The happy ever after we needed as much as Harry
Last saturday, something extraordinary happened. While the Royal Wedding was, on the surface, little more than two people publicly acknowledging their love, the way it gripped the nation suggested something else was going on.
Even those who are indifferent to the royals were mesmerised.
One friend who considers herself antimonarchy sent me countless text messages on everything from Meghan’s dress to the flowers.
When I went out that evening for dinner with friends, it was all we talked about. the table next to us even joined in. It clearly resonated on a profound level, speaking to us all about something. But what?
a few years ago, I read a fascinating book called When a Princess Dies. Written by a group of psychoanalysts, it explored the psychology underpinning the public grief that followed the death of Princess Diana.
the book argued that what we were witnessing was not mass What an awful statistic: one in four adults eats alone — and it’s one of the biggest causes of unhappiness. Professor helen StokesLampard, chairman of the Royal College of GPs, argues that loneliness is as much of a public health risk as obesity. It’s remarkable how much of my day as a doctor is focused on people’s social problems, rather than medical, and I have often thought that the best medicine I could ever prescribe would be a friend. a huge chunk of my work would vanish overnight. hysteria. Rather, Diana had — as do many people in the public eye — key characteristics that resonate inside us.
When we grieve for them, we are really grieving for something else — yet it is actually easier to cry for someone you have never met, but whose story chimes with some unresolved issues of our own.
this might sound fanciful, yet what’s interesting is that in the months after Diana’s death, psychiatric units reported a decrease in admissions by 50 per cent. suddenly, so the thinking goes, people had an outlet for their pentup distress.
Carl Jung, the 20thcentury swiss psychiatrist, was convinced that everything in the universe is intimately connected through a thing called the collective unconscious.
though Jung’s ideas have rather fallen out of fashion, I think he provides a useful insight into the psychology behind these public, collective displays of emotion.
He argued that the collective unconscious mind pooled our thoughts and experiences and put them in a sort of melting pot which we could all access. It is rich in imagery and explains why we share common fears, desires and beliefs.
It is something we all tap into without realising it, and sometimes a person or event comes along that resounds with something deep in our collective unconscious. I think this is what was happening last saturday.
It was impossible to watch Prince Harry’s wedding without thinking of Diana and the haunting image of that little boy walking behind her coffin. In that image, Harry represented our deepest fears — being bereaved or abandoned, left alone and defenceless.
and here was the resolution of that harrowing image: our desperate need to see that, however awful something is, things will turn out well in the end.
For me, what happened last saturday was each of us coming together to collectively remind ourselves that, even in the darkest moment, there is hope. that, in the end, everything will be fine.