“Purely a social call,” said Irene as she put her head round Dr Fairbairn’s door. “I was passing by, you see, and they said downstairs that you had no patients until twelve o’clock. So I thought . . .”
Dr Hugo Fairbairn, seated behind his desk and absorbed, until then, in an unbound copy of The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, greeted her warmly.
“But there’s no need to justify yourself,” he said. “Not that you entered apologetically, of course. You’re not one of those people who announces themselves with: ‘It’s only me’.”
Irene slipped, uninvited, into the chair in front of the psychotherapist’s desk. “But does anybody really say that?” she asked.
Dr Fairbairn nodded. “They certainly do. And it shows a fairly profound lack of self-esteem. If one says: ‘It’s me’, then one is merely stating a fact. It is, indeed, you. But if you qualify it by saying that it’s only you, then you’re saying that it could be somebody more significant. Wouldn’t you agree?”
Irene did agree. She agreed with most of Dr Fairbairn’s pronouncements, and wished, in fact, that she herself had made them.
“You see,” went on Dr Fairbairn, “how we announce ourselves is very revealing. J.M. Barrie, you know, used to enter his mother’s room saying: ‘It’s not him, it’s me’. He was referring, of course, to David, his brother who died. And that shaped, and indeed explained, everything about his later life. All the psychopathology. The creation of Peter Pan. Everything.”
“Very sad,” said Irene.
“Yes,” said Dr Fairbairn. “Very. And then there’s the interesting question of those who use the third person about themselves.”
“Oh,” said Irene, vaguely. It occurred to her that she used the third person on occasion when talking to Bertie. She said things such as: “Mummy is watching, Bertie. Mummy is watching Bertie very closely.” That was using the third person, 244 The Third Person
was it not? In fact, it was a double use of the third person; first (I, mother figure) became third, as did second (you, son). What did this reveal about Irene? she asked herself. No, deliberate play; what does that reveal about me?
“Yes,” said Dr Fairbairn. “I knew somebody once who did this all the time. He was called George, and he said things like:
‘George is very much hoping to see you tomorrow.’ Or: ‘George had a very good time yesterday.’ It was very strange.”
“Why did he do it?” Irene asked.
Dr Fairbairn looked up at the ceiling, which was a sign, Irene had noted, of an impending insight. “It’s a form of dissociative splitting of the self,” he said. “Or that’s what it is in the most extreme cases. It’s as if a decision has been taken that there are two persons – the person whose actions and thoughts are reported and the person who does the reporting. So if you’re George and you say that George has done something, then it’s as if you’re speaking from the perspective of another person altogether, an observer.”
Irene thought about that for a moment. “I can see that,” she said. “But this self-bifurcation?”
Dr Fairbairn leaned forward and made an emphatic gesture with his right hand. “Ah!” he said. “Two possibilities. One is that it’s a defensive withdrawal from a threatening social reality.
I don’t like what I see in the world and so I stand back for a while and let the alter ego get on with it. I take a breather, so to speak.”
“And the other possibility?” asked Irene.
“Smugness,” said Dr Fairbairn. “Have you noticed something about the people who do it? Well, I have. They’re often smug.”
Irene hesitated. She had been about to say that she sometimes referred to herself in the third person when talking to Bertie, but she was going to suggest that it was different with children. Adults spoke to children in the third person because it provided the child with a key to the understanding of a social world which would otherwise be too subjective. The extraction of the subjective element in the situation conveyed to the child the understanding that the social world involved impersonal, The Third Person 245
objectified transactions between people. In other words, we were all role players, and the child may as well get used to that fact.
That was what she was going to say, but she could not say it now. Smug? Was she smug? Of course not.
Dr Fairbairn leaned back in his chair, pulling at the cuffs of his blue linen jacket. “Smugness is a very interesting concept,”
he said slowly. “You may know that there’s a fascinating literature on it. Not a very extensive one, but very, very interesting.”
He reached for the journal which he had been reading when Irene entered the room. “Right here,” he said. “As it happens.
Much of this issue is devoted to the topic. Fascinating stuff.”
Irene listened attentively. She knew that it was disloyal, but she could not help but compare Dr Fairbairn with Stuart. The worlds of the two men were surely about as different as one could imagine. Indeed, there were so few men like Dr Fairbairn
– so few men who could talk with such ease and insight about matters such as these. It was like being with an artist who simply saw the world in a different way; saw colours and shades that others just did not see. Proust must have been like that too. He saw everything, and then everything behind everything. Behind the simplest thing, even inanimate objects, there was a wealth of associations that only somebody like Proust could see. So it was with Dr Fairbairn, and for a moment it made Irene feel a great sense of regret. Had she married somebody like this, then her daily lot would have been so different. She would have been able to explore the world with him in a way in which she would never be able to do with Stuart. Stuart lived in a world of statistics and brute facts. Dr Fairbairn inhabited a realm of emotions and human possibilities. They were so utterly different – two sides of a mountain range, she thought, and I am on the wrong one.
She told herself that she should not waste these precious minutes with Dr Fairbairn in thinking about what might be, but which was not. So she said to him: “Do tell me about smugness.”
79. Smugness Explained
“Have you ever encountered a really smug person?” asked Dr Fairbairn, fixing his gaze on Irene as she sat before him in his consulting room. Not that this was a consultation; this was a conversation, and a rather enjoyable one, with no therapeutic purpose.
Irene thought for a moment. Who, in her circle, was smug?
But then, she thought, do I really have a circle? She was not at all sure that she did.
“Plenty,” she said. “This city is full of smug people. Always has been.”
Dr Fairbairn laughed. “Of course it is,” he said. “But can you think of anybody in particular?”
Irene’s mind had now alighted on one or two examples. Yes, he was smug all right. And as for her . . . “Well, there’s a certain facial expression,” began Irene.
Dr Fairbairn cut her short. “There might be, but not always.
If there is, it’s the expression of oral satiety. The smug person has what he really wants, the good object, which is the . . . Of course, you know all about that. So he has it and he feels utterly fulfilled. He isn’t really interested in anything else – not really.
That’s why smug people never talk about you – they talk about themselves. Have you noticed that?”
Irene had. She was now thinking of a cousin of hers, a man whom it had never occurred to her to label as smug, but that is what he was. He was insufferably smug, now that one came to think about it. And it was quite true; when they met, which was relatively infrequently, he never once asked her about herself but spoke only of himself and his plans.
“I have a cousin,” she said. “He’s extremely smug.” She paused. “And do you know, he makes me want to prick him with a pin. Yes, I have this terrible pin urge.”