Katherine Faw Norris' Young God - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Goes Primitive

There was a period of time after the reluctant son was born when I could not watch much TV.  Seeing someone die would tear me up.  This wasn't just some actor pretending to die - nor was it some person irrelevant to the story who needed to die so that things could move along.  This was someone's son or daughter who had died and they were not going to be able to recover from it.  David Lindsay-Abaire, who wrote the play Rabbit Hole about a couple who lost their child, gets this.  In talking about writing the play, he said that he remembers being a writing student at Juilliard and his teacher telling him to write about what terrified him.  He remembers thinking, "I got nothing."  Then he had a child.  And he said, "Oh, so this is what she was talking about."

Don't read this book if you or your spouse have recently had a child.  Or have adopted a child.  Or if you are attached to a child.  Especially a thirteen year old child who might, in some way, remind you of the hero of this book - the Young God, Nikki.  This girl has grown up seven social rungs below white trash.  In the opening scene, after Nikki has successfully made the jump, her mother goes off the wrong side of a 50 or 60 or who knows how many feet high waterfall leap  into a river - which kills her - and Nikki flees the scene with her mother's boyfriend so that the police won't pick her up for being truant or return her to the group home she has run away from.  The boyfriend takes her home and, because he "wants to stick his dick in her", has sex with her.  And then she steals his car to go find her daddy who might be out of prison.  Only to be disappointed by him when she finds him because he is no longer the biggest and best drug dealer in the county.

OK, I've probably given away too much of the plot - and my summary may be wrong because it hangs together and fills in details that are, at best, hinted at in the book.  Instead of telling a story, Norris careens from describing one scene to the next.  And, though I think she offers an homage to J.D. Salinger on about the third page when Nikki states the river is witch-tit freezing (Holden Caufield in Catcher in the Rye is the only other person I have heard in life or in literature state that it is as "cold as a witch's tit"); this is not a schizophrenic break of a privileged kid, nor is it the existential crisis of well read, intelligent, upper west side Franny Glass, nor is it wrapped in literary confection.

Norris is though, I think, reaching for literary greatness.  Her style is more like Hemingway than Caufield, because it is brutal and spare, but I think she is trying to capture the psychology of her subject - to help the reader know what it is like to be Nikki, just as Salinger let us know what it is like to be Holden - though I think even more so Franny.  She does this, as Salinger did, not by writing in the first person, but by writing in a style that reflects the functioning of the hero.  In this case, the world is immediate -things are described simply and clearly - the visual images are bright, but there are smells and feelings - itchings - as well.  Stuff is spatially oriented.  Temporally, things jump from one moment to the next - especially as drugs enter the picture and a scene stops when consciousness does.

Nikki's character is as spare as the style of the writing.  And how complex could she be?  She has been trying to survive in a world that is not built to provide the care and attachment that builds a complex, Salinger-like character.  Instead she is curious and driven - she wants to be on top - not to be a victim of circumstance.  She wants to be a player, not the one played.

In this, Norris comes close to making the mistake that I think Stieg Larsson makes in his Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series.  There, Steig, a man, characterizes trauma as an organizing rather than a disorganizing factor in the life of his heroine.  As I read it, this is a male fantasy of being able to attack a woman - to harm her - without hurting her.  Instead, she benefits - honing her anger into the ability to achieve revenge.  And this myth apparently plays well with the women who, I assume, are the primary consumers of it.  They like to identify with the heroine who is impervious to - or at least makes use of the slings and arrows of the powerful other and ultimately is able to bring him down.

Nikki is not unscathed (nor, to be fair, is the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo).  And the quality of the damage is portrayed as much in the dissociative quality of the chapters - representative, I think, of the state of Nikki's mind - not in a description of her thoughts.  What we know is that she is powerfully curious and ambitious.  What might be missing is a sense of attachment - or a longing for that and using the cruelty of others as a masochistic substitute for the desired connection.  And this creates the experience of the psychopath - the antisocial personality that is dispassionately disconnected from those around him or her - seeing others - using them - as a means to an end.  She is also thirteen.  How psychopathic and how in the moment is she?  How self aware?

I was struck, in the middle of reading this book, at just how dependent Nikki is on a world that is completely foreign to her for her to get along.  She needs not just the cars that she is stealing and learning to drive - and the guns which she learns to clean and load and fire (both the result of highly sophisticated engineering and manufacturing knowledge)- not just the ax that she uses in various ways and the lessons about how to dispose of a body so it won't be traced, she needs the highways and the trucks that carry the heroin that she will sell - the hotel owners who keep open the run down motel 7s that serve as brothels.  She needs a world she neither cares about nor understands, but she doesn't sweat that (Of course, again, to be fair, we take these things for granted too, certainly all thirteen year olds do, but we who are out here are a bit curious about or knowledgeable of them.  Nikki isn't).  She takes what emerges.  Learns what she needs to survive, and uses it to create a space where she can thrive.  Or come as close to that as her circumstances will allow.  And she gets that this is a very precarious world and she needs to be vigilant in it.  How long will she make it?  We don't know.

I have referred elsewhere with concern and puzzlement to Freud's weird position that to be truly happy - meaning most in line with our drives - doing what we were built to do - we should be having sex with all those we want to and killing those who get in our way.  Nikki achieves this Freudian Nirvana state, but it looks a lot more like a Hobbesian nightmare - a life that is nasty, brutish and all too likely to be short.  She seems to be hurtling through her life - not unlike the reluctant stepdaughter on her way to college - but the stakes, if anything, seem higher.  Well, they are - there is mayhem in the stepdaughter's life but precious little murder.  That said, Nikki's life will be little noted nor long remembered - despite her ambition.  The reluctant stepdaughter lives in a very different social web than the one described here (OK, maybe I am somewhat defensively taking some distance).

The reluctant stepdaughter, even though she is reluctant to acknowledge her part in thinking about her experience, can do that.  Nikki can't.  The Oedipal themes that are played out in this book do not evoke reflection on her part - nor, at least in my case, on the readers.  They do not evoke particular aversion for her - except that Nikki's father does not live up to her expectations.  In fact, they don't seem to evoke much of anything - except acting them out.  We become numb to the sexuality and the violence - at least I do - it is simply the next bit of action that occurs.  And I think this is intended to convey the experience - and that is that this occurrence just is - it is experience unmediated by thought, guilt, or inhibition of any sort, the experience of Nikki. It is as close as we can get to what Freud thought was the natural state.

Don't read this book if you have just had a child.  Do read this book if you want to get a sense of what it might be like to try to stay on top of the wave rather than to be swept under by it if you are a kid at the very bottom of the food-chain in the United States.   Read it if you, like me, are curious about what this state of being might be like.



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Steve Jobs through the eyes of Aaron Sorkin and Victor Strecher – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst has Visions of Vulnerability

A Meaning Driven Life was the title of Victor Strecher’s talk today at the reluctant wife’s Temple today.  In it, he quoted Steve Jobs wish to “put a dent in the universe”.  Coincidentally, we had been to see Aaron Sorkin’s film about Jobs yesterday.  I am a big fan of Sorkin (see a recent essay on The West Wing).  My guess is that Sorkin is pretty full of himself.  Maybe not so full of himself as Steve Jobs was, but full enough of himself that he might have identified with Jobs enough to have written a film – not unlike his film Social Network about Mark Zuckerberg – that makes this tremendously talented but also intensely narcissistic person, if not likable, at least sympathetic.  I was surprised, then, at how brutal the film was – at how much I cared about the characters and how hurt I was by their actions – by how human the film felt.  And it was Strecher’s talk today, one that brought out themes from the Religion and Psychology talk I attended and wrote about last week, but didn’t include in that post, that helped crystallize for me what I think that Sorkin was getting at.

Strecher’s talk was organized around a personal experience that, in his words, broke through the defenses of his ego.  The experience was not one that broke him.  Quite the contrary, and this distinction is important, he characterized it as having broken him open.  His daughter was born healthy, but was infected by the chicken pox virus when she was six months old and it attacked her heart.  He was told that she would die within a month, but there was a chance she would survive with a heart transplant.  He talked about that with his family and they decided to try the transplant because there was a chance that she would not just survive but be able to thrive and they committed to helping her live a big life.  She did survive, but needed a second transplant at 10 and would have needed another one soon after her twentieth birthday, but she did not live long enough to need it.  She died at 19 of a heart attack, and the grief at her loss is what broke Strecher open.

The movie Steve Jobs is also organized around the relationship between Jobs and his daughter, and I think the intent is to help us see into the box (a section of the film was devoted to Jobs’ obsession with the Cube – the failed product of the company NeXT that he started when he was fired by Apple – and it not being perfectly cubic) that was Jobs (played by Michael Fassbinder)– the box of a person so intensely focused on having everything about himself be perfect that no imperfection could intrude.  His daughter Lisa (played by three different actresses at three different ages, Perla Haney-Jardine, Ripley Sobo, and Makenzie Moss), born out of wedlock to a woman he despised, personified such a threat.  So did Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen), his Apple co-founder who had the engineering chops to make the computer work.  And so did Andy Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg), the nebbish guy who helped his daughter find a therapist and paid her tuition when Jobs, in a snit, refused to do so.  Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet) the chief of advertising for Apple but mostly the personal assistant to Jobs and, to a lesser extent John Sculley (Jeff Daniels), the CEO (for a while) of Apple and father figure to Jobs, worked hard to help him keep the box together, but that proved difficult for each of them.

At one point in the move, Wozniak states, “It’s not binary.  You can be decent and gifted.”  Victor Strecher proves this point.  He brings ancient and modern philosophy and contemporary social science together to demonstrate that the purpose driven life leads to better health outcomes.  His website, www.dungbeetle.org includes both information about his graphic novel that illustrates how his grieving process broke him open and an app that will both help you articulate a purpose, but also to track how purposefully you are living.  And he does this while being incredibly personable and connected.  He talked about the Greek statues of their Gods being made of terra cotta, but having within them a gold bust – and that this inner bust – the bust within the bust that you would have to bust the bust open to see – is a representation of the daimon.  The same daimon that Socrates referred to in order to stay oriented in a turbulent and confusing world. 

To live a purpose driven life, Strecher, now quoting contemporary research, maintains, we should live a life that is eudaimonic. This is straight out of Socrates – eu and ic surround the daimon – and the researchers (including Strecher himself) mean living a life that is consonant with our internal compass – that little piece of gold that is at the very center of our being.  The scientific literature contrasts eudaimonic with hedonic living – living that is based on sensual pleasures that emerge in the moment.  Strecher cited numerous positive health outcomes related to eudaimonic living –including fewer strokes, lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease, and a lower risk of death related to heart disease.  He is not condemning pleasure – in fact a little hedonism fits nicely into a eudaimonic life – but a life without a keel – one in which we are skittering across the surface bouncing from one entertainment to the next – is not one that is conducive to health.

Strecher, at least in my mind, took a bit of a left turn here, in answering a question from the audience.  He noted that etymologically the daimon became the demon of religion and proposed that religions began to impose rules in order to squelch the daimon.  I think it is a little more complicated than this – both the protestant and the counterreformation movement – led by Ignatius Loyola – helped the individual reclaim their direct connection with the spiritual world.  Loyola, in particular, wrestled with the question of how to distinguish good spirits – I suppose demons or daimons – from bad ones – a question that the reluctant wife and Strecher puzzled over together in the question and answer period.  Who is to know whether an action that is taken based on one’s conscience is in line with God’s will or not?  Abraham Lincoln was said to say that he hoped God was on our side, but he was smart enough to know that he couldn’t know that for sure, even if most of us would now question why he would wonder.  But it ain’t that easy.

And it wasn’t easy, at least from Sorkin’s position, for Jobs to discern what was right and what was wrong.  In one of the early brutal scenes, Sorkin denies his parentage of his daughter Lisa to her mother and, at the same moment that he disowns her, cruelly explaining to Lisa that he did not name the Lisa computer after her – that Lisa is an acronym - he is clearly taken by her – engaging her in play with the first Mac – and doting over her as he teaches her how to save her creation.  His solution to this dilemma is to remain in her life as a manipulative presence with intermittent contact while she remains in the care of her well-meaning but poorly prepared to parent mother – an unstable woman who is fiscally irresponsible.

Jobs is able to justify his mistreatment of Lisa in the same way that justifies his mistreatment of the Apple employees who have kept the company afloat – their imperfections make them obsolete and worthy of his disdain.  He thrived on making things perfect, and if your actions could help him achieve that, you were of use to him.  John Scully, the father figure, notes with Jobs that he was adopted – and tries to assure him that he was chosen by his adoptive parents rather than not discarded by his birth parents – to assure him that’s how it’s done.  Jobs replies that his first adoptive parents kept him for five months and then returned him and, even more poignantly, that his second adoptive family didn’t meet his mother’s requirements, and, because his adoptive mother feared the mother would be able to veto her as the parent, refused to love him while he was in her care until she knew that she would be able to parent him.

If anything can screw up the ability to get in contact with one’s daimon, an early childhood history like that has a very good chance of doing that.  Jobs decided that he needed to be perfect.  I think it went something like, if I am perfect, I will never be rejected again.  Wozniak, in a recent interview, suggested that the real life Jobs made some kind of transition when Apple became a real company, and moved from being a screwball guy who engaged in pranks to being a person who was so committed to what he was focusing on that he didn’t care what others thought of him.  His disregard for others' negative views towards him became then his greatest strength – he could assert what he wanted without fearing the interpersonal consequences – but also his tragic flaw.  He was closed not just to criticism, but to the love that others might have offered him and that he might have offered to others who could have been dear to him.

Strecher’s grieving of his daughter closed him off from the world.  As one of his friends said to him at one point in his grieving – “Don’t you have another daughter?”  For Stretcher, the moment of being broken open was a moment that came in a dream – a moment of seeing still water.  He had read a poem that urged him to stay awake after a dream and to make use of it, not to turn over and go back to sleep.  He woke and, because he was at his cabin on Lake Michigan, he allowed the dream to propel him into his kayak which he rowed far enough offshore that land was almost out of sight, at which point, at sunrise, he felt infused by his daughter and felt her urging him to live – to return to living – to let go of her as a weight and move towards carrying her with him as he moved forward in his life – or even, perhaps to allow her to help sustain him as he did that.  This moment was the moment in which he felt most broken open – and most open to choosing a new direction – to live, and I know this might sound hokey, with purpose.

Jobs moment of breaking open is much more constricted.  He is able to acknowledge to his daughter, at the urging of the Kate Winslet character, that he is “poorly made”.  This acknowledgement of his imperfection, this owning of his failings – including and especially as a parent – is a far less than complete acknowledgement of all that has gone on between them.  It is also not a reformation of his life – nor of their shared life.  It is not an infusing of those lives with the kind of meaning that Strecher is referring to.  But it is a start in that direction.  It is an acknowledgement of his brokenness and of his being broken open both by Lisa and by his attachment – very much against his will, but I think in harmony with his daimon – to her.  It is also a window into the closed world of the perfect narcissist – a window that we infrequently get.  Having written that, I am aware of a terrible irony.  Narcissists frequently live with their antennae set on transmit - we hear everything, but have access to nothing truly intimate.

These two events have led me to think about the fact that psychoanalysis was born as a clinical discipline rather than as a philosophy.  I think that is because it emerged out of the moments of being broken open that bring patients to the offices of a psychiatrist, psychologist, counselor or social worker – but also a priest, rabbi, imam or other religious figure.  Psychoanalysis is a scientific explanation for the organization of the self that grew out of contact with moments of breaking open.  Indeed, I think the method that Freud proposed, the abstinence of the analyst in his or her stance to the patient, encouraged multiple moments of being broken open as part and parcel of the healing process;  that the ego must be broken open for the daimon to be able to emerge.  While he proposed that the interpretation of the analyst lead to healing, we are now more prone to believe that the relationship with the analyst promotes this; that in those moments of openness, we need a daughter who can forgive us, no matter how beastly we have been.   Whether we, like Strecher, have been beastly to hang onto her or, like Jobs, to ward her off, we need to open ourselves to her and embrace her, to take her into our hearts, and, by doing that, to become more fully human – carrying our flaws and our virtues into places where they can be embraced by those who can appreciate that we are, indeed, doing the best we can to live up to our daimon – even if we can, at best, poorly apprehend him or her at any given moment.   

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Religion and Psychology – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Learns from Ken Pargament about Mixing Faith and Science

Ken Pargament presented to my department on Psychology and Religion on Friday.  What a treat.   Ken is a clinical psychologist who has been looking at how studying religion can help us provide better care to our patients in various settings.  He started – and ended – by pointing out that how we go about gaining knowledge differs tremendously between scientific and religious traditions.  He attributed the schism between the two camps, in part, to the differences between the assumptions about knowledge.  In particular, he noted that, as psychology matured beyond the original founders – Wundt in Europe and James here, both of whom were interested in religion as a psychological event- as psychology turned increasingly to an empirical base for its evidence, Freud’s psychoanalysts and Skinner’s behaviorists dismissed theology and religion as psychologically determined phenomena – Freud articulated it as a defensive strategy (see Freud’s Final Session) and Skinner as an example of superstitious behavior (meaning behavior that was randomly reinforced.  Pargament noted that science is characterized by skepticism, observation, empriricism, pragmatism, and replication while spirituality is characterized by faith, revelation, intuition, religious authority, and mystery.

The upshot of all this was that religious behavior was dismissed by scientists rather than studied.  But it was also the case that psychology (broadly) has attracted individuals – both basic scientists and practitioners - whose beliefs are wildly at variance with those of the population as a whole.  This can be measured in various ways, but religious believers make up about 25% of psychologists, while 95% or more of the people that they study and serve endorse religious beliefs.  And various factors including, I believe, beliefs about separation of church and state, but also more idiosyncratic stuff – like feeling threatened by religiously based practitioners - lead to health interventions by professionals who are largely uninformed by a big part of the patient’s life (and psyche).   This causes some disconnects – including between practitioners who believe they are offering a secular intervention, but, when participants are interviewed afterwards, it turns out that they have attributed changes that have taken place to the God they were praying to when they were supposed to be simply urging themselves to relax.

So a psychoanalytically sensible intervention that Pargament described is offered to women who have been traumatized early in life and have difficulty conceptualizing God in a benign or helpful manner.  Nichole Murray-Swank has created a protocol for helping people visualize a Loving God.  This makes all kinds of psychoanalytic sense.  We build concepts of people out of our earliest experiences.  When those are corrupt, so are our conceptualizations.  Helping individuals work to create benign or positive experiences of others – including God – is part of what we work to help individuals do through object relationally based conceptualizations and interventions.  Partly we do this through the integrity of our work.  Murray-Swank is proposing a more directed means of doing this.  She offers visualizations of God as a cleansing waterfall that pours through the body.

How would having a more benign view of God help?  Pargament proposes that religion and spirituality, when they are helpful, can be particularly so at transformative moments.  These moments are sometimes thought to be existential moments – when we are confronted with death or loss of meaning or a sense of being abandoned.  And these moments can, under spiritual guidance, prove to help individuals be able to cope with potentially debilitating experiences.  Of course religion can also be harmful at such moments, just as treatment can.  But we have a lot to learn from spiritual traditions (see a post about JesuitSpirituality).

Pargament offered some very simple and direct observations about how to improve our clinical functioning.  He suggested that we include questions about spiritual beliefs in our routine questioning at the start of a treatment.  Simply asking lets the patient/client know that this is not something that is off-limits, but something that the therapist is curious about.  A friend of mine – a Monk (see The Wired Hermit) – went into analysis and a number of his friends joked that his religious delusions would be analyzed out of him.  His position, and one that turned out to be the case for him, was that his beliefs, being an integral part of him, became more so as part of the treatment. 

Though my friend found that psychoanalysis deepened his faith, that is not to say that he has no doubts.  Pargament notes that doubting is part of faith and counsels religious advisors to discuss their own doubts and spiritual crises to help those who are confronting such crises normalize their experience rather than to feel further isolated – as if what they are experiencing is unique and a mark of failure.  Similarly, he believes that spirituality can be improved by using psychological principles and knowledge. For instance, in addition to supporting articulating crises of faith, he suggests that a developmental model of religion, one that clarifies how our sense of God changes across the lifespan, so that our childhood concepts, while still relevant, are fluid and become more complex and layered as we ourselves are better able to understand and integrate complexity.  While regular cognitive psychological developmental literature could contribute a lot here, psychoanalytic developmental theories may be particularly useful to religious and spiritual practice.

Of course, being at an institution that is both religiously affiliated and has a large undergraduate program, I think there are opportunities to integrate psychology of religion studies into the breadth of the curriculum.  Developmental psychology could, for instance, illustrate the developmental arc described above as part of the teaching of development.  Similarly, Social Psychology could talk about the influence of religious communities on members, Abnormal Psychology could talk about the distinction between hearing voices and religious traditions of having conversations with God – and could note, while they are at it, that auditory hallucinations of loved ones who have died are normative – more than half of us experience them – rather than a symptom of madness.

The most interesting part of the talk to me, however, was when Ken returned to talking about how it is that we know things.  A lifelong researcher who has put his faith in science, he recognizes that there is a faith aspect to being a scientist – Why do we believe that a probability of < 5% of an event occurring is the sign of something being valid?  But he also sees that data tell us about the world.  He believes, though, that most of us don’t count on data.  Nor do we rely on an organized faith based vantage point for organizing our view of the world.  He says that mostly we just know what we know – we believe what we believe and we don’t really question why. 

Some have argued that psychoanalysis is a faith based tradition.  That there is a shared vocabulary for understanding human experience and that this vocabulary is what is important, not so much how well it maps onto actual human experience.  That may be the case, especially at some moments in our work.  But we may be even more insidious.  We may just know what we know because it feels right.  Mark Solms (see the post on the Conscious Id) has maintained that this is how we know, even at our most sophisticated, but I think there may be lazy “knowing”, this every day knowing that psychoanalysts, psychologists, and people of faith engage in all the time.  And this kind of “knowing” is something that I think we are built to engage in.  It is the knowing of prejudice.  It helps us function more efficiently, but at great cost.  If I am understanding Pargament correctly, faith traditions and scientific traditions have a lot to learn from each other not just pragmatically – both have useful ways to intervene with people in need – but more fundamentally.  We can become better at knowing by working to understand how each other’s traditions come to agree on what is known – but also what is not known.  Pargament maintained that what is characteristic of both types of knowing, when practiced diligently, is that they lead us to be able to be surprised.  And thus, within both traditions, we remain curious, hoping to better understand the world and reveling in knowing that we cannot know all that there is to be known (including that our tradition, whichever it is, is the only one that can validly determine what is known in the world).

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Life of Pi and Getting a Dog - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst sees Life Reflected in Art

We live in an urban neighborhood, one that was once grand, and still is, but it is now surrounded by decidedly mixed neighborhoods and ours becomes, periodically, the target for individuals or groups.  Most recently a group of teenagers has been going around the neighborhood, casing houses, and returning to those that are not well protected to rob them.  I stupidly left a basement door open after a weekend of working in the yard, and these kids discovered that and returned to rob us.  The reluctant wife was, understandably, furious about this (as was I).  She also felt violated and concerned about our well - being.  So she decided that we should act on a long held notion of getting a dog - not someday, but now.  She fell in love, on an internet website for adopting dogs saved from the pound, with Mack, a two year old bull mastiff mix who is, in person, a handful.  He is a delightful, exuberant dog who has, in the words of our dog trainer, not learned his manners, and our job is to teach them to him.  But to do this, we have to establish dominance and maintain it on a consistent basis.

That is also the task of Pi, in the book and now movie Life of Pi.  Named Piscine Molitor Patel after a beautiful swimming pool his Uncle enjoyed in Paris, Pi shortened his name when Piscine, which sounds like pissing when pronounced, became a way for his schoolmates to snicker at him.  The aggressive reclaiming of his identity by transforming it and owning it is a beautiful foreshadowing of what will be the center of the later narrative.

Born and raised in French Colonial India, an economic downturn leads the late adolescent Pi's family - he has an older brother, his mother who is the botanist in the family business, a zoo that his father, a business man, runs - to leave the country on a freighter with the animals from the zoo which they will sell to establish a new life in a new country.  They never get the opportunity to do that because the freighter sinks in a terrible storm and Pi ends up on a lifeboat inhabited by himself, an orangutan, a hyena, a zebra, a rat, and Richard Parker, a bengal tiger.  The zebra has a broken leg and is eaten, shortly after the rat, by the hyena, whom the orangutan hits.  The hyena then kills the orangutan and Richard Parker emerges from below the canvas, where he has apparently been sleeping off the effects of the seasickness medicine he was overdosed on, to kill the Hyena, leaving only he and Pi to face over two hundred days together on the open sea as they drift across the Pacific to finally make landfall in Mexico.

Pi was initially taken by Richard Parker when he shows up at the zoo.  He imagines that he sees some intelligence in his eyes and tries to connect with him.  Pi's father disagrees and asserts that Pi is merely seeing the reflection of his own soul in the eyes of the tiger.  Being stuck on a lifeboat with a tiger and a bunch of crackers let's Pi test his father's theory and discover how we mirror each other - as humans and as animals - as we engage with each other and, in the process, discover who it is that we are.

As harrowing as this story is - and it is harrowing, and here I offer a spoiler alert, it is not nearly as harrowing as the alternate plot.  Pi reveals this alternate to a writer who has come to hear his tale at the urging of Pi's Uncle.  After telling of surviving with Richard Parker, and Richard Parker disappearing into the Mexican jungle without so much as a look backwards, Pi tells the alternate version - that he was not on a lifeboat with animals at all, but with a sailor, the surly and subhuman cook from the freighter; and his mother - oh, and a rat.  The sailor, like the zebra, had a broken leg.  The cook, after eating the rat, killed the sailor, in part to use his meat as bait - and perhaps to dine on him - and then kills Pi's mother in rage when she slaps him for his barbarian behavior.  Pi, a vegetarian pacifist, is horrified and angry.  When the cook leaves the knife that he used to kill the sailor unguarded, Pi murders him, unleashing a part of himself, portrayed by Richard Parker in the first version of the story; a wild, unbridled part that he is absolutely terrified by, but that also gives him the will to survive on the open sea as he struggles with and tries to protect and save himself - a person who is more complicated and dangerous than he ever had any idea (this plot device is also used in Don Juan DeMarco, where it is used to illuminate defending against a different internal force).

The book and now the movie are brilliantly done.  The images in the movie powerfully bring to life a representation of the inner world that is rarely attempted on screen.  And it does so by persuasively telling the story of a boy surviving on a lifeboat - and the raft that he makes of life-preservers that he makes to float alongside the lifeboat - with a tiger - for over 200 days.  The boy must learn, in very tight quarters, to master the tiger.  To create separate spaces; his raft, but also places that he pees around on the boat; to kill fish (despite his abhorrence of killing); to leave an island they discover that would house them indefinitely, but that would also consume him; to wrestle with this animal and to care for it - despite his fear of it and his anger at all that it has destroyed.

The book and movie work on this level.  My struggles with Mack, while not as dramatic, mirror Pi's struggles with Richard Parker.  When Mack, who initially was friendly and more or less willing to go along with the program, first objected to a command, took a nip at me, and then growled and barked, I was both scared, but also angry and ready to assert myself; to become, in the current vernacular, the alpha dog.  I think that, when I do that in the rest of my life, I do it in such a cleverly hidden way that I can delude myself into thinking that I am not being aggressive.  I can, for instance, ask my son if he wants to take out the trash when what I am really saying is, "Take out the trash."  But with Mack, when he jumps on my bed and starts pulling at the covers with his teeth, my grabbing him in an instant by the scruff of the neck, lifting him into the air, then dropping him to the floor and forcing his neck to the ground to show him who is boss, all while saying quite firmly (bystanders might say shouting) "No, bad dog," there is no hiding my own aggression, my assertion, my commanding the situation.  For Pi, this is magnified, both by the contrast with his consistent, deeply held pacifism, and by the extreme aggression with which he has to engage a tiger - not to mention the fear that he will become his next meal.

I can return my Richard Parker to the pound.  The thieves have been caught, and, for now, there is no imminent threat.  Pi could, theoretically, kill Richard Parker, until we remember the other version of the story.  The only way to kill Richard Parker is to kill himself - an act of violence that will require Richard Parker's cooperation - meaning he will need to engage his own violence to bring about his death, but he is working to tame - to limit - to humanize - the very primitive force that he would need to kill himself.  And the convolutions in that last sentence illustrate the wonderful thing about this narrative device:  Yann Martel, the author of the book, and Ang Lee, the director of the movie, have figured out how to portray internal, psychological struggles, struggles that are ineffable and difficult to witness, even or especially from the inside, in vivid, concrete fashion.  Because it is through our engagement with the world, whether talking with our friends (or analyst), training a dog (or a tiger), or surviving in an open craft in the Pacific, that our unconscious selves emerge, guiding the (somewhat) conscious actions of engaging with, battling, anticipating and parrying to maintain our physical and/or psychological well being.  And thus the story of Richard Parker brings to life what would otherwise be a dramatic but invisible story, one that we would not be able to follow - the struggles between a man's conscience and his knowledge of the actions he engaged in when enraged as he is swept across the ocean by wind and waves.

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

 Post script:  This was originally posted on 11/25/12.  I have reposted it today to improve the ability of the title to be searched.  We did ultimately return the dog.  When it was continuously threatening and scaring the children - jumping on their beds and growling at them - and tearing up whatever was in reach while we were out of the house and it was caged - it was too much even for the the reluctant wife.  Much later we did a sweet dog that was found after it had survived one of the coldest winters on record on its own.  He is small enough that I can comfortably return to being largely unaware of how frequently I assert my alpha dogness.

Steve Bartman, ESPN, and the Cubs - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reflects on Being A Fan

In 2003, as a recovered Cubs fan in psychoanalytic training, I watched the fourth game of the National League Championship Series between Chicago and the upstart Florida Marlins (another National League expansion team that could get to the series before we could do it again (OK, I am not completely recovered)).  I was feeling confident that we would make it.  We were up three to nothing, we had Mark Pryor on the mound, and there was already one out in the top of the eighth inning.  A Marlin hit a high foul ball down the left field line and it drifted towards the stands where a bunch of fans reached for it and it bounced around among them.  No big deal.  Except that Moises Alou, the left fielder of considerable skill who came from a family that produced many major leaguers, did the unthinkable: He had a conniption.  He jumped up and down, throwing a tantrum and pointing at the fans, exclaiming that they had interfered with a ball that he could have caught.

I knew at that moment that we were doomed.  The thin veneer of confidence that we as a team, as a city, as a group of people who knew just how unlikely it was that the Cubs could do it, the thin veneer of confidence that had grown during a season, during the playoffs, and then during this game itself, was torn – ripped off – by Alou’s meltdown.  His childishness revealed the real Cubs, the bumbling, immature, incompetent, and lovable but lost Cubs to be who they actually were, a group of guys who did not belong on the big stage.  They – we – did not belong.

And, sure enough, the batter’s next effort was a routine groundball to the shortstop.  It was a perfect double play ball.  Not a rocket, but it was hit with enough authority to guarantee that we could get out of the inning and be only the top half of the ninth from the World Series.  But the shortstop booted it.  It popped off the heel of his glove, both runners were safe and before you could say disaster eight runs scored.  The series, the season, and nearly one hundred years of futility continued into the next day.  There was another game, but it was all over.  (For happier memories of Wrigley, connect to this post about a recent visit)

ESPN took on the Cubs and the Steve Bartman phenomenon in their 30 [films] for 30 [years of ESPN's existence] film, “Catching Hell”.  Who is Steve Bartman, you might ask…  He wasn’t in the story you just told.  Well, no he wasn’t.  He was, or should have been, the footnote.  He became the scapegoat, but I think the shame of what the City of Chicago and Cubs fans everywhere did to him, makes the curse of the billy goat pale in comparison.

Steve Bartman is a life long Cubs fan.  He is computer programmer.  A somewhat nerdy guy who, in his late twenties or early thirties, was living with his parents in 2003.  He was a Little League coach much admired by the kids on the team that practiced in the field next to his parent’s house and he was the guy lucky enough to score seats on the foul line for the fourth game of the National League Championship series.  He was so excited to be there, he so much wanted to soak up the game, that he had a radio in his pocket tuned to the game.  Because it was cold, he wore a turtleneck, with the Little League team’s Tshirt over it, and a Cubs hat with the earphones on top of that.  When the foul ball came towards him, he, along with about ten other fans, reached for it.  He was unlucky enough to be the one who actually got a hand on it deflecting it further into the stands.  The television cameras then picked him out – he looked the perfect nerd in his getup - and the commentators focused on how his touching the ball prevented Alou from catching it.  Suddenly his action – the reflexive action of most fans when the ball is hit to him or her (the exception being the occasional fearful fan who covers his or her head) to reach for the ball, became the cause of the Cubs’ titanic meltdown.

ESPN asked, without conclusively coming to an answer, why this occurred.  Why did Steve Bartman get singled out as the cause of the latest in a long series of heartbreaking blunders by the Chicago Cubs?  Why did he have to hole up in his parent’s home and receive death threats?  Why was he pilloried in the press non-stop?  I was disappointed by ESPN’s answer.  I will try to come at my own understanding, but first I have to reveal the depth of the pathology of a lifelong Cubs fan.  But also to acknowledge that, despite not being fully recovered, there is some distance that has come between the Cubs and me.  I am no longer a rabid sports fan, and therefore somewhat less crazy than I used to be. 

I was born in Chicago.  My grandfather – a graduate of the University of Chicago – became a Cubs fan when they last won the pennant – against other teams reeling from losing their stars to service in the military during the Second World War – in 1945.  During that World Series, Billy Sianis, who bought a ticket for himself and one for his goat, was ejected because the goat smelled bad, and Billy, in turn, supposedly cursed the Cubs - thus the curse of the billy goat.  In any case, my grandfather died without ever seeing the Cubs return to the World Series.  His son, my uncle, became an Andy Frain Usher at Cubs games and was a lifelong loyal fan.  When my uncle contracted prostate cancer, which he did not get diagnosed until its very late stages, he lived, miraculously, for ten years.  We joked that God was keeping him alive until the Cubs won the series.  If that was the case, even God couldn’t manage keep him alive long enough, as my uncle died last spring and the Cubs still have not gotten to the series.  I come by my love of the Cubs honestly.

Growing up, my family moved all over the country.  Never in a city large enough to have its own major league team, I rooted for them from afar.  In the days before cable, I had to rely mostly on the newspaper reports – usually only a box score, the occasional Saturday when they were on national TV, and going to the park when we went to visit Grandmother.  This kept me connected to the city of my birth, gave me a stable geographical center as we moved from place to place, and it also helped me maintain a stable identity.  I was a Cubs fan.

Being a Cubs fan is complicated, though.  All of that failure does not come without cost.  I began to fear that their failings were caused by me.  I noticed that when I went to Wrigley field to watch them play, they lost.  I wondered if I might be a curse to them – a sort of baseball cooler (See the movie of the same name for an interesting description of how love transforms losers).  This reached strange proportions.  When they would lose in Chicago, and I lived in Florida, I would wonder if I had done something – if I had opened a curtain at the very moment that someone talking with a friend in Chicago had meant to say something, but the distraction made them lose their train of thought meaning some significant (or perhaps insignificant) piece of information was not transmitted, setting up a long chain of reactions that led to – the Cubs losing.

I think this is because of a number of factors.  One is that my failing the Cubs masked the fact that they failed me.  I remember leaving an Ohio State football game, wearing my Cubs hat, and being taunted by Ohio State fans [Ohio State has the fifth most wins of any college football team all-time and has spent more time at number 1 than any other team] for rooting for losers.  But my crazy thoughts meant that I wasn’t rooting for a losing team – I was causing my team – a team that, when I was a kid, was peopled by Ernie Banks and Ron Santo, Ferguson Jenkins and Billy Williams, all excellent players - to lose. 

The second factor was that my failing the Cubs masked how irrelevant I was to the functioning of the team.  Despite my passionate concern about them, the Cubs – the players that I loved – gave not a whit about me.  At least if they had won, they would have given me some excitement, some pride.  But losing meant that I really got nothing from them.  So turning their failure into mine kept me in the dark about just how irrelevant to them I was.  In fact, it elevated me to a position of central importance.

Steve Bartman then, at least from my perspective, would have become the villain for me that he seemed to become for the entire city of Chicago if some of my passion hadn’t waned.  He personified me – the loyal, loving, but never loved fan who protected his idealized players by imagining that they did not fail him, but the other way around, that he had failed them.  My self blame could now be heaped on someone else – I could denigrate Steve Bartman and – and this is the kicker – I could keep my secret alive.  It was me, all along.  The fan does matter.  I – me – Every Day Joe me – in the form of Steve Bartman – brought down the Cubs. 

Moises Alou, someone with skills I could never imagine having, someone who was raised by a major leaguer, who has forgotten more about the game than I will ever know, and someone who has worked incredibly hard to get where he has, someone who should have been able to keep his cool at a critical juncture, is not the person that I blame if I am still a diehard Cubs fan.  I must continue to revere him.  I will buy tickets to watch him perform, I will imagine that I can do what he can do, and I will idolize him, protecting him (but really me) from my realization that he was deeply, fundamentally flawed at the moment when I, as a fan of a franchise, most needed to be able to rely on him – not to catch the ball – but to keep his head.  And this will keep me coming to the game.  Believing and hoping that my cheers, my support, my unwavering loyalty will, before the next century is done, spur someone who dons the light blue pinstripes to finally bring home the pennant and, could it happen?  A World Championship.

I have written about that surprising event actually occurring in a post about Scott Simon's book - My Cubs: A Love Story.

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

This blog was originally posted on October 8, 2011 and has been posted again to improve its ability to be found in a search.

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Wrigley Field - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Goes on a Father Son Pilgrimage

Chicago, the city of my birth, was the destination of a Labor Day Weekend pilgrimage with my 13 year old son.  It was a post-modern traditional journey, invented in our blended family as a means of celebrating the bat-mitzvahs of his stepsisters - a journey with the same sex parent to the city of choice of the child reaching the age of adulthood in the jewish tradition; now applied regardless of the faith of the child.  Our eldest stepdaughter chose New York, which I lobbied for with him.  He originally wanted to go to Miami, mostly having to do with the sports teams, but he ultimately chose Chicago, and, while the Cubs, White Sox, Redwings, Bears and Bulls had something to do with that, it also had to do with a city that means something more to him.  What that is, I am not sure, but I was certainly relieved as it is a city that I know well - the city where my mother was born and grew up and a city where members of both my mother's and father's families still live.

We filled the weekend with two visits with family, trips to a skyscraper and four museums, and an afternoon at the ballpark.  In between we wandered through the city, on foot, by car, and on the El, marveling at its size, its engagement with its citizens and visitors alike, its stores, and its jazz festival.  But also we spent time in each other's company - with a quality that was different from the time that we spend when we travel with the rest of the family.  We were, once again, and in entirely new ways, the dyad that we have always been; father and son.

Having a child was a radically different experience for me - it was, in the words of Bernard Lonergan, a Jesuit I am reading to better understand the relationship between psychoanalysis and Ignatius' spiritual exercises, a horizon altering experience. Lonergan proposes that there are horizontal and vertical exercises of freedom, and a horizontal exercise is is one that occurs within an established horizon.  A vertical exercise is the means by which we move from one horizon to the next; and the unexpected and profound love for my child, an individual not yet formed, but also perfectly present, was a paradigm altering experience - it introduced entirely new horizons.

As the infant, pre-verbal son and I spent time together, I was enthralled by his development, by our shared experience.  Then, as I have referred to elsewhere in this blog, he began to speak, and the profound experience that we had shared collapsed - the words actually interfered with a level of communication that had, at least I believed, been taking place.  Instead of resonating with each other, we were talking about food, and the bathroom, and stuff - real concrete stuff, and our words were not adequate to address the spectrum of all that we had been sharing.

As the boy grew and developed, language provided more opportunities to communicate in new and more complex realms.  Sports is an example.  Playing video games, watching Sports Center, and reading the sports section quickly made him more knowledgeable than I about which modern players are playing for which teams in a host of sports (and who is good, who just mediocre), but also increased his knowledge about such things as strategy and gamesmanship so that, at times, he was embarrassed about what his Old Man didn't know.  On the other hand, I retain an edge in knowing about the classic moments and players in sport (see a post about Steve Bartman and the Cubs), especially during the era of my youth and before.  I have a kind of reservoir of historical information that he is moderately interested in.  We are able to engage in conversation, but it involves ferrying material across a river that divides two similar nations who speak a different dialect of the same language.

Wrigley field, one of the Grand Dames, along with Fenway Park, of Major League Baseball, served as a wonderful place for these two congregations to come together.  The Cubs, who were so far out of contention that they were irrelevant, were playing the Giants - a team in contention, but one neither of us really care about one way or the other.  We didn't have a dog in the race.  But we were in Church together.

We arrived early.  My son, who has a collection of baseball hats, was interested in buying a hat at the ballpark.  We went to a stand and looked over the offerings.  His tastes run to the modern.  He likes the flat bills - a type of hat worn by rappers and a few baseball players.  I have trouble making sense of them - I think they neither look as good nor function as well as the traditional bill.  He also likes modern takes on traditional hats.  So he has an orange Cincinnati Reds hat, and he has a Tennessee Titans Football team baseball cap that has modern writing across the front rather than the more traditional team symbol.  In fact, most of his caps are caps that are trendy in one way or another.  I am strongly attached to the age old design of the Cubs' cap; one of the simple, traditional caps that is blue with a red C on the front and a red button on top - it is a symbol, like Wrigley field, of the way things used to be when we were more focused on building a country - primary colors and declarative symbols.

There were other caps on display.  There were pinstriped caps.  There were caps that festooned various things about the Cubs or about Wrigley in various fonts and colors across the front of the cap.  But most of the caps wore the traditional colors and symbol  - in either bill style.  He chose, after much deliberation, a flat bill traditional colored cap.  This choice was a sort of compromise - a mixture of the tradition that I lean towards but with the style that he likes, and that I have grudgingly grown accustomed to.  As we talked with the vendor, who told the story of an Alphonso Soriano home run ball that he had caught - and was till trying to get autographed - he mentioned where we could go to get a certificate for this being his first day at Wrigley (We had actually been here when he was two, but we agreed that pre-verbal trips to the ball park shouldn't count -especially because he was more interested in the El arriving at the station than a Sammy Sosa home run).

On our way to the seats, the scorecard vendor assured us, as I'm sure he had many others for years, that his Ouija board had predicted a no-hitter today...  though he wasn't sure whether that would be at Wrigley or at a little league game somewhere in North Dakota.  We picked up the certificate and headed to our seats, high above first base, but close enough, even though we were in the next to last row, that we were very much part of the game.  On the way, we passed hot dog stands offering Chicago style hot dogs, something I remembered eating on an earlier visit and found exquisite.  When we sat down, I offered to go get such a hot dog for each of us, but warned my son that it would be laden with many things that he didn't like - but I thought it worth it because, in my estimation it was good local food and worth a try.  Somewhat to my surprise, he agreed, even though he is a picky eater who frequently refuses my attempts to get him to try to broaden his palate.

As I loaded the all beef hot dog on a poppy seed bun with tomatoes, onions, a weird colored pickle relish, mustard, ketchup (I didn't know this didn't belong), peppers and a pickle, I thought to myself, "He won't like this - all of the condiments, with the exception of the peppers and maybe the mustard, are things that he avoids."  Despite this, and manifold experiences of having my hopes dashed when I present new tastes, I believed that my own experience of this wonderful combination was something that I wanted to share with him.  When I returned to the seat, my son had been traumatized.  In my absence a huge spider had landed on him and then walked onto his program where he was able to throw it to the ground.  Despite being shaken, he tried the hot dog and, what do you know, he liked it!  He and I were both surprised.  And we settled in together to watch the game.

It was really fun to be in a park where there were no blaring advertisements to interfere with the conversation between innings - where T-shirt shooting, scantily clad women weren't encouraging us to beg and plead to have them send a T-shirt our way - but instead of being constantly "entertained", to listen to the organ as it provided a gentle, though, as the game demanded, a more strident soundtrack.  To notice the flags flying of players whose numbers had been retired - players whom I had seen play on this field in my youth (boy does that make me sound old - though not as old as my grandfather who became a fan in 1945, nor my Uncle, who was an Andy Frane usher in his youth).  To have my son point out to me the odd and predictable batting stance of a Giant player, and to have him talk about the pitching styles of the current pitchers for both teams.  To watch the game unfold.  To notice the traditions of the park together - including the polite applause that welcomed the Cubs to the dugout after a particularly difficult inning finally came to a close (as opposed to the booing that a crowd in another town would have visited on their hapless players), and to cringe, together, at the noise that the Giants fans made in this home of the Cubs.

In addition to the conversation, to sharing our memory of hearing broadcasters characterizing the size of a particular gate onto the field as being determined by the size of the elephant the circus would bring to Wrigley field, to my learning about the modern teams and his learning about the ancient ones, there was an unspoken experience.  A shared experience of being together.  One that we didn't comment on.  We talked about some of that after the game.  We discussed the fans around us.  We talked about the rhythm of the game.  About our experience of watching a game where neither had a dog in the race.  And we talked about how good it felt to be there.

And there was much we didn't talk about.  Of being father and son.  Of being on a trip together.  Of relying on each other.  Of being in touch with each other.  Of enjoying the time we had together.  Of feeling good about having a language that would serve to bridge a divide.  Of feeling united, connected, on a level for which there is no language.  Of sharing a perspective, and of appreciating the differences between our perspectives.  Of acknowledging that the choices of the other would not be our own, but that there is a logic to it, even if it is not our own.  And respecting that the other is who he is - that we share much, and part of what we share is respect for the other's experience, at least in our best moments.

The theme of shared and separate moments and experiences was played out throughout the weekend - as we searched for another dog as good as the first (couldn't find one), saw spiders all over the town, talked over what it was like to be with family members (sharing appreciation for the virtues of the people that we knew and the new ones that we met), looked at art, technology, and natural wonders, and shared the experience while also having our own experiences of them in the moment, and revisiting them in conversation after leaving them.  Agreeing that this was the best of our trips together; not, I believe, just because it was the most recent.  Nor because of the manifold virtues of Chicago.  But because we continue to become better able to share both the verbal and nonverbal parts of our experience.  To be in an experience together and on our own.  I hope that this post modern mode of communication - this pilgrimage to a zone of proximal development, a place where we can both expand our perspective horizontally, and perhaps even vertically, together - is one that we continue to share for a long, long time.

Of course, the wish for the experience to stretch is partially because of a complimentary awareness - that we are in very different places.  While my son is on the verge of adulthood - including the chaotic swirls of adolescence - I can see, from my vantage point, not just retirement, but beyond.  When he asks me whether I would rather play third base or first, it is a theoretical question - I will never be called up by even the hapless Cubs - but he is still dreaming of what will be.  As my horizon moves vertically, I can see the edge of the world, while his horizons still stretch into countries that feel much warmer and beckon with promise.


To read a post about my reaction to the Cubs actually winning the world series, see a post about Scott Simon's book, My Cubs, A Love Story.

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

This post is a repost from September 9, 2012 - it was reposted so that it could be more easily searched as I did not know how else to change the title that it is originally filed under.  For an update from 2016 - we watched together - on TV - the Cub no-hitter (and my Uncle's widow texted to crow about it).  What a difference a few years (or decades or centuries) can make.  Maybe this year...

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