CHAPTER 1

Strokes

What is a Stroke?

People give and receive strokes from each other every time they do or sayanything that acknowledges the other's presence. Any intentionalbody contact made with another person is a stroke, but so, too,are words and many other symbols that show we are aware of theother person. Thus a smile, a frown, a telephone call, aninvitation, a thank-you note, or a threat are all received asstrokes, as well as pats on the arm, smacks, kisses or kicks.Strokes vary in their intensity and value, from the most highlypraised 'I love you' to the very slightly valued nod of recognitionfrom a passing acquaintance.

We need strokes in our daily lives as much as we need food, inorder to survive. And, indeed, in the earliest months of our lives,we need strokes in the most basic sense of skin to skin contact.This was definitively discovered during World War II in Paris,where there was an orphanage in which apparently well-fed andwell-cared for babies were losing weight and wasting away anddying, for no discernible reason. A psychiatrist called René Spitzwas called in to investigate, and he discovered that the reason forthese babies dying was that the staff were so busy feeding andkeeping clean the babies in their care that nobody had any timeto pick them up and cuddle them. And so it has become receivedwisdom that the intimate skin-to-skin contact that a baby haswith its primary caretaker – usually its mother – is as vital to thebaby's survival as the milk it is fed.

René Spitz's finding was supported by the famous experimentsof the behavioural psychologist Harry Harlow who, in the1950s, housed orphaned monkeys in a cage containing twomonkey-shaped surrogate mothers: a wire mesh one to whichwas attached a feeding bottle, and a soft cloth one without anyfeeding bottle. The baby monkeys spent far more time clinging tothe cloth than to the wire surrogate, and they invariably ran tothe cloth one whenever they were startled by a loud noise.

In the light of this knowledge, Eric Berne, the founder ofTransactional Analysis, asked himself, if physical strokes are soimperative a need in infancy, how do we manage without themonce infancy is passed? He decided that we do, indeed, go onneeding strokes throughout our lives, on a daily basis, in exactlythe same way and as imperatively as we go on needing food.However, Berne decided, once the period of infancy is over, welearn to value symbolic substitutes for skin-to-skin contact,including any eye to eye contact we make with another humanbeing.

The first symbolic stroke that we are capable of appreciating– and returning – is our mother's smile, when we are about sixweeks old. And then, as we grow up, we learn to value amultitude of other symbolic strokes - gifts we are given, birthdayand Christmas cards, invitations to parties ... We 'say it withflowers' and in innumerable other ways.

Everything that can be said about strokes is precisely analogous towhat we may say about food.

Although we go on throughout our lives having our strokeneeds met largely symbolically, at the deepest level of our beings,we all yearn for the nirvana we once experienced, ideally, at ourmother's breasts. Loving sexual intercourse is the closest we everget to that nirvana (ambrosia) again, and so is the most highlyvalued experience that life has to offer us.

There have been some experiments done to find out how longpeople can manage without strokes. In one experiment, somenormal, healthy adults were put in a situation where they had nocontact of any kind with another human being, for as long asthey could bear. What would you guess was the longest time thatanybody could manage? After 36 hours there was nobody leftwho didn't feel they were going out of their mind (which, interestingly,is about the same length of time that most people can gowithout food before becoming desperate). And, as we all know,solitary confinement is the most horrible punishment that can beinflicted on people, because it is a situation in which they arecompletely stroke-starved. While there are constitutional differencesbetween people in how long they can survive without foodor water, stroke-deprivation is a sanity – if not life- threateningsituation for nearly everybody.

Different Kinds of Strokes

All strokes are positive or negative and conditional or unconditional.Positive strokes make us feel good about ourselves; negativestrokes make us feel bad about ourselves. But we would ratherhave negative strokes than no strokes at all and, quite rightly, justas nobody who was starving would be foolish enough to refuse aMcDonald's and coke if there was no other food available. Sothose people who, for whatever reason, can't get positive strokeswill choose negative strokes rather than none at all.

By and large, the only truly unconditional positive strokes peopleever receive are from their mothers and fathers. And, if we arelucky, we can rely on our parents to go on loving us throughouttheir lives, no matter what we ever do or say. Unconditionalpositive strokes say, 'I love your existence. No matter what youdo, I will always love you.'

Unconditional negative strokes are given instead of unconditionalpositive strokes to some unhappy people, even in infancy.These strokes effectively say, 'I hate you and wish you didn'texist. There's nothing you can ever do to please me or to make melove you.' Those people in the world who were effectivelybrought up on unconditional negative strokes spend their wholelives, however unconsciously, looking for the unconditionalpositive strokes they were entitled to from their parents, butnever got. They are likely to have many self-destructive propensities.And there are other, less disturbed people who, nevertheless,having been given a surfeit of unconditional negativestrokes as children, are likely to reach out pre-emptively andwith great vigour towards every new person they meet, in thehope that this is the one who will give them the infantile, unconditionalpositive strokes they were deprived of. They are inclinedto see somebody across a crowded room and say, 'Ah, I'm in lovewith you. I knew the moment I saw you that you're the personI've been waiting for all my life;' and then the whole thing blowsup in no time at all, because they provocatively test the unconditionalityof the other's love with their own bad behaviour, andquickly find – of course – that there are limits to the other's love.Eventually, it is to be hoped, such people...