We Neurotics
I first read Bernard Basset’s We Neurotics about three years ago, I think, at my husband’s suggestion. A former therapist of his had lent him their copy of the book, and my husband had liked it so much that he photocopied the entire thing. My first reading of We Neurotics was in that Xeroxed form, but I have since obtained a real version—a third edition hardcover printed in 1967. The book’s original copyright is 1962. The subtitle of We Neurotics is “A Handbook for the Halfmad.” Bernard Basset, a London-born Jesuit priest, had a way with subtitles. Some of his other books include Priest in Paradise: With God to Illinois; Best of Both Worlds: A Guide to Holiness in the Suburbs; and Priest in the Presbytery: A Psycho-Ecclesiastical Extravaganza. Much like another Jesuit priest whose ideas I’ve explored on this show — Anthony de Mello — Basset had a great sense of humor, and a frank, engaging style. One need not identify as Christian to enjoy his words.
Basset was born in London on March 21, 1909 (a Pisces like me). Educated at Stonyhurst College and Campion Hall, Oxford, he went on to teach history at both Stonyhurst and Beaumont Colleges. He traveled extensively through North America and Australia on invitations to preach at retreats. For six years Basset was the superior of the first retreat house for men in London and for ten years was the National Director of Sodalities in England. In 1984 he suffered a stroke and lost the use of both legs, an experience he purportedly endured with heroic fortitude, without losing his sense of humor, which has been described as “indomitable.” He died in Oxford on June 13, 1988, at the age of 79.
We Neurotics is the only Bernard Basset book I’ve read. I’m hesitant to read others because I fear they couldn’t possibly be as charming (despite their delightful titles). Written from the perspective of a British “Everyman of the Atomic Age” named Henry Dawes, We Neurotics consists of ten narrative vignettes, each focusing on a certain person whose function, either wittingly or unwittingly, is to teach Henry something about his own neuroses, and how to live more freely. These teachers include a character called The Little Nun (whom we meet twice, in the first and ninth chapters); an eccentric named Miss Copsley-Smith; Henry’s own teenaged son Harry; a French Abbé that Henry encounters on a beach in Cornwall; Henry’s priest, called, simply, the Canon; a dog-fearing, self-effacing co-worker named Ponsonby; Henry’s grown daughter, Celia; a notably amiable and religiously earnest young American man named Buzz; and Nurse Ovaltine, who tends to Henry in the hospital as he recovers from a heart attack, and who encourages him to live in the present moment, “where [his] heartbeats are.”
What instantly endeared me to We Neurotics was its focus on the practice of lying belly-up on the floor, as a form of therapeutic relaxation and prayer. This is the thematic thread connecting all of the book’s vignettes, and it’s the concept I’ll give the most attention to in this blog post. Yes, a blog about lying on the floor! In less detail I will also consider the themes of self-knowledge (getting to know all our different parts, peeling back the layers); the important role that neurosis plays in spiritual liberation; the important role that humor plays in spiritual liberation; and how thinking — or more specifically, over-thinking, especially about ourselves — is perhaps the greatest threat to our sanity. The mind can be a real tyrant.
=
I myself have a had a nightly habit of lying on the floor for at least ten years now — long before I ever encountered the book We Neurotics. Every evening, after my shower, I roll out the yoga mat and, after doing a few poses (Child’s Pose, Downward Dog, Plank, Cobra, supine twist, Thread the Eye of the Needle, a.k.a. Reclined Pigeon) and a little bit of ab work, I stretch my body out long and rest. The ground is what this blood knows, to quote the musician Cold Specks. (I realize she was singing about death in that song, but I also think her words apply to living rest, too.) And there’s just something about lying on the floor that feels like more of a surrender than lying on a bed or sofa. You can feel the full weight of yourself better, all the bones of you. No blankets or pillows to blur the lines of where you end and something else begins. You are just there in all of your stark, aching realness, straight-spined for perhaps the first time all day, chest unprotected by shoulders curving in, tender belly exposed.
These nightly moments of surrender are also often moments of reckoning with my own neuroses. All the worrisome thoughts that the day’s activities and responsibilities have kept at bay now rise to the surface of consciousness, start splashing around, and try to pull me under. I guess they’ve actually been trying to pull me under all day but I just wasn’t aware of it. And now that I am aware, I can use my self-compassion skills to stay afloat in a more mindful way. Sometimes the silent repetition of the loving-kindness mantra — May I be safe, may I be happy, may I be healthy, may I live with ease — does the trick. Other times, an even simpler refrain of “this is how it feels to be alive right now” — or even more simply, “this, too” — is the most I can muster.
Henry Dawes, the fictional, everyman narrator of Bernard Basset’s 1962 book, We Neurotics: A Handbook for the Halfmad, develops his own tricks — with the help of some mentors — for calming his monkey mind. The book begins with a chapter called “Enter the Little Nun,” in which our hero reflects on an encounter from twenty years earlier, when he identified as a neurotic. By this he means that he can never escape from himself, that he struggles with “a thousand, pitiful panics and pretenses hidden behind a middle-class facade.” His symptoms have included, among others, “swallowing, blinking, scruples, drink, mysticism, lack of confidence, over confidence, fear of cancer, death and God.”
The cure to Henry’s neuroses comes in the guise of a “quaint little nun,” whom he meets by chance after giving a lecture on history books for “backward children” (again, this was written in 1962), while his mind strains to suppress the fear that he has stomach ulcers that are going to burst at any second. The Little Nun approaches him after his lecture with a few follow-up questions, and then Henry, inexplicably trusting her face, finds himself telling her about his nervous worries.
After assuring him that the soul’s contact with the body differs from one person to the next — that all people are “abnormal,” in other words, and thank goodness for that because how disturbing would it be to meet someone exactly like ourselves? — The Little Nun defies Henry’s expectation and does not exhort him, as so many others have, to pray about his neuroses. She says that in his situation, prayer could actually be harmful, because it would just be another way of thinking about himself. She tells him to eschew prayer of any kind for a month and to focus instead on relaxation. She lends him a book that she always carries with her called Relaxation in Everyday Life, and makes him promise to read the entire thing, saying that “God Himself is not at His best till we are relaxed.”
I love the idea of God not being at His best. Isn’t always being at His best what God does? Not according to The Little Nun.
Henry reads the relaxation book immediately and, despite various misgivings, follows its instructions. He lies on the floor, on his back, for forty minutes a day, and engages himself in what we would today call progressive muscle relaxation, starting at his toes and working his way up the body. Henry is especially attentive to the chest area, which the book authors say “always proves refractory and must be persuaded to let go.” With the entire body thusly relaxed, Henry lies still for forty whole minutes (I usually only do about ten myself, maybe twenty at the end of an especially hard day) and imagines himself strolling through green, luscious fields. After three weeks of daily practice, he is able to access those fields almost instantly.
This practice helps Henry realize that most people lose the aptitude for such true relaxation when they are children and they encounter their first television screen. As adults they adopt ways of relaxing that are “often more nervously exhausting than our work,” citing golf as just one example. If We Neurotics were written in the 21st century, we could cite many other technology-based examples. Henry realizes that The Little Nun was right about muscular tension impeding spiritual effort, and he comes to agree that “God is not at His best while we are tense.” This idea reminds me of a quote that one of my favorite YouTube yoga teachers, Michelle Goldstein, once shared in a video. She attributed these words to Robert K. Johnston: “Prayer does not consist of our catching God’s attention, but rather in our allowing God to hold our attention.”
=
After awhile, Henry begins to tire of imagining himself walking through green fields, and he wonders if there’s something more he could be getting out of his relaxation practice.
He receives guidance from a Miss Copsley-Smith, an eccentric, vigorous, middle-aged woman who is a fellow member of Henry’s church and who is known for practicing more esoteric kinds of religious devotion, and for using her eyebrows more than she uses verbs. Henry and his wife occasionally have dinner at her “delightful little flat,” which he describes as “half antique shop and half slum.” One evening while Henry is there by himself, accepting Miss Copsley-Smith’s offer of a friendly drink, he tells her about lying on the floor, or the “prayer of relaxation.” Apparently she herself had learned the trick as a little girl, while in India, and she begins to tell Henry about the three layers in prayer.
The first layer of the self that Miss Copsley-Smith addresses is one’s public persona, all the parts we play when interacting with the world around us. The second layer is the person one is when alone, without an audience. And the third layer is the “dark, uncharted place deep down inside us from which all our desires, motives, ambitions spring.” This is also the place where neuroses develop. Miss Copsley-Smith locates it in the heart, but acknowledges that for Henry it might be somewhere else. Regardless of where it is, if Henry doesn’t find it, she says that all his floor-lying will be a waste of time. He must get to know the “person who has been talking to himself since the age of four… The capital I with whom [he’s] been having a ceaseless conversation for so long.”
Miss Copsley-Smith urges Henry to be honest with himself and admit that there is a great longing at the center of his being, “a yearning which is never satisfied.” She compares her own soul to a dog “padding along with its tongue on the pavement.” And where prayer is concerned, she compares her own body to a cardboard model of the human form that doctors and nurses use in their training, which allows them to peel back literal layers and flaps, progressively revealing the deeper anatomical structures and organs. In a similar way, Miss Copsley-Smith prays by opening herself up one layer at a time, starting with her public personae, then moving down to her private self alone in her room with no one watching, and finally to her heart, the figurative flaps of which she lifts to reveal that central longing. “I sit or lie down and being very liturgical, I say inside: ‘Take a peep O Lord.’”
When Henry asks Miss Copsley-Smith, “What if, at the center of your heart, you doubt if there is a God?”, she says that it’s a question he must work out for himself. For her, though, there hasn’t seemed to be much of a choice. There’s either an “unexplained, ceaseless, empty craving or God Himself.” And I do think it makes sense that God would feel like an ineffable, endless yearning, when I think about God as being, not a patriarch who resides in the clouds, but the source of all creation, which of course is what we’re all made of, and of course any intentional creation begins with the longing to create. In this sense, we are made of desire.
“Life finds a way,” to quote Jeff Goldblum’s character in Jurassic Park. Maybe that longing at the center of our souls is the actual sensation of life looking for a way to become more of itself.
Also, I can’t think of a better prayer than “Take a peep O Lord.”
=
In the chapter titled “Translated from the French” Henry and his family have taken a trip to Cornwall, and there on the beach they meet the Abbé Delpierre, dressed in a black suit two sizes too big, with a group of ten school-aged boys who have come to England for the summer to practice their English. The Abbé himself speaks English perfectly. (An abbé, by the way, is an abbot, which is the title for a lower-level Catholic clergyman.) Henry’s wife Margery offers Delpierre some wine, and he accepts it, drinking straight from the bottle. Cigarettes are rolled and furiously smoked. Henry tells the Abbé about his habit of lying on the floor, and they start talking about neuroses, which Delpierre asserts are “always the beginning, never the end.” He cites St Teresa of Avila, St Teresa of Lisieux, St Francis de Sales, St Margaret Mary, St Ignatius of Loyola, and others as examples of people who displayed what we would call neurotic symptoms at the start of their quests for God.
The Abbé Delpierre defines neurosis as “suppressed ambition, a state of worry because we are so anxious to succeed.” He also says that it is easy to be neurotic. The more self-centered one is, the more neurotic; the more neurotic, the more self-centered. He says that neurosis is the result of people leading double lives, being duplicitous in some way, trying to serve two masters at once. He says, “The center of our hearts is double and the conflict is painful indeed.” (I think Delpierre and J. Krishnamurti would get along well.) However, if one can admit to oneself the extent of one’s self-centeredness, no longer trying to hide it from oneself or, like Adam and Eve, from God, then all fear of being outed will vanish. And with less fear we are more likely to succeed in the ways that will feed us most — that is, in spiritual ways.
An example from my own life comes to mind. One of my most significant neuroses has to do with my dogs, Tyke and Tina. I worry about them all the time. My dog Birdie died three years ago, somewhat suddenly in my bedroom, and now I’m just basically always afraid that Tyke and Tina are going to die suddenly, too. But worrying about them is a self-centered act. In no way whatsoever does my worry serve them. It serves to protect my traumatized little ego, helping it to feel prepared for whatever awfulness could occur, and to do whatever it can to prevent said awfulness. Meanwhile, instead of giving my precious attention to pointless worry, I could be giving it to something much bigger, indeed something much more worthy of my precious attention. Some people might call that thing God. I like to think of it as my Best Self, or what Marcus Aurelius would call my True Nature.
Delpierre’s definition of neurosis as “suppressed ambition” makes perfect sense in this light. Deep down we know that we are miraculous beings, and we long to contact that elemental, unnameable stuff within us. But as human beings we exist on a liminal plane, torn between serving the God within and serving the gods of the material world and all the fears that world imparts, including the fear of losing whatever we’ve become attached to. Like our dogs. Framing my dog-related neurosis as self-centered — in service of my ego’s protection and nothing more — is actually really helpful. I can see, at least a little bit here to start, the absurdity in that kind of worry. I can even see the possibility of my one day being able to laugh at myself for so spectacularly missing the point.
There’s a chapter in We Neurotics called “Our Mr Ponsonby” that begins with a delightful musing on humor. I can only do the first paragraph any justice by quoting it in full: “Does God ever smile? True, there are few mentions of His mirth in the Sacred Scriptures but could He invite us to call Him Father if He lacked that most winning of all gifts which He has given to His sons? A man without a sense of humor is to be avoided and a God who is not amused by the antics of His children could scarcely be the Father of a happy home.”
I’ll repeat that last part: “A God who is not amused by the antics of His children could scarcely be the Father of a happy home.”
Basset goes on to write, in the voice of his narrator Henry, that surely nothing gives God more pleasure than a person who can laugh at himself. I think that must be true — true of any God I’d want to believe in, anyway — because it relates back to the concept of self-centeredness. A person who can laugh at herself is not a slave to her ego, can separate from her own personality, at least sometimes, and see it for how silly it is. Not to mention what a gift laughter is in general—and what a strange phenomenon, if you think about it! We hear and/or see something that amuses us, something that lights up the humor centers in our brain, and we lose control of our bodies. It is our breath, essentially, that changes. A smooth, slow pattern of inhalations and exhalations suddenly becomes something entirely other. And if we are not controlling that process, who is? Maybe it’s God? He wants us to be happy, right?
The same reasoning could be applied to sex. In We Neurotics, in a chapter called “To Heaven with Buzz,” Henry refers to sex as “life’s most lovely virtue,” which plays a “noble and vital part in our happiness.” He also acknowledges, though, that sex and neurosis are invariably linked. I like to think that most societies have come a long way in this department since 1962, when Bernard Basset was writing, but I think we have an even longer way to go. I don’t doubt that a large majority of children being raised today have been given the message — either explicitly or implicitly — that sex is a naughty thing. And when something pleasurable — or in the case of sex, something potentially ecstatic and transcendent — is combined with guilt and shame, major neuroses develop, indeed! Henry sums it up nicely when he says that “the God who loves me is the God who thought out that tenderness which we call sex” — and, I’ll add, that paroxysm which we call laughter.
=
The last part of We Neurotics that I’d like to address, has to do with Henry’s second and final encounter with The Little Nun. Ten years after their first meeting, he happens upon her at Euston Station, where she’s waiting for a train. They engage in some small talk at first, and then the conversation turns to God. The Little Nun is pleased to see that the relaxation prayer she taught Henry so long ago has obviously done him good. She shares with him what else she has learned about prayer since teaching him about lying on the floor: that it’s best not to think too much. Why think about God when you can actually be with Him? She references a line from Elizabeth Barrett Browning (though she does not mention her name; I had to google it), who wrote, in her Sonnet 29, “I will not have my thoughts instead of thee.” The poem ends with the line, “I do not think of thee—I am too near thee.”
The human tendency to overthink things has definitely contributed to what The Little Nun calls “religious mania” or “lunacy.” “We go mad,” she says, “over the very cure that should set us free.” It is the result of us thinking too much about a totally misguided notion of who and what God is, and of how Christ wanted us to live. Which is to say, he wanted us to “find our holiness in the ordinary duties of daily life.” He was totally free of neuroses, because of his profound understanding — and therefore love of — God. The Little Nun wonders how such a sane man could give rise to so many “crazy parodies.” Christians should be judged as such, she says, based on how sane they are, not by their “multiplicity of odd devotions.” They should be judged not on how much they think about God, but by…wait for it…how they treat their neighbors. The more a person loves God and emulates Christ, the less he thinks of himself, and therefore the more he considers others.
In an older blog post, I explored some of the ideas presented in the book Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing. In that wonderful book, A.S. Neill attributes most of the world’s evils to the fact that children are not given enough time and space to play, to really be children. The Little Nun attributes them to our general lack of ability to control our thoughts, and she wishes that instead of spending so much time on teaching children doctrine, we teach them how to better wrangle their own minds. She can think of no tyranny greater or crueler than that of a mind that won’t stop thinking certain dark thoughts. When she meets people thusly afflicted, she reminds them that the mind can only entertain one thought at a time, and exhorts them to have some other, more pleasant thought at the ready, which can swoop in when they dismiss the unwanted one. She says that in constantly entertaining the same troubling thoughts, we are not only making ourselves mad, but selfish.
Of course, The Little Nun is not suggesting that we all become people pleasers and deny the existence of our own needs for safety, connection, and a fair amount of comfort. She is referring to the self-centered thoughts that bring us discomfort, that sever our connections to others, and that welcome danger into our beings, when more often than not it should only be an external phenomenon. She is considering the function of worrisome thoughts — namely, to keep us focused on ourselves — and pays less mind to their causes — which are probably some form of trauma. She might agree with the Abbé Delpierre, who decried neurosis as a label that pathologizes “a state of uncertainty and hesitation which all other ages took in their stride.” While I think it can be deeply validating and healing for a person to acknowledge that trauma has occurred in her life, and to give a name to whatever neuroses might have resulted (“name it to tame it,” as Dan Siegel says), I also know that people can get snagged on labels, and can over-identify with them. So the trick is to find the balance of taking things in stride while also honoring what has happened to us and how we’ve been affected.
We Neurotics was written before spiritual bypassing was a concept, first introduced in the early 1980s by Buddhist psychotherapist John Welwood. Spiritual bypassing is basically the "tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks.” No amount of lying on the floor, for instance, could heal whatever such unresolved issues Henry might be manifesting as a fear of stomach ulcers. He never mentions his childhood except to say that he once intentionally lost his shoe in a school track race because he knew he had no chance of winning and needed some concrete excuse for losing. For all we know, he’d endured many traumas growing up, and he needed to talk about them, not just try to relax. Telling a traumatized nervous system to simply calm down just doesn’t work; and if it does, it’s not for long. People with unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks (most people?) should absolutely 100% still lie on the floor every day, but they should probably also be in some sort of therapy or counseling, lest their relaxation practice be just another form of avoidance.
We do enough of that, don’t we? As a species? How much better off might we all be — and therefore the world at large — if we practiced true relaxation on a daily basis? And I don’t mean watching Netflix, playing video games, scrolling through Instagram, or even reading a book. I mean just lying there, feeling our own aliveness and witnessing our breath. To lie on the floor with the intention to simply practice being at ease with being present, is ultimately a practice in how to love. I think it’s even more important than exercise, for overall health and well-being.
I hope you’ve enjoyed learning about the spiritual benefits of lying on the floor, of not thinking too much, and of having a sense of humor about yourself. But even more than that, I hope you won’t take my word for it, or Bernard Basset’s. The only way to know if something works for you is to give it a try.
