Lyudmila Petranovskaya: About Life In A Spacesuit

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

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We were forbidden to scream during childbirth and treated our teeth with an old drill. We had to stand still on the ruler and be sure to go to the kindergarten. We talk with psychologist Lyudmila Petranovskaya about life in a "spacesuit" that protects from feelings and emotions, and what to do with it now.

Born in the USSR

Street cafes and seaside vacations, complaints about long flight connections and open Wi-Fi, 24-hour supermarkets and express delivery - it would seem that nothing in our life is left of the Soviet way of life. How long have we known by heart the opening hours and, especially, lunch breaks in all the next "grocery" and "manufactured goods"? And you had to stand in line there twice - first at the cashier, and then at the department, in order to receive the goods by check. And how to describe to today's children the degree of trouble hidden in the shout of the saleswoman: "Do not break through fermented baked milk and Vologda butter!"

The world around us continues to change rapidly. However, people do not change so quickly. Having mastered outwardly new skills, we carry with us the baggage of old ideas. As a result, a special phenomenon arises - a person of the old school, thrown out by life into a completely new, unfamiliar environment for him.

About the phenomenon of the Soviet person in the post-Soviet era - we would like to talk in the near future, to trace how our life has changed in various areas - from understanding history to the construction and design of apartments, from psychology to the manner of dressing, from school education - to the oddities of modern advertising. We will try to especially highlight and highlight those features of the thinking and behavior of modern people, which were influenced by their past Soviet experience.

Country of "heroes"

- Lyudmila Vladimirovna, in the USSR it was not customary to turn to psychologists. Many did not even know what kind of specialist he was and what he was doing. What are the consequences of this situation we are now seeing?

Lyudmila Petranovskaya:

- There is a deeper question here than just the lack of available psychologists. In the USSR, the right of a person to have problems of an intangible nature was denied. By Soviet standards, even if you are sick, you have to grit your teeth, smile, say: “Comrades, everything is fine with me,” and go to the machine. But this is not so bad.

All psychological problems like: "I am sad, I feel bad, I am afraid to ride in the elevator, anxiety attacks roll over," - caused a reaction like: "What are you doing, pull yourself together!" A person had no right to have such problems.

Naturally, when you have no right to have a problem, it does not occur to you how it should be solved, where to go with it. In fact, we had both psychologists and psychotherapists, sometimes even in polyclinics, within walking distance. After all, many psychological problems - like anxiety disorders or light-dependent depression - could be handled just fine by a neuropathologist. But they simply did not go to these specialists, except perhaps with sciatica. Even now, people sometimes respond to advice to see a doctor: "How can I go to a neurologist and say that I am afraid of something unknown at night?"

At the same time, one must understand that a person's endurance is limited. Therefore, not everyone is kept within the heroic framework. Traditional psychotherapy began, such as a bottle of vodka or latent suicidal behavior such as driving fast.

By and large, the romantic of the 60s and 70s - all these climbers, kayakers - this is also a story about how to relieve everyday depression, ordinary anxiety or even an existential crisis. And to remove it simply by adrenaline emissions, as if by real existence.

- What problems does a "heroic" stereotype of behavior threaten a person with?

- A kind of "ban on vulnerability" appears. "I'm fine" means "I'm invulnerable, nothing will happen to me, it can't be", "you won't hurt me in any way, you won't hurt me."It's like an artificially put on psychological spacesuit.

Well, and a spacesuit - it is a spacesuit. If you put it on, you will definitely not get scratched and you will not be bitten by a mosquito. But at the same time you do not feel the wind blowing on your skin, the smell of flowers, you cannot walk with someone holding a hand, and so on. This is the numbness of the senses and the loss of full contact with the world.

Therefore, in the 90s, we began to have a general interest in yogis, qi-gong, all kinds of oriental practices, including sexual ones. For people, it was a way to feel alive, to pierce a spacesuit and come into contact with the world. Just feel: “I am! I'm alive, warm! Because when you sit in a spacesuit all the time, you start to doubt it.

The very fact that a person is alive and feels was not obvious in our culture. Even our medicine was built on the prohibition of feeling - when, for example, children at school were forcibly treated with an old drill or women in childbirth were forbidden to scream. Such attitudes can in fact be briefly translated: "Don't feel!"

"Why is your child alive?"

- Did the Soviet person pass on this attitude further in communication?

- Naturally, I did. If, among the non-sentient, someone suddenly turned up feeling, he was perceived by those around him as a challenge, as a terrible reminder of what they were all deprived of. And they immediately began to persecute him so that he would not dare to be alive.

For example, the notorious favorite claim of primary school teachers: "Why didn't your child go to kindergarten?" - she is actually about this: “Why is your child not poisoned, not frozen, without a spacesuit? Why does he cry when he is upset, laughs when he is having fun, asks when he is interested?"

It's not even that you can react only on command. It's just that the teachers in our school themselves endure so much humiliating and so learn to cut off feelings that a living child infuriates them.

It’s like showing a man in a case, whose case has already grown to his skin, showing him warm and naked - this is a disgrace! Such a child simply walks in front of the teacher and reminds him of everything that he himself is deprived of. In fact, this is the hatred of the wrongly killed for the living. This is a reminder of the enormous pain that the person has repressed and does not want to think about it.

In communication, this feeling manifests itself in the form of intolerance of someone's vulnerability, in the form of hatred of any otherness. The popular belief is that you must either portray emotions in a ritual fashion, or you must not have them at all.

What to talk about with neighbors in the elevator

- That is, in the understanding of a Soviet person, emotions should be ritual?

- There is nothing wrong with this phenomenon in itself - it greatly saves psychic energy. Take the British for example, their emotions are very ritualized: you have to smile, talk about the beautiful weather … We usually laugh at such situations as forced. But in fact, if you have a ready-made model of how to react, then at this moment you do not need to turn on your head, internally you are free for some other thoughts, for example.

By the way, this is also one of the phenomena of the USSR. The structure of communication that existed before this was destroyed, the Soviet government mixed up all social strata and canceled rituals. We tried to come up with some Soviet ways of expressing emotions, when it was necessary to say on every occasion that “we will unite”, that “the team must not be let down,” that is, in fact, again to voice all the metaphors of “putting on a spacesuit”. But several decades of Soviet power for the addition of rituals is too short a period, nothing. And it was felt that these scenarios … not environmentally friendly, or something. Psychological mobilization methods work in stressful situations - for example, during a war. Well, you can hold out like that for five years, but it's impossible for a long time - the psyche must somehow relieve tension.

And when there are no rituals, then a lot of psychic energy is spent on standard situations. For example, when you find out that a friend's relative has died, you feel confused because there are no ready-made forms of what to do. In addition to normal sympathy, should there be some action - call or write? Immediately or the next day? What to say and in what words? Offering money - not offering? Or help? In what situations to go to the funeral, in what - to the commemoration? In our society, all this is not spelled out and people have to think about such things anew every time.

It's even easier - what to talk about with a neighbor in an elevator - on this topic, and even then there are no ready-made cultural matrices that you reproduce, not including your head. And as a result, the exchange of signs "we treat each other well, communication is safe" does not happen in such a way that you do not give your best emotionally. And so it turns out: when we meet with a neighbor in the elevator, we avert our eyes, start taking out the phone, looking at the clock … Because the time of this meeting must be somehow experienced.

- That is, the coldness and closeness, which many mark as a characteristic feature of our people, is simply a consequence of the absence of stereotypes?

- Well yes. In the summer I was in Bulgaria. There, if you enter the store and do not greet the seller, he immediately switches to Russian.

Of course, everything has its pros and cons. On the one hand, the duty exchange of phrases about the weather and mutual smiles with people who are indifferent to you is annoying, but, on the other hand, it is the economy of effort and the structuring of social acts. In this sense, we are very lost.

Modern trends: from pathos to cynicism

- What psychological manifestations have arisen in the last twenty years, after the collapse of the USSR?

- Demonstration of heroic feelings has become indecent. It is much more popular now to fall to the other extreme, like cynicism. Now anyone who says some pretentious things is perceived as an idiot or a liar. In fact, this is also not good, because pathos is a normal part of life, part of the emotional spectrum. But after poisoning with it in the Soviet years, in our public consciousness, it is completely taboo.

In our country, it is only fitting for a fan in a greatly altered state of consciousness and a history of three liters of beer to experience the elation of raising the Russian flag. And, for example, Americans consider it normal to react this way from morning and with a fresh mind.

- What has been happening in recent years in psychological practice?

- The research school of psychology, especially in terms of age-related problems, has emerged. But psychotherapy is called a very different thing, and sometimes, bumping into unprofessionalism in this area, people get additional problems.

Many, turning to psychologists, were disappointed and say: “I don’t go to psychologists, not because I have no problems. It's just that they're all idiots. Sometimes this is a defensive reaction, and someone really could stumble upon both disrespectful communication and outright stupidity.

But, at least in some big cities, the taboo on admitting their psychological problems is gradually disappearing among the educated part of the population. People begin to turn to specialists with family conflicts, with personal problems. It would be nice now to form a normal system of psychotherapeutic education in Russia so that people get what they need.