Transparent and Lola – Did the Kinks Get It Right?

Psychoanalysts discover (and create) the architecture of the mind.  Freud’s revelation that the mind is intimately and immediately tied to the body – and that the body, and therefore the mind, is foundationally a sexually driven space would, it would seem, make psychoanalysts centrally interested in issues of sexuality and gender.   But, following Freud’s errant lead – he was a guy who really didn’t get gender differences and who worked from a deeply heteronormative perspective - mainstream psychoanalysis, especially in the United States, tended to treat homosexuality and, later, transgender issues as anomalies – pathological states that needed to be fixed, treated, and changed – rather than understood.  The psychoanalytic organization started bypsychologists was more responsive to gay and lesbian and later trans issues, but the American Psychoanalytic Association – the stodgy and older arm of psychoanalysis – has been slow to recognize the importance of gender and sexual orientation variability as worthy of studying as “normal” phenomena.

So, imagine my surprise when the opening of the spring convention of the American Psychoanalytic Association in Chicago was a workshop that focused on understanding transgender, gay and other “queer” phenomena.  Not that there haven’t been small group sessions focused on this at the annual meetings for years – even decades – but these sessions have been at the margins.  This was a chunk of the convention – three hours – during which nothing else was scheduled.  Essentially all of the participants were expected to be there.  Of course, not everyone was.  Some were sightseeing, some came late, but the session was well attended.

Coincidentally, the meeting occurred on the Thursday following the murder of 49 people at a gay nightclub, Pulse, in Orlando.  The timing created an awareness of the ability of these issues to raise powerful – indeed murderous – feelings in people.  Understanding both the experience of the LGBTQ individuals, but also those around them were brought home as matters, literally, of life and death. 

After a brief introduction, mostly focused on helping orient us to the characters, a segment of “Transparent” was shown.  This show, streaming on Amazon, is written by a woman and her sister whose father “came out” as transgendered in his seventies.  While not autobiographical, it is clearly informed by the life experience of the writers.  In the show, the father, known for most of his life as Mort and played by Jeffrey Tambor, is divorced from the mother and has three grown children – an eldest daughter, a middle son and a youngest daughter.  In the particular episode that we watched, the father comes out to the younger daughter – she has come out to her eldest daughter but has not yet come out to her son – and the central dramatic moment is when she goes to the mall with her daughters, and, at the urging of her eldest daughter, goes with them into the women’s bathroom where that daughter outs her by calling her Dad, and she is shamed into leaving the bathroom by a self-righteous mother of a couple of teenagers.

 It was odd to be at a formal meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association, to be plunged into darkness to watch and get caught up in a modern dramatic series episode set in California – and an episode that was, as I will return to in a moment, disorienting, and then to return to a room full of analysts and a formal discussion of it.  It was a jarring mixture of media and of mindsets.  And, as the discussants called attention to, the episode itself was one that disoriented the viewers just as the family was disoriented.  The opening scene was an apparent love fest between the father and the daughter she had just come out to.  The daughter is expressing adoration for her father’s new look, but it is clearly feigned – and the father, while apparently bathing in her daughter’s adoration, is also non-plussed and limited in her responsiveness.

After this, there were many scenes with family members sorting out parts of their lives, starting with the son having aggressive sex with a woman he had known since childhood who pointed out that everyone knew, including his parents, that he had regularly had sex with his 35 five year old babysitter when he was 15, and that far from being the “wet dream” that he imagined, it was creepy and abusive – if the genders had been reversed, she would have been prosecuted.  Later, when he goes to confront the woman about his newly perceived abuse, they end up in bed together and his confused confrontation is muted by action.  The elder daughter who has previously been aware of her Dad’s coming out is shown in a series of tumultuous scenes with her lesbian lover who is promising, but failing to let someone (her current lover?  He parents? Her husband? – perhaps it was stated, but I had no idea who the person was) know that she and the daughter (who has left her husband and children to be with this woman) are lovers.  Meanwhile, the younger daughter who, in contrast to the lesbian daughter who looks traditionally feminine, looks butch, cuts her hair in a boyish manner and, after the scene in the mall, connects up with the brother in a kind of loosey goosey dance.

The presenters maintained that the disorientation of the viewer is intentional – it mirrors the disorientation of the children and all those around the transgendered person.  Gender is – they didn’t say this, but I will – a foundational aspect of identity.  To have one’s father become a woman is disorienting.  Who has my father been?  Who have I been in relation to the woman I have always thought of as a man?  The daughter names him MoPa – a kind of bi-gendered name – and how can she not be bi-gendered in the minds of her children?

Then, in this multimedia presentation, the presenters played Lola by The Kinks.  This song, an important song of my childhood, is on the album that marked the transition of the Kinks from their early incarnation as an English Pop group in the mop top tradition to a rock group that produced concept albums including rock operas that commented on modern life.  Their fans are divided.  They tend to like the early or the late Kinks, but not both – but all agree that the album with Lola on it is a masterpiece.

Lola was a disorienting song to me as a teenager.  My friend who turned me onto the Kinks was the youngest of a large family of musicians.  He played drums in a band where I played a pretty lame electric bass.  The song is an ambiguous one about a rube from the country who comes to the city and discovers Lola, who walks like a woman and talks like a man.  The final, ambiguous description of Lola, who becomes the singer’s lover is “I’m glad I’m a man and so is Lola.”   I was surprised that my apparently straight-laced friend liked this song – I wasn’t sure if he got it. 

From the context of the times, Lola would have been identified as a cross dressing gay man who, today, might have been able to identify as trans.  The lyrics point out, as did one of the presenters, that it is “a shook up, muddled up, messed up world, ‘cept for Lola.”  And he contrasted the way in which gender bending disorients those in the vicinity of the bender, of the one who is transporting him/herself across boundaries, but can be creating a stable base for what was a formerly off base – even confused - person – one who feels that they have been the wrong person in the wrong place at the worng time and now things are as they should be.

The problem with this idyll had been made apparent earlier by the first presenter who proposed that gender is not binary.  No sooner do we find a stable solution, than the rug gets pulled out from under us.  The presenter maintained that we should change a central training requirement for psychoanalysts – we are currently required to analyze both a man and a woman as part of our training.  The presenter maintained that this reifies our thinking about gender as binary.  Indeed, transgender folks do this as well.  They say, in effect, “I’m not a woman (or a man) but a man (or a woman).”  If gender is fluid, then aren’t we all both male and female?  But if it is fluid, what do those two poles mean?  Lola was able to define his gender (Lola, too, if I am reading the lyrics correctly, is a man – one who dresses like a woman).  Perhaps that is at least a temporary solution – and certainly the solution that most of us likely experience – I am a man (or a woman) we proclaim – or don’t need to proclaim – we just know – and I am attracted to women (or men or both) – we don’t proclaim – we know – until we question it, and then things become fluid and confusing. 

Freud, the intrepid explorer, left gender and sexuality (gender more than sexuality) relatively fixed.  Why did he do that?  On the one hand, when everything is shifting, it feels like there needs to be some constant landmark – something that stays stable so that there is a sense of being oriented in a disorienting place and world.  But there is more to it than that.  Freud’s gender brought him tremendous privilege.  He was catered to and coddled – as a man: as a Jew, not so much.  From that position of privilege, much was expected.  He had to prove that he could provide for a family before he could be married.  He had to provide – through incredibly lean times.  Privilege is a double edged sword.  Those of us who are privileged – and I am certainly high among that group – have tremendous expectations, but also tremendous opportunities.  The discussions of privilege often seem to revolve around what is afforded to those who are privileged – and the wish seems to be an envious one to get what the others have, but there is (or should be) a commensurate envy of and interest in the opportunity to contribute to the well-being of others. 

William and Henry James were a psychologist and a novelist at the turn of the twentieth century.  They were both raised in tremendous privilege – their father was quite wealthy.  Their productivity has been attributed, in part, to a reaction to the relative indolence of their father.  They saw that he done very little with the position of privilege that had been afforded to him.  They decided to make use of their privilege to produce – one started a science (psychology) in the US and the other redefined an art form – the novel.  What would happen if we all used our privilege as well as they did?  Or as Freud did?  Freud used his privilege to create a position from which such things as gender and sexuality could ultimately be questioned – and the magnetic north which he used to orient his exploration could, as the presenters proposed, shift, so that we can more fully explore the human condition.

In a case presentation later in the day, an analyst was presenting a case of working with a gay man.  The analyst and the patient experienced a “lovefest” where they were very pleased with a piece of work that they had done.  We, as a group of analysts listening, were as mistrustful of this love fest as we had been of the one depicted on film.   The work that they had done was good – but there was a tremendous amount of work left to do.  And, among other things, they needed to wrestle with the conflicts between them, not just the common ground.  None the less, it was useful for them to pause – in the long and difficult passage that is an analysis – and to be pleased; and in that moment, if only for a moment, to feel that all was right with the world.  Tomorrow there will always be time to discover that these things that we have come to count on as solid – as orienting – are merely resting points, places from which to chart a new path across a trackless sea.

Ok, that would, speaking of resting points, be a good place to stop this post.  And if you don’t want to keep reading, or feel satisfied, that is fine.  But I have left out an important piece of the presentation and of the episode of transparency.  The episode revolved around the center of the scene about the bathroom.  And bathrooms have long played a role in Civil Rights.  They played a central role in the Jim Crow south (as depicted in TheHelp and other places), and they are certainly playing a role in our current national debate about transgender issues.

The presenters talked about bathrooms as the places in which intimate and poorly controlled things happen.  Pooping and peeing, which involve smells and noises that escape from the confined areas of the stalls – but also more adult things – anonymous sex between men.  And these are the stuff of shame.  We are, first and foremost, creatures of our bodies.  Our bodies, and the things our bodies produce, define us in the early going, and continue to do that across time.  The boundaries of our bodies, which define us from birth, are softened and hidden by clothes, but are exposed and we are vulnerable when we are in places of nakedness, like bathrooms. 

Psychoanalysis is a process of exposing those vulnerable aspects of ourselves in a place of relative safety – the analytic consulting room.  Over time, we explore the boundaries between ourselves and others – those in our past – and the analyst in our present.  As we do this, we reclaim a sense of ourselves as reasonably bounded.  We come to feel more and more comfortable with those parts of ourselves that we have disowned or disavowed because they feel shameful, we have been ridiculed for exposing them, or they have been forced into the open or violated by others.

A poignant scene in the middle of the Transparent episode is a flashback to a moment earlier in the father’s life where she has met another man who is questioning his gender in a hotel room.  They have each dressed as a woman – one in the bathroom, one in the hotel room.  They reveal themselves in their dressed up glamour to each other and the other man asks the father what her name is.  She responds, “Daphne Sparkles.”  The man responds, “No.  That’s a stripper’s name.  Your name is Maura.”  The father reflects for a moment and agrees.  There is a sense, in this moment, that things may be mixed up in the world, but in Maura’s mind, things have come to rest.

The problem is that this will, inevitably, be a temporary resting place.  It won’t last.  For Maura, who has a lot of developing to do as a person and as a woman (don’t we all), but for our understanding of the human condition more generally.  Is gender binary?  Is it fluid?  What are the intrapsychic and social implications of magnetic north wandering?  Moving across boundaries is upsetting to people – it can, as this week has certainly shown, be violently upsetting.  And the purchase that we get in the new place is temporary – no sooner does one thing become fixed than other things go into motion.  Hopefully across time we come better able, through analytic and other types of understanding, be able to keep our bearings even as the reference points move.

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