Gregory Boyle's Tattoos on the Heart – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reflects on the Work of a Jesuit

At the Jesuit University where I work, we have been assigning a first year reading for 8 or ten years and I have been of two minds about the choices.  I wish that we were assigning classics; things that the students would refer to throughout their experience at the University – like the Republic.  Instead, the group that makes the assignments has been requiring current books – mostly of the inspirational bent.  I think they want to influence the students to engage in “living a life for others”, part of our mission statement.  The books “Three Cups of Tea” and “A Pearl in the Storm” have been assigned, for instance.  Last year the book was about the HeLA Cells, cancerous cervical cells that are used in almost all cancer research; cells that were “donated” by a poor African American woman who didn’t know they were being taken from her.  It is a rich, complicated and interesting book that I reviewed previously, and the students rose to the occasion.  At least in my group, they seemed to really get it and to discuss various complex threads that were central themes in the book.

The book this year is a book by Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart.  It has the virtue of being by a Jesuit.  But it really has no plot and the narrative arc is implicit rather than explicit.  It is essentially a collection of homilies that this Jesuit priest has told over the years.  These homilies have been told primarily to the “homeboys” – gang members – in the south central LA community where Father Boyle worked first as a Parish Pastor and then, after he had decided that this was his calling (not to work in the Student Services Division at the nearby, but light years away Jesuit University of Santa Clara, where he was originally intended to work) he started something called “Homeboy Industries”, a collection of agencies that provide many services, but mostly jobs, for ex-gang members so that they can get out of the gang/poverty cycle and move on with their lives.  So these are stories of kids who have moved on, but also of many who tried and failed – he has buried more than 150 “homeys” who have been killed by other homeys.  He tells these stories to homeys because they experience themselves as the subject of interest of someone like him – someone who it educated and not trapped in their community – and this makes them subjects of interest to themselves.  He tells these stories to us because he hopes that it will allow us to see gang members as human beings – very much like ourselves, with similar desires and ambitions.

Boyle relates that there have been three “waves” of addressing the gang problem.  The first was to wage war on the gangs.  This led to a proliferation of gangs as gang members were given additional, reality based reasons to band together against an outside force.  The second wave was to broker truces between gangs.  This was the early work that Father Greg – or “G” in gang parlance – engaged in.  It took him a while, but he and others realized that this was also perpetuating gangs – as Boyles puts it, it was like oxygen to the gangs.  In my mind, it legitimized them and their “turf” and led to institutionalizing gangs as the de facto organizations in the barrio, parish or neighborhood.  The third wave is not to engage with gangs at all, but to engage with individuals.  The idea is that by meeting individual’s needs directly gangs become unnecessary to them.

One of the chapters in this book is a chapter about outcomes.  Boyle has to demonstrate to those who fund his work that he is accomplishing what he has set out to do. This has been a real issue in both psychoanalysis and, more recently, in higher education.  Both are expensive, time intensive enterprises.  Are they worth it?  In some sense, Boyle’s book, the stories that he tells, is the outcome of his work; both the content of those stories – this homey got a job/that homey went to college, but also the impact of the stories on the reader.  He tosses off one statistic – the number of gang murders per year is half now of what it was when gang violence was at its worse when he started this program – but he does not claim credit for that.  What he does claim credit for – not directly, but through the stories, is the positive impact of being a father figure – a stable reliable father figure – to thousands of kids exemplified by stories about a few dozen of them.  And these kids have been able to have profound moments of emotional and spiritual insight as a direct result of the relationships that he forges with them.  And these lead to monumental life changes in some of them.  They also lead to changes in us.  We see the individuals he is talking about as people – soft vulnerable decent people living inside of scared selves and bodies that are tattooed and muscled to scare away scary others – and we feel more human – more connected with people we would not otherwise imagine connecting with - as we move with G through the barrios and witness what he has seen.

This afternoon, a group of us met with a new faculty employee.  She is a local celebrity – the ex-mayor of our city – who has been hired to help us in our community outreach.  We asked her what she envisions doing here, and she said that she would like to be able to be involved with projects that have demonstrable impacts on the well-being of members of the community; something that actually enhances their quality of living through improving their health, economic standing, or their vitality.  I realized that we do this – with our students.  We offer them an education that opens doors to jobs that provide them with a good standard of living.  Many of our students become do-gooders, but they are frequently able to do good from the position of being a reasonably well paid professional.  They work with the poor and underprivileged – they teach them, or treat them or minister to them in whatever way that they do – and they have the credentials to be compensated for this work.

Many of the students in my department are working in the community.  They log 72,000 hours of community service annually.  We know that the work that they are doing, in general, has good outcomes.  Most of the people they work with have better mental and emotional functioning as a direct result of the work that they do.  Many of the people that they work with are poor and/or marginalized in various ways.  Does the work that they do lead to measurable improvement in the functioning of the community?  Is our city, is this world, a better place for the work that they do?

My city will never be without poor, marginalized, emotionally despondent and spiritually bereft individuals.  My adolescent self cringes at the idea that I just wrote that sentence.  But my more mature self realizes that the human condition will, I think, always generate misery.  Ouch, now I’ve written another one - but I fear it to be true and thus feel compelled to write it.  The outcomes that we are looking to achieve, then, are not absolute or perfect – they are determined by the hand that is dealt.  Boyles does not believe that he can end poverty in South Central LA, nor even that he can end gang violence.  What he believes is that he can address both and that will have a positive impact on the lives of some of those he touches.

I think I feel guilty about teaching (and treating) students (and patients) who can most benefit from what I have to offer – those students (and patients) who are NOT marginalized, but are competent – but not yet as fully competent as they will be after their education/treatment.

 

As part of my own training, I worked in a State Hospital and made a vow to myself that I would include work of that sort, one day a week, in whatever my professional world ended up being.  I have not kept that promise.  Greg Boyle did.  It is some small consolation that my students do that on my behalf.

But, at the end of the day, does this rising tide raise all ships?  Are we creating paths for the homeys to get out of the barrio?  Is our educational and health care system one that improves the lives of all or just of a few?  How do we empower those who are marginalized?  And how would we measure it if we were empowering people – what outcomes would we track through the complicated pathways along which our interventions are being delivered?  Boyle has concrete answers.  He can see the impact of the work that he does.  And he can feel the need for it – which leads him to plead his case – effectively - by helping us feel the need for it.      



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

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

Lucy – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Gets Dragged to a Popular Movie

This year the reluctant family has joined me at the shore for the typical psychoanalyst’s August vacation.  Unfortunately, Hurricane Bertha has joined us as well and, despite being far out at sea, she has dumped a lot of rain and cloudy weather on us.  We have done jigsaw puzzles and gone to the local aquarium (where we learned the 80% of the world’s population lives within 40 miles of an ocean – we, in the other 20%, must drive to be near but not in one – who wants to get wet when it’s raining?), so it was time to get out of the house for a movie.  Seeing as it is summer and the offerings are limited – further, we are at the beach and our favorite theaters are hours away – our choices were limited.  The reluctant wife and I voted for the Phillip Seymour Hoffman vehicle, but we were outvoted by the reluctant children, who were more interested in Lucy – something that I was mildly drawn to by the trailers that featured the question “What would we do if we could use 100% of our brains?”

I should have known I was in trouble during the trailers.  After each come on for a shoot ‘em up, each one with less apparent plot than the one before, I whispered to the reluctant wife, “Just find your center.”  The eldest reluctant stepdaughter didn’t understand what I was saying or why I was saying it, but the reluctant son, I think, did – of course he finds zombie movies appalling while she feasts on them.

Now don’t get me wrong – I’m no longer squeamish in the way that I was immediately after the birth of the reluctant son.  Then, each movie death was not simply an act, but the death of a human being, the child of someone.  I’m still a softie.  My kids all can tell when I’m going to tear up while we’re watching a movie or, worse, a particularly moving commercial, but I have become somewhat hardened to the experience of watching violence, death and mayhem on film again and recognize in a film like The Avengers that this is all just for fun.  This movie, though, begins with a defenseless woman (played by Scarlet Johansson) being swirled into a drug gang crazy world by her lout of a boyfriend whom she has been with for a week.  And after the first scene there had been more deaths, some of them quite brutal, than minutes – and perhaps that was still the case at the end of the whole movie – we were trying to figure that out but could not produce an accurate body count of the extended car chase scene down multiple streets the wrong way creating mayhem and who knows how much murder and maiming.

Ironically, the woman’s capturer’s brutality injures her in ways that empower her and, in what the reluctant wife notes is a fantasy for all women, she lures a would be rapist into being thoroughly thrashed (and killed, along with his henchmen – at this point in the movie the body count was way beyond the minutes).  (I wonder if it is also partly Johansson’s fantasy about what she would do to the Marvel group that has not given her a well-deserved starring vehicle in that franchise because they are too afraid that a woman can’t successfully headline.)  In any case, Johansson’s character proceeds to grow in intellectual and physical power and is, incidentally, able to seek vengeance on the drug lord who gets her into this mess in the final scene.

So, why bother writing about this movie?  In part, it makes sense to give it some thought because the come on teaser is one that is broader than a shoot-‘em-up.  This is billed as a movie about what would happen if we could use more than 10% of our brains (a statement that has lots of legs, but no real basis in anything like modern neuroscience).  What is the intellectual framework that undergirds a shoot-‘em-up?  What does the director think is the reason that we are drawn to this? 

We are delivered a truism by the character played by Morgan Freeman, that "when the environment is supportive, we seek immortality through connection and passing on what we know to those we love, but that when the environment is hostile, the organism seeks personal immortality."  Hmm…  So, because the drug lords are seeking to attack Lucy, she becomes more focused on her own survival than on being connected with those around her.  Lucy’s only ally is a French cop who is mystified by how he can help her as she demonstrates her superhuman powers and she explains that she has him along as a reminder – so that she doesn’t forget her own humanity as she becomes increasingly smart and, in the language of the movie, computer-like.  From this perspective, having more access to our minds makes us more machinelike and less human – as if intelligence did not include empathy and connection but was only “cerebral”….  Again, hmm…  (For a very different view of the relation between human and machine logic, see my review of Hozier).  One problem with this film is that it is filled with so much drivel that it is hard to stay focused on the central message – which seems to be that the hero in an action film is so threatened that she must become, at least in Lucy’s case, essentially invincible and focused on solving the problem of individual immortality so much that she is in danger of losing track of the best interests of the community and therefore my fail to pass along what is known so that the tribe may survive.

Well, Lucy somehow manages to do both (whew!) (the dead in the cars are just collateral damage and she checks to make sure that one of her victims is terminal before mercifully killing him).  She leaves a flashdrive with all the information that we need to know (it’s a REALLY BIG flashdrive) when she poofs into post physical existence and is, as she says, everywhere.  Maybe she is able to manage it all because she is a woman.  I suppose boys get bullied more than girls (there must be data on this somewhere) and this may account for their sense of vulnerability and thus flocking to theaters to see the vulnerable hero overcome all odds to beat the corrupt enemy, but it really is women – especially as adults – who have to fight long odds and are, I think, constantly reminded of how vulnerable they are to more powerful men who can do bad things to them.  So it makes a lot of sense to have a female character be the hero in a shoot ‘em up.  Further, it makes sense that she refuses to consider that she is able to do all kinds of magical things because of drugs so that anyone else should be able to do this as well – but perhaps she just doesn’t trust men to handle the job, any job, with integrity.  They will just use the drugs to get people high.  What a waste.  Better to kill someone every minute until you get it all figured out and then hand on the wisdom.

This movie has wonderful visual effects.  Imagine what Stanley Kubrick would have done in 2001 if he had our toys?  Imagine what the Beatles would have done?  Perhaps there is a danger of moving more and more to the surface as we marry our intelligence to the visual.  Freud maintained that it is our initial thinking – our primary process, animal thinking, that is visual.  Our secondary process thinking – the rational part of ourselves – is, for him, narratively based – it is the thinking of Shakespeare where the words are the play, and the staging is just an excuse – a way to illuminate the words.  In our modern shoot ‘em ups, the words are an excuse to get to the next dazzling effect, and this effect has to be more expansive and, frankly, grosser than anything we have seen recently or we will, like the reluctant stepdaughter who found seeing the legs of dead people and then the bloody hands of the murder unimpressive, say that we could have done better with a bottle of ketchup.  Ouch…

So, the day after the movie, what should happen but that I should be kicked out of the ocean by a lifeguard?  Kicked out of the ocean?  Who gets kicked out of the ocean?  Well, it turns out that Bertha is creating rip tides in addition to dumping water.  I wanted some of Lucy’s superpowers to defeat the lifeguards.  They were kicking me, a body surfer, out, while allowing the surfboarders to remain.  It turns out the surfboarders had a flotation device with them - the surfboard.  If I fetched a boogie board, that would not suffice.  Aargh.  What is an analyst to do?  Stay out of the water so that he can pass information on to his students and his patients?  Preservation of the individual for the betterment of society – it’s the right thing to do.  I know, I know.  But I would much rather be personally immortal and not have to worry about small natural events like hurricanes… I would much rather take a drug that would lead to immortality, invincibility and enlightenment that trudge along towards small gains.  Kind of like the folks in the sixties who thought that LSD would be a shortcut to enlightenment.  We can wish - but the lifeguards apparently stand ready to provide an unwanted dose of reality.

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

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