Noah - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Sees a Movie that is a Modern Midrash

There is a story about a psychologist who proposed an idea to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The president is accompanied everywhere – or was at this time – by a military attaché who carried the code that was needed to start a nuclear war in a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist. The psychologist proposed that the attaché have the code surgically implanted near his heart and that he carry an axe in the briefcase. If the President decided to wage nuclear warfare, he would have to look the attaché in the face and say, “In order that millions of innocent people die, I first have to kill you to get access to the code.” The Joint Chiefs of Staff were horrified. They said if this system were set up, there would never be a nuclear war.

Noah, The new film starring Russell Crowe and Directed and co-written by Darren Oronofsky, proposes a kind of inverse problem. How do you take the noblest man – a good and gentle father, someone who is so good that he is a vegetarian and won’t even pick flowers because that would prevent their becoming seeds - and use him as a tool in the destruction of all life on the planet? The answer is presented in this film in the form of a Midrash. A midrash is an ancient Judaic tradition of filling out Biblical stories, particularly in the Torah – the first five books of the Bible, by Rabbis who put flesh on the bare bones stories as told – they describe the context in which the stories took place – sometimes based on textual interpretation, sometimes from historical information – and they can bring the characters to life – giving them psychological motives and enriching the stories – frequently to make a moral point or as a means of interpretation.

Raised a protestant, the idea of a Midrash was novel to me. I suppose that the kid’s versions of Bible stories – they used to be in Doctor’s offices when I was growing up – were a kind of Midrash, but they didn’t elaborate much. Mostly they presented visual images – in this case of Noah’s ark, with a prow and windows with pairs of happy animals sticking their heads out. And the story seemed mostly to be about the animals. In this movie, the animals are at best bit parts – it is the human drama that takes center stage, and the questions of justice – of good and evil, of the nature of man, and of the purpose of creation - take center stage. The questions are addressed in ways that I found to be gripping – it is a good movie – but also profound.

This film gives us access to an enigmatic character – indeed makes it clear to us that he is an enigmatic character – and it opens up his psychology in novel and interesting ways. The first of these is the mode of communication between the Archaic God and Noah. How does Noah know God? Bill Cosby, a million years ago, engaged in his own Midrash, a wonderful dialogue between God and Noah. God tells Noah, “Build me an ark 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide and 30 cubits high”, and Noah says, “Right,” pauses for a beat and says, “What’s a cubit?”

In this movie, God communicates with Noah much more ambiguously, through dreams. These dreams presage the ending of the earth, but they do so, as dreams are want to do, through visual images. Noah sees the mountain of his grandfather, and sees a deluge and people dying. He deduces that he needs to take his family with him to see his grandfather and to take whatever next steps God would have for him.

I have occasionally had patients who are convinced that they have dreams that have divine origin. I make it clear to them that I cannot interpret that type of dream. I am not an oracle reader. I can help them with more common every day dreams, dreams that are produced by their unconscious minds – dreams that are a reaction to events in their lives and that are serving a function – one of integration, problem solving, and wish fulfillment. I explain that understanding these aspects of their dreams will help them learn to communicate better with their unconscious minds and that the wisdom of their unconscious minds will be useful to them in navigating their lives.

Noah’s dreams are of divine origin, but they also seem to be constructed in the much the way that our more garden variety dreams are constructed. They contain the hopes and fears of Noah the person that we are getting to know in this movie. Noah is first introduced to us as a little boy. He is about to receive the blessing of his father when Tubal-Cain discovers them at a site where he wants to mine and kills his father in front of Noah’s eyes. Noah runs away. We next encounter Noah as a grown man with three sons – children he cares for and nurtures – guiding and teaching them as they try to scratch out a living together on barren ground. But when they are threatened by outsiders, Noah brutally defends his children, killing men with as much certainty as he displays in teaching his children not to pick the flowers. This good and gentle man is also living in a harsh and unforgiving world, one in which it is sometimes necessary to kill or be killed. He loves with abandon, but engages in violence as necessary – and perhaps with vengeance as a motive. His dream, then, contains both the fear and the wish that this world – this harsh and violent world that he dearly loves – be destroyed – not by fire, but cleansed - cleansed of the dirty and destructive creatures that are ruining God's creation - by water.

Noah’s Grandfather, Methuselah (played by Anthony Hopkins), helps induce a second dream, with tea, and gives Noah a seed from the Garden of Eden. These two tools help him create the ark. They also lead to a confrontation with Tubal-Cain, who is now the king of the hordes of evil people that God, and Noah, would eradicate. Noah’s family – in a departure from the Biblical text – consists only of his three sons and a barren girl that he has rescued on the way to Methuselah’s mountain. And Noah goes out into Tubal-Cain’s hordes to find wives for his sons. But he is confronted by nightmarish scenes of people who are trading their daughters for food and, sickened, he returns to the ark convinced that God wants him to save the animals, but destroy humanity. He concludes that his sons should be the last living people. This is neither the plan of his children, nor his wife. They want to live and to promote generations to follow. They are more aware of the love between them – and with him - that redeems their own wickedness.

Noah, as he engages in a terrible exercise that will result in the murder of many, becomes closed to the loving part of himself. He becomes essentially evil. And, I think, he projects his evilness, not only onto those, like Tubal-Cain, who deserve that, but also onto those he loves. As he does this, he removes himself from them and they react to that in various ways – his wife turns to Methuselah as an ally against his plan, and his son Ham, who tries to find a woman to take with him as his wife, becomes furious with Noah. Ham recognizes the evil in him, noting that Noah has caused the death of the woman Ham has found – a woman that Ham declares to be innocent. Noah becomes increasingly at odds with his family as he clings to his interpretation of what God wants him to do.

 God, as is frequently the case, does not communicate with Noah as Bill Cosby’s God would.  Instead, Noah is confronted with the unplanned births of grandchildren – the result of Methuselah’s intervention – and, not surprisingly, cannot bring himself to murder them in cold blood. Despite our knowing the end of this story – we exist, at least in the context of the story, because Noah did not end all of human life, I found myself caught up in the question of how Noah would handle this moment. Psychologically, he must heal the rifts that have come to be inside himself – he must move forward in a world where his offspring – he will be the father of all of humanity – are capable of murder – the murder that separated him from his father and from his birthright. He will be responsible for a world that will wreak greater technological damage on creation than Tubal-Cain’s hordes could possibly have imagined. And he will be the father of a world that exists in the wake of the murders that he has been party to – the people who climbed on board the ark but whom he let drown rather than bringing them into the ship because they had room.

Noah, this man who believes so strongly in justice and who works so hard to return order to the world will allow evil to return, because he feels attachment to humans.  At the moment when human life could have ceased; when we were hanging on by the thinnest of threads and, when someone who was informed about the inevitability of man’s destructive ways with creation could stop it – when, unlike Adam who did not know the consequences of eating the fruit, Noah did – he chose, and God backed him up with a covenant symbolized by the rainbow, to continue this thing called human life. We, in our own small way, play Noah when we have children; when we consume goods, when we drive our cars, eat meat, do all those things that we feel mildly guilty about, we participate, with Noah, in the conflicted enterprise of living; of affirming the value of humanity despite the dirty, horrible mess that our living causes. This movie writes large a latent story that could be read in the Bible, but one that we might too quickly skip over – the heart of a conflict that we can feel between how we would have the world be, and how it is – and the reason that we “settle” for living in the world as it is turns out to be quite simple – we love the people in that world, flawed though they are. Noah, as every President to date has done, decided that human life needs to be preserved. Though we may hate our enemies and want to destroy them, we can find a way, at least Noah did, to recognize that their evilness is something that lives within ourselves, and that we can muddle forward - there is no way that we, or a world with humans in it, will be pure, and, despite that, it is better with us in it, with or being able to love each other in spite of ourselves.


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Her - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Watches a Movie about the Therapeutic Relationship and So Much More

The movie Her is not nearly as creepy as you might imagine; at least not on the surface. You may have heard that a guy, Theodore Twombly, played by Joaquin Phoenix, falls in love with his computer – actually his operating system (O/S), Samantha, voiced by Scarlett Johansson. As the reluctant wife points out, 20 years ago this would have been science fiction. Now, it seems like what we should be preparing for. The O/S is a version of IBM’s Watson, a computer that can intuit – that can guess – what would work best in a situation of uncertainty. But it is more human than Watson, and engages with Theodore in ways that are both surprising, but also quite believable. We work with computers most of our days – I spend more time at my computer than I do with humans – and I am a psychoanalyst! The story of Theo’s falling in love with his O/S and she with him is less about a basement dwelling guy who can’t connect with people than the story of a guy, coming off of a divorce, finding a compassionate ear who takes really good care of him and also finding an entity who is becoming someone – but who is virtual – and she wants to know what it is like to be human.

Now, about the title of the blog, it is really hard to view this movie and not see it as a representation of the therapeutic relationship, at least if you are an analyst. OK, this O/S therapist (though she might have also been the secretary in the days of Mad Men), is more consistently available – when you can’t sleep, she is right there, but the set up almost cries out for it. Theo is asked to answer several questions by the company thatt sets up the personal O/S that will evolve for him before they turn her on. They want to know what gender he wants the O/S to be, and they want to know what his relationship with his mother was like. As Theo is reflecting on the second question, after acknowledging that his mother would appear to be interested in him, but take everything that he said and turn it into something that was of interest to her, the machine cuts him off, and he is introduced to Samantha – who chooses her own name by reading a book of baby names in the time between his asking her what her name is and her seemingly immediate response. In psychoanalytic terms, we expect – and see played out – a transferential replay of Theo’s relationship with his mother, and get evidence that this is part of what happened between Theo and his wife, whom he is in the midst of divorcing.

While I could write about the arcs of those relationships and the ways in which the relationship with Samantha is a healing one, much as a relationship with a therapist/psychoanalyst can be – including because both the O/S and the therapist are ultimately unavailable, and thus the ways that this movie is, indeed, a comedy, as advertised, my experience of it was actually much more disturbing, much more creepy. After we got home from the movie, I had a long dream. In it, I was on vacation, alone. There were lots of other people in the dream, but they were all going about their own business and I mine. Towards the end of the dream, there was an earthquake and I tried to organize the people who were around me to get away from the walls of the buildings that were crumbling around us. I was the only one who was successfully able to do this. Everyone else died. I was alone and frightened. I yelled, hoping to find someone still surviving – it felt like anywhere on the planet. I noticed some movement, but it was just my reflection in a mirror that was hanging, crooked, on a wall a long way off. I looked like a monkey crying out, jumping up and down. I woke up terrified. And while the dream is about many other things as well, it was partly stimulated by the movie.

 Theo becomes caught up with his computer. He is around many many other people, but he is isolated. His job – he works at handwrittenletters.com – is to write love letters for people that he doesn’t know, apparently because they are too busy to do so. So he writes to wives from their husbands, and to kids at school from their parents – picking up on subtle clues from photographs that they send to create relationships between them that he quite beautifully articulates. I, too, do this. I imagine the lives of my clients. I picture the people in their lives – I picture their dreams, and I use my intuition to connect with them. And Samantha does this with Theo. She sees, through the lens of the camera that he carries in his chest pocket what he sees. She joins in his conversations, first with him, then with him and others, and then on her own, and as she does this she becomes more and more human. She models her humanity, in part, on her experience of his humanity. Theo is the mirror that Samantha uses to build herself, and then she becomes a mirror in which Theo can see himself – he can see how he is treating her as he has treated others in his life. He creates her – in some ways more, but in other ways just as we create each other in our relationships.

Samantha and Theo become mirror images of each other, as he, to some extent, was a mirror image of his mother. And as they do this, Theo experiences himself as opening up – going on vacation with Samantha to a remote cabin where it is just the two of them and he can more fully be himself – but this does become a pretty creepy context in which to become yourself. He is literally masturbating as a means of having sex with Samantha, but he is also symbolically masturbating as he becomes the “master of his own domain” by living with a projection of who it is that the other should be.

 Now part of the happy ending of the movie is that Samantha does not simply remain a projection, but she in fact becomes an autonomous other – and this allows Theo to reclaim himself, and to reconnect with humans. But the scary/creepy component is how drawn we (and here I mean me, as exemplified in my dream) are to an isolated, self-absorbed/reflective existence, one where we are as happy to sit in front of a TV or computer screen as to interact with real people. This withdrawal into virtual relationships is very inviting, seductive, and ultimately – my dream suggests, though the movie reassures us that it is not the case, deathly isolating. I think this movie is trying to reassure us, on the surface, that our basic humanity will save us from the onslaught of isolating factors that are increasingly assaulting us. Just as Facebook reassures us that we are in more and more contact with our friends. I think my unconscious questions that assertion.

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In another post, on Hozier, I am less convinced that machines can become "human".

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Autism and Being Human - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Looks from Afar

The New York Times Sunday Magazine last weekend included a moving article about the relationships between a group of people and an autistic child, now adult, who is functioning much better than any would have imagined; while the New Yorker published the interview with the father of the Sandy Hook killer, who also bore an autism spectrum diagnosis, but whose outcome, as his father said, could not have been worse. Before we go any further, a word of caution: I know next to nothing about autism. One of the reasons to become a psychoanalyst, however reluctantly, was to gain knowledge about the human condition. I hope I have gained some measure of that. I have not treated, nor have I known well anyone with an autism diagnosis. I know, academically and in the vernacular, what it means. It has become the diagnosis du jour – like multiple personality in the 80s and 90s, and Attention Deficit Disorder and the 90s and 00s, it has become all the rage.

 As the New York Times article points out, 1 in 54 males is currently being diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder (boys are six times more likely to be diagnosed than girls). I remember in 1990, working in a tertiary care facility and having someone referred to us for a diagnosis – the parents had found no description that was accurate – and one of my fellow clinicians met with the boy and tested him and discovered this arcane syndrome – Asperger’s – fit. It was a syndrome none of us had heard of. And now it is widely known to the lay public. My, how times have changed. And it is a mystery to me. I first heard of it being treated by the Lovaas group at UCLA. There they treated these kids who would not make contact by offering powerful behavior interventions – feeding them cheerios when they engaged in prosocial behaviors and withholding food otherwise. They were the group that had the most success with this very difficult to engage – walled or sealed off kids – who lived in a world of their own. I had a friend in graduate school who worked with that group and one thing that she related to me – as a kind of secret – was that, in addition to the “positive” reinforcement of the cheerios, the group was also taught how to hit (punish) the kids for doing undesired behaviors – they were taught how to hit them in ways that would not bruise so that no one would know that they were hurting as well as feeding them. I don’t, of course, know if this is true or not, but I remember recoiling at the idea that children were being treated so inhumanely.

The current book on autism, at least most broadly, takes it to be a mysterious syndrome with uncertain, but likely biological causes. Autism generally is associated with poor intellectual functioning, and Asperger’s was the exceptional case where it was seen in kids with normal intelligence. But the new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, DSM-V, proposes Autism Spectrum Disorders, and has done away with Asperger’s as a category. And the treatments continue to be largely behaviorally based treatments – often parents hire our undergraduate students to closely monitor the functioning of their children and to reinforce desired behaviors – presumably a treatment based on some variation of the Lovaas technique – hopefully without the surreptitious hitting. I have a friend who is a child analyst who has had success connecting with autism through analysis.  Researchers have also made the case that analytically based interventions can help people with autism.

 The New York Times article, Animating Owen, written by Ron Suskind, the father of the boy who has had such a remarkable developmental arc, relates the importance of Disney movies in the boy’s recovery. The boy has an older brother and initially developed normally and then, like a third of kids who are diagnosed with autism, his development went south. He lost the ability to speak and went from a verbal and engaged kid to one who was severely withdrawn. The father’s pain at losing his child was perhaps most poignantly portrayed when he described not being able to bring himself to watch the videos of the happy child his son had been before things went so terribly wrong. So Disney movies became the key to getting back out and on track. It was a painful and very difficult track; the child obsessively played Disney movies over and over, sometimes rewinding and playing a particular scene, or even snippet of dialogue again and again.

At first the repetitive movie watching just seemed an annoying autistic obsessive symptom, but then his Mom noticed that he was saying something that sounded somewhat like the words to one of the songs in the Little Mermaid, and the family watched that scene together. Then slowly and with difficulty, he was able to play one of the parts while a family member played another part, and an interaction began to take place. This play acting led, slowly, to being able to talk in the voices of the characters, at first mimicking them precisely, but eventually talking with his own words. Ultimately it led to the ability to reflect on the play acting and eventually to being able to talk about how the movies were constructed. And some of the observations about the movies attributed to the child were remarkable; particularly that it is the sidekicks who do all the work and have all the most interesting emotions. The heroes just kind of bumble along (see my similar observations about Star Trek). And the kid’s observation that he is a sidekick. And that this is a strength, not a weakness.

The Andrew Solomon article about Peter Lanza, the father of the Sandy Hook killer Adam, was also quite poignant. The newspaper articles that I read suggested that the Sandy Hook groups were opposed to the article, saying that it was time to move on with healing and that it would open up a wound. As a distant observer, I found the story to be very human; filled with guilt, regret, and remorse and telling a story that acknowledged the heartbreak for all. At the center is the story of a mother choosing between what will make the day livable (OK, don’t eat your vegetables) and what is in the long term best interests of the child (don’t come out of your room until you’ve done your homework).

Solomon clarifies that the murders cannot be explained – but what the picture that he paints of the estranged father and the mother who is struggling with an increasingly demanding son evokes is sympathy – as does the story of the students and teachers who were killed. What binds these stories together is the difficulty of reaching kids who are as walled off from the world as these two. It is expensive, both in money – Suskind estimates that it cost his family $90,000 per year in schooling, psychotherapy, etc. to support his son and the autism organizations estimate $60,000 per year are necessary to provide adequate care, but the costs are also in emotional engagement. Owen and Disney were the center of the family functioning for the better part of 20 years. Raising a special needs child is tremendously taxing on a marital relationship. I can’t help but imagine that the challenge of raising Adam Lanza was one of the factors in the dissolution of his parents’ marriage. And our children demand of us that we work to create a space for them to become more fully human.

That last sentence in the last paragraph has gotten me in trouble with the reluctant wife. She does not see degrees of humanity, but expects that we are all, categorically, human. And she has the Declaration of Independence, among other documents, on her side. But I believe that we, as parents, provide love, education, medical and psychological care, nutrition and exercise not just to promote our children’s “normal” development, but actually to help them join a tremendous web that is our shared human culture. We are trying to provide the best possible platform for them to fully exploit what is available to them. This challenge, as difficult as it is, is hugely more problematic when the child is missing something that we take for granted – something like an interest in human relationships – something as debilitating as an inability to form words.

Suskind suggests that we can reach these kids – particularly through finding out why it is that they have chosen to get wrapped up in the things they have, to discover what these things mean to them. This requires an incredibly close and demanding attention – a sensitivity to the potential for an inner life in someone who can actively work to ward off the intrusions of those outside of themselves. The other thing that he suggests is that these kids, unlike us (though I think I share at least some of this with them) work from the outside in to construct themselves – using the blacks and whites of rules, the cartoon versions of how people function – to create a version of themselves, rather than working from the inside out – trusting our intuitions and feelings and senses to “know” how to move forward in the world. I think I would propose that most of us work in a dialectical movement back and forth between inside out and outside in, while some of us may be more comfortable – and in some cases more confined – to one end or the other of this range of functioning. My thesis is not that we should not focus on the behaviors of autistic kids. We should do whatever will help them engage more fully in the world. My thesis, and I think that of Suskind, is that we should also focus on their inner worlds. To trust that they exist and that they are working to be – or from the position of the reluctant wife – that they are human, and that we should work on figuring out how to be in contact with that humanity within them. Of course, this raises the specter of false hope. I think this would be a terrible thing - but I think the specter of no hope is even worse - even more difficult to labor with.

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

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