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.  

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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.

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