Steve Jobs through the eyes of Aaron Sorkin and Victor Strecher – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst has Visions of Vulnerability

A Meaning Driven Life was the title of Victor Strecher’s talk today at the reluctant wife’s Temple today.  In it, he quoted Steve Jobs wish to “put a dent in the universe”.  Coincidentally, we had been to see Aaron Sorkin’s film about Jobs yesterday.  I am a big fan of Sorkin (see a recent essay on The West Wing).  My guess is that Sorkin is pretty full of himself.  Maybe not so full of himself as Steve Jobs was, but full enough of himself that he might have identified with Jobs enough to have written a film – not unlike his film Social Network about Mark Zuckerberg – that makes this tremendously talented but also intensely narcissistic person, if not likable, at least sympathetic.  I was surprised, then, at how brutal the film was – at how much I cared about the characters and how hurt I was by their actions – by how human the film felt.  And it was Strecher’s talk today, one that brought out themes from the Religion and Psychology talk I attended and wrote about last week, but didn’t include in that post, that helped crystallize for me what I think that Sorkin was getting at.

Strecher’s talk was organized around a personal experience that, in his words, broke through the defenses of his ego.  The experience was not one that broke him.  Quite the contrary, and this distinction is important, he characterized it as having broken him open.  His daughter was born healthy, but was infected by the chicken pox virus when she was six months old and it attacked her heart.  He was told that she would die within a month, but there was a chance she would survive with a heart transplant.  He talked about that with his family and they decided to try the transplant because there was a chance that she would not just survive but be able to thrive and they committed to helping her live a big life.  She did survive, but needed a second transplant at 10 and would have needed another one soon after her twentieth birthday, but she did not live long enough to need it.  She died at 19 of a heart attack, and the grief at her loss is what broke Strecher open.

The movie Steve Jobs is also organized around the relationship between Jobs and his daughter, and I think the intent is to help us see into the box (a section of the film was devoted to Jobs’ obsession with the Cube – the failed product of the company NeXT that he started when he was fired by Apple – and it not being perfectly cubic) that was Jobs (played by Michael Fassbinder)– the box of a person so intensely focused on having everything about himself be perfect that no imperfection could intrude.  His daughter Lisa (played by three different actresses at three different ages, Perla Haney-Jardine, Ripley Sobo, and Makenzie Moss), born out of wedlock to a woman he despised, personified such a threat.  So did Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen), his Apple co-founder who had the engineering chops to make the computer work.  And so did Andy Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg), the nebbish guy who helped his daughter find a therapist and paid her tuition when Jobs, in a snit, refused to do so.  Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet) the chief of advertising for Apple but mostly the personal assistant to Jobs and, to a lesser extent John Sculley (Jeff Daniels), the CEO (for a while) of Apple and father figure to Jobs, worked hard to help him keep the box together, but that proved difficult for each of them.

At one point in the move, Wozniak states, “It’s not binary.  You can be decent and gifted.”  Victor Strecher proves this point.  He brings ancient and modern philosophy and contemporary social science together to demonstrate that the purpose driven life leads to better health outcomes.  His website, www.dungbeetle.org includes both information about his graphic novel that illustrates how his grieving process broke him open and an app that will both help you articulate a purpose, but also to track how purposefully you are living.  And he does this while being incredibly personable and connected.  He talked about the Greek statues of their Gods being made of terra cotta, but having within them a gold bust – and that this inner bust – the bust within the bust that you would have to bust the bust open to see – is a representation of the daimon.  The same daimon that Socrates referred to in order to stay oriented in a turbulent and confusing world. 

To live a purpose driven life, Strecher, now quoting contemporary research, maintains, we should live a life that is eudaimonic. This is straight out of Socrates – eu and ic surround the daimon – and the researchers (including Strecher himself) mean living a life that is consonant with our internal compass – that little piece of gold that is at the very center of our being.  The scientific literature contrasts eudaimonic with hedonic living – living that is based on sensual pleasures that emerge in the moment.  Strecher cited numerous positive health outcomes related to eudaimonic living –including fewer strokes, lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease, and a lower risk of death related to heart disease.  He is not condemning pleasure – in fact a little hedonism fits nicely into a eudaimonic life – but a life without a keel – one in which we are skittering across the surface bouncing from one entertainment to the next – is not one that is conducive to health.

Strecher, at least in my mind, took a bit of a left turn here, in answering a question from the audience.  He noted that etymologically the daimon became the demon of religion and proposed that religions began to impose rules in order to squelch the daimon.  I think it is a little more complicated than this – both the protestant and the counterreformation movement – led by Ignatius Loyola – helped the individual reclaim their direct connection with the spiritual world.  Loyola, in particular, wrestled with the question of how to distinguish good spirits – I suppose demons or daimons – from bad ones – a question that the reluctant wife and Strecher puzzled over together in the question and answer period.  Who is to know whether an action that is taken based on one’s conscience is in line with God’s will or not?  Abraham Lincoln was said to say that he hoped God was on our side, but he was smart enough to know that he couldn’t know that for sure, even if most of us would now question why he would wonder.  But it ain’t that easy.

And it wasn’t easy, at least from Sorkin’s position, for Jobs to discern what was right and what was wrong.  In one of the early brutal scenes, Sorkin denies his parentage of his daughter Lisa to her mother and, at the same moment that he disowns her, cruelly explaining to Lisa that he did not name the Lisa computer after her – that Lisa is an acronym - he is clearly taken by her – engaging her in play with the first Mac – and doting over her as he teaches her how to save her creation.  His solution to this dilemma is to remain in her life as a manipulative presence with intermittent contact while she remains in the care of her well-meaning but poorly prepared to parent mother – an unstable woman who is fiscally irresponsible.

Jobs is able to justify his mistreatment of Lisa in the same way that justifies his mistreatment of the Apple employees who have kept the company afloat – their imperfections make them obsolete and worthy of his disdain.  He thrived on making things perfect, and if your actions could help him achieve that, you were of use to him.  John Scully, the father figure, notes with Jobs that he was adopted – and tries to assure him that he was chosen by his adoptive parents rather than not discarded by his birth parents – to assure him that’s how it’s done.  Jobs replies that his first adoptive parents kept him for five months and then returned him and, even more poignantly, that his second adoptive family didn’t meet his mother’s requirements, and, because his adoptive mother feared the mother would be able to veto her as the parent, refused to love him while he was in her care until she knew that she would be able to parent him.

If anything can screw up the ability to get in contact with one’s daimon, an early childhood history like that has a very good chance of doing that.  Jobs decided that he needed to be perfect.  I think it went something like, if I am perfect, I will never be rejected again.  Wozniak, in a recent interview, suggested that the real life Jobs made some kind of transition when Apple became a real company, and moved from being a screwball guy who engaged in pranks to being a person who was so committed to what he was focusing on that he didn’t care what others thought of him.  His disregard for others' negative views towards him became then his greatest strength – he could assert what he wanted without fearing the interpersonal consequences – but also his tragic flaw.  He was closed not just to criticism, but to the love that others might have offered him and that he might have offered to others who could have been dear to him.

Strecher’s grieving of his daughter closed him off from the world.  As one of his friends said to him at one point in his grieving – “Don’t you have another daughter?”  For Stretcher, the moment of being broken open was a moment that came in a dream – a moment of seeing still water.  He had read a poem that urged him to stay awake after a dream and to make use of it, not to turn over and go back to sleep.  He woke and, because he was at his cabin on Lake Michigan, he allowed the dream to propel him into his kayak which he rowed far enough offshore that land was almost out of sight, at which point, at sunrise, he felt infused by his daughter and felt her urging him to live – to return to living – to let go of her as a weight and move towards carrying her with him as he moved forward in his life – or even, perhaps to allow her to help sustain him as he did that.  This moment was the moment in which he felt most broken open – and most open to choosing a new direction – to live, and I know this might sound hokey, with purpose.

Jobs moment of breaking open is much more constricted.  He is able to acknowledge to his daughter, at the urging of the Kate Winslet character, that he is “poorly made”.  This acknowledgement of his imperfection, this owning of his failings – including and especially as a parent – is a far less than complete acknowledgement of all that has gone on between them.  It is also not a reformation of his life – nor of their shared life.  It is not an infusing of those lives with the kind of meaning that Strecher is referring to.  But it is a start in that direction.  It is an acknowledgement of his brokenness and of his being broken open both by Lisa and by his attachment – very much against his will, but I think in harmony with his daimon – to her.  It is also a window into the closed world of the perfect narcissist – a window that we infrequently get.  Having written that, I am aware of a terrible irony.  Narcissists frequently live with their antennae set on transmit - we hear everything, but have access to nothing truly intimate.

These two events have led me to think about the fact that psychoanalysis was born as a clinical discipline rather than as a philosophy.  I think that is because it emerged out of the moments of being broken open that bring patients to the offices of a psychiatrist, psychologist, counselor or social worker – but also a priest, rabbi, imam or other religious figure.  Psychoanalysis is a scientific explanation for the organization of the self that grew out of contact with moments of breaking open.  Indeed, I think the method that Freud proposed, the abstinence of the analyst in his or her stance to the patient, encouraged multiple moments of being broken open as part and parcel of the healing process;  that the ego must be broken open for the daimon to be able to emerge.  While he proposed that the interpretation of the analyst lead to healing, we are now more prone to believe that the relationship with the analyst promotes this; that in those moments of openness, we need a daughter who can forgive us, no matter how beastly we have been.   Whether we, like Strecher, have been beastly to hang onto her or, like Jobs, to ward her off, we need to open ourselves to her and embrace her, to take her into our hearts, and, by doing that, to become more fully human – carrying our flaws and our virtues into places where they can be embraced by those who can appreciate that we are, indeed, doing the best we can to live up to our daimon – even if we can, at best, poorly apprehend him or her at any given moment.   

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