The Brutalist: Art's Brutality May Be Its Essence

 The Brutalist: Adrien Brody; Art; Psychology; Psychoanalysis; Film; Movie; Bauhaus

 

Jonathan Rosen’s Memoir, The Best Minds, helped me articulate something that I have known without the ability to describe for some time.  The artist who works in a physical medium (the sculptor, painter, potter, weaver, etc. – as opposed to the literary artist) works with things as they are, not as we represent them.  Yes, the physical artist is often representing something else, but the medium of expression is not words, which represent objects, but objects themselves – stone, bronze, paint, clay, or cloth.  The artist is (usually quite literally) getting their hands dirty to create what we see and experience. 

In The Brutalist, Adrien Brody plays László Tóth, a fictional Hungarian born Jewish, German concentration camp surviving architect who washes up on US shores penniless and with a shattered sense of himself.  His wife and niece are still in Europe, but in the east – perhaps being persecuted by the Russians, and the restrictive immigration laws are not likely to let them immigrate.  He is taken in by a cousin – a furniture salesman and interior decorator – and he exhibits some of his Bauhaus styled furniture in the very mid century lower middle traditional show room in a somewhat seedy section of town.

The cousin is approached by the son of a wealthy man to revamp the wealthy man’s library as a surprise birthday gift on a very tight time schedule while the father is out of town. Tóth leads a crew in redesigning the man’s dark and ornate refuge into a modern, spare room.  They are interrupted as they are finishing the design by the return of the father who is incensed that there are workers in his house doing work that he hasn’t authorized, and he kicks them out of the house.  The son, wounded by his father’s rejection of the present, refuses to pay for the work, and the cousin kicks Tóth out of the shop and onto the streets to fend for himself, which he does by picking up labor work and staying in a rooming house.

This is the skeleton of the story to this point, but there is flesh on those bones.  The flesh is subtle though.  This is a three-and-a-half-hour film.  I ran into a friend at the intermission, and we talked about the pace as being Hitchcockian.   He was concerned that younger viewers would not stick with the film, though his two twenty something kids had recommended it to him.  I took the view that binge watching season long shows in 4-, 6- or 8-hour intervals was training our kids to hang onto more complicated material over longer periods of attention.  While that is true, I agree that the subtlety of what we are asked to attend to here is of a different order.

We observe that Tóth, a man of few words and somewhat wild and unkempt appearance, is highly polished in his social interactions.  He uses his words politely.  He cares about the people he comes in contact with – not just his relatives, but also the homeless who are waiting in line for bread with him.  He is both not of the class of people that he has been thrust in with, but also not above them.  If he is to be a Brutalist – the title tells us he will – he is certainly also a humanist.  And the room he creates, despite the objections of the owner, is beautiful, subtle, and elegant – and he figures out how to protect the books from the damaging effects of light while allowing the reader to bathe in the glow of natural lighting, getting rid of the black out curtains that turned the library into a dark and uninviting den.. 

So, the room that Tóth created catches the attention of the media and it is featured in Look magazine and the owner seeks out the architect and hires him to create a community center – a gathering place that will include a library (of course), a religious chapel, gymnasium, and a concert hall.  The owner has done his homework and knows that Tóth is a renowned European Bauhaus architect.  He invites him to live on the grounds of his home and to oversee the work that will take place on part of his land.  He also empowers his attorney, who is Jewish, to try to get Tóth’s wife and niece into the country.

Again, there is flesh on these bones.  The owner is rich, but boorish.  His two children, a son and a daughter, seem to have some weird sexual chemistry between them.  Tóth, unbeknownst to the owner, has become a heroin addict and a porn user, despite his discomfort with going to a brothel when he landed in the States.  The person he helped in the bread line was someone he worked with as a laborer and he has now brought him on to help manage the construction project.  There is a lot going on under the surface of this very comfortable, slowly paced film and here, where the intermission occurs, we are left wondering how all of the loose ends and undercurrents will come together into a coherent package.

The first part of the film, the part of the film I have just described, is titled The Enigma of Arrival.  The second part of the film is titled The Hard Core of Beauty.  Then there is an epilogue: The First Architecture Biennale.  I am, for the moment, going to let it suffice that the second part delivers on much of what is promised in the first.  I will refer back to it, a bit, from the epilogue, but I will focus on the epilogue because I think it is the most true to my experience of the physical arts and artists.

In the epilogue, we move forward in time twenty years from the events of the first two parts.  We discover that, after the dramatic complications that led to the completion of Tóth’s first major project in the United States – the building that emerges out of the Hard Core of Beauty – Toth goes on to have a very successful career, building multiple Bauhaus structures that have become iconic in their imprint on the world and on the field of architecture.  What takes place at the Biennale is that a narrative is given to describe the works – the work that we saw being constructed is the centerpiece, and there is a narrative that describes how that work anticipates and lives on in the other works that Tóth creates and are being celebrated.

The critical component of this speech, though; the piece of it that seems most true to life for me, is that Tóth does not deliver it.  What he has accomplished is articulated both in pictures – the speaker has slides – but also in her words.  She – his niece – provides the narrative of the work that Tóth has created.  The pictorially presented backstory for this is that Tóth is now quite old and feeble.  He is being taken through the exhibit and listens to the talk from a wheelchair.  He does not speak a line in this section of the movie.  Perhaps he has had a stroke and can no longer speak?   Though the authors have provided a likely a backstory, I think this leads to a brilliant articulation of the importance of the physical in the expressive repertoire of some artists.  These artists are not dealing with the meaning of things, but with things as they actually are.

Now you might think that Tóth is a poor speaker – or that he can’t articulate what he is thinking or feeling.  This is not the case – he is quite good at arguing for the project to be completed as he has designed it.  He is very good at expressing his disdain for those who would alter it in order to save a penny here or there.  He explains the model of the building to the citizens of Bucks County, PA, and the reasons for constructing in the manner that he does so that they will be able to use it in the ways that the owner of the land intends.  But this is not what is described by the niece in the epilogue.

What we learn from the niece is not how and why Tóth built if for the people, but how and why he built it for himself.  What it was that the building symbolized.  But the symbol requires translation.  Though we have followed him through the steps – and though we think we know him and something of his background, and the struggles that he has connecting with a new land – and with a wife whom he feared he would never see again; we have not understood the architecture of what all that means to him.  He has not created (I don’t think) a symbol – but instead the thing itself.  He might be able to explain it – at some point he must have told the niece this story so that she can now tell it to us.  But that is not the vehicle that he uses to express what he feels in his bones.  He doesn’t describe his feelings, he makes them come to life in the buildings he creates.

Though physical artists represent their thoughts and feelings by creating representational objects – I think this is a basic human function.  We are built to express ourselves through action.  We have been selected by millions of years of evolution because we can change the environment we live in – we can manipulate and move it.  We are not just thinkers, but doers.  One might even say that our thinking is a way of interrupting - or, psychoanalytically, inhibiting and preventing our doing.  As my youngest daughter says to me with some regularity, “Use your words,” when I have engaged in some impulsive action intended to fix a problem – like assuaging my own hunger by taking something off of her plate that she would have been happy to share if only I had asked.

Am I saying that art is primitive?  Yes.  But does that mean we should abandon it?  Absolutely not.  First, art requires forethought.  A supervisee treating a patient in the state hospital talked about his “art” of nailing dead birds to board.  I disagreed with considering this art.  The “artist” was not preserving the animals.  He was not engaged in creating them as a display – but simply tacking them in place.  For the artists who work to get something just right, they may or may not have a verbal concept that they are trying to articulate.  Is Michelangelo’s David a representation of the divine in human form?  Perhaps – but it is certainly a representation of something that Michelangelo felt in his bones needed to be expressed, and we have resonated with that expression in a variety of ways – including, perhaps, feeling that it is an expression of the divine in human form; the ways in which we can approach something godlike in our human form and expression – including in our expressing what we think and feel through art.

Tóth is brutal.  He is also brutalized.  Both of these characterological aspects of him are expressed in the creation of the work and in its meaning as explained by his niece.  As verbally articulate as he is – and this actor, whose work was honored with an Oscar for best actor – portrays Tóth as not just verbally but also physically and facially expressive - Tóth’s ultimate expression is in the building.  And the building is – to my eye – ugly.  I think that many Bauhaus/Brutalist buildings are.  They are austere – inhuman – clunky.  In a word, brutal.  And isn’t brutality part of the beauty of human functioning?  Don’t we achieve the divine in spite of our earthly and complicated psychologies that include both love and disdain?  Or, maybe we achieve that beauty precisely because of our mapping ourselves closely to the world that we live in – a world that the wealthy denizens of Bucks County alter to make it look like we live in a more perfect world – and Tóth’s vision helps them achieve the semblance of that, while not letting them forget the foundation – the deep and complex foundation – that allows their lives of ease, worship, study and communal activity to take place.

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Jonathan Rosen's The Best Minds disturbs me at the American Psychoanalytic Association Meetings...

 Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds, Joan Peters, Untangling, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Grief, Mourning, Schizophrenia, Deinstitutionalization.

Jonathan Rosen, the author of The Best Minds was a presenter at the Winter Meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association.  He presented immediately after the author of another memoir (Untangling), Joan Peters talked about her writing.  Both of them are professional writers and they were speaking about their memoirs to a group of analysts so that there could be a subsequent discussion about the relationship between the writing of memoir and the psychoanalytic process.

Joan’s memoir is about her psychoanalysis – which seemed to me to be a kind of cheating on the topic. Reflecting on being in analysis when being in analysis might be more about the process of analysis itself than about the process of writing a memoir.  And writing the memoir turned out to have been an integral part of the analysis.

Joan noted that there are relatively few memoirs about analyses – something that I would expect there would be more of.  I thought about and intended to keep a journal of my own analytic experience, but I was so crunched for time (or I used this as a rationalization) that I never seriously undertook that project.  I did occasionally keep a dream journal – but that was difficult because the dreams seemed not to make sense when simply written down.  I needed to provide context for them to make sense – and that was what we were working on in the analysis, and it was a lot of work.  To rehash that work would have been even more work.

Joan’s analysis was also a lot of work.  It was actually a second analysis.  She had engaged in an earlier, useful analysis with an analyst who explained to her the difficulties that she had as a child.  In this second analysis, those difficulties came to life as she engaged in an intimate, bruising relationship with a woman who provided the kind of care that she so desperately had hoped her mother would provide when she was a child.  The contrast between what she was currently getting in the analysis and what she didn’t get as a child led her to experience her earlier deprivation in the present, in a way that led her to desperately desire her analyst when not in the session – so that she became much more needy, but also more deeply engaged in this second treatment.

Writing about her analysis was something that her analyst suggested, and she took to it immediately.  It served to help her survive times without her analyst – she could, as it were, conjure her analyst up when her analyst was away.  So, the memoir was less about a psychoanalytic process than it was an adjunct to and support for the analytic process that may have served an analytic function for her on its own, but that was not easy for me, as an audience member, to ferret out.  It seemed to be a piece with the analysis.

When I was in psychology graduate school, my two roommates were a poet and an essayist/memoirist.  Both of them were writing about central aspects of their life.  The memoirist was writing a piece about hats.  He would ask me questions about hats.  I don’t know that he ever finished that essay.  It wasn’t really about hats, it was about his father and, at least during the three or four years we were roommates, he never reached a sense of resolution about his father, so that the essay never got finished, even though he finished many other essays about a wide variety of topics that he then published – as well as a book about his failed first marriage. 

So, when Jonathan Rosen began talking about his relationship with his best friend Michael Lauder when he was ten, I was all ears.  This was going to be a memoir about a relationship, and it would then also be about the psychological experience of having and maintaining a friendship across the course of a life.  This had the potential to be the presentation that was advertised – a memoir as a quasi-analysis.  But that was not to be.

Jonathan began by giving us an overview of the material covered in the book.  He said that he chose to write it as a memoir rather than as investigative journalism, where it would have begun with the ending, but it could have gone either way and he chose the format of a novel because he wanted to draw the reader in.  But he related the ending at the beginning of the presentation to us – partly, I think, because of time pressure, but perhaps also because of the impact he wanted it to have on us.

Jonathan met his friend – he starts the memoir going back to this moment – when he was ten and they lived down the street from each other on a cul-de-sac in New Rochelle, a close-in suburb of New York City.  Both were verbal and smart – both went to Yale – but his friend was someone he looked up to – literally.  His friend was nicknamed toes because he was always moving up onto his toes, and he was also nicknamed tall, because he was the tallest in the class.  Jonathan also metaphorically looked up to him because, with Michael’s near photographic memory and ability to both summarize and quote books, he helped Jonathan hide that he was dyslexic and had not read texts that the rest of his class mates had.

Michael got derailed when he was at Yale – he had a psychotic break and became a person with schizophrenia.  This occurred at the same time that deinstitutionalization was occurring – so that long term hospitalization, which can be a useful treatment for people with severe mental illness, was largely unavailable.  At the same time, a cadre of psychiatrists, under the sway of R. D. Laing, who maintained that mental illness was a sane reaction to an insane world, created a space in an old mansion where people with schizophrenia (not patients) could naturally heal.

When Michael appeared to be improving, he became the poster child for the movement.  He was admitted to Yale Law School, written about in the New Yorker and the New York Times, and he wrote his own version of his “recovery”, one that was the basis for a screen play of a movie that was to star Brad Pitt and be directed by Ron Howard. 

Jonathan pointed out that this was consistent with the narrative they had been provided for their own lives – that they would become stars – famous, wealthy, and accomplished; they would be heroes.

The problem with that scenario was that Michael was not, in fact, able to function at Yale Law School.  But rather than being kicked out, he was coddled and passed along.  He was, after all, the poster child of the deinstitutionalization movement; a movement that, from Jonathan’s position, was pushed by the legal establishment under the misguided rubric of affording civil rights to patients who had previously been confined.  Michael was, from the perspective of his professors, healed, recovered and not in need of hospitalization.  As seeming proof of being in a recovered state, Michael engaged in a relationship with a woman – and she became pregnant.  All looked good, until he killed her.

Now, Michael’s picture was in the New York Post under the headline Psycho!  The charade of Michael’s mental health came to an end and Michael has been in a forensic hospital (he was judged not guilty by reason of insanity) for the past 26 years. 

Jonathan did a great deal of research for this book.  He interviewed law professors and psychiatrists; he interviewed Elyn Saks, a woman with schizophrenia who has gone on to become a psychoanalyst and a law professor herself. He ended up with a very jaundiced view of the law and of psychiatrists, and of psychoanalysts in particular because of the belief of some that schizophrenia is not different in kind, but really different in amount of disturbance – and that the same rules of treatment can be used with schizophrenia that are applied to those who are conflicted, in pain, and suffering from mental illness, but whose brains are not broken (my word, not Jonathan’s),

Both of these presentations were moving, and both presenters evoked my sympathy.  I was concerned for Joan.  She clearly went through a particular kind of hell in her second analysis and there is a sense in analytic treatment that to heal we have to face demons that are difficult.  She certainly did that in her treatment, in her writing and in her presentation.  And I was able to stay with her.

I was not able to keep taking notes when Jonathan was speaking.  I felt too sad to keep writing.  I felt for Jonathan – the kid who looked up to Michael.  I felt terrible about the way he was treated by well-meaning but deeply misguided individuals – everyone from the Dean of the Law School to the psychiatrists who created an asylum of sorts that didn’t come close to addressing his needs. 

On a larger level, I felt deeply sad and angry about a society that was overly rigidly committed to protecting the civil rights of the mentally ill and would sacrifice the ability to provide care in order to provide the kind of freedom that was littering the streets outside of the very fancy hotel where we were staying with people who could barely function and who were using powerful street drugs in plain sight to numb themselves so that they could go on living.

But I was also paralyzed.  As a psychoanalyst, I was complicit. Long ago, I treated a patient who was hospitalized after killing his girlfriend.  He, like Michael, was not able to acknowledge that he had done this.  I theorized that, when my patient would be able to grieve – to acknowledge what he had done and to truly feel sorrow about that - he would no longer need to be hospitalized.  I was at that hospital on a one-year training assignment and heard many years later from a friend at that hospital that he had eventually been released, but I did not know what had led to that.

This thought, unbidden, that I had been a good treater – on the side of the sick and injured person – was, I think, a reaction to the guilt I felt as a result of being accused by Jonathan, and I was reminded of something that a supervisor had once said when processing the suicide of a patient.  He said, in the wake of a suicide we all vacillate between guilt and blame.  The one relieves us of the other, but neither provides a comfortable resting place.  I think Michael’s murder of his girlfriend was also a suicide and I began to wonder if Jonathan was moving back and forth between guilt and blame.

As the audience asked questions about the process of writing, one of their questions was about the experience of putting things out there for the world to hear.  Joan noted that it was easier to write her memoir after her mother had died.  Not that her mother would have been ashamed.  She would have read the description of her as a description of a woman who was strong and had raised her daughter using the strength that came in handy after the death of her husband – she would not have seen herself as emotionally unavailable.  Joan used this as an example of her general point that, regardless of what you think you are writing, the audience will do with it what they will.

Jonathan talked about feeling OK about putting out finished versions of his writing, but not the material before it was finished – the latter material would be too raw.  So, I began to wonder whether Jonathan’s book, his memoir, but more importantly he, himself, is done.  Is he, like my friend with the inability to finish the story about the hats, not done mourning the loss of Michael? The amount of sadness I felt in listening to the story – and the quality of that sadness, the heaviness of it, leads me to think that he is not done.

When asked to talk about whether immersion in the material had been “therapeutic”, Joan noted that a second analysis was really covering the territory of the first analysis – she was the same person for both – and by implication, I think she would be the same for a third.  All of her talking, feeling and writing did not change the essential facts of her life. 

Jonathan agreed with this and took a more extreme view – that when we unearth things, when we go back to the past, those things do not get better – they simply get unearthed. I think that may be especially true in some kinds of writing (and perhaps some kinds of therapies).  Joan spoke about the analytic third – the presence of an entity that is neither the analyst nor the patient, but some kind of entity that they both contribute to but that neither owns.  This shared alternative entity is, as described by Joan, one that either partner can enter as needed in the process of the analysis.  I think she may have been saying something like; the analytic third allows both the analyst and the patient to step out of themselves – to be in a place that is both theirs and not theirs.

Jonathan noted that Michael cannot leave the institution he is in until he acknowledges that he killed the person that he loved more than anyone in the world, and until he acknowledges that he has a mental illness, neither of which he is able to do.

The current president of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Bonnie Buchele, supervised me a long time ago.  She said then that, for her dissertation, she interviewed people who were incarcerated after killing someone.  None of the people she interviewed were denying that they had murdered someone, but, to a person, none of them could remember the act itself.  It was as if, Bonnie thought, the act of killing another person is too horrific for us to process, which is necessary for us to be able to remember it.

I think that neither Michael, nor Jonathan, has fully processed what happened.  Jonathan has engaged fully in an effort to wrap his head around the entire situation, but like the Melancholic in Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia, he cannot let go of the need both to punish, but also not to forgive those who failed Michael (including, I suspect, himself).  He does not trust – and I cannot guarantee that it would be the case – that, without the constant bludgeoning, he will be able to protect the space that he and Michael inhabited together so long ago, an innocent space of being kids with lots of talent in a world that would welcome them warmly.

I agree with Jonathan that the deinstitutionalization movement was a travesty.  We did not build an alternate system – and we didn’t maintain more intensive care for those who needed that.  I am glad that he was written this book where he is championing appropriate care for those who seek services from mental health providers.  We need to figure out how to provide this desperately needed care – and continue to fight for the rights of those who are mentally ill.  Whatever system we build (and we are a long way from that), it will not bring Michael back in a form that Jonathan will recognize as being like the person he knew as a child. 

Going back (the original title of this memoir) will only unearth what is already there.  It will not change the fact that Michael’s life led, in the haphazard way, influenced by the zeitgeist, that it did.  We cannot undo history.  But we can mourn it.  As tumultuous and difficult as Joan’s second analysis was, it appears to have helped her let go of – in part by acknowledging the shortcomings of her mother and Joan’s own desperate need for her to be different – her hope that her mother will become or would have been a different woman.  In that sense, Jonathan’s position is correct.  But Joan’s process of unearthing has led her to a kind of peace – to an acceptance of the experience of her mother – she can even have a little fondness for her and her toughness.  Can Jonathan find a way to forgive himself for failing Michael?  Can he find a way to connect with the person that Michael has become – a person that is vastly different from the one that Michael would have been?  I hope so.

3/8/25 Epilogue:

OK, I have now read the book.  I stand by what I said above.  I would add that I think Jonathan is still competing with Michael, and still aching for Michael to set the standard and to create the path that he would follow.  He misses Michael deeply.  He pours into this book so much information that I, as the reader, am overwhelmed.  It is as if he is saying to Michael, "See what I learned from you?  See what I have learned as a result of your madness?  Are you proud of me?"

One of the things that Jonathan taught me in the book has to do with the nature of language.  Language is defined by other words.  But it is not the world as it is - it is a translation of it.  I used this insight to articulate something about the concrete nature of physical artists - artists who work in media like paint and stone and clay - in a review of the Movie The Brutalist.

The most important thing that I learned though, is that we should change the narrative about mental illness.  We have shied away from characterizing the mentally ill as violent with good reason.  We don't want people to be afraid of the mentally ill.  But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't study violence - perhaps especially as it manifests itself among the mentally ill.

I think the most violent act that is most closely associated with mental illness is suicide.  It is violence against the self - but also violence against those who loved the person who was killed.  It rips a hole in the social network.  Shouldn't we acknowledge it as a violent act and think about it in that way?  Thanatology is not my area of study, so some people may be thinking in this way, but the way that Rosen opened this up for me is important.  He was reviewing writings by people like Karl Menninger that point out that all criminal activity is psychologically motivated - and that the correction of such behavior should be psychology - not criminal punishment; something that has not been shown to be an effective deterrent.  In order to determine the deterrent, we need to know something about the motivation and the characteristic of the person committing the crime.  Of course the law is asking deeply psychological questions, but shouldn't they be doing this in a scientifically informed way?

In any case, the book was an interesting if scattered read.  I now know more about the song American Pie than I did before, but I'm not quite sure what that has to do with the main thesis of the book...

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Elon Musk: Walter Isaacson promises to reveal the man behind the Musk mask.

 Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Psychoanalyis, Psychology, Children, Spectrum, Trauma

In one of my weekly conversations with my reluctant son, as we were discussing politics and the influence of Musk on Donald Trump, he noted my lack of knowledge about Musk and offered to lend me a recent biography of him.  I was intrigued and, on his next visit home, he brought it to me.  It is a long book: more than 600 pages, but the chapters are brief – three to five pages generally, and reading it is more like reading people magazine both in the length of the entries and also in their generally journalistic style. 

The biographer, Walter Isaacson, has written previous biographies of historical people (Leonardo DaVinci and Benjamin Franklin), but also more contemporary folks (Henry Kissinger and Steve Jobs).  For this book, he was clearly invited to be in Musk’s inner circle as he wrote the book and there are times when he enters in as a player, letting people at Twitter, for instance, know critical information about Musk’s thinking as the Twitter takeover is happening and everyone is scrambling to make sense of the situation.  This could have led to the kind of hagiography that Ernest Jones employed as a devise in his early biography of Freud – a person he knew and respected.  Isaacson appears to have kept more journalistic distance than Jones, but that is a low bar for evaluating the “objectivity” of an observer.

Musk’s early life strikes me as beyond bleak.  He was mercilessly belittled by his father and experience significant episodes of bullying from his peers.  While Isaacson acknowledges this and repeatedly refers back to it, he does not, I don’t think, give it enough weight to it as a contributor to Musk’s psychological make-up.  He repeatedly chronicles episodes of Musk failing to understand the impact of his behavior on others, something that he attributes to Mush being “on the [autism] spectrum”, as Musk himself does.  But I think his need to attend to others – to keep an eye out for what they might do to him next, may contribute to his ability to manipulate and, actually, read others – not by virtue of empathy, but more cognitively, mathematically, or even as a kind of computer code – because x happened, I expect y will occur next, and this is not the result of deep insight, but simply a predictive algorithm based on past experience.

In so far as Musk is driven by his past traumatic experiences, the paucity of his internal experience may be the result of the external focus that he needs must have engaged in to ward others off.  This seems to make him a psychological brother to Donald Trump – both of them were savaged by their fathers.  That said, Musk, unlike Trump, was able to be tremendously successful in the endeavors that he has engaged in.  This is attributed by Isaacson to his having read science fiction as a kid – particularly Asimov, Heinlein and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  I was an avid reader of Asimov and Heinlein and have been curious about the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy forever – and have now acquired a copy.

I think that the values that Musk picked up from Heinlein and Asimov have led him to love humanity, but I don’t think they put much of a dent in his hatred of humans – not just the particular ones who have caused him harm, but the many who could – and still do.  Heinlein in particular, in his book Stranger in a Strange land, a book about a human returning to earth from having been born and lived his early life on Mars, articulated for me, as an isolated, nerdy adolescent, the yearning that I had to be in contact with others.  It also presented a vision of that contact being able to be made through sexual interactions with women.   I think Musk has found solace in his relationship with women (though these are often stormy and complicated as well as soothing), but perhaps even more so in his relationships with his children.  I think it possible that he has so many children not just because of his stated concern that the declining birth rate is the greatest threat to human kind, but because each of his children push him towards being able to feel connected to others in a loving way.  This is perhaps most completely chronicled in his relationship to X, his youngest son through much of the book.

 Musk’s hatred of particular people – usually expressed by firing them or firing off angry tweets at them – is mirrored by Trump’s snide dismissal of those he denigrates, and both, from a psychodynamic point of view, could be understood as trying to turn passive into active – becoming the aggressor rather than being aggressed against as they try to battle the critics who mirror their fathers’ early criticism of them.  From a slightly more sophisticated vantage point, they could also be understood as laboring against the internalized critical voice that results from an identification with the criticizer, and they project onto others the traits or thoughts and feelings that they struggle against, and then attack them out there rather than attacking themselves.  From this point of view, Musk rails against the soft aspects of corporate life and the lazy workers it attracts while rationalizing his bouts of gaming engagement as helping him learn techniques to better manage his companies.

This book, though, oddly calls up Bill Clinton, whose autobiography was long on the ins and outs of the various challenges that he faced throughout his life, but short on a description of how his mind was working during the period of time he was facing those challenges.  Clinton’s background reflected more neglect than malice – but I don’t think any of the three – Clinton, Musk and Trump - all very bright men, two of whom became president and one who became the richest man in the world, built internal worlds that give them much sustenance.  Clinton comes the closest of all three to experiencing gratitude for all that he has witnessed and been able to engage in, but his is more of the gee shucks variety – how could I be here at Camp David negotiating Middle East peace treaties when I am just a kid from Arkansas – while neither Trump nor Musk appears to be any less hungry at this point in their lives - still searching for whatever it is that will make them happy.

Musk’s professional accomplishments are tremendous.  I had a patient refer to him last week as an Einstein – but I think Thomas Edison or Henry Ford are better models.  They were engineers and tinkerers and Musk is certainly both of those.  They were also the models for Tom Swift, a fictional inventor about whom over 100 short novels – much like the Hardy Boys series – have been written.  Tom Swift invented stuff of fantasy and vanquished all sorts of enemies – just as Musk has done, in fact, and in his mind.

Perhaps the most revealing thing about the book, though, was how badly I had misperceived Musk through my connection with him through the media – and I think this is why the reluctant son recommended the book to me.  For instance – I have been appalled that Musk sided with the Russians by cutting off the Ukrainian’s access to Starlink, his satellite-based internet connection system.  I was appalled that a private citizen could make a decision about something with such important international implications with no governmental oversight.

What I didn’t know was that Musk had largely donated the Starlink system to the Ukrainians – with some financial aid from various countries, but his share in the creation of the system, according to the book, was 60 million dollars.  And Starlink was critical to their early survival of the Russian invasion.  Musk was, in fact, fighting against the Russians throughout, but turned off the Starlink system just around Crimea when the Ukrainians were planning to deploy drone submarines guided by Srarlink to attack the Russian Navy.  He severed that connection because he feared that if the Ukrainians had been successful, that could have led to an escalation in the war so that the Russians would have felt justified in using nuclear weapons.

My concern about a private citizen – especially one whose knowledge of war tactics comes largely from gaming and reading histories of warfare and whose diplomatic skills are negligible when he is not negotiating from a position of having the upper hand against an opponent – making decisions about the kinds of tactical resources our allies can have access to during war continues to be valid, I believe.  I also believe that Musk’s interests lie in a science-fiction-based conception of what human well being looks like.  He does not have a good sense of the value of human lives that are not, in his estimation, productive and focused on the current threats to human life.

His idea of what is most important to preserve, and thus the centrality of his drive to populate Mars, is human consciousness.  He believes that it is, based on our observations, unique in the universe.  Human Consciousness is something that I have increasingly come to focus on in my History of Psychology course as it has evolved over the years that I have taught it.  Recently a friend who is a philosophy professor clarified that one of the positions I take with my students was first proposed by Epicurus.  The position is that death will not be a traumatic experience, because all of the faculties that we use to experience the world and the pain that results from that interface will cease to exist.  Indeed, the universe itself exists, to me, only in so far as I percieve it.  When I die, it does, too.  From this perspective we could understand Musk's central driving factor as being a fear not of humanity ceasing to exist, but as a fear of his own death.

Musk disdain for human beings the governments they create belie his being born on third base and believing he hit a triple.  No, he did not inherit wealth in the way that Trump did, but we live in an incredibly interdependent world.  Thousands of people working together result in our being able to eat bacon and eggs every morning.  Musk’s decisions about building cars and rocket ships are carried out by engineers who were trained in elementary schools, junior and senior high schools, colleges and universities – and they would not have been able to carry out the visions that he mapped out without the background that was supported by a dizzyingly complex social system that certainly has inefficiencies in it, but, while his engineering mantra of you haven’t cut enough if you don’t have to add something back in works on an assembly line with a clearly defined product – the assembly line of education is a much more haphazard undertaking whose output – the kind of workforce that he can tap into – is not one that can or should be dominated by capitalistic ideals, even if that is the system it is feeding (and supported by).

After reading this book, I have a better sense of Musk.  I admire him more – but continue to mistrust his ability to generalize his belief that he can improve everything he puts his hands on.  Isaacson is more caught up in what could be seen as cult-like worship, though he appears on the surface to have retained journalistic objectivity.  I don’t fault him for being part fanboy.  I could not objectively evaluate the outcome of a treatment that I have conducted: I am too closely allied with the subject of the investigation.  Fortunately others – consultants in my case, the reader in the case of Isaacson, can put what we hear into perspective.  We can worry about Musk and the gaggle of other billionaires who exert outsized influence on this government that is, in theory, by and for the people; and we can experience that anxiety regardless of which party is in office. 

Postscript 2/16/2025: This post was conceived and written before DOGE went into operation.  It is clear from its working that Musk is applying the same principles to Government that he honed in the private sector, particularly at Twitter (now X).  There are problems with this - in addition to his continuing to fail to think about or be concerned with the impact of his firing people on the people he fires and the institutions that they serve - Government is essentially different than the private sector.  Musk felt at many times that his ventures might fail.  His changes at Twitter endangered it as a viable entity.  Indeed, businesses do fail.  There are no remaining members of the Dow Jones Industrial group (from which the average is taken) who originally belonged.  GE (a company founded by Thomas Edison) was the last founding entity to lose its status.  If our government fails, we are in a profoundly different position than having the stockholders of a company lose their investment.

The patient I mentioned above commented this week that the government is not like a private corporation.  When Musk runs Tesla or SpaceX, he constantly states that the only laws that matter are the laws of physics.  When you run a country, the laws that matter are constitutional.  Violating those laws is like violating physical laws when building a product.  The thing may limp along for a while, but the tear in the fabric of the social contract will not heal itself.  We need to rebuild our country - return it to being the one that we have agreed to live in - or face the consequences of living in a world where the rule of law no longer applies.  That is scary beyond belief to me.

Btw, in addition to Asimov and Heinlein, Musk credits The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as helping form his cosmology.  I have long wanted to read that book - hearing that it is a kind of widely shared antidisestablishmentarian book.  It is that - but it is decidedly tongue in cheek...  It is written by a writer for the Monty Python group - and its regard for the value of human life is cheeky, at best.  We are a laughable species whose main purpose is to consume...  Not the philosophical base that I would have an unelected de facto president use as the basis for making decisions that affect millions, if not billions, of people.

Postscript 2/18/2025  It occurred to me overnight that one of the motivations for Musk to take on the DOGE position is that it gives him access to LOTS more data.  I was initially concerned that the 19 and twenty somethings working for him would post my bank account information on the dark web (which they may), but I think his motivation is to gather more information for his AI initiatives.  If he can get his computers to understand the financial system (and his competitors don't have access to this information) and the other governmental systems, he can train them to anticipate and therefore use that information for what he will deem to be prosocial goals - including expanding his wealth so that he can help a few of us get to Mars so that when this planet is destroyed - whether by AI or by climate change or by whatever - human consciousness - including that of his son X - will survive.  And this is the stuff of science fiction - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to be precise...

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Suits: Is the law this base?

  Suits; American TV series; Psychology; Psychoanalysis; Psychoanalytic/Psychological understanding of suits and the law.

Suits is a nine season, 10-16 episode per season drama series that has recently been streaming.  It is the first such long series that I have watched from beginning to end (I never made it to the end of Mad Men, for instance), though I have made it to the end of shorter, series – both in time of episode and number of episodes, including Succession, another long drama series.

When the Reluctant Wife first proposed that we watch it, I was intrigued in part because the Reluctant Son is in law school and I was curious to see how the law was being portrayed – to see what I might learn about the law.  Spoiler alert – the characters play fast and loose with the law – and the script frequently leaves big holes in it about how conclusions are reached and what the legal issues actually are.  The characters seem to be explaining the law – or, more frequently, the reasons why the law would force someone to do something they don’t want to do so they settle – but I learned very little about the law from the program.  The Reluctant Son was a much more reliable source about a world that I know very little about.

Not only are the descriptions of the law thin, so is the entire premise of the show.  Mike Ross (Patrick J. Adams) is a kid who is doing a favor for a friend who is a drug dealer.  He is being pursued by the police when he is carrying a briefcase full of marijuana in an office building and he ducks into a law office, where he talks his way into being interviewed for a position as an associate attorney at the most prestigious and cutthroat practice in the city.  In the interview, we discover (as does the partner, Harvey Specter (Gabriel Macht) that Mike has a photographic memory.

It turns out that Mike, though he has studied law books to illegally take the LSAT for others, has not graduated from college.  The same drug dealing friend who set him up to get caught with a briefcase of weed got him kicked out of college for cheating.  Yet Mike still has faith that this drug dealing best friend guy has his best interests at heart.  Well, the small-time drug dealer has met his match in filling the father role in Harvey Specter – the best closer in New York – and someone whose scruples are both much more in tact and much looser than Mike’s best friend brother/father figure.

It turns out that Mike desperately needs a father figure.  His parents died in a car accident when he was a tween (or so), and (we learn much later) he was screwed out of a reasonable settlement by an unscrupulous lawyer.  His grandmother has raised him to be a morally upright, good boy, and he is supporting himself through being a bike messenger and getting a hefty fee to take other’s LSATs for them.  Harvey offers Mike an opportunity to make an honest man out of himself – to use his talents to engage in the law – on one condition – no one can know that he is not actually a lawyer.

This secret turns out to be Mike’s only moral failure.  Even carrying around weed was to help someone else out – a moral action that cancels out the illegal aspects of it (at least in his mind – and presumably in the minds of the viewers) – and Mike’s moral compass continues to be his guiding star, and the star that increasingly guides the very high powered law firm – all while Mike is learning from Harvey about how to use “leverage” to manipulate people into doing what you (or your client) need them to do.  He becomes, in essence, Batman – a vigilante working at the margins and/or outside of the law – where the law can be defeated by an evil presence because it is constrained to act within the law – and the vigilante’s moral compass can stay focused on true north.  Of course, in the jocular interplay between Mike and Specter, Mike is Robin and Specter is Batman.

One of the reasons I stuck with this show as long as I did was the artful way that cliffhangers were used.  For the first few seasons everyone who knew about Mike’s secret was in danger of being found out in seemingly every episode – and the circle of people who knew kept widening and the danger to the entire firm became more and more in the balance.  Eventually the cliffhangers hung on other aspects of danger – including in Mike’s evolving relationship with his work mate, girlfriend,  fiancé, and eventually wife Rachel Zane (Meghan Markle – who left the show after the seventh season to become the Duchess of Sussex).  Will they (whoever they is this week) be OK?  Will they be found out?  Will the new person who discovers the secret use it as leverage?  To what end?  Tune in next week… or, since it is streaming – don’t touch that remote – we will answer the dire question in the next episode.

Somehow this set of cliffhangers remained generally engaging though it was also exhausting and even tedious at times as we would binge on two, three, and sometimes four episodes at a sitting.  I think one reason it was not more tiresome is the contentious nature of each of the characters.  Partly in their role as attorneys, or legal secretaries, or paralegals they were confrontational with their clients – but also with each other.  There was a kind of bracing authenticity to the interactions as people would tell each other what they really thought about the other and about their relationship or, if it was impolitic to do that, they would talk with each other about what was really going on in a professional or personal relationship and strategize about how to handle the situation.  These conversations were refreshingly direct, honest and the communication was clear – even if its intent was to figure out how to tell a lie to someone so that the desired outcome would be achieved.  Combativeness seemed to be an essential cornerstone to being so clear in their communication (Harvey boxes as a means of staying fit – carrying the pugilistic feeling literally into the ring).

Another element that kept my attention was the genuine likeability of the characters.  Donna Paulsen (Sarah Rafferty) is Harvey’s mind reading secretary – sort of an attractive Radar O’Reilly (a character on the TV show M*A*S*H who always knew what his commanding officer needed) – and Donna is always a covert love interest – only at the end of the series do she and Harvey become a genuine item (and the tension of not being straightforward about their attraction to each other in this show that is based on honest interaction only increases the ironic tension).  Her caring for Harvey, but really for the entire firm is the counterbalance to Mike’s moral uprightness in a sea of turpitude.  And she sees Harvey’s moral fiber beneath his make the deal at any cost outward armor.  Louis Litt (Rick Hoffman), a winsome and clownish character who is always artlessly climbing towards the top of some hierarchy while being a loveable buffoon who inevitably fails in his efforts but is always contrite when he realizes his errors, provides comic relief and, as his character develops, pathos.

The show, in a word, articulated my worst fears about the legal profession.  These lawyers were more interested in their own well-being and were working hard to beat every other lawyer – but they had a kind regard for each other and treated those that they bonded with as family.  

When I was a graduate student, there was a term for people who cared about each other but not about the rest of the world.  This was a type 2 psychopath.  A type 1 psychopath was someone who viewed everyone as an enemy and felt no remorse for harming others as long as they were able to profit from the interaction.  A type 2 psychopath is one who behaves like a type 1 to everyone outside of the core social group - often their family.  Outsiders are all marks to be taken advantage of, but they care deeply about those who are in the family.  In this way, this show might mirror the Sopranos – or another show about the mob – who are a well-known group of type 2 psychopaths.

Does it worry me that my reluctant son, reluctant though he may be, is going to be working for a high-powered law firm?  Will he become focused on the firm’s profits at the expense of his very soul?  Yes, that worries me.  Do I hope that he will have the integrity of a Mike and keep the firm on the moral high ground?  There are indications that this may happen.  He was a summer intern at the firm he will be working for and while there he observed one of their top lawyers depose a man who was suing the company the firm represented.  The firms attorney, by building a relationship with the plaintiff – by treating him as an ally rather than an adversary – an ally in investigating the truth of what happened to him – was able to clarify that the person had, indeed, been injured, and needed to be compensated, but it was not the company that the firm represented who was responsible, but another party, and the plaintiff agreed (and so did that plaintiff’s attorney) that it made more sense to sue the other company.  This was a regular Specter and Mike move.  Let’s make sure that the bad guys pay – and that our guys are not the bad guys.

Of course, it is not always the case that our guys are the good guys.  One of my old reluctant roommates from graduate school asked me to listen to a podcast about BP’s Deep Water Horizon oil spill and its aftermath.  The podcast is called Ripple.  It documents the antics of BP and their attorneys to protect the corporation from suits over the long-term effects of fisherman who were hired to clean up the spill after their fishing was ruined by it – and the fact that only one person has successfully negotiated compensation for the health consequences.  This person represented himself for a long time in the fight, calling in attorneys to help only near the end of a twelve-year battle, but most importantly, he had moved to Tennessee and had the case moved there.  His belief is that the court system in and around the gulf coast is essentially owned by BP – and the podcast made the point that BP had been put in charge of the clean up and of documenting its effects on the environment and the workers by the federal government.  It was a case, the podcast maintained, of the fox guarding the hen house.

A case where the fox is guarding the henhouse is exactly the kind of case that Mike championed on the show.  When Megan Markle became the duchess of Windsor and left the show, it was easy to write she and Mike out – they went to the west coast and joined a firm that engaged in going after big corporations.  He could not continue to do that at a New York law firm that was tasked with defending corporations – those corporations would not hire a firm that was going after businesses like themselves.  Mike was increasingly portrayed as taking the big firm tactics and using them in support of the little guy – using leverage, but also bluffing – and calling the other person’s bluff – essentially playing high stakes poker as a means of resolving disputes.

Some would say that this is psychological warfare and should be right up the alley of a psychoanalyst.  There are, in fact, two psychotherapists who play significant roles in the series.  And though the psychotherapists are clad in Hollywood garb, the writers and actors got the essence right – both therapists are anti-suits in their approach – they are working to ally themselves with their clients and to help them see through the context of a caring relationship how out of balance their lives are and the importance of moving relationships to the center of their lives rather than treating relationships as additional areas in which to exercise leverage.  Interestingly, both psychotherapists engage in boundary violations with their patients – demonstrating the dangers of becoming too passionately involved in professional relationships by their actions…

But psychological warfare is not, ultimately, what practicing psychologists and psychoanalysts study, even though that warfare or poker playing gets dubbed "psychological".  I would be a terrible poker player.  I am not trying to outwit my patients.  I am trying to connect with them.  Sometimes that does mean that I have to practice abstinence – meaning to step back and let them solve something for themselves – or to feel something deeply even though that may be painful and all I can offer at that moment is myself as witness to their pain.  And also as witness to their survival of the lived experience of it.

The reluctant son took a class in law school last semester on mediation.  There was a lab associated with the class, and he needed to mediate ten cases at a small claims court across the course of the semester.  Courses were referred to mediation as an alternative to trial.  If the cases were not successfully mediated, if the parties could not come to an agreement, the dispute would go back to a trial and the judge would decide how to resolve the issue. 

We discussed the cases and the ones that were most successful (meaning that the reluctant son was pleased with the outcome) were the cases where there was a dispute between friends or family members over some financial issue.  The complainants were frequently able to come to an understanding of the underlying issues – and there were even cases where the emotional disagreement was identified and addressed!

There were other cases that were more complicated.  Someone who had been in section 8 housing for 10 years was moving to a new apartment and the landlord wanted to keep the $200 deposit because the apartment needed to be painted and the carpet needed to be replaced.  The tenant sued to get his deposit back.  The landlord’s lawyer came to the mediation and threatened to countersue for $400 because of other damage they found.  The lawyer “generously offered” not to countersue if the complainant would drop his case to get his deposit back.  The reluctant son was not allowed to tell the complainant that the lawyer was using leverage and likely bluffing.  The complainant agreed to withdraw his suit – and was satisfied with the result: from his perspective he had saved $400!

The reluctant son tells me this last case was consistent with the evidence from studies of mediated solutions.  Poorer people have poorer objective outcomes from mediation, but they have higher satisfaction with the outcome of the mediation process than do more well-heeled people who make use of this avenue.

In my view, the legal system should be used as a court of last resort.  Most of our disagreements are not primarily about money.  In fact, most of the disagreements that provided the cliffhangers on suits were not primarily about money, but more often about grudges, or getting even, or trying to get more power, and money became the means of determining the outcome of the issue.  This was generally satisfying as the good guy – the one we identified with and that Mike and Harvey Specter represented – almost always won.  But the legal system is about winners and losers and it is an adversarial system that determines who is at fault – who is to blame.  Real life problems are rarely that simple.  And the more complete solutions require bargaining in good faith – meaning, bargaining based on the assumption that the other person, too, is a good person.

It is also the case that, in real life situations, to achieve the best possible outcome, the kind the reluctant son will feel good about, we need to be as candid and upfront as the characters in Suits are.  We need to let people know how we really feel about the issues that affect us.  This is difficult to do.  We have been socialized to be indirect, to be "polite", which means, on some basic level, duplicitous.  We need to hide our feelings and to pretend to resonate with the feelings of the other.

In order to make a negotiated system work well, all parties need to act in good faith and to be honest and direct.  This means that they have to assume that the other person is a well-meaning individual who also wants to find a harmonious solution to whatever difficulty is being faced and that they will represent their true desires truthfully.  Rarely do we achieve this state of affairs, and so we, especially in the United States, settle back into a position that what the other person is doing is not fair and we triangulate in someone to referee between us.  Sometimes, as in Louisiana, that referee appears to be biased against us.  Sometimes we need to find an advocate who is wilier at the “psychological” ability to outwit the other guy – which often means coming to have a sense of who that person is, what they want, and why they want it not by listening to what they say, but by inferring what their motives are by closely watching their actions and then figuring out how to provide a satisfactory version of what they really need rather than what they think they need.  Ultimately, in the final season of suits, the characters that we came to be identified with, the people that we cared about, had a “happy” ending – which generally involved their finally expressing and addressing their relational needs – and ultimately, at least for some of them, giving up on the rat race that had used money and adrenaline to create the illusion that those needs were being addressed.  Of course, this let's the air out of the balloon of unmet needs that has kept us glued to the set, and we are oddly deflated by at all this happiness...

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Go Tell It on the Mountain: James Baldwin’s Coming of Age roman a clef that Comes together in One Day.

 Go Tell it on the Mountain, James Baldwin, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Civil Rights, Personal Narrative, Power of the Concrete

When I was a kid, I lived in segregated West Palm Beach, Florida.  The woman who came to clean our house every other week was African American, but she was one of the few blacks that I saw, and I don’t remember speaking with her.  I think one of the fifth-grade teachers at Belvedere elementary may have been African American – but I almost never interacted with African Americans. Blacks were, therefore, fascinating to me.  When we went to New York City, I wanted to go to Harlem, because what little I knew about African Americans was that they lived in Harlem.

This summer, reading Eddie Glaude Jr.’s book, Begin Again, about the process of maintaining forward progress on civil rights in a world that seems to think that they have been taken care of them when that has most decidedly not been the case, got me interested in James Baldwin, an author whose works I had not read.  Glaude was using Baldwin as a guide to rethink civil rights and how we should begin the civil rights movement again. 

Going to the source, I picked up Baldwin’s first novel.  Surprise, surprise, it was about Harlem.  One day in the life of a family, but more particularly, a boy in Harlem.  I have read Circadian novels before, Mrs. Dalloway being the quintessential tale in a day, but this day, though ordinary on the outside, is extraordinary at its center.

Go Tell it on the Mountain is not an easy read.  It is particularly hard to get oriented.  Who are these people?  What is the source – not only of their poverty, but of their rich internal worlds that are filled with moral striving, interpersonal conflict, and wide varieties of spiritual and emotional experience?  If I had picked up this book instead of wishing to drive through the streets of Harlem, where I would probably have been overwhelmed by the poverty and seen little beyond it, I would have learned a lot more about what I was looking for.  And I would have found complex, human beings engaged in living meaningful lives not, as I would have thought, on the margins of the world (though the violence and poverty within and around them are palpable), but in the center of a rich culture that oddly mirrored and contrasted with my own.

I think, though, that this book is not an easy read because Baldwin wants you to be disoriented.  It is pretty clear that this is a roman a clef (a thinly veiled autobiography), though I think Baldwin has invented a narrative that allows for the emotional experience of growing up in his family to be communicated by introducing elements in the plot that are not part of his known biography – at least as he relates it in the essay Notes of a Native Son, which was a quick and easy read after this novel.  In the novel, he both simplifies and complicates the family – primarily with the aim of helping us become as confused as the central character – John – by the hatred that his father has for him.  

Rather than being loved as the eldest – rather than being loved for the apparent gifts that he has, gifts that will allow him to take on his father’s mantle and join him in the family calling, John is scorned by his father who dotes over his younger, wayward brother.  The father, who is a laborer by day and a preacher by night in a storefront church and who surrounds himself with angels of the parish, is crestfallen when the younger son, Roy (probably short for Royal) is knifed in a fight, leaving him bleeding, scarred, but unrepentant. 

We are introduced to John in church, on Sunday morning, with his family, immediately after the knifing and we find, to at least my surprise, that he is not a believer.  He has not been taken by the spirit – he has not come forward to be embraced by Christ and welcomed into the community of saints.  He knows this – and the rest of the congregation knows it.  He is both a member of the community and not.

I was raised in the Episcopal Church, and the rite of becoming a Christian was formalized.  You were baptized shortly after birth – and then you went through confirmation – where you confirmed your faith – when you were 14 – John’s age.  But this was a formal procedure.  It involved classes (I must have learned something in those classes, but all I retain now is a dim memory of being required to go to them), and then a group ceremony where the bishop anointed you.  This felt a little like the scene in The Crown where Elizabeth is crowned and the Archbishop watches closely to see the spirit of God enter her at that very moment – but I don’t think anyone was watching any of us in the confirmation class all that closely – we just stood there while the Bishop did something.  Neither we nor the queen was an active agent – the magic of God was visited upon us with, at least to me, no visible shift in our being.

That is not what happens in John’s church.  If you are going to be a member, you need to choose to be saved.  You need to express a desire and have the community respond to that desire.  Part of what felt disorienting in the first part of the book was how alone John seemed to be – and how alone I felt as I empathized with him.  Not only did he not belong with the saints, and didn’t seem to want to, it felt that no one, with the possible exception of his mother, was recruiting him to join the saints – no one was encouraging or supporting him.  This led me to feel, through him, a tremendous sense of isolation – even as he was clearly socially a member of this group of saints – and there was a positive expectation that he would not, as his brother had done, transgress the bounds of the community.  John was a good boy who was not welcome in the inner sanctum – and didn’t, somehow, want to be there.

Confusing the reader is, then, a vehicle for helping the reader to empathize with the hero.  The hero (John) does not understand, any more than we do, why his father hates him.  Our confusion drives the desire to know, which keeps us reading, and keeps John working to make sense of his relationship with his father.

John does want to transgress some boundaries, though it is not quite clear why – or more particularly how he would do that.  He feels guilty for various homoerotic stirrings – and we wonder whether his father, on some level senses them and therefore is rejecting him – or perhaps John fears that his father will reject him and so does not reach out in a way that would lead him to be loved.  We are puzzled by the sins that John wants to commit – they are not clearly articulated, so they seem willful in the sense of being desired in order to prevent him from being pulled into the community, or perhaps he is afraid of being pulled into the orbit of his raging and inconsistent father.

In the second part of the novel, after introducing us to John, Baldwin introduces us to Gabriel, the father.  Here we discover the complicated relationship between Gabriel and John, one that John is apparently unaware of and one that John will, presumably, come to know later so that he can write the book.  In the meantime, he (in the form of Baldwin as author) does write some of Gabriel’s sermons, and this was the point where I woke up to the pleasure of reading this book.  The sermons were beautifully written, and I suspect a point of pride for the author.  Though they were attributed to the father, they clearly flowed out of the pen of the son.

It turns out that Baldwin did become a preacher – and these sermons are certainly his.  And they may be both an homage to the father – and the glory of his father's early preaching, when he was a fiery force to be reckoned with – and they are, I think, a point of personal pride – they are saying to the one who withheld his love, look what I can do.  What I can do is every bit as good as what you did – and perhaps a mite better  (I just heard the childish jingle, “Anything you can do, I can do better” ring in my head).

A friend who was reading the book with me commented that the language in the book became somewhat repetitive and almost hypnotic.  We posited that the source of the author’s linguistic abilities was in his reading of the King James Bible, and the vehicle of self-expression was in first hearing and then, for some, the delivery of sermons.  I began to think of the church as being not just the spiritual home of many African Americans, but also of its being their intellectual home.  This would, I suppose, mirror the ways in which the church helped bring Europeans out of the middle ages and into the renaissance.

After we are introduced to the rest of the family and the characters, already broadly known, take on nuance and three dimensionality, we return to the church, for the evening service.  John opens the building up to prepare for the service (he does a lot of work for a non-saint, I’m just saying), and he cleans the building and wrestles with Elisha, an older teenage boy, one who is saved, but in danger because he is interested in a girl at the church.  Again, the excitement of wrestling with another man, the theme of homosexuality, is a prelude to this final act.

The family, and a few other saints, gather in the church.  The service begins – and so does John’s awakening.  I don’t want to spoil this moment for you – or compete with Baldwin’s writing if you have read it.  Just let it suffice to say that to get to heaven, John has to go through hell.  And part of that hell is moving from being confused and isolated by that confusion to becoming furious – tapping into the reservoir of anger and hatred that has built up over a life time of being unacknowledged.  And wrestling with this anger takes the place of wrestling with Elisha.   He is now wrestling openly with God and the devil, and doing it in the aisle of the church as those around him look on, realizing that he is in the midst of a terrible struggle.

Perhaps the wish to sin that he has been holding onto is driven in large part by the wish to express his anger directly at his father – to confront him, wrestle him – perhaps to murder him.  The desire to transgress is strong within him, despite his being the dutiful son – the one who, on the surface, is without apparent passion.  But the passion is apparent in what one would assume would be his physical writhing - the others in the church can see his conflict express itself through his body - but we get to observe it from the inside - and the turmoil is intense.

The outcome of the struggle is as powerful (at least to me) as the struggle itself.  We are rooting for him to express the wish to be saved – we fear it will not arrive – but when it does, he is able to achieve it without giving up or succumbing to the father.  The competition that I saw play out with the writing of the sermon becomes a preview of the integrity that he maintains in his acknowledgement of his need to be saved.  He will become a saint with integrity – and the wherewithal to protect that.  He is not his father’s son – doing his father’s bidding – he is his own person, embracing his own belief – one that he can own on his own terms, not the terms of his complicated and, ultimately, corrupt father.  He finds his own way to becoming part of the community while retaining the position of one who stands apart.

At this moment, there would be a lot of directions to go in discussing this book.  The relationship of the father and son is very rich psychodynamic material.  I could reduce it by generalizing it – showing that it fits under a particular Oedipal umbrella.  And while that would work, and might even be edifying, and would be worth discussing, it would also leave us without the texture of the very particular struggle that John has gone through, and something essential would thus be lost.  Such a process would also be a second reduction.  The rationale that Baldwin gives for his father’s hate in Notes of a Native Son is that his father was increasingly psychotically paranoid as he aged. 

The beauty of this story is that the richness of the struggle of the son to be confused, to be angry, to be afraid is preserved by the anti-diluvian process of complicating the father – not washing him clean with the clinical diagnosis of paranoia, but filling him with a backstory of sin, betrayal, and brokenness that leads him to harbor secrets from the son, secrets that the son fills in with his own explanations, and his own judgements of the shortcomings of the father – explanations that are only hinted at, only poorly articulated, but that are deeply felt, expressed and wrestled with as the son comes to grips with becoming a man and a man of faith.

Creating a narrative, changing the facts of his upbringing, allows Baldwin to own the essential, felt nature of being the son of the man his father was – and the son of his mother – and the 14 year old in contact with the world that he was in contact with – not as that world, including his mother and father, existed in an objective sense, but as it was constructed by him as a subject – a very particular subject with a keen sense of what is right and what is wrong.

When I was wrestling with this book – trying to like it – I complained to the reluctant wife about the difficulties of reading it.  She suggested that the book on Baldwin is that his essays are where his brilliance lies and where he best expresses himself.  She was somewhat surprised that I had chosen to enter his world through the novel.  Having completed my own mini version of his conversion, I am glad that I chose this entry point.  Whatever is in the essays (which I may or may not get to), springs from this fountainhead.  His understanding of the injustices that necessitate a Civil Rights Movement spring from the lived experience of mad and crazy father – one who is rich with contradiction, with a moral compass and a rigid and errant sense of justice; one who can see in others the rot that he cannot see in himself and sometimes unloads his own rot there rather than discovering.  It is not a great leap to see the white patriarchy in this country as a version of Baldwin's father.

I am now in danger of doing what I said I would not – reducing this story, as Baldwin might have done were he to have become a psychoanalyst and presented the case of his paranoid father – and a country with paranoid tendencies – to a gathering of other psychoanalysts.  We would together come to a better understanding of the puzzling aspects of the current political climate, but I think that conclusion would not have been as useful as his political essays were at the time they were written and, according to Eddie Glaude, Jr., as they can be now. 

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