Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom – The HBO series that charts a course through transitional times in the news.

Donald Trump’s surprising success in the early primaries is a result of many factors.  A recent NewYorker article credits the internet with a leading role in what it terms the U.S.’s eighth (or so) crisis or revolution in party politics. Alexander Hamilton, with his Federalist Papers, helped form the first political parties (his life is currently being celebrated with a Broadway Musical).  The internet poses a threat and brings opportunities to various industries – education is the one I am most intimately familiar with, though it has implications for therapy as well.  Whether or not the party system will be revolutionized by it, Journalism and politics are being profoundly affected.  The reluctant son recently brought Aaron Sorkin’s show The Newsroom, a three season series aired (or cabled) on HBO and now available for binge viewing to my attention after I spent time watching and showing him some of The West Wing.  The Newsroom covers much ground, but, especially in its final season, it takes on the issue of internet “journalism” head on – as well as attending to many other things.

Aaron Sorkin, in both The West Wing and The Newsroom, drives me mad.  He presents complex nuanced arguments about issues of the day.  He gives us whip smart players who explain them to us without patronizing us – he expects us to be on our toes and to learn from his fast paced – OK - breakneck dialogue.  He then, especially in The Newsroom, makes fun of a medium that is more interested in gossip and muckraking than in hard news.  And then it feels like he panders to us by creating characters – idealized though they may be – whose tawdriness and pettiness is not only paraded before us – but relied on to maintain our interest.  He stoops to be those he criticizes. 

Sorkin’s pandering is directly played out in the Newsroom, where the central character, news anchor Will McAvoy, played by Jeff Daniels, has brought the quality of the news that his mythical Atlantis Cable News delivers to a very low level because he is so concerned about being liked by his audience.  Bring in his ex-girlfriend MacKenzie McHale (Emily Mortimer), who used to produce his news when it was better, and magically it becomes better – why?  Because Will is now more intent on winning the love of MacKenzie than his audience.  Oh, but it is more complex than that – MacKenzie treated him badly, so Will spends most of his time outwardly humiliating her while desperately craving her approval.

OK, secretly, as a psychoanalyst, I admire that Sorkin doesn’t pretend that our heroes are better than we are.  He doesn’t pretend that he is above the fray – and the very things he criticizes.  He clarifies that he is human.  We are internally inconsistent critters.  But Oh, I don’t want us to be – part of why my identity as a psychoanalyst – where we acknowledge all of this – is reluctant.

The first two seasons of The Newsroom are framed around the central relationship between McAvoy and MacKenzie that is mirrored in complementary ways by two other office misbegotten loves that triangulate in complicated fashion while the plot is also being driven by very real world and timely events.  The Deepwater Horizon Gulf Oil Spill and the Killing of Osama Bin Laden are woven into the soap opera events of love, but also the theme of trying to produce quality news when all kinds of forces are aligned against that – an ownership (including Jane Fonda playing a media mogul) that is concerned – along with the anchor – about ratings; an audience that prefers titillation to the meatier work of wading through complicated ideas; and the increasing threat, especially by the third season, of the internet “news” to the production and management of information that the populace of a democracy needs to become an informed electorate.

In the second season, the focus is on an error that the news team makes – misreporting that the U.S. committed a war crime.  This gets at some very important ethical issues regarding reporting, and the role of the legal system in news – but it is also a loose season that almost falls apart as it careens along.  I would like to focus on the third season, which also careens along (and which we had to pay for – the first two seasons were “free” on Netflix, but the third season, at least at this point, required us to pay for a streaming version that we thought was well worth it) but that ends up nicely resolving – not just the issues of the season, but the series as a whole.  It is a good piece of writing, acting, and just plain theater – but I worry about whether it downplays the extent of the threat of new media – while hoping that it is providing a model of how to address that threat.

Throughout history, we have had to band together to produce things of value.  From the Great Pyramids of Giza to the Interstate Highway System this has been the case.  Journalism is another example of this.  An army of printers and editors and newsboys were required to circulate the words of a privileged few who opined about the ideas of the day.  In order to have a diversity of opinions, there needed to be a diversity of organizations, and people got together to make those work.  The internet puts anyone with a laptop at the head of that organization.  A guy like me can bypass learning the ropes of the profession, take my iPhone to a campaign stop – record some footage – blog about it and upload it for all to see.  Of course there is an army of people who have built and maintain the internet itself, but they don’t control access to producing its content.  I don’t have to argue with a producer to get my story on the air – it just goes there.  And, to return to the theme of the second year, if I say something irresponsible, my integrity is momentarily questioned, but that gets buried under the avalanche of new material that appears tomorrow.  Organizations, on the other hand, are held accountable by their viewers and by legal eagle eagles for what they put out there. 

In the third season of The Newsroom, a new owner, a Silicon Valley new money billionaire, wants to change the news.  He wants us all to become reporters – with hundreds of channels of information available, and with almost infinite viewing and reporting capacity.  The misreporting of suspects – people who were physically harmed – by the internet media in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings were told as a cautionary tale as the corporate hostile takeover threatened the fractious balance – but one that was based on mutual respect – between ownership and the news department.  This disintegrated with the new ownership and my fear in watching things unfold was that the center could not hold and a great institution – one that is essential to the functioning of the democracy – would be undermined. 

I suppose this spoiler alert is too late – but a particular solution is offered.  I am less interested in doing any more spoiling than I am in acknowledging some of the elements of the solution.  One is that luck and timing have a lot to do with it.  Things that are not, in fact, central to media issues play a determining role in the solution.  I think this is often the way of the world.  How many great ideas have failed to materialize because economic conditions have changed?  How many great leaders have emerged because of circumstances?  So this solution is unsettling, because the underlying thesis is that a thoughtful approach to learning a craft – and practicing it despite all the forces that are arrayed against it – is central to living a civilized life.  That craft might be journalism but it might be acting.

I am struck as I think about this about the functioning of the internet with YouTube videos that the reluctant stepdaughter watches.  There are YouTube “stars” that take pictures of themselves engaging in life.  They are, I think, shaped by the audience response – which things that I put out there get retweeted most?  And they are learning a craft – directly from the consumer of what they offer – not from a director or other actors.  They are getting feedback the same way that a comic does in endless performances of his or her routine – the same way that the Beatles did when they were playing small clubs and bars before recording a single hit.  And this is a particular kind of training – Paul McCartney still can’t read music – and he hires people to “put in more notes” in his compositions; would he have been able to more fully realize his musical vision if he had been classically trained?  It is hard to imagine that his musical career could have been more successful…

I am reminded of another example which I think I have given before of game players on the internet taking on the persona of analysts and having offices with couches.  Other game players come to the office and begin to talk about the difficulties they are having in the game – but the difficulties sound like difficulties they are having in life.  And the people playing the analyst begin to become concerned that they are out of their depth.

Some of the characters on The Newsroom appear to be quite young.  They are taking jobs in an industry that is terribly important to the functioning of the nation.  They are, at moments, thrust into roles that are new to them – they try them out – a reporter gets laryngitis and a young producer has to go in front of a camera.  They give it a shot.  And they get feedback on it – not just from the masses, but from other professionals.  Indeed, the central character, Will McAvoy, becomes an anchor by accident.  A prosecutor by training, and a reporter by aptitude, he sits in for an absent anchor on September 11^th and has the authenticity to carry the day.  Sorkin’s portrayal of McAvoy and the rest of the characters as people – deeply flawed, but also deeply committed people, articulates the frail nature of what we try to accomplish – taking our limited nascent selves out there into the world to learn from it and to offer something back.  We do what we can with our native talents and with the instruction we receive.

This series, and the political arena that is emerging in this election, seem to be asking whether careful planning and corporate work – the building of pyramids – which seems to necessarily enslave us some of the time so that we can all have a measure of freedom – whether the compromises that must be made to achieve the huge structures that we build for the common good – are worth it.  Can and should they be torn down in favor of simpler, more direct approaches to solving problems.  Approaches that do not involve nuance and caution, but bold articulation of powerful forces – are these superior?  Or do they simply lead to a cacophony of individual voices, all straining to be heard – and to a worse suppression of all of us as we must figure out how to move forward and so choose a leader who ends up answering not to us but to him or herself?  Can the individual voice supplant the collective?  Can we, individually, hear all of the channels and integrate them?  Should we rely on others to filter them, knowing that important voices will be lost?

I find it chilling to watch interviews or footage of the powerful figures in our history describe their thinking.  Especially with the luxury of 50 or 60 or more years of hindsight, I am struck by how narrow minded they were – by how parochial their thinking was.  And these are people whose motives and actions I admire.  Yet I cringe.  We will necessarily cringe at our actions when we look at them from further down the road.  Part of that is because we will have a broader view, one that can be enhanced by the ability of so many to articulate what is on their mind.  The Newsroom ties up one of many strings that seem too numerous to pull together in its final episode by proposing that the new media can and should emulate what was good and useful about the old media.  The new media can and should look for approval to those who have made the news before – to hold themselves to the standards of those, flawed though they may have been, who set the standard.  I like this solution and hope that we can achieve some measure of it, but fear that the very freedom that allows us to strike out in our new directions will make it hard for us to figure out how to work together in this new world where we all feel that each of us is the leader – each of us does or can know how to move the ball forward.  Of course, I probably would have felt the same way were I to have watched the 1968 Democratic Convention as an old guy rather than as a child who interpreted the actions of other young people - putting flowers into the barrels of rifles - as inspired activity.

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Daniel Stern’s The Interpersonal World of the Infant – Rereading a Psychoanalytic Classic

I first read Daniel Stern’s The Interpersonal World of the Infant as a trainee in about 1989.  It was a new book, hot off the presses, and it questioned many of the assumptions that the people who were training me had held dear for most of their careers.  And, much to my surprise, these very talented and capable people were excited – instead of threatened – by the book and the ideas in it.  I think they were excited by it – and this is purely speculative – because this book was consistent with their experience of their own children in the ways that the previous psychoanalytic theories had not been.  Whether or not that was the case, it is the case that this dense book, written in a very high tone, but with good examples, helped me greet my son in a way that seemed to me to be consonant with who he was when he was born.  That said, I also need to clarify that he was born ten years later, which is probably a good thing, because it took a considerable time for the material from this book to sink in – and frankly, re-reading it every year as I do now for a graduate course that I teach, I find new things in it each time that I read it.

This book seeks to integrate two very different literatures.  One is the psychoanalytic literature that is based on the “re-created infant” – a child remembered in the therapeutic process – sometimes by the adult (in conversation with his or her analyst) on the couch – sometimes from working with young children and trying to imagine, based on newly verbal kids, what the internal experience of pre-verbal infants must be like.  The other is the growing literature that Stern tapped into (and contributed to) about the “observed infant” – a preverbal infant that a researcher “asks” to answer questions about his or her internal states having the infant do the things that the infant is able to do.  A newborn, for instance, is able to move his or her eyes to track things, is able to turn his or her head when it is supported, and is able to engage in sucking behavior.  So, we use these few things that newborns can do to ask them questions.  We ask them – can they remember?  We bring in their mother’s breast pad and place it on one side of their head and the breast pad from another woman and place it on the other side, and they reliably turn their heads towards their mother’s breast pad.  They have memory (and other faculties) right from the get-go.

More central to his thesis, we give infants a pacifier that is either smooth or bumpy.  We let them suck on it without seeing it.  We then show them two pacifiers – one that is bumpy and one that is smooth – and they spend more time looking at the one that is like the one they have been sucking on.  This turns out to be a tremendously important piece of information.  What the infants are communicating to us is that they can transform tactile information – what the pacifier feels like – into an abstract representation – what it is shaped like – that they can recognize visually.  This ability – to represent something concrete in abstract terms – again essentially from birth – turns our understanding of the mind of the infant upside down.  Instead of having to learn all kinds of intermediate steps to build up to being able to represent something perceived in their minds, they can do this essentially immediately.  OK, so we have to rethink Piaget and rework our understanding of cognitive development.  But Stern doesn’t really get all that interested in this momentous shift – he is much more interested in why we are equipped to do that.

Stern spends the rest of the book articulating that the reason we are built to represent things cross modally is because this supports our ability to relate to our caregivers – and this, in turn, facilitates our learning lots of things from them – but primarily how to relate.  To get from here to there, Stern notes that we are not born with an oceanic lack of knowledge about where we begin and end, but actually we learn quite quickly that we have a boundedness and we experience Mommy as a separate entity in the world (this is radically different from some psychoanalytic developmental schemas).  He also introduces the notion of vitality affects – the idea that emotions are not just categorically different – but that they come in a rush – that they may start out slow and then become stronger – or they may taper off slowly.  He uses this fact to note that we use the vitality component to communicate to infants that we know what they are feeling by matching the speed of what we are doing to the speed of what they are doing – that we can mirror what the infant is doing.  But, and this is the really cool part, we don’t just mirror, we exploit the infant’s ability to represent things cross modally, to make a sound that we emit track the intensity of their muscular tension – and, in the next moment, we open our eyes as wide as the sound they emit.

What Stern is observing are the everyday interactions that take place between infants and parents.  As a result of that observation, he is able to articulate what we as a species know intuitively with the more precise language of science.  We can communicate feeling states with each other and this is the basis of human communication.  What he adds is the postulate that we are built to do just that.  We are built to communicate.  He then notes that the culmination of this communication ability – the introduction of language – learning to talk – is a two edged sword.  We are able to communicate particular thoughts more accurately, but at the cost of a loss of affective communication.  The richness of our communication actually plummets as the precision increases.  Our infants become, in a weird but very palpable way, less interesting as they learn to talk.

So, with Stern (and, frankly, T. Berry Brazelton, a pediatrician who writes about these phenomena in much more accessible terms), I was able to greet my son in his early life not just intuitively, but as a true geek should, with book learning.  We spent time together playing, hanging out, and napping.  I thought that I would get a lot accomplished when he was napping, but I rarely did.  I usually napped with him – being fully engaged is hard work – for the kid and (at least this) parent.  My experience of our time together was of connecting with a huge intelligence – one that was curious about the world, about me, about himself – and wanting to learn more about it.  So I was terribly disappointed when he learned to talk (Oh, don’t get me wrong – I was excited – you would think no person had ever learned to talk before – I was amazed and proud about this incredible achievement), I was disappointed that the imagined other – the kid that was so broadly curious – now would utter one word statements – “Cookie” – that collapsed all of that wonderful space that we had built between us.  Language is a double edged sword indeed!

Of course, as Stern points out, we learn to use language to create cross modal descriptions - they are the basis of poetry - my love is like a red, red rose.  This, in turn, facilitates the kinds of communications that can be lost when language first appears - though the functions of language are manifold and they can move us away from an intersubjectivity as well as move us towards it.

Stern has a bigger ax to grind in this book.  He is using his evidence to support an intersubjective theory of psychoanalysis.  I think there is something to this argument.  But I also think that this developmental perspective can help inform many other psychoanalytic theories as well.  For instance, many older psychoanalytic theories postulate a diffuse, boundary less state as a part of normal development – and suggest that later boundarylessness is a regression to an earlier state.  While it may be that the later state is a regression to an earlier one – it may be a regression to a pathological earlier state of boundarilessness – perhaps related to early traumatic experiences that crossed personal boundaries, overwhelming the infant’s capacity to manage the autonomous state they were built to inhabit. 

But it is not just in theory that this book can help.  In our “technique” – how it is that we connect with others, this can be a truly useful perspective.  As we better understand the actual infant, we will be better able to connect, not just with those infants (this really did help me in raising a child), but with the adults that they become.  Adults who have amazing capacities for communication – for communion really – can see these capacities atrophy as they focus on developing other skills – such us finding just the right words to communicate how an infant develops.  Not all is lost, however.  When we play with infants, we regain a sense of how spectacular it is to be in contact with another human being.   Also, when we play in therapy, we can connect with that “inner child” and remember what it means to feel authentically – and we can use that connection as a base to move forward in relating in very adult – deeply felt - adult ways.

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Ivy Pochoda’s Visitation Street – Mourning Can Be Beautiful

Brooklyn’s Red Hook district has long held a colorful place in my imagination.  Named for the hooks stevedores used to pull crates out of the bellies of cargo ships and then sank into each other’s bellies after they got off work, this is one of those corners of New York that has never been savory.  Visitation Street starts off with a late night walk by two teenage girls teetering on the edge of womanhood to a pier in Red Hook.  They are carrying a pink plastic raft and the author might as well scream at you that this is not going to end well.  And it doesn’t.  And it feels like it is headed into thriller/mystery land, but, thankfully, it doesn’t go there.  Where it does go, after a number of fits and starts and introducing a number of characters that seem to have something to do with each other, but the connections seem tenuous and even random - even many of the blood relations seem barely held to each other by twine – the characters seem mostly to have in common that they are floating in space – not making headway with their lives - where the book goes is straight into a morass of stuckness.

At about page 192, the reluctant wife asked if I liked this book.  I had to respond that I didn’t know.  Now you have to understand that she would have discarded this book long before page 50 if she didn’t already like it.  I almost never stop a book without finishing it – but in this case I really wasn’t just along for the ride; the stuckness seemed to be an essential part of the book – it had promise, but I just wasn’t sure that I trusted the author to deliver on it.  The characters were intriguing and varied; black and white, gay and straight, Latino and Latina, Lebanese, Greek and Puerto Rican – they all had in common that they are stuck in a corner of Brooklyn that has gone from bad to uncared for and uncared about – but stands on the verge of being yuppified – of being turned into something that it never was that will make it into a place where people who don’t belong there will fill it with things that will be safe and recognizable and completely unrelated to a place named Red Hook.

Each of the main characters in this book, and there are several, are revealed, over time and in interesting ways, to be grieving – or, more precisely, to be avoiding grieving.  To be stuck in a life that has lost its meaning because they have lost the person or the role that gave their lives meaning.  I feel like this paragraph should have come with a spoiler alert label.  If you haven’t read the book, please forget about that last bit.  It will lead you to look for things that are artfully hidden.  Let them stay hidden and be surprised by them when they are revealed, because the surprise of the revelation is what makes this book worth reading.  The seemingly disconnected and random people turn out to be deeply and precisely connected in a wide variety of ways.  Some of the connections are historical, others are metaphysical, but they all move together to both recognize and work on undoing their stuckness as one domino cascades into the next and each of them both sees their stuckness and sees a way out of it.  The resolution of this book, while not quite perfect, is pretty damn good and feels musical – each of the elements occurs at a similar time, each with its own pitch – each is a very liberal variation on the other – and together they form a chord – a beautiful, final chord that brings closure to this book.  My experience, on finishing, was that I was done with it – I felt satisfied – and I really didn’t want to linger any longer in this world.  Not that I wanted to get out of it, but all the loose ends were tied up and, much to my surprise, I felt like the yuppies could have the place – it has been cleansed of all that was holding it in place.

OK, maybe I have gotten a bit grand and gone beyond the scope of the book, but perhaps not.  Ivy Pochoda, the author, is credited with having grown up in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn which is a world away from Red Hook.  She, after graduating from Harvard and becoming a squash champion, lived in Red Hook as one of the seedier – or perhaps she was just slumming - gentrifiers depicted in the book.  She apparently frequented the 24 hour bar that plays a central role for the truly down and out member of the gentry who is a central character in the book.  Nowhere in the book does a pure yuppie character appear.  But when you go to Google maps, the worst, most decrepit spot in the book – the place where the homeless live and some near rape scenes take place – is now an Ikea.  The Gentry have taken over and while the projects may still rise in the middle of the neighborhood, the fringes have moved in new directions.  The yuppies here may live on and near the fringe, but they are yuppies all the same.

The book includes a map of the neighborhood.  Missing from the map, and from Google maps, is Visitation Street.  Central to the story, this street binds the neighborhood together, but it is clearly an allegory.  Each of the major characters in visited by their past.  In the case of one family, they have the “gift” of being able to hear the voices of the dead – something that can lead to incapacitation – and something that each of those with the gift has a different relationship with – some immersing themselves in it, others resenting and denying it.  Other characters' relationships with people from their past is revealed seemingly by accident.  We see the impact of the past long before we discover what has caused these people to become stuck.  An intimate part of the visitation is the experience of guilt – the feeling that the living person has contributed to the death of the person that is visiting them.  Part of the domino effect of the release from the stuckness has to do with the release that each of them feels from the guilt – and part of that comes from acknowledging the guilt and recognizing it – sometimes as much in the mind of the reader as the character confesses their guilt.  Aha, we seem to say, this is why they have been doing that.  And, in hearing our saying that, the character seems to be released from what was holding them there.

So, in so far as this is a mystery, the answer to each of the mysteries posed in the book is that the person responsible for holding each character in a particular prison is that person him or herself and their relationship with the person who is visiting them.  And at the very center of the book, in the biggest mystery of all, is the individual who is holding onto his culpability in robbing others of their freedom – and he uses his knowledge of how this has enslaved him (and them) to prevent the incident with the pink raft from becoming yet another intractable loss, and the solution to the pink raft situation cascades into the solution of all the others.

My friend Armando would have hated this book.  He hated it when outsiders passed judgement on locals.  He hated it when people let loose of ties that bound them – even if that led them to certain kinds of freedom.  He hung onto his own visitations – his own ghosts – in ways that did him huge harm.  And people loved him for it.  I feel, as I often felt when he was alive, guilty in my relation to him – in this case for liking this book.  I feel as if I am killing him, as if he weren’t already dead, by connecting with what I think is a central thesis of this book – that a place like Red Hook is a place that can be left behind – the bloody legacy of a dead end world is one that we should transcend.  Armando – in ways that were painful to him and to me – would object to that.  He believed that the dead had much to teach us.  He believed that the struggles of the dead were noble, and that our wish to distance ourselves from them was self-serving and hollow.  Pochoda’s resolution is elegant and beautiful and feels beautifully freeing.  Armando’s discordant din is not pretty, but it is hard to ignore as I struggle to reconcile the dead with the living.

Freud, in Mourning and Melancholia, would have us, like Pochoda, leave the dead behind.  When we are visited by the dead, he believed, we are mired in the past and in attachments that weigh us down.  And we are.  Yet our attachment to the past, the sense that what others have done is valuable, is at the core of our moral and ethical systems.  We don’t harm others, I think, because those others could be our mothers and fathers – or are mothers and fathers of the next generation.  Balancing reverence for the past – bloody and pointless as it may have been – with excitement about the future – the Ikea stores just waiting to be built – is a difficult and complex process – more complicated in life than in a novel, even though the solution offered here is beyond elegant – it is beautiful.   

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Statistics and Psychoanalysis I – Why does the story matter so much?

Among the most powerful relationships in health is the relationship between smoking and lung cancer.  The studies vary, but there is about a .40 magnitude correlation between smoking and lung cancer.  If that number were 1.0, every smoker would get lung cancer.  If that number were 0, someone who smoked would be no more likely to get lung cancer than someone who did not. A correlation of .40 is a huge number.  It is big enough to win gigantic lawsuits and to require warnings to be put on every pack of cigarettes.  It is big enough to scare an entire society to change its ways, so that we no longer smoke in restaurants and in college classrooms – indeed most buildings that we enter are smoke free and the number of smokers has plummeted.

What does a number of that magnitude really mean, though?  Well, there is a trick that statisticians use to interpret correlations.  They square them.  That’s right, they multiply them by themselves in order to determine the “percentage of variance accounted for in the second variable by the first variable."  So, if we square .40, (4 X 4 = sixteen and move the decimal to the right place) we get the number .16.  So, 16 per cent of the variance in lung cancer is accounted for by smoking.  That means that eighty four percent of the variance in lung cancer is accounted for by something else.  What else?  No single factor.  Smoking is the best predictor of lung cancer – so many, many factors – hundreds or even thousands of factors are related to lung cancer in addition to smoking. 

On some level this makes sense.  We’ve all heard stories of someone who has lived to 100 years of age and, when asked the secret of their longevity, they’ve said that they smoke a pack of Lucky Strikes every day.  And we’ve heard stories of people who have never smoked in their lives and yet they have contracted lung cancer.  The first person likely had many, many of the environmental or constitutional factors that prevent cancer on their side, and the second person apparently had other factors, none of them as strong as smoking, working in concert to bring about their unfortunate situation.

What does this have to do with psychoanalysis?  Well, Freud introduced the concept of multiple determinism over a hundred years ago.  This is a fancy way of saying what the cigarette smoking example illustrates – our thoughts, feelings, dreams, and actions do not result from a single cause, but from multiple sources acting in concert and as a result of weird compromises that emerge between conflicting sources.  So the cigarette smoking example should be something that psychoanalysts understand and live by, right?

Well, it’s not as easy as that, whether you are a psychoanalyst or the woman or man on the street.  We get overwhelmed when things get too complicated.  We want things to be simple.  When I hit the billiard ball, it rolls in the direction that I hit it every time.  That is a correlation of 1.0 and we want correlations of 1.0 – or very close to 1.0 – all the time.  And remember, in health, .40 (which we have discovered – despite its power – is actually a very small number) is about as big as numbers get in the world of predicting some distant outcome from some set of behaviors.  But this means that we are only able to predict what will happen some of the time for some of the people when a lot of other things line up in important but hard to infer ways.  It’s pretty remarkable that we have any kind of behavioral science at all, actually.  

So Freud, who was a keen observer and a brilliant theoretician, was able to see through this maze and recognize those big predictors – the smoking cigarettes, if you will – and bring them to our attention.  That said, he was frequently wrong, or saw the wrong aspect, but even when he was wrong, he was often able to provide an explanation that made narrative sense – meaning that it held together the way that a good story does – so we gave him the benefit of the doubt.  So, for instance, as part of a grand theory related to sexual development, Freud proposed that the way we are toilet trained will predict aspects of our later personality – specifically that if we are toilet trained in a lackadaisical way, we will be messy in our approach to the world, but if we are given rigid direction, we will be neat, orderly, even obsessive – and thus the term anal has come to describe, in common parlance, those traits. 

If toilet training actually is related to obsessional symptoms, which it probably is, it is way down the list of things that predict how obsessional an adult will be – so it has a really low number – and the things at the head of the list – the ones that have the most power to predict - don’t have a very big number.  We don’t have a great handle on what causes obsessive functioning – genetics is part of it, and certainly the ways in which people interact with caregivers during their childhood are part of it – but Freud’s explanation was one that was so clear and had such a compelling narrative arc that we were willing to take it as a valid explanation.

We were also willing to do that because we want to reduce complicated situations to more simple ones.  Freud was actually pretty humble about the reach of many of his theories.  He would say – look, this is based on a small sample and I don’t know that it is relevant to other populations or in other situations.  He did this at the beginning of Mourning and Melancholia, where he noted that he was basing his formulation on very few cases, but the distilled idea – which does violence to the very complex and subtle description that Freud offered – that depression is caused by anger turned towards the self – became first a platitude that was used to describe all depression and then a symbol of how psychoanalysis over reaches – because it simply isn’t the case that all depression is related to either the boiled down version or the more extended version.  Some aspects of some depressive experiences are very well explained by the principles set forth in Mourning and Melancholia.  It is a very useful way to understand some situations (just as cigarette smoking is the critical causal agent in many cases of lung cancer), but it is not always the determining factor – and many times is not even one of them.

But we are drawn by elegant descriptions and prefer simple explanations, and so we boil down complex situations and people into very simple equations and apply them beyond their useful limits.  But that doesn’t mean that narratives don’t serve very useful functions.  We use narrative descriptions to capture some important aspect or element of the lived life of the people that we interact with.  Psychoanalysts do this when they offer an interpretation to a client.  Novelists and poets and screenwriters do this when they construct a story in a particular way.  I do it when I interpret a book, play, or movie in a certain way – I reduce it to a particular dimension.

I am almost always dissatisfied when I re-read a post about just about anything.  Despite being generally satisfied - I usually feel like I have portrayed some important element or story line of the piece I am describing, I also feel that I have not gotten all of it.  So, I have come to accept that I can’t do that within the length parameters that I give myself, but frankly I need to come to grips with the idea that a complete explanation can’t be offered.  Art – whether in the form of a good book, play, movie, or lived experience (a dream or an interaction with another person) – hints at the complex universe that we live in, but it is not a complete representation of it.  The author uses his or her conscious and unconscious mind to construct a narrative that reflects what could have led to a series of events that could have occurred.  We, as the audience, use our conscious and unconscious minds to fill in the gaps in the narrative – to make it into a plausible story that is both reducible to something understandable and part of something more complex than we can hope to grasp.  And this process, which I try to engage in with these posts, captures (hopefully) some small but powerfully useful per cent of the variance of something that is very complex – something that goes beyond the story and merges into the vast murkiness of the millions of lives that people actually live – lives that are never fully understood by anyone.  The story doesn’t – and can’t - get anywhere near all of that complexity, but having a handle on even a corner of it gives us some power to appreciate it, to know it, and to be able to communicate about it.

The number .40 can be both a very large and a very small number – and our ability to make sense of the world necessarily falls short of accounting for all of the variance in it, but it can provide a useful handle that can help us account for more than we otherwise might.   A good friend of mine is one of the statistical gurus in our department.  It is his position that a good research paper tells a good story.  The statistics need to be used to create a narrative arc.  The statistics, just like a good analysis of a story, and just like a story that is about some event – real or imagined – is a reduction.  And a psychoanalytic interpretation is a reduction – one that draws us back, away from what we are engaged with, but also equips us to re-engage with it, to wrestle with it, but to do that with a new tool in our hands, one that gives us a little more leverage to move a little closer to flipping the thing we are wrestling with on its back so that we can, at least for a moment, pin it down.  That is just fine as long as we realize, whether we are statistician, psychoanalyst, or artist, that we have only pinned down a small corner of a vast network.

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

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Psychoanalysis and Race - Dorothy E. Holmes presents to the American Psychoanalytic Association

Every year at the national meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association there are various events across the course of the week.  There are workshops and discussion groups, committee meetings and panel presentations, but the big moment, the time when essentially all the analysts at the meeting gather together in one room – the Ballroom at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel (which also annually hosts the inductions to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame – though not, of course, concurrently), is the Plenary Address on Friday night.  It is a highlight of the meeting and can be the pinnacle of an analyst’s career to present a plenary.  I have reported on Plenarys in the past (Jonathan Lear for instance) and some that occurred before I began reporting (Peter Fonagy on Sexuality) were almost transcendental moments (you may think that I must be a geek to get so excited about a speaker – and even though I may be reluctant – I am much more of an analyst, and therefore a geek, than I would generally like to admit).  This year’s plenary speaker was Dorothy E. Holmes from South Carolina.  She was selected in part because she is the first African American Training Analyst – the type of analyst that is entitled to train other analysts including by providing personal analysis to analysts in training.

I have heard Dr. Holmes present before – she presented at a panel at a recent annual meeting - and I found her to be a compassionate and eloquent speaker.  She was presenting on the ways in which psychoanalysis can be informed by the African American experience and I was intrigued by that.   This has been a tough post to get around to writing in part because it was a more difficult talk for me to engage with than I expected and I am not pleased with my response to it.

Dr. Holmes began her talk by describing a conversation at the beginning of her own analysis and, since she was the first African American training analyst, she was necessarily talking with a white analyst.  She talked about letting him know ahead of time that she did not trust that he would be able to understand her subjectivity.  Her analyst acknowledged that this made sense and acknowledged that he would be curious about it as it arose in their work together.  I think now that conversation with its attention to her response to him was more charged than I knew in the moment.

Dr. Holmes not only told her analyst about her subjective experience, she told the gathered crowd at the Waldorf about it.  She described what it was like to be her.  And a very weird thing happened – I disagreed with her experience – or, perhaps worse, I just didn’t believe it to be the case.  Dr. Holmes stated that her basic experience of being black in America is one that is based on fear – true physical fear of aggressive actions on the part of whites.  My reaction was: really?  How can that be?  Racism is much more subtle and pervasive than that – I thought.  In fact I wrote it on a slip of paper and showed it to an analyst friend next to me, and she nodded in agreement.

I’m not saying that my reaction isn’t defensible.  I also do strongly believe that racism is subtle and pervasive.  What I think is remarkable is that, as an analyst, which is certainly part of my identity that should be available to me when I am in a plenary session at a psychoanalytic conference, when I am listening to the thoughts of another analyst about her subjectivity, I should have been open to that subjectivity – I should have swirled it around in my mouth and tasted it before I spit it out.  I should not have screwed up my mouth and not let it in.  Not that I have to agree with Dr. Holmes, even about her own experience - we constantly think of ways that someone's experience is the result of multiple defensive forces which alter that experience, for instance - but I rejected her description of her own thoughts out of hand.

Why did I do this?  I’m not sure.  What I was conscious of were Dr. Holmes’ references to recent police shootings and to the Black Lives Matter movement.  I felt somehow that her revelation of her internal experience was trendy rather than deeply felt and articulated.  Would I have felt this about any other analyst presenting at a plenary?  I have certainly felt about other analysts that they are presenting stuff that is not new – that they are simply covering ground that they have covered before.  Part of what was so tremendous about the presentation by Fonagy was that it was, indeed, novel – it was very different than the other stuff he had written.  But I acted as if Holmes' stuff wasn't new – by quickly turning it into a reflection of something that I experienced as trendy rather than, for instance, seeing the trend as a valid expression of a deeply (and broadly) held belief.  Is this how I react, as a white male, to the subjectivity of African Americans?

It is particularly interesting to me that I did not take in what she said because I have begged to have access to the subjectivity of US blacks in various posts here (for instance in reviewing Pym I was frustrated that the author, a black man, did not articulate the inner world of his characters, and in The Help noting that it did not make sense for the author, a white woman, to articulate the internal experiences of her black characters even though she did for her white characters– instead she simply related the dialogue of the black characters and let the reader wonder about the thoughts and feelings that produced the words).

Well, the next day I went to the new Whitney Museum of Art and, at the urging of some friends, went to a retrospective exhibit of Archibald Motley, an African American Artist the Whitney was touting as a Jazz Age artist.  In his early works, many of them painted when he was in Paris, he was working from a European sensibility, and was, according to the guiding materials, working to establish himself as a traditional master – though his subjects – his grandmother, a series of self-portraits, and other subjects – were of African American themes or with African American content, the style was high art.  He also painted, and I think this was truer later in his career, in a more immediate, almost folk art style that conveyed more movement – the colors were frequently more garish and the content allegorical – while on the surface being depictions of street scenes or interiors of African American gathering places – pool halls and jazz clubs in the south side of Chicago – the quality was flatter – the paintings seemed two dimensional.

The final painting that was displayed was one that seemed to incorporate elements of both styles.  More crafted than the others, but at the same time a collection of symbols juxtaposed in a haunting manner, the painting depicted various martyrs for the cause of civil rights – MLK, Jr., JFK, RFK – but also Abraham Lincoln.  There was also a lynched man hanging from a tree near a depiction of the Statue of Liberty.  It was as if Archibald Motley were telling me that I should have been listening to Dr. Holmes, that the basic state of living as an African American in the United States is one of fear.

And then this past Friday, in a kind of trifecta, an African American Psychologist from the University of Michigan, Robert Sellers, visited us at the University where I work.  He talked with us about mentoring students of color.  And as he was doing this, he noted that our psychology is based on the subjectivities of a relatively small group of white men, most of them Jewish, who had real identity concerns.  He listed Erik Erikson as an exemplar of this group.  He and I then wondered a bit about what lead this group of people – Jews are certainly a persecuted group – to be so comfortable with articulating their internal experience in a very public way.  He noted correctly that when they were doing this they were the voices of the dominant psychological movement in the United States – psychoanalysis was king in the middle of the twentieth century.  This was a different period than when Freud, for instance, was articulating his subjectivity, but frequently pretending that his dreams were those of his patients.  Since then, I have come across the writings of James Cone who maintains that Christianity, the religion of the dominant culture in the US, is actually a religion of the downtrodden, and he equates the Cross with our own Lynching Tree.

So, it is interesting that fear is so central to the experience of Dr. Holmes.  And, as been hammered home to me by other experiences in addition to the ones I have related here in the three weeks since I heard Dr. Holmes speak, this is shared by many others besides Dr. Holmes (and, as I write this, I wonder, how could this not be the case?).  It is interesting from the perspective of how fearful white Americans can be of African Americans and the characterization of African Americans as aggressive and dangerous.  It is also an interesting factor that would be operating in concert with the external factors of discrimination that I privileged over the subjective ones of Dr. Holmes.   But, I would add, there is the fact that Dr. Holmes first fear, that her analyst would not be able to hear and understand her experience  - was, in fact, embodied in her interaction with me – a white male who should be at least as open as most.  In so far as my experience can generalize, we may have significant difficulty hearing and appreciating the subjective experience of African Americans – even when we ask to hear it.  She is justifiably fearful of physical aggression from the dominant culture - we have acted in physically aggressive means to subdue African Americans from our first interactions with them as slaves.  She may also want to add to her list of fears the fear of not being heard - at least not at first - even by a sympathetic audience.



For other posts looking at Race in America see: James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree, and applied to a Rock Musical,  2017 Convention Aktar, Powell and Trump, hearing Ta-Nehisi Coates talk, Black Lives Matter,  John Lewis' March, Get Out, Green Book and Blackkklansman, The Help, Selma, August Wilson's Fences, Da 5 Bloods, The Black Panther, and Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me.

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

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