House of Cards: Art presents a scary vision of life

Terror: That is the new state of affairs nationally and internationally.  It is represented well in our hearts as we watch, fascinated and drawn in by Frances (Frank) Underwood played by Kevin Spacey, and his wife, Claire Underwood, played by Robin Wright.  When the techniques of building to a cliffhanger that were developed to help us sustain our interest in the next episode across a week are employed in a streaming series where the next episode is immediately cued up, the series, especially this one, becomes addictive, and the reluctant wife, but also the reluctant son and I and sometimes all three of us have watched more than we intended on more than one occasion.  We have just finished the fourth season and must now wait several months before the next season is released. 

Will we still be enthralled?   One thing that letting the next episode play does is to help us disregard just how sick and empty we can feel after watching a particular episode.  With the cliffhanger, we become aware of our hunger rather than the pervasive feeling that we have while watching of not been nurtured during the hour and, kind of like when eating cotton candy, we beg for more despite or maybe partially because of the emptiness we feel.  Will we want to return to this state next spring?  Or will we have thought better of it by then?  That may depend, in part, on the political outcomes that occur between now and then.

The emptiness is not just in our stomachs, it is on the set.  Where The West Wing, also a serial about the White House and National/International Politics, is constantly crowded and filled with people essential to the plot and inessential – and in the documentaries, actual denizens of the White House insist that there are many more people running the West Wing than could be depicted in the show because it would have confused people to try to track even more than was already being depicted.  But the personal and professional space of Congressman and then President Underwood is stark – and the absence of people is, I think, an intentional depiction of the internal world of the kind of person that he is – a psychopath, or by its more modern name, a person who has an antisocial personality.

The paradox of the psychopath, and both Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright nicely portray different versions of the style, is that while they are coldly manipulative and their internal worlds are as bleak as the sets of House of Cards, they evoke in us, the people they interact with, a sense of attachment and we feel warmly to them (Autism, particularly Asperger's syndrome, as depicted in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, raises a parallel set of questions).  Frank is charming in public appearances, and his asides to the audience are endearing – we are given access to his inner thinking and we admire the cunning and guile that he betrays.  He knows more about what is going on in the insides of the people he is interacting with than they (or we) do, and we are let into his inner sanctum of knowledge about the way people function.

Claire, as the show moves forward, polls higher than Frank and she is enlisted on the campaign trail because people like her.  Seeing Frank through her eyes leads people to like him because they like her.  She is likeable – though to those of us who have a closer view, we see that she is actually quite cold and has a very functional view of life and people – I find myself trusting her even less than Frank as the series progresses. 

We like them, though, not just in spite of themselves, but because of our ability to empathize with them.  Frank is a hard luck kid.  His Dad was mean and downtrodden, couldn’t keep a job or make something of himself and Frank has made a LOT of himself.  He has struggled up from nothing.  Claire was born with a silver spoon in her mouth, but her mother is cold and while it appears that her father indulged her, it is not clear that anyone ever loved her.  I think that, were these people instead of characters, it might be even clearer that we empathize with them in a way that they can’t empathize with themselves.  They are angry about what happened.  Frank at one point is upset about a picture linking his Dad with the KKK because he was proud of the picture.  His father had gone to the KKK member to try to secure a loan to get on his feet, one of the few times he showed some gumption.  When that is all that you father has done to be proud of you have led a pretty bleak life, and we feel that bleakness.  But I’m not sure they do.  I think they feel angry that they have been treated this way, and entitled to much more, but they likely believe they can’t feel upset about how they have been treated because that feeling state is one in which they feel vulnerable, and they can never, ever allow themselves to be vulnerable.

I think that the dramatic device of using the aside allows us to use our more sophisticated psychologies to understand and appreciate their more primitive ones (you have to wait until the very end of the fourth season for Claire's joining in the aside piece - we view her through the eyes of her paramour before that).  Were we actually living in the world of the Underwoods, I think they would be communicating with us much more viscerally - I think they are actually functioning in much the mode that terrorists do (see a post on 9/11 to understand what I am referring to here).

In addition to getting a chance to "look under the hood" as it were through the asides and just as spectators, we admire their grit and determination.  We also feel, on some level, that they may be savages, but they are our savages.   More than once, the reluctant son and I have wondered about how Frank would have dealt with some intractable situation.  Especially when there is a bully around, it would be nice to have someone who is even more cold hearted and ruthless than the meanest bully you can bring to the party, and when we identify with the bully, we feel protected.  We are in the position of power, we are making others feel uncomfortable.  We are acting, not reacting.  We are doing not being done to.  The very things that help the bully feel comfortable help us - as their henchmen - feel comfortable and protected.

So, we are fascinated by this pair – this couple who feel it is them against the world and who manipulate and cajole and work the system and the good will of others to achieve – what?  Frank keeps referring to the goal of their work as the possession of this house – the White House.  But to what purpose?  It seems to give them very little pleasure to occupy it.  They might as well be playing one of Frank’s first person shooter games as leading a nation filled with living breathing people.  Even State Dinners – moments that might be seen as places to feel special and important are filled with angst and intrigue as they work in a non-stop political game of one-upmanship.  They must always be the top dog.

Of course, this is an election season, and it is tempting to wonder if Bill and Hillary’s marriage, one that certainly must have strange and intricate rules, mirrors this strange marriage.  What is Hillary’s true motive for running?  What is the magnetic pull of that house for them?  Are they – if not exclusively but in some ways pervasively as drawn to power for its own sake as Frank and Claire?  Is there some way in which there is not just a wish to do good, but a wish to aggrandize oneself that is at the heart of all political striving?  I was struck when a revolutionary in Nicaragua, Dora Maria Tellez, was not more disappointed in Daniel Ortega who went from being a freedom fighter for democracy, and the first democratically elected president - and the first leader to voluntarily give up power - to becoming a despot.  Her position was that there is something about power that is very hard to give up – that people like George Washington who chose not to be crowned are the exception, not the rule.

And there are certainly overtones of Donald Trump in Frank.  Could it be that, in addition to the attention that he craves, there is something about having power over others that is driving him towards the presidency?  Is his effort to have us fear others really an attempt to redirect the fear that we have of his drive towards power and perhaps despotism in another direction – to imagine that the threat is from someone – anyone – but the real threatening person, himself?

Power, here, is being presented as a drug.  Something that promises to make the person who feels deeply and powerfully (but neither completely consciously nor in an integrated and processed fashion) damaged to feel the opposite of that – to feel whole and, instead of downtrodden, to feel on top of things.  The drug is also revealed to be insidious.  Though it promises a new state, the state of power, it actually just keeps adding layers of mistrust and emptiness built on more layers of mistrust and emptiness because the power is illusory - it is not built on the genuine trust of others, but on having something on them or over them and of being vulnerable oneself because of the means that have been used to acquire that.

At the conclusion of the fourth season, the cliff hanger is a big one.  We are left with the promise that, to protect the house of cards from being exposed – to misdirect the people from seeing that all that is constructed is anchored in lies, deceit and murder – the Underwoods will introduce chaos – they will unleash fear.  And they will use this – they will massage and sculpt it because it is their medium - and they will, they promise, create a masterpiece of mayhem out of it.  We, the American people in this strange parallel universe, we know, will be drawn into it.  What will befall us?  How far can this be pushed?  What horrific ends will they achieve?  Stay tuned – don’t turn away - watch the brutality unfold.

One of the nice things about House of Cards is that we can, in fact, turn away.  We know that it is fiction.  The political landscape this year is not fiction, even though it feels, often, more like a reality TV show – which means something completely unreal (who could live with integrity in a house with a random group of people, be videotaped from morning to night, and be subjected to weird parameters?  How is this real?).  At this writing the Democratic National Convention has just concluded and the party – under the direction of Hillary Clinton and her campaign – has painted a picture that is in stark contrast to the picture painted at the Republican convention last week.  Both pictures are consistent with the campaigns to this point, but they may be coming into focus more clearly.  The two candidates are polling about dead even at this point, so to this point, these two very different visions have a similar hold on us.  What are they?

The one vision is that of the individual who can solve problems.  The person who is simply smarter and knows what is going on versus all of the dummies in the room (except for those who think like him) and who can cut through all the hand wringing and questioning and act forthrightly and directly.  Let’s just cut to the chase is this model.  From a psychoanalytic perspective, this is a powerful model – one that we identify with.  “If I were king…” things would be better.  They would be done my way.  I know what is going on better than those around me.  I can bring people around to my position and, if I can’t, I can overrule or override those who disagree with me.

The second vision is much more conditional.  The world is not one in which there are easy answers.  It is complicated and we must listen to the minority voices because they contain wisdom.  Ultimately we must act, but our actions will always involve compromise and conditions and will never be based on certain knowledge and they will never accomplish a goal completely – there will always be flaws.  And actually those flaws are part of what makes the world a beautiful place.

Now I have a strong opinion about which of these views makes sense (OK, it is the latter), though I am less certain that either candidate truly believes this (the Bernie chanters who would be heard were drowned out by cries of USA or Hillary whenever they tried to voice their concerns in the hall – good for appearances on national TV but inconsistent with the message being preached on stage…).  But I believe that taking in more information is more efficient, actually, based on a model of psychoanalytically healthier mental functioning. 

I think the practice of free association leads us to hear from the cacophony that is our own minds the diversity of voices and opinions that we feel about any given situation.  This can be overwhelming and confusing – especially when we first start doing it.  It is much more comforting to have a sense of certainty about a course of action or about how a situation is configured than to feel our way into a position that takes more data into account.  Heck, a lot of psychoanalysts try to boil things down to a simple rubric – they see the Oedipal situation in almost everything, not as a way to open up various ways of thinking about any given situation, but as a way of closing it down, of having the right answer - this is simply the Oedipal situation - like every other Oedipal situation - rather than one of an infinite number of variations on a theme - in which it is the variations - the particular tones of this particular rendition that are of interest.

I believe the paradox of using free association, however, is that it leads to more efficient thinking.  We actually come up with models that more closely match the environment when we take into account primitive as well as sophisticated ways of thinking about it – concrete as well as abstract – fearful as well as hopeful – selfish as well as community based.  And as we exert less control over our thoughts – as we let them bubble up, we find a richness in the resulting steam that is an aggregate of flavors and spices.  There is something severe and therefore impressive about a more incisive approach – a black and white one.  But I think that our political system – as envisioned in the interpretation of the framers of the public narrative of the Democratic convention – actually nicely mirrors what we strive for in our best psychoanalytic interventions and the lived moments that result from having learned to function more fully as the result of the psychoanalytic process.  


To see a post about the final season of House of Cards, link here.

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

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The Taming of the Shrew and 10 Things I Hate About You: A modern double feature

 

William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew was adapted to the screen as 10 Things I Hate about You – a RomCom that showed up among the top thirty RomComs on an internet list that we searched last night to have a movie night with the younger stepdaughter.  She wanted to watch a movie that would not be too demanding and the reluctant wife and I agreed that 10 Reasons that I Hate You sounded cute – and it was.  The reluctant wife, having some affection for the Richard Burton/ Elizabeth Taylor version of Taming, recognized and informed of us of many of the allusions to Shrew, including, for example, that the High School is named Padua- the name of the town in Shrew.  Well, because we were already streaming 10 Reasons, we simply called up – as if by magic – Burton and Taylor to perform Shrew.  

Remember when you had to go to a theater, or wait for something to be offered at a particular time on TV, or go to a store to get a DVD?  How much more gratifying – in a weird parallel to the induction of the play that Zeffirelli – the director of the Burton Taylor version - left out of the movie – it is to be able to conjure up what you want to see on a whim.  In the Induction, a drunken tinker is convinced that he is a lord and the play is performed for him – sort of, in my mind, like the play that Hamlet commissions to be played for his doomed stepfather in the climactic scene of that play.  In Shrew, the entire play is framed as a play – one that is performed for common folk who believe they are nobles – and it includes much play of nobles being common folk and common folk pretending to be nobles as part of a variety of ruses to win the hand of Bianca, but I get ahead of myself…

10 Reasons I Hate You  is set in a Seattle High School, Cameron James, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, is transferred into the school and is immediately smitten by the unattainable Bianca Stratford, (Larisa Oleynik), the beautiful but vapid younger sister of Kat (Julia Stiles)– the bad girl of Padua High.  Where the Shrew, as the older sister, needs to be wed before the younger sister can be, in 10 Reasons, the girls’ Obstetrician father, who is obsessed with the fear that they will become pregnant, softens his edict that neither of them can ever date by deciding that the younger sister cannot date until the older one does – something that he sees zero chance of happening as she works so hard to repel everyone in her path.  Cameron, intent on dating Bianca, tries to convince the bad boy in school, Patrick Verona (Heath Ledger) to woo Kat and, when this fails, induces the vapid and pretty boy Joey to pay Patrick to go on a date with her – the catch is that Joey thinks he will get to date Bianca as the prize, something Bianca is initially intent on as well.

To think of Shakespeare as the father of the RomCom, takes some getting used to, but it makes sense –  he is the foremost dramatist of the English Language and wrote in a wide variety of styles.  What audiences demand now is more backstory – and we discover in 10 reasons not simply that Kat is shrewish, but that she used to be popular and to cultivate that popularity.  At first we are led to believe that she may have become more difficult in the wake of her mother’s disappearance – at first it seems like she is dead, but later we are told that she left, but ultimately we learn that the “cause” of Kat’s rejecting high school society is something else: that she, after having sex with Joey when a freshman, because it was the thing to do, asked him to slow things down as she wasn’t sure she wanted to continue to be sexual, and he rejected her – and she has since quit doing things that others expect of her ever since.

With no explanation of Katherine’s shrewishness, Shakespeare moves away from the particular and confronts us with a force of nature unbridled.  She is simply horrid – and a sharp contrast to her sweet sister Bianca – at whom she rails for no apparent reason other than Bianca being appealing – in sharp contrast to how Katherine presents herself.  This play has been criticized for being misogynistic (as has psychoanalysis), and when read or viewed as the wooing of a Shrew, it is hard, from a modern perspective, not to be brought up short by the cruel ways in which the wild man Petruchio, the suitor who is convinced to pursue her by the size of her dowry, tames her.  But if we remember the Induction and think of this as a play conjured up for us to wonder about identity – including especially the identity of the viewer – we might wonder about whether we are confronted by a literal wooing and marriage of a man and a woman or whether we are in the land of symbolism and whether we are deconstructing what it means to be a man (perhaps wild but needing to tame) and a woman (perhaps wild and needing to be tamed).  And we might further wonder whether we are thinking about the masculine and the feminine – aspects of the self that are both related to but independent of gender – so that I, male or female may be wild and wanting to both tame and be tamed.

You might be thinking, at this point, that I am playing modern with a four hundred year old play.  And I may well be doing exactly that.  But I also think that the play was likely performed for Elizabeth, who, in the anachronistic movie Shakespeare in Love states that she knows “something about being a woman in a man’s world.”  And if this play were crafted for her – especially by someone like Shakespeare or Edward de Vere, Elizabeth’s possible lover and one of the possible writers of the Shakespearean plays, a person who was both defending a world where nobles were nobles and commoners were common as men are men and women are women, but is also writing for a stage where women are played by men and a world where commoners are rising through economic means to outstrip the wealth of nobles – the issues of identity were very much in play for him.  And, even if all of this weren’t for in play him (a far weaker argument, I know), they are for us, and we can use his play to look at our world, as the writer and director have done with 10 things.

So, what if Katherine – or Kate – or Kat – is a symbol of the feminine: the feral, untamed wild part of us that, at least in the Burton rendition of the role, a masculine power as wild as Petruchio can, at best, hope to have some influence on?    (It really is fun to wonder about Burton and Taylor playing these roles and to wonder about the ways in which this is a play on the “real life” (as if their lives could have been real) interactions between them)  But in the symbolic – the feminine may symbolize many things – but for a moment, let me borrow it as a symbol of the untamed, wild, aboriginal parts of ourselves that Freud called the id.  Petruchio then becomes that part of ourselves – that tries to assert power over our untamed aspects – OK, the ego – and it might take a wild ego to tame a wild id.  And while we are here, because symbols are plastic, might this pair not also symbolize the relationship between society, parents, and here I will insert the anachronistic therapist, and the wild elements in citizens, children, and the mad among us?

If we take the latter metaphor, and we, for a moment, suggest that Shakespeare is writing a manual for future therapists (OK, now I have gone anachronistically mad), might he be proposing something like this:  In a household with only a father present – the mother is absent without explanation in both Shrew and 10 things – we have two diametrically opposed feminine objects that emerge.  The one is unbridled and seemingly untameable.  The father adores her, but from afar.  He does not understand her.  The other is sweet, demure, but largely uninteresting.  The wooing of these characters demands two very different suitors.  Katherine (and Kat) are wooed by men who appear to be their equal as forces of nature – they are bad boys.  At least in the Burton rendition – and more starkly in 10 things – they turn out to actually not have been as bad as all that.  They are the ruffians with hearts of gold – and they help the shrew return to her true roots as a someone who wants to be tamed – who wants to be loved and is willing to be lovely to achieve that – once she can count on a man (or masculine force – whatever that might mean for us at this moment) to be reliably present – to give her what she really needs.

Bianca – our sweet feminine nature (again, whatever that means for us in this moment – see a post on Transparent for ideas about that current general configurations) responds, ultimately, to the suitor in false clothing.  In Shrew, she is wooed by a noble posing as the servant/scholar to a noble – one who falsely promises to the father more than he can deliver.  In 10 Things, the successful suitor quickly learns French in order to be able to tutor her (something, it turns out, she knows much better than he does), and he is duplicitous, but constant in his direct adoration of her.

What are the results?  The Shrew is successfully tamed.  She sings – perhaps archly – the virtues of obedience.  Despite having been publicly humiliated and ill treated, she has come to heel.  She will and does do as she is told.  And while she may bridle against that – different productions of the play portray this differently – I think there is a sense of a true and genuine marriage between the two entities – whether they are symbolizing man and wife, state and citizen, role and person (e.g. Sovereign and Elizabeth), or, perhaps dubiously and certainly speculatively, therapist and patient.  In 10 things, Kat is freed to articulate her pain – which she eloquently does with her modern rendition of Shakespeare’s 141^st sonnet when she articulates the ten things that she hates about her suitor, but acknowledges that, despite these things, she still deeply loves him.  Stating – in effect – that love for the other does violence to ourselves.  To enter into a compact with nation, person, office or therapist we must violate ourselves in some essential fashion.  And while this hurts (Shakespeare refers to this directly as pain in sonnet 141), it is also the state that ultimately works best for us.

Bianca’s love in both renditions sounds an interesting counter tone.  She is docile from beginning to end – seemingly doing what state, role and person would have her do – but she proves to be, if anything the more recalcitrant of the two.  In Shrew, she disobeys her husband in the climactic scene, failing to come when called for (along with another woman), perhaps indicating that the majority of apparently happy marriages are really anything but that – they are seeming monarchies in which the subjects actually do as they please, disregarding the overlord.  In 10 things, Bianca is the one who outwardly revolts against the father – she actively campaigns to go on dates against his wishes while her sister is actually adored by the father and he seems to not so secretly wish that she would connect with others despite his fears that she will become pregnant.  Bianca also manages to have a much more complex path to connecting with Cameron – she has to discover that Joey is really not for her.  And it is not clear that Cameron ever appreciates who it is that Bianca actually is – she is more than the pretty, but vacuous person we are led to believe she is at the beginning, but neither we nor he get to know all that is there.

OK, this seems like a pretty good stopping place, but let me note in closing that my obsession with treatment here might have to do with reading Sydney Blatt these days.  Blatt proposed that there are two types of depression that are related to two ways of relating to the world – in the first we crave the presence of others.  In the second, we are so self-critical that we can’t imagine that others would want to have anything to do with us.  These two types of depression require different kinds of treatments.  The one who can’t imagine that others want us (I am supposing that to be the Shrew), needs a constant other who can engage them across time and help them learn to trust others.  Ironically, needy ones do not do as well with unlimited contact – they need to learn how to function more autonomously.

Blatt’s observations of depression led him to posit a broader developmental task – that we all need to both connect with others and to function autonomously.  When we are connecting well, that helps us feel competent to function autonomously, and vice versa.  This is a positive spiral.  We can also spiral down – feeling incompetent so that we worry no one will want us, etc.  While Shrew feels violent, it may be that Shakespeare was onto something that it would take 400 years to figure out, that there is a violence to bringing our selves to heel - and whether we do that ourselves or the state, a therapist, or a lover assists us with that, it is an important part of the socialization process - even if something essential about us is lost in process.  I think that his induction - could this be the source of our talking about hypnotic inductions? - invites us to wonder about the ways in which our socialized roles - as men and women, as nobles and commoners - define us - but also for us to wonder about what unites us - how we are all, in some very real sense, essentially similar - some of us just wake up to find ourselves noble or common, male or female.  There is some irony, then, that this defender of the sovereign and of nobility plays to and connects with the common people in ways that will, over the course of the following 400 years, empower them.

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

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Black Lives Matter

The lives of most people living don’t matter to me at all.  I am overwhelmed by the prospect of keeping up with and engaging in the lives of those I care about and know.  One of the few things that rang false about the television show The West Wing were the number of times that the President and the staffers expressed genuine concern over the lives of people that they had never met.  That may sound inhumane of me.  But I think that, especially in situations where individuals are confronted by others having massive losses on a frequent basis, it is natural and human to become hardened to those losses – to build a protective shield so that we don’t become burned out by over-caring.

There was a period of time after the birth of my son when I had a hard time watching television.  There are an incredible number of deaths depicted on television shows – fewer 17 years ago – but plenty then – and I usually barely register them.  But in the wake of his birth – each of those deaths, whether in a drama, documentary or on the news, was not the death of some character, but the death of a child of a mother and a father whose grief at the loss of that particular child would be inconsolable.  Obviously I was overidentifying with those mothers and fathers and this was a measure of the fear of losing my own child.  I am reminded of David Lindsay –Abaire, the author of the Pulitzer Prize winning play The Rabbit Hole who was told by his writing teacher at Julliard to write about what terrified him and he remembered thinking, “I got nothing.”  Then his first child was born and he knew what he needed to write about – losing a child:  Terrifying.  And to constantly live in this state is taxing and can, quite frankly, be paralyzing.  We live in a world where we have to act- and there are consequences – seen and unseen – to our actions.  So we generally exist in a state that is more weighted towards not caring than caring.

I think, in addition to it being natural not to care about many others, it is also natural to fail to appreciate other people’s perspectives.  We want others to appreciate our perspective.  As Hermia, in Midsummer Night’s Dream cries, when her father wants her to marry his choice rather than her own, “I would my father looked but with my eyes.”  In fact, as a professional who works hard to understand others ways of seeing the world, I know that it is ridiculously hard to actually have a sense of what others think and feel about a particular situation.  We frequently think we know what another is thinking (the reluctant wife consistently thinks she knows my mind better than I do – and her perspective is frequently both accurate and something I haven’t considered, but it is never the whole story), but to actually know what is going on in another person’s mind is all but impossible.

So, when a movement claims that Black Lives Matter, and they go on to state that this is different than Lives Matter, how are we to understand this?  The Black Lives Matter movement arises immediately out of a series of police shootings of blacks – usually black men or boys – and doing this over relatively minor offenses or in questionable situations where claims of perceived threat seem to be greatly exaggerated.  From a more distant perspective, it arises out of both the long civil rights struggles of African Americans and the history of deadly violence without due process that were the lynchings of African Americans.   The implication of the title of the movement is pretty straightforward – we need to quit acting as if black lives don’t matter – because not valuing them is contributing, most vividly, to widespread racial violence – though I think the impact is actually much broader than that.

Why don’t black lives matter?  At least for me, I think this is partly because they represent the other – the disowned aspects of ourselves that we would rather not acknowledge.  I base this assertion in part on the experience of dreaming myself to be Black when I was applying to become an analyst.  As a psychologist in a field dominated by physicians (indeed, until recently, psychologists were prohibited from becoming analysts), I feared that I would not be admitted – and even more, accepted as an actual member of “the club”.  While we might think that this is a representation of what was going on in the social world, I think it is more accurately a reflection of how I felt about myself – or struggled to avoid feeling about myself.  Consciously, I thought it would be foolish not to accept me – Psychoanalysis is in a precarious condition and they need people like me.  In ways that were represented in my dreams as my being African American, I did not feel up to snuff. 

Does this mean African Americans are not up to snuff?  No, it means that on some level that can be used to represent thoughts that I don’t want to acknowledge, I believe they are not up to snuff.  But it is more complicated than that.  I also believe – in that same place or perhaps right next door to it, that I am not up to snuff.  But I don’t want to believe that I am not up to snuff, so I think to myself something like – “Well, I may not be the best thing since sliced bread, but at least I am not black.”  The next step would be to do something like kill the blacks to rid the world of all the stuff that is not up to snuff.  The reasoning – such as it is – is that, “All the bad stuff is actually not in me, but in blacks, and getting rid of them rids us of all the bad stuff.”

I think that some process like this – and it sounds pretty weird, but I think there is something to it – happens on an individual and societal level.  The problem is that we are generally unaware that we are functioning in this way.  In so far as this is a defense mechanism, it is something that we are putting in place without conscious thought or awareness.  If you ask me if I am racist, I might say something like, “How could I be racist?  I have dreams about myself where I, myself, am black.”  The difference is that when I am representing myself as black, I want to protect myself.  When I move over just a tiny bit and represent the other as black, that life does not matter.  Quite the contrary, I want to get rid of it.

The most powerful moment that I, as a white American male, experienced of being singled out for an aspect of who I am, was on 9/11/2001 when I found myself under attack not for something I had done, but for who I was and what it was that my being that symbolized.  I was an American, and because of that I was hated.  That is not what I experienced immediately.  Quite the contrary: I felt angry, powerless and afraid and a myriad of other powerful emotions – emotions that I think were communicated to me by those who hated me.  They did what they did for many reasons, but one of those reasons was, I believe, to put inside me – and millions like me – the feelings that they had – feelings that they quite literally felt they could not contain, and they literally put in me.

I think that we have done a similar thing with Blacks in America.  We have put the feelings that are hard for us to contain – our fears, our aggressive impulses – into them.  Of course we have not literally done this, any more than the terrorists literally put their feelings into us – but we, for all our successes, are not a comfortably confident people.  We can fall from grace at any moment, and we aren’t sure there is a safety net to support us.  Blacks – and here I mean a particular view of blacks – the black of the ghetto – represents that part of ourselves that fears we won’t survive – that in this dog eat dog world, we will be eaten.  And we react against this part of ourselves – we hate this part of ourselves – and we communicate that through violence of various sorts, including shooting people who symbolize this.  (In this paragraph I have condensed a wide variety of possible and probable experiences into one simple narrative.  This narrative necessarily does violence to the many ways that individuals experience race relations, but it is intended to be a narrative representation that serves as a general summary – one that will relate sometimes quite well and sometimes quite poorly to individual narratives).

Of course, just as the terrorists on 9/11 communicated a range of feelings to us, I think our violence communicates a range of feelings to Blacks – they feel – not just their own feelings, but the feelings that we cannot tolerate in ourselves (James Cone has written eloquently about this).  We ask them to know terror – and then we don’t recognize it when that is what they communicate to us – as I failed to do with a fellow psychoanalyst, Dorothy E.Holmes.  We have disowned the feelings so thoroughly that we don’t recognize them when they are stated back to us.

Why should black lives matter?  Because our lives should matter: because our lives are incomplete when we disavow such broad swaths of them by disavowing our reactions to blacks – including disavowing that they don’t matter.  Perhaps the most chilling part of the New Yorker interviews with Darren Wilson, the police officer whose killing of Michael Brown touched off the Ferguson protests, is when Jake Halpern, the interviewer, asks Darren Wilson if he imagines what Michael Brown might be doing now if he – Darren Wilson – hadn’t killed him.  Despite Wilson’s having said many of the right things about race relations and his style of policing – things that Halpern indirectly questions as he interviews others – Wilson’s failure to even fathom that Michael Brown might have a life were he not killed seems to speak directly to the concerns expressed in the Black Lives Matter movement. 

That said, I had a close friend inadvertently (and it was never established who was at fault) kill two people in a car accident.  He was seriously injured as well.  Despite his mother’s wish to express remorse to the parents and spouses of the dead women – a wish that the attorney in the case quashed as it might represent guilt – my friend’s dominant experience, not without some reason, was that he was the one who was victimized – they were likely drinking and came around a blind corner and he was now seriously injured – injuries that will be with him through the rest of his life.  He felt himself to be the victim.  I have seen the same thing happen when I talk about date rape with various groups of men where just imagining that they have been accused of date rape leads them to imagine themselves victims rather than to focus on their potentially being perpetrators.

I do think that one thing that is hard for white people like me to keep in mind is that we are perpetrators.  We are not comfortable with that.  We want to disavow not only the disavowed things that I have stated above, but we also want to disavow that we have disavowed them.  This can, I think, cause us to feel unconscious guilt.  And we can imagine that if we open our hearts to blacks, that we will be manipulated because of this guilt.

I am writing this post from the shores of one of our Great Lakes in a resort community that is so white that the first blacks I have seen in a week were in last night’s production of Midsummer Night’s Dream referenced earlier.  This production had a white Theseus preparing to marry a black Hippolyta and the same actors played the parts of Oberon and Titania – the Faery King and Queen.  The play notes point to Shakespeare having questioned some of the tenets of English History in much the same way that Hamilton is questioning the tenets of American History.  The Arts are leading the way in helping us to reconsider what it means to be marginalized – and more importantly, what it means to come in from the margins – how does this impact both those at the center and those on the margins?  And for both, this can be, but does not have to be, a violent interaction.  We can violently resist reowning the disavowed aspects of ourselves.  We can also enact the projected aggressive aspects – as the United States did in part in its war on Iraq – a misguided effort to attack terrorism that may have incited more instability and therefore more terror than it prevented – and, perhaps, as the attacks on the police officers in Dallas last Friday did. 

Coming to value each of our children as if they were one of our own – as if owning our own children, including their manifold antics, were an easy matter – but coming to value each of our children as our own – including, especially our black children – children who represent by just one attribute parts of ourselves that we would disown – and children who by virtue of being represented entirely by that attribute have their lives – the complexity of who they are – erased in the minds of others – this is a disservice to ourselves – it keeps us from appreciating and living with the tension of being the complex internally contradictory beings that we necessarily are – and it continues to oppress those who have been oppressed for generations.

I don’t know how we come to care about the lives of others – especially those that we do not – and maybe cannot – know.  The continual movement toward achieving the ambitious goals dreamed of by Martin Luther King – and by each and every one of us when we hear his inspiring words about it – is fraught with danger – we resist it, sometimes violently – and also paradoxically embrace the gains we have made and work for more.  As lofty as the goals may be, the terrain that we have to navigate to achieve them is the most treacherous of all – the complex minds and hearts of people whose complexity is something we continually work to avoid acknowledging, much less appreciating.  

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

For other posts looking at Race in America see: James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree, and applied to a Rock Musical, Dorothy Holmes presents to the 2016 Psychoanalytic Convention, 2017 Convention Aktar, Powell and Trump, hearing Ta-Nehisi Coates talk, Black Lives Matter,  John Lewis' March, Get Out, Green Book and Blackkklansman, Americanah, The Help, Selma, August Wilson's Fences, Hamilton! on screen, Da 5 Bloods, The Black Panther, and Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me.

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The Sun Also Rises: Hemingway Still has the Power to Discombobulate

Ernest Hemingway and I are linked by the coincidence of a birth place: Oak Park, Illinois - a town I happen to be near on the annual family summer vacation that this year starts in Chicago.  While it may seem like a random similarity, I think there is a shared Midwestern moral position between me and the protagonist (Jake) in The Sun Also Rises - who, in turn, is a thinly veiled version of the master himself.  We are both drawn to and repulsed by the trappings of privilege, something that I think we as a culture more generally struggle with (at least I hope we do) as well.

Jake is an ex-patriate American living in Paris.  The novel was published in 1926 and, according to Wikipedia, is a fictionalized version of events that occurred in the summer of 1924.  The plot revolves around what would seem to be a love triangle but is really a love hub centered on Lady Brett Ashley, the soon to be divorced 34 year old woman whom every significant man in the tale falls in love with in one way or another.

Jake has the oldest history with Brett - they have been unconsummated lovers for a long time; unconsummated because Jake's war injury left him impotent.  Their love has the quality of affection between friends, and Brett seems both to resonate with and to be oblivious to the erotic longing that Jake, despite his impotency, expresses for her.  Robert Cohn enacts Jake's erotism by having an affair with Brett and then, like the smell of last night's dinner, refuses to go away as he properly should when her fiancée returns to the scene.  Cohn who is a Princeton educated boxer is also Jewish and he is taunted throughout with anti-Semitic barbs - most pointedly by Mike, the fiancée.  His being a boxer hints that we should expect this taunting to result in some kind of violent reaction, and one of the delicious tensions in the book is just how long it takes for this particular climax to occur - we have almost forgotten that this man, who has taken so much is capable of dishing it out as well.

Other men in Brett's orbit include a Count who spends money on her lavishly and seems content just to be in her company and to watch her, an acquaintance of Jake's who joins him for the fishing on the way to Pamplona, and then, finally and climatically, the next great bullfighter; the 19 year old Romero in Pamplona.  Brett is, then, a queen bee and an enigmatic one.  Her enigmatic quality - as much as her beauty - seems to be what draws men to her.  She appears to be open and available, but perhaps this has more to do with what they imagine - what they project on her and less on who she is - something that we have little access to - in part because the story is being told through Jake's eyes and he is one of her suitors.

Jake tells another story as well - and this is the story of the expatriate lifestyle in Paris.  He seems to be the only working man - he is a journalist - in the group.  All the rest seem to be living on money that sometimes comes from home but sometimes doesn't.  And, perhaps not just because I am traveling with my children, this lends the social group a kind of late adolescent quality - they seem to be living in a kind of borrowed luxury not based on their efforts but on their position as an heir or person who is in some way - by virtue of birth or, perhaps in their own minds by virtue of virtue - entitled to their lifestyle.  My reaction to my children's entitlement mirrors Jake's reaction - a mixture of indulgence (Jake runs into one of his friends who hasn't eaten in three days because the check has not arrived - he loans him some money and they have a drink together - food can wait when their is companionship and alcohol available) and sometimes subtle and sometimes not so subtle judgment.  Jake is mildly disdainful of these creatures who are so dependent and directionless while simultaneously being drawn to and attracted by them.

In the next section of the book, Jake goes fishing on his way to Pamplona.  I think this trip betrays Jake to be essentially like those he disdains.  Like them, he is a hedonist.  His writing like a reporter - telling us the details of the roads and the clouds and the water betray his love for them.  Similarly, his descriptions of the Basques who join them for parts of the trip betray a love for people who, while less wealthy, have turned drinking into an art and who are as generous and as ambivalent about living as he is.  He is both akin to and completely different from these people of the hills.

Finally, we arrive in Pamplona.  Again we are treated to the details of the town and the bullfight, the running of the bulls, and the recognition of a good bull.  The similarity between the peasants and Jake's profligate friends is driven home in a central haunting image.  One of the peasants who has come into the town for the festival is gored to death as he is running with the bulls.  His wife and two children come to claim his body and take it home on the train.   The Innkeeper notes the waste of life in the pursuit of frivolous entertainment - clearly a metaphor for the wasted lives of Jake's companions.

We discover that Jake has invited his friends into a place where he has, as an outsider, come to be trusted as someone who appreciates the aesthetics of the ring - he is an aficionado - so dubbed by the selfsame Innkeeper who finds the running of the bulls to be frivolous.  His friends, however, are just the boors he has brought along, and their excessive drinking and lack of understanding of the aesthetics marks them as unworthy.  Jake introduces them (and us) to his passion gently - Brett is seated high in the grandstand for the first bullfight, not close to the ring, to shelter her from the blood and gore - and this only excites her more, so she comes down to participate - to have a ringside seat.  And here she falls for the Matador.  Romero is not like the other Matadors - nor is he like the professional bicyclists they have passed on the way to Pamplona who have competed against each other and don't care who wins.  He is the real thing - deeply invested in the aesthetics of his sport, he is a true artist (as, perhaps, Hemingway strives to be).

Brett, somehow not surprisingly, is taken with him.  And the first person to notice this is her fiancée, the same fiancée who has been mercilessly and drunkenly riding the last man to cuckold him - Robert Cohn.  Now he derisively notices her new interest seemingly before she does.  Jake, for his part, betrays both his love for her and for the integrity of the community he reveres by arranging Brett's tryst with Romero.  But it is only the much maligned Robert Cohn who has the cajones to deliver the blow of the jilted man - swelling the Matador's face the night before the final fight - and knocking Jake, his one true ally, completely out as an added bonus.

Despite his injury, the Matador does what only he can do; dazzling all with the artistry of a kill done right, and then high tails it to Madrid with Brett in tow (after publicly awarding her the ear of the dead bull - a prize that clarifies to all that he and she have crossed the line they were not supposed to have crossed).  To her credit, Brett realizes, once she is in Madrid, that she is toying with a child - and perhaps realizes that she is nearing the end of her run of power - and releases the boy from her hold.  As the son in Transparent proclaims, it is every teenaged boy's wet dream to be introduced to love by an older woman - but as his girlfriend points out, if the genders were reversed, it would be creepy - a predatory relationship.  But Brett plays the dependent other - and calls Jake to rescue her and return her to her fiancée, whom she will take back (she knows he will have her as he is incapable of saying no to her no matter how badly she behaves) - God what a lump of nothing he turns out to be - the one who wins the prize.

So, what are we to make of this deeply disturbing, enthralling look at something that is simultaneously desirable and deplorable?  We could look for universal truths - something about the various Oedipal triangles that are played out with Brett.  We could also think about this as Hemingway's dream with the various men representing various aspects of himself in relationship with whoever it is that we imagine Brett symbolizes - and there would be manifold options for that - is she the entitled one?  The dream of being the great author?  The unattainable mother?  Or is it more the wish to become the woman - one of the things that I find frustrating is that Hemingway who can so clearly map his characters with so few words spends so many words describing things - is he afraid that his feminine qualities threaten his much publicized wish to be masculine?  Does depicting himself as impotent support this?  All of these would require, from a psychoanalytic position, having access to Hemingway's associations to the work and to talking with him about it to have a sense of psychoanalytic certainty.

We don't have access to Hemingway, but we do have access to my reactions to the book (I take them as a starting point not to privilege my own associations over yours, for instance, it is just that these are the ones that I have at hand.  We could also, were we in a conversation, have used yours as a starting point).  Despite its age, this book felt very alive and disruptive.  Why do I care what was going on in Paris almost 100 years ago (Woody Allen wants to have been there - I am less certain)?  What comes to mind this week - and I'm not sure that the content of the reaction would be the same in the fall - when I might associate to my students - is: How am I to manage my conflicting feelings of envy for my children as they glory and - from my fuddy duddy position - waste this moment of their greatest powers?  What am I supposed to do with the pride that I feel in having given them the gift of an interstitial space between childhood and adulthood (I have not been able to provide for them in a way that will let them become permanent expats)?  I remember one of my college teachers noting that we were being afforded the luxury of productive leisure.  How are we to distinguish that productive leisure - certainly Hemingway's book stands as one of the great fruits of that - from pure debauchery - some of his own which he chronicles here and which was certainly a significant component of my own college experience?  How do we live with the ambiguity - the uncertainty - of what will come from our experiments in living?  Who among us will live as artists?

Underneath my contempt and disdain, then, is a certain envy.  An awareness that I, like Lady Brett, am coming to the end of my powers.  If I am, for a moment, identifying with Jake, and each of these characters is an aspect of him, then Lady Brett might, among the other things she represents, be a stand-in for the powers that he has at this moment - the powers to enthrall and to engage others - and there is also an identification with the transitory nature of those powers.  They are hers today, but may well be gone tomorrow, and certainly will be the day after that.

Like all good parents, I revel in the accomplishments of my children.  I want them to surpass me.  But I also feel, when they do, diminished by their accomplishments.  Those accomplishments aren't really mine, after all.  Were it not for this analytic position which I am so reluctant to hold, I would distance myself more fully from this aspect of my experience, but I think it is real.  I am envious of them.  I am also aware of what it will take to achieve that other aspect of Jake - the Matador.  In his day (broadly speaking), becoming excellent at something, becoming an athletic artist was difficult (see a post on Boys in the Boat) - but the level of investment to hone oneself into a singular entity - the best in the world - is different today (Agassi's Open just hints at what is required of Novak Djokovic).  While I am envious, I would also have my children enjoy their experience of being cared for - of having leisure be available to them and being able to both be productive and also to waste some of what is afforded to them in hedonistic and pleasure producing pursuits.



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...