Why do we give gifts? To bring joy to others and … to myself personally. An investigation into the true motives of our generosity and the hidden meaning of our gifts.
The role of a gift in the modern world is special. Not fitting into the framework of rational economic behavior based on the principle of mutual benefit, it has become for us a symbol of selfless love or simply friendly disposition.
However, this view is rather far from the truth: in reality, the relationship between the giver and the one to whom he presents his gift always involves some form of reciprocity.
At the beginning of the last century, the French ethnologist Marcel Mauss made an attempt to study the practice of exchanging gifts in archaic societies.
His observations, which compiled the famous Essay on the Gift in 1925, are still relevant today: they help to understand the essence of the New Year’s Eve “gift bacchanalia” that makes us spend long hours buying countless souvenirs and languish in queues for gift-wrapped tables.
By analogy with “kula” (a gift exchange system in the New Zealand Maori tribe) or with “potlatch” (its equivalent among North American Indians), buying gifts for relatives and friends, we, in fact, enter into a “voluntary-compulsory exchange” relationship: we give partly because we want it ourselves, and partly because tradition pushes us to do so.
Moss found that each of us has a triple obligation: to give gifts, to accept them (to reject a gift is to inflict severe offense on the giver), and to respond to a gift with a gift, thereby ensuring the stability of the relationship.
Reciprocal gesture
A direct prototype of a gift is the act of giving food to a child by a mother. The baby is not able to offer a return gift – he can give her only positive emotions, because the very fact of his existence is already a reason for maternal happiness.
Therefore, a successful gift should, like its prototype, satisfy the most intimate needs of the one to whom it is intended.
“Ideally, a gift is a direct antithesis of barter,” comments psychoanalyst Marina Harutyunyan. – This is a gratuitous manifestation of love, affection and attention. However, in the process of development of social and interpersonal relations, it inevitably acquires various pragmatic functions.
The extreme manifestation of this tendency is a bribe: it can also be qualified as a kind of gift, which is presented with a specific purpose – to win over to one’s side.
Any gift includes two components: emotional and pragmatic.
Even without directly expecting to receive some object or service in return for our gift, we unwittingly put the recipient in the position of a debtor. Unconsciously, we hope for some kind of reciprocal gesture on his part.
“A gift always contains a certain message,” explains Anna Fenko, a psychologist. “To accept it means to accept the proposed relationship. As an adequate response to a gift, not only a counter gift can be considered, but also, for example, a feeling of gratitude or dependence felt by the one who receives this gift. This reaction ultimately boosts the giver’s self-esteem.”
“Regardless of our conscious intentions, any gift includes two components: emotional and pragmatic,” adds Marina Harutyunyan. – If the first of them is a sincere manifestation of our love, generosity, desire to see the joy of the addressee, the second personifies the desire for power, self-assertion or even bribery. Both of these impulses are always present, but their proportions will be very different in different gifts, and their correlation can be understood only in the context of specific relationships.
Gift soul
In addition to the pragmatic and emotional gift has another function – magical. In the heyday of psychoanalysis, Marcel Mauss made the most important discovery: according to the ideas of our ancestors, gifts have a soul.
So, the New Zealand Maori believe that every gift carries “mana” – a piece of the soul of the giver. For all their archaism, these ideas have not lost their power over us to this day. Any, even an insignificant present, with an invisible thread, connects us with the one to whom we give it.
“A gift is not just an item meant for someone else. It emphasizes the uniqueness of this person, multiplies the image of the giver, reinforces the uniqueness of their relationship,” says psychologist and teacher Tatyana Babushkina.
Perhaps that is why the folk tradition did not allow it to be evaluated – “they don’t look a gift horse in the mouth” – and tabooed its further transmission – “they don’t give a gift”. Any gift magically takes on a part of the being of the giver and draws him into the fate of another person – his addressee.
Main secret
“A gift says a lot more about us than many of our actions,” says psychologist and teacher Tatyana Babushkina. – It comes from the deepest essence of a person, requires from him the excess of the soul. And the more it is, the more amazing the gift itself.
Its main secret is not that the soul of a gift is akin to two human souls at once – the giver and the one to whom the gift is intended. And not even that the very process of giving sometimes brings more joy than receiving it.
Its main secret is that a true gift is not invented, but it happens that it enters the soul of the giver as inspiration, without any reason. And its true meaning sometimes comes to us after many years.
“The worst gift of my life…”
Angela, 24 years old
“At the institute, I was very worried about my fullness, and for my birthday my best friend gave me … a course of diet pills. In front of everyone, with a witty, as it seemed to her, commentary. And at that moment I wanted to fall underground from shame and resentment.
Vyacheslav, 38 years old
“My mother-in-law once brought me a calendar from Greece with images on ancient vases. It was all erotic scenes. I don’t know if she wanted to hint in this way that I’m too busy with work and don’t satisfy her daughter as a man, or it was a form of female coquetry, but her gift seemed just boorish to me.
Catherine, 36 years
“For New Years, my now ex-husband gave me a wonderful blue pendant. I was so happy! And then his sister unwrapped her gift. These were the earrings that came with it! I ran to cry in another room. It seems to me that from that day on, everything went wrong with him and me. ”
Julia, 21 years old
“My older sister gave me a beautiful silver wallet for my birthday. It would seem great, only two years earlier I gave it to her daughter for her eighth birthday. My sister really hurt me with her act. It’s a pity that I still can’t tell her about it.”
Oksana, 35 years old
“When I was 10 years old, shortly before the New Year, I got lice. Mom shaved my head herself, and then Santa Claus came and gave me a beautiful package … with very beautiful hair clips. I sobbed terribly. I still don’t understand how she could do this to me…”
Galina, 43 years old
“I was 37 and my husband had just left me. I was very worried about this and decided to celebrate the New Year with my parents. Usually they gave me something useful, but this time they gave me… an hourglass. “Yes, yes,” my mother told me, “this is so that you do not forget how quickly time flies.”