One Battle After Another: Reaction Formation takes center stage.

 One Battle After Another, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Reaction Formation, Defensive functioning, review

The Reluctant Wife and I have just finished a marathon viewing of the 10 films nominated for best picture and I have already reviewed two of the others (Bugonia and The Secret Agent).  I found all nine of the films I watched riveting, and my wife assures me that the 10^th, Train Dreams, was perhaps the most visually glorious of them all.  I have decided to write about one final movie from this group, One Battle After Another, not because it won best picture, but because it illustrates a psychoanalytic defense that I don’t think I have written about to this point, one that I rarely see in treatment, but one that is more prevalent than I think we give it credit for (do I overlook it in my treatment of my patients?), and, when it is present, a virulent problem.  The defense is Reaction Formation.

This post contains all kinds of spoilers.  It is intended for folks who have already seen the film and want to think about it.  If you haven’t seen it yet, the Academy (Oscars people) and I recommend it – it is suspensful and contains lots of chase scenes and a fair amount of violence.  The Reluctant Wife, who can tolerate violence when it is not unnecessarily cruel and when it is plot based, not gratuitous, survived viewing this film.

One Battle After Another is a film in the thriller tradition.  It grabs you in the opening scene and keeps you in breathless thrall from that moment until the resolution.  There are little eddies to the side of the rushing stream, but you need to be wary when you are in them because you sense that the lulls are there to give you a slight respite before the roller coaster drops you over the next cliff (indeed, the central chase scene is, quite literally, a roller coaster ride through the pitched roads of the California mountains). 

We begin with an attack on a refugee camp near the American border in what feels like contemporary America, but necessarily must have been twenty years ago if the rest of the film is contemporary.  The attack is both chaotic and extremely well-orchestrated.  The eddy in the midst of this rushing torrent is an encounter between Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), a very attractive African-American who gets sexually aroused during her revolutionary acts and Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), the person responsible for securing the Detention Center she is liberating.  She breaks into his tractor-trailer command center and lords her power over him – commanding him to have an erection, which he dutifully does before she clarifies to him that she is the person in charge of him ties him up (I think) and runs off with the rest of the commandoes and the people who had been incarcerated.  This Sado-Masochistic interaction between Perfidia and Steven unleashes the central relational tension that drives the rest of the film.

The aspect of this interaction that I would like to highlight is less the sado-masochistic component, though that is very worthy of analysis and description, but more the way in which that ongoing interaction ignited by this first brush is an obsession that Col. Steven Lockjaw is both deeply invested in and, I think, intermittently unconscious of.  That is, Lockjaw may be hiding (in plain sight) an extremely high level of disavowal about the nature of his feelings towards Perfidia Beverly Hills and perhaps even the actions that we see him engage in.

We learn, much later in the film, that the pinnacle of career success for Col. Lockjaw would be membership in the elite secret cadre of the Christmas Adventurers Club.  This club is a White Christian Nationalist group that has, as a central tenet, the separation of the races.  Miscegenation is a cardinal sin of this group – and, just as “interbreeding” was forbidden and a common practice when white masters raped their slaves in antebellum days, Col. Lockjaw is entranced by that which, by transitive logic, is morally repugnant to him.  He also goes to great lengths to cover up his actions which are, I believe, in tension with not only his stated, but also his avowed beliefs.

Now this raises the issue of a Christian organization engaging in Unchristian activities, something that has been going on since before the Crusades.  Why would a spiritual leader who preached love for others – others of all kinds – even tax collectors, be used as the vehicle for war, hatred and persecution?  This is a very big and important question that any fifth grader should be able to pose, and yet we have not been able to find an answer that allows us to deconstruct the seemingly airtight rationales for things like miscegenation prohibition, attacking of Muslim countries, and the prevention of immigration of those with different religious beliefs into a country founded on, among other things, the principle of religious freedom.  So, Col. Lockjaw’s psychology is, I think, worth our interest.

Unfortunately, the best lived example that I have to understand his behavior was seemingly intractable.  There was a family in Topeka, Kansas that was incredibly homophobic.  They received national attention when they would travel to funerals of prominent gay men during the AIDS epidemic and throw red paint on the mourners.  On a more local level, they would do disruptive things like texting the same black sheet of paper to the local courthouse over and over so that the printer there would run out of ink.  They also set up signs at prominent corners in town deriding gays.  The family owned all of the houses on a city block and, instead of having fences that demarcated different yards, the fences went from house to house creating a common backyard, or compound.

When I was in training in Topeka, I played on a recreational basketball team in town.  There were no other mental health professionals on the team.  The players were all “Townies” who had grown up in Topeka.  They had gone to school with the children of this family and, in their gossip about the family, it was clear that were concerned about what took place in the family – in the compound.  One of the family members was, according to my friends, routinely masturbating in class.  They assumed, as did I, that this elementary aged girl was in an oversexed environment.  And the efforts of the family were to point a finger at others that they claimed were oversexual appeared to us – professional and nonprofessional alike - as likely a result of projection and, as I will explain in a minute, a particular form of projection, reaction formation.

In the film, Perfidia Beverly Hills exerts power over Col. Lockjaw.  She holds the gun and stands above him, confident, cocky, and full of confidence.  Col. Lockjaw’s evident arousal betrays his desire for her – for what she has.  He imagines her, I believe, to mirror him. To be, like him, self-assured, organized, angry (but seemingly in control of that anger, as evidenced by the control of the people and forces around each of them).  As Col. Lockjaw obsessively watches Perfidia, he becomes aware of her white lover, Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio). Lockjaw imagines himself as a superior person, in part to manage his envy of Pat.  Lockjaw demonstrates he is a superior person when he captures Perfidia and trades sexual pleasure for her freedom.  He is now in the position of power and she in the position of the needy and therefore, at least in Lockjaw’s mind, desiring one.

The issues of power, control, and sexual desire in the movie are all now in play and interacting with each other.  We can think of these as interpersonal forces, but, as a psychoanalyst, I am aware of them as intrapsychic forces as well.  Lockjaw (and the family in Topeka) publicly present themselves as being in control of these forces – indeed, they publicly deny that they are operative within them.  And yet they are drawn to and focused on the behavior of others – behaviors that they want to stamp out.  This is a classic example – in both cases – of the reaction formation defense.  In this defense, the person denies interest in the forbidden area, and their consistent efforts to eliminate the forbidden thought or action in others allows them to think about the forbidden material and thus satisfy their own forbidden desires.  At least in theory the defense should help prevent action on the part of both Lockjaw and the family in Topeka.  Certainly in the movie, the defense fails to ward off action, and, in the case of the family in Topeka, both the townies and me worried that it may not have been adequate there either.

Lockjaw lives an austere life.  He is not married, he does not have a family.  He is the consummate soldier, focused on getting rid of those who are undesirable.  He is also clearly drawn to and fascinated by those he despises, betraying his desire.  Perhaps the closest we come to seeing folks like this in the clinic on a regular basis is when we treat incest offenders.  These individuals invariably know that what they are doing is wrong.  They feel ashamed about what they are doing and try to hide it, including telling their victims not to talk with anyone about what they are doing.  But they are also powerfully drawn to act on desires that they feel uncomfortable with.  From this perspective, reaction formation might seem less damaging.

The problem with reaction formation is that it is a defense that keeps the defendant from realizing the perversion that is at the base of it.  Rather than exploring the fascination with the otherness of people who are different from (but also in important ways similar to) oneself, we deny the connection to them and their actions and stand firmly on the side of the right rather than the wrong that others engage in.  This means that we do not seek help for our position – our position is, after all, the healthy one, the right one.  Why would we ask for help dealing with being in the position of the right?

Reaction formation is, then, a partial answer to that fifth grade question of how can Christian organizations profess Christian beliefs while acting in what would appear, from the outside, to be decidedly unchristian ways.  When we define others as sinners, we can protect ourselves from their heathen ways so that we can lead Christian lives.  We are pure, and they are misled, and we can send missionaries to fix them while we stay safe within our Christian nation.

Lockjaw’s defense against his interest cracks when Perfidia Beverly Hills lords herself over him.  He then, I would posit, uses what we call vertical splits to try to keep his interest in her at bay.  He generally is able to rationalize his surveillance of her as part of his job.  Apprehending her is also clearly part of what he needs to do.  Once she is apprehended, he acknowledges to her and, apparently, to himself, his interest in her, but, in the long run she successfully wards him off.  He can then, for a very long time, deny that he had the interest.  The concern, though, is that there may be evidence of his interest and, when he is called up to be in the Christmas Adventurers Club, he has to discover if that evidence exists and, if it does, to erase it.  As is often the case, it is the effort to cover up his misdeeds that proves his undoing.

At this point, you may be a little confused about defenses and how they work.  The idea here is that Lockjaw has an impulse – a very human impulse.  He is curious about people who are different from him.  Jaak Panksepp, via Mark Solms would suggest that this is a result of the seeking drive.  Conveniently, the sex drive is a subsystem of the seeking drive, so all of this stuff is nicely nestled together deep in the human, but we might as well call it the animal, part of the brain.  Wanting to know more is a way that we and other animals learn about the environment around us, and this enhances our ability to survive.  Civilization mandates that we not be too nosy – we need to curb our enthusiasm, as it were, so we learn to limit our curiosity.

A big part of limiting our curiosity is discovering that there are dangers out there lurking in the unknown.  So, we are simultaneously drawn to and afraid of the unknown.  In part to get rid of bad feelings that we are told not to have, we can begin to attribute those feelings to those who are unknown.  We can project our unwanted or socially unacceptable feelings onto an entire class of people that we don’t know.  We are told not to be aggressive – “don’t hit your brother!”.  Obediently, we deny that feeling, but still sense it, but we sense it as arising in someone else.  It is then a simple step to try to help this unknown other with this terrible feeling that they have.  “Stop hitting,” we might say to these others – or “Stop watching pornography, it’s bad for you”; “Stop having sex with other men, that is a sin”; or “Stop being attracted to white people, that is a bad thing for you to be doing.”  And the sneaky thing is that as we do this, we observe and/or imagine the forbidden activity and we are able to deny that the activity is something that we are interested in, except to stop it.

In so far as Lockjaw does use reaction formation, it doesn’t work very well.  He decides that, if he has control over the other person, he will be able to keep his interest contained as well.  Unfortunately, when he puts Beverly Hills in the witness protection home that he believes she won’t leave in order to avoid being killed by her own people that she has ratted out, she has other ideas and flies the coop.  Of course, the child she had after the sexual interaction when he first picked her up might be his, so when he is tapped to be in the organization, he has to find out if that is the case, and, if it is, he has to get rid of the evidence.

When he is asked about the match between his DNA and Perfidia’s, Steven makes up a lame story about having had his sperm stolen against his will.  This is not reaction formation, it is just bad rationalization. The Christmas Adventurers Club and they quickly see through his ruse with terminal consequences.  His reaction formation – the projection of his desire onto Perfidia – is not successful any more than the reaction formation of the family in Topeka, blaming everyone else for being sex obsessed when they themselves may very well have been sex obsessed.

I hope that this tricky defense is a little clearer after having had these two examples of it, but I also hope it is clear that defenses in general are just that, defenses.  And like walls in a castle, they are not always successful in keeping things out (or, in the case of drives, in).  Our defenses leak all the time.  This leads us to engage in symptomatic behavior – and also to be able to create gripping works of art such as One Battle After Another.

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The Secret Agent: Survival takes a village

 

The Secret Agent, Brazilian Film, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Dictatorship, Brutality

What can I say?  The most succinct description of this movie comes from the brilliant reluctant wife who stated that the hero of this film, Armando, who has to go by the name Marcelo (played by Wagner Moura), is the secret agent because he doesn’t know that he is an agent.  What could be more psychoanalytic?  A secret agent who doesn’t know that he is?  It is very much like our experience of having an unconscious determining huge swaths of our experience and, because that agent is unconscious, we don’t know who is running our own show.

Like other films nominated for best film by the Academy (Bugonia, One Battle After Another, and Sinner, though Frankenstein and others could fit here) and other foreign films like The President’s Cake, this film is carrying a not so concealed message about the craziness of the times we live in, even though each is making tangential rather than direct commentary.  In this case, a Brazilian film, in Portuguese (with a little German) and with good subtitles, is talking about the period of craziness in Brazil during the 1970s and 80s.  My interpretation that it is commenting on our current experience could be projection – as is the case when making an interpretation in psychotherapy or psychoanalysis – and that means it could land, or not.  In this case, we’ll see if it squares with your take.  Because I am relying on that and don’t know that you will have seen this relatively obscure film, I will talk about many details in it.  If you intend to see it, you may want to stop here and return after you see it.

The events depicted in the film are not of earth-shaking consequence.  There is a contract made to take a person’s life and it is carried out.  This could just be a gangster film.  But it is not.  It is a film about what happens when the government, instead of protecting the people and supporting them in the moment, but also in the long term, becomes blind to what is going on or, more pointedly, becomes open to corruption and removes its oversight of human affairs.  I think it is no accident that the Academy nominated this film.  As splendid a film as it is – and it is a splendid film – it has essentially no chance of winning the award, but it is important that American audiences see it, and nominating it assures that at least some of us do that.  So, my interpretation of this being relevant may more accurately reflect the minds of the members of the academy than the film makers themselves, who may, frankly, be more interested in exploring the consequences of the lack of oversight in their country than in warning us about what will happen when we take our eye off the ball.

On the other hand, from my very brief sojourn in Nicaragua, where the US was on the front pages of the newspapers there every day, I am keenly aware that the rest of the Americas do have their eyes on us.  They know what is going on, and, having lived through corruption, I think they may well want us to know what it looks like. 

In this movie, a member of the privileged class, a scientist – not an award winning scientist, but a solid University professor scientist and department chair who has a patent to his name that would be of use to people interested in building an electric car – it has something to do with improving the functioning of a lithium battery – is pushed, along with everyone in his department, out of a job so that a pirate can “relocate” and use for profit the parts of the department that are useful to him.  He apparently has the ear of a politician or something that allows him to be a thug. 

The thing is, being a thug isn’t enough.  He feels insulted by the scientist and his wife, also a scientist in the same department.  He is angry enough at them that the scientist must go into hiding and take on an alias for fear that he will be brought up on trumped up charges and put in jail.  The wife has the good sense to die of pneumonia (please forgive my releasing her carelessly – she is only seen on screen in brief flashbacks – this is really a movie about the scientist) because the thug, not satisfied with upending the scientist’s life decides to end it.  Perhaps he fears that, if the scientist remains alive, he is vulnerable to being exposed.  We really don’t get to see what his motives are, just that he hires the hit men.

Perhaps the most engaging part of this film is the way in which what I have sketched out above emerges over the course of the more than two hours of the movie.  At the beginning of the film, we follow Marcelo on a trip through Brazil at Mardi Gras time in a yellow VW Bug, watching as a human who was murdered trying to steal from a gas station is left to rot in the sun, and as he is intimidated by highway patrolman who want him to bribe them to make them go away.  We feel disoriented and uncomfortable as he sneaks into what he equates to a US Safe house and connects with other “refugees”.  Some are legitimate refugees from other countries and some are refugees within their own country – as he is.  Minding his own business, operating his own department, he was not only thrown out of his job, but he is now a hunted man.

As I watched the film, I didn’t know how safe or unsafe he is.  The title of the film suggests he is a secret agent, but is he a spy?  I identify with him and I begin to feel unsafe and, as it becomes clearer and clearer that he is no more a secret agent than I am, I am brought into sharing his feeling of naivete, and therefore the feeling of uncertainty swells.  What have I done wrong?  Who can I trust?  Is there a rule of law in this country?

We might not think that could happen here, just as we might have thought the Chinese Cultural Revolution could not happen here, but after the events of the last year, as the chaos seems to increase day by day, as institutions of higher learning that are the envy of the world are held hostage by our President who is openly using his office to make money for himself, including by apparently selling state secrets to advance his own financial well-being among many other schemes, and who is regularly pardoning known criminals, how long will it be before people realize that they can get away with murder and how long after that will it be that they start acting on that?

Instead of “Marcelo’s” situation becoming clearer as the movie progresses, it becomes murkier.  “Marcelo” is set up with a job, apparently one he has asked for in the department of government that issues identity cards.  But that branch of the government is being used as a cover by a person who is presenting himself as the “Chief of Police”, but is he really?  He is deposing, in the government identification office, as if it were his own, a woman who did not tend to her servant’s child when she sent her servant out to get supplies.  The child wandered into the street and was hit by a bus.  Apparently, this “deposition” was staged so that the mother could arrive and complain like a crazy person, which the photojournalist could record, put in the paper, and sway public opinion away from the mother’s plight. 

Justice is apparently not blind in this corner of the world.  Indeed, it seems that justice may have taken to the streets, with public opinion about cases being more important than the jury – or maybe you sway the jury before the trial.  One of the chief of police’s misdeeds shows up in the form of a human leg in the belly of a shark.  Perhaps the body was chopped up and put in the sea?  In any case, the leg takes on a life of its own and, in one of the distracting scenes in the movies, hops around the park where couples meet to have sex interfering with their privacy.

Marcelo is offered a fake passport to help him get out of the country, but he is suspicious of the motives of the people supplying it.  None-the-less, he is interviewed and describes the events that led to his having to go into hiding.  We are confused and outraged by the thug’s behavior and that of his son as they steal the department from the man we now know is actually named Armando. We are also listening in with current day researchers who are listening to the tape of the conversation.  They, in turn, deliver to the tapes to Armando’s son, a physician.

The discussion between the researcher and Armando’s son helps clear up Armando’s interest in finding the identity card of his mother – she had been essentially a slave of his family with whom his father had an affair, and then he was raised by his grandparents as neither the maid nor the father were old enough to be parents.  Was she fired?  What happened to her?  And now, the son does not appear to be that interested in his father.  We saw his affection for the father when he was child, right before the father was murdered.  But now?  He has no memory of his parents – his grandparents raised him and are, effectively his parents.  The child is now a physician and he is running a blood bank.  Perhaps the filmmaker is trying to help him restore his interest in his father – and his country’s interest in what happened in a time that feels long ago and perhaps irrelevant.

The most poignant scene in the movie is when Marcelo, in a late evening hanging out with the other’s in the refugee building, lets them know his real identity in an act of trust.  They reciprocate, telling their own stories – and risking being ratted out by doing that.  We discover how diverse they are, the various types of corruption they are running from, but there is a greater sense of community – a feeling that others share their plight.  The woman who is the angel who protects them describes her own experience of surviving the Italian dictatorship during the war, she demonstrates that we can survive – and remember.  Perhaps know what others are going through can help us feel so not alone, and knowing that others have survived can help us feel hope, even during dark times.

I am finishing this post the morning after the Academy Awards.  The theme of the awards did parallel my reading of this movie.  The arts can help us remember who it is that we are and what it takes to get us through hard times.  In her acceptance speech for the first award for casting directors, the woman who was awarded (and everyone who was nominated was a woman) asked all the women in the auditorium to stand up – to thank them for their contribution to the industry and for their work together to make the industry a place where women’s contributions are recognized and valued.

  

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Bugonia: Queen Bees and Wannabees at the Oscars

Bugonia, Yorgos Lanthimos, Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Politics and the Movies, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Oscar Nominated Films for best picture 2025

This week, at our local movie house, we are watching 10 films that have been nominated for best picture.  Actually, I missed one that was only being shown during the day, and we’ll see if we make it to the other nine.  Movies pack a lot into two hours (plus or minus).  The binge watching we have become more accustomed to pushes us along a known track, creating a craving at the end of each episode.  A movie introduces us to a whole world, the way a novel does, walks us through it, and then wraps it up with a bow and delivers us back to our own world.  It is a more intense ride.

Bugonia was a particularly intense ride.  With no background or expectation – other than having seen Emma Stone in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things a couple of years ago – we were introduced to her not as the suicide survivor who was struggling to come of age in an era when women were thwarted, as she was in that film, but as Michelle Fuller the powerful CEO of a company who has little empathy with the poor things who work for her and bring her and the corporation fantastic wealth as a result of their unending labor.

Simultaneously, we are introduced to Jesse Plemons’ character, Ted Gatz, a struggling, loner who keeps bees with his mentally challenged cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) and is concerned about the welfare of those bees as they face Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD as he calls it in his dialogues with Michelle Fuller).  The corporation he works for as a shipping clerk, loading boxes, we learn is also the corporation that Michelle Fuller heads, and it is a pharmaceutical company that also manufactures the pesticides that he blames for CCD.

At this point, after having set up the dynamic, I want to try to step out of describing the plot.  I want to avoid describing the plot for two reasons: partly because it is wacky – a little like Donny Darko, Everything, Everywhere All At Once, or a host of other seemingly low budget, science fictionesque films that use science fictiony ideas as a device to expose something uncanny about our experience of life.  I was not surprised to learn that this is a remake of a 2020 Korean film.

The second reason that I want to avoid describing the plot is because this is a well-crafted movie that keeps you on the edge of your seat.  I was uncertain about just what was really happening as it pivoted from moment to moment and I was constantly reassessing my own reading of the basic plot – so if you haven’t seen it, I don’t want to steal that from you.  That said, I should warn you that there is a great deal of violence, and, though it is not gratuitous in that it is, I think, necessary to the plot, the violence is graphic and while even, at moments, over the top and blackly comical; it is considerable in both its quantity and graphic depiction.

So I will, in effect, try to interpret the latent content of this movie/dream without referring too much to its manifest, observed content.  In doing this, I have a sense that I may be anticipating the “collection” of Oscar nominees for best picture.  This film (and we also saw the Brazilian nominee last night, The Secret Agent) seems to be struggling with the craziness that the world is currently experiencing, even though it has been being planned for over the course of the past five years.  It feels as if Hollywood knew that we would be perched on this precipice.

One theme that is right below the surface in this film is that of toxic masculinity.  Not the type of toxic masculinity that is being modelled by people like Trump, but the toxic masculinity of some of those who voted for him.  There is the sense that competitive women – the women who are no longer taking their place in the kitchen where they belong – are destroying our world.  They are Queen Bees that the men now work for – but in Colony Collapse Disorder, they are the Queen Bees that the workers abandon in droves.  Ted Gatz personifies the disaffected worker who is tired of working for the Wo-man, seemingly forgetting that this trope was defined by masculine mores about what it takes to get ahead, and he has not seen, as we have, that Michelle Fuller is working at full tilt to get ahead and stay there, both mentally and physically, just as, or perhaps, more aggressively than a man would have done.

He also doesn’t quite see the stark emptiness in her life, living in a modern, stripped down, sterile home, surrounded, not by a family, but by well-manicured but lifeless lawns both at home and at work.  Her worker bees are not supportive and warm, but efficient, awed, and a bit scared by her and her power.  She deigns to know them by name, and to grant that, as a new policy, they can choose to leave work at 5:30 if they really have nothing additional to work on – and this will not be held against them, perhaps.

I have to stop at this point and note that the reluctant son is in his first year as an associate at a high-powered law firm.  He likes the law, he has worked hard in undergraduate and in law school and enjoys the work, including at the law firm, but even he is brought up short by the lifestyles of the partners at the firm – many of them rise very early so they can work out and be at work early – they leave to spend “quality time” with their families in the early evening, before getting back to work before lights out.  Even for my hard working son, this feels like a daunting life path to be treading.

Michelle Fuller’s life is contrasted with the home of Ted Gatz and Don.  Not only is it the place where unspeakable things were done to Ted when he was being babysat by a boy who became one of the local sheriffs, it is a rural home that is in obvious disrepair.  Ted’s obsessions with various ideas have led him to invest in tinkering, but not in a way that makes the house a home.  It is, instead, a particular kind of ramshackle man cave, and the bee hives out back are the least toxic components of the environment that Ted has created and the Don inhabits with him.

We are not surprised when Ted wants Don to join him in chemical emasculation so that his sexual thoughts don’t derail them from their mission of fixing the earth.  Ted’s feelings of paternal affection for the earth seem divorced from the kind of care that we would associate with generative paternal functioning.  From a toxic masculine perspective, women have taken over our space, we have defined ourselves not in positive qualities, but as the things that women – our mothers – are not.  We need to develop into a different space.  We do that, only to find that women have already occupied that space and we now have nowhere to live – so we abandon the community.  We don’t have a vision for how it should be, only dissatisfaction with how it is, so we want to destroy the changes that have led us to feel disaffected, isolated and lonely – but we recoil from acknowledging the soft feminine core of that desire for something that feels a lot like dependency and being a little baby - attachment.

For Ted, his retreat is into a very cerebral world.  He becomes obsessed with a variety of conspiracy theories and finally lands on one that he beilieves to be true, and he comes up with inventive ways to test the theory.  His abduction of Michelle is the final piece that he needs to prove it.  He may not have the resources of the corporation, or indeed much of a community at all, outside of the obeisance of Don, but he does have considerable smarts.  These smarts are read by Michelle (and us) as madness, and she works from within that framework to connect with him, but Ted, as crazy as he may be, recognizes her pandering ploy and will have none of it.  Her offers to connect are clearly a trap – whether she is offering sex or comfort and dependency he knows that this is just more of what he is trying to overcome and he and Michelle are stuck in a standoff.

Michelle’s effective strategy is to offer a solution – one that fits within Ted’s sense of her as both all powerful and withholding – and she offers what we realize is a fatal solution to the thing that he seems most to desire.  She dangles it in front of him, like bait, and he bites.  But even after he knows that it is bait, she still holds him in her thrall because she has the answer to his overwrought, paranoid fantasies about what has led to the upending of the world as we (used to) know it.  He hangs in there even after delivering the most horrendous betrayal any person could lavish on another because his curiosity is so powerful and has such a hold on him.

This view of human nature – that we are driven both by primal nearly unmanageable urges but that reason, the very faculty that we use to curb those urges, can be corrupted.  In current neuropsychoanalytic speak, the seeking urge, the one that leads to and is supported by higher cognitive functions, is also, for lack of a better word, primitive and can override those other urges that would save us, like attachment, to our detriment.  That is, the very thing that Ted is relying on to lead him out of the morass is what proves his undoing.  I suppose I have just described this as a classical tragedy, and the ending would suggest that we, as a species, have internal programming that cannot be overcome.  That which would lead us out will, in the end, be our undoing.  This is not black "comedy" at all.

Just to follow up on one more thread here, women, leaving hearth and home and inhabiting male roles, end up leaving their redeeming qualities at home – so their inhabiting the masculine space is not a solution.  That thread leads me to believe that this film really is, underneath it all, supporting a weird version of the toxic masculine discourse.  I’m not sure whether it is doing that ironically or unconsciously, and whether it is offering a reduction ad absurdum argument (you guys are crazy - women would not be ruthless as you imagine men would be in that position - and men need to be ruthless to protect our sanctuary) – or whether this really is a dim view of what we are capable of becoming as a species.

 

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Rupture and Repair: Research, Clinical Practice, and the Erotic Elements of Life

 

Rupture and Repair, Safran, Muran, Clinical Practice, Applied Psychoanalysis, Applied Psychological Research, Original Sin

At our local meeting of the Association for Psychoanalytic Thought (Apt), we recently had a panel on Rupture and Repair – a concept that emerges out of the research literature to describe an important psychotherapy phenomenon – one that predicts a good therapeutic outcome.  Apt is not, however, primarily a group of people interested in clinical phenomenon.  We get together to talk about the ways that psychoanalytic thought can help us more fully appreciate works of art, but also politics, religion, and just plain living.  We call this applied psychoanalysis, which is a little confusing because psychotherapy itself is usually thought of as applied psychology, but psychoanalysis plays a bit by its own rules and imagines itself to be a particular kind of psychology - a branch unto itself, as it were.

We had a panel on rupture and repair because these concepts had come up when we were discussing the film Good Luck to You, Leo Grande.  One of the board members was taken with the idea of Rupture and Repair and wanted us to articulate what is meant by that and to help us have a better sense of what the concepts were and how we might apply them to the works of art that we address in the programs that we present.  Dutifully we set off to make sense of these ideas and to present them to a group that is analytically curious but not necessarily steeped in or interested in being steeped in clinical and research lore.

Jeremy Safran and Christopher Muran first proposed Rupture and Repair as an important set of variables in an article in 1996.  Sadly, Jeremy was killed in his basement by an intruder in a robbery gone awry.  I had an opportunity to interview him before then and reported on that here.  To prepare for the panel, we read a more recent introduction to a book on Rupture and Repair, by Muran, Eubanks, and Samstag (2022). 

As I was mulling over the concepts they described in the chapter, focused mainly on how repairing ruptures helps maintain the therapeutic alliance which, in turn, predicts a positive outcome of a psychotherapy, I happened to listen to a podcast of a lecture about classical ideas of erotic love.  In the podcast, the author of the lecture talked about two models of erotic love.  The first is in Plato’s symposium (which recently caused an uproar in Texas about its appropriateness for a college audience because it deals with LBTQ+ issues) and the second is in the book of Genesis.

In Plato’s Symposium, a series of people speak about love.  The most memorable speech is a fable that is made up by Aristophanes, the Greek Comic Playwright.  Aristophanes proposed that humans were once four legged, four armed two headed creatures who were tremendously strong.  Zeus was concerned that they were plotting his overthrow, so he cut them (us) all in half – so that we would only have 2 legs, 2 arms, and 1 head (the first great rupture).  Even after this, Zeus was afraid we would band together to overthrow him, so he distracted us from that task by creating sexual organs and desire.  We could now repair our lost connection with our other half (Some men yearned for the men they had been separated from, some women from the women they had been separated from, and some men who had been separated from women – and those women, would desire the person of the opposite sex).  So sex became the repair of a rupture.

In the second Genesis creation story, the author argued that the nuclear family (including Adam and Eve’s family with God, but every nuclear family after that) has a centripetal force (or perhaps a gravitational pull) maintaining that family as the center of the lives of all of its members.  It is erotic desire – the wish to connect with someone outside the family – being drawn to them – that is the centrifugal force that allows the family member to pull away – to have a life of his or her own.

Graphically, I represented it like this:

The blue circle on the left represents the family which has been the center of the person’s life and blue circle on the right is the erotic (love) interest, that pulls the person out of the orbit around the family and into a new orbit – now around a love object.  If a friend of yours has ever fallen in love with someone, you will understand this experience (or, of course, if your child has).

Rupture, in this model, is a desired goal.  It is how the child grows up and then leaves home to start their own family.

When I went back to read the current article on rupture and repair, I discovered that Safran and Muran had based their understanding of rupture on a number of concepts in the clinical literature.  They stated that “rupture is intended to be a synonym for: breaches, breakdowns, challenges, derailments, deteriorations, dissociations, disturbances, disruptions, dysfluencies, failures, impasses, misalliances, mis-attunements, miscoordination, misunderstandings, negations, pulls, resistances, splits, strains, threats, and weakenings (Muran, Eubanks, and Samstag, 2022).”

That is a whole lot of condensation that is going on there.  They went on to say that “Rupture is intended to be associated with: enactments, negative processes, projective identification, transference-countertransference, vicious circles or cycles (Muran, Eubanks, and Samstag, 2022).”  Again, that’s a lot of stuff to say that it is related to.

I think that the way that rupture and repair has been applied to this point is that the focus has been on the ruptures and repairs that take place between a therapist and their client or patient.  But that is only part of the picture.  Part of what the therapist is trying to help the client or patient do is to engage in a huge rupture – with their usual way of doing things.  This might be understood as helping them, for instance, break away from their family or origin, much as a romantic interest helps a young person do that.  But it might also be breaking away from a pattern of behavior, or an idea, we might think of it as helping them give up an addiction, or whatever it is that the patient is trying to change.  An author, teaching students of writing about how to write a novel, has proposed that we should be writing about how the person deals with a lie.  In our culture, perhaps the first rupture in the family is when we discover that the Christmas presents don't really come from Santa Claus...

I think this way of thinking about the bigger picture may help us better understand how complicated it is to maintain the therapeutic relationship.  We are trying to help the patient feel heard and understood – which is difficult when something like 70% of the time when we are speaking we are not understood by the person listening to us.  But we are also trying to keep them in orbit around the new way of doing things – to keep them engaged with a whole new way of functioning while an old way of functioning is still exerting tremendous centripetal or gravitational pull.  If we lose our grip – or they lose their grip on us – they risk being pulled back into a pathological (but familiar and therefore comfortable) way of doing things.  But repair is not our central task.  Rupture is.  We are trying, in part through the relationship that we offer, to help them break with something that has been life giving, or order producing, or comfort providing.

So, part of the repair work that we need to do has to do with the relationship we have with our clients/patients, but part of it has to do with helping our patients mourn the way of life that they have left behind.  Often, too, we are inviting them into a world that is tremendously uncomfortable.  It is more difficult in the short run, for instance, for people to tell others what the problem is than to simply ignore those who are discomforting or to figure out how to get back at them in some indirect way. 

So, not only do we help repair the ruptures that occur in the hour with the treater, but also more broadly, we help repair the client/patient’s experience of a larger scale rupture with the world as they knew it, without, however, having them fall back into those old patterns and ways of doing things.  So, when we marry someone, we have to figure out how we, as a family, are going to function.  It would be easiest to just have our family do it the way my family did.  But our spouse's family did things differently.  Not only that, but both of us found some aspects of the life in our family of origin onerous.  So we need to construct a whole new way of doing things, while also borrowing from what worked and what we are both accustomed to and is functional.  

Psychoanalysis comes into this picture by pointing out that we are talking about an operating system (if you will) in each member of the new pair that is largely unconscious.  We don't actually think about whether to have the toilet roll come over the top or out the back, we do it the way we learned how to do it - it only becomes a point of conscious point of attention (and possible contention) when our families did things differently - or we had planned on changing that when we got out on our own.   

 The rupture repair model then can be used fruitfully as a means to understand the coming of age stories that are at the center of so many of the movies and books by which we are entertained, but also enlightened.  The protagonist or hero often learns to connect with the world in a novel way (or to give up the lie, or to point out to others that they are living according to a lie).  Most recently, I have written about Lamia, the hero in The President’s Cake, who must search through embargo isolated and war torn Iraq to find the eggs, flour, sugar and baking soda needed to bake a cake for her class on Saddam Hussein’s birthday.  As she goes about this, she learns that she is capable of navigating in an adult world - that she is less dependent on the adult world than she knew – a lesson that comes far too early for this nine-year-old girl.

It is no accident that the second creation story in Genesis - the one that follows the origin story of light and dark, heaven and earth - the one about Adam and Eve, is about rupture.  Original sin - in this language, original rupture, becomes the foundation for so many stories that come after it.  We feel guilty, but also feel compelled to break with what came before in order to create what will be.  And just as Eve needed a collaborator in Adam to get out of paradise, we need helpers to do that in our lives.  Psychoanalysts, but other therapists, teachers, friends, and family members end us serving this role in novels, movies, and in the lives we lead.

 

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The President's Cake: An Iraqi film made for an audience like us, even if we don't want to see it.

 The President's Cake, Iraqui Film, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Dictatorships, Coming of Age

We watched this Iraqi film on the day that the United States started bombing Iran.  It is a film set in 1990 that purports to document the hardships endured by the poorest people in Iraq, the peasants, as a direct result of the sanctions that the US and other countries had applied to Iraq.  The people were caught between a leader who was, at best, indifferent to them, and foreign powers who flew overhead in multimillion-dollar planes that seated on or two people while they scrounged for basic necessities.

The film centers on a day when a nine-year-old girl is tasked with finding more than necessities.  This girl, Lamia, who is cute as a button, is an orphan.  She lives with her grandmother, her Bibi, in the marsh country in Iraq.  She travels to school in a beautiful but very simple canoe-like-boat with a high prow and aft that is like those of everyone else, that she pushes, paddles and steers with a single long oar.  Her Bibi has instructed her on various ways to avoid the raffle that will take place in school, one where the “winner” will be required to bake a cake on Saddam Hussein’s birthday – an annual ritual. 

Despite her arriving late to school, but not, unfortunately, before the raffle, and despite her telling the teacher that she has to go to the bathroom at the beginning of the raffle, she is forced to write out her name like all the others and put it into the pot.  Her friend, Saeed, the son of a cripple – almost as humiliating as being an orphan like she is – suggests she should have said that she had diarrhea.  In any case, as we expect, she wins the lottery, meaning that she must find flour, sugar, eggs and baking soda; all nearly impossible to come by.

Bibi & Lamia Hitchiking

Bibi takes her by the hand and leads her to the city.  The only way to get there is by hitch hiking and they are picked up by a taxi/mail/wedding/funeral driver who introduces himself as a saint and a devil, depending on how you see him, but in the movie he plays the role of the family’s patron saint, helping them out of various jams across the course of the day, and ultimately helping them return home that night.

I was reminded, in the film, of interviewing for my first job as a paraprofessional.  When I decided to apply to graduate schools in psychology, I thought it would be a good idea to do some clinical work to see if it suited me and if I was good at it – could I help people?  I applied to work at a halfway house for runaway teenagers and the head of the agency, when interviewing me for the position, informed me that if teenagers would not phone their parents to get permission for us to house them or, if the parents didn’t give permission, they would have to return to the streets and he wanted to make sure that I was OK with that.  I assured him I was. 

“What if they are twelve and it is late at night,” he asked.  I felt terrible.  I had been picturing a 17 year old high school senior stopping by in the middle of the day.  I must have looked crestfallen, because that was, in fact, what he was looking for.  He trusted that I would follow the rules, but he wanted to know that I got it that we were dealing with a vulnerable population and that sometimes we would not be able to protect them from the vagaries of the world and that this would (of necessity if we were suited to work there) be distressing to us.

This is, in many ways, a coming of age story.  We have been exposed to these ever since we read Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.  It is a different thing to see a nine year old navigating a world that is much more complex and frightening than she is prepared for, but also one that is, I trust, generally more supportive than we might fear.

This film has been criticized by an Iraqi critic as one that “rehearses known stereotypes and corresponds to little that is real. Instead, it fulfills misconceptions of morbid Oriental cities reduced by despotic regimes to decadent theaters for the corrupt.”  It is certainly, in his telling, a mishmash made for the foreign audience.  He particularly objects to both the careless connections across time and space (Baghad, where Bibi, the girl and the boy face all kinds of difficulties, is far removed from the marshes and the kind of corruption depicted did not occur until later), but I do think that the film speaks to a larger truth, if only found in our country when children confront ICE members: those on the margins are not able to protect their children from sociopolitical harm that corrupts cultures and individuals that would once have sustained those selfsame children.

I don't object to the use of geographically distant places to be mushed together.  This happens in dreams, but also in movie making.  My home city (where Mark Twain claimed he wanted to be when the world ends, because everything here happens 15 years after it happens everywhere else) is frequently used a set for New York in the early 1900s, as in the movie Carol, because our skyline is so dated.  His point is a little more subtle than that, but still, I think some license is warranted.  But I am more curious about the salutes to Saddam - both in the classrooms and on the street.  Is this a warning to us about the cult of Trump and what we might be in for in a dictatorship or is this a realistic representation of daily life in that particular dictatorship at that time?

Of course, as I was watching the film, I was unaware of the very broad license that was being taken to pull at my heart strings – I just felt them being pulled, as I did in the interview at the agency where I personally never had to turn away a 12-year-old runaway during the year that I worked there, though I’m certain that it happened.  Instead, I experienced anger at a President who cared more for his own well-being than that of his country and the people in it (and in that sense I do think the film is intended to speak to both an Iraqui audience and an international one).  

Btw, the Iraqi reviewer was using the empty theater where he saw the film in Iraq as evidence that it wasn't a realistic representation of Iraqi life, but there were only two other people in the theater with the reluctant wife and me here - I think this level of despair is hard to muster a large audience to be enthusiastic about on any continent and in any city.  

But there was a lot more to it than that being a depressing movie about a dictatorship and its consequences.  This is a tragi-comedy.  This girl is plucky and I won’t spoil all the ways that she sees through the shenanigans and plots of the adults around here, though I will say that she has seen the cruelty of children – including her friend, the crippled man’s son.  His inconstancy and meanness to her is countered by their loving connection and pleasure in each other’s company.  Their game, of staring into each other’s eyes until the one blinks – a game the boy always wins – is the image we are left with at the end of the film when, rather than staring into the fate that awaits them, they stare into each other’s eyes and the boy doesn’t call the game when she blinks, but they keep staring.

Last night, at a local French restaurant, they were playing a French farce in the background without sound.  It was clear that the ineptitude of the police was central to the humor.  This film relies on this and similar tropes, but in a much grimmer and more unsettling background.  This is not farce, even though it borrows from it.  It portrays a world that still has remnants of the threads that bound a great civilization. 

Yes, as Freud pointed out, these threads restrain us, but they are also what allow us to travel unmolested – and to raise children who are trusting but wary.  These threads allow us to offset the base drives that Freud encountered beneath the civilized veneer – pure aggression and sexual desire – with other, powerful but more subtle drives, like attachment.   Just as in My Friends, a book by Fredrik Backman, it is the children who step in with the attachment when the adults fail.  Coming of age involves transitioning from a defensive position of harming others to protect oneself – pointing out anything that others do that sets them apart so that they can be ridiculed – to recognizing one’s vulnerability as similar to those around us and banding together with others who realize this to protect the group – and sometimes that is just the dyad – through mutual support, rather than through attacking others.

This developmental process is enacted over and over in films, books, and plays because, I think, adults wish to pass this knowledge along – to get the developmental process started early, to teach and prevent the continuity of the cruelty that is a seemingly earlier and more powerful force – the force that comes from fear and isolation and that ends up powering some of us to rise through the corporate and political ranks to the pinnacles of power.

It has been said that Buckminster Fuller wondered if our technology’s useful products could stay ahead of and prevent or remediate its destructive aspects.  He thought that, if we were to survive, this would be a neck and neck race to the end.  I think similarly the race between our goodness, affection and attachment to each other is in a similar race with our more dangerous aspects.  Films like this, though they may collapse complicated components of that balance into familiar tropes and generalizations, portray our vulnerability and the importance of banding together in ways that are, I think, on balance useful to us as a global community.  

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Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore: A Micro and Macro Path Forward

 

Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami, Coming of Age, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, review no spoilers

I was recently in San Francisco at the American Psychoanalytic Association’s annual convention.  While there, I went to Japan town to a stationary store.  My obsession with fountain pens leads me to also be interested in ink and paper, and the Japanese make some of the finest paper in the world (one of their secrets, apparently, is to mix some hardwood into softwood pulp used to make paper – allowing for incredibly thin paper that is non-absorbent and doesn’t bleed through to the other side).  After being a little overwhelmed by all the washi tape and stamps and other accessories for sale in the store, I walked across the hall to a Japanese bookstore.

I probably should have asked one of the storekeepers for help, but instead, standing in front of the fiction shelves, realizing that I had not, to my knowledge, read any Japanese literature, I Googled Japanese novels to read.  The first review was about some current book, but the author of the review mentioned having read Murakami – including, he or she said, “of course, Kafka on the Shore.”  Well, when I looked at that book on the shelf and compared it to the other Murakami books, I thought, “Oh no, another one of these long, difficult masterpieces that is going to be impenetrable.”

I have read War and Peace – I quite enjoyed it actually, but I am currently only halfway through Moby Dick, and Infinite Jest took, to my mind infinite patience to read, and I gave up 3/8ths of the way through it.  Coincidentally, one of my patients mentioned on my return a recent New Yorker article that I also haven’t read suggesting that books like Infinite Jest are marathons intended to test the reader’s endurance – their ability to take on another’s perspective and look at the world through their eyes.  Well, some tests are too long, some bars are too high, and some perspectives are a bridge too far for me.

I thought about picking up one of the shorter books, but I was in San Francisco alone, had just finished a book, and I had a long flight home – so, why not?  Let’s see if I can make it to the end of this one…

Surprisingly, this book was, for me, a real page turner.  I looked forward to returning to my hotel every night to re-enter this magical, nearby world that was both mildly foreign – Japan is a different country, but it has highways and towns and cities and forests – and totally, completely different and yet, somehow, familiar as a dream scape – as the kind of world that you discover when, as a young man, you take off and find out that the world is both held together all over the place – and also infinitely variable and your place in it moves from relative certainty to being unknown and open to question almost everything once you step out of the door (or through the back of the closet).  And the feeling of this space is both terrifying and exciting and also terribly lonely.  You feel cut off from the rest of the world – as the hero in this book becomes – but also as the reader, I became. 

It felt odd to be reading a book that I so thoroughly enjoyed – while feeling that so many people that I know might not like it at all – they might feel too threatened or disoriented or repulsed by the raw violence or the raw sexuality – that the dream scape that this artist creates would be one that many readers would want to be wakened from because of its nightmarish qualities, but that I was consuming like manna.

I suppose my reading of 100 Years of Solitude – a million years ago and long before I could make sense of it (or even thought of blogging) – was like this reading, only at that time I was so confused I just wanted the dream to end, though, even then, I was compelled to finish that book (and I sense this means I might quite like it now).   

Because this book reads more like a dream than a straightforward narrative arc, I don’t know that I will be able to give a veridical account of what happened in it.  Or rather, if I give my account it is unlikely to match yours, and that is fine.  This is not, by the way because the book lacks structure.  It is very well organized and structured – like the best dreams… But like the best dreams, it can be accurately interpreted in multiple ways and, because Murakami is a consummate story teller, it becomes our dream – we participate in it with our own mind, so our experience of it is valid, even if it doesn’t square with someone else’s valid experience.

(I serve on a research committee.  It is a psychoanalytic research committee – but the explanation I offered above would simply not fly with a research committee.  We propose only testable hypotheses, they would say, and when we test them, we discard those that would not work.  The tension between that position and the more analytic position about flexible realities I have taken above is part of what makes serving on that committee both delicious and frustrating.)

So – this book is structured as a description of the movement through time of two individuals.  One of them, Kafka, is a fifteen year old boy.  His are the odd numbered chapters.  He has led a bleak life as the son of a remote sculptor whose wife (Kafka’s mother) and daughter (Kafka’s sister) left him when Kafka was so young that he has at best fragmentary memories of her.  The father destroyed whatever pictures there were of his mother (save for one that is hidden and that Kafka discovers) and was so bitter that he lays an Oedipal curse on him.  Kafka, not surprisingly decides, with the help of his alter ego, Crow, to run away from home and seek his fortune.

Though I worked at a halfway house for runaway teenagers, I never ran away from home.  That said, I did go hitchhiking and I had the fantasy of putting a canoe in the Olentangy River and taking it out only when I reached New Orleans.  This Tom Sawyer/Huckleberry Finn fantasy was realized when I rode my bicycle (with a friend) 1500 miles home at the end of my Junior year of college.

The other individual, who is the centerpiece of all of the even numbered chapters, was injured by a supernatural event – or perhaps by something much more personal but traumatic – in either case he is left in a state of helpless, but very sweet dependence.  His superpower is his ability to talk to cats – but also to wait indefinitely.  He is in no hurry to get anywhere, has had most of his cognitive abilities erased and he refers to himself in the third person.  “Mr. Nakata would be happy to find your cat,” he might say.

These stories, the story of Kafka seemingly straightforward, and the story of Mr. Nakata filled with magical and other worldly events, seem to be related – and when they cross over it seems almost accidental – as if the author didn’t see it coming any more than we did.  Indeed, in the anniversary edition of the book that I read, the author had a preface in which he stated that his writing of this book (and I think his writing in general) involves a sort of taking of dictation from what he describes as another world – going over to this mysterious place and bringing back the writing from it.

The magical quality of this “shadow” story appeals to both my more childish self – the kid who believed in all kinds of magic – from Santa Clause to ESP – and to my analytic identity with its affinity for dream images where the shackles of empirical living have fallen off.  Is it plausible that Mr. Nakata is speaking to cats and that fish fall out of the sky when he opens his umbrella?  No, but it is equally implausible that he lives in a place where, when he decides to go on a trip, people are taken with him – they feel compassion for him and comfort in his presence and they not only buy him meals but take up his crazy quest – they, too, believe in magic and get back in touch with aspects of themselves that they have shed in order to enter into and live in the adult world.  And yet, that is the world that I want to live in and have more often than not.

I was listening to a podcast about erotic love this week, and one of its central theses is that the Genesis story is about how erotic love creates centrifugal force that pulls children out of the centripetal force field of the nuclear family.  I think that what gets depicted in this book, with its Oedipal theme, is a kind of have your cake and eat it too coming of age story. 

To get through this novel, you have to survive both the violence – and it comes from the unexpected source of kind Mr. Nakata and the awful world he gets pulled into before heading off to somehow meet up with Kafka, and the sex – this is an Oedipally constructed tale.  And it is not just Oedipus, but Jack Daniels, Colonel Sanders, and Elvis, along with a host of other Western artifacts that make their appearance here.  I suppose I should not be surprised after having recently seen a Five Guys restaurant on the Champs Elysee, but the mixture of Western and Japanese culture into something that feels like an intentional blend helps support the other worldliness combined with the familiar that makes this feel uncanny – that connects me, as a western reader, to a foreign world that is infused with familiar objects.

Despite the violence – I felt strangely comforted by this polyglot world.  The Anime invasion that I see at comic- con events feels less intrusive and more like the Japanese are returning the favor of our cultural sharing/intrusion.  Perhaps we are moving towards a world that is interconnected and reasonably comfortable with that as a way of functioning, creating the discomfort that is leading to conservative efforts to thwart international trade.  It feels like it is too late to close that door and we will learn that soon (or perish). 

But there is also a kind of calm that feels distinctly Japanese.  Mr. Nakata, in particular, feels safe as he travels across the country.  There is a sense of community and caring for others that feels expected and reliable – something that takes place without fanfare.  There is also a comfort with getting to know strangers and looking out for them.  Ironically, this may be partially driven by a monoculture.  Perhaps one day we will have a global monoculture?  We will be able to trust each other because we know that, wherever we grew up, we learned how to be human.

Though that last sentence is, I think, largely true now.  I think if we were plopped down into a village - a ghetto - or a suburb anywhere on the planet, I think we would discover different ways of achieving goals, but I think we would find common values and would be able to recognize how those were being expressed - and recognize that they were functional to a greater or lesser extent.  Over time, we could interrogate our differences and achieve the Jimmy Carter approved message in Voyager 1 that though we are still a bunch of nation/states we are working toward "a single global civilization.universal/world government."   

Ultimately, though, the story is, I think, about the process of transitioning away from the family romance to a kind of courage to function autonomously while being in contact with those around us.  Perhaps because of reading this book, I was musing about the folly of the Japanese attaching the United States during the Second World War.  Japanese autonomy, like British autonomy, emanated from a small island country that imagined itself capable of manhandling those around it.  Of course, since then, the world has become a much bigger place.  I am drawn back into musing about the macro – who isn’t, these days – and about the U.S. imagining of itself as the dominant world power that doesn’t need to rely on others.  We need to be autonomous and in contact with – supporting and being supported by – those around us.  Achieving this delicate state of balance is challenging for both individuals and for nations.  

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