Seinfeld and the Harmony of The Contest

The other night our channel surfing led us to a rerun of a particularly well remembered episode of Seinfeld – The Contest (I have since looked it up and it has been rated the best sitcom episode ever by TV Guide).  We did not see it from the beginning – and, despite three passes, I have never seen it from the beginning.  The first pass – in the old days – happened when we waited to see Seinfeld on Thursday nights.  I somehow missed the week it originally aired, but heard about the episode from many people.  A few years later, Seinfeld went into nightly reruns and there was a second wave of watching, and the current occasional watching is the third wave.  In the last two waves, I have caught the last two thirds or so of the episode.

When it was in its first run, NBC called the Thursday night line-up “must see TV”, and it, along with Friends, was the most popular television series in the US.  With the proliferation of channels and programming, no show will likely ever again match the simultaneous audience that it commanded.  That said, not everyone was a fan.   When we recently went to my Mother-in-law’s house, and I mentioned having seen the episode, she commented that she did not like watching the show because she didn’t like any of the characters.

There are four central characters.  Jerry Seinfeld plays a version of himself – a snarky single comedian who finds everyone else somewhat lacking and therefore has a kind of arch humor.  He is living in an apartment in Manhattan across the hall from Cosmo Kramer (Michael Richards) – a lanky, tall, scattered and apparently unemployed guy who mooches off of Jerry – using his food, clothing, and apartment with impunity; Jerry’s best friend from childhood, George Costanza (Jason Alexander), a perennial loser, and one of Jerry’s many ex-girlfriends, Elaine Benes (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) round out the weekly cast, though there are various additional recurring roles, including George’s mother and father.

Frankly, I think one reason so many people like Seinfeld is that the central characters are so unlikeable.  This is because I think the characters present themselves in a bad – mostly self-interested – light.  They function in public the way that most of us experience ourselves functioning privately. The socially inappropriate comments they make are oddly familiar – they sound like the inaudibly articulated thoughts that we have and then quickly squelch, edit or discard so that they don’t get expressed out loud. I think that we fear that, if we were to express these thoughts, they would alienate others.  I think we even fear that to hear them ourselves would make us feel uncomfortable with who it is that we “really are”.

On Seinfeld, these thoughts that can’t be said are not just expressed and heard, but celebrated.  Despite their closest friends knowing just how despicable they are – knowing things that we fear that if others knew them about us they would beat a hasty retreat from us – this band of characters is able to maintain their social network – indeed, their casual and consistent contact is enviable.  Vicariously, then, we get to join their gang as another self-interested person who has thoughts that shouldn’t be spoken aloud and here, as we watch and, in so far as we identify with the characters, participate in the episodes, we are able to express our forbidden thoughts and to be accepted in spite of that.

Now I think my mother-in-law has a valid objection.  As an actual social group, the Seinfeld bunch leaves a great deal to be desired.  We would like a group like this to rein each other in – to raise the moral questions that they never seem to raise – or, when they do raise them, to not ignore them as quickly as they so consistently do.  They function more like the fraternity boys that Ryan Lachte was accused of emulating at the recent Olympics than “decent” human beings.  It is not always clear, but I think the self-conscious smirks at what they are doing (pitching a TV show to NBC about their lives – which will be a show about nothing) indicate it to be the case that they realize that this is morally reprehensible territory.  Certainly the final episode, where they are all thrown in jail for their manifold crimes against humanity across the course of the many seasons indicates an awareness of this.  And I think, then, that this is a representation of a fantasy – not a representation of reality.

If we accept that this is intended to be a fantasy rather than a representation of reality as lived (though I think we live in ways that are consistent with the show – probably more consistently in the wake of it because it has implicitly given us permission to do that), it is possible to imagine that this is not just a representation a social group, but also of a single person – with each character playing the part of an aspect of that person.  If we entertain this crazy idea for just a moment, we realize that the conglomeration is one that is less in tension with itself – the way that Freud posits humans are – and more in cahoots – egging itself on to do more and more outrageous stuff.  This, I think, feels freeing.  This group somehow has figured out how to avoid the frustration of constantly having to run into impediments to what they actually want to do – they have approached Freud’s jaundiced view that the only happy person is the one who can kill and get sexual gratification at will (a view that is, I think, naïve and at odds with the reality of what brings happiness to people – an example of carrying a theory to its logical, but clearly impossible, conclusion).

The irony, in so far as the show is suggesting that unbridled and unchecked/unedited reacting to things is the way to go, is that the show is so well crafted that it clearly required a great deal of effort on the part of the writers, actors and crew to create it.  This does not come about without discipline – which tamps down desires – and creates conflict – both between the members of the creative team and within the individuals.  George Costanza personifies this “neurotic” functioning most clearly.  He wants to do things but can’t quite bring himself to – he is hung up on some aspect of it.  He is all but bursting to do things, but also is aware of how people will perceive him if they catch him at it, so he is forever concocting feints about what he is doing, or lies to cover up what he has done.

One result of their craft is that we get to see aspects of our own tortured actual existences – as well as the idealized gratifying activities.  And part of what is gratifying about the way that the players engage in those activities is not just that the players are doing things – but they are expressing powerful emotions as they play– they are cathecting.  In one episode, George’s father demands, at the top of his lungs, “Serenity Now!”  The actors say the things that can’t be said and express them with such force that, at least for this Midwestern boy who was taught to always be polite – there is a feeling of liberation.  Furthermore, instead of alienating others, they, like Donald Trump within his circle of supporters, are loved because of the expression of their emotion.  Furthermore, the strength of the expression of their emotion is met by similar strength of emotion coming from the other players – there is a level of emotional attunement between them that feels balanced – even while they are careening off on some zany pursuit.

And the craft is also gratifying on another level.  Most comedy is linear.  There is a story, a couple of things happen, and then we are surprised – things go off in a novel (frequently) liberating direction and the tension that was built up in the story is released.  We experience the catharsis that these players demonstrate in their daily living.  Ancient sitcoms generally had one story line that resolved by the end: satisfying, but somewhat dull.  M*A*S*H was the first sitcom to have two story lines that were related – two of the main characters would become involved in situations that were variations on a theme – and they would each resolve – double the complexity and double the satisfactory resolution.

Seinfeld often had four plot lines – or five or six – in a single episode – each related to the others but separate.  The best episodes took on a musical quality with a series of melodies that nicely harmonized with each other and then would resolve – like a final chord at the end of a symphony – sometimes with a single note left out, and that note would be provided in the wrap up after the commercial. 

In The Contest episode, the four principles are bound by the contest that emerges out of George's behavior.  George has been caught masturbating by his mother and the four agree to compete to see who can go the longest without doing so.  Elaine has to put extra into the pot because it is assumed to be easier for women to forego masturbation.  So the four plots are set up – and each one is tempted to masturbate by their own personal siren.

Another layer of pleasure here is that the thing they are not doing is never said.  The word masturbation is never uttered the entire episode.  While this has been blamed on the censors – the use of multiple euphemisms – including master of one’s own domain – simply points out the naughtiness of the whole thing – what they are competing about is naughty enough that they can’t talk about it directly.  If they were to say masturbation, it becomes an adult thing – the kind of thing some authority would talk about on NPR.  But if we keep referring to it by nuance – we remain kids playing at something that is forbidden.

Kramer’s siren is a woman across the street that is walking around naked in her apartment with the shades up.  He is out almost before the contest begins.  Elaine is tortured by running into the most eligible man in the world – JFK, Jr. – at the gym and his offering her a ride home (she lies to him about where she lives so that they can share a cab in the same direction and he believes she lives in Jerry’s building).  George is tortured by the image of a beautiful patient in the hospital bed next to his mother’s (she fell and hurt her hip when she discovered him masturbating) who is give a sponge bath by an equally lovely nurse (and how glorious is it that he is gathering fantasy material while tending to the mother he has injured by indulging in fantasy – what could be naughtier?).  Jerry is trying to bed a virgin – Marla – but lies to her constantly about his intentions because to be honest would scare her off. 

After this set up, we see the four of them in bed at night – Kramer sleeping soundly, but the other three in tortured agony unable to sleep – and we sense that if they would just masturbate they would be sleeping well, but they each (other than Kramer) wants to win more than to be at peace.  This is the end of the first act, if you will, just before the commercial.  And it is a nice moment to pause and to reflect on the relationship between fantasy and sleep (if one is so inclined).  From a psychoanalytic perspective, Kramer is freed to sleep because he has released enough tension, both by masturbating, but also by indulging in enough fantasy about the woman across the street that he can sleep peacefully.  None of the other three have the portal of release that will move them to be able to incorporate fantasies into their dreams and instead ruminate about them as a means of fending them off which keeps them in a tortured state.

Elaine, somewhat surprisingly, falters shortly after the commercial.  She is so excited about a date with JFK, Jr. who is going to pick her up at Jerry’s building that she can’t contain herself.  Jerry, in the process of getting close to having sex with Marla, tells the virgin about the contest.  She is disgusted by the behavior of he and his friends and leaves in a huff, and Jerry turns to the window to look at the woman across the way and it is not hard to imagine what comes next.  Later George tells Elaine and Jerry that she missed JFK arriving at the apartment, but that JFK found Marla running out and offered her a lift instead.  After the commercial, we are rewarded with another look at the sleepers.  Kramer is now sleeping with the exhibitionistic woman, George, Elaine, and Jerry are sleeping soundly – and – in a final note that ties it all together, we see the JFK figure sleeping soundly with Marla – who presumably has chosen to be deflowered by him.

All of this (and more details than I could include) has been packed into a half hour.  We have had a feast of keeping up with each of the plot lines, each of which we have been interested in and unsure how they would resolve – each of them has resolved – and, as a bonus – the unresolved piece of the three extras – the exhibitionist, Marla, and JFK, Jr., get resolved in the final moment as well.   Each of the main characters has failed to inhibit him or herself in his or her inimical way.  And, to afford the viewer further satisfaction, all of their scheming and conniving and lying leads them to shoot themselves in their own feet – and the people that they have schemed against end up connecting with each other, leaving us on the moral high ground.  We have been able to simultaneously revel in their pleasures and, when they achieve their just ends, we can pull back from that, and be reassured (and gratified) that those they have abused end up in a good (and gratifying) place – and, hey, our heroes get to finally sleep because they get their own form of pleasure as well.

The problem for my mother-in-law, bless her heart, is that she is so good herself and so disturbed by the callous shenanigans of others that she can’t wait long enough to see that this ultimately doesn’t work for them.  That this is, despite all the trappings of being a show without morals, without boundaries, a show that appears to have thrown off the yoke of civilization; that it is really a morality play and the liberation that the kid-like parts of ourselves feel as we identify with the out of control characters is not the only gratification – our parental parts get some gratification as well when we see the failings and comeuppances visited upon the protagonists.  This ends up being a feast for our own entire internal gang – and we end up feeling satisfied on multiple levels – levels that are usually in conflict, but here get harmonized – simultaneously and satisfyingly.  We are released from the tensions that the show has built up and are free to sleep peacefully as we allow various levels of fantasy free rein.

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The Tyranny of Quantification

How much do you weigh?  Did you check today?  I did, as I do almost every day.  I weigh one pound more than yesterday.  Yes, I had a dessert last night that I didn’t need – and it showed up on the scale.  How many steps did you walk today?  I had no clue about this until recently when – no I didn’t get a Fitbit – it turns out that my phone came with an installed app that measures this.  So now I do, too.  A friend with a Fitbit said that it would change me, and I scoffed.  But it has.  I am now doing sneaky things to up my numbers.  I check them in the middle of the day.  On a recent trip to New York, I set records and, with my family, it was a consistent point of conversation.  The reluctant son and I became pretty good at estimated how many steps we had walked to that point on any given day…

Why do we do this?  I think it allows us to take something very complex and reduce it to something very simple – a number.  What does my weight signify?  For some who are anorexic the number seems to be related to something like beauty – the lower the number the greater the beauty.  Though I think that attractiveness is part of it – there is a correlation between that number and the size of my gut which, when it protrudes is decidedly ugly – I think it likely has more to do with something like health – the lower the number the healthier I am.  Why does this matter?  One component is, I’m pretty sure, death anxiety.  The lower the number the longer I will live.  And as for steps – the inverse is the case.

So, each time I check one of these numbers, I am checking in on a scale – actually many of them.  How likely am I to die soon?  How much am I protruding?  How healthy am I?  But this is not the conscious experience.  Consciously, this is a number and it is a good number (lower weight than yesterday, higher steps) or a bad one.  I feel something in that moment – good and validated or bad and lacking.  It is a motivational moment.  I am drawn to eat less or walk more – I even park my car further from the store to pick up a few extra steps – how weird is that?

I think that checking the numbers allows me to split myself for a moment.  There is a part of me that has been acting – eating or not eating, walking or sitting in my chair working – and there is a part of me that gets to appraise that – to say, “Good job.”  Or “Get to work.”  Either way, there is actually a sense that I am in connection with – and this might sound really weird – an other.  An other is the other – the other part of me that is evaluating me.  And in that moment, someone cares – someone is noticing what I am doing.  I am being validated – actually whether I did good OR bad – I am being validated because someone – that other who is also me – cares enough to check the book and decide whether to give me a gold star or a demerit.  Someone actually is checking up on me!

Actually, one of the great discoveries of how to change someone’s behavior is that just monitoring it will change it.  There was a General Electric Plant – the Hawthorne Plant – where researchers tried to find out how to improve worker productivity.  They increased the brightness of the lights – they dimmed the lights – they did this, they did that – and they found that the productivity improved when the workers knew that someone was studying their productivity – regardless of whether the lights were brightened or dimmed.  The psychoanalyst in me wonders whether those workers felt that there was someone out there – an other – who was looking in on them and this sense that someone cared got translated into working harder.

When we work with a client to help them quit smoking, one of the first things that we may have them do is to simply keep track of how many cigarettes they are smoking.  And (if they or we have been keeping track ahead of time) we find that simply tracking when we smoke leads to a decrease in the number of cigarettes that we smoke.  While this may be due to the other having an interest, this also seems to be related to being more conscious of our activities – actually thinking before we light up – and choosing not to smoke this cigarette – or not to smoke it now – to put it off.  So maybe counting calls up another and allows us to be more self aware.

What’s so bad about relying on quantification of my behavior to drive it?  I think the problem is that I am driven in ways that are outside of my consciousness to do stuff that may not be in my best interests.  In addition to checking my weight and my steps (and the temperature outside), I also check the number of page views on my blog.  Regularly.  I think a lot happens when I do that.  It gives me a break from whatever else it is I am doing, but it also gives me a moment in which I know whether someone out there – the other from the outside – has expressed interest in the things I write about.  It feels really good when those numbers are high for the day, week, month or year – and it is concerning when they aren’t.

At the last psychoanalytic meeting I attended in New York in January, a psychoanalyst that I really like (and one I hadn’t met) presented on blogging.  A big chunk of the presentation was on the numbers and on the importance of getting those numbers up.  Now, to be fair, I have worked with the psychoanalyst I know and like for a long time and she is really concerned about whether psychoanalysis will survive in the 21^st Century.  She wants us to get the word out there that Psychoanalysis is alive and vibrant and relevant to people’s lives.  And that is one of the reasons that I blog – to support that very mission.  But it is not the only reason that I blog.

At the presentation, I was sitting next to a woman – a fellow analyst – who was thinking about blogging chapters of a novel that she was thinking about writing.  She said that she wasn’t sure that she would even make it a public blog – perhaps only a few people would be able to check in on it – but she thought that having it out there – even for a few people – would motivate her to write.  That was her primary motivation for putting her chapters up – to motivate moving forward in the process.  She was a bit befuddled by the emphasis on the numbers in the presentation – her motivation for writing was much more pure – at least in the moment.

I have a friend who has kept track of his thoughts about a science fiction book that he is writing – and the only person who accesses his blog is himself.  And he expects that.  But there is something about the idea that someday – once his book is a best seller – others will want to know what he was thinking when he solved this particular problem or invented this particular planet – and the imagined presence of others goads him to continue his work and his blogging.

The presenters in New York said that it is not worth blogging unless you have 50 hits per hour of work preparing a post.  I didn’t have the temerity to ask how they had figured that out.  It was just one of those things that were put out there and, at least in the moment, I accepted it at face value.  Good, now I can evaluate whether I am wasting time or not!  If it takes two hours to write a post, then I need one hundred page views to justify my time.  Huh?  The value of a page view is approximately one minute of work time.  How does this compute?

But the numbers certainly push me to write.  When I post – there is a bump in the number of page views.  If I don’t post for a while, they wane.  But this is a double edged sword.  I don’t want to post until I really have something new to say – but if I say nothing, I may lose my audience.  What’s a blogger to do?  Additionally, if I post about a movie – it is likely to get about twice the page views of a book – should I spend more time in the theater and less time reading books?  And writing about analytic topics or statistics (God forbid) can scare up almost no one.

The presenters seemed very concerned about this.  They noted that more people are accessing blogs from their phones.  And that people want short and simple content on their phones - people who access from computers are likely to read longer and more complex pieces.  Less than 10% of my posts are accessed by phone.  Should I shorten them to connect with this audience?  Should I avoid using (and explaining) technical language to connect with them?  Would my numbers go up?  At what cost?  Who is it that I am hoping to reach?  Is it just more people or is it thoughtful people - people who are interested in struggling with complicated issues?

Fortunately, there is some randomness to the numbers – and I am not completely driven by them, but by other factors as well.  So some of my “best sellers” have been posts about psychoanalytic talks by Anton Kris and Andrea Celenza and a psychoanalytic book by Mark Solms.  And some of my best writing may not be read by many.  Or it may be discovered at some point in the future – some of my posts don’t pick up much traffic initially but, after a year or two, people seem to have a sudden interest.  And I have to fight to figure out what I want to write about – what is important – just as I have to figure out whether eating that dessert I wanted but didn’t need was worth the pound that I know would show up on the scale this morning.  And I have to figure out what it is that I am going to do with my life – if I am so lucky as to have it be extended by the incredible number of steps I seem to be walking these days.  What is the quality that we bring to the quantity?  Certainly it will affect the quantity – but maybe not immediately and maybe not in the ways we had expected.  I certainly rely on the numbers – and am driven by them – but they cannot be the only determinate of who I am – I have to unpack those collapsed signifiers and remember what it is – or discover what it is – that I am trying to accomplish.

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

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Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers

The walls near the Mumbai Airport that hide the slums have “Beautiful Forever, Beautiful Forever” written across them as a means of helping those who are whisked by imagine a present and future that is at odds with the gritty reality that is only a few feet away.  Katherine Boo traveled behind those walls to the shacks of Annawadi, a half-acre slum with 3000 inhabitants, to connect with the polyglot peoples that are squatting on fetid ground next to a lake filled with human and industrial waste. Those who thrive here are garbage pickers who turn the trash of the airport environs into cash through recycling.  They also drink, there is a lot of prostitution and use of the available drugs – a local version of wite-out and various alcoholic beverages, and the children spend time in sham schools that people run to get government money, but they actually have no idea how to run a true school nor any interest in doing that (with the exception of one girl who teaches, in part, to spite her mother – show her mother how things should be done). 

Through interpreters, Boo tracks what led up to and what resulted from a particularly violent moment – when one of the denizens, a one-legged woman who entertains men in her hut while her husband is away at work, douses herself in kerosene and sets herself on fire in order to call attention to what she calls mistreatment by a family that shares a wall with her hut.  Her hope is that this will empower her and ruin them.  This plot device holds our interest as we try to puzzle things out and get to know two main families and a host of other interesting characters in this – I don’t know what to call it – Shanty Town? 

When I traveled to Nicaragua with the express interest of connecting with various poor people, wherever we went it was possible to see people precariously perched on every available scrap of land.  They would build shacks of tin and wood and whatever else was around.  From these shacks, kids dressed in the whitest shirts I have ever seen would emerge and to go to school (I learned that a process that involved leaving the shirts in garbage bags to bake under the sun was critical to the whitening process).  Though we talked to peasants and to people who had been helped by microloans to achieve a better standard of living, and though we went to institutions that worked with the poorest of the poor, we did not really connect with the people who were squatting on land, though they were all around us. 

Boo connected with shack people (on a different continent and in a different culture – but in shacks for similar reasons).  She observed them and reported on them.  The resulting historical novel is part detective novel, part crime reporting, part social and political commentary (Boo herself is commenting – though generally doing it by quoting or paraphrasing the residents of Annawadi), and part anthropology a la Margaret Mead.  It is also a bit like psychoanalysis. 

In the author notes, Boo acknowledges that the people she was interacting with had a language that was well suited to describing garbage – sorting it and making gradations in it.  They did not have a finely honed language to describe their internal experiences.  This language developed across time as a result of their interactions.  So the scientific paradox emerges that something can’t be observed without changing it.  As true as that may be of subatomic particles, it is certainly true of anthropology and psychoanalysis.  So part of the dilemma, for the analyst and the anthropologist, is how best to engage with the people with whom we work.

Boo describes an interaction between a resident – one of the heroes of her story – and an almost imaginary person – the teacher in a prison where the resident is incarcerated and then visits three days a week while on probation awaiting trial.  The teacher tells stories of morality that the resident takes to heart and embellishes and works hard to live up to.  The resident imagines that the teacher wants to know how he is doing and will be proud when he hears about all that the resident has done to live up to the precepts the teacher has offered.  While this story is important in its own right, psychoanalytically we can wonder if this is a variation of the resident’s experience of Boo – as someone who is interested in him, but perhaps feels to him almost imaginary – as if she (Boo is a blond haired woman from the west) is not completely a real part of his life, but is also certainly a very important figure that he wants to impress. 

Freud’s engagement with the world through his writing changed it profoundly.  We live in a very different place than we would otherwise be in as a result of his helping us – not just individually – but culturally – think differently about the thoughts that we have – sexual thoughts and aggressive thoughts primarily, but he lead us more generally to wonder about our subjectivity – and what unconscious forces influence the way that we think.  On the whole I think the world is a better place for that – whole categories of mental illness have been eradicated in industrial and post-industrial countries. 

South Pacific Stick Navigation Chart 

Museum of Natural History, NYC

Margaret Mead, who was also a very public figure, worked not just to understand the tribes that she engaged with, but to educate people about them more generally.  In the South Pacific wing of the Natural History Museum in New York City, the reluctant son and I discovered on our recent trip that she wanted us to think more carefully and respectfully about the peoples that we engage with – and to learn from “primitive” people without burdening them with our hang-ups: She specifically was concerned that we not introduce our death anxiety and birth aversion to peoples who seamlessly integrated both of these events into their lived lives.

Boo has a political message here – and it is at heart a very Roussean one.  Her position is that in our natural state people are good.  Bad things – injustices, even evil is – I think – in Boo’s world something that is traceable to corrupt and corrupting societal and ultimately governmental influences.  She sees us – and cites impressive evidence of this – as being essentially moral creatures even when in the most dire circumstances.  She notes that the children were the most reliable witnesses to what had taken place – their observations seemed least washed with self interest and other distorting factors – and they tended to agree with each other across lines that divide adults – things like Muslim vs Hindu and relatively wealthy versus abjectly impoverished.  As her witnesses aged – and as they got further from an event – self-interest became more and more evident in their reporting.

The heart of goodness, from Boo’s perspective, is a social network – a web that binds people together.  This is threatened when whatever it is that sustains us – what sustains us economically – is threatened.  She sees this as being inevitable in a global society with increasingly mobile capital – it is inevitable that we will see both an improvement in general living standards and intermittent and painful disruptions in personal well-being.  The opportunity is for governments to help cushion the impact of these disruptions. 

Ultimately, then, this becomes political, moral and economic reporting.  But I am aware that describing the book at this level undermines the level on which it works best – as a good story, which it certainly is.  Boo starts with the event – the self-immolation.  She then goes back in time and helps us realize how it came to be.  And then she moves forward in time to see the consequences of that (and the global economic contraction) on a small group of families and individuals that she has helped us care deeply about.  We get to know these individuals and this micro culture.  We get a sense of how it works.  We resonate with the people she describes – they are not just glimpsed from a bus or taxi in passing on the way to someplace that feels like many other places – but are intimate and surprisingly non-exotic people – people we can identify with.

Openly embracing this culture – living in and among these individuals over the course of four or five years is a herculean task for someone who is used to the creature comforts of the first world.  I remember at the end of our 5 days in Nicaragua, as we were processing our experience, an administrator pointing to the exit sign in the hotel where we were staying – a sign like the signs in almost all of the buildings we had been in.  In white lettering on a green background, it said (in Spanish) ruta de evacuacion, with an arrow.  He said that had seen these signs the whole time and each time had been reassured that there was an escape route from this country that felt so foreign and scary to him.  While his reaction was extreme, I think we all resonated to some extent with his experience.

Boo thanks the people who provided the haven for her to recover from the reporting.  In so far as this book – to return to the question of whether we, as reporters, can be as free of self-serving bias as the children, and the question of how to best scientifically report on what we observe – in so far as Boo has self-serving biases, she has invested a great deal in exploring them – and I salute her for that.  I also believe, however, her discovery of goodness in Annawadi, analogous as it is to psychoanalysts discovery of the inherent good in the people we work with – whether the infants that Stern observes or the adult patient who, despite horrific treatment, works to engage humanely with those around him or her – this discovery is worth the investment she has made.  Bringing it to our attention, in the way that she does, has the potential to help us think more charitably about those it would be much easier to leave sealed safely behind walls that promise a vague and better future – one that allows us to stay disconnected.  

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

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The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time: What can we know about other people’s minds?

I read Mark Haddon’s book, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, some years ago.  So, when I was added to a trip to New York City that my Mother and Son were taking and this play was on the itinerary, I was interested in seeing it.  I realized, waiting for the play to start, that I remembered absolutely nothing about the curious incident in the title.  Had there been a dog?  All I remembered was an absolutely terrifying – I would even say Kafkaesquely or nightmarishly terrifying – trip across London by the fellow I was about to be re-introduced to on stage – Christopher.  Why he was taking this trip – all the details that are part and parcel of the plot (which I will dutifully recount in a moment) had totally escaped me – what was present was the feeling of terror that Christopher – or perhaps more precisely, Christopher as I imagined him – experienced.

So this book – and I think the book is the medium best suited to portray this experience (see a post on August: Osage County for another perspective on differing media) – conveyed the internal experience of someone who is odd.  It did this by telling the story in the first person and allowing the reader to do something uniquely human – and something that Christopher is severely restricted in being able to do – it allowed the reader to empathize with him.  To feel what it is like to be him.  The author had to imagine and create an internal world, and then we, as readers, had to imagine the world as well – to live inside it. 

So – what are we imagining when we imagine the inner world of a person who is odd – so odd that he can’t articulate feelings of others or even his own feelings?  Does he feel something in some remote part of himself that he is unaware of being able to feel?  Or does he have some sort of defect in his mind so that his emotions and emotional reactions to others both can’t and don’t work?  Can he learn to feel these things that we feel as we connect with him, or will that world of feeling and of human connection always be unavailable to him?  These questions and more pile up in my head as I prepare to watch and actually do watch what is a truly moving experience – as I become empathically connected with someone who is remote – but able to communicate – however oddly – from his position of remoteness. (A similar set of questions arises in the context of a very different personality configuration - psychopathy - when he watch House of Cards).

The questions in the last paragraph may seem philosophical or conceptual or academic or intellectual, but they are very real, alive questions for me on an almost daily basis as I listen to patients and try to empathize with them.  How close is my construction of their internal experience?  Time after time I find that what I imagine they are experiencing is something that they deny having felt or thought.  Time after time, if I am able to inhibit my wish to intrude with what I think, I find that they articulate aspects of their experience that are surprising to me and, I think, to themselves.  And it is also the case that across time, sometimes across years, what it is that people are able to articulate about themselves and their experience becomes richer and deeper and what they say morphs in interesting ways.  They discover aspects of themselves, including feelings, that they would have denied existing.  Did they exist previously and they have, through listening to themselves, come to be better able to hear them?  Or have they learned how to feel – have they developed a “skill” that they didn’t have before?  Have I become more attuned to them and am able to hear them better?

This character, Christopher, written by an author, an artist, brings to mind two previous characters – Jordy and David, both from abook written in the 1960s by Theodore Isaac Rubin, a psychiatrist, about two patients – Jordy, an autistic child, whom the author, if I remember correctly, chooses to describe in the first person, and David, another emotionally remote child, a teenager who is characterized as obsessional, and his efforts to connect with other patients in an inpatient setting, including Lisa – a girl diagnosed with multiple personality disorder.  This book was made into a movie and then into a play and that is where I first ran into it – in High School – when I played David on the stage.  My high school director’s mother used to ask him for years afterwards if that boy had gotten better – so I guess my portrayal of the more broken aspects of his character was convincing – but it was convincing not just to her, but to myself.  I found myself identifying with David, connecting with him, and feeling that his struggles were in many ways my struggles.

The irony of the identification with David is that he and I couldn’t be more different in surface ways.  He was emotionally remote and personally well organized.  I tend to be a bit emotionally dramatic and am organizationally challenged at best.  But there was a genuine connection with both his terror – he feared that if others touched him they would kill him – and with his anger – he had dreams of a clock that, in its inexorable counting of minutes, cut off the heads of important people in his life that popped up at the five minute interval spots.  Underneath the particulars of the expression of these emotions, we shared a common humanity that made it hard for me to sort out what was mine and what his as I navigated the treacherous minefield of adolescence.

In this play, Christopher is more like Jordy – who I am remembering as being non-verbal – except that Christopher is both hyper-verbal and mathematically gifted.  But he can’t make it through the day without considerable help because he can’t read the expressions of other people and, though he can explain the Pythagorean Theorem with aplomb – he can’t figure out how to chart a new course to school – there are too many new things that assault him and that need to be categorized and attended to and it all becomes overwhelming.

So what is the incident?  At the beginning of the play and the book, Christopher encounters a dog who has been killed by a garden fork in his neighbor’s yard.  He doesn’t understand what has happened and feels badly that the dog has died.  He is hugging it and his neighbor runs him off, accusing him of having killed it.  He becomes a detective (the title of the play alludes to a Sherlock Holmes novel to discover what happened).  He interviews people in the neighborhood to discover clues, something that his father is opposed to.  In the process of doing this, a neighbor confides that his father had an affair with the woman who owned the dog.  Trying to find out more about this, Christopher discovers letters from his mother – whom his father has told him died.  He is overwhelmed by this, and his father discovers him curled up in a ball having vomited all over himself.  The father gingerly cleans him up (Christopher, like David, does not like to be touched) and explains that his mother had an affair with the man next door, and then ran away with him and he lied about that to Christopher because he didn’t know how to explain what had happened.  Further, the father acknowledges that he killed the dog when he was angry with the woman next door not reciprocating his affection for her.

What a complicated stew, and, as complicated as it might be, I don’t think that is why I forgot it.  As I sat in the audience – and maybe you experienced this reading the synopsis above – a whole series of thoughts unfolds about Christopher’s reactions to these multiple revelations.  His mother is alive?  Joy.  His father killed the dog?  Anger, fear, but also curiosity about what went on with the neighbor woman.  The scary neighbor man ran off with his mother?  Again – anger, but also some sense of why his father might be angry.  But this is not Christopher’s experience at all.  And to be fair – I didn’t really expect it to be.  We have been introduced to Christopher as a remote, mathematical kid – the stage, a perfect cube with black with white dots laid out in geometrical regularity on the floor and the two walls, is clearly a representation of his mind.  He talks with a therapist at a special school and he is decidedly odd.  So we wonder what his reaction will be.

His reaction is one of terror – and the flight on the underground is the result of the revelations from his father.  He focuses on one fact – that his father murdered the dog and he generalizes from that to the fear that his father will murder him.  It is clear that he does not see a difference between murdering a dog and murdering a human and he fears that his father – by far the more patient of his two parents – actually a paragon of patience – though with a lot of pent up anger about caring for Christopher and being left by his wife – and with some impulse control – will kill him.  So he runs.  Is he excited about re-connecting with his mother?  He is angry that he has been lied to – but her revivification seems mostly to mean that she is on the list of possible safe havens and he chooses to run to her because she is less threatening than the other options – not because he is attached to her.

I think that my forgetting do many details of the book (details Christopher surely would have remembered) is because they were unimportant to me – especially in the first person rendition.  Though Christopher would have remembered them - they were unimportant to him - they were related as facts about which he did not have feeling and, for me, without the feeling, there is little to hang onto - while for him facts are what the world is built of - truly cold and hard facts that evoke no particular feeling - his mother is either alive or dead - his father is either a safe person or not.  What we both agreed was important was the terror he felt – first of the father and then of all the confusing impediments on the trip to find the mother.  And the terror of that was well portrayed on stage – though we were necessarily seeing Christopher as an object – something that I couldn’t help but do when reading the book as well – but in the staged version we had to work from the outside in - imagining his internal state from what we saw – where in reading the book the challenge was to stay within the frame of Christopher’s perspective and not to imagine too clearly how easy it actually would be to navigate the system and how challenging it was for him.  Of course, the play has the ability to jangle us with lights and sounds – something that augments our appreciation of his experience as we are jangled along with him.

Christopher’s diagnosis, like that of Jordy, is one of autism, though he is on the Asperger’s end of the autistic spectrum meaning that he intelligence - his ability to communicate verbally and to do other normal human cognitive tasks - it at least in the normal range.  I have written elsewhere about a child on the autism spectrum reported on in the New York Times.  The reluctant son was coincidentally reading Temple Grandin’s book Thinking in Pictures (Temple Grandin is also diagnosed as being autistic) and, though she is not particularly good at empathizing with people, she gets the terror of animals and uses that to help them feel more at peace as they approach being slaughtered.  Hollywood's version of Autism is the wonderful film Rain Man.  Though each of these people share a diagnosis, they are very different individuals and it was, according to an interview with Terry Gross, Mark Haddon’s intent not to portray Asperger’s syndrome, about which he is not an expert, but the character Christopher. 

So – how well has he done that?  How well does his experience of Christopher and mine – as both a reader and a theater goer and yours, based on this and other experiences of the character Christopher, line up with the experience of a human being?  How well does my experience of David when I am enacting him – or my patients when I am listening to them – match with their lived experience?  How well does your experience of me through what I have written track to who it is that I am – and who should we use to measure that?  Is my perspective the most valid?  Or the reluctant wife’s?  Or my mother?  Or my children?  Who knows us best?  Art allows us a particular portal, a particular lens through which to view this thing we call life.  Science allows us another.  I would maintain that psychoanalysis - a blending of art and science - allows both the analyst and the analysand an additional portal.  Whichever viewpoint we use, all of we see of ourselves and others gets filtered through our own humanity – our own particular personality - that weighs and measures and connects and disconnects from various aspects of the other. 

I think that what Christopher has the most access to in his emotional life is fear.  In both the book – but also in the play – we can connect with that part of his experience.  It is harder – even when he pops up after the play is over to explain the Pythagorean Theorum - to resonate with his geometrical understanding of the world.  There is an appreciation of that – both from the language and the style of the book and from seeing what he does on stage (and how his world is portrayed by the geometrical styling of the play), but this is a conceptual understanding – not a felt or empathic one.  So it is ironic that our connection with this kid who had so much trouble connecting is along the pipeline that we use to connect – the emotions that he feels.  Will he, as we continue to do that, become more competent at travelling that highway?  That becomes a question that he and his therapist and the other people in his world will need to address together - and the play ends with that as a very open question.

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

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Andrew Lloyd Webber’s School of Rock and James Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree: Are We Really All Oppressed?

I somewhat reluctantly saw School of Rock as part of a plain and simple tourist trip to New York City last week.  I make an annual trek or two to professional conferences in New York and have always talked with the reluctant son about the city, bringing him back souvenirs of landmark buildings when he was younger and sports teams as he has grown older and his interests have shifted.  When it came time to go on a pilgrimage together to the city of his choice, he chose Chicago – and that was a wonderful town to explore together.  His grandmother (my mother) takes him to Stratford Ontario annually to watch Shakespearean plays and, when she asked whether he wanted to do that again this year – wondering if he had outgrown this shared outing – he asked if they could see plays (and a Yankees game) in New York City.  She said yes, and was willing to include her sister and me on this trip. 

We did our best to introduce the reluctant son to the city (and even squeeze in a college visit), and I think we did pretty well, but I was surprised by his and my Mom’s choice of School of Rock to represent Broadway’s tradition of musicals.  I have seen Jack Black’s School of Rock on TV – often in pieces – I’m not sure that I have ever seen it all in one sitting, and I found it an amusing screwball comedy based on a pretty unlikely premise – that a prep school hires a substitute teacher and doesn’t notice that the kids in the classroom do no studying but play rock and roll music all day instead.  Hmm… there must be pretty thick walls in that prep school.  Even more concerning, I had seen one of the musical numbers performed on the Emmy show and I was severely unimpressed (plus it was a rock and roll tune – would Mom and Great Aunt Julie like it?).

What a pleasant surprise that Andrew Lloyd Webber (who, after all, started his career with the Rock Opera Jesus Christ Superstar) could turn a madcap movie into a slick and even mildly psychologically compelling musical, complete not with just rock and roll, but some stolen Mozart nicely integrated into the mix.  Jack Black’s part, Dewey Finn, is played by Alex Brightman – who bears a physical resemblance to Mr. Black (and to John Belushi), but, as is the case in the best Biopics (see Saving Mr. Banks, for instance), he does not try to imitate him, but instead allows his own exuberance to be expressed – and this becomes an interpretation of the role that is immensely satisfying.  This Dewey Finn character is a ne’re do well living with (OK, sponging off) a high school buddy and one time fellow band member who is now moving on with his life.  Dewey gets kicked out of his lame Rock and Roll band just as his high school buddy – pushed by his girlfriend – demands the rent.  Dewey answers the phone when his roommate is offered a long-term substitute teaching job at the most prestigious prep school in town and he, masquerading as the roommate, takes the job.

And the irony begins…  The loser dude becomes the chief arbiter of cool in a classroom full of middle school geeks of incredible privilege.  Their respect for authority barely holds them in his orbit as he shows up late and derides all that they hold dear – but then he discovers that they have musical talent when he overhears them playing various classical instruments in music class.  He tells the students that, until he found out they could play, he thought they were “douche-bags”.  Once he discovers they have competence, he hands them rock and roll instruments and welcomes members of the class, telling them one by one that “you’re in the band”  (My personal favorites among the students - though they were all quite talented and engaging- included the bass playing girl and the nerdy keyboardist - whom my Aunt chatted up in the street after the show - a genuinely nice kid), And then we discover that this group of ultra-privileged kids feels alienated – their parents are wrapped up in their own lives and in directing/demanding what they will do rather than listening to who they are – and thus they resonate with Dewey’s message of “Stick it to the man.”

This message is one that I oddly found to be consistent with the message from a very distant corner: an award winning conversation available on YouTube between Bill Moyers and a Harvard Professor named James Cone whose thesis is that Christ’s cross is equivalent to the United States’ Lynching Tree – and that Christianity is a religion of the oppressed – and that when we turn it into a religion of the dominant culture some odd things happen to it.  So, for instance, we in the United States portray ourselves as the ones who are not the aggressors, but are reacting to aggression, when in fact we are often the aggressor – and the lynching tree – a form of terrorism that we enacted to help manage the behavior or recently freed slaves when we no longer could control them with the lash, is a blatant example of this.  Cone’s position is that to understand Christianity – to become Christians – we need to acknowledge our aggression – to realize that we are the Romans (who controlled oppressed people by terrorizing them with the cross) and to move away from that by empathizing with those who have been oppressed (including by us) – and to recognize that we are all oppressed.  That religion helps us realize that, though we are behaviorally controlled by oppressors, we can express what our soul feels in the context of a shared religious experience.  This means that to appreciate what is at the heart of the Christian message, we need to identify with Dewey and his students’ experience of being oppressed (a much less difficult position for privileged people to connect with than to identify with those who have been lynched).  Oddly, then, Cone's Christian message and Dewey’s line up: Both become a message of love – we all become members of the band – and we “stick it to the man” by banding together and engaging, freely, in what it is that brings us joy.

Freud takes the position, in Moses and Monotheism, that religion offers a defense against our fear of dying.  While it is certainly the case that any activity can serve a defensive function (I am thinking this thought in order to avoid thinking that alternative bad thought), we can think of the function of the defense – it is, in both Cone’s Christianity and in Dewey’s Rock and Roll to unite us; to allow us to make use of the limited time that we have in a particular way – by connecting with those around us in ways that sustain us.  Yes, we are defending against an oppressor – and what bigger and more common oppressor is there than death – the force that will rob us all of the most precious thing – life, but we are not, in either Cone’s or Dewey’s cosmology turning away from life by defending against death, but engaging more deeply in life itself - living, not hiding from or defending against living (which adds another layer of irony to the School of Rock - Dewey is the poster child for people who are avoiding moving forward with their lives).

Indeed, I think the point of the analytic endeavor is also to engage more deeply in life – to feel more fully connected to our own thoughts and to feel more competently connected to those around us in a self-perpetuating loop (at least this is how I read Loewald’s description of how the defense of sublimation works).  And I think that is why we play music together, and go to Church Synagogue or Mosque together, and why we engage in analysis – but also why Bill Moyers so sensitively engages in conversations with his interlocutors – sometimes difficult conversations like this one with James Cone.  Not just to distract us from the fact that we will die, though that is certainly a part of it, but to live.  And Andrew Lloyd Webber offers – along with the cast and crew of this show – moments that truly come to life – and a message of hope.  OK, it is a bit sickly sweet – but we are able to both identify with the kids – and then with the parents as they join us as an audience for the final show and end up reconciling with their kids – hearing, under Dewey’s unintentional tutelage – that the kids want to be appreciated for who it is that they are.  And my little band of three generations making a pilgrimage to New York found that Rock and Roll did, indeed, unite the four of us in a shared moment of appreciation of the human spirit.

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