Be Brave

In the early days of the pandemic, a message often conveyed to the public was: “Don’t panic, prepare.” This message struck me at the time as an odd one given that people do not decide to panic. Panic is, by definition, a state in which deciding and preparing have gone out the window and impulse rules. I wondered if the message was really meant not for the public, but for the person delivering it, who was telling himself not to panic because he was on the verge of doing so, and he was much more comfortable projecting his panic onto others than owning it himself.  The message not to panic is a variant on the famous advice offered US citizens by FDR in 1932: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” The message also felt something like what parents sometimes tell their children when they are afraid: Be brave.

Of course, as intimated in the message, the problem is not with fear, but with that heightened state of fear in which we are disconnected from the best way we have to deal with a threat, which is to think before we act.

Of course, as intimated in the message, the problem is not with fear, but with that heightened state of fear in which we are disconnected from the best way we have to deal with a threat, which is to think before we act. What the child needs from his or her parent, and the nation needs from its leaders, is help in preventing fear from paralyzing the higher-level mental functions we need to cope in a dangerous world. What the child gets is something else: the idea that it is fear itself that is the problem.

If there is nothing to fear but fear itself, fear must be the most fearsome thing. During the pandemic, there has been, I suspect, considerable emotional communication going on of the following message: I am not afraid, I will not change my behavior, I will risk infection if the alternative is to reveal to you the fact that I am afraid. I will not wear a mask because my intent is not to tell people that I am a conscientious citizen committed to protecting myself and my community from a deadly threat, but that I am not afraid, and you are. In other words, the whole event becomes a test of courage; and the more this is the case, the poorer is the community response and the greater the likelihood that the virus will get out of control.

 My hypothesis is that the starting point is the parent telling the child to “be brave,” and the emotional communication embedded in that message. Sending this message tends to equate bravery with fear of being afraid and in doing so impedes access on the part of the child, and the adult the child becomes, to the experience of fear and the protective function fear provides. This is the function of signaling our need to protect ourselves against a real threat. Ignoring important danger signals can lead us to do things that turn out not to be very smart.

Part of the reason the problem arises is that, as I suggest above, the message delivered by the parent is not about the parent being available to help the child manage his or her anxiety, but about the parent using the child to manage the parent’s anxiety. In other words, the message about being brave is part of the intergenerational transmission of an important way of relating to anxiety, a transmission centered on what is referred to in psychoanalysis as “projective identification:” use of communication as a way of provoking or creating an emotional state in others that originates in ourselves. This way of managing anxiety short circuits the process of developing in the individual the capacity to contain anxiety in favor of the use of more primitive modes of response.

The transmission process is set in motion by the child’s fear and the parent’s identification with it. Thus, the more the child’s anxiety provokes anxiety in the parent, the more it provokes the parent to have recourse to the method he or she learned early in life for managing anxiety—being brave—which has now become the problem. When told to be brave we are told that how we really feel—afraid—is something about which we should be ashamed. In other words, telling us to be brave is the way our parents attach shame to fear. Being brave then becomes our way of dealing with the shame that is now attached to fear by making sure that our fear appears in others and not in ourselves.

Don’t panic, be brave” places the burden of dealing with the problem, which has now become not the real problem but the child’s emotional response to it, squarely on the child.

            “Don’t panic, be brave” places the burden of dealing with the problem, which has now become not the real problem but the child’s emotional response to it, squarely on the child. What the child actually needs is the message that there is an adult available who can help the child see that the problem is manageable if you know how to manage it, and that the child is not alone. For adults, and for problems like the one posed by the pandemic, what we need is reassurance that our government and its leaders understand the problem, know what needs to be done, and can help us get through it. We must already be convinced based on past experience that leadership is above all attentive and competent, two qualities in short supply, at least at the national level, during the Trump administration and even now in some parts of the country.

 Courage becomes important in proportion to parental failure. Indeed, courage can be said to signal the fact that, under the most difficult circumstances, we are on our own. This means that displays of courage are meant to convince others, and by convincing them possibly convince ourselves, that we can get along just fine on our own. We don’t need or depend on anyone else. Put simply, “be brave” means “You’re on your own kid.”