Ann Patchett's A State of Wonder - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reflects on Immortality

Ann Patchett packs big psychoanalytic and human themes into pages that don’t seem numerous enough to handle the load in this compelling and dream-like coming of middle-age novel (www.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/books/review/book-review-state-of-wonder-by-ann-patchett.html).  Her protagonist is a Minnesota born woman whose father returned after her birth and the completion of his graduate program to his native India, leaving her with her Minnesotan mother.  The girl grows up to be trained as an OB/GYN, but left her residency at Johns Hopkins after injuring a child she was delivering through C-section and instead of a physician she became a bench scientist.  She returned to Minnesota to work at a pharmaceutical company.  She is now having an affair with the president of the company, who is a widower many years her senior, and she is lovingly and, at least on the surface, Platonically attached to her lab partner, a happily married father of three boys. 

The lab partner is sent to the Amazon basin to make contact with a physician who is doing unspecified and potentially hugely lucrative research for the drug company, but the physician is not reporting on the progress she is making.  One of the twists is that the physician was the protagonist’s mentor and attending physician when she was a resident, the physician’s inattention was instrumental in the botched C-section, and the president did not send the protagonist on the mission originally, even though he thought her best suited to it, to protect her.  When the lab partner comes up missing, the distraught protagonist agrees to go find the physician to find out what happened.

The psychoanalytic and, I think, human landscape that is than explored is the landscape of modern heroes – the driven, brilliant people who passionately and single-mindedly engage in their work – and their mentorees, who worship, fear, identify with and/or despise them, but it is also the landscape of ancient heroes - the protagonist sets out on a quest - one that she did not choose and, at least on the surface, is poorly prepared to successfully navigate.  This landscape is, then, also the landscape of immortality – the modern hero has the hope to achieve immortality both through the accomplishment of a goal that will win the hero fame and through generating paths for the mentoree to follow, developing the hero's ideas more fully.  The ancient heroic quest is related; the hero's actions are praised in poetry and remembered always, but the generativity is in encouraging others to engage in their own heroic quest.

The usual modern heroic interaction is between an accomplished and revered mentor and an ingénue, a young capable person who is hungry for guidance and latches onto a seemingly infallible source.  The central drama in this novel is between two people who have been in that type of relationship and have had a rupture, the idealization has been burnished, and yet when they cross paths again, they still feel pulled into the same orbit.  Patchett also introduces a gender specific twist into this interaction which is usually portrayed as being between two men, or a man and a woman, and she deliciously develops this theme in the secret quest of the modern hero: the project is to extend the fertility of women into their 40s, 50s, 60s and beyond.  So, the issue of the ways that a woman traditionally achieves immortality, through childbearing, and the gender specific limits that are placed on that by menopause, are brought into the equation.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, then, the modern hero aspect makes this a book about narcissistic relationships.  Psychoanalysts view narcissistic relationships as occurring early in our lives – we are the apple of our mother’s eye when we are born, we rely on her for everything, and she, at least in our fantasy, provides for all of our needs.  In the normal course of things, we then move on to more complex types of relationships – relationships with teams of people, not just the coach, and relationships in which we both provide and receive nourishment.  But, especially if the original narcissistic relationship was less than perfect (and whose wasn’t), we continue to wish to return to it and to finally get it right – either as the ingénue, finally receiving the hoped for goodies that were meant for us, and/or as the all-powerful provider, providing perfectly for others what was imperfectly provided for us, though frequently in terms of what we wish for, not taking into account the particular needs of this ingenue.

Patchett provides numerous variations on the theme of narcissistic/hero-mentoree/immortality seeking pairs in the novel, and she illustrates the tension between this way of achieving immortality and the psychoanalytically more mature means of relating as a team member – not just by contrasting human relationships, but through the type of ecosystem she invents that produces the endless fertility of the Amazonian tribe the physician is studying.  The fertility occurs as the result of women chewing the bark of a tree that grows, as aspens do, in groves with a common root system linking them into one organism.  Similarly, there are psychedelic mushrooms, another communal plant, growing in the grove.  They somehow contribute to the properties of the bark, as does the chewing of the bark itself, which exposes the sap to a variety of butterfly whose nectar also contribute to these properties.  Further, the bark’s health giving properties extend beyond fertility into realms that will create a moral dilemma for the drug company – will it develop this drug to support the profitable narcissistic wish of wealthy women to extend their fertility or will it use this scarce and apparently non replicable resource to much less profitably protect the lives of citizens in the third world?

The choice between a stunted but narcotically powerful relationship with a powerful other and the less intense but perhaps more truly fertile relationship with a team or interdependent group posed in this novel ring true in real life, both within the political world of psychoanalysis itself – where two of Freud’s most devoted disciples, Melanie Klein and Heinz Kohut, broke with Freudian ideas in order to provide an alternative vision, ironically about narcissism itself, at great personal and institutional cost, and with my own experience of living with and through the relationships with two powerful mentors in graduate school.  Patchett is pointing us toward an alternate way of relating. but one that is achieved at great cost and one that does not promise the same kind of certainty.  She hopes for a more generative, a more broadly connected relational basis for our actions, but the outcome of this vision is less familiar and therefore produces more anxiety.  She sees personal maturity as an important element in providing the ability to more broadly relate and she sees, I believe, a cultural and social maturity that could pave the way for these kinds of relationships, though I also think that she sees a feminine sensibility as essential to establishing them.  On the other hand, she nicely portrays some of the pitfalls of feminine relatedness and does not naively or stridently praise all things feminine.

The conclusion of this novel is swift.  Many loose ends are tied up quickly.  Some are left dangling, but there is a sense of abruptness to the conclusion.  The ending is like waking from a dream, a good and satisfying dream where the troubling themes have been set aright and we don’t have to worry any longer about them, but can get on with our day.  In fact, the issues that Patchett struggles with are, I think, deep and problematic themes that we as psychoanalysts, but as humanists more generally, must continue to struggle with as we strive to create a better world on both a personal and a societal level.   She suggests that the successful achievement of the ancient hero's quest, requires her to give up her narcissistic investment in being the perfect child and, for that matter the perfect parent, and the result of this, while satisfying on one level, leaves open many questions about the brave new worlds that we enter into, in both the novel and in life.  In the protagonist's nightmares, she is repeatedly separated from her father by the crowds of Indians that appear when she travels to see him.  We will, ironically, face the terror of being alone as we transition to a more broadly based relatedness.  Patchett points us in a direction, but she suggests that there will be great anxiety as we separate from those we love to chart our own course, and as we free those who depend on us to follow their own path.  Ultimately, we must each achieve whatever conclusion we do as the result of our own heroic quest and the resulting idiosyncratic engagement with the issues it exposes us to, an engagement that can be informed by such fine works of art as this novel.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.   For a subject based index, link here.

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Kathryn Stockett's The Help - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reads a Book and Contemplates the Limits of Understanding the Other

The Help, a debut novel by Kathryn Stockett, is one of those books that I became engrossed in.  In the middle of reading it, the reluctant wife complained about my disappearance into the book and, when I said it must be like trying to compete with another lover, she responded, “No, I’m not competing, I’ve lost.”  Unfortunately, this occurs with every other book or so that I read, but, thankfully, she generally welcomes me back after my dalliance with a good humored, but pointed, description of my inconsiderate behavior.

This book is told from four vantage points: the first person narration of the three central protagonists and, in one chapter describing a party where they are all present, the third person.  It is a book about Jackson, Mississippi in 1962 and a white woman’s discovery of the experience of the African American women domestics who lived there. 

The white woman, Skeeter, has just graduated from college and wants to become a writer.   She returns home to live with her parents.  She gets a job at the newspaper writing an advice column about keeping house, something about which she knows nothing, and she turns to the domestic, Aibeleen, who serves one of her friends, to find out how to get the ring out of a bathtub and stains out of a shirt.   As they work together on this, Skeeter becomes curious about Aibeleen's life, and she partners with Aibeleen and 11 other domestics to write a book of stories told from their vantage point about being a domestic in the time leading up to and including the birth of the civil rights movement in the south.

The story, then, is told by Skeeter, a tall, gawky woman who lives on her parent's plantation but is part of Jackson society, Aibeleen, who is a spiritually gifted and very grounded domestic who looks after families when they have young children and moves on to new families when the children mature, and Minny, a domestic who loses positions because of her smart mouth, and who is able to keep those positions she does only because her cooking is extraordinary.

Suffice it to say that a very fine, gripping tale is told.  The consequences for each of these women of articulating their experience, even in “anonymous” form, are severe.  They reexamine, and fear for, their lives as they conspire to give voice to a perspective that is apparently ignored, but that is actually – and as becomes apparent when the white women use their power to demand that the domestics mouth support for racist positions - actively suppressed. 

From a psychoanalytic viewpoint, I was most interested in the voices of the narrators because that relates to a central question of psychoanalysis: Can we know the subjectivity of another person?  In this particular case: Can a white woman who grew up in Jackson and lives in Atlanta accurately portray the subjective experience of southern domestics who lived before she was born?

The author, wisely and consciously, chooses not to do this.  Aibeleen’s and Minny’s voices are written in southern black dialect.  This has the effect of giving us access to their spoken words, not to their inner experience.  It is as if they are telling us their stories – as if we are sitting on the porch listening to them talk.  Skeeter’s voice, on the other hand, is written in plain English.  And her story is told through her eyes as she experiences it.  We have access to her visceral reactions when she hears the stories of the domestics.  We know how she feels about the injustices that she hears about from the domestics and witnesses directly in her friends' behavior.  We get to know her internal reaction to the racism of her peers.

This distinction is subtle but critical.  It is perhaps most obvious in the difference between Skeeter’s description of her reactions to her disappointing lover and Minny’s reactions to her abusive husband.  Skeeter longs to be touched, but then can’t stand to be.  Minny thinks (or talks) very strategically about her husband and her reactions to his actions.  She knows – in the way that we do when we talk – about her own motivations and those of others (including being puzzled by some of her reactions)– but her subjective experience – the raw data of her experience – the building blocks of her knowledge - is not available to us.

In her afterward, the author explicitly states that the ability to know the subjective experience of another across racial lines in the segregated South was impossible because of the essential dishonesty that was the cornerstone of interracial relationships.  While genuine love and hate existed, and are portrayed both in this book and in the “book within the book”; to put one’s self in the shoes of someone across that great divide is, to her way of thinking, impossible.

The bigger question then becomes whether we can ever know the subjective experience of another person.  Is the divide too wide between all of us?  Certainly it is much more difficult for me to connect with the subjective experience of my patients who have been overtly and severely traumatized.  I am always, to a certain extent, a potential or actual harmful other, and for them to reveal their inner workings to me would be stupid because I can and will use that knowledge against them. 

But haven’t we all been traumatized?  Isn’t our trust in those we love tempered by the knowledge that they could at any time (and frequently do) disappear – in my case into a book, a TV show, or God forbid, into a relationship with someone else (even though in a small and necessary way I do that every day when I go to work and engage with my peers, students and clients, or when I turn my attention from my wife to my children)?  And despite my efforts to empathize with the reluctant wife’s experience when I abandon her, I don’t really know what it feels like.  I can imagine what it feels like.  But that has a very different quality than what it actually feels like when she turns away from me.  And I’m not sure that what I feel when she turns away from me in similar ways is the same – do I need her attention in the same ways that she needs mine?  Do I depend on her more, less, or in qualitatively different ways than she depends on me?

So, this book is, ultimately, disappointing.  It promises, at the beginning, a glimpse into a world that I cannot know.  The book within the book promises it as well.  It, wisely and consciously, does not deliver on that promise.  The author understands the limits of our ability to cross certain divides.  This book can’t integrate the experience of white and black, employer and domestic, and that may be a big part of its sad but accurate truth.  The author, on the other hand, appears to confidently portray the subjectivity of Skeeter.  In her acknowledgments, though, she notes her intentional inclusion of some anachronistic references - to songs that weren't sung until 1964, and appreciates that her copy editors weeded out many other anachronisms.  Despite their weeding, I found myself being bothered by what I perceived to be many subtle but critical references to the future - as if really being in that time and place is too much to bear if you don't know how the story turns out..  And I wonder if these betray the author's reluctance, or even inability, to leave her own subjectivity to inhabit Skeeter's world - a world that is, of necessity, filled with stereotypes that are uncomfortable to articulate and dishonest to avoid.

Post script:  It is now years later and I am remembering this book and noting that I did not talk about the ultimate communication of the black experience to the whites - when the infuriated best cook in town literally makes the most poisonously racist woman eat her sh*t.  I think that I did not reference that moment (one that was highlighted in the movie) for the reasons outlined above - I experienced Stockett as distancing herself from the subjectivity of the cook and of the racist woman so much that the potential impact - the projective identification (described in a post on 9/11) - does not register.  Instead, especially in the movie, I remember experiencing this as a moment of triumph, which I don't think it was for anyone involved - I think it was a moment of deeply and powerfully felt communication of feelings that are incredibly difficult to contain and to communicate verbally.  

Mrs. Bridge, reviewed here, and the companion piece, Mr. Bridge - which I have not reviewed, are intriguing meditations on the consciousness of a relatively benign bigot (Mrs.) and a somewhat more malevolent, but still very middle of the road one (Mr.) in Kansas City in the 1930s.  I have also reviewed the movie Selma in the same post, which, I think, interestingly protects the African American psychological experience in the time of the civil rights movement in ways that are similar to, but that may have different motivations than does The Help, as does The Butler, which I have not reviewed.  A post on an African American psychoanalyst describing her subjective experience, and my failure to appreciate it, is described here.  Another post about the series Transparent, which details a psychoanalytic description of why bathrooms seem to be so central to issues of civil rights - something that is a central plot in the help, but not one I articulate above.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.   For a subject based index, link here.

For other posts looking at Race in America see: James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree, and applied to a Rock Musical, Dorothy Holmes presents to the 2016 Psychoanalytic Convention, 2017 Convention Aktar, Powell and Trump, hearing Ta-Nehisi Coates talk, Black Lives Matter,  John Lewis' March, Get Out, Green Book and Blackkklansman, Americanah, The Help, Selma, August Wilson's Fences, Hamilton! on screen, Da 5 Bloods, The Black Panther, and Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me.

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Escape from Alcatraz - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Goes to the Movies

When we were on vacation earlier this summer, one of the big family hits was visiting Alcatraz.  Numerous friends had recommended it, and it was number one on the kids’ wish list of places to go.  The Rock was wonderful and terrible all at once.  Designed for inmates who were troublemakers in the federal prison system, it was intended to be a penitentiary.  Modeled on monasteries, the prison cells and isolated life were intended to help inmates build an internal world, one that included a sense of being penitent.  One of the differences between a monastery and Alcatraz is that, while both provide shelter, medical care, and food, on Alcatraz everything else was earned, including contact with others.  Even speaking was a privilege.

In our continuing efforts to remember the vacation, we watched Escape from Alcatraz last night.  Based on real events, this movie stars Clint Eastwood as the leader of a gang of four who figure out how to break out of prison, and disappear into the waters of San Francisco Bay never to be seen again.  Filmed in part on the island, the movie powerfully evoked the place we had visited, and seemed largely true to what we had observed and imagined.  While the plot had been slightly Hollywoodized, it seemed to have significant psychological truth to it.

The film was stark.  It began with the Eastwood character’s (Frank) transfer to Alcatraz, complete with his boat ride to the island, his bus ride up the hill tourists walk today, his medical evaluation and his delivery, naked, to his cell.  We are slowly introduced to the other characters; prisoners, guards, and warden, largely through Frank’s eyes as he meets and interacts with them. 

There was no voiceover explaining what was taking place.  The director trusted us, the audience, to make sense of the story as it unfolded, figuring things out from context.  The dialogue was stripped down.  True to the nature of a place where even talking was a privilege and overuse could leave to the privilege being revoked, the interchanges were concise.  This led to beautifully spare interactions, as when someone asks Frank what his childhood was like.  His one word response, “Short,” speaks volumes.

The characters that emerged out of these brief and terse interactions were wonderfully detailed, nuanced and different from each other.  Placed in a context designed to minimize identity (the inmates were referred to by number rather than by name), the differences between the individuals quickly became apparent.  It was as if the narrowness of the window for expression increased the intensity of the need to assert oneself.  Further, in a world filled with the most criminal of the criminals, the need to differentiate those whom you could trust from those you could not became critical.  As we watched over Frank’s shoulder, it was easy to see why he made the choices that he did.

What was more difficult was to fathom the character of Frank himself.  Intelligent (his prison testing suggested a superior IQ), able to defend himself (targeted by a huge thug named Wolf, he gave more than he got in each interaction), we are given neither the crime that led to his first imprisonment, nor the in prison offense that sends him to Alcatraz.  A cursory Google search provides these data, but the choice to leave them out of the film creates a kind of opacity to Frank’s character that allows us as viewers to project ourselves into the lead role, to imagine ourselves as Frank.  Or to imagine him in whatever way we might.  Early psychoanalysts used this technique when they presented themselves as a blank screen for patients to project their expectations of others onto.  Here, though, I think it is used to promote identification.

Identifying with Frank is tricky business, though.  His history is not like that of most of us.  Raised in foster homes, first imprisoned at age 13, sent to Alcatraz after multiple escape attempts, it is easy to imagine that he could be deeply hurt, but also angry as a means of protecting himself, and therefore quite impulsive.  But the task that he engages in is one that requires a great deal of foresight, planning, care and attention to detail.  If his behaviors were driven primarily by anger, which the Hollywood influenced interaction between he and the warden would suggest, his fuse burned slowly but continuously for many months.  Eastwood’s enigmatic portrayal suggests the possibility of something more universal.  And here we might insert any number of motivations, but the one that occurs to me is the basic need for freedom. 

Robert Kennedy shut down Alcatraz when he was the Attorney General about a year after this escape occurred.  The reason given on the tour was that Alcatraz was deemed to be cruel to the inmates.  The movie certainly portrays cruelty.  Access to such basics as contact with other humans and with sunlight could be taken away for six months at a time and the movie depicts Frank being washed when in solitary confinement with a fire hose.  The philosophy behind the system used to manage – and perhaps treat – inmates was based in both the monastic tradition and in behavioral psychology – reinforcing desired behaviors by rewarding them should lead to an increase in the desired behaviors. 

Frank’s response – his plan, his careful work, his recruitment of others to join him, their team work, the conspiracy of the other inmates to support them and to not rat them out, is a testament to something that is greater in the human condition than responding as animals do to the environment around them.  It speaks to a deeply and powerfully human desire to be human – even in the midst and in the wake of the most inhumane treatment.  I don’t believe that all of us are able to do that – the Wolf character in this film does not, becoming both in name and in action an animal – but the humanity of the other characters, while dramatized, also feels real – and portrays the kind of world, even in a place as grim, cold, unpleasant and frightening as Alcatraz, that we recognize and want to live in – and to escape from.


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Bottle Shock - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reflects on Dreams

Bottle Shock is a 2008 movie apparently very loosely based  on the events in 1976 that culminated in California wines being judged superior to French wines in a blind taste test by French Wine critics.  This is a bad movie and we were watching it for the second time.  Why?  Our recent trip to wine country led us to want to observe the scenery again – and to see if there was anything we recognized from our trip.  Also because we were curious about the story of the emergence of California wine and wanted to hear it again, even if badly told.

But more to the point, why would I blog about a movie that I wouldn’t recommend?  Because I think that bad movies help us understand what works about good movies in the same way that I think bad dreams (nightmares) help us appreciate the ways that dreams are intended to work.  This is in part because I believe that movies serve a function that is very similar to the function of dreams.  In fact, I believe that movies are the Director’s/screenwriter’s and, to a lesser degree, actor’s/editor’s dreams writ large.  We are encouraged to enter into and share their dream life.

But, you may say, movies are coherent and dreams are not.  Movies make sense, and when people have tried to make movies that are dreamlike, as the surrealists did, they ended up being incoherent, unsettling and strange – not cogent, calming, and familiar the way that movies are.  This is because, I believe, the best movies present the latent or hidden dream – not the manifest or apparent dream that we directly experience.  The movie is the decoded dream, the analyzed dream, the dream as it was constructed, not the dream as it has been disguised so that it could make it past what Freud termed the sensor  - turned into something that it wasn’t because it was presenting a version of reality that is intolerable to our more inhibited selves.

Dreams are disguised, at least according to Freud, because our uptight selves would be aghast at how our unfettered, free, more animal selves organize and prioritize things in the world as they would construct it, which they are free to do when we, the sensor, the sensible one who has to pay the bills and cares what the neighbors think, is asleep and not minding the store.

So, if movies are presenting the version of dreams that we can’t tolerate, why do we enjoy them?  If they are dreams turned upside down, with the hidden part of dreams showing as the top layer of movies, why aren’t we repulsed?  For many reasons, but here are two.  First, because they are not our dreams, they are the dreams of others, so we can disown those aspects that feel uncomfortable and blame the movie makers for the unacceptable stuff.  Second, and this is the reason I would like to explore more fully here, because movies still follow the rules of dreams.

Dreams are ruled, in Freud’s simplest formulation, by the dictum that the dreamer will not be awakened.  They are intended to protect sleep.  So, in this first formulation, dreams are frequently intended to fulfill a wish.  If the dreamer is hungry, a slice of pie will keep her or him asleep and the dream provides it.  But the pie mustn’t be too sweet, or too available.  If there is no effort in achieving a goal, it doesn’t feel real, it feels constructed, false, and therefore something that creates anxiety in us and wakens us.  Sometimes it is useful for the dreamer to have to search for a piece of pie.  Not only does that buy time, but it creates other distractions along the way, and it feels more real; the pie passes the real test, not of satiating hunger, but of keeping us asleep, searching for a way to sate that desire.

Bottle Shock is a bad movie then, in part because it provides answers that are too pat, too dramatic, too dreamlike, and thus, paradoxically, wake us from the movie sleep that a good movie, and this movie is very good in parts – puts us into.  By this I mean that it puts us into a state where we, like the screenwriter dreamer, are trying to decode, to figure out, to understand what the solution to the puzzle is.  We are curious and engaged and we care about the characters.  But in this, a bad movie, the characters and/or situations disappoint us on a regular basis.  Sometimes a bad movie misses the mark on the shy side and sometimes on the fat one.

For instance, on the fat side, the darkest moment in the movie occurs when the crotchety hero who has left a lucrative law practice to pursue his dream of being a vintner discovers, after firing both his best friend and his son, partially over terrible finances and partially over disloyalty, that his prize chardonnay, the wine that he has racked six times when everyone else only racks theirs three, is brown.  He sells it as scrap and he goes back to the law firm to beg for his old job back from the man who is now married to his ex-wife.  Ouch.  Meanwhile, unbeknownst to him, his son has discovered that the brown discoloration in the wine is a temporary flaw caused by a too perfect process and manages to protect the wine.  He calls his father to ask him not to ask for his job back at the exact last moment that this can be done.  The father checks the one bottle that he kept, discovers it is no longer brown, tries to open it, and the only implement he can find is the samurai sword of the partner he has just been begging, and he cuts the bottle open with the sword to serve to all before heading back to his dream.  Well, the mind reels.  Too much has happened in a single moment.  Too many things have been choreographed.  This can’t have really happened.  We are jolted from our movie induced dream sleep and reminded that this is a movie, not a dream, it is too perfect, and we, incredulous, are no longer happy, somnolent viewers.

On the thin side, there are plots that are not woven together.  Pieces that are left lying around or not integrated in a satisfactory manner.  As an old adage says, if a rifle is hanging over the fireplace in act one, it will be fired in act three.  Dreams (and movies) have a lot of work to do in very little time.  They don’t have time to waste.  They are incredibly lean vehicles in their best incarnations.  In this film, the crotchety winemakers son is a ne’er do well who beds every woman around, except the intern who is taken by his friend.  As part of the ne’er do well’s development, one that is not believable – another problem – the intern switches loyalty.  Her relationship with the friend is never resolved.  Further, this action is inconsistent with her character.  She chooses the heir to the castle over the hired hand – a Mexican with dirt under his fingers – while preaching that she values the integrity of the latter.  Again, we have a whiplash reaction, though this time in the opposite direction.  We find that the story is not fundamentally believable because it does not live up to our lowest expectation: that it have an inner sense of integrity.  That it seems more like the chaotic surface of a night dream, and not like the inner workings of the well understood dream.

There is much more in the movie to criticize, but that criticism is along the lines outlined above.  I do think there is a compelling story here: the dreams of many men and that of a woman.  These dreams are vivid and real and the film-makers err, I think, in making them too fantastic – too much like the dreams that awaken us because they break the bounds of reality and not like those that are successful, that stay within those bounds to protect the fantasy elements – to let us have our pie - and eat it, too.


To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.   For a subject based index, link here.

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Midnight in Paris - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Wonders Whether We Can Appreciate What We Have

At the beginning of this new Woody Allen film that many have commented feels like an old Woody Allen film, there is a montage of Paris scenes.  I found it mildly disturbing to see modern vehicles cruising the streets of Paris, but the truly disturbing element was, towards the end of the montage there was a jogger.  I thought it must have been a mistake, but then there was another, and another, and then a pair of them.

It was disturbing from the perspective of this being Paris – the city of lights, the city of fine food, art, wine, and living – living that does not include the dull and hum drum human maintenance projects symbolized by jogging.  But there they were.  Joggers.  In Paris.  Living in Paris is supposed to be divine, and all of that butter is not supposed to have any bad effects because… I don’t know, because the Gallic intestinal system is somehow constructed differently and we gain that ability through osmosis when we are there.  Furthermore, Woody Allen detests physical exercise and those who engage in it.  So what is he up to?

Well, I think he is trying to deliver a mature film, a mature view of the world.  One that acknowledges his own - and therefore our - immaturity and the regressive pull of nostalgia, but one that suggests that this pull can be overcome.  Owen Wilson plays Woody Allen in Paris – a film-maker who is tired of making money from screen plays that he is not proud of and is working on a novel – a novel about a nostalgia shop.  He is in Paris with his fiancée and her wealthy, right wing disturbing parents.

The Owen Wilson/Woody Allen character is taken with Paris – the Paris of today and the Paris that once was and is no more.  He gets a chance to experience that old Paris and, Zelig-like, shows up in the Paris of the twenties, where he meets Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, Irving Berlin, Pablo Picasso and the very Gertrude Stein about whom SFMOMA is having a retrospective (see my recent blog about this).  

As he goes back and forth between these two worlds, the screenwriter learns from Gertrude Stein, and from Hemingway, that his fear of death occludes his writing.  He also learns that his writing is good and can become great if he can just manage this fear thing better.  He falls in love with Picasso’s and Hemingway’s lover, someone he characterizes as one of the great art groupies of all time.  They, together, go further back in time, to the Belle Epoch, where they meet Degas, Gauguin, and Toulouse- Lautrec at the Folies Bergere. 

It is in the context of the relationship with this woman that he learns that he does not want to marry someone who does not value what he does (his current fiancee), but neither does he want to live in the world of the past, a world that is not his own.  He realizes that going back in time is an endlessly recursive task – there is always a golden age that precedes this one, and he cannot hope to ever find the true golden age of the past, that he must make his own epoch, his own golden era.  In the process he begins to face the fear of death by looking forward rather than forever backwards into the time that never was.

Despite the movie being not quite so trite as I have summarized it above – or rather because it is that trite but also a bit more rough around the edges, it is rich psychoanalytic ground.  The wish for Paris feels also a like a wish for the infantile – for a time that was grand, pristine, and when we were cared for, or should have been – idyllically.  The analytic relationship promises this idyll, but also, if it is successful, fails to deliver on that promise.  The world that we would have inhabited, the care that we would have had, proves to be a trap.  It is the world that we inhabit now that we must wrestle with, engage with, and make our own. 

I think it is no accident that the screenwriter longs for Gertrude Stein’s salon.  It is an American outpost in Paris.  A place that is foreign, but one where the people speak English.  They are Americans abroad.  Woody Allen, perhaps the most serious screen writer and director that America produced in the last half of the twentieth Century, wants to have a very different set of peers.  The irony is that many envy him and would want to have dinner with him.  They want to pick his brain, to get to know him and his perspective on the world and go to the kinds of parties with the kinds of people he has access to.

OK, he has not written the Great American Novel.  OK, his movies, including this one have been a bit fluffy.  Well, the United States is a bit fluffy.  He has captured something very telling about our neurosis – about our wealth, our bravado, and our failure to have the kind of depth that other nations with different, richer traditions have.  It may be that our greatest writers might have learned and practiced their craft elsewhere, just as Allen has done by producing a movie in Paris.

 And this movie may fall short of being A Moveable Feast.  But it, and the rest of his work, does provide the kind of mirror that the works of others at other times have provided of their worlds.  And perhaps Allen is finally coming to realize this – to be comfortable with who it is that he is.  If so, it is hard won.

Woody Allen has had highly publicized battles with immature behavior – marrying his own adoptive daughter comes to mind as an example of what looks, from the outside, like a very regressive move into the world of what couldn’t – or perhaps shouldn’t - be.  His very public attempts to make use of psychoanalysis, and the failure of psychoanalysis to prevent such a failure in judgment, leave us scratching our heads.

This movie promises the possibility of achieving a different, more mature and integrated end, one in which the past is preserved as a lovely place, a place that we are fond of and that we are comfortable respecting and even visiting, but that we end up living in a present that requires self knowledge, courage, and even the maintenance activity of something as unromantic as jogging to become all that we can.

I revisited this film five years later here in the context of COVID-19.

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St. Ignatius and the Jesuits - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Goes on Retreat

In addition to being a psychoanalyst, I am a faculty member at a Jesuit Catholic University.  There are 28 Jesuit Universities in the United States (the most Universities of any Catholic order), and many more high schools than that.  There are additional Jesuit Universities and High Schools scattered around the world.  The Jesuits were founded by St. Ignatius Loyola in the 16^th Century.  Loyola was a young courtesan and minor royal in Basque Spain who was injured by a cannonball when he was leading a foolhardy defense of a castle.  During his convalescence he discovered that he was not drawn to read the tales of Chivalry that he thought he would have preferred, and instead found himself reading about the life of Christ and the lives of the Saints.  This inspired him both to reconsider his life as a young knight, and to become an academic - in part so that he could learn more about Christianity.  After training at the University of Paris, and in company with ten others, he founded an order of activist priests who ended up creating an international confederation of High Schools, Colleges and Universities.

The Jesuits in the United States have a problem.  They are not attracting members at the rate they once were.  Fifty years ago, virtually all of the faculty and administrators at my University were Jesuit priests.  Today, there are about 12 Jesuits at a University that employs roughly 500 teachers.  Our President has publicly mused that he is likely to be the last Jesuit President.  In the last 10 years, 10 of the 28 Jesuit Colleges and Universities have hired lay presidents (who are all white, male, and Catholic).  So I spent the week at a retreat for faculty, administrators and board members of Jesuit schools.  The retreat is a kick-off to an 18 month process that is meant to mirror the formation of Ignatian priests so that we can, in effect, maintain the Jesuit or Ignatian character on our campuses.

Formation for Jesuits involves becoming a priest.  That is not on my to-do list.  But the group leading this effort wants to both inform; that is, to teach us about Ignatius, and to form us; that is to help us become emotionally resonant with a Jesuit position with regard to issues that emerge in an academic setting. 

From the information presented this week, I came to be able to articulate things that I have felt about the Jesuits but have not had a knowledge base that has allowed me to know why I have felt them.  Ignatius, it turns out, is not unlike Freud:  He was a revolutionary thinker who emerged at a propitious moment in history and built an organization that promulgated his ideas.  Ignatius was roughly contemporary with Luther and, like Luther, he proposed that the individual person could be in direct contact with God.  This “protestant” idea did not lead to a schism for Loyola and the Jesuits because he worked very hard to remain connected with the church, but his ideas were consonant with those who split away.  And, raised in the Episcopal Church, I think I resonated with both the “protestant” views of my Jesuit peers, but also with their organizational loyalty – the Episcopal Church has been called Catholicism without the Pope.

The “protestant” position of the Jesuits is important as a cornerstone for Colleges and Universities.  From Ignatius’ position, knowledge is something that is acquired by direct engagement with the world, not through indoctrination at the foot of an authority.  This position was essential to and a product of the zeitgeist of the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance; Freud’s discovery of the unconscious – deposing the authority of consciousness, like Ignatius's and Luther's deposing the authority of the pope, was both a product of and essential to the transition to modernism.

                 













Ignatius reminded me of Freud, though, not primarily because they were both transitional thinkers, but because Ignatius created a method of listening that is eerily reminiscent – or presages - Freud’s listening method.  Ignatius created the Spiritual Exercises.  They were based on the conversion process that he went through in the wake of his injury.  These exercises are engaged in by a spiritual director and a retreatant who has a particular problem that he or she wants to address – the Jesuits have always used the exercises as a means of helping a novitiate determine whether he was truly called to be a Jesuit.  They are intended, in their original form, to be undertaken over the course of a month, give or take.  The part that seems to me to be centrally parallel is that the spiritual director is to help the retreatant engage as directly as possible with God – indeed, where possible, the director is to try to facilitate without interfering with the conversation that emerges between the retreatant and God.  The listening perspective for the spiritual director is supposed to be one that is attentive, reverent, and devoted, which feels very much, to me, like the evenly hovering attention of the analyst.  What does not feel strictly analytic is that the retreatant is asked to imagine particular scenes from the life of Christ rather than to simply follow his or her own associations.

The analytic process can be thought of in many ways, but one of my orienting thoughts is that one of the analyst’s central tasks is to facilitate a conversation between the analysand and his or her unconscious.  Ideally this conversation becomes an ongoing, dynamic conversation where the unconscious, instead of being always unknown and even hostile to a person’s conscious personal intent, becomes an ally, using different but very powerful processes and data to work on the very problems the conscious mind is struggling with and to propose an array of solutions that can be implemented in ways that become more and more consistent with the consciously experienced self.

Ignatius used the Spiritual Exercises as a means to facilitate a dialogue between the retreatant and God – an entity that, like the unconscious, is not directly knowable by most of us most of the time.  In my own analysis (and in my current life), I have been confronted over and over with evidence that I do, indeed, have an unconscious that attempts to communicate with me; sometimes by engaging in outrageous or embarrassing behavior, but more frequently through dreams that symbolically – through the use of images and narrative - represent problems that I am wrestling with.  Dreams do not necessarily offer solutions, but might offer a representation of the problem in ways that clarified aspects of that problem that I was uncomfortable representing to myself consciously.  For instance, if I am struggling to help a patient articulate a particular thought, a dream might help me realize that this has to do, in part, with the ways in which that feels like an expression of affection that feels, on some level, sexual, and therefore forbidden.  Recognizing this, I can reflect on the amount of sexual oomph behind the idea and determine whether pursuing it is likely to be more useful or more distracting to the analysand.  

From the perspective of dreams as informing our consciousness, when the spiritual director in the spiritual exercises proposes that the retreatant imagine an episode from Jesus’ life as clearly and vividly as possible – imagining the sights, sounds, feelings and smells - the director is encouraging a guided dreamlike experience.  It is then up to the retreatant to discern (this is another Jesuit technique that I may discuss in a later post) how God would have the retreatant engage with the current problem.  As a central component of the formation process, I will be going through the spiritual exercises – probably in about a year.  I don’t yet know whether I will still be blogging at that point, but should I be, I intend to report on the experience of parallels between going through the exercises and going through analysis, not just the theoretical parallels that I have reported on here.

Postscript:  I did both continue with this process and continue blogging.  Part of the formation experience included a trip to Nicaragua to appreciate a very different world view.  I blogged in anticipation of going here, and then wrote about my experiences while there here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.   I returned from Nicaragua and, a week later, did a condensed version of the spiritual exercises, which I blogged about here, here, here, here, and here.  I am now aware, in putting together this compendium, that I did not write about the final, concluding retreat, nor a kind of summary blog of the experience of being a participant in the ICP.   

It is also the case that, through the rest of the ICP experience, my views on Ignatius changed.  I came to see him less as a protestant who didn't leave the church and more as a mystic - a person who truly believed that direct access to God was possible.  In addition to being a mystic, he contributed to the reformation of the church in many important ways.   In terms of education, he reintroduced Plato and Aristotle as important thinkers.  The church had marginalized them as being pre-Christian and thus necessarily unenlightened.  Ignatius disagreed with this position, pointing out that the world has always been God's creation and that we have always been able to learn about God by learning about the world.

As to the process of discernment that is at the heart of the spiritual exercises referred to in the post, the very simple version is that Ignatius taught us to notice how we feel about things that we engage in - as he noticed that he felt energized after reading the lives of the Saints and depleted after reading the exploits of the Knights.  This process is, of course, more complex than that, but this is the foundation on which it rests.  The intent, from Ignatius' position, is to discern what it is that God has in mind for us - to read His will through our experience.  The psychoanalytic version of this is to live a life where our unconscious needs - the entire range of them - can be met by the life that we lead - a life that we become deeply invested in leading.  Or, as Confucius is reported to have said, at 70 I follow my heart's desire without breaking moral principles. 

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.   For a subject based index, link here.

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