Love Actually - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Engages in a Holiday Movie Tradition

The reluctant analyst and the reluctant wife annually, more or less, engage in a holiday viewing tradition.  When we can find time away from the kids (this actually is a movie that, were it not for some necessary and in some ways silly nudity would be wonderful for our teens), we escape for a couple of hours into the romantic fantasy world, set during the Christmas season, of Love Actually.  This star studded British comedy (Emma Thompson, Hugh Grant, Liam Neeson, Colin Firth, Keira Knightley, Alan Rickman, Laura Linney, and a bunch of really good character actors) seems like it should be an ensemble piece, but it is more a collage of individual love stories woven together by the affiliations that the players have with each other.  The stories range from the absurdly carnal - the British loser who goes to a random bar in Wisconsin and, because of his cute British accent, beds not one but four women; to the touchingly sweet - the naive couple that are playing stand-ins in an X-rated film, so get to know each other while wearing no clothes and yet manage to engage in an innocent love affair, and the writer who falls in love with the woman who is cleaning his home and she with him even though neither can speak a word of the other's language.  In between are stories of love on the rocks and how couples survive, romantic love shelved by fraternal devotion, the love of the rock star for his fat manager  (and of the masses for an aging rocker who is cheeky), a story of first love guided by paternal love, the love of a hopelessly klutzy prime minister for one of his staff, and forbidden love left unconsummated because of respectful friendship.  Left on the cutting room floor, but available in the out takes, are more love stories - stories of maternal love and committed love in the face of death.  It is a banquet - a feast of love.  More love than one has the right to imagine - and it is sandwiched between the opening and closing sequences of anonymous lovers, parents and children, and friends greeting each other at Heathrow airport.  As Hugh Grant intones over the opening montage, "Love actually is, all around."

This cornucopia of love, necessarily surfacy in any individual story, builds, one after the other, to a climax of not one but three (or is it four? or five?) powerfully told moments of romantic consummation - the moment when the lovers acknowledge their love for each other - the moment when they pledge their troth - the moment when what has been private, hidden, hoped for, feared, but deeply deeply desired becomes public, shared, acknowledged - and a feeling of unbridled joy, of deep and powerful satisfaction, of happiness that moves us to tears occurs.  And in that moment - or these moments - layered one on top of the other, the director/author, Michael Coulter, is addressing the question that my esteemed British analyst colleague Peter Fonagy has asked the analytic community to consider - it is a question one of his patients posed to him - why is sex alone so much less satisfying than sex with another?  Now this question could also be phrased, "Why is the love of another so much more satisfying than self love," but I think that the sex part is essential both to Fonagy and to Coulter - there is something about sex itself that is perhaps the most powerful cohesive agent known to man.  And why is that?

For Freud, the answer was easy.  Sex is the engine.  It is the primary drive that powers everything else.  In fact, all of the loves, not just the romantic but the fraternal, the maternal, and the star worship depicted in the film are, for Freud, expressions of the sublimated sexual drive.  But Freud, too, struggled with the question of what love for and from the other has to offer that self love doesn't.  For Freud, the first sexual act was the pleasurable feeling associated with breast feeding - or its equivalent - and thumb sucking became the first masturbatory activity.  Sometimes accompanied by rhythmic ear tugging, this pleasurable activity was, to him, clearly a self controlled position where the infant could provide a feeling state analogous to the deep satisfaction that the warmth of maternal care - and milk - produces, without the bother of having to rely on someone else to provide it.

So, without getting caught in some of the logical loops that derailed Sigmund, we can ask, "What is the milk of love - what is the nourishment of being pleasured and known by and knowing and pleasuring another that leads to the pleasure that is so much more satisfying than providing pleasure for ourselves?"

The answer that this film provides, at least to this viewer, comes in the form of satisfaction that the ending provides.  To me, the end of this movie is more satisfying than the usual cotton candy of a romantic comedy ending.  Aristotle proposed that the satisfaction of tragedy is the catharsis that comes from identifying with the protagonist.  Catharsis is a BIG experience - it is an emotional cleansing.  Romance doesn't usually provide this sort of experience.  Roxanne, another favorite rom-com, is great until the last ten minutes.  Once she says I do, the air goes out of the movie.  In part, I think, because we don't have access to the manifold ways in which she means that - C.D. has sent her hundreds of letters and she has known him in many many ways.  But we see two people, somewhat two dimensional, on the screen - excited to know each other, but incongruous.  She, beautiful but ditzy, having fallen for the dumb attractive guy who used C.D.'s words, and he, smart but wearing a stupid nose.  Suddenly the identification falls away and we are looking not at two loved or desired people, but at two people who will have to find a way through life together - and that seems full of problems and they seem, somehow, ordinary - no longer imbued with the tension that the anticipation of their knowing each other provided.

In Love Actually,  the climax romances all share important components.  Each involves a bumbling lover - the writer who has been cuckolded by his brother and who now woos a woman with what he thinks is pidgin Portuguese but is really just pigeon, the Prime Minister who feels more like his Aunt Mildred than the powerful leader of a nation, the boy who has a crush on the most popular girl in school but fears she doesn't even know his name - and in each case the beloved falls in love with the inept lover not in spite of their ineptness, but, in part, because of it.  Each is inept in his own way, each is competent in his own way, and we (or perhaps I should speak for myself here - I) identify with each of them.  And in the multiple identifications, the mirroring of true love may start to emerge - it is not just that the other can know and appreciate this about me - not just that they can know and appreciate that - but they can know more and more of me and, as they do that, they continue to want to be with me.  Simultaneously, as I get to know this other person, more and more of them is revealed.  They are glorious in ways that I didn't even know - and I already thought they were pretty glorious.  The layering of the discovery process, the depths of the knowing - and sexuality is certainly one of these - that she or he can know me and want to know me, to touch me, to pleasure me - to respond with pleasure to my touch, is sublime.  I feel truly awake and alive - physically, sexually, emotionally, cognitively, and in every other way, in the other's presence.

This experience, while not as cathartic as the identification with the tragic hero, is hard to portray on screen - hard to present as an analogue in part because it is so particular - he or she loves ME.  Also because, a propos of this discussion, the viewer is, ultimately, alone.  Watching others engage in an activity is not the same - even with the powerful identifications that occur with attractive and vulnerable movie stars.  But this movie comes close - closer - to the experience of love in part because of the multiple plots, the multiple identifications that get resolved one after the other - it is like multiple orgasms of consummation - and I think that reflects the experience of falling in love - a spiral of discovering multiple overlapping connections - multiple ways of being accepted, touched, appreciated and appreciating as the single relationship unfolds between two complex individuals who reveal and discover multiple aspects of themselves, in some ways multiple selves, to bring to that single relationship.    And the conclusion of the movie - with each of the couples reuniting at Heathrow airport - continues the sense of more - one analytic writer has described love as the feeling of excess - that the basic resolutions involve, and they fade into the tens and, in the final montage, hundreds of reunions between actual people at Heathrow - people who are less luminous on screen - their skin is not as clear, their eyes are not as bright - but the love that they feel for each other is real, palpable, and all the more intense for their having recently tasted the loneliness of separation and for now dipping into the joy of reunion - of connecting again with people that we know and love, and who know and love us.  This bridging, this sharing, is much more profoundly joyful than being the emperor of our own well controlled, pleasurable but ultimately empty kingdom.

Love does not sustain this peak - this high - we don't live happily ever after.  The other also discovers things we don't want them to know - and things we don't want to know about ourselves.  We discover that they are not all we imagined them to be.  In that sense, perhaps Roxanne, with its flat final ten minutes is a better reflection of part of the reality of love, but in lasting loves - in those that sustain us - we do continue to have reunions - to rediscover ourselves and the other in ways that are enchanting - in ways that give us hope and joy in living.  Not a bad thing for the reluctant wife and I to rediscover in our annual rite of movie watching...

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

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The Nature of Determinism - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Leads a Case Seminar

Presenting our clinical work to others is one of the most terrifying, and sometimes fun things that we analysts do.  There is a nakedness when we do this.  We are showing our work, and, while there will hopefully be moments where others appreciate and understand what we are doing, there will almost inevitably be criticism, which is hopefully presented in the spirit of being constructive, but exposes areas we have not thought of, interventions we did not make, and ways in which we have somehow failed the people, our patients, about whom we deeply care and whom we are invested in  helping.  Presenting our work to our peers can, thus, be terrifying.  I believe that the experience of presenting to our peers is parallel to the terror our patients feel when they are in a psychoanalytic - or, indeed - any exploratory therapy session.  The experience of terror is manifold, and I want to address one layer of it, though there are certainly many others.  When I ended my own analysis, I was flabbergasted at the amount of energy that I had.  On reflection, I surmised that one aspect of the increase in energy was that - though I consciously felt like I had settled into my analysis and had woven it into the context of the rest of my life - in fact, I think that I was girding my loins on a daily basis - preparing to see and be seen in a more naked and raw form, and that this was psychically expensive.

This week I substituted as the facilitator/teacher/supervisor in an ongoing clinical case conference.  The presenter was describing work that she was doing with a man, a man who had considerable difficulties and a man whom she was just beginning to get to know.  I noticed that the therapist and the man were working together to understand the man and how he functioned.  That is, the therapist would offer an interpretation of how the man had engaged in a particular action and she and the man together would evaluate how it is that he had done that.  The group, too, was engaging with the therapist in this way - how can we understand this man.  On the surface, this was a very psychoanalytic process, both between the therapist and the patient, and in the collegial interaction that the seminar participants were having with each other.  What, it can seem, could be more analytic than to be trying to understand what is causing a series of behaviors on the part of a client?  But I found both the clinical material and the discussion to be frustrating.  I felt, somehow, that we were missing something in the consulting room and now in our meeting room by focusing - I think prematurely - on the root causes of the behavior.

As I thought about it, and then talked about it, I realized that my frustration was based in part on the fact that we did not have access, in these interactions, to the man's feelings - to what his direct experience of the moment and of the world was.  I felt that the therapist's focus on the dynamics that were underlying the interactions the man was having felt premature or even defensive to me.  When I presented this position, there was some sense that it made sense and then we worked to try to get an understanding of why the therapist was working in this way (OK, I guess it's just what psychoanalysts do...).  I quickly realized, and pointed out to the group that we were again engaging in the same activity, but now it was taking place between the therapist and me.  That is, we were wondering about what the dynamics were that were leading the therapist to wonder with the patient about what was causing his behavior.

I asked the group and the presenter if we could try to approach the material differently.  I then asked her what she was feeling in the room.  She said that she wasn't sure, but she thought that she was feeling terrified.  This man she was treating was potentially suicidal and was alienating people who were important to him at work.  She wanted to support him so that bad things didn't happen.  She had, very early in the hour, offered a summary statement of some material that the patient had presented, and he experienced her observations, which the group did not see as deep at all, as coming in from left field - specifically he was relating what a person had told him and the content of that included a brush off.  When the therapist noted the brush off, he was surprised by it - he hadn't heard it and further was a little puzzled by how the therapist had heard it in that way - again something that was obvious to all of us in the room as a brush off.

So, as we talked further, it became clearer that the therapist was terrified not just of the circumstances surrounding this particular hour, but perhaps of the patient's demonstrated inability to accurately perceive and make use of information that others provided in emotionally charged interactions (as a therapy hour can be).  To allow him to describe his experience of the world can, then, become scary because we are moving further and further from what moors and tethers us to the world.  It felt like it would be better - meaning safer, and more supportive, to tell him about this world - through interpretations and through working with him to create a shared understanding of how he operates than to simply listen to his distorted understanding of the world, not knowing just how badly distorted it is.

This was a new understanding of what the therapist had been doing with the patient.  It was based not on her articulation of what she intended to be doing, but on discovering what was occurring - at least partly unconsciously - between the two of them.  Moving from the conceptual to the concrete, and simultaneously moving from the intellectual to the emotional, with the therapist trusting that this would be helpful, allowed us to think differently about what was taking place in the consulting room, and allowed something different to happen in the room between the therapist and I.  We had a new, shared understanding of what had happened, and we were more directly engaged with each other.

At this point, one of the participants asked a question that is typical for case conferences.  "So, what would you have done differently."  I was stumped.  I didn't have an answer, and I thought it would be unkind to offer an alternate way of intervening.  But the real reason for my being stumped didn't emerge until after the case conference.  And that was, there was no other way for the therapist to have intervened.  Given who she was, and who the client was, at that moment she did the best that she knew how to do.  She may have thought about other options - don't we often do that when we are engaged in any kind of conversation - but she could not, I don't believe, have said anything other than she did.  That is the nature of psychic determinism.  We do what we are determined to do.

This then, becomes the reason for a consultation or for a supervision session or for reading about the analytic process.  By engaging with other sources, we expand the possible ways of intervening.  The question is not what I would have done differently in that session, but what the analyst has available to do in the upcoming session that she might not have had before.  Will she be able to feel less tied to figuring everything out and be able to float a bit more on the sea of this man's thoughts?  Will that prove useful or it will it unmoor him and her?  Does he need the kind of work that she is doing with him?  Will this become apparent to them if she let's loose of the reins a bit?  Or might he become better able to describe his world when he is less worried about making sense of it?

It might seem that some of the questions in the last paragraph are rhetorical - as if I know what the answer is and am asking to make some kind of point.  In fact, I intend them as actual questions - questions that will, depending on what emerges from the interaction between the analyst and analysand if the analyst does engage differently, inform the analysis as it moves forward in an iterative process.

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

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The Life of Pi and Getting a Dog: The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Contemplates the ways that Life Imitates Art

The Life of Pi

We live in an urban neighborhood, one that was once grand, and still is, but it is now surrounded by decidedly mixed neighborhoods and ours becomes, periodically, the target for individuals or groups.  Most recently a group of teenagers has been going around the neighborhood, casing houses, and returning to those that are not well protected to rob them.  I stupidly left a basement door open after a weekend of working in the yard, and these kids discovered that and returned to rob us.  The reluctant wife was, understandably, furious about this (as was I).  She also felt violated and concerned about our well - being.  So she decided that we should act on a long held notion of getting a dog - not someday, but now.  She fell in love, on an internet website for adopting dogs saved from the pound, with Mack, a two year old bull mastiff mix who is, in person, a handful.  He is a delightful, exuberant dog who has, in the words of our dog trainer, not learned his manners, and our job is to teach them to him.  But to do this, we have to establish dominance and maintain it on a consistent basis.

That is also the task of Pi, in the book and now movie Life of Pi.  Named Piscine Molitor Patel after a beautiful swimming pool his Uncle enjoyed in Paris, Pi shortened his name when Piscine, which sounds like pissing when pronounced, became a way for his schoolmates to snicker at him.  The aggressive reclaiming of his identity by transforming it and owning it is a beautiful foreshadowing of what will be the center of the later narrative.

Born and raised in French Colonial India, an economic downturn leads the late adolescent Pi's family - he has an older brother, his mother who is the botanist in the family business, a zoo that his father, a business man, runs - to leave the country on a freighter with the animals from the zoo which they will sell to establish a new life in a new country.  They never get the opportunity to do that because the freighter sinks in a terrible storm and Pi ends up on a lifeboat inhabited by himself, an orangutan, a hyena, a zebra, a rat, and Richard Parker, a bengal tiger.  The zebra has a broken leg and is eaten, shortly after the rat, by the hyena, whom the orangutan hits.  The hyena then kills the orangutan and Richard Parker emerges from below the canvas, where he has apparently been sleeping off the effects of the seasickness medicine he was overdosed on, to kill the Hyena, leaving only he and Pi to face over two hundred days together on the open sea as they drift across the Pacific to finally make landfall in Mexico.

Pi was initially taken by Richard Parker when he shows up at the zoo.  He imagines that he sees some intelligence in his eyes and tries to connect with him.  Pi's father disagrees and asserts that Pi is merely seeing the reflection of his own soul in the eyes of the tiger.  Being stuck on a lifeboat with a tiger and a bunch of crackers let's Pi test his father's theory and discover how we mirror each other - as humans and as animals - as we engage with each other and, in the process, discover who it is that we are.

As harrowing as this story is - and it is harrowing, and here I offer a spoiler alert, it is not nearly as harrowing as the alternate plot.  Pi reveals this alternate to a writer who has come to hear his tale at the urging of Pi's Uncle.  After telling of surviving with Richard Parker, and Richard Parker disappearing into the Mexican jungle without so much as a look backwards, Pi tells the alternate version - that he was not on a lifeboat with animals at all, but with a sailor, the surly and subhuman cook from the freighter and his mother - oh, and a rat.  The sailor, like the zebra, had a broken leg.  The cook, after eating the rat, killed the sailor, in part to use his meat as bait - and perhaps to dine on him - and then kills Pi's mother in rage when she slaps him for his barbarian behavior.  Pi, a vegetarian pacifist, is horrified and angry.  When the cook leaves the knife that he used to kill the sailor unguarded, Pi murders him, unleashing a part of himself, portrayed by Richard Parker in the first version of the story; a wild, unbridled part that he is absolutely terrified by, but that also gives him the will to survive on the open sea as he struggles with and tries to protect and save himself - a person who is more complicated and dangerous than he ever had any idea.

The book and now the movie are brilliantly done.  The images in the movie powerfully bring to life a representation of the inner world that is rarely attempted on screen.  And it does so by persuasively telling the story of a boy surviving on a lifeboat - and the raft that he makes of life-preservers that he makes to float alongside the lifeboat - with a tiger - for over 200 days.  The boy must learn, in very tight quarters, to master the tiger.  To create separate spaces; his raft, but also places that he pees around on the boat; to kill fish (despite his abhorrence of killing); to leave an island they discover that would house them indefinitely, but that would also consume him; to wrestle with this animal and to care for it - despite his fear of it and his anger at all that it has destroyed.

The book and movie work on this level.  My struggles with Mack, while not as dramatic, mirror Pi's struggles with Richard Parker.  When Mack, who initially was friendly and more or less willing to go along with the program, first objected to a command, took a nip at me, and then growled and barked, I was both scared, but also angry and ready to assert myself; to become, in the current vernacular, the alpha dog.  I think that, when I do that in the rest of my life, I do it in such a cleverly hidden way that I can delude myself into thinking that I am not being aggressive.  I can, for instance, ask my son if he wants to take out the trash when what I am really saying is, "Take out the trash."  But with Mack, when he jumps on my bed and starts pulling at the covers with his teeth, my grabbing him in an instant by the scruff of the neck, lifting him into the air, then dropping him to the floor and forcing his neck to the ground to show him who is boss, all while saying quite firmly (bystanders might say shouting) "No, bad dog," there is no hiding my own aggression, my assertion, my commanding the situation.  For Pi, this is magnified, both by the contrast with his consistent, deeply held pacifism, and by the extreme aggression with which he has to engage a tiger - not to mention the fear that he will become his next meal.

I can return my Richard Parker to the pound.  The thieves have been caught, and, for now, there is no imminent threat.  Pi could, theoretically, kill Richard Parker, until we remember the other version of the story.  The only way to kill Richard Parker is to kill himself - an act of violence that will require Richard Parker's cooperation - meaning he will need to engage his own violence to bring about his death, but he is working to tame - to limit - to humanize - the very primitive force that he would need to kill himself.  And the convolutions in that last sentence illustrate the wonderful thing about this narrative device:  Yann Martel, the author of the book, and Ang Lee, the director of the movie, have figured out how to portray internal, psychological struggles, struggles that are ineffable and difficult to witness, even or especially from the inside, in vivid, concrete fashion.  Because it is through our engagement with the world, whether talking with our friends (or analyst), training a dog (or a tiger), or surviving in an open craft in the Pacific, that our unconscious selves emerge, guiding the (somewhat) conscious actions of engaging with, battling, anticipating and parrying to maintain our physical and/or psychological well being.  And thus the story of Richard Parker brings to life what would otherwise be a dramatic but invisible story, one that we would not be able to follow - the struggles between a man's conscience and his knowledge of the actions he engaged in when enraged as he is swept across the ocean by wind and waves.

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

 Post script:  We did ultimately return the dog.  When it was continuously threatening and scaring the children - jumping on their beds and growling at them - and tearing up whatever was in reach while we were out of the house and it was caged - it was too much even for the the reluctant wife.  Much later we did a sweet dog that was found after it had survived one of the coldest winters on record on its own.  It is small enough that I can comfortably return to being largely unaware of how frequently I assert my alpha dogness.

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Stegner's Angle of Repose - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reads a Pulitzer Prize Winning Novel

Life is hard.  It doesn't matter - rich or poor, privileged or not.  Life is hard.  I was not excited about reading another book about America - another Pulitzer prize winner.  I was tired of hearing how wonderful we rich Americans are after having seen us through the lens of the poor in Nicaragua this summer (see posts starting here about that).  But a friend recommended this book about the American West.  It is long, and  captivating.  It tells of how the west was won - not by cattle barons, and not by gunslingers (though those certainly also won the west), but by engineers.  Oh, the engineers wore six shooters, and used them when they had to, but primarily they mapped mines and built dams; they created places for people to live, and figured out how to get water to parched soil so that wheat would grow and livestock would be fed.

The Angle of Repose in the title is the angle of a dirt hill, like one that would hold up a ditch or a dam, and the angle of repose is the angle at which dirt does not roll down the slope.  This is the most efficient angle to use - using a shallower angle requires more dirt, while using a steeper angle causes the dam to self-efface until it collapses.  But it is also a metaphor that is used in various ways.  One application might be the angle a person takes towards themselves that allows them to live with themselves and with others.  Too harsh, and they can't live up to strictures, too lenient and they consistently fail themselves and others.  Written in the first person, the book is primarily about two people: the protagonist, a historian writing in 1970 about the life of his grandmother, which he knows both from having known her when he was a child and from her letters and other records which he is now organizing and turning into the second story, one told in the third person, about her.

The author is looking to his grandmother, who lived before Freud's work (and other factors) ushered in the changing mores that the author self consciously complains about.  The author speculates about the conscience (and consciousness) of people in the late 1800s - people who lived in a more rule governed time.  The author is writing across multiple divides, however.  He is a man writing about a woman.  He is also, almost in spite of himself, a citizen of the late twentieth century - a post Freudian/post modern time, writing about people who lived in the modern era.  From that position, he can't write in the style of the time about the people of that time.  He can't know their subjectivity in the ways that authors in that period pretended to know them, nor can he impose a subjectivity upon them.  He can speculate about the subjective experience of his heroine, and he does, but he also knows that it is much more complex than he can portray and likely than even she knows.

Almost twenty per cent of the book is written by an actual historical figure about whom the fictionalized account is written.  Her letters - beautiful, poetic, and indirect (She lived before Freud pushed towards an era that, probably to his personal horror, includes Oprah-openness as a hallmark) - make up a significant portion of the book.  Some criticized the awarding of the Pulitzer to a man who did not write a big chunk of the work.  OK, then, two pretty talented writers teamed up to write this book.  Mary Hallock Foote also deserves credit, because she lends her voice to this work, which is essential to it. As skilled and talented a writer as she is, her writing hides as much as it exposes - or refers to states through metaphor rather than describing them directly.  And she is a romantic - imagining the world to be a better place - imagining the friends she has left on the East Coast to be living an idealized existence - in ways that seem, at times, implausible.

A book of this size and scope - a book that takes on so many things, that is simultaneously so complex and readable, is a book that I naively expected to deliver a good solid conclusion - to wrap things up in a way that makes them comprehensible.  But the question that drives the narrative of both the characters in the 1880s and 90s and the characters in 1970, is one that is left unresolved.  And I can't imagine that it would be otherwise.  The question is multi-layered.  On the surface it is a question about guilt and forgiveness.  How do we forgive ourselves?  How do we allow others to forgive us?  How do we forgive others?  Concretely, the question is put in the form of a mysterious illness which is petrifying the 1970 figure - the writer - who suffers from a disease that is locking up his bones, making him more and more constricted - unable to bend or turn or see behind him, and, filled with anger and spite that emotionally constricts him - anger and spite that are based on a very real, very painful betrayal, can he rise above this?  Can he become something that he is not - flexible, malleable, and able to connect with others - including in and through his and their vulnerability?  Do we, despite our novel ways of thinking about ourselves and others, still have a character based core - a deep seated conscience - that keeps us locked up in ourselves and isolated from those around us?

For the author, in the 1800s there were external constraints - the constraints of society that simply did not allow marital ruptures, for instance, to occur.  But more importantly, there were constraints of character - and a belief in character - both the character of others, but one's own character.  These constraints came from the depictions of people in novels and in the proper upbringing that many in the upper classes received.  And a central part of this was the construction of a self.  This led to a self consciousness that created a narrative arc that was unbending, no matter what else might occur internally or in the environment.  When things got in the way, the person reassessed the goals and strove for them.

The author's grandfather and grandmother faced a myriad of challenges.  They lived in the developing west and, though they were living privileged lives relative to those around them, they were living in primitive conditions.  His grandmother, raised to be a lady, functioned as one in a whole variety of primitive conditions, convinced, especially early on, that their sacrifices would be rewarded.  Life, especially among those worthy of the kind of consideration that this book gives, involves self conscious self construction that would have a certain kind of integrity and would demand that of others.  Now the book is not as naive as this sounds.  There are many in the book who do not have character of this sort.  But the heroes do.  And, as heroes do, they have tragic flaws.

The author's grandmother, a woman who was privileged through birth, natural talent and education to live as very few women lived, married a man who, though virtuous in many ways - he was hardworking, a brilliant engineer, and highly principled - was not verbal in the way that she was - he was not what we would now call her soul mate, though they were bound together as if by baling - or even barbed - wire, and though he loved her deeply and unswervingly; she was lonely.  She imagined more - believed herself to be deserving of something greater - something warmer, more responsive, more engaging.  And she found this, or thought she did, in her husband's doppelgänger, a look alike who worked for her husband and who, while in love with her was loyal to both of them.

Suffice it to say that no good came of this triangle, and the question of the grandfather's ability to forgive the grandmother becomes central, though I think that her ability to forgive herself is at least as important.  In any case, the primary question is whether the grandson, betrayed by his wife, can display the kind of keen empathy towards his betrayers that he does for his grandmother.  And can he, a grotesque, twisted by his anger and his disease - rise above himself to re-engage with his child, but more importantly, his wife, who has betrayed him?

Steven King was hit while walking on a rural Maine road and severely injured by a driver who was reaching into the backseat to both fend off his dog and grab another beer.  An interviewer commented that the driver sounded like a Steven King character, and Mr. King corrected him; he stated that any human being is more complex and more real than the best character that he could construct.  Stegner, I think, recognizes this as well.  To ask deeply human questions of any character narrows the question.  Our humanity is more complex than any character's handling of it will allow us to appreciate.

Stegner may also be asking us to think about our own character.  Are we strong enough to go where our ancestors, as gifted and capable as they were, could not dare to go?  Can we, with the privilege that they have bequeathed us, exceed them?  Does the privilege they have afforded us serve as a platform from which we can exceed them?  I think this is a question that Stegner does not know the answer to.  And we will answer it based on the complex way that we live out our lives - both individually and collectively as a culture.  Will privilege lead us to waste what we have been given or will it spur us on to new heights?      

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Wrigley Field - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Goes on a Pilgrimage

Chicago, the city of my birth, was the destination of a Labor Day Weekend pilgrimage with my 13 year old son.  It was a post-modern traditional journey, invented in our blended family as a means of celebrating the bat-mitzvahs of his stepsisters - a journey with the same sex parent to the city of choice of the child reaching the age of adulthood in the jewish tradition; now applied regardless of the faith of the child.  Our eldest stepdaughter chose New York, which I lobbied for with him.  He originally wanted to go to Miami, mostly having to do with the sports teams, but he ultimately chose Chicago, and, while the Cubs, White Sox, Redwings, Bears and Bulls had something to do with that, it also had to do with a city that means something more to him.  What that is, I am not sure, but I was certainly relieved as it is a city that I know well - the city where my mother was born and grew up and a city where members of both my mother's and father's families still live.

We filled the weekend with two visits with family, trips to a skyscraper and four museums, and an afternoon at the ballpark.  In between we wandered through the city, on foot, by car, and on the El, marveling at its size, its engagement with its citizens and visitors alike, its stores, and its jazz festival.  But also we spent time in each other's company - with a quality that was different from the time that we spend when we travel with the rest of the family.  We were, once again, and in entirely new ways, the dyad that we have always been; father and son.

Having a child was a radically different experience for me - it was, in the words of Bernard Lonergan, a Jesuit I am reading to better understand the relationship between psychoanalysis and Ignatius' spiritual exercises, a horizon altering experience. Lonergan proposes that there are horizontal and vertical exercises of freedom, and a horizontal exercise is is one that occurs within an established horizon.  A vertical exercise is the means by which we move from one horizon to the next; and the unexpected and profound love for my child, an individual not yet formed, but also perfectly present, was a paradigm altering experience - it introduced entirely new horizons.

As the infant, pre-verbal son and I spent time together, I was enthralled by his development, by our shared experience.  Then, as I have referred to elsewhere in this blog, he began to speak, and the profound experience that we had shared collapsed - the words actually interfered with a level of communication that had, at least I believed, been taking place.  Instead of resonating with each other, we were talking about food, and the bathroom, and stuff - real concrete stuff, and our words were not adequate to address the spectrum of all that we had been sharing.

As the boy grew and developed, language provided more opportunities to communicate in new and more complex realms.  Sports is an example.  Playing video games, watching Sports Center, and reading the sports section quickly made him more knowledgeable than I about which modern players are playing for which teams in a host of sports (and who is good, who just mediocre), but also increased his knowledge about such things as strategy and gamesmanship so that, at times, he was embarrassed about what his Old Man didn't know.  On the other hand, I retain an edge in knowing about the classic moments and players in sport (see the blog about Steve Bartman and the Cubs), especially during the era of my youth and before.  I have a kind of reservoir of historical information that he is moderately interested in.  We are able to engage in conversation, but it involves ferrying material across a river that divides two similar nations who speak a different dialect of the same language.

Wrigley field, one of the Grand Dames, along with Fenway Park, of Major League Baseball, served as a wonderful place for these two congregations to come together.  The Cubs, who were so far out of contention that they were irrelevant, were playing the Giants - a team in contention, but one neither of us really care about one way or the other.  We didn't have a dog in the race.  But we were in Church together.

We arrived early.  My son, who has a collection of baseball hats, was interested in buying a hat at the ballpark.  We went to a stand and looked over the offerings.  His tastes run to the modern.  He likes the flat bills - a type of hat worn by rappers and a few baseball players.  I have trouble making sense of them - I think they neither look as good nor function as well as the traditional bill.  He also likes modern takes on traditional hats.  So he has an orange Cincinnati Reds hat, and he has a Tennessee Titans Football team baseball cap that has modern writing across the front rather than the more traditional team symbol.  In fact, most of his caps are caps that are trendy in one way or another.  I am strongly attached to the age old design of the Cubs' cap; one of the simple, traditional caps that is blue with a red C on the front and a red button on top - it is a symbol, like Wrigley field, of the way things used to be when we were more focused on building a country - primary colors and declarative symbols.

There were other caps on display.  There were pinstriped caps.  There were caps that festooned various things about the Cubs or about Wrigley in various fonts and colors across the front of the cap.  But most of the caps wore the traditional colors and symbol  - in either bill style.  He chose, after much deliberation, a flat bill traditional colored cap.  This choice was a sort of compromise - a mixture of the tradition that I lean towards but with the style that he likes, and that I have grudgingly grown accustomed to.  As we talked with the vendor, who told the story of an Alphonso Soriano home run ball that he had caught - and was till trying to get autographed - he mentioned where we could go to get a certificate for this being his first day at Wrigley (We had actually been here when he was two, but we agreed that pre-verbal trips to the ball park shouldn't count -especially because he was more interested in the El arriving at the station than a Sammy Sosa home run).

On our way to the seats, the scorecard vendor assured us, as I'm sure he had many others for years, that his Ouija board had predicted a no-hitter today...  though he wasn't sure whether that would be at Wrigley or at a little league game somewhere in North Dakota.  We picked up the certificate and headed to our seats, high above first base, but close enough, even though we were in the next to last row, that we were very much part of the game.  On the way, we passed hot dog stands offering Chicago style hot dogs, something I remembered eating on an earlier visit and found exquisite.  When we sat down, I offered to go get such a hot dog for each of us, but warned John that it would be laden with many things that he didn't like - but I thought it worth it because, in my estimation it was good local food and worth a try.  Somewhat to my surprise, he agreed, even though he is a picky eater who frequently refuses my attempts to get him to try to broaden his palate.

As I loaded the all beef hot dog on a poppy seed bun with tomatoes, onions, a weird colored pickle relish, mustard, ketchup (I didn't know this didn't belong), peppers and a pickle, I thought to myself, "He won't like this - all of the condiments, with the exception of the peppers and maybe the mustard, are things that he avoids."  Despite this, and manifold experiences of having my hopes dashed when I present new tastes, I believed that my own experience of this wonderful combination was something that I wanted to share with him.  When I returned to the seat, my son had been traumatized.  In my absence a huge spider had landed on him and then walked onto his program where he was able to throw it to the ground.  Despite being shaken, he tried the hot dog and, what do you know, he liked it!  He and I were both surprised.  And we settled in together to watch the game.

It was really fun to be in a park where there were no blaring advertisements to interfere with the conversation between innings - where T-shirt shooting, scantily clad women weren't encouraging us to beg and plead to have them send a T-shirt our way - but instead of being constantly "entertained", to listen to the organ as it provided a gentle, though, as the game demanded, a more strident soundtrack.  To notice the flags flying of players whose numbers had been retired - players whom I had seen play on this field in my youth (boy does that make me sound old).  To have my son point out to me the odd and predictable batting stance of a Giant player, and to have him talk about the pitching styles of the current pitchers for both teams.  To watch the game unfold.  To notice the traditions of the park together - including the polite applause that welcomed the Cubs to the dugout after a particularly difficult inning finally came to a close (as opposed to the booing that a crowd in another town would have visited on their hapless players), and to cringe, together, at the noise that the Giants fans made in this home of the Cubs.

In addition to the conversation, to sharing our memory of hearing broadcasters characterizing the size of a particular gate onto the field as being determined by the size of the elephant the circus would bring to Wrigley field, to my learning about the modern teams and his learning about the ancient ones, there was an unspoken experience.  A shared experience of being together.  One that we didn't comment on.  We talked about some of that after the game.  We discussed the fans around us.  We talked about the rhythm of the game.  About our experience of watching a game where neither had a dog in the race.  And we talked about how good it felt to be there.

And there was much we didn't talk about.  Of being father and son.  Of being on a trip together.  Of relying on each other.  Of being in touch with each other.  Of enjoying the time we had together.  Of feeling good about having a language that would serve to bridge a divide.  Of feeling united, connected, on a level for which there is no language.  Of sharing a perspective, and of appreciating the differences between our perspectives.  Of acknowledging that the choices of the other would not be our own, but that there is a logic to it, even if it is not our own.  And respecting that the other is who he is - that we share much, and part of what we share is respect for the other's experience, at least in our best moments.

The theme of shared and separate moments and experiences was played out throughout the weekend - as we searched for another dog as good as the first (couldn't find one), saw spiders all over the town, talked over what it was like to be with family members (sharing appreciation for the virtues of the people that we knew and the new ones that we met), looked at art, technology, and natural wonders, and shared the experience while also having our own experiences of them in the moment, and revisiting them in conversation after leaving them.  Agreeing that this was the best of our trips together; not, I believe, just because it was the most recent.  Nor because of the manifold virtues of Chicago.  But because we continue to become better able to share both the verbal and nonverbal parts of our experience.  To be in an experience together and on our own.  I hope that this post modern mode of communication - this pilgrimage to a zone of proximal development, a place where we can both expand our perspective horizontally, and perhaps even vertically, together - is one that we continue to share for a long, long time.

Of course, the wish for the experience to stretch is partially because of a complimentary awareness - that we are in very different places.  While John is on the verge of adulthood - including the chaotic swirls of adolescence - I can see, from my vantage point, not just retirement, but beyond.  When John asks me whether I would rather play third base or first, it is a theoretical question - I will never be called up by even the hapless Cubs - but he is still dreaming of what will be.  As my horizon moves vertically, I can see the edge of the world, while his horizons still stretch into countries that feel much warmer and beckon with promise.

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

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Hope Springs and The Dew Breaker - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Contemplates Atonement

In "Hope Springs", Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones, playing a Nebraskan couple - Kay and Arnold - ensnared in a routinized and deadened marriage, seek treatment from Steve Carell's character, a couple's therapist in Maine.  It is surprising that this cast would be assembled to attack, in what is intended to be a directly representative way, a subject as real, everyday and plain as a marriage gone bad.  I remember when I was trying to hang onto a marriage going bad, a friend told me that the difference between the couples that got divorced and those that didn't was that those that didn't, wanted to stay married; but they were no happier.  While I have been privileged to have access to good marriages, there is some truth to her statement - it is hard to sustain an intimate relationship with another across the better part of a lifetime - hard to see their foibles and to have your own exposed, to fail each other, to manage being roommates, lovers, perhaps co-parents, and to emerge unscathed.  Despite the two dimensional nature of the characters and the relationship, despite the unrealistically compressed nature of the treatment - something that seems necessary to keep our attention, and the emphasis on sex as a means of reconnecting, not to mention the Hollywood ending that feels tacked on, there is much that is true and real in this movie, just as there was in my friend's comment about marriage.

The Dew Breaker, a novel by Edwidge Danticat, seems at the other end of the spectrum.  This disorienting book that leaps from short story to short story in confusing and convoluted ways, has, at its heart, a relationship that, on its surface, could not be more different from the story of Kay and Arnold.  The way that the Dew Breaker, a brutal guard during the Haitian nightmare of rule under Baby Doc Duvalier, comes to marry - in so far as he does - the woman with whom he escapes Haiti for New York, is so incredible that it can't be revealed until the author has introduced us not just to the stories of trauma that are woven into the fabric of Haiti, but induced in us, the reader, a kind of dissociative experience as we try to piece together the book, giving up when parts of it just don't seem to coalesce, only to find that, if we try, we can put the pieces together in such a way that, rather than being a tightly tied ending, we discover all the loose ends, all the questions that linger in the air.

So, while Kay and Arnold are locked into a relationship that is functional on the surface, but seethes with unspoken feeling based on long enduring grudges, the protagonists of the Dew Breakers understand and support each other because they don't know or don't acknowledge the intimate ways they have harmed each other and are therefore loving and supportive in ways that seem much more genuine.  On the surface, the movie partners, who have raised two children, have similar values, and work together at living life (symbolized visually by Kay cooking Arnold a single brown egg and a strip of bacon each morning before he heads off to work), seem to be in a supportive, cooperative relationship, but Kay is more willing to acknowledge the void that exists within their relationship.  Despite their  deep and powerful attachment to each other, they are deeply and powerfully furious with each other.  Each has withheld from the other, each has felt deeply hurt by the other, and both fear making contact; they fear that being open to the other reopens them to being hurt, ignored, and rebuffed.

Kay expresses a willingness to engage and seeks out the therapist.  Arnold resists, almost cruelly and we, like another therapist, could make the mistake of believing that it is Arnold who is the impediment - the resistant one - and not realize that they are both hurt, they are both responsible for where they are - and that Kay is just as afraid, just as resistant.  We wonder why she is with him - why she puts up with his cruelty.  But this is not, at heart, a sado-masochistic relationship.  It is a loving relationship.  And so, ironically, is the relationship between Anne and a man so monstrous he can't be named - he is referred to only as the Dew Breaker, the fat man and, by his daughter, as Papa.

The fat man, the macoute, becomes monstrous as an adult.  He joins the regime that has displaced his father from his one acre plot and thereby driven his mother back to the arms of her true but poor love.  He goes to the city, joins the police, and uses his powers, from afar, to right things both for his father but also for other poor families back home.  In his new role as dictator in the prison, however, he becomes the most sadistic of men.  He takes real joy in observing terror - and in seeing the hope that springs when he offers his victims freedom right before he tortures or kills them.  But he feels enslaved by this, and by his awareness of his own precariousness in a system that is based on rule through fear.  He runs - escapes - after botching his work and being physically assaulted.  He runs into Anne's arms, and together they flee Haiti.

For her part, Anne feels great guilt for what she has done.  An epileptic, she had a seizure while she was to be watching her brother at the ocean and he drowned.  I believe that she blames herself for this and does not know how to seek redemption.  She is pleased that her husband is able to achieve some sort of redemption in their new life in New York - in fact she thinks that it is truly a miracle.  But in order to see this, she cannot look too closely at who he is or at how they are linked.  She must keep her vision fuzzy for if she knew, she might not be able to appreciate the resolution that he achieves.

And this is where the two stories diverge.  The atonement - the reconciliation - in Hope Springs occurs because the protagonists quit trying to fight each other off - quit trying to maintain the distance that has kept them feeling safe but cruelly isolated - and engage with each other - they become one - by acknowledging the grief that they share - the grief that they have visited on each other and the grief that they now are wallowing in.  But the Dew Breaker, the one who comes in the early dawn to maim, kill, and steal children, cannot atone - cannot gather together all that he has done - cannot acknowledge what he has done to Anne - nor even what he has done to his daughter.

In Hope Springs, as we unwind the ball of string that ties the protagonists together, we observe how simple it is for them to connect.  In the Dew Breaker, the opposite occurs; as the story unfolds we discover more and more connections between the protagonists,  but these connections are toxic.  They fear, and we the readers fear, that, if known, these connections would do what Kay and Arthur fear will happen if they speak what they are feeling, the connections would drive Anne and Papa apart.  Is there something about a level of trauma, is there a threshold of damage that can't be bridged?  Is the solution that Anne believes the dew breaker has achieved, the miracle of being transformed from working in a prison to being calm, to being patient, to driving forty miles to pick his daughter up to take her to a Christmas eve mass, the best that can be achieved?

Each story, in its own way, has a happy ending.  Hope Springs suggests a resolution - a coming together, a shared reconciliation.  Anne is proud of Poppa in the Dew Breaker, but it is from a distance.  She appreciates his transformation, and he, though tortured by his past and the belief that it will keep him from the afterlife, has raised a daughter and recreated a stable existence for himself.  As a clinician, I would not hesitate to recognize the differences between these two couples, to recognize that different treatments are called for, different outcomes likely; but somehow, as a reader, I am disturbed by what seems to be an inequity.  These people, through accidents of birth and circumstance, have different potential arcs available to them.

Anne and Papa live separate lives; Papa shares neither Anne's love of miracles nor her faith.  She adores him from a distance.  He dismisses her, but with affection, and she worries, as does he, about the fate of his soul.  Kay and Arnold also live separate lives, but the history that separates them is a shared history.  It can have a narrative thread that binds them - they were once in love and they still yearn for connection.  I suppose that both couples will settle into a playfully connected and disconnected latter third of their relationship.

Perhaps what is both disturbing and engaging is that both couples achieve a certain internal atonement - a certain kind of oneness - but the atonement of Kay and Arnold is based in a more realistically tinged view of each other.  The atonement of Anne and Papa is more saturated in fantasy.  Anne's view of Papa is as fantastic as her faith in the miracle that allows a woman to cry crystals.  Papa, who could so closely see the people that he tortured, is blind to both Anne and his daughter.  They are there, but his burden of guilt occludes them, and they are peripheral to his vision of his own damnation.  He cannot even see himself through his daughter's eyes; he destroys the artistic representation she has made of him.  While he may be loved by Anne - and by his daughter - it will ring hollow.  He is ultimately alone with the ghosts that haunt him, that he cannot shake, but that are also, on some level now fantasy figures too - memories of real actions - but memories none-the-less.  I think that Danticat, in the parallel stories she tells, suggests that revenge is not a solution, but also suggests that his guilt, his fantasy of himself as a monster, is its own kind of revenge.  Because he has concern, because he can connect, he can also feel guilt and can be cut off from those who would love and know him.  He cannot reconcile himself to living and is, perhaps, as dead in some ways as the people he has killed.  

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

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Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reads a Classic

While on vacation last week in Canada, I realized that I had left the book I intended to read in the car when we jumped onto the train.  I feared that in Francophile Montreal I would not be able to find a good book in English, but fortunately our Air B&B (a person's apartment that we rented on the internet instead of staying in a hotel room) was in the McGill University - the English speaking University - student ghetto and was over a small storefront English Language bookstore.  The store was tiny - maybe 20 feet deep with shelves on either side of a single aisle and struggling to survive as I learned through overhearing in the hour or so that I browsed through the books, struggling, even though the manager was also using the back small room as his apartment.  Which is a shame.  It was stocked with classics - in literature was the strong suit, but also in theology and history, science and even a smattering of psychology.  It is the kind of bookstore that I fantasized about running as a college student, and that we seem to have come close to eradicating in the US (though apparently in Canada, too) by a combination of chain bookstores and the availability of online bookstores and, now, books.

Well the choosing of books is a delicate matter - it isn't just one of your holiday games.  Reviews can be helpful, recommendations are good - though they can be freighted with obligation.  Choosing a book on line involves hunting for a particular tome, or following some kind of string of associations based on similar content.  It is only in a bookstore that one can truly browse.  Which, perhaps because it had been so long since I have had that luxury, felt like a naked excursion.  And reading a book on vacation is a bit different than at other times, or it feels that it should be.  Among the classics were big, difficult books that I should read because they are part of being well read - Gravity's Rainbow was an example of many in this category - there were books that should be read because of various professional paths I am currently on - the collected writings of Ignatius Loyola was an example of these - but I really wanted a book that I wanted to read - and the only trashyish novels in this rather high minded place were whodunits, and I'm not a big fan of that genre.  So I finally settled on Steppenwolf.  A book that was a must read among my peers in high school.  A book that I seemed to vaguely recall may have to do with the life of the Buddha (I was confusing it with another popular Hesse book, Siddhartha).  But also a slender volume that, because my friends had read it for pleasure and enlightenment, promised to be engaging but also meaty enough - and at this moment I was looking for spiritual food and the Buddha confusion was likely fueled by a wish for the kind of nourishment I hoped to find in a book that would be pleasant to read.

Originally published in 1929, the author's note from the 1961 edition further supported the notion that this might actually be the right book to read at this moment.  In it, he reflected on the popularity of the book.  He noted that it was written when he was fifty and that it represented the struggles of that particular developmental moment.  He then went on to note that his biggest problem was not with the detractors of the book, but with the supporters - especially the younger adherents.  And I began to wonder whether my friends - and I, had I read it as a late adolescent - were guilty of this sin of somehow subverting the intended message because we could not, from our own developmental vantage point, understand the book, and perhaps I might be able to appreciate that message now, as a fifty something year old reader.

So, the title character, the Steppenwolf or Harry, turns out to be a loner - an intellectual - a passionate but also highly constricted man who, in his fifties, takes a room in a boarding house in a town he lived in many years before.  He starts to see messages - weird invitations to enter into another world - a world where the sign says "FOR MADMEN ONLY!" - and he begins to stray into a world that is much more open, free, and sensuously driven than the world that he has inhabited and disdained throughout his life.  Harry is guided into this world by a beautiful and ambiguously gendered woman, Hermine, who both reminds him of an old male friend, but also seems to be a version of himself.  Harry is guided, then, on a journey of self discovery by someone who is very much like himself, though also somewhat other - this woman; but also by her lover, a black Saxophone player who, instead of being like Harry in talking about music, simply makes music - and the potions that help Harry enter an altered state to appreciate the world differently.

As a twenty year old, I would have heard this tale as one that is inviting me to throw off my inhibitions, to live spontaneously - perhaps I would, as my sophomore roommate did - give up language altogether and communicate only through barks - as if the sensual life - and I don't know that this is the right term, but please allow it to suffice - were the proper life to lead.  This level of simplicity would be a very possible, indeed a likely, response were the book read from that vantage point.  Life is simple - engage, respond - might be the bumper sticker version.  But, in fact, the tale is not about how to live as a twenty year old, but how, as someone in his or her fifties, to enter into a process of coming to know oneself, both who one is and has become, and the paths that were not taken.  It is a tale of self discovery that occurs after the self has been formed - after difficult choices have been made - after internal inconsistencies have become habitual and are no longer vividly portrayed, but instead hidden, assumed, covered up; and to discover them - to come to know oneself - brings with it the fear that the process might well lead to madness.  The message of the book - at least in so far as my fellow Steppenwolf feels it - is not that the Steppenwolf's life course could have been avoided, but that it is inevitable.  That even my barking friend must now, in his fifties, deconstruct the less verbal life that he chose.  That his simplicity introduced complications as well, and, in order to put his house in order, he, too must enter into a portal that proclaims "FOR MADMEN ONLY", because to know ourselves is to know the internal inconsistencies that are integral to supporting the facade that is essential both for our public functioning and, more importantly, for maintaining our delusionally consistent self narrative.

Even as I say this, though, I am remembering the author's note, where he states "I neither can nor intend to tell my readers how they ought to understand my tale."  And this, in turn, leads to a wonderful essay that Thomas Ogden, a psychoanalyst, wrote as an introduction to a book that he wrote about reading classic psychoanalytic papers.  Ogden's position is that readers who closely read other's work are actually writing it themselves.  They are taking whatever the author offers and remaking it, filtering it through their own experience.  While my identification with Steppenwolf leads me to feel kinship, it also leads to distortions.  From Ogden's position, I have rewritten it - or taken the ideas from it and made them my own.  As psychoanalysts, we are constantly doing this, including when we make interpretations in the consulting room.  Sometimes we lose track of this and believe that we know what is going on in the minds of our analysands, and to a certain extent this is true - frequently we accurately apprehend unconscious dynamics that are unknown or unseeable to the person who is freely associating, or writing a novel, as the case may be.  But our interpretations, and Ogden's clinical writings make this amply clear about his own practice, are infused with our own idiosyncratic mental content - we are rewriting the text that our patients give us.

I am aware of some distortions that my reading has introduced in the brief review that I have offered here.  I could go back and more closely tie what I have reviewed to the text- to clarify what is Hesse's thought and what my own.  Ogden does this in the articles he reviews, quoting them at length and closely parsing individual elements from the articles.  I do this as a requisite part of the process of editing these blogs for "publication".  But I also like to keep some of the boundaries blurry and, in the spirit of both Hesse and Ogden, would cathect - would own - Hesse's work and his intent, at least in this moment, as my own.  As I do that, I run the risk of cultivating Hesse's now silent wrath - of being like the twenty year old boys who distort his ideas and turn them into permission to live a different kind of life - but as I reread the author's note, I find that he is concerned not with the twenty year old starry eyed readers - perhaps a group of readers who would pick up the book in the twenty years after he wrote the note - but with a group of readers who misinterpret the Steppenwolf's, Harry's, Herman's suffering with despair.  From that perspective, my twenty year old friends are not appreciating the healing power of reflection - and are, as I imagine them, trying to avoid the kinds of wounds that Hesse portrays Steppenwolf as bearing.  And as I circle back, as I discover one way in which I have misunderstood Hesse, I am also finding ways in which I have actually gotten a clear vision of him and what his message is.  The bumper sticker version is that the wounds are a necessary part of healing - that redemption can only come as a result of having been in the dark.  But this is not just his message, it is my own.  He has become my Hermine.  And deliciously, even this name - her mine - transliterated into English - does it mean the same in German? - betrays an identification - the same identification that J.K. Rowling betrays when she names her alter ego Hermione (she and I are one).  Is Hesse punning in English?  Was Rowling?  At this moment it doesn't matter, because I am - and it is my Hermine that Hesse has become.  As my transferential figure, I bestow on him - and discover within him, and his character, Harry, the traits that I am struggling to understand.  And if, like he, I am able to discover this book as a redemptive one then I am able to make use of it in a way that is parallel to Hesse's stated intent.  Of course, if I do not, as he feared many of his most effusive readers had not, we end up in very different places.  And it is not surprising to me that he would be dismayed by this - for this, I think, is where, for Hesse, madness lies.

Wandering in a bookstore, browsing - wandering in another country - losing our way - becomes then a metaphor for being able to sort and sift through partly known, but also unknown elements - to choose the ones that resonate, and to follow a path that leads to, at the very least, a satisfying read, but perhaps more grandly, a moment of connection, with the author, with other readers - not a perfect connection, this is our own construction based on who we are at this moment - but it is also a shared construction - one that is influenced by the author - and that influence shapes the way that we experience subsequent connections.  By destroying parts of ourselves (portrayed in the book quite concretely) - finding out how the author actually does have a different point of view that we must take into account - leads to a rebirth not in the world that we have lived, or would have lived, but in the life that we lead from this moment forward.

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O Canada! - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Travels as a Typical Tourist in the First World

Wanting the kids to have a sense of another country and neither feeling competent yet in the third world nor flush enough to travel to Europe; we decided to visit our neighbors to the north.  After dropping our car in Toronto, we headed by train to Ottawa, a cute little city on the border between Ontario and Quebec that is situated on a defensible bluff overlooking the Ottawa river.  The capital was moved here from Quebec City in part to protect it from attack by the United States after we invaded the country in the war of 1812.  I have been struck by two things - the form of government, and the consequent depiction of it - and the intertwined historical roots of this country with ours - in ways that I, a casual historian at best, have been unaware.

The Parliament building in Ottawa sits on the bluff and is a vision of Romantic High Gothic English elegance.  With copper roofs, dominated by a twenty five story peace tower in front and a beautiful circular wooden library in back, it feels a bit like Hogwarts - and the meeting room of both the House of Commons and the Senate, the two bodies of the Parliament, are rich in wood and green or red leather, and feel very clubby.  Unlike our Chambers, arranged as auditoriums, each of these rooms have sets of desks on risers that face each other across a center aisle.  The presider - a presumably neutral party - sits at the head of the room, while the majority sits, faces, and debates with the minority across the aisle.  There are, of course, committee rooms where the legislators hammer out the details, but even these are configured differently, frequently with a table that legislators sit around rather than a dais that legislators sit behind while experts testify.

One of the moments that the differences in government become apparent then, is at 10 O'Clock at night.  That's when crowds assemble on the front lawn of the Parliament to watch a half hour light show, MosAika, that is projected on the walls of the Parliament building.  A mixture of history, cultural definition, and entertainment, this show, with accompanying music, is simultaneously humble, playful, and immensely impressive.  One of the central themes is that Canada is a country that is engaged in a conversation.  The gimmick is that Canadians can make brief YouTube-like videos to "participate" in the conversation  - and have them projected as part of the show.  Another theme is that Canada is a country that is committed to peace.  Finally, there is a theme of commitment to community and to heritage.  Throughout, the four seasons play a significant role, weaving themselves into each of the themes - not surprising in a country where everyone experiences a long, cold, dark winter.

The theme of conversation in a bilingual country is interesting.  Conversations around us moved from French to English and back to French.  Traveling mostly in well touristed areas, we were not randomly sampling, but people were willing to struggle across language barriers.  The British "took over" in the 1760s after a series of battles that they attempted to finance by waging taxes on the New England States - arguing that the war was protecting our interests.  We objected, and England ended up losing the larger prize.  More broadly it is apparent that Europe never really understood what was of value here or in the countries they colonized world wide (nor did we, in turn understand what was of value in Central and South America).  They came searching for gold and silver and, while they returned with some, it was the land as a cradle for nations that was the real prize.  Sometimes we, in psychology, can be guilty of this same sin.  We don't recognize the value of our patient's autonomy - the importance of the governmental structures they want to put in place - and instead we try to put in our own.

Back in the real world, however, the English gained control of a vast area that the French had explored and settled - including much of what would later be the US Midwest - dotted with French Names from Detroit though St. Louis and Des Moines all the way down to New Orleans.  So the English came, they governed, and they doled out the choicest morsels to themselves.  The French who had come here were largely poor, Roman Catholic and loyal to the crown - even if that crown was now English.  Benjamin Franklin was surprised when he came north to recruit the Canadians as allies who, despite having been recently defeated and occupied by the British, preferred to side with the Royalists than with our revolution.  But this did not mean that, across the centuries, as the English speakers doled out favors to their own, the French were sanguine about it.  Quebec became more and more adamant about seceding from the government and in 1995, by a slim majority of 50.6%, Quebecers decided to stay in the Union.  While the intent to leave the union has diminished, shopkeepers seemed pleased when we asked if they spoke English rather than our assuming that they did.  And it seems possible that this divided nation is able to dialogue about its differences and work towards solving some of the inequities that certainly remain.

Peace as a central theme felt genuine.  Unlike our country, with a sitting President who, though having won a Nobel Peace Prize, is presiding over a bloody war, the Canadian military seems more focused on maintaining adequate self defense and being prepared to serve in an auxiliary fashion in attempts to redress inequities abroad.  The TV commercials included prime time public service announcements about giving a broad berth to police and other emergency vehicles - characterized as people working to protect you - as well as appeals to contribute to aiding kids in third world countries.  Canadians have a much better international reputation - perhaps both because of their foreign policy but also because they have had to be guests in their own country; visiting provinces that are potentially hostile to them; learning to be polite to people that are both like and unlike themselves.  When traveling abroad, then, they may be more open to differences, more embracing of diversity, than we are.  Certainly the subways in the major cities are filled with as many diverse ethnic groups - including the dominant culture - as is the case in the US.

I think it must be different to be in a country where there is a large minority culture that is there by choice.  Many of the original French immigrants were poor.  Like in the US, many of them returned - 10,000 of the original 30,000 went home again.  But those who stayed were happy.  They were poor, as they had been at home, but they could forage for wood and hunt for game - neither of which were possible at home, and their happiness turned into progeny.  The French Canadians reproduced at a terrific rate and relatively densely populated the Eastern corridor along the Southern Great Lakes and the Saint Lawrence Seaway, with more English present the further west one travelled.  Perhaps our closest analogy would be to the Southerners who "lost the war of Northern aggression" but retained much of their cultural heritage.  Having the legacy of different languages might interfere with Canada's ability to deny the presence of two very different heritages - to keep them from building, like us, a myth of National Unity.

So the conclusion of MosAika, the national production at the national capital in a country that is currently dominated by the Conservative Party, was about the social responsibility of Canadians towards other Canadians - and about the government's role in making this happen.  A message with this tone, in our country, would be an abomination to the Republican party - the same party who, not long ago, had a president, Richard Nixon, who tried to implement a National Health Care system and failed.  Perhaps the long cold winters here help people to realize a sense of responsibility towards each other.

An acquaintance who moved to Canada characterized it as a country where everybody drives a Honda.  While I have seen more variety than that on the road, I think his point is well taken.  In contrast to our country, where every man acts for himself, and therefore some of us accumulate great wealth, in a country with a more socialist ethic, a reasonable level of autonomy and a government that is concerned with the well being of the people, there is neither great wealth nor is there as much abject poverty - of wealth, and perhaps spirit, a real accomplishment in a country where there can be so much darkness that Seasonal Affective Disorder must be a national issue.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, the metaphor of discussion/dialogue is a powerful one.  If the discussion includes those who have been excluded - if the marginalized - on the personal level, the unconscious and the repressed - are included in the dialogue, does it follow that there is a greater sense of connection with those around you - a greater sense of empathy, and a corresponding lessening of drive?  How do we square that with the increased self focus of the analytic period - with the intense experience of the self - a kind of analytic narcissism - that can be part of the analytic process and even part of the residual analytic effect?  Is the Canadian humility - one that is leavened with self confidence - a model of a positive analytic outcome?  Is the playfulness exhibited in MosAika - a projection onto the symbol of power of the country that at times pokes fun at the building itself - a self deprecating self concept that is elastic and able to withstand attack through flexible engagement - a model for individual psychological health?

Obviously I am drawn to the possibilities inherent in the analogy - perhaps under the sway of the charms of this country.  It is also very nice to be able to move between train and subway, using mass transportation to travel.  Sure, we have to wait at stations.  Yes, the kids complain about walking.  But we don't have to find parking.  We are using a little less gas, and I am able to read and write while taking a break to look out the window rather than being forced to drive.  The US is less expensive, perhaps less shabby, and certainly warmer.  Despite that, the reluctant wife and kids are ready to move here.  Me?  I'm not so sure I could survive the winter.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

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

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), if you are on a computer, hit the X button on the upper right of this screen and, on the subsequent screen, hover your cursor over the black line in the upper right area and choose the pop out box that says subscribe and then enter the information.  I'm sorry but I don't currently know how you can subscribe from a mobile device - hopefully you have a computer as well...