The Wired Hermit - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst entertains an Old Friend

Development is central to analytic theory and technique.  Development is also one of those words that I just didn’t understand in graduate school, and I don’t think it was one that I was exposed to much before then.  I remember teaching Introductory Psychology and explaining that kids thought differently than adults did, but I didn’t really believe it – or, I guess I believed it, but I didn’t get it.  Through my own eyes, I had always been myself.  Or maybe, I had always been myself, damn it.  I remembered what I had seen and heard and the perspective that I had and I still had that perspective and I wasn’t going to be convinced otherwise.  Ironically, of course, this perspective has changed as I’ve aged.  I now remember fondly the intensity of youth, but am no longer driven by the destabilizing energy that used to push me from pillar to post.  I have also lost some of the certainty that I once had.  Of course, I have traded it in on wisdom and a broader world view… OK, some things never change, or do they?

 My first personal experiment in development across the life span occurred when, in my mid thirties, I decided to travel back to Florida, a state that I left when I was twelve and my family moved north to Ohio.  I left behind my best friend Jimmy, whom I had only known for three years, but who was someone I felt deeply connected to.  He and I had been in a gifted child program together and we had bonded by competing over just about anything.   We played one-on-one tackle football – he was faster and could outrun me but I could outmuscle him and run over him, we played chess – and derived strategies and gambits that I use to this day, we spent sixth grade being excused from both math and English class because we tested out at the beginning of the year, so we sat outside together and, instead of reading the A encyclopedia entry for Algebra as we were supposed to do, we played a game called dots where we connected those dots to create boxes.  We were mean and vicious competitors, but we were also careful and considerate friends.

I sensed that Jimmy was different from my other friends.  His parents were very protective and – though I didn’t have the word for it then – conservative.  In fact, as I was preparing to look him up again, I reasoned that they must have been Baptist, something that I don’t think I knew or cared about in sixth grade, but something that was, indeed, a very important part of Jimmy’s family’s and of his own identity.  So when the other kids started teasing Jimmy because he didn’t know about the birds and the bees and were threatening to tell him, I thought it best to protect him from them and, in my twelve year old moral system, to let his parents tell him about this sacred secret when the time was ripe based on their perspective (Sex education in Florida in the late sixties simply did not happen in the schools).

So, when I looked up Jimmy, I knew where to look.  He would be working in his father’s furniture store, living in the town we had lived in, and following in his father’s footsteps.  And I was right.  I called the furniture store and explained my wish to the person who answered the phone.  They said, let me transfer you to corporate headquarters, and there was Jimmy.  We renewed our friendship and, though he was older and more mature – he now not only knew about the birds and the bees, he had two children and three stepchildren – but he was still very much himself.  He was conservative, true, somewhat naïve about the world, but very involved in his community and with his family.  It was now apparent to us, in ways that it had not been when we were children, how different from each other we were, but because of the childhood bond, we renewed our friendship and have maintained and enjoyed it since.

The second experiment was much more recent and one that was not as intentional.  Last summer, when we travelled to California, I looked up my friend John whom I had known when we were both psychology postdoctoral trainees together in Topeka Kansas.  John was then and is now a Monk.  When we were in training together, he lived, on the weekends, at his home monastery in Atchison Kansas and stayed, during the week, at a parish house in Topeka.  He has since joined a hermitage in Big Sur, California and that is where we visited him this summer.  My children were not excited about going to visit Brother John.  It was going to be a long drive in the car, which they hate.  And my stepdaughters, who are Jewish, were concerned that a religious person would try to convert them.  I, frankly, wasn’t certain what to expect.  I had kept up with John, on a somewhat sporadic basis, after our training, but he had become much more monastic – indeed hermit-like - and no longer went on trips that allowed him to drop in on me.  Indeed, we had also fallen out of email and snail mail contact. 

The girls, and my boy, became quite smitten with John.  He immediately took their side in arguments over things like the amount of sugar they should eat, and brought them a big bag of chocolate to munch on in the cell we stayed in.  And the cell was nice.  John also gave us a lovely tour of the hermitage and was present and forthcoming about what he did, while simultaneously being very interested in all that we were doing.  Previously I had known him primarily as a psychologist and, though I visited him at the Monastery and spent considerable time with him both professionally and more personally, I had thought of his ability to listen empathically, to think about situations and dilemmas critically, and to be avuncular – in the ways that he was with the children – as attributes of his psychological identity.  But this time it was not so clear.  And this had to do with more than the setting.

Last weekend he returned the favor of the visit.  He came with his iPhone, his iPad, and his Mac Book.  He was wired – or more precisely wireless.  We spent considerable time with him at a very busy time in the semester.  While I was looking forward to seeing him, I was concerned about how we would manage large swaths of time that we would have together.   In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been.  He has lived in community for the better part of his adult life.  He knows how to be with others and to create space both for himself and for them.  But he also knows how to be present when he is present.  And this has a different quality than it did twenty years ago.  No longer an actively practicing psychologist, John talked about the joys and also the difficulties of living in community.  He also listened – in particular to a dilemma that I was having about a very difficult matter at work.  And he was able to helpfully articulate my experience.  He was curious about my spiritual development and that of the Reluctant Wife, but he neither pried nor proselytized.  In fact, he was respectful of our positions and of our experience more generally.  There had been a very subtle but also a very profound shift in him.  No longer was he as quick to point out the proper action, but he was, in a very compelling way, more certain of himself.  He was more comfortable in his own skin, and this allowed me to be more comfortable in mine.  Mind you, I enjoyed being with him before.  And our current relationship was continuous, especially in terms of the content of our conversations with our previous one, but it was also new, and based, I think on a more profound sense of love that John feels for himself and for the broader community of humanity in all its guises.  He had become, in the last twenty years, a monk.

Now John was always a believer.  He talked, twenty years ago, about his own psychoanalysis and about how people had said that the analysis would analyze his faith right out of him, and he responded that, if his faith was truly part of him, the analysis would enhance it.  And, while I am sure that the analysis did enhance his faith, something has developed in the time since then, something deeper, harder to articulate, but something that is truly wonderful, and comforting to behold.

Interestingly, in the fifteen years that I have now re-known Jimmy, he, too, has developed.  In part as a result of seeing me having realized one of our shared (though never spoken to each other) dreams of being a University professor, he brought his work with his father to a close, went to graduate school, and has become a professor himself.  He has just earned tenure but also courageously searched out a new job that will allow him to do the work – studying and helping family businesses succeed – that turns out to be his true calling.  He has also become a Presbyterian!

Traditional psychoanalytic developmental theory focuses on the earliest parts of life.  Some analytic thinkers have even considered character to be set in place at a relatively early age.  Others, Erik Erikson was one of the first, are champions of lifelong development.  I have witnessed the growth and development of my child.  I have come to rethink my own early development.  And I have witnessed across a span of years, the constancy but also the profound development of my adult friends.  Across time each has become more like himself.  This is certainly not the only developmental arc, but it is one that turns out to be neither stultifying – quite the opposite, I find it fascinating – nor erratic.  Instead there is a quality of achieving a goal – of moving towards something that is both defined and ineffable.

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One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst watches a classic

           One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, both in the form of Ken Kesey’s novel and Milos Formans’ film starring Jack Nicholson and featuring Danny DeVito and Christopher Lloyd in early roles, and Louise Fletcher in her Academy Award winning performance as Nurse Ratched, were powerful influences on me as an adolescent.  R.P. McMurphy, Ken Kesey’s alter ego, based in part on Kesey's experience as a psychiatric orderly, is a petty criminal who chooses an insanity defense in order to get what he believes will be lighter treatment at a psychiatric hospital than he would get in jail.  Instead, he runs into Nurse Ratched, authority figure extraordinaire, in her starched uniform and her rules upon rules intended, in her mind, to help the patients improve, but, as is apparent to the most casual observer, serving to protect her world view and to keep the patients repressed.  Meanwhile McMurphy’s self-sacrificing rowdy mischievousness leads to actual therapeutic change as the patients unite against “The (Wo)Man” and become cured of their stutters, their self doubts, and, in the final glorious scene, their physical and spiritual imprisonment.

            When I first read the book, I was also enthralled by The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe’s journalistic account of Ken Kesey’s band of Merry Pranksters who roamed the United States in a school bus named Further.  I was an adolescent, and found the collective call to set aside attachment to what is reassuring and instead to forge ahead into a brave new world of living in NOW a powerful siren pulling me towards a destiny that was somehow different, grander and more substantial than what I had previously been led to believe could be in the cards for me by what I now suddenly realized were inhibited, uptight, establishment individuals who just were not “on the bus”. 

 How surprising, then, to reread the book in my early thirties, while working as a psychologist in a mental hospital, to find myself empathizing with: Nurse Ratched.  She seemed, instead of evil, to be essentially scared.  Sitting on top of a ward full of what seemed unpredictable people, she created a cool, crisp exterior to mask the anxiety that she felt being in charge and charged with caring for 18 men, including the inhibited son of her best friend, but also men with a wide range of moderate to severe disturbances.

            In contrast, in both the book and the movie, R.P. McMurphy is carefree and has nothing to preserve or to protect.  Much like my 16 year old self and Kesey’s Band of Merry Pranksters, he could react against the strictures of Nurse Ratched and have great fun stealing a boat to go deep sea fishing because he was a ward in a loony bin and the worst consequence he would receive is being sent back there. 

            As I saw the movie again the other night on Family movie night, I was curious to see whether the Nurse Ratched character was as sympathetic as she felt on the page.  I suspected that she was not, and, indeed, that turned out to be the case.  The film heightened the tension between the two main characters and hardened the conflict into one that pitted good versus evil instead of two three dimensional characters together hating but respecting each other.  In the penultimate scene in the movie, McMurphy clearly observes Ratched in all of her glorious evilness – he watches it build and we feel his moral superiority, and we revel – even my sweet 12 year-old stepdaughter reveled – in his evening the score.

            The movie version, though, turns the drama into something bigger, and therefore less human, than the struggle between two flawed people.  Especially because it loses track of the idea that, in addition to being mirrors of each other, the protagonists are necessary to each other.  McMurphy can no more live freely without a society, necessarily including the nurse Ratcheds in that society, than she can live without a group of patients who depend on her.  The balance between them is better maintained in the book because they are both aspects of the author – as Dostoyevsky remembers Dickens telling him in this morning’s New York Times Book Review, “that all the good, simple people in his novels… are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity towards those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to love.” *
           In the movie, we no longer see that Nurse Ratched is also Kesey's alter ego - the scared orderly trying to maintain order with his own internal chaos - instead, we can imagine that Ratched is outside ourselves – an evil to be vanquished or one to be escaped from – rather than an inevitable partner, someone we carry within ourselves who is trying to protect us from ourselves and is also capable of doing terrible violence to ourselves (and those under her care) if we let her.  On the other hand, Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, without someone to limit and contain them, terrorized towns when they showed up with their unbridled aggressive acts (I think there is an odd and eery parallel in the events of 9/11).  The Merry Pranksters were sustained by money from Kesey’s books, money that required all kinds of Ratcheds working in publishing and then actually printing and selling those books, not to mention wannabe Keseys like me who bought the books to catch a glimpse of the world that I would love to inhabit but didn’t quite dare - in part because I had to show up for my part time job to afford the books I loved.  

Further, when the Ratcheds are not there, when the institutions like the one depicted in the film are not there to contain, support and, occasionally to treat individuals like the ones depicted in the film, and adequate alternatives are not established in the community, we discover that the mentally ill are living among us – homeless and sometimes desperate, until they engage in criminal activity, if they are lucky, so that they can come to the attention of mental health treatment in the penal system (because the institutions like the one depicted in the film - as problematic as they were - no longer exist.  We phased them out in favor of "community psychiatry", but have never funded that to the point that the mentally ill are adequately cared for).  Of course I am condensing a lot in this paragraph, but I think that mirrors the danger of the collapsing of good and evil into two separate entities the way that the movie does.  When we try to make the world simpler, we come up with simple solutions, but this can, unfortunately, distort the world and lead us to fail to anticipate consequences that are, in retrospect, easy to see when realize that the simple solution has been applied to complex problems deserving nuanced solutions.


* (NOTE: Though this quote later turned out to be a hoax, I have left it in this post because it so accurately describes Kesey's writing as I perceive it - even if Dickens never said it, it captures what I am imagining occurs within all of us when we write and when we read.  I think that it spread so quickly across the internet because so many people resonated with the sentiment that the underlying logic of these two men meeting, much less communicating wasn't questioned - plus, it was the New York Times that published it.  Since this time, I have heard many authors supporting this sentiment - Eric Cornwall who wrote under the pen name John Le Carre, endorsed this on a broadcast with Terry Gross on Fresh Air.  In that interview, he talked about writing about characters allowing him to more authentically inhabit himself by expressing the contradictory aspects of his nature - aspects that were more tightly bound in his functioning, for instance, as a spy, but also as the child of a con man, in real life.)

Postscript 5 years later (2018): I was thinking about this post this morning and realized that I only briefly mentioned in an oblique manner the hero of the book - and the person through whose eyes it is told: Chief Broom.  This massive man, whose elective mutism allows him to listen in on all the staff machinations as he apparently mindlessly sweeps his broom from room to room in the hospital is the moral center of the film.  A psychotic inpatient, he is also a Native American from Washington State, Kesey's home before he moved to San Francisco and became a psychiatric hospital orderly.  To get inside the mind of his narrator, Kesey wrote in the first person about Broom's psychotic episodes while taking LSD.  Most of the writings were discarded because they were drivel, but Kesey hung onto and edited in a sober state enough of them to give the best account of what it is like to be psychotic that he could muster.  The underlying message of the Native American, whose close proximity to nature was disrupted by the intrusion of the Europeans, reclaiming his soul as a result of interacting with the most destructive European of all - the psychopath with a heart of gold McMurphy - may account for the lasting value of this book and film.  Despite my dismissal above of McMurphy and Kesey as role models - their questioning of the inherited values of dominating nature rather than appreciating it - of control versus wonderment - they continue to have tremendous resonance with me and, I believe, many viewers who are concerned about the dangers of dictating to nature rather than learning from her.  A post on the Overstory, a Pullitzer Prize Winning novel about a current iteration of the man vs. nature dilemma may be of interest.

Postscript 7 years later (2020).  I am struck that the film and a campy series about Nurse Ratched have both been released on Netflix as the re-election of Trump (or the election of Biden - it is the day after the election and it is unclear how this will turn out) has loomed.  The wonderful thing about the film is, I think, because there is so clearly a good guy and a bad guy - and the good guy is the outsider - it may appeal to the Trump inside us - my 16 year old self was as enamored of Ayn Rand as of Ken Kesey.  While I hope that in my next postscript we will have passed beyond the phase of having a psychopath with a (presumed by some) heart of gold as President, but I think we should have learned that this narrative is very close to our hearts as a nation.  We identify with Kesey and the gender split in the vote may help us realize just how threatening the maternal figure that Ratched represents is to us and the lengths we will go to in order to avoid empowering her (imagined - and depicted in the movie) type to care for/dominate us. 

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