Night at the Museum III - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Bids Robin Williams Farewell

Night at the Museum has been a fun, if not very demanding, franchise.  Starring Ben Stiller, our neurotic hero, and special effects that take us on crazy tours of museums in the US and Europe, the third and final film boasts a fine ensemble cast and two final performances by stars - a very brief one from Mickey Rooney and a poignant one by Robin Williams.  The film seems to follow the "Save the Cat" Hollywood formula that I have just discovered - which is based on a book about how to write screenplays.  In case I am not the last on the planet to discover it and you, too, have been in the dark about it, briefly it is a formula in which the hero, mood and tone of the movie are established in the first 10 minutes (including when the hero "Saves a cat", getting the audience clearly behind him - perhaps as Stiller does by confronting his son who is refusing to go to college, but also by recognizing his son's need for independence), the hero then faces some life changing event (in this case the ancient Egyptian tablet that brings the museum to life is deteriorating), then, at 25 minutes or so in, the hero leaves the old world for a new one, a second plot is introduced that is a mirror image of the first, and the fun and games commence.   Here, the hero travels to London, sneaks into the British Museum, and searches for the exhibit that contains the answers to how to fix the tablet, with the mirror plot being the search that his small companions take through the heating ducts within the museum where they have been sucked by the power of the air recirculating system.

At or about the midpoint of the movie, according to the "Save the Cat" rubric, the bad guys close in, and the hero must face them - in this case with the help of Sir Lancelot, who - though not actually an exhibit in the real British Museum - helps Stiller fight off a nine headed Chinese serpent - also not an exhibit in the real museum, and adds a bit of mayhem, becoming, himself a threat for a period of time - which leads to the crescendo - which should usually occurs at about 75 minutes into a 110 minute film.  Called the "dark night of the soul", which seems a bit melodramatic for this bit of fluff, all seems lost until a solution emerges (which I won't give away in case you haven't seen the movie).  By 85 minutes the crisis is resolved, the secondary plot merges with the primary plot and the last 25 minutes involve dispatching enemies in hierarchical order.  All neat and tidy, except that it is about mortality - and the limits of our ability to exert influence on the ways that things go, especially in other's lives.

In order to say farewell to Robin Williams, I will have to give away some of the particulars.  Williams portrays Teddy Roosevelt in this film as in the other two (actually I can't vouch for the second as I don't think I've seen it).  He is a wax figure who comes to life at night due to the magic of the tablet.  In this film, he and other favorites from the Natural History Museum in New York accompany Stiller to London to solve the problem.  The solution to the problem means that those who are from New York must, at the end of the movie, return to a sleep from which they will never awaken.  Stiller has to reinstall them in the museum and say good bye to them.  Knowing as we do that Williams will shortly die, this is a particularly poignant moment in the movie - one in which Williams, who has been incredibly restrained, for him, throughout the film, tells one last joke on parting from Sacajawea, his love interest, noting that despite their saying it could never work out because he was made from wax and she from polycarbonate, their love has triumphed.  The line was delivered with what, perhaps with the wisdom of hindsight, seems to be great wistfulness and sadness.

Google, in its year end greeting, noted that the searches for Mrs. Doubtfire were the ones that exploded in the wake of Williams' death.  This movie (one that seems as I review it in my head to also have followed the "Save the Cat" format - apparently most do),  captured Williams' humanity - his wish to connect with people - that his humor seemed to simultaneously fuel and prevent.  We were drawn to his manic humor because it was amazing - he could hold us spellbound with his ability to turn something as simple as a scarf into a shawl, a rickshaw, a violin and whatever else might occur to him in the space of 2 or 3 minutes, creating or accessing a wealth of characters as he did so.  This let us in, but also kept us apart as we viewed him, as we do all entertainers to some extent or another, as an object.  But the fluidity of his thought; his ability to jump from here to wherever at the drop of a word or expression lent new meaning to the term free association - his comfort with his unconscious and the power of that unconscious - and his seeming effortless conscious control of the material so that he could channel it within bounds was awe inspiring - and therefore distance creating.

There was also a sense of naïveté that his characters expressed - the radio DJ in Good Morning Vietnam comes to mind.  In that film, his character believed, on some level, that the US was doing good to and for Vietnam - and that because he had befriended particular Vietnamese, that he was doing them good.  There was visible shock that registered when that friendship, legitimate though it was, turned out to be much more complex - and built on foundational levels that he did not in that moment have access to - and it would take much time to achieve appreciation.  This was certainly a message about America's role as a superpower and our blundering belief in our ability to do good in cultures and places where we have no knowledge, something explored by Graham Greene in The Quiet American as well - but it was also as if Williams, and here I am blurring the actor with his characters, was still Mork, come from another planet, and somewhat confused about how it is that things work here.

So this film, with a subdued seeming Williams playing a wax character - one that feels somewhat removed, observant, but not active - could I say depressed? - seems to be offering, we can imagine, a weird fun-house mirror picture of the person; someone who was struggling with his current TV show - one that felt heavy handed rather than funny - as if the Midas touch of being able to see the absurdity of things was becoming a burden - something to throw in people's faces rather than something to laugh at with them - as if he stood on the other side of a barrier rather than on the same side of that barrier with us.

I never knew Robin Williams, and for that reason I can't ethically offer a diagnosis of him, and I don't intend to be doing that in this blog.  Instead I mean to be wondering - and I do think that we need to wonder about something like suicide, which we are programmed by millions of years of evolution, and the joy of life - to avoid - we need to wonder what causes someone - especially someone as full of wit, conviction about the importance of family, and a naked desire to connect with others - to choose to end his life.  Why do we, who share those attributes, though to a lesser extent, consider suicide ourselves?  Why are we depressed when there is so much wonderful stuff that life has to offer?

I think there is a sense of isolation - a sense of being made of an essentially different substance, that may have been part of Williams' depressive experience.  I also think there may have been some anger - some significant frustration that all of his talent, all of his ability did not give him something that he desperately desired.  I assume that to be a kind of love - a kind of connection - that he felt to be out of his grasp.  I also think that the onset of a progressive illness - one that would rob him of his ability to be as physically fluid and ultimately as cognitively fluid as he was used to - may have angered him.  I don't know any of this - it is a guess.  But I do wonder about the role that anger played in his suicide.

In a small instance of life imitating art, I could not convince the reluctant son to join us for the film.  Despite it being the case that he has enjoyed the first two installments, he has decided that he does not like going to movies, so we were not able to have the family outing experience that I had hoped for.  It was frustrating.  Certainly less so than if he decided that he didn't feel that he needed to go to college.  Perhaps we need models like the character that Ben Stiller was playing to help us think about managing our wish to control our lives and the lives of those around us.

Perhaps also we need to question the Hollywood formula of overcoming adversity with a specific formula.  I have often compared movies to dreams, and think that the Save the Cat formula, present in so many movies, while bankable, constrains our dreaming capacity.  In fact, we need to learn how to manage limitations - and dreams, and movies, can, if we let them, help us with that.  But we have to trust that our audience wants catharsis - that they want to see that their heroes have limitations and live within them.  While this movie let's Williams character go with grace into the night (or day - it is daylight that robs him of his living quality), the end of his actual life does not feel so graceful.  He played characters who gave voice to important positions that were not popular, and they always seemed to be able to triumph on the moral level if not always being able to best the powers that be, though sometimes they were able to do both.  Perhaps it was too much to ask that he do this in his life as well as on screen.  


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All The Light We Cannot See - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reads a Novel about WWII

This is a book about stuff.  It begins in the Paris Museum of Natural History, where the blind daughter of the locksmith, Marie-Laure, hangs out while her father works.  His job is to protect with keys and locks the stuff - and there is lots of it around.  There are mollusk shells, and gems, and dinosaur bones and stuff, stuff, stuff from all over the world.  And one of the things in the museum is rumored to be incredibly powerful - and therefore incredibly valuable, especially as the Nazis approach Paris.  It is a diamond - called the Sea of Flames - that is cursed.  The owner will live forever, but those the owner loves will endure endless misfortunes.

This is a book about media.  It begins in a coal mining town in Germany where a technical wizard named Werner lives in an orphanage run by a French Nun with his sister after his father was buried alive in the mines.  He is able to make a radio out of bits of wire he finds in the trash and it brings into his life music, the propaganda of the third Reich, and lovely stories broadcast in French that describe to children how the natural world is constructed and address some of the precocious questions this very bright boy asks.

The book alternates from chapter to chapter between these two children, growing up worlds apart, but also lets us know that their fates are linked - they will meet, briefly, in St. Malo, a storybook city in seaside Normandy the girl runs to with her father when they flee Paris entrusted with the Sea of Flames, to hide it from the Nazis.  A city that will be destroyed by the allies as they work to retake France.  And a city that Werner will be directed to after he uses his radio skills to perfect triangulation as a means of finding and destroying radio operators in the field because Marie-Laure's uncle, the St. Malo resident to whom she fled with her father - and the very person who broadcast the lovely stories that Werner tuned into, is now broadcasting intelligence to the allies.

For a period of time the book bounces not just between the two children, but also adds in chapters about the Fuehrer's gemologist - the man pursuing the Sea of Flames.  Initially he is in pursuit of it to add it to the collection that will be housed in Berlin of the great things of the world - though this is the kind of thing (in High School I read a book about the Spear of Destiny that Hitler tried to acquire) that Hitler would have wanted to personally own.  This man, dying of cancer, becomes obsessed with the idea the that the gem will cure him, and he does not care about the cost: we are briefly introduced to his family, who would be cursed were he to achieve his goal.  His pursuit becomes indicative, then, of not just the pursuit of Hitler, but of the German people who sell their souls to the devil in order to dig themselves out of a very deep pit that the First World War has left them in - the same pit that has imprisoned Marie-Laure's uncle in his home - fearing to leave it because of the ghosts who have haunted him since his own horror in the trenches.

So, this is a nicely told story - one that weaves together various elements to create the seemingly inevitable - perhaps only so in retrospect - denouement where all three characters come together at the same place and same moment in time, as the rage of war rains down around them.  This meeting was more suspenseful than it sounds here - and felt chancier - more daring - and certainly more dangerous than I am able to give it credit for because I would like to focus on something that feels less central to the thrust of the narrative, but that this story may represent more viscerally, and that is our transition from the material world as our grounding and resonant point to the world of ephemera - one that is largely driven by electronic representations of others rather than material ones.

In Freud's view of the development of the infant, he was confronted with a dilemma.  Why does the child become invested in the world around him?  As infants, our needs are met by caregivers.  We don't have to do anything and they materialize.  What leads us to give up this cocoon like world in which others adore us and we adore being alive and cared for (he called this primary narcissism)?  His answer was a simple one, that the child, driven, somewhat tautologically, by drives, invests in the things that gratify his drives.  These things, from Freud's perspective, happen to be people, but later writers, most notably Margaret Mahler and then Daniel Stern in The Interpersonal World of the Infant proposed that it was not by accident that we get invested in people, but by design - and that our development is intrinsically caught up in connecting with and investing in our relationships.

But we shouldn't throw the old man out.  We don't just invest in people, we also invest in things - in stuff.  We will work for stuff - certainly for money - but to be able to acquire things.  And when we meet a kid, he or she will frequently show us some of his or her stuff as a means of introducing him or herself.  Maybe, through some kind of convoluted pathway, they have invested in the stuff because their dependence on others has been disappointing, but the stuff is always available, but maybe it is also because the stuff has been given to them by the others and they feel some kind of connection to the others through being connected to the stuff - and maybe just because the stuff is neat and they like to play with it and therefore it is a representation of their passions and what they have invested their passions in - and maybe for all of these reasons and more - kids will hand people their stuff as a way of introducing themselves.

The world of stuff, then, is a complex, interesting, psychologically charged world.  Marie-Laure lives deeply in this world - she is drawn primarily to the mollusks and loves to feel their shapes - but more than just the dead mollusks which she organizes by shape and size, she ends up being drawn to the living mollusks - the snails which, as an adult, become her life work.  She manages to invest in both the shells, but also the inhabitants of them.  She uses the stuff as a means towards connecting more and more closely with the world around her.  A world that is viscerally but not visually available.

Werner lives in a different world.  One that is peopled by disembodied voices.  He leaves his sister behind to go off to camp because of his radiological gift.  There the propaganda becomes no longer disembodied; it is shouted by his fellow campers and brutally enacted.  He sees the impact of the propaganda on his friend - a bird lover and quiet soul who doesn't belong in a camp to train future soldiers and pays dearly for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Werner, who understands and, I think, loves both his friend and his sister ultimately fails them both through the very human sin of being concerned about his own hide.  And the vehicle to safety - the stuff that will protect him - is the electronic world of radio - a world that can carry lovely voices opening up the world, but also propaganda that warps many of the minds of those who hear it.

So Marie-Laure, it seems to me, is living in the world of my parents.  They were children of the depression, but also children of an era in which stuff got infused with meaning.  Gifts were given, and the giver was remembered each time the gift was used - whenever an event occurred - like it started to get dark - and the "lamp that Uncle Wes and Aunt Nancy gave us for our wedding" was used, or simply in the act of putting on the sweater that Mom had given me that Christmas and I could feel the warmth not just of the wool, but of her choosing this particular object for me so that it reflected who I was - so that it fit and was of value and use to me.

Werner, on the other hand, seems to reflect the world of my children and my students.  They snap-chat the latest experience to each other, knowing that it will be swallowed up and disappear in a heartbeat, and the triumph of knowing what is going on now seems to trump the fact that the picture will be gone never to be seen again.  Books, which hold an almost sacrilegiously sacred place in my psyche, seem to have almost no pull for my students - the idea of building a professional library is anathema to them.  And why, it seems to me they seem to wonder, am I assigning books for them to read - especially books by people who wrote 50 or 100 years ago, when they can access summaries of the work at the flick of a finger from anywhere at anytime?

It is as if my students don't need to know, when they are sitting with a patient, something deep and timeless about the human condition - something that is unpredictable that they need to know at that moment, but something that they can glean from these books, that they may put into their own internal system that is searched, not by subject or author but by feeling and intuition - by an associative network that is richer and deeper than anything Google will ever create.  But I think that I have gotten derailed by a rant - for I, too, am drawn in by TV - to watch the ephemeral - and I have lost much of my earlier attachment to stuff - especially as there is more stuff seemingly than there ever was - and more distractions in terms of demands on time - much of it from electronic sources - and these sources, when they are embodied - whether as the cell phones themselves or laptops or even TVs seem outmoded only moments after they impress with the new and brilliant ways that they present information.  It seems to be the information - the knowledge - and the connection with the people who are snap-chatting, with the wisdom of the people on Instagram and Vine and Twitter and Pinterest who are concisely and wittily summing up what is important, what is of interest, this kind of knowledge, is what is important.

So this book, read on this level, becomes a morality play about the ways in which things - like the Sea of Flames - protect us but endanger those around us.  Marie-Laure, who ironically doesn't even know what she possesses, survives the war, but loses the people that she loves, indeed she loses the entire city that surrounds her while her home, and she within it, miraculously survives and is protected by someone whom she grows to love.  We could expand the metaphor and suggest that the Sea of Flames engulfed all of France in the war - drawing the Germans to her wealth.  France survives, but does so by enduring endless misfortunes.

Werner, on the other hand, is drawn not by things, but by things as a means of connecting with others and, through the machinations of the Third Reich, of using that connection as a means of killing others - sometimes, perversely and unintentionally.  The dead in no way deserve the death that he has inflicted.  He is haunted by his misdeeds, and does what he can to undo them - to do right by those he encounters now and to provide what he can to those whom he has left behind.

The after story of this novel nicely allows both Werner and Marie-Laure's stories to move forward in time, through a period not torn by war, and to come to somewhat peaceful conclusions.  The fate of the stuff - the fate of the Sea of Flames - is left up in the air.  Marie Laure has tried to leave it behind, but it haunts her 'til the end, and we don't learn its ultimate fate.  Werner's connections with those he loves are traced - they were not erased by his pursuits nor by the propaganda that his machines transmitted.  Quite the contrary, he seems to have remained connected, in his heart, to the people that he has left behind - and to the person, Marie-Laure, he has just met.

The author's final vignette explicitly includes the modern world of electronic connections.  Marie-Laure's grandson is playing a video-game - something she cannot see, but can sense his investment in - and she can sense his return to being engaged with her once he has been killed in the game.  He is also connected to stuff - anticipating his twelfth birthday, he is looking forward to being able to drive the moped.  And he is connected, deeply connected, to Marie-Laure.  Perhaps the author is trying to overcome his (and/or my) reservations about our entering this brave new world.  A world that is populated by electronic strands that knit us together - with each other, but perhaps also with those who have died - or perhaps we have all died a bit as we have connected through the ether to people who aren't really people but just opponents against whom we test our ability to quickly press a button or our knowledge of trivia or whatever we are doing at the moment with whoever is out there.  Perhaps we use these media to draw ourselves into the world - as Freud postulated we invest in things in order to emerge from our primary narcissistic state - but we certainly also use them to return to a narcissistic world; a world where we are inert - infantile - and entertained by the images flickering in front of us.  Even if we have moved from a world that was only filled with stuff to one that is also peopled by various ghosts, we still face the same tension - the same dilemma of how to invest ourselves in moving forward when there are so many siren calls that promise forward movement while actually delivering solipsistic emptiness - as destructive if misused as any world war that was driven, at least in part, by the wish for stuff.      


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Birdman (or the unexpected virtue of ignorance) - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reflects on Narcissism at the Movies

Michael Keaton, the washed up actor who played Batman years ago, plays Riggan Thompson, the washed up actor who starred in three Birdman movies when younger and who is now making a comeback attempt on Broadway with a play that he wrote (adapted from a Raymond Carver short story), is directing and starring in.  The movie doesn't just imitate art in having an actor play himself - in a role that may earn the washed up actor an Oscar nomination - but it competes with Broadway as "legitimate" theater - taking us behind the scenes as Birdman goes through the paces of putting itself together as a play - giving us the illusion that it is shot in one long scene - that it has the form of a play instead of a movie - it appears seamless, without cut scenes and multiple takes - while noting that the play, unlike the movie, is an unfinished mess that morphs and changes as it limps towards an opening that could be glorious or gloriously ignominious; upsetting the New York prejudice that film stars aren't actors or confirming it beyond a shadow of a doubt.

One of the many nice things that is captured, then, is the manic quality of living on the edge between despair and elation; powered by the twin engines of the wish to show off and the fear of being exposed, that seems to be at the heart of the narcissistic striving that we all, to some extent, engage in.  The artist - and in so far as this movie is art, the actors, the director, and the crew are all engaged in an artistic process - living, at least according to this film, on that edge, and as they portray living on that edge (we would have to see the documentary to know if they are), we fear the edge can't be held and that the movie and the play within it will careen off into something self indulgent and distracting or something simply bad (and there are a few moments where it does this) - that it will collapse and not be art, but schlock.  But it maintains that if it doesn't live on the edge between greatness and self indulgence - which it does - then it can't be art.

In psychoanalysis, when you present the work that you are doing with a patient to an audience of analysts, there is nothing more denigrating than for another analyst to say than the work that you are doing is not analysis, just as there could be nothing more devastating than for the critic to predict that she will say (as she promises to in one of the penultimate scenes) that the play is not art.  Because she threatens to pan the play out of pride - for New York - for Broadway - for the art of serious acting; something that the star-making power of Hollywood corrupts absolutely - at least in her mind; it is not a true criticism of the actor or his art.  So he is, in some weird sense, protected from her criticism, but he does not experience this in the movie.  What he expresses is anger at her - and fear that her review will ruin him - he says financially, but we know that it is more that he will feel himself to be false and small - and, like the character he plays in the play within the movie, that he will not exist anymore without the play's success, which he believes depends on her to determine.

The irony of the critic's criticism is that no one knows the corrosiveness of becoming the star more than he; he battles with his Birdman persona - the part of himself that is not the role but the Birdman himself - the one who has superpowers - on a daily basis.  Indeed, in the wake of the critic's devastating news, he goes on a bender that is followed by a full fledged immersion in the experience of being Birdman - he and we are convinced that he is the superhero.  This star turn distracts him from the task at hand - which is not to be Birdman, but to portray someone who, it turns out, is quite vulnerable; not protected by the magic shield of being the star or the superhero.  To translate that back into the world of the psychoanalyst - it can be difficult for the analyst who can create analytic magic and perform a true analysis to know that he is not the magician - to know that the magic is occurring in the mind of the analysand - just as the magic of the movie/theater is actually occurring in the mind of the viewer who is watching the film/play, not in the hands of the actor who is calling that experience up.

So, the perfect foil for Riggan is Mike - played with incredible manic zeal by Ed Norton.  Mike is Broadway.  He lives for the stage.  Riggan's superpowers - he can apparently levitate and perform telekinesis - only occur when no one is looking.  When people come into the room, it no longer looks like he is directing things to fly into the walls, but that he is throwing them.  Mike is the exact opposite - has no power off stage, out of sight of others.  He needs to be in front of an audience to express his superpowers - which are considerable - his performance is stunning.  Concretely, though, he hasn't been able to get it up with his girlfriend, who also plays his lover in the play within the movie, for months - but does so for the first time when they are on stage and he proposes having sex with her - and attempts it in front of a full house - emerging from beneath the covers with a very apparent erection, as Riggan bursts in finding him in bed, in the play, with Riggan's ex - which leads directly to Riggan's suicide and the end of the play.

We witness the suicide scene three times - once after the erection, again the next night after Riggan gets locked out of the theater with only his underwear on, has to run through Times Square to enter the theater from the lobby and do the scene as he walks down the aisle - and on opening night, when he knows that the Times critic is going to crucify him.  Each iteration becomes more real as we see the convergence of the player and the role.

We learn more about Riggan in part by seeing the interactions between he and Sam, his daughter, played by Emma Stone.  Sam's mother divorced Riggan over one of his many infidelities - yet she remains connected to him and cares about him.  She also cares that Sam connects with her father in ways that Sam never has.  So Sam is working as Riggan's assistant on the play.  And she has a scene with Riggan where she points out the double edged nature of fame.  She begins with a task that she learned in rehab - she shows him a roll of toilet paper with pen marks for each thousand years and the last sheet contains all of human history.  So what Riggan does, she maintains, will be of little consequence.  On the other hand, she points out, he is so antediluvian that he does not have a twitter account nor even a Facebook account; he is too outmoded to be a star.  So, even though on the grand scale Riggan can't do anything that will matter, he is also incapable on the scale that she, and he, know and measure.  (Of course Riggan's underwear clad romp through Times Square will be you-tubed and trend and be reported in the news, showing that there is some play left in the old boy).  Later in the film, almost to underscore that he is not the guy - that Mike is the guy - she takes up with Mike after Mike's girlfriend dumps him, in part over the sex on stage incident (fear not for the girlfriend, she takes up with Riggan's girlfriend, the fourth actor in the play within the movie - everybody sleeps with everybody in this film...) and now we have another iteration of Mike being in bed with someone that Riggan would have love him.   The tragic element is that Riggan can't quite see that the love he so desperately desires will come more easily if he actually sees and appreciates the person his daughter is becoming, as Mike does, rather than to focus on making himself the person she will desire.

The play is a tragedy, but would Hollywood tolerate that in a movie about itself and its ambitions?  Can the analyst accept his own limitations?  In one of the taped analyses that I review as part of my research, the analyst is older.  He is confronting his own mortality.  And this leads him to focus on his superpowers instead of the experience of the patient.  Weirdly, despite knowing that the analyst was not doing analysis, we rated his work quite highly.  Why?  I think there are many reasons - perhaps including our own wishes to avoid identifying with the aging analyst - but I think the dominant reason is that he was practiced enough to engage, technically, in the analysis.  He was following the rules.  But the music wasn't happening.  I fear that this film disappoints because it does not confront the malignant nature of this kind of narcissism - this self love that occludes making real connections.  Or maybe it succeeds in showing us how we live in a culture - whether that is the culture of Hollywood or the microculture - in my case the psychoanalytic subculture - that promises us superpowers if we dedicate ourselves to the terrible master that each of our particular cultures can become.

Hollywood has long told us - since at least Citizen Kane - that the star is immortal - and that the tragic wound - the remembered happy world that our ambition and the ambitions that others have for us has dragged us from - makes us appealing characters.  Orson Welles, though, had the courage to face the idea that all of his talent - all of his charisma - all of his magic does not allow him to change the fundamental parameters - and that these very gifts are also despotic and demanding tyrants who will, sometimes even despite our best efforts, destroy our efforts to be human as we are lured into being superhuman.  What this film articulates, perhaps better even than Kane, is the way in which the adoration of the other - whether an individual, a critic, or an audience - is so necessary to maintain self cohesion.  That the essence of narcissism, even in its most difficult forms, is not the armor that it provides, but the vulnerability to annihilation, an annihilation that none of us - actor, analyst or Indian chief, can avoid.  This movie's answer to the dilemma is to keep working on the armor.  I think it is more difficult, more humbling, but also more likely to bear fruit to deal with the universe as it is - and to live with rather than deny the resulting vulnerability to annihilation that we do, in fact, inevitably face.

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Frank Lloyd Wright- The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Learns about the Architecture of Relationships

My mother, in her eighties, is more productive than I am in late mid-life.  I am reminded of a friend of mine’s comment on meeting my grandmother, my mother's mother, who was in her eighties at the time – he said that he hoped that he could be that clear minded when he was her age.  Then he corrected himself.  He said that he wished he were that clear minded now! 

In the last three years my mother has co-written, produced and directed four plays, each of which has been presented in a one night stand at her local theater.  The previous three were offered late on weeknights and travelling to her city two hours away and then back after a performance during the school year was daunting and we never managed it.  This year, however, the production was a Sunday matinee, so the reluctant wife and I were gladly able to make the trip.

Mom has been working with a theater group – they have sort of become an informal company – during this time.  They have worked on themes of plays that have struck their fancy.  This time, the local arts center that houses their productions was going to be hosting a display about a housing development that a Frank Lloyd Wright enthusiast built in the town in the 1960s.  This is an architecturally distinct neighborhood in a community that is, as a whole, divided between Olde New England style – with early 1800s buildings and buildings built to look them (including gas stations with cupolas required by the town zoning) and modern suburban split levels.  So the Frank Lloyd Wright inspired subdivision is a group of 20 or so homes that form a visually and even spiritually unique sub-community.  The houses don’t have clear boundaries between the plots, one is circular and one is a tower and each of the rest are in their own way unique yet vaguely reminiscent of the others because they have casement windows, parts that are underground, no gutters and downspouts, and that Frank Lloyd Wright look.  The theater group decided to celebrate this community by creating a work that described who it was that Frank Lloyd Wright was.  As they pulled together material to create the play, they read biographical material about Wright, but much of it was focused on the women in his life, and the play emerged as a description of the home makers who made the houses that Frank Lloyd Wright lived within.

The play, then, included six characters – the four central women in Wright’s adult life – his first wife, Catherine “Kitty”( Tobin) Wright, second, Maude “Mimi” (Noel) Wright and third wife,  Olga Ivanovna “Olgivanna” (Lazovich Milanoff) Lloyd Wright and also the woman he lived with, Mamah Bothwick Cheney, who was killed by their live-in cook, along with her children, while he was separated from wife #1 – a newspaper reporter, and the voice of Wright himself, which came from backstage.  It was staged as a series of monologues – each of the four women spoke twice – they went through in order – and the newspaper man interacted with them while Wright offered editorial comments – or pontificated.  The style at first felt like it might be stilted or preachy or too didactic, but as the play settled in, it clearly became a play and the sense of anticipation – of wondering what happened, what would happen, and why it all happened, emerged, but more importantly, the sense of a dramatic unfolding took place.  We were in the presence of people whose lives mattered - people about whose lives we cared.

It is interesting to note that Wright was born about 13 years after Freud and lived 20 years or so longer than Freud.  While he lived in the US, they were born into similar worlds, and worlds where the roles of women were quite similar.  Wright’s first wife was every bit the traditional wife, and played the traditional role that Freud’s wife did.  Though she was educated – she was a social worker as well as a socialite – she came across as terribly traditional in her gender identification.  She was portrayed in the play as saying something like “Frank built the house that I lived in, he made the furniture, and I found it no surprise that he designed the clothing that I wore.”  There was a sense that Wright, who was frequently absent, treated his first wife as an object to be housed, furnished and clothed.

Of course Freud’s interests and Wright’s could not have been more different.  Freud was interested in people – in their minds, in their products – their works of art and where they came from, and in their psychological health.  Frank was interested in buildings – in architecture, which he took to be the highest form of art.  And he was not particularly interested in the creature comforts of the people who lived in his works of art – his homes are notoriously cold and drafty – those single pane casement windows conduct the heat and the cold directly into the house – and Taliesin, the home where his second lover died and his third and fourth wife lived, was primitive, with only fireplaces to keep out the cold of the Wisconsin winters. 

Wright connected with the second, doomed woman, when she and her husband were clients of his.  She and Wright, who had been having numerous brief affairs, became proponents of free love, and she relied on the writings of a woman who was a spokesperson for the free love movement to support her decision to leave her husband and Wright's to leave his wife and children so that they could live together – they could not marry as neither spouse would grant them a divorce.  At least as portrayed in the play, this woman was a more suitable match for Wright, but was still quite traditional, while he was breaking architectural boundaries and creating a novel visual style.  She felt, at least on stage, as a slight move forward from wife #1, though Wright viewed her as more of an intellectual equal.  And Wright seemed less than invested in her (and her children) as individual people with particular minds than he might have been – even more than he was interpersonally somewhat distant from his own children.

This was an interesting period in which to have come of age.  In an earlier time, or at the same time in Europe perhaps, he and woman #2 might have simply had an affair.  But they made a bold and public break at a time when divorce was still relatively novel and had a morally repugnant tone, and they began to build lives together quite publicly – talking with the media about the decisions that they made – publicizing their otherwise “private” lives.  This took a macabre turn when the cook – who was I think from the Caribbean – set the house on fire and took an axe to the family members as they fled, killing Mamah and two of her children (Wright was away at the time).  What the cook’s motives were have never been clarified, though some have wondered whether he was driven by moral qualms over the living arrangements – whether true or not there was certainly plenty of room for a late Victorian public to feel that some justice had been served by the deaths, justifying their own sense of satisfaction at an event that otherwise would have appalled them.

Frank then got caught in a snare.  Wife #2 sought him out by writing long, long letters to him in the wake of the deaths at Taliesin, and he became enamored of her – or perhaps more accurately, he became enamored of how enamored she appeared to be of him.  He was dazed by her enough that he overlooked such things as her dependence on morphine – at least long enough to marry her.  Once married, he reasonably quickly became aware of what a burden she was.  The character, by the way, was one that was clearly quite fun for the actress portraying her to play.  She enjoyed that this histrionic woman turned every little interaction into drama, and it was an actress’s dream to have a part in which nothing could be too over the top – what a chance to act without abandon! 

The intriguing thing about the arc of this trio of women, though, is that it seemed to prepare Frank for the final relationship of his life.  The final woman to waltz into his life, wife #4, Olgivanna, was a dancer from Montenegro who had the mettle to match the distant and brilliant Wright.  I am not certain of this, but the plot of the play, which borrows heavily from novels tracing Wright’s wives, including one titled “The Women”, suggest that Wright needed to learn that a woman could be a match – that love could occur between two people with similar passions and with similar strengths.

Again, like Freud, Wright was the leader of a group of people who learned their craft at his feet.  He was an acknowledged genius within his lifetime and exercised his genius with impunity, treating lesser mortals with a certain amount of disdain.  Freud was able to stick with his wife – apparently quite faithfully (though he had a very close relationship with her sister who seemed more his intellectual equal and some have wondered whether they may have had an affair).  Freud was deeply invested in his children (maybe too deeply – analyzing his daughter Anna and helping her become the heir apparent in the family business).  He was deeply invested in his work with women patients and became a clueless and sometimes problematic icon in the development of a women’s movement toward equal footing with men.

At a time when, even in the privileged classes, women did not have anywhere near the same opportunities as men for such things as getting a good education, to expect equal relations between individuals so differently prepared to become adults required a tremendous amount of romantic (meaning fictional) support to work. Olgivanna was an accomplished artist in her own right and she was able to manage the farm that was their home, to keep Frank’s students in line, and to command the respect of those around her, including, I believe, Frank himself.

 My grandmother, the one whom my friend noted was such a powerhouse, was raised by her father, who trundled her across lumber towns in the Pacific northwest and she watched as her father engineered and built one lumbermill after another.  As an adult, engineer friends marveled at her ability to understand mechanical principles, yet she claimed never to have been taught about fractions and decimals and therefore claimed to be mystified by them.  She ended up being a college graduate, but she was an art history major – something for which she had great passion – but her apparent native mathematical and engineering talents could never have been tapped in the educational system available to her.

She, in turn, became the mother to my mother, whose training was pushed towards the humanities in part because of prejudice and what kinds of opportunities existed for women, though largely out of interest and aptitude.  She became a theater director, which meant someone who taught theater, and then her career was secondary to that of my father, who was seen as the de facto bread winner.  Perhaps because of that, her current productivity is particularly impressive.  Perhaps the arc of her life has mirrored in some ways the arc of the lives of the privileged through the first half of the last century and has led to a certain ownership of her gifts and talents that is continuing to reap rewards later in her life.

What would Freud – or Wright – have made of this?  I think that Wright came up against women of greater and greater strength as his life developed – OK the strength of wife number two was largely in her ability to be wacky, but that is a certain kind of strength, one that women have relied on when all else has been denied them for a very long time, and it may have taught Wright that you really want to have the strength of women working with you, not against you.  So find someone who can measure up, and he seems to have, at least at the end (Perhaps Mamah did as well – their relationship never had a chance to mature).  Freud, too, befriended and championed powerful women, including his daughter, throughout his life.  But it is also the case that women have taken what Freud had to offer, including his misreadings of women, and made them right – refusing to be cowed by a genius who had his blind spots.

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The Conscious Id – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst reads Mark Solms

Many psychoanalysts talk lovingly of the first time they read Freud.  They say things like, "He really helped me understand myself," or "For the first time I felt like someone understood psychology;” for me, not so much.  I found Freud to be a difficult and dense read.  His models of the mind were too simplistic in text books and too complicated for me to understand when I read Freud himself.  And, while some of his cases were lovely, many times his explanations were tough to follow.  But the clinicians who loved Freud really seemed to understand people and to be helpful to them.  And, over time, I learned a language - not necessarily Freud’s language, but a dialect related to the language he coined - one that helped me better understand the people that I was working with and how to be helpful to them.  And I kept banging away at Freud, giving the old man another chance, trying to understand what he was saying.  I read a lot of Freud in my psychoanalytic training proper, but I can't say that I got it all of the time - or even much of the time.  I am teaching Freud now, and I'm beginning to get him, but it ain't easy.  So, imagine my surprise when I read a paper and said - "Oh, of course.  So that's how the mind works."  It's not a paper by Freud, but one by a South African neuropsychologist named Mark Solms.  I recommend it - here is the link, but I think it would have been largely impenetrable to me, so I offer the following as an interpretation - and therefore recognize that it will overly condense, simplify or distort the paper - so please, feel free to check the facts.  I am also aware, now having written it, that this may be as dense and impenetrable as the paper, and for that I apologize ahead of time.

Now there are two funny things about Solms’ paper.  First of all, Solms claims to be turning Freud on his head, but I experience him as straightening Freud out.  The second is that this paper is a really dry, really technical paper (OK, it has some cool color pictures of the brain, but you know what I mean), and yet it seems, at least to me, to be incredibly applicable to day to day life - to be burning into my thoughts these days as I try to puzzle this or that problem of human living.  I feel like one of those psychoanalysts I have envied who found Freud speaking to them; ironic that I am getting that experience out of this very dry paper.  It is also ironic that I find this lively because Solms is, I think, completing some of Freud's work, or at least intending to update it based on our current neuropsychological understanding.  Freud was originally a neurologist, he abandoned neurology for a particular psychology that he invented because his neurological descriptions were not up to the task of explaining the phenomena he ran into, so he translated his neurological understanding into a more psychologically based one - though he never gave up hope that his model of the mind could become a neurologically supported one.

So how does Solms claim to turn Freud on his head?   Well, first of all, he claims that the id - Freud's cauldron of drives, uncivilized wishes, and forgotten/repressed material - is not unconscious at all, but intimately related to consciousness and, indeed, central to our primary conscious experience. He also states that we are pretty much constantly at least capable of being aware of the stuff that Freud claimed was deeply unconscious (though I think he means by this the immediate derivatives of drives - feelings – not necessarily the contents (memories) and functions (defenses) of the unconscious) though he does not clarify this, which confuses the paper.  In any case, Solms locates the id deep within the brain - in the brainstem and the structures near it like the ventricular system - in the systems that are responsible for waking and sleep and for our feeling states.  In fact, Solms claims that the function of the mind is not primarily to think - to be cognitive - but instead to feel.  Why did we choose this course of action?  We chose it because it felt right.  We leaned in one direction, and checked out how it felt.  If we felt uncomfortable, we may have asked for more information.  Getting it, we may have leaned further, or leaned in the other direction and, when it felt like we were in a comfortable place (or we felt like there was no time left) we acted.  And the cognitive parts of the brain, the stuff that Solms equates with Freud's ego, provide the needed information.  It informs our feelings (and restrains them – so we don’t act too impulsively), but also justifies them, creating a plausible rational narrative for our affectively based actions and, Solms believes, the ego is thus subservient to feelings on both ends - the feelings search the ego for what they need to have a better feeling for something and, once the decision has been made, using the ego to provide support for the feeling based decisions.  So Solms feels that he has turned Freud on his head.

Now, I’m going to quibble with Solms' idea that he has turned Freud on his head with a technical point about Freud’s model in this paragraph. Solms seems to assume that because something is unconscious, it must be part of Freud’s id.  Solms seems to have forgotten that, for Freud, most of the mind, including most of the ego, is unconscious.  Our conscious selves are really small – not just small but largely inconsequential or irrelevant in most of our psychological functioning.  The real bang, for Freud, is in the unconscious.  And I think that Solms is elevating a very small part of that unconscious, but one that Freud put deep inside the most unconscious part of his model the id, the drives – the part of ourselves that wants this now and wants it anyway, into something that we have conscious access to rather than being unconscious.  I think he means by this something like what happens when I walk by an unlocked car and see something in it that I could use – a CD that I want but don’t have – I have an impulse to open the door, grab the CD and keep on going.  This is part of what seems so right about this article.  Solms is maintaining that a lot of what Freud sees as having been defended against is just kind of continually running across the front page.  So I think that Solms may be confusing consciousness with the ego. I think he is extending the range of consciousness more than upending the ego and id.

The major thesis of the first part of the paper is that there are two self-representations in the brain.  One – which is located in the cerebral cortex – is the one that locates us in space.  It is the part of ourselves that feels where we are and that directs us to move in space.  This is connected with the sensations that come to us from the outside world.  This is the self that Solms equates with Freud’s ego.  I think there is some sense to that.  He then contrasts this with another sense of self, the sense of self that arises from within – the feeling states – the urges that drive us and that give texture and continuity to our lives.  This is the stuff he locates in the brainstem and other “lower” brain centers.  These brain centers he claims are actually in charge of our consciousness because they do such things as determine our wake sleep cycles, and they operate to do that even when there is no cerebral cortex.  OK, they determine wake and sleep, but I think he makes a bit of leap when he states that they therefore are the site of the primary consciousness and the “higher” ego consciousness is subservient to it.  This could be the case, but does not follow necessarily.

So, Solms maintains, the cerebral cortex, or ego, is called in to access procedures for handling particular situations – it is what he believes is the aptly named working memory that is our conscious functioning – and it figures out what, procedurally, to do at a given moment.  We access relevant chunks of information and manipulate them in order to come up with a procedure and the intention of this is to come up with a procedure that is a routine so that we can just do that routine and NOT have to consciously work at a problem.  OK, I am dealing with x situation – I need the x solution box and need to plug in the subroutine that will solve it.  I don’t need to figure out how to do this.  The point of our minds is to avoid being conscious as much as possible so that we can function efficiently and, I suppose, have RAM (or working memory) open to be used for novel situations which require actual problem solving.  This is largely a restatement of what Freud has said, but also what cognitive psychologists have been saying about why so much of our processing is unconscious.  Solms is taking the position that his “new” part of this is that it involves the ego as an unconscious piece, but I think Freud actually beat him to the punch on that in The Ego and the Id.

What I think is remarkable about the distinction that Solms makes between “higher” ego functions and “lower” ego functions is something that is actually implicit in one of Freud’s models of the mind that Solms recreates in one of his color illustrations.  This model is from Chapter 7 of the interpretation of dreams and is a model that Freud used to describe how dreams function.  I think of it (perhaps wrongly, I have not yet heard others call it this) as a kaleidoscopic model of the mind.  Freud creates this model to explain two features of dreams – that dreams are visual and that they are never in the location that we would expect them to be.  And what Freud comes up with, I think, is brilliant.  It is a model where we look at an image that is on top of another image that is on top of another image so that we can simultaneously see multiple things that are coming to bear on a particular issue and so that we can also obscure some things that are occurring because they can be covered by other images.  What is it that we are observing?  We are observing the things that have occurred during the past day – and the things that have been associatively called up by them – how those things have been fit into our memories – our reworking of what has occurred at previous moments in our personal history and how those are related to what has happened more recently.

While Solms does not apply his model to dreams, this is one of many places that I think it could well prove quite fruitful.  For instance; what if the function of dreams is partly a consolidation of memories – not just as they occurred but as an active integration of them into the existing components of our perspective on the world?  Here we have been applying, from our data banks, the material that we use to make decisions and move forward in the world.  Then, at night, we replay our experience – Freud calls it regression because we reverse the direction of the movement of materials, and move them backwards – from the memory out to the sensory system where we watch them being played back, but on unfamiliar ground – the ground of the old memories that are called up by what we have observed and engaged in during the day.  This might help us both build more efficient means of staying unconscious – help us fine tune our procedures; but it also might help us realize when those procedures have failed us – and these might be the dreams we remember or the moments in dreams when we awake and need to think of a new way of handling things – our processes are not capable of handling the situations – or we realize the negative consequences of handling situations in the ways that we have – they feel bad to us – and our brainstem says to us, in effect, there is something dangerous going on that we need to react to.

Solms does talk about psychopathology.  In this model, psychopathology – neurosis – happens when the automatic processes of the ego are put in place prematurely – before there has been a chance to adequately test them.  This largely happens because we are anxious about a situation and act before we have enough information.  Once the solution gets put in place however, because it is unconscious and because it works at some level, it becomes automatic.  Dreams and psychoanalysis become ways to rework these compromise or failed but nominally functional solutions.

So you may have lost track of why I think this paper is so exciting.  Let me try to review with some bullet points:

• Solms clarifies that the drives, if not directly conscious, are much closer to consciousness than Freud maintains.  The ego, instead of being a driver, is actually a largely unconscious consultant to the lower parts of the brain that are both driving us, and central to our conscious experience.
•  This means that our minds are primarily feeling organs rather than thinking ones.  Thought is an afterthought, as it were.  This “feels” to me more consistent with my experience than that thought is primary.
• This models preserves and enhances something specifically psychoanalytic – that there are multiple layers to our experience and that these can be understood singularly, but also in terms of how they interact.  It essentially explains that there are multiple systems functioning simultaneously that can be accessed and understood as separate entities and as integrated systems.
•  It is complementary to theories of how dreams work – that this may be the basis for new thinking about the adaptive function of dreaming – and why it is neuropsychologically so important to our functioning.  That dreaming might be similar to the cleaning out a fountain pen that occurs by drawing ink in from a reservoir after having had it run out onto the page.

But I think the primary reason that I am so excited about this paper is that, as much as psychoanalysis has evolved in the past 100 years – we have self-psychological models, object relations models, intersubjective models, new and better models of psychological development – we still rely on Freud’s models of the mind – his metapsychological models.  This paper revisits them from a neuropsychological perspective, finds them more serviceable than I think we would have expected, and updates them in ways that make them even more relevant, including in ways that may help us better understand how the relational models work within the individual.  As Kurt Lewin noted, there is nothing more practical than a good theory.  Freud’s theory has been very practical.  Tweaking it in ways that make it more closely mirror reality can only make it even more useful.

I also posted on a talk about psychoanalytic education that Mark Solms gave in 2019 and another at the 2020 convention.  Please also see a complementary post about Antonio Damasio's book, The Strange Order of Things.  I have also written about Solms (2022) book The Hidden Spring.

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 Crucible – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Goes Back to High School

            The Reluctant Son is taking an interdisciplinary course in High School – his US History Course is coordinated with his American Literature Course so that while he is studying the pre-Revolutionary period in History he is reading the Scarlet Letter and the Crucible (which will also be relevant for the post Second War period) in Lit. There are two sections of Lit and two of History, and they dosey doe during second and third bell. In order to facilitate the students meeting with both teachers at once, and to allow all of the students to interact, the teachers are hosting a weekend film series, inviting parents to participate in order to facilitate family discussion of the material and yesterday was the first of those.  As the title of this blog suggests, they showed the Crucible with Daniel Day Lewis starring as John Proctor, Winona Ryder as Abigail Williams and Joan Allen as Elizabeth Proctor, a 1996 production that I don’t remember coming out (it was not a box office hit), but one that is an excellent film. 

               Either the other parents didn’t get the memo, or their kids strongly encouraged them to stay home, but the reluctant ex-wife and I were the only parents there.  The film was shown in the High School auditorium, the kids watched from the balcony, and we watched from the main floor with one of the teachers, thus not embarrassing the Reluctant Son too much (he left the auditorium with the other kids after the post movie discussion and we discreetly hooked back up with him at our cars – he only acknowledged us with the slightest of nods in the auditorium).   The sound in the auditorium was not good, and we sat far enough away from the group during the discussion afterwards to avoid embarrassing our boy, but the students all had their backs to us, so we did not get all of the film or the discussion, and so I apologize ahead of time if I missed an important detail from either.

               This play, written as a commentary on McCarthyism and Puritanism by one of our great playwrights, was appropriately discussed primarily from the vantage point of the cultural and historical significance that it has.  From this vantage point it is, as told, the story of hysterical contagion – of a group of girls caught being naughty – dancing in the woods and dabbling in a slave’s spiritualist practices something that the Puritans perceived to be witchcraft and a sin – and the ways in which they transform their naughtiness, which puts them at risk of censure – into pointing their fingers at the rest of the community – using the community’s beliefs and rigidity against them in ways that create a tragedy – the tragic fulcrum being the rigid laws and mores of the community.  The high school group discussed the girls’ strategy or tactic of first implicating the most marginalized in the community – the beggar and the slave – before moving onto respected members of the community and eventually crossing a line when they accuse a pillar of the community – the minister’s wife – that finally strains and breaks their credibility.  This was compared to McCarthy’s first fingering writers and actors and the intelligentsia –people who are marginalized in the governmental system and the social system more generally - and it was only when McCarthy tried to take on military figures that  his indecent tactics were seen for what they really were.

               The group also discussed the potential corruption of a system that married the church and the state so that a legal trial, which physically took place in the church with the authority of the religious government behind it, was able to produce “evidence” that was based in belief systems rather than in consensually observable phenomena, producing a tyranny in which a well-meaning judge (Paul Scofield) was corrupted without knowing it, and one in which that judge fell more and more into the trap of having to stick with his method after it should have been apparent that things were terribly awry because, in part, to change in midcourse would be to acknowledge the fatal errors that he had made to that point.  This, in turn, became a discussion of the foundational importance of separating church and state in the US constitution. 

               The movie was also discussed as a movie.  The literature teacher also teaches film and encouraged the students to consider the director’s choices in framing particular shots and choosing to bring some characters to the fore at certain moments and how this helped move the story along and underlined important themes.  They discussed how shooting from below made some characters and moments larger – how shooting the dining room table to emphasize the distance between John and Elizabeth when they were eating represented the psychological distance between them at that point in the movie.  There was also a very interesting discussion of the use of music and how it influenced the viewer’s experience of the film.

The conversation went in other directions, all directly relevant to the course and the task at hand and, in so far as I could hear it, an informed, intelligent and lively discussion of an important work of art and two periods in history that interweave in interesting ways.  And a discussion that was diametrically opposed to how I would have approached interpreting the movie.  From the perspective of this psychoanalyst, the story is about the tension between three people – John and Elizabeth Proctor and the orphaned girl – Abigail Williams – whom they hire to help them around the house and on the farm.  John, a rigid and upright man, has an illicit affair with Abigail – he characterizes it as engaging in the sin of lechery – during a time when his wife, due to illness, is sexually unavailable to him.  He characterizes this affair as a bestial failing, though it is clear that Abigail became attached to the qualities he displays as a doting father and husband and fell in love with him – in addition to being powerfully sexually attracted to him.  She also became aware of her power as a sexual creature - as the person who caused him to fall from the perch that he had established for himself as an upright and perfectly righteous man - to sin - to become human.  Perhaps she became cynical – especially when he spurned her after his wife discovered them and fired her and he disavowed their love – and she may have decided that the entire society was corrupt and deserved whatever came to it.  Though it also seemed that she felt she could continue to use her power to make him love her and to bring them back together - believing, in effect, that they were star crossed lovers.  In any case, she began to act from a position of power, if corrupt power, calling herself high and mighty and throwing the town into turmoil, and murdering 18 or so members of it along the way.

This, then, from the perspective of the individuals involved is a tragedy; one that is based on John’s pride, his adultery and the rigidity of the moral code of the Puritans.  But it becomes clear in an achingly beautiful scene between him and his wife, when she owns her own part in it, that there is room for multiple tragic heroes here.  Elizabeth Proctor is as upright a woman as there is.  She would, for instance, never tell a lie, and John relies on this to stem the craziness.  Her loyalty to him overrides her aversion to lying, but this is but a road bump on the way to her true revelation.  While Elizabeth did withhold her love for seven months, about which she feels guilty, her true crime – or sin in this context – is a somewhat ironic one.  She, believing herself to be too plain to be loved, never engaged with John in ways that would have allowed his love to sustain them across the inevitable dry spells that enter into relationships.  This sin is ironic because it is a lack of pride – not an overabundance of it – that, from Elizabeth’s position, sets the whole tragedy in motion; and pride, as we know, is a sin that the puritans were vigilantly guarding against.

In this poignant scene, after Elizabeth has been asked by the judge to help John confess to cavorting with the devil in order to avoid being hung, John asks her to forgive him.  She clarifies to him that neither she nor anyone else can deliver absolution – the judge that he must satisfy is the one that lives within himself.  But in the very next scene it is clear that this psychoanalytic solution – the one that involves the relationship between John Proctor and himself – is not an adequate one.  In fact, what others think of him is important to him and simply being OK with God and Elizabeth is not enough.  John wants to retain his good name.

So, the literary, the historical and the psychoanalytic each bring something important to the understanding of this play.  In the ultimate moment, when John Proctor and the two women of integrity (as the reluctant ex-wife pointed out) are being executed (no spoiler alert necessary for that; I already told you it was a tragedy), the three say the Lord’s Prayer together to the assembled townspeople, including the request to “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”  In the context of the moment, those who are being hung poignantly forgive those hanging them, but we also see the integration of the perspectives that are socially derived (the literary and historical) and those that are psychologically derived (especially in the sense of the psyche as the soul).  The martyrs, for – in addition to being tragic heroes they are, indeed, martyrs (and this is another layer of the social/psychological dichotomy) – are forgiving those who have wrongly condemned them – and they, as tragic heroes, are asking for the forgiveness of the ultimate objective/subjective judge, God.   

One of the revolutionary and powerful tools that Freud afforded us was using the subjective perspective as the defining perspective from which to understand the ways in which the events in an individual’s life unfold.  As powerful as this perspective is it is not the only perspective that matters.  Certainly Freud’s case of Dora proved this, but so does a high school history and literature class. 

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Silver Linings Playbook and a Poetry Slam – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reflects on Female Sexuality as a Powerful Healing Force

   The Reluctant Wife recommended that we watch Silver Linings Playbook on date night and I somewhat reluctantly agreed.  Her description of an award winning film that depicted the trials and tribulations of a guy who is bipolar, out of the hospital AMA and falling in love with someone who helps him get better frankly sounded like going to work.  And I was concerned about how accurate the portrayal of mental illness would be and how much time I would spend evaluating that and so on and so forth.  Well…  This is a delightful little film.  And one that I think says something very interesting – not so much about mental illness, but about the function that sex can serve in relationships between men and women. 

     The film is set in Philadelphia and Bradley Cooper plays Pat Solatano, Jr., the character who is hospitalized after he discovers his wife Nikki having a tryst in their shower with a history teacher from the high school where she works.   Pat beats her lover so severely that they are both hospitalized, the teacher for injuries and Pat for a mental disorder by the judge.  Pat comes by his violent streak honestly – his Dad (played by Robert De Niro) is no longer allowed to go to Eagles games because he was in too many fights in the stands.  Released from the hospital into the care of his mother (Jacki Weaver) and father, Pat meets his buddy’s sister-in-law Tiffany (played by Jennifer Lawrence the star of the the hunger games movies), who is recently widowed, at a dinner party thrown by his buddy and his buddy’s wife, who is still in contact with Pat’s wife Nikki– who, in turn, has a restraining order against Pat, which he resents and bridles against as he is still madly in love with his wife despite her affair.

     The party is where things get interesting.  Tiffany is a slightly gothy, completely wacky woman who apparently sleeps with anything that walks.  She leaves the dinner early, Pat walks her home, she invites him to have sex, and you’d think Pat, who hasn’t had sex in a long while, would bed her in heartbeat, but his devotion to Nikki prevents it.  Tiffany promises to deliver a letter to Nikki for Pat if Pat will practice dancing and enter a dance contest with her.  OK, now the spoilers begin.  Tiffany, as wacky as she is, is in league with Pat’s Mom.  Pat’s Mom let’s her know when Pat is going out jogging so that she can stalk him, which she does as she tries to get him to commit to practicing for the dance contest and competing.  Pat’s Mom, who sprung Pat from the hospital prematurely, is trying to fix Pat up with Tiffany because she believes Tiffany is better for him than Nikki was or ever could be.  Neither Pat nor we know about his mother’s machinations.  When he finally commits to the dance routine in exchange for Tiffany sending his letters to Nikki (and returning letters from Nikki to him), he becomes quite fond of Tiffany and fends off one of the many men that she has bedded and keeps on strings since her husband’s death.

     Tiffany’s explanation for her apparently indiscriminate interest in sex is tied up with her husband’s death.  He died when they had been having a slow spell in their sexual relationship; he had driven to Victoria’s Secret to get something to spice up their relationship and on the way home, he had a flat tire and, while changing it, was hit by a car.  What she doesn’t say is that to deny sex to a man is to kill him, but it isn’t hard to connect the dots.  She became set on a path of preventing the deaths of men (and women) in her life – and also assuaging her guilt for killing her husband – by having sex with all of them.  Of course, this introduced interesting complications, including getting fired when she slept with everyone in her office, but I think one of the complications is that she attracted men (and women) who really did need her to keep them from falling apart.  And Pat stands out because he is able to use his ex-wife - a woman he is NOT sleeping with – to organize himself – to keep himself from falling apart (though just barely – and Tiffany helps – a lot – and it is, I think, important that her help, too, does not involve having sex with him).

     What truth is there to this?  Will a man fall apart without sex?  Men talk about exploding when they don’t have sex (Blue balls is the myth that men pass around about what will happen if they become aroused and don’t orgasm – as if they didn’t get erections 4 or 5 times every night when they dream; and very rarely do they wake up the next morning with missing or damaged parts).  And sexual intercourse was privileged by none other than Freud himself, who credited masturbation as causing mental illness and intercourse as the route to mental health.  The irony is that while Freud was doing this, at least initially, he was denying the importance of the relationship between people as a curative factor – or certainly giving relationally based cures a snide dismissal (he was also likely having sex infrequently - we don't have good data about his masturbatory habits).  In any case, Kohut is the analyst who talks about individuals becoming shattered because they don’t have an internal sense of integrity, and he ties this to the need to have another person to, quite literally, hold them together – something that, across time, in normal development (and presumably in treatment), we internalize, so that we are able to hold ourselves together because we have an internal version of the people who have held us together.  For Kohut, unlike for Freud, this isn’t explicitly tied to sex; but Tiffany makes that connection.  She senses the vulnerabilities of the men (and women) that she approaches, and serves as an organizing entity through her sexuality – though she seems to be equal parts stabilizing and chaos inducing.

     Lawrence’s portrayal of Tiffany, for which she earned an Oscar, shimmers.  She steals every scene that she is in.  We cannot take our eyes off her (OK, maybe it’s just me as a man, that can’t, but I think there is more to it than that).  Tiffany hovers between offering this tremendous salve – this healing binding force which will cure what ails you – and being desperately hungry for something herself – something that only the other, only this one, can provide.  As in all good romantic comedies, the tension between Tiffany and Pat builds, but her apparent nonchalance – she is the one who has all the goodies – precariously balances against the need to have Pat love her, a need she tries to hide from him, but one that we can see all too clearly – a need for him to transfer his allegiance from Nikki – who surely does not deserve it – to her.  She not only deserves, but needs someone who can love her as firmly and resolutely as Pat loves Nikki – not someone who needs the salve of a temporary fix that comes from a sexual encounter that momentarily helps them believe that they are worthy, but someone who can use her presence to anchor themselves and, because they are capable of doing that, they can serve as the kind of anchor that she needs – someone who can be deeply, intimately and constantly connected to her and help her rebuild the sense of herself that she had – or hoped to achieve – in the relationship with her husband.

     Last night we went to a spoken word event.  This is poetry, sometimes set to music, frequently written by African Americans and, at least in our local rendition, is frequently written to heal the wounds that the poets have, but they are wounds that, at least in the experience of the authors talking, are not just their own, but shared by the community.  I happened to have gone to an African American funeral earlier in the day – one of the brothers of one of my co-workers died – and to a wedding reception for two women who had celebrated the twentieth anniversary of their original, illegal wedding by getting married with the imprimatur of the state.  At each of these events the congregants were together, supporting each other, helping each other to bear – to be – constant to each other.  Trying to help each other rise above the difficulties of being able to be constant because of the ways that trauma – death, exclusion by society, the inconstancy of a fragmented culture’s caretaking – had deeply and powerfully impacted individuals.  The hope – a hope that was exemplified by both Nikki and Pat – in each of the three gatherings – was that, in spite of the odds against it – this group, these individuals could be constant for each other – could provide what is needed to help keep themselves and each other stitched together, whole and filled with integrity.

All four then; the movie, the funeral, the wedding and the poetry slam, were dreams.  Dreams that point towards an integrity not yet achieved.  The movie – as dreams that are of things that are not yet quite possible in the mind of the dreamer – lurches towards its conclusion.  The plot is far-fetched and threatens to fall apart.  Our credulity is strained.  Things don’t fit together seamlessly and threaten to spin out of control.  And the conclusion is not quite the fairy tale ending – which is much more satisfying than a pure fairy tale ending would be (that said, there is an unrealistic amount of cotton candy at the very end– it is, after all, a Hollywood product…).

     William Raspberry, an African American Columnist, wrote in a column twenty years ago that he felt little hope for the African American Community because he did not see that African Americans were able to help themselves.  I think that a culture whose shared roots lie in inhumane trauma – trauma that is institutionalized as well as woven into the transgenerational transmission of trauma through the family and individual relationships - will be incredibly hard pressed to achieve the healing that the spoken word performers were seeking through their work.  It will be long, slow work – the work of generations.  But it is incredibly important work – and as we lurch towards achieving the goals of that work, I think that it is no accident that soul and R&B music – with its references to sexual healing and love – including especially decidedly physical expressions of love – is an expression of a powerful balm that those who have been traumatized can be drawn towards (see an essay on Hozier, an Irish r&B performer, here).  And while the ending of Silver Linings (it is a RomCom) suggests that this is an achievable end; Tiffany’s unbalanced lurching towards that goal – Pat’s belief that enough exercise will win Nikki back - the importance of Pat’s parents being willing to endure the tension of working without a net, all of these clearly characterize just how chancy and risky it is to try to bootstrap our way to happiness. 

     But honestly, what other option do we have?  Won’t we necessarily be inconstant in our efforts to provide each other with the foundation that we need to move forward?  Won’t this be incredibly destabilizing – how can we learn to trust when we keep getting disappointed by those we rely on most closely and intimately?  But won’t we, in the process, learn the value of constancy?  Won’t we become that which we are lurching towards – not the Kardashian’s, who use money and things to prop themselves up, but people whose love for each other creates a base that they can use to spread that love to others – not just through sex – but through caring for our children and for each other – being able to love more broadly than just sexually because we have a foundation – a base to work from – a base in our relationships with our parents and other caregivers where the sexual is peripheral – not central – that allows us to build ourselves into adults who are comfortably sexual – in whatever way that may be, including being asexual – and we can work from this adult, loving base to spread the love that will develop us and those around us further?  Perhaps not in this or the next generation; but we will only achieve our destination if we keep working towards it.   


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

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