Tori Murden McLure's A Pearl in the Storm - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reads an Inspirational Book

Tori Murden McClure, the first woman to reach the South Pole by trekking overland on skis and the first woman to row a boat singlehandedly across the Atlantic, chose to write a memoir of the latter experience (www.apearlinthestorm.com/).  This book falls under the category “Inspirational Reading”, and I am curious about what she would inspire in us – what hope does she hold out for addressing the conundrums that life visits upon us?

The central metaphor in the book is a pearl.  Her boat is titled The American Pearl, and the book is about the storms that the boat and the author weather together.  In the dedication, the author talks about a Masai she knew who wore beads representing his friends.  She appropriated his habit, but used pearls rather than beads as symbols.  Interestingly, she adds that, in addition to friends, the pearls represent “the dreams that are shared by friends.”  She talks about the dreams as irritants and as aggravators.  The dream, like a piece of sand, works its way into the oyster and, she says, if one works at it, becomes transformed into a pearl.

I think that she is referring, at least on the surface, to the inspirational dreams – the visions, ideas, and goals that lead us to do things like trying to row solo across the Atlantic.  Her dreams are experienced, then, as alien – as something external; grains of sand that enter into us and motivate us, ultimately, to do crazy things that become beautiful in the process of doing them.  What she doesn’t say explicitly, but what is played out in the book, is the saying that a dream of one dreamer is just that, a dream, but when it is shared by more than one, the dream starts to take on the edges of reality.  And she certainly invites others into her dream: others help her build the boat, teach her the skills she needs to row it, and provide the logistical support she needs to undertake the voyage.

But she may also be referring to night dreams; dreams that we observe – that happen to us – but that, even though we don’t usually experience them that way, we also author.  Dreams are a place where we, outside of our awareness, create a world that reflects the way that we want things to be, tempered by the way things are.  We work to create a world where our wishes can be attained, our dreams (in that former sense) realized, a world where we exert the kind of control that we don’t exert in our actual waking lives.  And we frequently wake from them at the moment when we can no longer deny the reality constraints, when our fictionalization of reality stretches to a point of breaking, and we are confronted by the thing that we most want to avoid: the collapse of our dreams at the hands of what feels like a cruel and unforgiving reality.

Now I think it is also the case that, despite the author’s attempt to substitute dreams for friends in the pearl metaphor, she is also referring to friends as pearls, and thus, initially at least, as grains of sand.  Friends, as desirable as they are, are irritants.  They aggravate us.  They are, indeed, as external as grains of sand and they don’t bend to our wills – in the same way that dreams are constrained by the realities of our external lives, friends bend to meet us halfway, to support our vision, but ultimately they have their own views, their own needs, and their own agendas – which are frequently at cross purposes with ours.  That is, on the surface, this is a book about the friendships that support and sustain this woman on a solo journey.  But I think it is also a book about wanting to be able to do things alone – to be the autonomous hero on the journey that requires no (apparent) support.  

The author crosses the ocean alone.  By choice.  She is a woman who, while telling the tale of the voyage, also talks about her upbringing; about defending her developmentally disabled brother from the neighborhood bullies; about growing up a girl with athletic abilities who was excluded from sport because she was a girl – or being allowed to participate because of a boy’s intervention; about the challenges in getting the education that a person of her ability deserved.  She consistently felt herself to be an outsider battling to get what her family or she herself deserved.  Against this backdrop, in addition to being connected, there is likely a strong wish to be free of the constraints of human relationships.      

While the author would not present herself as admirable in regard to wishing that others not impinge on her – in fact she goes out of her way to represent the ways that she plays well with them – I think she articulates, perhaps by accident, a part of herself, and, I believe, a part of each of us that would just as soon not have to rely on those whimsical, careless and inconvenient others that litter our lives.   Her voyage, then, can be seen as an expression of a wish, of a dream, of a desire to autonomous.  It is one that is concretely played out.  And, interestingly, it is played out twice.  In her first attempt, she fails.  The North Atlantic hurricanes prove too much for her – they toss her boat like a cork, and she, inside it, is horribly bruised, beaten and bloodied.  I felt terrified as I read it, even though I knew, because she wrote it, that she survived; the journey was harrowing.

The second, successful attempt, one that took the easier east to west route across the Atlantic, making use of the reliable trade winds instead of the difficult to track and ride Gulf Stream from West to East is presented almost as an afterthought.  She has to get up the courage, the resources and the challenge (two other women are going to attempt it), in order to go out there again.  But the drama is in the first brave but ultimately vain attempt.  She tries, and fails, to go it alone.

This is played out in her personal life as she, for the first time, has a loving relationship with another person.  She gives up the dream of autonomy, and is repaid – not by having a tyrant move in to her life (the presumably feared solution) – but by gaining what she describes as a loving available other who can connect with her in ways that feel supportive to her.  This includes supporting her efforts to function autonomously – to become the first woman to row the Atlantic solo.  The dream is altered by a reality that proves not to be as irritating and aggravating as she had feared.  Or, if the irritations were there, they were able to be worked on, to be surrounded with a lustrous, worked surface that allows them to become a pearl.  Would that we all could emulate such an alteration in our dreams and shift from our hedonic wish to be in control of our universe and to move, instead, into a position of comfortable partnership. 

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The Steins at SFMOMA - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reflects on the Need for Interpretation

While on vacation, we stumbled on the exhibition of the Stein’s collection of artworks currently on display at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.  Leo Stein was the oldest of a family of children from the Bay area whose parent’s died when Leo was about 25.  The family owned a business that afforded them a comfortable living, but not tremendous wealth.  They moved to Paris, and Leo lived with his sister Gertrude, while their brother Michael and his wife Sarah lived in a house near by.  They began collecting art, and bought canvasses, primarily by Matisse and Picasso when their art was new, innovative, shocking, and therefore relatively cheap.

The Stein’s did not just buy the art, they befriended the artists, and, perhaps most importantly, they opened their two homes to show the art, presenting the art at salons.  And the art was not simply on display; the Steins, but especially Leo, held forth about the art, interpreting it to an audience that was curious, but not yet enthusiastic about art that was moving further and further away from representing reality as directly perceived and more and more into depicting psychological reality.

Painters have always depicted psychological elements in their work.  The narrative elements of religious painting and the family details that embellish aristocratic portraits have long been central to the artist’s task.  Indeed, early western art was frequently explicitly intended to depict particular historical events, usually as a means of aggrandizing a person in power.

This art was different, and Modern, in that it depicted the psychological experience – not the sensory, but the perceptual and conceptual experience – of the artist.  The subjective and representing the subjective was now the aim of the painters.  This paralleled Freud’s discovery of the subjective experience of his patients, and his depiction of his own subjective experience in his dreams.

So, what was fascinating to me was that the artists had (and I think needed, but I’m not sure that can be proven) interpreters who could articulate what it was that they were doing to the world, because it wasn’t apparent from their work (Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris vividly interprets the nightlife of this period, and I review it here).  The work was brash, even garish – for instance, Matisse’s 1905 Femme au chapeau is a portrait of his wife and her face has a mask-like, clown white appearance with green and blue highlights – and cried out for interpretation.  What is he doing in this painting?  Why is he doing that?

The Stein’s provided that explanation, while, a few hundred miles away, Freud was doing the same thing for the bizarre symptoms of his patients – explaining how those symptoms were an expression of their internal, subjective experience, an experience that became bizarre when it was represented in a world that was used to conventions honed over hundreds, even thousands of years to hide those parts of the human experience –things like sex and aggression – that were not acceptable, even if necessarily part of who we are.

I was left curious after viewing the exhibition how the Steins explained the art.  I was curious about the language they developed and how it might parallel and differ from Freud’s descriptions.  I know that later twentieth century artists – Salvador Dali comes to mind – explicitly used Freudian ideas both in terms of the process of the painting (Dali painted dream images as part of a self analysis intended to help cure him of his unhappiness - the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg clearly describes this process) and sometimes incorporating content based on Freudian ideas.  But when the Steins started collecting, I don’t know that Freud’s ideas would have been available to them.  Later they would have been available to the artists and to the Steins, but by then the art had grown too expensive for the Steins to continue to collect.  Furthermore, Gertrude Stein had taken up with Alice B. Toklas, creating a rift in Gertrude’s relationship with Leo. 

I also found the interaction between Gertrude Stein and Picasso around his portrait of her interesting.  She is reported to have said to him something like, “But it doesn’t look anything like me.”  To which he responded, “Oh, but it will.”  Meaning, I think, that the artist’s vision would supersede the subject’s experience of herself – something that analysis at its worst does.  More charitably, perhaps Picasso imagined that Stein would come to see herself as he did.  Certainly our patients are able to use our interpretations to achieve new self views and sometimes this is a very violent process, but hopefully that ends up being a self authored, or co-authored view, rather than one that is imposed.

Finally, I think it interesting that the images of Picasso and Matisse have, like Freud’s ideas, become part and parcel of our world view – no longer a vantage point that is so alien.  Yet they do also, when we stop to look at them, retain the ability to shock, just as our unconscious does, when it asserts itself, whether in a dream or in a symptom.

Gertrude Stein makes an appearance in the film Midnight in Paris.

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Zoe Ferraris' Finding Nouf - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reads a Book about Arabian Culture

Zoe Ferraris’ first novel, Finding Nouf ,  is a detective story.  Not my favorite genre.  It always seems that the author promises to have given you enough clues, but the critical element is withheld so that you can’t quite solve the problem on your own.  That is the case here, and the whodunit aspect feels familiar even to someone who doesn’t read many detective novels.  What the author is attempting, though, is something a bit more daring.

The book jacket tells us that Ms. Ferraris was married to a Palestinian Bedouin and lived with he and his family in Saudi Arabia.  Not a world that many westerners of any stripe, much less women, have access to.  The novel creates an unlikely detective team – two friends of the brother (Othman) of a Saudi woman (Nouf) who has been murdered.  The male friend, Nayir, a Palestinian whose desert guiding ways lead him to be perceived to be a Bedouin, is paired with Othman’s fiancée Katya, a woman who, though half Saudi, has a PhD in Chemistry and works in a CSI type lab.

The central relationship in the story, then is between Nayir, a devout, naïve, but not stupid man who is both the sympathetic mouthpiece for the fundamental Muslim views that define the traditional Saudi society, and Katya, who can empathize with Nouf’s wishes to escape a gilded birdcage that she, like other wealthy Saudi women, inhabit.  Katya is about to join the gilded group, through her marriage to Othman, but she has been caged her whole life as a Saudi woman. 

Ferraris paints what is, to my ear, a very sympathetic portrait of both protagonists.  Nayir is someone who is bound by a rigid code, lives by it, and is affected by it.  He is human, but tightly bound by moral strictures.  This neither prevents him from seeing the ways in which others exploit the system nor from being cynical about the motivations of other men, but it does create a vantage point of the possibility of someone internalizing a very strict set of guidelines and using them to keep his baser self in line.  He has, from a psychoanalytic perspective, a very successful neurosis.  His baser desires, despite showing up in his dreams, are well controlled and he strives to lead an upright, sober, and moral life and he is not totally out of touch with the internal struggles this creates for him.

Katya, too, is quite believable.  She is a proto-feminist in Arabia, though she has the advantage of a second-generation feminist as an author.  To my western ear, she is working from within the confines of the system to change it – or more precisely her place in it.  She carves out a reasonably free existence as a woman in a culture that is, objectively, quite oppressive of women.  She also cautiously and carefully helps Nayiz see the inherent conflicts in his position.

Nayiz, on the other hand, experiences his enlightenment as a violent reworking of all that is near and dear to him.  He feels the edifice that supports his worldview collapse beneath him as he reconsiders women as deserving of freedom and self-direction.

I am curious about Ferraris’ intended audiences.  Certainly we in the west are one of those audiences and, from a position of having survived some weird parallel shift – we live in a postmodern world, one that Freud helped us create, we can root for Katya as she tries to build a similar bridge to a brave new world in Arabia.  We can also appreciate the internal dilemmas, but also the inherent nobility of Nayir’s positions regarding women.  Perhaps Ferraris should take up writing novels about Christian fundamentalists for the rest of us to appreciate that approach as well!

But I am curious about how this will be read in Saudi Arabia.  Ferraris is described as having moved to Saudi Arabia “… to live with her then husband.”  A woman, an infidel, who no longer has a relationship with a man – unless he died – is an unlikely proselytizer no matter how good her prose.  But the dilemma of how to change a society is an interesting one.  One aspect of Freud’s genius is that he recognized that he was not talking about them – about the objects, his patients – but about us – about himself.  He discovered that he, himself was a hysteric with symptoms, an unconscious and a need to be analyzed.

Katya and Nayiz are both members of the Arabic society.  They are also projections of the author.  They are also likely based on observed individuals from the Arabic society.  I think it is likely more from the perspective of the flesh and blood Saudis who are reconsidering the role of women in their society that change will emanate and ripple, and that Saudi Arabia will have to have its own home grown Harriet Beecher Stowe – the little woman whom Lincoln credited with starting the Civil War through her sympathetic portrayal of enslaved Americans.   But Ferraris’ does, I believe, give us as outsiders an interesting glimpse, through her own outsider’s eyes, of the imagined inner workings of a people that seem, from a distance, to be quite foreign.   They become, through this text, familiar, known and even loved.  We can imagine our way into their world and find that it is not that dissimilar from our own.

P.S.  I also read “City of Veils”, Ferraris second novel, which continues the characters in new interactions around a new mystery.  Psychoanalytically, it continued the themes from the first novel.  As a mental health professional I was dismayed that, in an attempt to profile a gruesome killer, Katya considered the psychotic as a reasonable class of individual likely to have committed the crime.  This is not consistent with what we know about the frequency of crimes, particularly violent crimes, that are committed by the mentally ill.  In a book that is fighting stereotyping it was particularly disappointing to see the stereotype of the mentally ill as a menace being promulgated.


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