as well as professional. My own childhood was nothing like as bad as many I encountered in my professional life, but it was not a very happy one all the same, and I often felt profoundly alone and unseen. I am in my late sixties now. I have many kind, warm friends, a lovely wife, grownup children and small grandchildren who I love and who love me – all things that once seemed frighteningly beyond my reach – yet I still often feel myself inside to be that lonely, isolated child. My subjective experience, a lot of the time, is that I still lack things that I do objectively possess. In fact, you could almost call this my resting state, the place I end up if I don’t do something to avoid it.
I read somewhere about a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps who would sometimes burst into tears when presented with a meal. No amount of food could take away the memory of starving.
One thing that has helped me to think about this is a story by Philip K. Dick. His own childhood was unhappy, and he had many problems in his adult life, including drug addiction and an inability to sustain relationships with women. The story is called ‘I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon’ (though it was originally published under the equally appropriate title of ‘Frozen Journey’), and it’s sufficiently important to me that I once wrote a whole 20,000-word dissertation on it for an MA in English Studies.
The story is about a man called Victor Kemmings who is one of the passengers being carried in cryogenic suspension in coffin-like boxes on a ten-year journey to a new planet. When the journey is underway, the starship, which is very intelligent, realises that, due to some malfunction in the cryonic storage system, Victor is not completely unconscious. There’s no air in the ship, though, so he must stay inside his box for ten years, with nothing to do and no one to talk to except the ship itself.
The ship can see that, unless something is done about this, Victor will be completely insane by the time they reach their destination, so it hits on the idea of drawing on his own memories: it will fill up his time by getting him to relive his past. But when the ship tries this, all that comes up for Victor are episodes full of loneliness and shame. (Small children who are isolated, and have no one to help them understand their own experience, have no recourse but to fall back on their own pre-rational way of explaining things, and often imagine themselves to be responsible for all sorts of bad things – the story evokes this very vividly.) Memories from Victor’s adult life are also full of fear and insecurity: houses that crumble, relationships that fall apart, treasured possessions that turn out not to be real…
Realising that memories aren’t going to help, the ship comes up with another idea. Instead of getting Victor to inhabit his past, it will get him to live out his future arrival on the destination planet. This- sort of- works, but only up to a point. Victor does imagine arriving on the planet, emerging from the ship, making a start on his life there, but pretty soon he starts to see through the illusion, and then he’s alone on the ship once again. However the ship is out of ideas now, so all it can do is keep replaying Victor’s arrival over and over, going back to the beginning each time Victor starts to become aware of the illusion. It’s not ideal, but it prevents him from completely losing his mind.
When the ship finally reaches his destination, Victor is greeted by his ex-wife, who the ship has contacted, and who it seems is willing to give their relationship another go. They go to a hotel, they make a start on a new life, but almost immediately Victor begins to have doubts. He’s been through this scenario so many thousands of times, and it’s always turned out to be an illusion. He simply can’t believe that this time he really has arrived.
That’s the story. But you can find the same theme in pretty much everything Dick wrote: anxieties about whether what appears to be real is real in fact, and how you tell the real from the fake – the androids and artificial animals in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the drug-induced delusions of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, the precious but possibly inauthentic artifacts in The Man in the High Castle, the idea, found in so many of his books, that this entire world is in fact a delusion, a kind of malevolent trick. And you can see it in his own life too. Dick was married five times, and talked about the way that, in every relationship, his partner seemed at first to be the loving mother he had always longed for, and ended up turning into the scary, distant mother he actually had.
Constantly feeling that what you have isn’t real can lead to a very unstable life -and a lot of hurt for other people- as your inclination is to abandon what you’ve already found and search obsessively for something better. The only way out of the cycle is to learn to live with your doubts, and stop picking and poking away at your life as Victor Kemmings does, searching for the flaws that will make it fall apart. This can be very hard work if you have to do it day in day out. It also has its own drawbacks, since, if you disregard all your own doubts, you may settle too easily for something that really isn’t the best that you could do. So you have to try to distinguish different kinds of doubt, all of which may seem subjectively to be equally real.
Although this is particularly hard for people with very traumatic episodes in their past, I’m guessing that, to some extent at least, it’s a challenge for almost everyone.
