Emma Donoghue's Room - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Re-experiences Closeness and Loneliness

Room, the 2010 novel by Emma Donoghue is the story of a mother confined in a 12X12 shed for seven years. She creates a world of wonder for her now five-year-old son Jack out of the meager resources available to her.  This is a story in the tradition of the 1997 Italian film Life is Beautiful and Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel The Road.  All three of them are about a parent navigating a threatening and horrific world with his or her son – Life is Beautiful is set in the holocaust, The Road in a post- apocalyptic landscape and now Room, in the narrow confines of a shed, pits a mother against a jailer upon whom she is totally dependant.  Each narrative describes a grim and beautiful task, that of protecting a child against the obvious threats of an evil world.  In so doing, each of the parents preserves the human nature, the joie de vivre, and the integrity of their child from a soul-killing world.  I can’t help but wonder about this theme resurfacing in these three popular works in part because each of them also resonates with the everyday and very complicated task of raising a child in our current environment, one that appears benign (especially in comparison to these three universes), but one that actually contains insidious threats posed by everything from fast food, internet porn, and school bullying to our own distraction from the task of parenting by all the demands in our adult worlds. 

Room does, indeed, create a universe similar to the other works; however, it struck a very different set of emotional notes for me.   In this book, instead of primarily identifying with the parent, I found myself immersed in the world of the child.  This is partly because the other two works are about a father and son – and it is easier for me to identify with a father than a mother – but mostly it is because this story is told from the point of view of the five year old.   

I think the story worked for me because of my reaction to it.  It evoked in me longings – longings for closeness with my mother.  The mother in this story is never named – she is just Ma.  When Jack learns that she has another name, he rejects it as foreign and never includes it in the narrative.  Jack’s Ma is not just his Ma, but mine.  The closeness that he shares with her is the kind of closeness that I once had with my Ma and that we necessarily, and not without a great deal of pain and angst on both our parts, had to give up. 

Not surprisingly, then, it was in the giving up of the closeness that takes place in the book that I found myself wrestling with the author.  As she introduced plot elements that led the mother and son to move away from each other – more specifically as the mother moved away from Jack, I found myself wanting to argue with her.  I wanted to say to her, “Look, this wouldn’t really happen this way.  This woman has dedicated herself, despite considerable difficulty, to this child.  And she will continue to do that indefinitely.  Just because the situation has changed does not mean that she will be any less unwavering in her devotion.”

This criticism comes not from a theoretical or intellectual psychoanalytic perspective (though I kept trying to figure out a way to cloak it that way), but from my own five-year-old self’s wish to not lose his mother and his sense of closeness to her, or more precisely, her devotion to him.  When they are in Room together, Ma spends all of her time with Jack.  The other creatures in his world are Bed, and Wardrobe (where he sleeps), the characters in the stories he reads and Dora and other characters from TV (itself another presence in the room), and the jailer whom he never sees, Old Nick.  Though I had a brother and a sister, and my father was a presence in my home, in some ways they paled - they became as shadowy and partially alive as Bed and Wardrobe – in comparison to my Ma.  The intensity of the connection with my mother is like no other I have felt in my life, until I had a son of my own. 

In my life, the separation from my mother came from both sides.  She moved away at various points in my development for various reasons of her own, but I also moved away from her – especially during adolescence and later in my development.  Part of the violence of my movement away was the wish to get some distance from a relationship that felt so intense that at times it felt like it threatened to engulf me.  And, from the perspective of myself as a mature, more or less well-organized adult, the wish to create distance that I direct feels under my control; when my mother wants to be closer it is her wish to be closer that is uncomfortable, not the distance between us.  And it is from this perspective that the book, though certainly flawed in a variety of ways, worked for me because it un-worked me.  I felt betrayed by Jack’s mother as she moved away from seeing the world through her son’s eyes and instead articulated her own wishes and needs.  As she moved more and more into her own skin, I became more and more upset with her.

The most painful part then, for me, of this coming of age tale – and it is a coming of age tale for both the mother and Jack, as weird as it is for a five year old to be coming of age – is the separation – the pulling away – of the mother from Jack.  And this, in turn, is because it causes a type of regression in me.  I am no longer the relatively mature adult, but instead my five-year-old self emerges, a self that longs for his mother’s closeness, or, more accurately, from Jack’s perspective, simply expects it to be there.  When she pulls away from me, I feel helpless, scared, and concerned about myself – in the form of Jack.  When Ma creates a plan that requires Jack to act, I am certain that he is not up to the task.  And when he demonstrates competence, I feel like the plot is strained.

My regression is induced by the book’s narrative.  Psychoanalysis is intended to induce a similar regression; one that is intended to help us remember what our earlier life was like.  Of course, it can never be as it once was.  I can read from Jack’s description what his mother is thinking and feeling even though he doesn’t have access to that – he really is five, while I am just remembering what it was like to be five.  But remembering what it was like creates an opportunity for me and for analytic patients.  We have the emotional immediacy of something occurring now – not in the distant past – and we know now, and feel now, the other side of the coin – that we not only want to distance ourselves from closeness (in this case) but we also desperately desire it and are puzzled by the autonomous strivings of those on whom we depend.  Like my patients, when these competing and complementary desires become alive to me, I can work on reconciling them in whatever way I will.  But this reconciliation will not involve simply denying one half of it – my desire for closeness – but will involve integrating that desire with my own desires for autonomy, desires that mirror the desires of Ma.

Ultimately, Ma's movement away, which leads to my movements away, can lead to a position where I am more comfortably autonomous, but also more comfortable expressing my needs for closeness and connection.  Especially when the kind of firm base that Ma’s attention has provided to Jack and to me is exposed by her absence, but also her reasonable, if intermittent availability, we can learn to grieve the loss of the closeness, and also to embrace the freedoms the autonomy affords.

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Lawrence Durrell's Justine - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reads a Classic

     Justine is the first of four novels that make up the Alexandria quartet.  I must confess that I have not read the other three and don’t know when or if I will.  Justine stands on its own as an intensely disturbing meditation on love.  Told in a free form style where events are related in the first person based on “the order in which they first became significant for me” rather than in linear fashion, it has a very dream like quality – it is hard to keep track of characters and events but, just as in a good dream, this doesn’t seem to matter. 
     The title character is the object of intense desire – the narrator calls it love – of many people.  Centrally she is loved by her second husband, Nessim.  Her first husband’s novel about his love for her is quoted extensively throughout, and it is used to articulate the love of the narrator, who has an extensive affair with her and who is now also writing a novel about her, while maintaining powerfully attached relationships with his lover, Melissa, and with Nessim.  Indeed, Justine and the narrator himself maintain that Justine’s affair with him is a way of more fully expressing her love for Nessim.   Nessim, in turn, ultimately has an affair with Melissa and the love quadrangle thus becomes complete around the edges.
     Perhaps because of the intensity of the relationships between the four central characters, auxiliary characters abound.  The sharpness of the depiction of them stands in contrast to the amorphous, elusive, shifting quality of the four central characters and particularly of Justine.  It is as if the more you know and love someone the more ephemeral, translucent and unpredictable they become.
     Justine is, in many ways, the perfect object of desire.  Complexly, powerfully and intimately available, present to her lover physically, emotionally and historically, she is also elusive.  The author ties this to a childhood molestation and to Justine’s lingering feelings for the perpetrator.  These feelings are complex, poorly articulated, and we are left to conclude that they include multiple desires - even murderous ones.  I believe we are left to conclude this, rather than the narrator articulating them directly, because Justine does not, herself, know them and she can not articulate them, except, perhaps, through action.
     One of the problems with thinking about a book like this from a psychoanalytic perspective is that it is written under the influence of Freud.  The two epigraphs quote the Marquis de Sade (who also wrote a book titled Justine) and Freud.  Reviewers have stated that Durrell was intending to portray a quantum reality – a post Einsteinian and Freudian view of personality as malleable and essentially unknowable.  The question then becomes whether the analyst is seeing in the mirror simply a reflection of the ideas that come from his discipline to begin with.
     Books like Justine – in so far as they reflect aspects of the real world – are a big part of why I am a reluctant psychoanalyst.  I was raised in a world that promised a very different vision of love than the one presented here.  In the world I was led to believe existed, and the one I came to long for, people who were simple and true could find each other, know each other deeply and well, and live happily ever after.  This worldview, though, is dependent on a static view of human character.  Indeed, part of what made a personal analysis attractive to me was a comment someone once offered, “The well analyzed person never unintentionally insults someone.”  When one of my analytic teachers offered the opinion that the goal of analysis is to teach self-analysis, I vehemently objected.  My wish was to attain a post analytic state where my unconscious would be known and continued analysis would be unnecessary.  Freud’s dictum – where there was id, ego shall be – seemed to promise this was possible.  I wanted a refund!
     Justine, when she is rediscovered after having resolved her central dilemma, is dull.  Her hair is cut; she is living in a kibbutz, farming, and is no longer desirable.  Once her dilemma is resolved, Justine is flat, and no longer worthy of being an object of desire.  I am reminded of the vague dissatisfaction that I feel at the end of a romantic comedy when the boy finally does get the girl (or the other way around).  It is the chase, it is the hunt, it is the drama of the unknown and, at least from the perspective of this novel, the unknowable, that keeps our interest alive.

It is also the case that we prefer that the drama have a conclusion; that the conclusion should come in two to four hundred pages or, in a movie, play or opera, within 2-4 hours.  We can immerse ourselves in the chaos of the unknown for only so long.  Reading the other three books of the Alexandria quartet can wait.  I’m not sure that I want to re-immerse myself in this unsettling world from a different perspective.
     Psychoanalysis can provide some closure as well.  While it does not, in my experience, lead to the post-analytic state that I longed for; it does improve the dialogue between the conscious and unconscious states.  And while this does not eliminate conflict (nor does it, in my case, prevent unintentionally offending others), it does lead to having a stronger base from which to venture into the unknown and tools to better appreciate more and more of the terra incognita that lies both within myself and between myself and others.  It provides a narrative structure to the chaotic elements of my experience.  Strangely, then, and perhaps perversely, Justine (and the rest of the, as yet, unread Alexandria quartet), reassures me that, reluctant though I may be, I am on the right track.  There is always more to be known about the complexities of the human soul.  This, though, is a double-edged sword.  There are many times that I wish that I could turn off the analytic process and stand somewhere, anywhere, on a nice bit of solid ground, secure in the knowledge of something not contingent, not relative, but absolute, certain – like the speed of light.

Postscript:  I have just finished a post on The English Patient.  In it, there is a similarly enigmatic love object, though the focus of the book and movie is on the lover rather than the beloved.  I think - now years later - that the true focus of Justine may actually have been the author and that she is the object not of his love so much as his fear of love.  That actual contact - the somewhat naive kind of love contact that I refer to in the post above (and reference in terms of a reunion in the post on the English Patient) is an anathema to the more Gothic romantic view - a view of loving someone who must, necessarily, be unknown - because it would be terrifying to actually know her - and to be know by her.  I am reminded of Freud's callous disregard for Dora's inner life - including that she might want to actually be loved by Herr K. - not fondled by him - something that Freud was blind to in his work to get a handle on her and the complications of being present to someone else.  I suppose I am also a reluctant psychoanalyst because it turns out that actually making contact with someone else - being present to them and while being present to ourselves is much more difficult than we imagine it.  And it may be that sexually abused women - especially women who have been abused by people whom they trusted to love them - can sniff this out in us - can expose in us just how complex our best intentions are - including their base components.  This leads them to mistrust us - and we to mistrust them, but also ourselves in their presence.  This gives them a certain allure - a dangerous allure - as they, and we, try to discover something noble in a sea of desires, each of which seems to have a base component.

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ESPN, the Cubs, and Steve Bartman - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst watches TV

In 2003, as a recovered Cubs fan in psychoanalytic training, I watched the fourth game of the National League Championship Series between Chicago and the upstart Florida Marlins (another National League expansion team that could get to the series before we could do it again (OK, I am not completely recovered)).  I was feeling confident that we would make it.  We were up three to nothing, we had Mark Pryor on the mound, and there was already one out in the top of the eighth inning.  A Marlin hit a high foul ball down the left field line and it drifted towards the stands where a bunch of fans reached for it and it bounced around among them.  No big deal.  Except that Moises Alou, the left fielder of considerable skill who came from a family that produced many major leaguers, did the unthinkable: He had a conniption.  He jumped up and down, throwing a tantrum and pointing at the fans, exclaiming that they had interfered with a ball that he could have caught.

I knew at that moment that we were doomed.  The thin veneer of confidence that we as a team, as a city, as a group of people who knew just how unlikely it was that the Cubs could do it, the thin veneer of confidence that had grown during a season, during the playoffs, and then during this game itself, was torn – ripped off – by Alou’s meltdown.  His childishness revealed the real Cubs, the bumbling, immature, incompetent, and lovable but lost Cubs to be who they actually were, a group of guys who did not belong on the big stage.  They – we – did not belong.

And, sure enough, the batter’s next effort was a routine groundball to the shortstop.  It was a perfect double play ball.  Not a rocket, but it was hit with enough authority to guarantee that we could get out of the inning and be only the top half of the ninth from the World Series.  But the shortstop booted it.  It popped off the heel of his glove, both runners were safe and before you could say disaster eight runs scored.  The series, the season, and nearly one hundred years of futility continued into the next day.  There was another game, but it was all over.  (For happier memories of Wrigley, connect to this post about a recent visit)

ESPN took on the Cubs and the Steve Bartman phenomenon in their 30 [films] for 30 [years of ESPN's existence] film, “Catching Hell”.  Who is Steve Bartman, you might ask…  He wasn’t in the story you just told.  Well, no he wasn’t.  He was, or should have been, the footnote.  He became the scapegoat, but I think the shame of what the City of Chicago and Cubs fans everywhere did to him, makes the curse of the billy goat pale in comparison.

Steve Bartman is a life long Cubs fan.  He is computer programmer.  A somewhat nerdy guy who, in his late twenties or early thirties, was living with his parents in 2003.  He was a Little League coach much admired by the kids on the team that practiced in the field next to his parent’s house and he was the guy lucky enough to score seats on the foul line for the fourth game of the National League Championship series.  He was so excited to be there, he so much wanted to soak up the game, that he had a radio in his pocket tuned to the game.  Because it was cold, he wore a turtleneck, with the Little League team’s Tshirt over it, and a Cubs hat with the earphones on top of that.  When the foul ball came towards him, he, along with about ten other fans, reached for it.  He was unlucky enough to be the one who actually got a hand on it deflecting it further into the stands.  The television cameras then picked him out – he looked the perfect nerd in his getup - and the commentators focused on how his touching the ball prevented Alou from catching it.  Suddenly his action – the reflexive action of most fans when the ball is hit to him or her (the exception being the occasional fearful fan who covers his or her head) to reach for the ball, became the cause of the Cubs’ titanic meltdown.

ESPN asked, without conclusively coming to an answer, why this occurred.  Why did Steve Bartman get singled out as the cause of the latest in a long series of heartbreaking blunders by the Chicago Cubs?  Why did he have to hole up in his parent’s home and receive death threats?  Why was he pilloried in the press non-stop?  I was disappointed by ESPN’s answer.  I will try to come at my own understanding, but first I have to reveal the depth of the pathology of a lifelong Cubs fan.  But also to acknowledge that, despite not being fully recovered, there is some distance that has come between the Cubs and me.  I am no longer a rabid sports fan, and therefore somewhat less crazy than I used to be. 

I was born in Chicago.  My grandfather – a graduate of the University of Chicago – became a Cubs fan when they last won the pennant – against other teams reeling from losing their stars to service in the military during the Second World War – in 1945.  During that World Series, Billy Sianis, who bought a ticket for himself and one for his goat, was ejected because the goat smelled bad, and Billy, in turn, supposedly cursed the Cubs - thus the curse of the billy goat.  In any case, my grandfather died without ever seeing the Cubs return to the World Series.  His son, my uncle, became an Andy Frain Usher at Cubs games and was a lifelong loyal fan.  When my uncle contracted prostate cancer, which he did not get diagnosed until its very late stages, he lived, miraculously, for ten years.  We joked that God was keeping him alive until the Cubs won the series.  If that was the case, even God couldn’t manage keep him alive long enough, as my uncle died last spring and the Cubs still have not gotten to the series.  I come by my love of the Cubs honestly.

Growing up, my family moved all over the country.  Never in a city large enough to have its own major league team, I rooted for them from afar.  In the days before cable, I had to rely mostly on the newspaper reports – usually only a box score, the occasional Saturday when they were on national TV, and going to the park when we went to visit Grandmother.  This kept me connected to the city of my birth, gave me a stable geographical center as we moved from place to place, and it also helped me maintain a stable identity.  I was a Cubs fan.

Being a Cubs fan is complicated, though.  All of that failure does not come without cost.  I began to fear that their failings were caused by me.  I noticed that when I went to Wrigley field to watch them play, they lost.  I wondered if I might be a curse to them – a sort of baseball cooler (See the movie of the same name for an interesting description of how love transforms losers).  This reached strange proportions.  When they would lose in Chicago, and I lived in Florida, I would wonder if I had done something – if I had opened a curtain at the very moment that someone talking with a friend in Chicago had meant to say something, but the distraction made them lose their train of thought meaning some significant (or perhaps insignificant) piece of information was not transmitted, setting up a long chain of reactions that led to – the Cubs losing.

I think this is because of a number of factors.  One is that my failing the Cubs masked the fact that they failed me.  I remember leaving an Ohio State football game, wearing my Cubs hat, and being taunted by Ohio State fans [Ohio State has the fifth most wins of any college football team all-time and has spent more time at number 1 than any other team] for rooting for losers.  But my crazy thoughts meant that I wasn’t rooting for a losing team – I was causing my team – a team that, when I was a kid, was peopled by Ernie Banks and Ron Santo, Ferguson Jenkins and Billy Williams, all excellent players - to lose. 

The second factor was that my failing the Cubs masked how irrelevant I was to the functioning of the team.  Despite my passionate concern about them, the Cubs – the players that I loved – gave not a whit about me.  At least if they had won, they would have given me some excitement, some pride.  But losing meant that I really got nothing from them.  So turning their failure into mine kept me in the dark about just how irrelevant to them I was.  In fact, it elevated me to a position of central importance.

Steve Bartman then, at least from my perspective, would have become the villain for me that he seemed to become for the entire city of Chicago if some of my passion hadn’t waned.  He personified me – the loyal, loving, but never loved fan who protected his idealized players by imagining that they did not fail him, but the other way around, that he had failed them.  My self blame could now be heaped on someone else – I could denigrate Steve Bartman and – and this is the kicker – I could keep my secret alive.  It was me, all along.  The fan does matter.  I – me – Every Day Joe me – in the form of Steve Bartman – brought down the Cubs. 

Moises Alou, someone with skills I could never imagine having, someone who was raised by a major leaguer, who has forgotten more about the game than I will ever know, and someone who has worked incredibly hard to get where he has, someone who should have been able to keep his cool at a critical juncture, is not the person that I blame if I am still a diehard Cubs fan.  I must continue to revere him.  I will buy tickets to watch him perform, I will imagine that I can do what he can do, and I will idolize him, protecting him (but really me) from my realization that he was deeply, fundamentally flawed at the moment when I, as a fan of a franchise, most needed to be able to rely on him – not to catch the ball – but to keep his head.  And this will keep me coming to the game.  Believing and hoping that my cheers, my support, my unwavering loyalty will, before the next century is done, spur someone who dons the light blue pinstripes to finally bring home the pennant and, could it happen?  A World Championship.

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