Inside Out: The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Encounters Pixar's Vision of the Mind at the Movies

A friend of mine teaches the newbies in our clinic how to be clinicians.  She is most challenged by the students who have not had enough rain in their lives.  This movie, Inside Out, from Pixar and Walt Disney, tells the tale of a little girl, Riley, who starts out looking like she is headed for being one of those future psychologists who will be challenged by having faced too little difficulty - her childhood is just too perfect to be able to empathize with others whose lives have been marked by rain.  Riley's mother and father dote on her and even love to play hockey with her so that the Minnesota winters, which can be depression inducing, are something to look forward to.  But then, thank goodness for the plot and for her future as a good psychologist, some rain falls into Riley's life.

The twist in the way this movie works, of course, is that this girl's inner life - the emotions that literally run her control panel - are personified.  The girl's basic emotions: Joy, Fear, Anger, Sadness, and Disgust, are portrayed as anthropomorphized characters - and they are the inside that we see on the outside of this movie.  Most of the time it is Riley's inner life that is portrayed.  Occasionally we see into other's control rooms - or headquarters - and see that they have the same basic emotions and thus the characters in their control rooms have the same colors (Joy is yellow, fear is purple, anger is red, sadness is blue and disgust is green).  Though the characters are dressed differently and each set of characters has its own unique set of interrelationships which are integral to the outer person's character, we can see that each person has the same basic make up, just a different configuration of the "personalities" of the emotions, which, in turn, are the primary drivers of the lives of each person.

Riley begins the movie with Joy (voiced by Amy Pohler, the insufferably positive actress of Parks and Recreation and 30 Rock fame) firmly in charge.  This feels, frankly, a bit annoying.  It is like having a soccer mom, one who used to be a cheerleader, run the show.  Everything is just a little too perky, a little too perfect, and Joy, while clearly the real star, is a complicated character to like because her saccharine sweetness is two dimensional and cloying.  She also seems strangely middle aged.  Her primary role - besides generally being at the controls and consulting with most of the other feelings, is to keep sadness isolated from the rest of Riley's functioning.

The daily tasks of the emotional group involve helping determine what kinds of routines Riley will use to react to situations, and then, at the end of the day, to work on consolidating memories.  Some of these memories, about five of them, are considered core memories, and each of these is directly tied (across an abyss that, at its bottom, contains discarded memories) to complex entities that represent the personality structures - they are called islands - that are the basis, the cornerstones, of Riley's character.  Riley's core personality structures include Goofball Island, Family Island, Honesty Island, Friendship Island and Hockey Island.  Each memory, represented as a small ball, is colored by the dominant emotion associated with it, and each of her core memories are yellow.  The other memories, the ones that aren't core memories, are sorted at the end of the day and sent off to long term memory, a huge maze of connected shelves that are maintained by a crew that picks out memories to be discarded (It is pretty funny to see them vacuuming up all of the presidents except for Washington, Lincoln and the fat one).  The discarded memories are sucked into the abyss where, over time, they decay and disappear into smoke.

In addition to the Islands and long term memory, there is a train of thought that wanders from station to station, with stops in imagination land and preschool land.  At one point, Joy takes a shortcut through abstract thought - I question its fully developed presence in a twelve year old - but it is pretty funny to see the characters become deconstructed, reassembled as cubist elements, become two dimensional, and use their two dimensionality to escape from being abstractions.  Whether developmentally accurate or not, it is truly delightful to watch this kaleidoscopic transformation - I am impressed here, as I am always impressed when watching high quality cartoons - by just how much of the humor is directed at the educated adults in the audience.  This really ain't kid stuff.

And the plot rains on this little girl with the too good history by plopping her into a dank and unfurnished row house in San Francisco where the moving van is late, her parents' relationship is fraying, and she goes to school as the new kid.  When she tries out for hockey, the internal chaos that the other events have unleashed interferes with her performance and we observe an inner meltdown that eventuates in threats to the core memories, and the loss of Joy and Sadness from the control room - they get relegated to the outer reaches of her mind.  The plot revolves around Joy's quest to return to the control room; a quest that is, like any other quest, filled with all kinds of perilous impediments.

There are some psychoanalytically interesting elements in this mind (for a review of an article on a contemporary psychoanalytic model of the mind use the link here).  The subconscious, roughly equivalent, I suppose, to Freud's repressed unconscious, is filled with scary stuff that has been banished but is very much alive.  Like Freud's earliest model of the mind, these contents are guarded, though these guards are hilariously and usefully inept, much more focused on their own lives than on their jobs.  Dreams involve memories from the day, what Freud would call the day residue, together with the ability to tap into longer term memories.  There is a filter in the dream studio that changes the actors, who are essentially blobs, into the characters that are remembered, but the wonderful ability to integrate recent and remote memories that occurs in our actual dreams is not portrayed.  What is portrayed is that no amount of joy will wake Riley from her slumber, and Sadness begins to show her use by convincing Joy that to wake Riley they really should use fear, a much more effective means of invoking sleeplessness (though guilt, not included as a basic emotion, might have worked even better...).

What seems most real about this movie, however, is the way in which Joy is tempered by Sadness.  Sadness, initially seen as just being a drag, becomes essential to the quest, to the resurrection of Riley, and ultimately to Joy becoming a three dimensional character, one who is able to effectively function as the executive, calling in the auxiliary emotions not just when she is flummoxed but as a means to more effectively and competently guide Riley's experience.  While we would argue over the root emotions and which should be included, and we might quibble with the more fanciful aspects of the geography of Riley's mind, the net internal result of this girl's coming of age rings true.  This movie presents a model of recovery that works well for someone with a solid psychological base - one that falters in the face of trauma.  If the trauma has been earlier and more severe, the recovery -building the islands of character from scratch - is more complicated than the rebuilding described here.  But one more true to life component is that sadness reveals that these memories, including the core memories, are more complex than Joy initially led us to believe; they include traumatic elements - and the new structures that are built are built on core memories that are golden, but with a distinct bluish tinge, one that will help Riley, should she choose to become a therapist - or a wife - or a mother - or a good friend - or a good daughter, become more empathically connected, because they aren't artificially yellow.  Rain, it turns out, falls into even a Disneyfied life (see a posting about Disney and Mary Poppins).

In case you were wondering, I went to see this film with the same reluctant stepdaughter with whom I recently went to see Hozier (the link is to that posting).  It is nice that she is interested both in moving forward in her musical taste, but is also willing to visit the Island of Childish Pleasures (including Pixar films) with me.  This film could, I think, be used as a therapeutic vehicle.  It could, in a relationship between two people who were trying to understand the workings of one of their minds, help the pair reflect on that mind and think about what aspects of the film were consistent with the models of the mind that the therapist and patient are using and what might be useful additions.  But I don't think that this movie, like a good fairy tale, necessarily has to be thought about abstractly, to be deconstructed, to be of use to someone who is in the midst of having a core meltdown, or who is trying to understand what happened when they had a core meltdown (though I think it important that, if someone has a core meltdown, it makes sense to acknowledge that the external stressors that lead to the core meltdown here are really pretty nominal and their experience is likely both more complex and more objectively distressing).  For the two of us, who are not in a therapeutic relationship, it led to a conversation about whether we have core memories and into talking about some of our early memories.  This was a fun and pleasant conversation.  The ways in which the movie touched us more deeply were largely left unexplored other than to note that, predictably, I cried in all the moving places.

Post script:  For an essay by a philosopher on the ways in which the film represents the self as a semi-permanent result of shifting underlying forces and processes, go here.  Another philosopher, Antonio Damasio, is looking at how our minds are organized primarily around feelings and feeling states.  There have been a few essays about how the Pixar folks chose these five emotions.  The one in wikipedia I found particularly interesting,

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Humanism and Mechanism: Hozier helps The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Contemplate the Digital World

Last week’s Sunday New York Times focused on the ways in which the digital world is altering physical and psychological landscapes around the globe.  I have commented to a number of folks recently that we are engaged in a huge social experiment.  When I started writing this blog on Saturday morning, I was very aware of the experiment being alive in the moment as I sat in the living room with the reluctant son, he on his device, and me on mine – pleasantly sharing the same space but occupying entirely different worlds.  By Sunday night, I had a very different perspective as Hozier came to town and I hung with a crowd of people doing the same thing at the same time.  Sure, they frequently had their phones raised and pointed at him, recording the event for later consumption in their own idiosyncratic ways, but in that moment, we were all together sharing the same experience.  What will be the impact of the digital world on our environment, on our social relating, and, of most interest from a psychoanalytic perspective, on our minds?  How will we be altered and will this be useful to us or, in some subtle but also powerful way, pervert us from our basic humanity?

The world of electronic translation is one place that the Times Magazine (a publication itself threatened by electronic media) asks about technology.  At the upper right hand corner of the home page of this blog, there are a series of buttons.  One of them provides instantaneous translation of the site into a host of other languages.  I marvel at the immediacy of the French version that I choose.  My high school French is not adequate to determine the veracity of the translation, but in general it looks as good as I could have done by laboring over it for many hours at the height of my limited powers.  I don’t know how many of the folks who access this blog from other countries use the translation button versus being fluent in English.  The magazine suggests that electronic translation is pretty good if you want to fix your toaster or if you need to tell someone in a foreign country exactly what kind of help you need, but nuance is not its strong suit.  So, I’m guessing that, at those moments when I am closest to articulating what I mean, the Google translation may become pretty clunky – which, by the way, was also true of my high school and college translations of poetry and prose.

Apparently the electronic and the traditional translational worlds inhabit parallel but seemingly non- intersecting universes.  The electronic translators are actually math and computer geeks who are writing code that allows massive computing power to be used to determine the probability that a particular word in one language should be translated into a particular word in another language – actually a process of transliteration rather than translation.  This is done by referencing tons of existing translations to see what words in one language are likely are associated with what words in the second language.  These original translations; the point of contact between the worlds, are ironically done by the linguists and translators whose existence is all but erased in the minds of the electronic translation group.  The original translators know both languages and are intent, not on getting the right word, but the right meaning.  They are trying to help the reader in the second language experience a similar psychological reaction to the language of the writer that a native speaker of the writer’s language would experience.  This is a profoundly empathic endeavor that involves a deep reading of the intention of the author – appreciating the nuance – and carrying that over into the translated work.  The electronic translators mine this work to produce transliterations – swapping out words for words.

The electronic translitoraters scoff at the 25 or so translations of Don Quixote into English.  They also scoff that, if we show a translator his or her work a year later, he or she will reject it is as being a poor translation.  Though they are reliant on the traditional translators’ work to feed the parallel texts to their statistical machines, they are disdainful of the process that linguistic translation – simultaneous translation of both surface and deep meaning – entails.  They don’t seem to get that the translator has evolved in the intervening year.  They don’t seem to get that a great work of art can be interpreted in many different ways (how many and how various are the translations of the Bible?), and they don’t seem to get that language is evolving; that middle English needs to be translated so that we can understand it – and that the language of our grandfathers sounds to us overly stiff and formal and we wait for them to get to the point – just say it, we almost scream – in the process implicitly noting how literary conventions have led us to be able to craft a language that we find more useful in conveying the meanings that we find most important because of who we are at this moment.

The electronic translators, I suspect, have been living too long in a digital world.  They believe that things, and maybe it is true of things, can be reduced to a particular description.  From their perspective, the task of translating is to change this into that.  Or, more precisely, they are functioning as the people in Gulliver’s travels who carry objects in their packs rather than having words and use the objects to communicate.  What they are missing is the alchemy of communicating thoughts and internal experiences – the evanescent aspects of ourselves that we only fleetingly understand; much less have the ability to communicate.  The dichotomy between these two worlds reminds me of the dichotomy in the psychotherapeutic world between those who are focused on symptom management as their primary goal, and those, like the psychoanalysts, for whom symptom management is a beneficial side effect of a process that involves articulating – to another person – what my internal experience is and, in the process of doing it, changing the experience; I have learned more about myself – partly from the concepts another shares with me, but also from the dance that we are doing together – I learn new steps, and I engage in those with others outside the consulting room.  In parallel with the translators, when describing a recent psychotherapeutic hour in a supervision session - an hour that was alive with meaning - I frequently hear that hour in entirely different ways than when I lived it – there are other meanings that I simply didn’t catch when I was focused on the particular narrative thread that I was following during the hour.

So with this model in mind, I went to see Hozier on Sunday night; a popular Irish musician, probably in the Alt Rock category.  The concert is an early father’s day present, and Hozier is an interesting artist on many levels, not least because he is the first great point of intersection in musical interest between my youngest stepdaughter and me.  For as long as I have known her, she has been a devotee of pop, which I find mind-numbing when I am not shocked by the shallowness of the lyrics with their descriptions of precocious and seemingly mindless sexuality.  She finds my tastes to be stodgy and lacking energy and verve.  Hozier somehow seems to hit a sweet spot (one we have arrived at before with Lorde) -  a place where the catchiness of the tunes is good for both of us, but there seems to be more meat on the bone than in the latest offering from Nikki Minaj. 

So we arrived at the concert an hour and a half early as it was in an outdoor venue on a splendid Midwestern summer evening, and it was festival “seating”, meaning that if we beat the hordes, we were able to crowd nearer the stage to stand and wait for the opening act and then to stand to see and hear Hozier.  The crowd was relatively diverse on the age dimension – weighted towards twenty somethings, there were teens but also enough old fogeys that the reluctant wife and I didn’t feel completely out of place.  The crowd looked to be largely white, with a smattering of other ethnicities, and reasonably hip – with a decent representation of both the tattooed and those without, and did not look Goth at all – perhaps because it is hard to look Goth on a warm summer night.

While waiting, there was a loop of songs that were played – largely oldies.  The group, as it formed around us, swayed in time to them and sometimes sang along with the more popular ones – a Beatles tune and a Janis Joplin tune for instance.  Interestingly, though, when a Wilson Pickett or a James Brown tune played, or one of the other R and B standards, people didn’t seem to recognize or to be much moved by them; the soundtrack suddenly seemed to become background music.  This was interesting to me because one of the popular and very catchy Hozier Tunes is one called “Jackie and Wilson” and the refrain is about getting married, having two children, naming them Jackie and Wilson and raising them on Rhythm and Blues.  Could it be that Hozier’s audience hadn’t themselves been raised on Rhythm and Blues?

Well, we suffered through the opening act, whose tunes we recognized, but whose jaded vision of life, while accurately depicting part of my emotional world, does so in ways that feel all too close – close to the cynical self that I have, one that I am uncomfortable with.  Hozier – well here’s a breath of fresh air – commented at one point that he appreciated the audience’s responses to his songs because they were all about death, and he felt comfortable and supported by a group that, like himself, was drawn to the macabre.  But the beat, taken both from R and B and, in the deeply moving “work song”, directly from even earlier spiritual/field work songs, and the melody – light and bright and hopeful - transform the content into something that is far from oppressive.  There is a stark beauty in the simplicity of the music and of the musician – the artist – armed only with a guitar, his voice, and a back-up band, taking on the stuff that most scares us, and, through the alchemy of his art, transforming it into something that is life affirming.

In this alchemical act, Hozier is not just transforming the scary content – one of the tunes is called “An arsonist’s lullaby” - but the musical traditions that he has inherited into a modern vernacular – one that speaks directly to his audience and matches the rhythms of their lives.  They sang along, not just on the popular songs, but throughout the evening – except when he sang a very old blues tune (with a modern arrangement by an artist he credited), The Illinois Blues.  This tune allowed him to show off his picking as well as his singing and his audience was spellbound, if transformed for a moment into an audience instead of a collaborative organism.  He was raising us – not just in that moment, but throughout the show, on Rhythm and Blues.  Not by playing Wilson Pickett, but by channeling him – translating him into a version that would allow us to feel what others have felt when they heard Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour” in the context of a different moment in time.

This raises the specter of White musicians covering Black musician’s tunes – whether with or without credit – to reap greater rewards than the Black’s.  I don’t know how to reconcile that here.  I am reminded of the position taken in the movie “The Commitments” that the Irish are the Blacks of Europe and therefore that Soul is the natural music of the Irish, but that begs the point.  Can we take something that we want to be foreign – our fascination with death, our carrying on with dignity despite the fact that life deals out manifold indignities – more easily from someone who looks and sounds more like us – the privileged majority?  Is there something about the white idiom that makes conscious but disavowed experiences easier to process?  Or is Hozier another in a long line of exploiters?  And don’t all artists – White and Black alike - stand on the shoulders of giants to give us a better view – to move us closer to the experience?  Hozier is engaged not in transliteration: other than the one Blue’s tune, he sang his own material – not covers of black musician’s songs – but in translation.  He is not functioning as Big Blue – the mindless IBM computer that would pull together themes to create a “new” version of old stuff – whether literary or musical – but as an artist, using his own soul to resonate with the soup of material that he has immersed himself in throughout his life and, out of that stock, to create something new, alive and electric and very much his own.

Interestingly, another article in the magazine touched on music.  A writer described the music trade in Mali, Africa, home, in addition to 15 million people, to Timbuktu.  There the computer, in the form of the cell phone has, as here, allowed people to fill their worlds with music.  We can share recordings prodigiously and listen to them, effectively, anywhere.  What is intriguing about the system in Bamako, Mali’s capital, is that telechargeurs, or downloaders, sell copies of music that they discover from local and distant sources in a street vending system.  Buyers go to their favorite vendor, a person who knows their tastes, and the buyer takes the music they have trolled the ether for, downloading music from multiple sources, and sells the latest tunes to be listened to.  Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers have sung about the last DJ, a person who refuses to be the company man and is the person “Who plays what he wants to play, And says what he wants to say, Hey, hey, hey, And there goes your freedom of choice, There goes the last human voice,” but apparently he hadn’t been to Mali, where the human connection furnishes a soundtrack at about a dime a song.

Also in the issue is an article about an office of disinformation, titled The Agency, in Russia that floods the web with pro-Putin material.  Trolls are hired to incessantly post to fake Facebook and twitter accounts and to drown out any opposition voices - the voices that were originally empowered by the internet.  Of course, here in the States, corporations hire goons who market what they think we want directly to us on Facebook, twitter, and Sirius – the massive national radio network on which my daughter and I found Hozier.  Our telechargeur is some corporate suit who has decided that we can tolerate thinking about death when it is wrapped in Irish Rhythm and Blues.  Thankfully there is, underneath that, and driving it, a real human being – one who is in touch with both his own soul, historical musical traditions, and the rhythms of today.  Thankfully, also, my daughter’s mother raised her on Rhythm and Blues.

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Grace and Frankie - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reflects on Netflix' Depiction of the Complications of Connection

Netflix has a new series about two couples - the men (Robert and Sol played by Martin Sheen and Sam Waterston respectively) have been law partners in a practice that specializes in divorce law for thirty years.  They are as different as night and day, and have wives that match each of them.  Robert, married to Grace (played by Jane Fonda) is likely the public face of the firm.  He is a good old boy who knows the proper thing to say at every moment - but people might question whether he and his wife - a woman who started her own line of beauty products, who is beautiful and incredibly organized, have a marriage or a business partnership.  They know how to make an entrance and to look good, but they lack affection.  Sol balances Robert.  He is goofy but sincere - a real Jewish mensch married to Frankie (played by Lily Tomlin), a hippie dippie Californian whose faith in New Age principles is laughable to Grace (and to us - at times).  So, while Robert and Sol complement each other, Grace and Frankie are like oil and water - avoiding mixing whenever they can.

Not just the two couples, but the two families have been intertwined.  Robert and Grace have two daughters; the eldest is even more tightly wrapped than her mother and though she is now a soccer mom and married to a physician, she had an early, serious fling with one of Frankie and Sol's two adoptive sons - the white one who is in rehab as opposed to the black one who is a lawyer in the parents' firm.  Robert and Grace's younger daughter is a force of nature and therefore has had trouble keeping a job - until Grace asks her to take over her beauty business.  Somewhat improbably she is working as the CEO though she has never been able to hold a job due to insubordination, but they explain that she is better at giving than receiving orders...

The families are intertwined in one other way - they share a beach house - because, the husbands said, it was a great deal and it just didn't make sense to pass it up.  In truth - it was also a place for them to get together and tryst because they been having an affair for twenty years - and this series begins when they finally admit this to their wives - in a restaurant of all places - when they are all in their seventies.  They announce that each is leaving his wife,  that they are lovers, and that they intend to marry each other.  Well, all hell breaks loose.  First a food fight breaks out, then there is  fall out, and the fallout is explored through the 13 episodes of the series - which, since this is Netflix, you don't have to wait to see - the whole season can be seen in about six hours if you want to indulge in a Grace and Frankie-a-thon.  The series is titled Grace and Frankie in part because these two, who have always thought the other was from another planet, now find that they are the only people they know who have been jilted in just this way - and despite their best efforts to distance themselves from each other they find themselves not just thrown together, but working together to survive and understand a seismic shift that has left them each in their own way struggling to regain equilibrium.

So, this is a tightly woven situation comedy.  It doesn't have a laugh track, it has movie like sets, the language is salty and the writing is crisp.  Some of the dialogue and plot devices are very Hollywood - the setting is San Diego, but there is a decidedly L.A. feel to the family configurations.  That said, I have to admit to a small world midwest connection to this production.  My in-laws were introduced to each other by a mutual friend at Cass Tech High School in Detroit, Mary Jean (originally from Paducah Kentucky and certainly not Jewish - nor is she straight - she recently married her lover of more than forty years), who went on to become Lily Tomlin.  Their take is that this is the role that seems most like the person they still know and care about as Mary Jean.  She was the earliest of the hippies, and goofy and naturally funny, playful, but also genuine (and salty) in her interactions with her friends.

So this comic vehicle asks some very serious and complex questions about the nature of love - including very interesting and confusing questions about fidelity and about the importance of being able to publicly celebrate a union; and the downsides of moving from an affair to a marriage - the ways in which happily ever after turns out to have bumps and twists that no one would have predicted.  Though I think the central question is about whether and why it is that we have room for but one beloved in our hearts; why does our love have to be exclusive?

I am now going to construct, largely from my imagination but with clues we have from the present action, the backstories of these two couples:  The relationship between Robert and Grace is relatively straightforward.  They had a marriage that was largely based on a public union.  He was the quarterback, she the head cheerleader and their job was to raise their children and be successful.  And they accomplished this.  But this left a void for Robert.  He wanted more.  For Grace, this was enough or, even if it wasn't, it was what you could expect out of life.  So, while she resented how hard she had to work, she felt entitled to what she got out of the relationship.  Primarily she was respected - she held a valued place in the social order; she also had material goods, and, even if things weren't as good on closer examination as they appeared from a distance - even if she resented her husband - even if she did not feel close to him, and was secretly somewhat disdainful of him and his profession, and even if there were aspects of their children's lives that were mildly horrifying to her, she had made it and had it made.  And I think she thought she could count on him.  Theirs was a relationship founded on being reliable.  Then he pulled the rug out from under her.  She wasn't devastated by losing him, but by losing what being married to him meant.  And she was furious when her husband - with whom she had sex four times a year like clockwork, "turned out" to be gay.

Before I go on, sexless, or nearly sexless marriages are common.  One of the things that I hope to get to in this blog is that an important reason why I like this series is that it doesn't provide pat answers.  Why Grace's marriage was sexless is left unanswered.  And I don't know that there is an easy answer to that - and the relationship between it and Robert's sexual relationship with Sol is unclear.  I don't know that there is a relationship and I don't know that there isn't.  I think that psychoanalysts have a bifurcated history.  Within the psychoanalytic world, we recognize how complex the human condition is.  Publicly, when we offer pat summaries and "reasons" for behavior that are ridiculously reductionistic, we can be as guilty as Hollywood of oversimplifying.  All that said, how each partner responds to the sexlessness of a marriage is important.  How do they make sense of that?  What do they do with their sexuality?  In this case, does Grace sublimate - meaning allow her now unconscious sexual wishes to drive behavior - by starting a beauty company where her visage graces every box of products?  Does she have a secret sex life - secret even, perhaps, from herself?

Frankie and Sol, on the other hand, are very intimately connected with each other.  While Grace and Robert share values that are based on appearances, Frankie and Sol are connected by threads of what is internal.  When, after the break up, an earthquake hits, Sol knows just how upset Frankie will be and also how to soothe her.  He runs to her side to provide what she needs - to talk her out from under the table, and the tenderness between them is palpable.  Even as we are a bit dismayed by Frankie's neurotic behavior, we sense that Sol is not - he gets her and her loopy approach to the world and he loves her not in spite of that , but in part because of it.  Frankie, too, appreciates Sol.  She loves the spelling bee because he loves it - and more poignantly and subtly it is she who works to help Sol realize that their relationship is over and she knows how painful it will be to him to disconnect from her, but that he must to that - even though she herself is not ready to do it - and she does this while she is immersed in her own pain of having to be separate from him - something that she does not completely understand.

So what is the brittleness in this relationship?  Why would Sol want to leave?  Sol seems to be in love with the world.  He is an incurable sentimentalist who is worried, after he moves in with Robert, about having his in- home office in Robert's daughter's room displace her (where was Grace's in home office?), and has to have lots of evidence that this daughter is really not much attached to the room or the mementoes there.  Sol is the one who explains to Frankie what happened between he and Robert- that they were drawn to each other at an out of town conference when each of them had been drinking too much and they fell into each other's arms in an elevator - but then went to their separate rooms and couldn't even figure out how to speak about it for some time.  If we think about homosexuality as existing on a spectrum, Sol seems to be firmly in the middle - not so much straight or gay as in love with people, with humanity.  He is overjoyed to be able to publicly acknowledge his love of Robert, and his homosexuality, and, at least on the surface, he appears perhaps somewhat more traditionally gay (neither character swishes, though their gay friends do), but this may have more to do with a pan sexuality than one that is more heavily located in one place or the other.

So why can't Sol have it all?  Why can't he have his cake and eat it too?  Why does Robert have to give up his relationship with a person who knew how to make an entrance - something he clearly appreciates - and something that Sol recognizes is a loss for Robert - both losing Grace the person and losing a Graceful partner - Sol is too sincere to play the necessary roles.  Why can't they be civilized like the French, maintain their public marriages - do that sincerely - and continue with their private affair?

Part of the motivation seems to be in the obvious pleasure that they get from being in each other's company.  They really have trouble not being able to be apart - and not being able to publicly share the infectious love that they feel for each other.  Sol talks at one point about the dilemma of feeling simultaneously profoundly guilty for all of the chaos they have wreaked in their families' lives, and feeling tremendously joyous to be united with his lover.  And this is the kind of conflictual complication that makes this series feel genuine despite some moments that strain credibility.  There is a pleasure to illicit love.  There is something delicious about being in another's arms without being allowed to be.  And there is a pleasure in connecting with a spouse.  There is a moment in the movie "The Ice Storm" when the character played by Kevin Klein starts talking after having sex with the wife of a friend about office politics and she coldly says to him - "I already have a husband.  We are having an affair, not a marriage."  But this relationship between these two men does not seem to be about being lovers, but being more fully partners - even being business partners is not enough for them.

This depiction, of course, goes against stereotype.  These are men who are being portrayed as being straight - having straight values - and having a love for each other that is, by and large, as pure as the driven snow.  And I think there is clearly a political motivation for this depiction.  When we are in the midst of transitioning as a nation to supporting homosexual marriages, we need models of the kind of relationships that we mean to be supporting when we do that.  This feels, despite the Hollywood mores, to be aimed directly at Middle America.  And that requires supporting the model of marriage that Middle America embraces - the one about 'til death do us part.  And so this series, one about blowing up just those sorts of marriages, also happens to be about creating them.  Fortunately it does so with Grace, humor, and the messy stuff of life.  I find myself identifying with aspects of each character, and laughing and crying with them at the absurdity of living.

But I am still a bit mystified about the apparent axiom that a man or a woman can only have one true love at a time.  Of course this isn't the case.  Sol still is clearly in love with Frankie.  Robert is mourning the loss of Grace, but that is a bit different.  Theirs seems to have been a marriage based on mutual respect and a fair amount of affection, but little true romance.  So why can't Sol stay married to Frankie and just add in Robert?  Psychoanalytically, I think this is reduced to the family romance - that we have the fantasy of an exclusive relationship with one parent - and we relinquish this as part of the Oedipus complex - where we acknowledge and connect with the other parent and then go on to acknowledge other interlopers, including siblings, but we continue to harbor a deeply held belief that someday we will have someone all to ourselves and we powerfully, axiomatically believe that this is something that we will be able to achieve at some point.  Of course, in a traditional marriage this fantasy bubble is burst when kids are born and we have to compete with them for our spouse's attention.  In Sol and to a lesser extent Robert's fantasy, they will maintain their relationships with friends and children and ex-spouses, but have a different central relationship.  Making that transition proves to be every bit as complicated as one would expect - including the complication that I have not focused on - that of the title characters coming to know and love each other.  Who would have predicted that?

I am satisfied neither by Hollywood's pat answer - that gay men and women - indeed all men and women - enjoy greater pleasure in publicly acknowledged and supported dyadic relationships, nor by psychoanalysis' pat answer - that marriage is a publicly supported throw back to an infantile unrealizable fantasy no longer consciously held but still determining our behavior.  I think both are partly true - they each, in the vernacular of the social scientist account for some of the variance (and each for a different amount within each particular marriage) - but even together they are at best a partial truth.  Both because all marriages, despite similarities, are built in subtly and sometimes profoundly different ways, but also because all marriages are more complex than simple formulae will ever allow us to comprehend.  So, even though this series, by virtue of the limitations of the arts to accurately reflect life, falls short of answering the questions that it raises, it gives us, by its willingness to muck around in the sticky complications of life, plenty of fodder to explore what it is that we mean by love.

 
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Daniel James Brown's The Boys in the Boat - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reads about Team Sports as Psychotherapy

Through the first four fifths of this book I was convinced I would not write about it or, if I did, I would do so from the perspective of the limitations of writing a historical novelization of someone else's life in terms of portraying the internal workings of the mind.  But something happened near the end of the book - a subtle shift that revolved around two short sentences.  While I will still intend to write about the limitations that this perspective introduces, I think I may have a better sense of why this particular book has turned into a best seller.  Something universal seems to have been described about Joe Rantz, the central protagonist, in the sentences, "Now he felt whole.  He was ready to go home."
                                                                                                                                                                  Joe had a lot of hard knocks as a kid and then joined the eight man crew (nine if you count the coxswain) for the University of Washington who, in 1936, not only beat Cal Berkeley, the reigning West Coast crew power, but every elite crew in the East and went on to win the Olympic Gold medal in the Berlin Games.  So a lot of the book can be seen as setting the historical scene for this powerful victory - one that is, in some ways, as stirring and as filled with intrigue as Jesse Owens' victories in the same Olympics.  And the author does a very nice job of setting the stage for the propaganda fest that the 1936 Olympics was, and the ways in which the world was duped by Hitler's literal and figurative whitewashing of what was going on in Germany.  He even clarifies how the U.S.'s own Avery Brundage (the head of the American Olympic committee for a very long time) witlessly colluded in Hitler's double speak based on Avery and his class's own ingrained double speak to manage their disavowed but very real anti- Semitism.

This parallel, by the way, is, I think, a missed opportunity for the author.  He chose to emphasize, in what I thought were pretty anemic ways, the differences between our system and the Nazis and made an attempt to portray this as a victory for democracy or the American way over totalitarianism.  But to get there, he had to overlook a great deal of classism that the group overcame and, interestingly, a great deal of privilege that came their way as well.  Even Joe, with all the hard luck that he had, had opportunities that a person of color, for instance, could not have had.  More subtly, the author notes in passing but neither explains nor emphasizes that the definition of amateur, which we came to think of as a noble distinction from the professional athlete, was intended to protect the gentleman athlete from having to compete with the working class person who, for instance, rowed for a living - it would be unfair for someone like that to compete with a gentleman of leisure!  Our educational system did allow people like Joe and Jesse to compete with aristocrats, but our educational system was and is aristocratic in addition to being meritocratic, and our system protected every one of the boys in the boat from becoming cannon fodder in the Second World War - their skills, learned at the University - were needed behind the lines.  I don't want to belabor this further, but the author was portraying a more complicated world than his summary would indicate and evil was not confined to Nazi Germany; it was and is among and within us every day.

The book, though, takes a very long time to build to its Olympic crescendo as it paints the picture of Joe-  a cast off kid, the second son of his father's first marriage who is sent to live with relatives when his father remarries Joe's older brother's wife's twin sister (you might want to read that again) - a prima donna who cares only marginally more for her own children than for her stepson.  Joe moves back with his Dad and stepmother and his half siblings after being shuffled around, only to be left totally on his own at the age of 14 when his Dad and Stepmother drive off with her children and he is left on the porch of their farmhouse to fend for himself.  So Joe becomes, effectively, an orphan.  He lives on his own on the farm the family abandoned, raising food, foraging for timber and generally fending for himself through High School, and then being admitted to the University of Washington, where he did janitorial work during the school year and outdoors work during the summer to support going to school and sleeping in a cubicle at the YMCA during the winter.

At Washington, which he saved for by working for a year after High School, Joe tried out for crew.  His motivation for doing this is unclear.  The author initially states that he believes that he will get cushy or higher paying summer jobs as a result of this.  There is no evidence that this happens.  I think that the competition, if it was not what drew him in the first place, is what kept him.  He liked hard work.  I think he also liked the structure and the pecking order - he found out where he stood on a regular basis and, by working hard, he could improve on his lot.  But he was a funky crew member.  His stroke was never quite right - he was dropped from the boat a number of times, but each time he was replaced by someone who the coach thought would do better, the boat's times went down.  He wasn't the right guy, at least not yet, but he had something - in spite of his technique - that was of value.

The crew coach was a dour, driven former champion.  Terse and reserved, he used a stopwatch and a keen eye to build a team.  The wild card, though, is that the UW boats - indeed essentially all of the boats competing in the US - were being built upstairs in the UW boathouse.  And they were built by a zen like figure who observed and commented on the team, and who was assigned to figure out Joe.  This somewhat enigmatic figure, a poetic writer whose epigrams grace most every chapter heading, George Pocock, was a displaced Brit who blended the shorter stroke of those working class taxi rowers who were disallowed from the Olympics with a love for the centuries old cedars that he discovered in the Northwest.  Pocock built the boats using this wood that had a certain tension in it that allowed the boats to come alive, but also watched the boys and, as he worked with Joe, was able to find a particular kind of life within him as well.

This book is written as if the author hopes it will be turned into a movie.  Despite having access to Joe, near the end of his life as he lay dying in hospice, and lots of access to Joe's daughter, who had heard Joe's stories across the years, there is remarkably little about the inner life of Joe or the other characters.  The author is relying on historical sources - rowing was the first collegiate sport and was - in the thirties - as big a deal as college football would become - there were 100,000 spectators for some of the regattas and coast to coast broadcasting.  The newspapers reported on the progress of the crew in morning and evening editions, despite the fact that there were really only two competitions during the year - there was a lot of speculation, with not just coaches but newspapermen holding stopwatches in their hands as the teams prepared and regular interviews of the coaches - who didn't want to give anything away to the other teams.  So the book holds the attention of the readers through a description of the boats, of the crews, of the coaches, of the weather, and of the techniques of racing and it is this last little bit that opens the door to the psychological.

Pocock described to the crew, and the author describes to us what it means when a crew is functioning together - when something called "swing" occurs.  In this moment, the crew is acting as one, and the experience is uncanny - beyond rowing - it is divine.  Pocock uses this goal, something that the phenomenological psychologists like Abraham Maslow characterized as a peak experience, as a carrot to help Joe move away from a position of being defended to the point of isolation.  Pocock told this boy who had by necessity come to be incredibly self reliant, "If you don't like some fellow in the boat, Joe, you have to learn to like him.  It has to matter to you whether he wins the race, not just whether you do."  He then went on to say, "When you really start trusting those other boys, you will feel a power at work within you that is far beyond anything you've ever imagined.  Sometimes, you will feel as if you have rowed right off the planet and are rowing among the stars."

The transcendent experience that Pocock describes is one that Joe is able to work towards and experience, in spite of his history.  In ways that are merely described, he is able to carry this far beyond his experience in the boat, as he becomes a generative son - reconnecting with his father after his stepmother dies - husband, and father of five children.  As I was preparing to write this section, I received a piece of writing from a friend that described the complexities of psychotherapy - especially the kind of psychotherapy that a therapist should endure.  Joe's therapeutic interaction with Pocock is much simpler - almost cinematically so - but it does capture the essence of what a good psychotherapy should do - it should allow, through the means of a personal interaction, a person who has become separated from him or her self and others, to reconnect and to move forward with the complicated business of living.  Ideally this should be able to take place with at least a little bit of joy.

I think the interaction between Pocock and Joe illustrates another important element of treatment - many of the best treatments take place outside of the psychoanalyst's consulting room - they take place between a parent and a child or a teacher and a student or between a coach and a player.  And I am concerned, then, that my State - and others I assume - is moving away from teaching team sports in Gym - in favor of teaching students how to get fit - to use rowing machines (something the dour coach deplored) and treadmills as opposed to teaching rowing and running (and I won't even rail against texting instead of writing and conversing).  I withdrew from sports in High School - I was engaged in other things, but also afraid that I did not have the "right stuff".  While my stuff might not have propelled me or my team to the Olympics, it might have given me moments of swing, and an interaction or two with a coach might have saved a year on the couch!  It might, as it did for Joe, have helped me feel whole.

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