Psychology and Torture III – The Reluctant Psychologist Imagines: What Would Freud Think (WWFT)?

“If anyone were inclined to put forward the paradoxical notion that the normal man is not only far more immoral than he believes but also far more moral than he knows, psycho-analysis, on whose findings the first half of the assertion rests, would have no objection to raise against the second half.” 

Freud, S. (1923).  The Ego and the Id.  Standard Edition. P. 52.

The Ego and the Id is the text in which Freud describes one of his models of the mind – the one that he is most popularly known for.  This structural model solved some important problems for him, but it was always, for him, just one model among many.  I used to have my graduate students studying personality theory read this text, but they, frankly, found it too difficult and dense.  And it is difficult and dense.  It was written when Freud was in tremendous pain from the effects of Jaw cancer and the ideas were not yet clear to him, and therefore they are all but opaque to the reader.  That said, I think this model of the mind has become his signature because it seems – from a distance – clear and easy to understand and because it is, in fact, tremendously useful.  I will try, in this post, to use it as a means of understanding some aspects of the recent debacle in psychology where officers of the American Psychological Association (APA) colluded with the CIA and/or Department of Defense (DoD) to tinker with the ethical principles of the APA so that psychologists could sign off on what we later came to see clearly was torture.  I have written about the process of this coming to light here and here and you may want to read those first if you don’t have some background on the APA situation. (I have also written about my reluctance to write this post, and the dream that helped propel me to do it, here).

As a means of easing into the Ego and the Id, let’s first think about what it means to become a psychologist.  I have written elsewhere that psychologists do not engage in torture.  Well, that is both true and untrue.  By definition, psychologists, when they are functioning as psychologists, do not engage in torture because the guiding document – the ethical principles - states that psychologists “do no harm in their professional actions.”  Psychologists as people do harm.  Just ask my little brother.  I was not nice to him when I was a kid.  He would say I tortured him.  The relevant defense at this moment (of course I owe my brother apologies and other reparations, but that is between him and me) is that I was not acting as a psychologist in those moments.  Interestingly, though, if I am harming someone whom I am treating or, as in the case of the DoD psychologists, whom I am responsible for, I am, based on that statement, not acting as a psychologist in that moment.  In other words, psychologists are not psychologists just by virtue of attaining a degree or meeting a standard, but by having done that and by living up to an ethical standard at a particular moment.  The degree gets you in the door, but to stay in the club, you have to play by the rules on a continuous basis.  I will leave aside the thorny issue of the necessity of harming, for instance by taking away a treasured but malignant world view, to achieve a greater personal good – though I think that the cabal of APA psychologists who apparently colluded to align our ethical principles with the DoD’s needs intended to be invoking something like this in their position that the unusual war against terrorists created a higher good that necessitated extraordinary measures.

For Freud, we are born with a mind that is all Id – or, in German, Das Es – The It, in English.  This later disowned part of ourselves is, in fact, our primary self (for one among many disparate views of this see a review of the Conscious Id here and a very different take on development - one that has more empirical support here).  And it is, in the metaphor that has suddenly become available again this summer, the Pac Man aspect of ourselves – the part that sees what it wants and goes out to get everything desirable that is in its path, without regard for the consequences.  The Ego, Das Ich in German, The I in English – the person at the controls in Pac Man – is constrained by the reality principle – the idea that we need to wait a bit for the right moment to grab the cookie so that we don’t get caught – or we might not take the cookie at all because it is bad for us or for others.  Another way of thinking of it is that the Ego is equivalent to the ethical principles of psychologists.  It is a check on our behavior that helps us to function in ways that are good for the organism – the self in the individual, and society in the case of psychology.

At this point you might be saying, “What happened to the Super Ego?”  Well, that’s the interesting thing.  The superego is a component of the Ego.  It is one of many ego functions.  It is a big one, but not the only one.  The book is not called the Ego and the Id by accident.  Freud didn’t just forget the superego.  What he did was sneakier than that.  When we read about the Ego in textbooks, it is frequently presented as the conscious part of the self.  In fact, for Freud – and this was something the graduate students really had trouble wrapping their minds around – the Ego is largely – almost entirely - unconscious.  Conscious functioning is a very small part of the mind for Freud – and it mostly has a role as an observer, not as the author of actions.  It is the ego – a set of activities – that guides actions – and that inhibits some actions.  In this model, we are driven to act by forces that can’t become conscious, and we use those forces, we (the I or ego) direct them, to engage in activity that passes muster for us.  The Superego is one of many subsets of ego functions that guide and direct our behavior, but it is a critically important one – one that takes up a great deal of space in Freud’s model of the mind, but it is also just one among many ego functions.

The superego comes from an internalization of values through the process of identifying with the individuals that are teaching us what is right and wrong.  And this happens in a wide variety of ways for each individual and across individuals, though Freud talks about it as if we all incorporated our values in the same way.  He sees the mechanism for this as the Oedipus complex – the resolution of our inability to compete with our same sex parent for the love of the other, and our ultimate decision to identify with the same sex parent (if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em) (this model works MUCH better for boys than for girls – and it is important to realize that it is not all that good for some boys – or for any particular boy – because there are lots of little differences in the particular way this happens for each individual).

In any case, the superego is a way of describing a whole set of individual controls or control systems learned or internalized from our parents and these controls are distinguishable from regular ego controls, which are in place because they protect the self, because these protect the self in the eyes of others.  We are doing not what will result in our survival, but what will result in our receiving praise or avoiding censure from others as we imagine them.  So, one of our internal voices when we are deciding what to do in a given situation is one that says something like – If you take this course of action, everyone will love you.  This is not unlike the cartoon of the person (the ego) with the angel (superego) and devil (id) on their shoulders proposing alternate actions. 

The difficult piece with the ethics code situation is that the praise of others is not just nice, but essential.  If you aren’t following the ethics code, you aren’t being a psychologist.  This was a problem for the DoD because they needed a psychologist to sign off on their interrogations in order for them to be legal.  So they worked with a group of psychologists, the majority of whom were in the employ of the DoD, to create APA ethical guidelines for interrogations.  They came up with a loose set of guidelines – that psychologists should only sign off on interrogations that were “Safe, Legal, Ethical and Effective”.  The way that this was defined was too loose for the minority members of the committee.  The majority promised that they would produce a casebook with particular examples in order to mollify the minority - and to clarify what needed to be clarified, what was and was not ethical, which they then never did.

The guidelines were loose.  That was a problem.  The second problem was that the gatekeeper of those guidelines, the person who would determine what actions would be taken against those psychologists who didn’t adhere to them, as loose as they were, was the director of ethics for APA who had worked behind the scenes on the APA position so that it lined up with the DoD position.  When people complained about the functioning of psychologists, this person, Stephen Behnke, while publicly saying that he would bring the psychologists to task, in fact apparently did not follow up on the complaints brought to him.

This is what happens on the individual level.  We know that what we have done is wrong.  But we justify our actions.  We publicly take a stance against a particular activity – imagine a preacher preaching about the importance of marital fidelity – and then we engage in behavior that we don’t approve of – the preacher has sex with one of his congregants to whom he is not married.  Then we justify our actions.  Perhaps we take the position that the congregant needed the special closeness that we could offer – or worse we blame the congregant for seducing us (of course, we psychologists engage in this forbidden behavior as well – we sleep with our clients - see a post about that here).  Behnke, as director of ethics for APA, took the public position that torture was wrong, but privately did not act to bring those psychologists supporting it to task.   He knew – assuming the report to be correct – that his actions were wrong, and yet he engaged in them anyway.  How do we do this?  According to Freud, we have separate entities – I would call them functions – that exist internally and they engage with each other and come up with plans of action that are a compromise behind the demands of each.  In this case, the importance of self-preservation and the importance of retaining integrity appears to have been focused on the DoD cabal that Behnke led.  He was personally attached to and identified with them and what they had constructed together.  This trumped his identification with other psychologists and with APA and its ethical principles as a whole.   Freud points out how sadistic the superego, which is allied with the id can become.  In order to protect the compromise solution, and the “ethical” position that Behnke took, this analysis would suggest that it allowed him to mobilize forces to protect it – in part because it was a precarious compromise – one that he, on another level, knew to be precarious at best and publicly indefensible – by attacking those who would question it.

But the beauty, at least in this case, is that others did question it.  Just as the individual questions his or her morality – as Behnke was doing, apparently, and then strongly protecting it (methinks thou dost protest too much).  The organization – the other individuals in the organization – questioned Behnke despite his protestations.  And in doing this they were, to paraphrase the quote that is at the head of this post, more moral than we can know.  Though the Hoffman report does not address the cover-up and the resistance to it, that, it seems to me, is the front where we as a profession can be proud.  Some who knew did not compromise, but continued to question what we had done.  They suspected a rat and worked to out it.  This doesn’t always happen – it happens probably much less frequently than it should.  But knowing how it worked in this case – and knowing what mechanisms kept this from coming to light for so long, will be an important analytic part of the investigation.  And, just as in a personal analysis, one hopes that the next time we will have checks and balances, personal and institutional, in place that will allow us to more effectively – and sometimes that means consciously (in the individual) and publicly (in the institution) articulate the process that we engage in to arrive at actions.  This can be less efficient in the moment – but as the fallout from the debacle over the APA scandal will likely demonstrate -  save a lot of grief in the long run.

Post script: After posting this I realized that, for Freud, all moral systems are imposed from outside.  He had a powerful belief in the primacy of the primitive and saw it as needing to be contained by powerful, external forces.  Since his time, we have learned a lot about affiliation and attachment - internal forces that connect us to each other and that also contribute, from within the organism - to inhibiting behavior that might cause harm to others.  We don't hit others (at least when we are more mature than I was with my brother) not just because we fear punishment, but because we have empathy for them.  There is a tension, then, in our ethical systems between what is imposed or borrowed from the outside - the APA borrowed heavily from the Hippocratic oath in its principles -

and what emerges from within.  The issue as framed by the Hoffman report is that those guarding our actions - the ethics committee of APA - worked to give us latitude and, when we give ourselves latitude - as an organization or as individuals - when we are feeling our aggressive impulses constrained, we are likely to act on those impulses and to rationalize them.  We really need concrete, clear help and guidance - to articulate what is right and wrong when powerful feelings are being stirred and we are in ambiguous situations.

Btw, for a similar analysis (in so far as I can understand it) from a more systemic perspective, please see this brief posting in the BMJ.  A more personal self-analysis, from the point of view of an early whistle blower can be viewed in Forbes Magazine.  To see some of the long term political maneuvering behind the APA ethics code, look here.  For a more recent article about torture being ineffective, look here.

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Psychology and Torture II: The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Ponders the Implications of the Hoffman Report

In the wake of the September 11 2001, the Bush/Cheney administration engaged in a war on terror that included actions that we later deemed to be torture.  The American Psychological Association (APA), including its chief officers, played an important role in supporting the legality of that torture.  In order to engage in "enhanced interrogation", a mental health practitioner needs to be present to evaluate the impact of the interrogation on the mental health of the person being interrogated.  The AMA, the national association of Social Workers, and the National Association of Nurses all refused to work with the government on this project.  The APA agreed to play a role.  The organization then denied that they had done this and actively worked to cover this up.  A group of psychologists used access to a limited pool of emails to write a report about what they believed had taken place.  That initial report is available here and I blogged about that report when it came out here.  The Board of Directors of APA then commissioned a group of lawyers to investigate whether “APA ‘colluded’ with government officials to ‘support torture’.”  This quote is from the resulting investigation, titled the Hoffman report, which is available here.  To see a Freudian analysis of this situation, go here.  The Hoffman report, as of this writing, has not been “accepted” by APA, but it has been shared both with the membership and with the public.

I have been putting off writing about this for some time.  First of all the report is long – over 500 pages - so finding time to read it has been difficult, and I have not waded all the way through it yet.  Second – the topic is difficult.  And what I would like to blog about here is the complexity of that topic – which I think includes many separate topics, and why the topic as a whole is so difficult – I think understanding the components will help with that.  I am not going to cover all of the subtopics.  The report is a deceptively simple and straightforward set of information and opinions about what is in fact a dense intersection of many deeply psychological issues, and I will not be able to flesh any of them out in depth in this post.  It will take time for me, the organization, and others to sort through them.  They are deeply human issues that are not confined to this situation nor to this moment, but they are emblematic of it and at least mapping some of the territory seems to me to be a good first step. 

I have been talking with many peers about this, and have been following comments on list serves and on other public forums.  There is lots of dismay, anger, and distress, and actions that have been taken.  Three top staffers at APA have lost their jobs and more may follow.  Even more importantly, the report suggests that individuals have had torture inflicted on them at least in part because of the actions of psychologists - the psychologists were not protecting those being interrogated but actively promoting the torture (See the movie The Report for a horrific rendition of this).  In one conversation, with a former chair of my department, a different attitude was expressed.  He said, “This will blow over.”  And he is right.  It will blow over.  APA may dissolve, it may reorganize, or business may continue as usual.  This will become a moment that is taught about in ethics class (we already did that this summer on my campus), and the intensity of feeling that is currently in the air will be cleared as new storm systems move through.  But the issues will linger because they are foundational to the profession, but more so to being human and to the very complicated process of trying to understand what it means to be human.

The Hoffman report is an interesting document because it is written by a group of six lawyers who studied APA for 8 months.  They had no prior institutional knowledge of APA, though they have some knowledge of their own professional organization.  They also had little knowledge about psychology as a profession.  What is clearer to me, and perhaps to them after having written this document, is that the ethical principles of an organization are at the heart of what that organization is - in some ways it defines the organization, just as our conscience - and how we react to it - is an important definition of who we are as people.  I had come to think of the ethical guidelines of APA (the current version is available here) as being important because they are guides to good clinical practice.  They are more than that, they are also guidelines for good research practice.  And they define, in very important ways, who we are as psychologists, whether engaged in research or practice. Part of what the Hoffman folks did to get up to speed was to learn about the history of APA as an organization.  I will go even a little further back in history and then catch up with Hoffman et al.

Psychology was originally an academic discipline and could have been described as the scientific study of the human condition.  This marks a crossing of two traditions that were previously separate – philosophy, which was a liberal art and therefore used the liberal arts such as logic and rhetoric to explore humanity, and science, which was a process for observing and reporting on natural objects.  At one time science was also a subset of philosophy, and Aristotle opined about physics based on a logical understanding of the world – one that was based on first principles (such as nature abhors a vacuum).  A group of philosophers agreed to use a method to empirically determine how the world operates.  This method involved proposing hypotheses or theories and then testing them to see if, in the real world, they held up.  If not, the new information was used to tweak the hypothesis or as the basis for entirely new ways of thinking about things.  So, if I observe that I can suck all the air out of a tube, nature may still abhor a vacuum, but they do exist, and I need to think about altering what is now a theory rather than a principle.

The Hoffman report picks up with psychology as an emerging discipline for the scientific study of humans at the end of the 1800s.  At first we were trying to figure out things like reaction times and whether they differed between people. Now psychology becomes also an applied science.  So we were also trying to figure out what would predict who needed more support to do well in school.  In the US, the growth of our profession, the applied part of our work, has been closely tied to the military.  Our testing in the First World War determined who would be privates and who would go to Officer Training School.  In the Second World War there was a shortage of qualified treaters for soldiers who were traumatized by the war, so, in addition to assessment, we started treating.  Our science has also been supported by the Department of Defense (DoD), which has provided funds to study aspects of behavior that have military applications.

So, when the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 occurred, the DoD turned to us and we to them, and this was nothing new.  "How do we address this new threat?" we asked each other.  And the Hoffman report suggests that a cabal – a small group of psychologists – determined how we would do that.  This group, supposedly one that was a group of APA psychologists representing APA was dominated by psychologists in the employ of the DoD who had an agenda in mind that was based on a position that some in the DoD were taking that was in line with the position the Justice Department was taking under the Bush Cheney leadership that suggested that we did not need to be governed by international law, but by our own law as interpreted by the current administration.  There was conflict in the DoD about this, and there would have been HUGE conflict about this in APA generally, but through a collusion between (and the Hoffman report is clear that in their judgement there was a collusion here) APA officials including the chief ethics officer (a staff position), the head of the practice directorate (a staff position - and this person was married to one of the DoD psychologists - a conflict of interest), a series of Presidents of APA (an elected position), and others in the organization, there was a concerted effort to make sure that the ethics guidelines met the requirements that the DoD wanted to have in place to engage, legally, in what would later come to be seen as torture.  This was a subversion of the process that the APA psychologists should have been protecting - that psychological ethics should be determining our guidelines, we don't rent them out to other agencies to determine any more than we would let someone else dictate to us our own personal morality.

Why did the psychologists do this?  In part, there was likely patriotic fervor in the wake of 9/11.  But mostly this seems to have been the result of a guild based long term effort to improve the standing of psychology in the eyes of the DoD – an entity that had supported psychology, but one where psychiatrists (physicians who also have psychological training) had more standing than psychologists.  There may have been other side motives.  The Hoffman report does not enumerate these and I don’t think they can.  The people most likely to have such motives refused to be interviewed.  Speculation about such motives would be just that, but they might have to do with individual loyalty or competition and/or things as concerning as personal sadism (Yes, I'm afraid psychologists can be, not just a little bit, but characteristically sadistic).  Who knows?

So what are the questions that this confluence of factors raises?

1. What is the role of the Military-Industrial Complex in the functioning of our everyday lives?  How does it impact us just as a result of being citizens of a particular country?  Presidents from Washington to Eisenhower have been concerned about our dependency on war to fuel our economy as a means of pushing us into a position where we needed to be warlike to survive.  We have one set of values that we espouse for ourselves – freedom, equality.  We have always been somewhat hypocritical about this – first with slavery, and then with a variety of doctrines, Manifest Destiny being one, that protected our rights at the cost of undermining those of others.  Does our marriage to our sovereignty lead us, paradoxically, to give up control over those things that we hold most dear? This is a higher level question and it has broader roots and branches than I can enumerate here (are we responsible for exploiting Chinese workers when we buy an Ipad could be a related topic, for instance), but I do think we need to both know and own up to our role as citizens of the dominant Superpower.  We didn’t become that just by being the champions of freedom.  We are also the biggest gorilla on the block.  How does that seep through the walls that we build to protect us from many things, including knowing that we are supporting a government that can be a bully?
2. What is the role of a set of ethical guidelines in determining the identity of a professional group?  How important is it that we decide what we will and will not do?  Especially when that group is also a scientific organization?  I am going to ask what seems like a crazy question in this context, but have we failed to study torture in ways that we should have?  Do we need additional evidence – should every psychologist be able to cite the limits of torture and the damage that it causes both individually and to the fabric of a society?  Part of what has driven our ethical code’s development has been experiments like the Milgram Experiment that caused tremendous distress to individuals who engaged in them.  Do we need to focus more effort on ways of indirectly studying and documenting the impact of stress and trauma?  Do we need to know more about things like sadism?  I am aware that we know, collectively, a lot about trauma and sadism and even, I have learned from the Hoffman report, something about torture.  Have we shied away, though, from the dark side of what humans do to each other – as if we could just have a positive psychology and as if we were only motivated to help each other, when in fact our motivations are much more complex and include destructive components.
3. We need to acknowledge, and do, through various mechanisms that, despite our best efforts, our members do not consistently subscribe to the ethical principles.  I see this annually within our training program (and don’t see more than I do see).  Psychologists are human and are, therefore, all kinds of things – including prejudiced in a variety of ways.  When we act in harmful ways on those prejudices, ethical or legal sanctions should result.  In this case, the gatekeeper to the sanctions – Behnke – was apparently publicly saying that reprehensible behavior would be punished while, behind the scenes, giving free passes to people who were alleged to have engaged in unethical behavior.  How do we oversee the overseers?  When I worked in a bank I learned that all bank employees need to take vacations every year so that audits can be scheduled when key employees can’t cover their tracks.  Do we need to build more of this into our system?  Is this going to lead us to crack down on people who are making human mistakes and cause unnecessary grief?
4.  Can we build in safeguards to an organization so that it does not get hijacked by well or ill-intentioned members?  Isn’t it ironic that this should happen to the largest organization of psychologists in the world?  Should we be more humble about the limits of our knowledge and our ability to manage behavior when we have such difficulty managing our own behavior?  We can describe what has happened and why, and I think some of our theories – psychoanalytic and psychological – will be terribly important in doing that.  But despite our insights and knowledge, we continue to be human.  And there is more than a little perniciousness in that.
5. What about all the smaller stuff?  Part of this whole debacle seems to have been driven by the wish for one guild – the psychologists – to displace or find an equal place at the table with another – the psychiatrists.  Isn’t this, in some sense, tribal thinking?  On the other hand, if we don’t look out for ourselves – what will happen?  How do we balance the good of the individual (in this case, the individual organization) against the good of the whole?  And how do we recognize that winning this battle – beating the psychiatrists – results in losing two wars – one against our own sense of what is humanly right – it means that people are lead to believe they will drown and are terrorized by that – and more than that – we have ceded the war to the terrorists.  We are now communicating on their level.  Our intention is to build not just a guild, not just a nation, but a world that is just and safe and helpful.  Is this both beyond and within our bounds?  Don’t our actions with each other – whether on a large or small scale – create that society and doesn’t that ripple in ways that we cannot fathom, but desperately want to?  Does the petty narcissism, or whatever else was in the co-pilot’s seat on this one really trump the reasons that we are here?  And yet doesn’t it all the time?  Don’t we need to constantly re-gird ourselves to do what is right and to make amends for what we have done wrong?
6. Finally, do we need to ask a weird question - are ethics essentially philosophical in nature or are they also empirical?  Have we just run an experiment and collected some data and found that - for instance - making decisions about ethical codes in secret is a really bad idea?  In fact, this was pointed out by our faculty member who teaches ethics - that the dilemmas the officers faced are the same ethical dilemmas that practitioners face on a regular basis.  And isn't it ironic that one of the implicated presidents literally wrote the book on ethics that is used to teach graduate students?  To state it more plainly - aren't ethical principles - as philosophical as they might seem - actually guides to behavior and we may need to test them out - preferably by thinking about what might happen in the future rather than, as in this experiment, seeing how much damage can be done by ill conceived principles.

This has turned into a rant.  For that I apologize.  The bad news is that this is not the end of things.  The Hoffman report was looking at something very focal – it did not take on the issue of the organizational cover-up, which went on for almost a decade – and the ways that those in power may have abused that power to hush up the would be whistle blowers.  The organization is much broader than its relationship with the DoD.  How well is it functioning across the scope of its very broad mission?  Will good things go unnoticed?  Will the bad be exaggerated or hidden?

Most people come into this profession, on a conscious level, primarily because of its ideals.  That said, they are also interested in the well-being that the life of a professional provides.  The majority of people in our organization, for the majority of the time, on balance act in ways that we would universally acknowledge as ethical.  All of us, some of the time, engage in unethical behavior.  We will learn more about how close to a tipping point that balance has been within our organization and perhaps within ourselves as this organizational situation unfolds. 


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Amy Schumer's Trainwreck - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reflects on Morality and Integrity

Ok, I admit it.  I'm procrastinating.  I should be reading and writing about the American Psychological Association's trainwreck - the ways in which the presidents of our organization and the paid officers colluded with the CIA to support torture - what could be worse than a psychologist who supports human rights abuses - and then covered up what they did for almost ten years - villifying those who were trying to blow the whistle on the organization while they engage in the cover-up and after committing what may have been, at one time, understandable sins.  Yuck.

Instead, the reluctant wife and I went on a double date with the oldest daughter and her boyfriend to see a RomCom - Trainwreck, starring Amy Schumer.  Amy Schumer is a stand up comedienne who has taken on the gender bashing double standard characteristic of sexual promiscuity by making herself the butt of jokes about her drunken, anonymous sex filled apparently boundary-less life while, as all good comedians do, retaining her morally superior position by being the one who is passing judgment on her life, not letting others do that, and by being a likable person despite reporting engaging in behaviors that her audience likely partly thinks are reprehensible, partly are identifying with, and partly are admiring her bravado in articulating.  And, when the audience is a Dad who sits in on what the kids are watching in part to have an opportunity to connect with those kids and in part to monitor what they are dipping their toes into, she evokes a complicated set of emotions as he sees that she is modeling something that the children are identifying with as a potential psychological approach to the world.

So, if I am trying to avoid muck, I am also plopping myself right down into the middle of it with the reluctant daughter and her stable and responsible boyfriend.  And, while there is a fair amount of muck, Schumer and Apatow (the director) manage to construct a traditional RomCom on top of it - tightly tying together truly funny bits and gags, many of them acted by Saturday Night Live alums and current players - people who know how to put together a good sketch, and there are many of them in this film.  The star turns and cameos are also quite good, with Lebron James playing a quite (un)believeable and very likable version of himself as a Downton Abbey watching, penny pinching best friend of her ultimate love interest and saving grace Aaron, played by Bill Hader who does a credible job as the straight man - quite a feat from the guy who played Stefon in the ridiculous and ridiculously funny Saturday Night live weekend update sketches.

And, if you have been following the turns in this piece, you might think that I would have been relieved by the predictable and safe outcome of the movie.  It reassures us that all is right with the world.  The troubled and troubling daughter - the scary adolescent who is experimenting with dangerous stuff but is, at heart, a sweet girl, finds the good dedicated boy (and he's a Doctor!), gets her life in order, and moves to the suburbs.  But I wasn't.  In fact, I found myself feeling deeply disappointed.  Not by the movie as a movie; it is a well crafted and funny - at moments absolutely hilarious - movie, but I was disappointed by the developmental arc that the Amy Schumer character takes in it.

The film opens with childhood version of Amy and her younger sister being told by their father that he and their mother are divorcing.  He is a womanizer who hilariously gets them to side with his need to bed multiple partners and gets them funnily but poignantly to chant, "Monogamy is unrealistic".  This creates a very real and believable foundation for Amy's future life as a woman who is on the make for pretty much anything that walks and who also uses a wide variety of substances - the analyst in me says in an effort to soothe herself - but the viewer does not see her as being in particular pain, just floating along as flotsam or jetsam on a stream of culturally determined and constructed moments at bars, alleys and bedrooms that are oddly recognizable as the kinds of places in which single people of privilege in their twenties might live, living a life that appears fun if vapid and remarkable only in an Instagram way.  It therefore makes sense that she is a writer at a men's magazine that is focused on the inane and ephemeral oddities of urban life - fluff for the bathroom reader - working for a boss who is pushing her harder than she pushes herself.

Amy's younger sister has, in contrast, carved a very typical suburban life out for herself.  Married to a dweeb, with a very dweebie stepson, she becomes pregnant during the course of the movie.  Amy and her sister connect and fight about the care of their father, who is now in a nursing home.  Her sister is concerned about the expense, while Amy is concerned about the quality of his life - so she tries to preserve his cocaine for him so that he can have his pleasure, but despite her efforts, the sister flushes his drugs down the drain.  Meeting the father again, we get a sense of how irascible he continues to be, but also how lovable he is, something that Schumer eloquently captures in her eulogy for him when he dies.  She does not shy away from the difficulties inherent in being his daughter or his friend.  And she enacts a bitter but realistic bit of vengeance on her sister after the funeral when she caustically, meanly and sadistically claims their father for herself - enacting the sense of connection that she feels towards him - and demonstrates in her imitative behavior both in dumping her sister and through her promiscuous behavior which simultaneously lets her be like her father, but also fear being the partner of men, all of whom she feels on some level are like him and by whom she will inevitably be left - so she leaves others before they can leave her, in psychoanalytic vernacular turning passive into active, but leaving her alone and in what would be a superior position in her splendid isolation - were it not for her poignant portrayal of the angst that she feels in that space when her long time boyfriend leaves her when he discovers her consistent cheating on him (The comic displaced homoerotic undertone of this particular relationship is worthy of a blog all unto itself).

Aaron then waltzes into this picture as the subject of a magazine assignment.  He is too good be true.  Knee surgeon to the stars, he is naive and wears his heart on his sleeve - and is decidedly unsexy by the standards of the magazine Amy works for.  His parents were high achieving and demanding - or perhaps he has internalized their standards as his own through osmosis - he's not quite sure.  But he begins placing implicit demands on Amy almost immediately and only across time do they become explicit.  The primary demand is that she relate to him as a normal person would - not as the wounded bird that she normally uses as her dominant interactional lead with men.  This is strange to Amy.  His game is no game.  He simply wants to be with her - not with her contrived persona, but with something or someone more essential than that.  Despite our not having seen much evidence of her being, for instance, considerate of others, he perceives or assumes many positive qualities in her, and this creates a crisis for her.  She finds herself, against her will, being drawn to him.  And, in the process, being drawn to a better version of herself than she believes is sustainable.

Of course she fails to live up to the standard that he sets for her - and of course she can't or won't apologize for that, even though she is manifestly in the wrong.  And so, of course, girl loses boy.  And hits an even deeper bottom.  Then the girl - almost Rocky style - works to remake herself and we are in RomComVille with the typical denouement, including, along the way, reconciling with her sister.    And this remaking of Amy is where I was disappointed.  As I tried to articulate my disappointment to myself, I realized how internally inconsistent that disappointment is.  How many times in these blogs have I been the champion for love as a means to conquer difficulties?  How often do I propose that we are malleable and can overcome difficulties?  Aren't I the person who is dismayed by my children's predilection to revel in the muck on TV and hopeful that they will emerge from this, in spite of what they are being fed and choosing to seek out as entertainment, to lead high quality - not necessarily suburban - but certainly moral lives?  Don't I want to believe that Amy can meet the right - almost virginal man and let go of her wanton ways?

Yes, a part of me is rooting for this Hollywood ending.  But the analytic part notes that things are not this easy.  Not only that, but naively seeing Amy through Aaron's eyes is not enough to transform her - on some level nothing is.  We are in the midst of purging people from the American Psychological Association as a means of "cleaning house".  When we do this, the press releases emphasize the wonderful contributions these people have made to the organization over their long and distinguished careers.  Presumably because of the confidential nature of personnel processes, the facts of their involvement in the shameful actions of the organization are not mentioned.  But the implication is clear.  But they are neither pure Saints they are painted in their career summaries nor are they the Sinners we know are being run out of town on a rail.  They are complicated people - people whose wishes to promote the organization may have proven to be a tragic drive - one that has already besmirched that organization, and one that may cause tremendous damage to it, even destroy it.

Trainwreck is a romantic comedy, but I think it divorces itself from the tragic component that underlies every comedy.  It doesn't acknowledge that Aaron is drawn to Amy not in spite of her peccadilloes,  but because of them.  In their very first interaction, Amy is coyly all over the place on her relationship to sports, while we know she despises professional sports and athletes and those who admire them.  Aaron catches her in lies - and is charmed by her style of lying.  He likes that she is complicated and savvy and naive and all that she is.  He ultimately is frustrated that she does not use who she is to connect with others and to bring them together in a positive way.  The denouement enacts her willingness to transform herself into a person who helps bring others together so they can be happy - not to drive them apart.  The irony is that this is what Amy Schumer, the stand-up comedienne, does with her humor - she draws people together to reflect on the vagaries of living through exposing the vagaries of her own life.  As uncomfortable as it is for me to see my kids watching this, and as connected with superficial cultural components as her comedy is, there is also something very real and gritty about it.  She is a real person and, should my kids end up being as real as her comic persona is, I will be proud to call myself their parent, even if I am as uncomfortable with the content of their lives as I am with the self reported content of Amy Schumer's.  Unfortunately, the story book ending of this movie, for me, left open the question of whether that Amy Schumer - the person with integrity - one who knows both the good and the bad, not to mention tons of ugly - would survive the schmaltz to be the kind of partner a naive guy like Aaron needs to navigate the world.  Perhaps I should become, like Aaron, more trusting of human nature to assert itself.  

The paragraph above is the conclusion of this blog, but I can't leave without a shout out to one scene in particular.  When Amy has left Aaron, Lebron engages Aaron in an intervention with the intent of getting him to take her back.  The intervention is narrated by Marv Albert, who calls the intervention the same way he does a basketball game.  And, just as he does when calling those games, he is not at all shy about making psychological interpretations of the actions of the players.  This is just a marvelous spoof, not so much to me on interventions, as on the process of psychotherapy.  What could be more fun (and worse) than to have your internal game called by a sports announcer?  And this is in miniature also portrayal of the position of the modern comedian - a person who commentates their internal and external worlds, tying them together into a coherent understandable narrative, very much as we do in the psychoanalytic hour, bringing meaning to our lives and using humor to get enough distance from them that we can see them in a realistic if not always complimentary light.

Finally, I did get to writing about psychoanalytic pecadilloes that I was procrastinating about at the beginning of this blog- three posts worth.  The first is here and will link you with the other two.


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On Being "Cool" and "Uncool" - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Interprets One of His Dreams

When I first started work in my department, there was a secretary who worked with us briefly who had a boat.  She wanted us all to come on board for a "cruise".  The boat was big, but not big enough for all of the faculty and their spouses.  So there were two cruises, on successive Saturdays.  The first cruise included all of the "cool" faculty and I, of course, was on the second cruise.  This wouldn't have been a big deal; I was, after all, a newby, except that my friend, who was hired at the same time that I was, went on the cool cruise.

How many times does this happen across the course of our lives?  How many times are we picked last for the athletic team, or left off the invitation list to a party that we really want to go to?  And what is the impact on us of that?  Last night I had a dream that jolted me awake.  I wasn't quite sure why I was awake and was concerned that I would not be able to get back to sleep - that I was disturbed by something I couldn't quite name.  I searched around in my memory and discovered the dream.

In the dream, I was at a gathering of "the best and the brightest".  One of the students (I was also a student) complained that he (or maybe she?) hadn't gotten into two or three programs that they had applied to.  I responded quickly and with a great deal of feeling that anyone who was a member of this group could have gotten into any program that they really wanted to.  Others joined in and said much the same thing.  I wanted to clarify what I meant, but ended up saying, "If you didn't get in, it was your own fault, and quit whining."

I think this propelled me into a state of wakefulness for at least two reasons.  First of all I was being more forceful than I generally prefer to be.  I was not being nuanced and taking into account all the other considerations that might have led to the person not being accepted.  But also, I think I was speaking a kind of cold truth.  In a group of people who have what it takes to do something - whether that is smarts or athletic ability or charm or whatever it might be - some of them will "make it" and some of them won't, and that will be, in large part, because of choices they make along the way.

Now this is a sword that definitely cuts both ways.  We were watching Wimbledon on vacation, and the commentators were describing Novak Djokovic's typical day - he is the world's number one ranked tennis player and his daily regimen - he starts by drinking a warm glass of water first thing in the morning every morning - then spending a day avoiding anything that might taste good and working out in a variety of set and invariable ways - sounded horrifyingly self - renouncing; and a necessary sacrifice to achieve his desired goal of being the best among a group of very talented and hardworking individuals (Andre Agassi, see my review of his book Open, may be the last world class tennis player who could afford to be a rebel - not that he didn't work very hard...).  If you want to achieve something badly enough, you need to be disciplined enough to put up with the sacrifices that it takes to achieve it.  If you aren't, don't whine about it.  If you decide to care for your dying mother, or dance in the streets instead of taking those extra practice shots, well, that's your business...

So, yes, achieving a goal involves self renunciation (without a guarantee that the other guy won't work harder and/or be more talented or lucky and get there before you).  And, on the other side, you have warped yourself - you have lost something to achieve the goal.  You have chosen to ignore significant aspects of yourself.  Becoming "cool" involves renouncing significant components of ourselves.  We decided to do what others like in order to be accepted.  We listen to the criticisms they offer and choose to lose various "uncool" habits.  Some of these, like burping where and however loudly we like, seem to most of us like relatively reasonable things to do.  When we are devoting ourselves to a clear goal - becoming the number one tennis player in the world - it is clear what we are trading our selves in for.  When the goal is to be cool - to be accepted - it can be much more insidious.  I think that part of what propelled me awake is the realization that I pay all the time, in little ways, for the acceptance of others.  I can do it.  I can make myself conform.  I can do what is needed for acceptance.  And, as I do this, I lose something essential about who it is that I am.

Perhaps this is a big part of why we admire rebels.  They don't compromise.  They don't care what others think.  And this, ironically, is "cool".  "I did it my way."  In fact, to do it my way takes a lot of moxy.    And it takes a lot of self knowledge, something that can be very hard to come by.  One way of thinking about the dream is that the group of individuals represented aspects of myself.  That I was remonstrating a part of me for complaining that I have not achieved acceptance in important areas - areas that were achievable.  And I think I am ambivalent about that.  On the one hand, I am critical that I haven't worked harder to achieve the acceptance, in whatever form, was available to me.  On the other hand, I think I was saying to myself, "Quit whining.  You can't be all things to all people.  You need to choose what is important and get to work on that."  And, as much as I need to hear that, it brings me up short and contributes to my sleeplessness, because I would like to be all things, and try to convince myself that I can be, even thought I can't.

While I think this conflict is one that fuels our interactions with the world all the time, I think this dream calls it to my attention because of the convergence of at least three forces: one is my dismay at the continuing revelations of the mess that the American Psychological Association apparently has made of our relationship with the CIA around torture - we were trying to be "cool" and curry favor - or profits, and compromised ourselves to do that; second is that I am watching my children make tough choices as they make the transition from high school to college and work to realize their dreams, and also figure out which ones to put aside; and third, I think that my initial association to the question of my being cool in the context of my department indicates that there are issues of my integrity with my roles in the department that need to be attended to.

Waking up and recalling the dream and beginning to think about what it was about actually allowed me to get back to sleep - a deep sleep in which I worked on some of the things that I needed to address with my department, and I woke this morning refreshed and ready to tackle that work.  Addressing the 500 page document that the APA has released, and the news stories that are taking a very different tack from the official APA position will take more time.  Please bear with me.

Post Script:  I did, indeed, finally get to work on the APA issue.  I have written three posts on that here, here, and here.

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

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Phil Terman's Our Portion - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reads the Intimate Poems of His Friend

In graduate school, I roomed with two other men.  Both were graduate students in English - Dan is an essayist and Phil a poet.  The writings of both men introduce them to me - these are men that I know well - in ways that I previously hadn't known them.  On the surface, we are three guys.  We played a lot of basketball and hosted a weekly game of football that took place at the park at the end of the street we lived on.  We hosted a big party together - a "mixer" - and invited the English and Psychology departments.  In fact, they mixed not at all - the Psychologists inside, the English folks in the backyard.  We hosted many smaller parties - and got to know each other well.  Dan was married to a woman I'm not sure I ever met - though Phil liked her a great deal.  She lived in another city and she and Dan, despite his continued attachment to her, drifted apart from each other during this time.  I started dating the woman who would become my first wife.  Phil dated and married - a brief marriage.  And we talked about all of this.  About our families, about our dreams, hopes and ambitions.  And we bickered.  Famously about how to open a cereal box.  And we worked, each on our own passions.

Dan, the essayist, wrote about his life.  Big swaths of his life - his marriage - and little bits and pieces - the hats that his grandfather wore.  Phil, the poet, wrote some poetry that was romantic - and some that read more like an essay - poetry about his life and the people and events in it.  The latter poetry became his dominant voice, much to my relief, though his newer poetry contains romantic strains - but the mature romantic strains of a father, of a lover - of his wife and the life and place that they have built together and a lover of a life that is all too brief; "a hummingbird's worth of air,// the portion you were allotted,/ the dust-mote of your existence."

Now, thirty years later, Phil has published a book that contains new work and a retrospective of his old work, Our Portion.  It contains poems like his epic poem, The Used Car Lot, that I interfered in its composing with the cereal box complaint, poems about his family, and recent poems, poems about the raising of children, something that each of us is doing relatively late in life and that keeps us from spending as much time together as we otherwise might.  And these poems are both familiar and strange.  The product both of someone that I know in places that are well known to me and of a stranger, a person who is thoughtful and careful and generous and observant in ways that I have not had access to.  And sometimes that person is in places that are familiar to me - like New York City, but not in ways that I can see and know, except through his eyes.  At other times he is in places that I flesh out through what I have seen with my own eyes - his family's home in Pennsylvania - a landscape that I know intimately, and with him in it.

I don't know how you will read this book.  For me, it evokes some very particular images.  The one room school house in which Phil and his family lives is etched in my mind - the quality of light at different times of day is evoked by the poetry that he writes.  The images that I see are very particular.  In one of his poems, Phil goes to Walt Whitman's house and thinks he sees the ghost of Walt hanging out under his shoes.  When we were in graduate school together, Phil wrote his dissertation about James Wright - and in this volume he writes a poem about being James Wright's age when Wright died.  Wright's poetry, like Phil's, evokes a particular place - one that I have never been, but that is alive inside of me because Wright wrote about it.  Whitman lives in Phil through his poetry and Phil yearns to touch that poet, to know him in the flesh.

This book evokes in me more than the Phil that I have known - the living breathing Phil - it evokes a particular Phil - an intimate Phil - a Phil that I have never known, and think I could never know except through his poetry.  I have heard him read many of these poems.  I know the rhythm of his voice as he reads these poems and hear it as I read them silently.  I have talked with him about some of them.  And my experience of them allows me, I think, to have an authentic experience of him, but one that is novel - different than how I know the guy with whom I have hung out, the guy I have played basketball and football with, the guy with whom I have eaten many meals and talked of many things.  This Phil is a Phil that Phil knows and constructs in particular ways - the ways that poetry allows.

I get to know the variety of experiences that Phil's Judaism, never far from his poetry, and present but somehow in a less poignant way in our day to day interactions, has for him.  I get to know how Phil views his parents, his wife and his kids - from the perspective of Phil the poet.  I get to know a Phil and a vision of the world that is very personal and very moving.  Reading his poetry feels not unlike being present to the constructions of the world that analytic and other psychotherapeutic patients often create when they are freely associating - and by that I mean not saying whatever comes to mind as means to avoid dealing with the things they are trying to avoid, as happens at the beginning of treatment, but articulating important, moving, real and frequently quite deep connections, some of which are difficult to articulate because they don't shed the best possible light on their selves, and, by their nature, are, in fact, multilayered and full of seemingly contradictory elements that somehow, together, create a beautiful harmony.

Neither a poem nor an essay is a free association.  Both are worked and reworked, edited and left to lie fallow, only to be returned to and reworked.  Dan's essay about his grandfather's hats was one that he worked on off and on for many years.  Phil's great epic poem, the one that starts the second section, The Used Car Lot, a poem about his father, contains themes that are revisited in the most recent poems.  The material is worked and reworked.  It is published when it is complete - or as complete as such things get at any particular moment.  And a patient comes to have a more complete narrative - one that helps them articulate who they are within the therapeutic relationship, but also outside of it - though that version is, inevitably, different.  One of the fun things about knowing the writers is that both versions, the private and the public, the rough and the final draft are available, in some form, to me.  With the writers, this includes seeing the poems and the essays evolve across time, but also talking with them, knowing them across the dinner table, and seeing them live their way into their lives - lives that they are in the process of  writing about.

My reluctant wife points out that my students don't really know me.  They know the constructions of me that they have made based on my being the type of authority that I am in my roles as teacher and administrator; who I am (as the reluctant wife experiences me, which I like to think is as close to the authentic self as anyone can experience) from her perspective - one where she knows my strengths, but also my considerable weaknesses, is one that is at odds with my students' experience of me and one that I particularly value because she loves me despite the reluctances that such a view inevitably introduces, but also because those reluctances are based on my shortcomings as a person, not on my lack of abilities to fill a role defined by others (OK, she is also reluctant because of my shortcomings as a husband as she defines that role, but we can argue about that because neither of us is afraid to articulate our different and converging views of what that role entails).

The relationship between the reader and the poet, most of the time, I imagine, is a relationship with someone who, if he or she is known, is known in a particular way.  The poetry allows us access to parts of him or herself that he or she has come to know and to present to us in a particular way.  In this book we are treated to not just a layer of that poet, but to a developmental arc.  The arc from being his father's son, wrestling with what he has inherited as a man and as a Jew, a man who has a long and known and unknown line of ancestors with academic interests in things mystical, the things that sages think about - also from being his mother's son, a mother whom he loses but connects with in her Alzheimer's, and the arc of being a younger brother, one who idealizes and then poignantly loses one of his older brothers, and his parents - to the point of becoming a parent himself, and anticipating his own loss to his developing daughters.  And this arc - particular though it may be - particular to Phil and his one-room schoolhouse on Scrubgrass in Barkeyville (yes, that really is the name of the street and town where his family lives) - and as particular as the memories that are evoked for me are, this poetry taps into something universal - some part of which we all share as we move forward through this complicated thing called life, in part because it is tied together by the close appreciation of the passing of the seasons, of the world of nature, a world that we, in our suburban bubbles, sometimes seem to cruise right past, but one that is, in fact, churning beneath us, calling us out to a garden, perhaps one that is not as lush as Phil and Ganya's, perhaps the world is not as carefully apprehended as Phil's is, but his gift is to lend us that perception - to let us see, as he does, the natural world that continues to breathe, to move underneath us, holding sway, despite our wish to deny it and our movement forward, as he points out again and again, in a variety of ways, to becoming dust again.

So Phil's gift, the gift of the poet, is to introduce us to the particulars of his life - to tell us what a Schvitz is and how it fits into his life - in this case by describing it in detail, but sometimes he lets us figure things out from context - so that we come to know the world that he has lived in by repetition, the way that a child comes to learn language.  We discover the pieces of it that he casts before us, and he lets us stitch them together, these things that I would call associations, both within and between poems, to create a tapestry of a life lived fully - and all too fleetingly.  And we feel, with him, the infinite possibilities that we have not pursued.  And we get to experience with him some of the moments that he has experienced, because he has worked to bring them to life for us.  So that we, even if we have never been to Barkeyville, know what it is to help his wife, a master gardener, plan and plant a magical garden - one that feeds the body and soul - and names her - Ganya.  And we can piece this together, or we can simply place this book by the bedside and pick it up now and then and read a poem, and be transported, for a moment, to a very different time and place - one that is both strange, and very familiar.          


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

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Hannah Decker and Freud's Dora and The Supremes: The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reflects on the Changing State of Marriage in the US as We Welcome Homosexual Unions

The supreme court’s recent debate about gay marriages included an interesting bit of repartee between Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the conservative men who believed that the founding fathers would not have identified homosexual marriage as acceptable.  Ms. Ginsburg pointed out that the model of marriage the founding fathers were using was based on inequality as an essential element of marriage – an inequality based on gender based differences that they saw as critical to optimal marital functioning.  By that definition, marriage between equals, as a marriage between a man and a man or a woman and a woman was excluded – because it would make no more sense for a man or woman to marry someone of the same gender than for a man to marry an empowered woman (see the original quote here see a post questioning the binary masculine and feminine here).

Freud's case of Dora, one that has served as cautionary tale on multiple fronts for psychoanalysts for years, demonstrates how fully Freud bought into this gender differential.
Every other year, a friend of mine in the philosophy department teaches a course on Freud.  I inevitably guest lecture, and more often than not I teach about Dora, the first of Freud's five great case histories.  The last time I taught it, my friend recommended that I read a book by Hannah Decker; Freud, Dora and Vienna, 1900, which I have just finished. Decker is a historian and a feminist, and I found her reading of Freud to be consistent with mine, though her knowledge of the family background of Dora, the cultural world that she shared with Freud - including the role of judaism and anti-semitism in the case, and a particular feminist reading of the interaction between Freud and Dora fleshed out my intuitive reading in ways that brought the case more vividly to life for me.

When Freud was a young physician, just beginning his practice of psychoanalysis, something that he had learned in rudimentary form from his mentor Joseph Breuer who, along with his patient Anna O. (Bertha Pappenheimer), had applied a prototypical form of the treatment; one that involved talking freely about symptoms and what had occurred when they first emerged led to the resolution of those symptoms; to the daughter of a patient of his, whom he referred to as Dora in the paper that he published about her.  He treated her for five months before she summarily fired him (though he had promised that the treatment would take a year).   Freud, who was eager to publish findings that supported his studies of dreams and that included examples of how dreams could be used therapeutically, knew very little about what he was doing.  As a result of what he went on to learn, and what others after him have learned, we now have a much better idea of what was happening between Dora and Freud than he did at the time.  We also know this because Freud, for all his faults in conceptualization and technique, clearly observed and reported the interaction between himself and Dora.  He was perhaps the first scientific reporter of psychological data - particularly data related to the subjective experience - as a valid basis for drawing scientific conclusions, and we can still draw valid conclusions from those data.

Dora came to Freud, at her father's insistence, with a slew of symptoms.  She was suicidal, she had a persistent nervous cough, various vague neurological problems, and a host of other problems.  But mostly she was forced to come to Freud, Decker maintains (and it makes sense to me), because her father wanted to shut her up.  You see, her father was having an affair with a family friend, Frau K. - who was also an important figure to Dora - and Dora was on to them.  Herr K., Frau K.'s husband, meanwhile, had tried to force himself sexually and perhaps romantically on Dora, once when when she was thirteen and once shortly before the consultation, when Dora was 18.  Dora's father would, apparently, have been fine trading his daughter to Herr K. in exchange for unfettered access to Frau K., but Dora objected to this on many levels, including that she found Herr K. to be disingenuous, and someone towards whom, as Freud pointed out to her, Dora felt affection, just as she did to Frau K - a confusing situation for an 18 year old, especially when each of these adults, from whom she expected to have support and direction, used her to their own ends.

Dora, then, was at the epicenter of multiple conflicting relationships.  Her father, a wealthy industrialist - Phillip Bauer was his actual name - found no sexual satisfaction from his wife - a woman who was much more concerned with keeping her house clean than with connecting emotionally with those around her.  Frau K., whose children Dora had cared for, and to whom Dora looked up, had taught Dora about sex.  Freud - in what was a prescient leap from the more stereotypical positions he took elsewhere - sensed that Dora had a crush on Frau K.

[While this could have been offered and experienced as an empathic moment, Freud used it and other interpretations that he imposed on Dora more as a means of supporting his theories - in this case of the essential bisexuality of humans - than to help her have a better understanding of herself and the world around her - though I think that Freud intended to be enlightening Dora, he didn't yet get that just being told that something is the case by an authority is not the same as discovering it with a colleague or on one's own or when one is ready to get it in the context of a relationship with an empathic other (some of which Freud did get, in part through working through this case).]

Dora was also being pursued by Herr K., who, like her father, was not getting sexual satisfaction from his wife.  Freud was puzzled that Dora didn't take the attentions of this middle aged man to heart - that she wasn't smitten by his interest in her.  Ask my 18 year old daughter about being hit on by a married thirty-something year old man and you will be enlightened.  But also, Herr K. had hit on and had an affair with his maid - wooing her with the same words he "wooed" Dora, and Dora resented being treated as a mere servant - a servant Herr K. discarded when he was finished with her.  Freud, on one level, didn't get all of this.  He was even more blind to the ways in which he himself was a player in this drama - that he was an older man (who wasn't getting sexual satisfaction from his wife) who was listening to a young girl and talking with her about intimate things, including sexual things.  He hid his own feelings, and potential feelings that Dora might have had towards him behind a veil of duty and medical/scientific objectivity.

When I teach students about this case, I use Dora's dreams as a means of understanding the complexities of the situation from her perspective, including the role that Freud plays in her life, but following Decker's lead, I will think in this essay more about the ways in which Dora is caught in a gender role trap of her (and more than we like to admit it, our) generation.  Dora wants to be emancipated in ways that Freud can't comprehend.  She wants to be free to go to school - to think her own thoughts - and, I think, to be loved by someone who can appreciate her.  Despite having been disappointed by her mother, her father, Frau K., and Herr K., she still, at least at the beginning, pins her hopes on Herr Professor Dr. Freud.

Maslow's Hierarchy from Cheung et al. 2015

I think Dora is disappointed by Dr. Freud because she has a high stakes model of marriage in mind - one that won't be invented until years later and one that has been recently written about.  A 2015 article summarizing, in laymen's terms, research on The Suffocation Model of Marriage by Eli Finkel, Elaine Cheung and others (see a link here, though you made need to reference this link through your library if you don't have an account with the publisher of the journal - my apologies), describes three eras of marriage in the US.  The first, which they see as spanning 1776-1850, is what they call the institutional era - where marriage was primarily focused on filling Maslow's physiological and social needs.  These marriages were, from the perspective of these authors, primarily economic means of forging a utilitarian team effort to manage the challenges of the world around the pair.  During the companionate era (1850-1965), marriage met increasingly "sentimental" needs - needs like being loved, loving, and engaging in romantic relationships.

I think Freud was operating, as he was thinking about Dora, primarily from the institutional perspective with a dash of the companionate.  My guess is that Dora was operating partly from the companionate, but also from the self-expressive era perspective (1965-present) - one in which marriage is used to support self-discovery, self-expression, and personal growth - something that Freud felt totally supported by his family and his wife in doing - in part because he was a male - but one that he was not yet willing to support Dora or his wife in - not realizing that this was an innate human desire, not just a masculine one (and Decker would go on to point out that any empowered group would not recognize the right of a disempowered group - the Jews in Vienna at the turn of the 20th century for instance - to exercise their autonomy needs).

What Finkel and Cheung point out is that engaging in this higher form of relationship is one that requires a huge investment of time and emotional energy, at a time when there is tons of competition for our time from other entities and thus our marriages and families are frequently last on our priority list rather than first.  They suggest, then, that while this newest marital model affords the possibility of much greater satisfaction than earlier models - there is also a huge risk - we may fail to support each other in the ways that we expect - indeed, feel entitled to - and this may lead us to feel suffocated in our marriages rather than supported.  The metaphor they use is that climbing the mountain of Maslow's hierarchy of needs results in less available oxygen, and therefore we need more interaction to counteract the suffocation that can take place when less oxygen is available.

In fact, I think that all three models have always been available, particularly for privileged couples, which Dora and all of her potential partners certainly were, despite their gender and religious limitations to that privilege.  Her own (and their) physiological, affiliative, and aspirational needs were always potentially in play in the relationship.  Freud chose to ignore the affiliative and the aspirational in his relationship with Dora, famously wondering whether he could have helped Dora by playing a part - pretending that he cared for her.  Freud recoiled from this possibility, dismissing the cure that could have arisen as false - dependent on the relationship with the therapist rather than something that belonged to the patient.  In fact, though, it may be that we need the support of others to achieve that which is most particularly our own (Harper Lee's new/old book Go Set a Watchman nicely illustrates this).  We may have buried this realization in the fabric of our received lives, where inequality is hidden from all but the oppressed, who are cautioned not to speak of it.

Decker, while acknowledging that Freud helped Dora in small ways that her other treatments, mild electroshocks and hydrotherapy did not, points out that Freud and Dora - and the entire Jewish population of the European continent - were swept by much bigger forces than psychotherapy can address - the institutional racism that led to the holocaust and forced them into parallel harrowed lives.  In this the reader might conclude that the needs of Dora - the needs to be accepted, to be loved, to be supported so that she could achieve the kind of psychological autonomy that would allow a woman like her, in the person of Ruth Bader Ginsberg a century later (and four other individuals including two more women empowered in ways unforeseeable when Freud was practicing) to see that, despite inherited beliefs, people can be conceived in radically different ways than we have previously done and, through doing that, we can reverse tides as powerful as those that swept through Europe and destroyed so many lives.  In other words, Decker does not seem to understand that the kind of listening that Freud engaged in with Dora - imperfect as it was and in many ways still is - opened up our inner lives to scientific study.  Not just the artists but the scientists could explore and validate the subjective experience of all people, including the oppressed, and these could become the basis for sweeping change.

We are not done.  Racism, classism and homophobia may always be with us.  But isn't it ironic that a man's efforts to help his fellow man suppress his daughter's concerns should play a part, and not a small part, through listening to the subjective experience of that daughter - while suppressing her - and reporting her thoughts, along with his prejudices, that this might be one of many streams that join to form rivers -- well, my metaphor will break down because rivers don't turn tides, but there is a flow that is working counter to the powers that Decker cites, powers that are still very much alive - the people at the beach house across the way raised, saluted and took pictures of a Confederate flag today, one they are now flying underneath the American flag - and that the flow is towards having more of those days when Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream - and that of Dora - can be realized: that we are judged by the content of our character, not by the form that our character inhabits.

Ironically, as Finkel and Cheung point out, the closer we get to this goal, the rarer the air.  The more we will feel suffocated by our failures.  The more we will need to rely on each other to be engaged with each other - to hear each other out - to achieve what feels more and more possible but further and further away the closer that it gets.  Finkel and Cheung note that as marriage has become potentially more fulfilling, the rate of divorce has increased.  We will likely see more, not less, difficulties in engagement the closer we get to the summit.  We are likely to be more, not less, disappointed in each other as we fail to live up to each other's expectations.  Finkel and Cheung - and Freud - and Decker would all have us engage more fully especially at the times when we feel most disappointed, a tall order indeed.

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