What’s the collective noun for a group of porcupines?
a) A herd
b) A spine
c) A prickle
The answer is c)... a prickle. Join me in this moment of delight, when language manages to be simultaneously descriptive and entertaining!
What have porcupines got to do with couples therapy?
In 1851, Arthur Schopenhauer, a nineteenth-century German philosopher, published the parable of the porcupine. It goes something like this:
A prickle of porcupines is hanging out together on a cold winter’s day. They are feeling chilly, so they move closer together in a huddle to shelter themselves and each other from the wind.
As they huddle, they get close enough to poke each other painfully with their prickles. So they back off, but then feel the freezing cold again, so move back closer together. This dance repeats itself, as they struggle to find a comfortable distance between entanglement and freezing.
Schopenhauer was famously rather a pessimist about human nature, seeing our lifelong journey as a never-ending cycle of unfulfilled desires. This story is probably a good example of his view!
But maybe it's not too much of a leap to see something of ourselves in this story, too. Do any of these beliefs feel relevant to you?
Let someone in, and they can hurt you. So it’s better to keep people out.
Let someone in, and their needs will engulf me. I’ll have no space to myself.
Let someone in, and you lose control. I can’t let that happen.
These beliefs, sometimes called "rules for living", are usually there for a reason, and often with a protective intention. Figures from the past cast long shadows. We all have learning from an earlier time in life that needs updating.
There aren’t that many opportunities in everyday life to feel both safe enough and vulnerable enough to properly examine our ‘old programming’. Within the boundaries of a good therapy relationship, unconscious and painful dilemmas can be brought to awareness, explored, and, to a degree, resolved so that they don’t unthinkingly run the show of your life any more.
A good outcome of therapy is that you are able to make conscious choices based on what’s happening and what you need now, in this moment, based on this situation with this person.
The porcupine story highlights a central - and familiar - tension in human relationships. In relationship, we are repeatedly confronted with dilemmas, the polar ends of which each hold both relief and discomfort. Joys, and pains, of different kinds:
Wanting to be known and accepted for who we really are… vs the terror of shame and potential rejection.
The fear - and courage - inherently bound up with being vulnerable with someone… vs the triumph of knowing we can have power over someone by withholding our full self.
The certainty of knowing you have someone to go to… The freedom (and inherent uncertainty) of keeping your options open.
Which of these speak to you? Connection and personal space. Intimacy and independence. Facing up to and avoiding. Engulfment and individuation. Merging and separating. Agreeing and disagreeing. Going along with things and going your own way. Commitment and choices. And, a favourite of us humans - just wanting to have it all at once... The fantasy of having our cake and eating it!
It’s thought that the porcupine story was influential to Freud’s work, as he cited Schopenhauer's work in several of his writings. He also famously kept a bronze figurine of a porcupine on his desk. You can go and see it in his home, which is now the Freud Museum in north London.
Photo: Nick Cunard
Schopenhauer's porcupines gives comfort when you feel prickly and need to withdraw, or when you feel the cold and feel drawn to others, or when the equilibrium of what you need seems to keep changing!
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