Salmon Akhtar – Dionne Powell – and Donald Trump’s Inauguration

Yesterday, while Donald Trump was being inaugurated, the reluctant wife and daughter prepared to march on Washington while I sat in New York listening to analysts talk about the nature of the human mind.  Salmon Akhtar delivered a Plenary Address – a speech in which an accomplished analyst is given free rein to talk about what that analyst believes is important.  Salmon chose to speak about curiosity.  Later, Dionne Powell, who will be visiting our institute in the spring, led a panel of speakers who were reflecting on the forces that led to the election and that represent the exposure of underlying racism (and sexism) that have been hidden by our apparent forward movements in civil rights (and women’s rights).  Meanwhile, Trump assumed the presidency.

As I reflected on this day after a night’s sleep, it was a set of remarks that Dr. Akhtar made – not central to his thesis – that seemed to organize swirling sets of thoughts.  Dr. Akhtar noted that we are not powerful creatures – we don’t have fur so we can’t regulate our temperature – we don’t have claws and teeth so we aren’t at the top of the food chain based on our native tools, but we have achieved our claim to the top by by virtue of our wits and our tools.  But, he maintained, despite our having attained power in a variety of ways, we have a central and ineradicable experience of being vulnerable.  We compensate for our vulnerability – and ultimately gain our power not just by our wits, he didn’t say this, but I believe – and think he would agree – by being social creatures.  But our dominant American myth is that of the rugged individualist – the autonomous person – the autonomous man – who vanquishes nature (and hostile others) through sheer strength of (his) wit and will.

The content of Dr. Akhtar’s talk was about a very different mythological and lived world.  He talked about how his mother, when he was a child in India, responded to his curiosity about the lid of the tea pot bouncing by telling a story about a Scottish man, John Watt, who was also curious about this, and how John Watt figured out that it was the steam that was coming off of the heated water that led the lid to dance – and he figured out that by focusing the steam on a wheel he could make it go around – and thus created the railroad trains that carried them to Mumbai.  She went on to say that she was sure that Akhtar’s curiosity would lead him to discover great things – and that he would be invited to give a Plenary Address someday! 

Dr. Akhtar comes from a very prominent Indian family.  For generations, the members of his family have been extremely productive poets, philosophers and teachers.  He traced this intergenerational productivity, indirectly, to the family's support of curiosity – and support of sharing the ways that satisfying the curiosity with the world that is generative and constructive – indeed, it that will lead to being rewarded with fame.  And this has led to a very productive career, where the books that he has published, when stacked together, are almost as tall as he is.  His wits – responding to curiosity – allow him to assert – not aggressively but generatively – many useful and organizing ways of thinking about the world.  He has also mentored many others, including them in his generativity.

At the other end of the spectrum is the developmental message that the panel reported is delivered to African American males who are brought up in supportive families in our culture.  They are taught to avoid asserting themselves because of the danger of doing this.  The curiosity of young African American males is stunted by anxiety about the ways in which their assertion will be seen as aggression and lead to their death.  Dorothy Holmes also spoke about this in her own plenary address a year or two ago. 

Many of our kids do not get this message, especially those who are economically disadvantaged and those who are members of marginalized groups.  In fact, many of them have the experience of overwhelming trauma within their homes and within their peer groups from early on.  This morning I am in a panel of psychoanalysts talking about working with kids who have been traumatized and who are acting that out aggressively.  Interestingly, here, also, the need to open up curiosity – to think about what it is that the opponent is thinking – becomes a means of helping fragile individuals who resort to violence in order to protect how fragile they are feeling – becomes a strategy for helping a person manage their anxiety about their vulnerability.  And this, paradoxically, permits them to be curious about others in ways that leads to their becoming more comfortably attached to others.  This attachment – rather than autonomy – is ultimately what helps them “heal” from their “diagnosis” of Oppositional Defiant Disorder (or whatever diagnosis or sentence they receive). 

 As these thoughts were swirling last night, I passed a couple of street banners here in New York in support of Trump.  Next to them were posters encouraging avoiding being pissed on by Trump (If my grandmother had lived to hear golden showers and the President mentioned in the same sentence she would surely have died at that instant).  The idea condensed in the poster is that Trump, far from being the savior of the disenfranchised, is actually intending to use the power of government not for the good of the populace, but for his own ends – and he will therefore be using the population to meet his needs.  Ironically, of course, I think this is what his campaign was promising to interrupt – a government that is oppressing rather than supporting people.  The poster might be suggesting that Trump’s demonstrating and encouraging aggression against groups that are seen as threatening in various ways betrays his true intent.

 

More broadly, those who, from the position of others, appear to be privileged do not themselves experience that sense of privilege.  We have a more fundamental, primal experience of being alone – and of having, from that perspective, to protect ourselves.  If we are going to move away from feeling alone, we are going to move towards people who look and feel like us – the other, from this perspective, feels threatening the more they differ from us.  Akhtar is encouraging us to remain open to remain curious.  This is really hard for us to do when we are anxious.  We inhibit our curiosity and restrict our vision.  This leads us to avoid exploring and instead to begin asserting – telling ourselves that we know what we know – that we are certain rather than curious.

Ironically then, in the US in 2014, for the first time in decades, children became less poor relative to women (who, in turn, are poorer than men) than they had been the year before.  We reversed a trend that had been occurring for decades.  Reversing this will lead to greater security among children, which will allow them, in turn to be more curious – to be more open to possibility rather than to foreclose on possibility and assert certainty.  However, as the tide of people now swelling around the Waldorf and headed towards Trump Tower in a jovial and festive mood wearing pink knitted hats and objecting to the impending loss of social supports that have allowed this trend to turn around would attest, we cannot maintain these gains without a government that shares this as a value.  Out of anxiety about others taking from us what is rightfully ours, leaving us impoverished and vulnerable, we have elected a chief executive who has no interest in supporting the kind of support that would reduce all of our anxiety.  Instead he promises the illusion of greater individual strength – as if that were possible without social support – and a congress and senate that are similarly minded.

Ironically, it is, as far as I can tell, highly privileged people who are marching.  These are the people who, in the short run, are most likely to benefit from the policies that Trump is likely to put into place.  These people are marching against their own immediate best short term interest because they know that in the long term this is not in the best interests of the country.  The majority of those who voted for Trump are those who are LEAST likely to gain from what his administration is likely to put in place (or disrupt), though, they believe that, in the long run what he will be doing will be in their best interests.  What a weird world we live in...

So, rather than staying with the joyful and disruptive crowds outside (there is gridlock as a swelling, large and very cordial crowd is not contained to any parade route – if there ever was one – and spill over into various streets and avenues, having a good time and stopping traffic - and when the taxis honk their horns in protest, the marchers raise a chorus of hoots and yelps as if the horns were joining them in support rather than frustration), I have come back inside to attend a panel on disillusion.  In this panel, a similar conclusion to that from this morning is being reached: Disillusion is inevitable, but this can be a source of creativity – Akhtar’s curiosity re-emerges when we are able to recognize that illusion is part and parcel of living.  The primal illusion is that mother and I are one – and that is all that matters – there is nothing outside of this bound world.  But to stay in that world is impossible.  How do we use curiosity to help us move beyond the circumscribed bounds of this relationship so that we gain more as we experience new and exciting things – rather than feeling overwhelmed by the losses associated with losing our deeply felt (or hoped for) sense of safety in the presence of others?

I frequently find the annual conference to reignite my interest in psychoanalysis – something that I can lose faith in and contact with as I do so many other things during my day – and as my clinical and academic engagement waxes and wanes.  But this year, I am more impressed with the ways in which psychoanalytic thinking is an integral and important way of understanding not just my patients, not just the books and movies that I read, but the way that the world – on a social, political, economic, biological and relational level.  It seems, somehow, essential to me, despite my reluctance, as a person, not just as a psychoanalyst.  I know the world is moving in many ways away from a psychoanalytic perspective – I think it always has.  But the truths that are at the heart of psychoanalytic thinking continue to be at the center of the way that world in both the consulting room but also the world much more broadly.  We need to partner with other perspectives, but we also need to keep alive this powerfully useful and accurate perspective.  

One of the final speakers at the panel on illusions noted that the New York Times credited Trump with seeing the simultaneous implosion of faith in the illusions that the church, universities, the press, the government, psychoanalysis as field and society as a whole has created for us to live by (such things as All Men (and now Women) are created with equal opportunities) not as a threat but as an opportunity.  My dinner companions and I agree that the Times is giving Trump too much credit, but I do think this is functionally what we are seeing happen.  How will we weather this?  What will we create to guide us into a strange new world?  I don't know, but I was buoyed by the enthusiasm and the infectious happiness of the crowd today.  There were many slogans in evidence, but the repeated tried and true one, "Love Trumps Hate" seemed to resonate with this old child of the hippie days.  Could it be that we could forge our youthful dreams into a mature illusion that will sustain us?  We can look forward with curiosity...

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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ORLAN - Art, Beauty and Psychological Health

If we are not art, what are we?  If our lives are not artistic expressions, what are they?  ORLAN, a French performance artist, lives this out quite concretely, using her body as a canvas or pile of clay and performing her art by, among other things, filming herself during surgeries that have transformed her face and body, and reading out loud while these surgeries are performed.  The intent of the surgeries is to graft or apply parts of great works of art onto parts of her face – so, for instance, she has crafted her forehead to look like the forehead of the Mona Lisa.  The intent is not to become beautiful, but to embody these works of art and, I think, by doing this to embody - to concretely represent - what it means for her to be human - to articulate who it is that she is.

Danielle Knafo brought this literal body of work to the attention of the psychoanalytic community at a discussion group this afternoon.  She started the discussion by noting that, some years ago, ORLAN spent the night at Dr. Knafo's home as part of a project where Dr. K. was interviewing ORLAN – and Dr. K. was concerned that her son, who was three at the time, would be startled by ORLAN’s appearance in the morning when he awoke to find her in his home.  In addition to hair that is yellow on one side and black on the other, and big bold round glasses that make her look like an owl, ORLAN has implanted silicone under her skin to give her the appearance of having horns.  When Dr. Knafo found ORLAN with her son the next morning, they were playing together, and her son was clearly enjoying himself with ORLAN as he would with any adult with whom he was playfully engaged.

Dr. Knafo’s anxiety speaks to a fear that we have of the monstrous.  This was also spoken to by the discussant of the group, Dr. Ted Jacobs, a highly respected analyst, who posed two questions: “Is this art?” and, “Is she pathological?”  Though I think these are wonderful questions - they were also somewhat ironic.  Dr. Knafo had carefully related ORLAN’s artistic intent – ORLAN wants to escape the binary.  She wants to transcend being masculine or feminine (She describes herself as a transgender person who is changing from female to female), modern European or pre-Columbian American (Her current work is to transform her image, through computer enhancement, into various culturally defined images of beauty), and ultimately living or dead (she wants to have her body be preserved and put on permanent display in a museum when she dies).  Both questions posed to the group are binary – art or not, pathological or healthy – and both therefore would reduce her to being one or the other – they would give us, the viewer of her – a handle with which to designate her – a box into which to put her – and I think this undermines the effort (at least as I understand it at the moment) of her (and perhaps our own) art - an effort to transcend ourselves while fulling becoming ourselves.

I was reminded during the talk of something that I once heard about.  I don’t know if it is fact or fiction, but I do know that it caught my fancy so I will relate it.  Apparently in Japan there are people who use head to toe tattoos to become living works of art – the Birdman – a very colorful NBA player is very much on his way to doing this.  The problem is that introducing that much ink into the skin is toxic and these individuals die young.  Rather than having their art die with them, many of them have their skins removed and hung (in my memory it is like being hung on a hanger) in a museum where others can appreciate the artwork.

From Dr. Knafo’s careful description of ORLAN’s childhood, it is clear that there are ties between her life experiences and her artistic expression.  For instance, ORLAN experienced her mother as being largely unavailable, and thus that she herself was largely invisible, except when ORLAN became ill.  It is not hard to draw a line between feeling invisible as a child, becoming a performance artist and having people observe her surgeries.  But the question, to me, is whether this reduces ORLAN to simply repeating a childhood experience and enacting a continuing longing to be seen – which is clearly happening, or whether this gives us a window into the particular way that her artistic expression of something that is both incredibly particular and concrete -but also general – even universal – about the human condition, finds an avenue for expression.

I used to scoff at the notion that my becoming an analyst was determined by events in my childhood and the relationship between my parents and me was related to choosing a profession.  For what it’s worth, I still scoff at the idea that this determined my course.  I might have become a number of other things, and my early childhood experiences and relationships with my parents and siblings and friends would have put their stamp on the profession that I choose (come to think of it, I have chosen a number of vocations – clinician, teacher, researcher, middle manager, parent and spouse), and I have discovered through analysis proper and my own continuing analysis just how potent that stamp has been on each of my pursuits – that who I am has been shaped by those I am in contact with as I have lived out my life in manifold ways – but all of this is far from a linear relationship.

In so far as ORLAN has threads that connect her childhood experiences of feeling invisible and then becoming visible when ill with her using medical procedures to articulate herself, the connections are not as linear and simple as they appear to us with our 30,000 foot view.  As Dr. Knafo relates it, the idea of filming her surgeries first occurred when ORLAN was unable to perform at a scheduled time due to an ectopic pregnancy.  In the ambulance, on the way to the hospital, it occurred to her to film what was occurring as an alternative to the performance that she had planned.  This, in turn, led her to the notion of highly staged, aesthetically determined surgeries that also, necessarily included much blood and guts.  Even the still pictures that we observed were hard to stomach.  What is compressed into these images?  What is occurring inside of ORLAN and what is occurring inside of the viewer?

We spent some time speculating about whether the next step in her career, these staged surgeries, was partly a means of mourning the child that was lost.  I think there are likely tendrils there.  In fact, a seemingly simple question turns out to have very complex answers.  ORLAN herself articulates very different aspects of her experience at different times, in different interviews, and under different conditions.  At times she denies that she feels pain (and she was given local anesthetics when she underwent these surgeries).  At other times, she acknowledges that the manifold surgeries have been assaultive on her body.  She did not begin this process until she was 43 years old – a time when the body does not bounce back like it once did.  Some of the post-operative images were of a person who had been attacked – something that is not unusual after facial plastic surgery.  Fortunately, we don’t remember trauma in its original form.  And it seems that ORLAN was using a variety of strategies to avoid the experience of pain in the moment (in addition to the medications, the ritual aspects of preparing for the surgery and planning and executing elaborate readings may have helped her enter dissociative states where she could be less psychologically present to the procedures than she otherwise might have been).  And her experience in the moment – and in memory – is, like all of our experiences, multilayered.

Our experiences as viewers are also multilayered.  There is, at least for me, horror, fascination, identification, rejection, and curiosity, plus much more.  I turned away from some of the images.  I have not included those in this post, but you can easily find them on the web.  But some of her images – especially those in which she morphed her image into other culture’s definition of beauty – were strikingly beautiful, or at least awe inspiring.  In these images she is clearly herself and clearly someone or something completely other.

Dr. Knafo pointed out that ORLAN anticipated, with her art, what we are approaching – a world in which our biology is no longer our destiny (something that Freud maintained).  We can alter our bodies – changing the gender from this to that – and we live increasingly non-bodied lives as we build, tend and cultivate virtual identities and relationships.  In the virtual world, we can construct ourselves with many fewer apparent constraints.  Even in the corporeal world, bodily decoration (tattoos) and augmentation are becoming the norm.  ORLAN herself (like Eric Ericson) created her name as means of more fully articulating herself and is in the process of doing this again, this time with a product naming consulting firm.  The ability to transform ourselves in these ways was viewed with some trepidation, I think, by most of those in attendance.  It seemed they thought this was a kind of manic flight from the reality of limitations that are part and parcel of being human.  My own experience was very much a minority one – that our internal lives are much bigger, grander and far more complex than our hum drum external world would indicate.  ORLAN, to my way of thinking, is, as it were, living the dream – becoming, first physically and then increasingly in a virtual way – a representation of what it means to be complexly, complicatedly human -  and therefore beautiful – including in our ugliness.  Ultimately, psychoanalysis is a means of transforming ourselves.  As psychoanalysts, we privilege the verbal, cognitively mediated transformation over physiological transformation, but I think that we are both, ORLAN (who has been engaged in at least two analyses) and the analysts, engaged in transformative work.

You see, Dr. Jacobs asked the question about art because he did not see beauty in what ORLAN was doing.  I think that Aristotle might have disagreed with him.  In the Poetics – a meditation on tragedy – Aristotle proposes that the theater allows us to confront, in part because we have the support of the rest of the audience all around us, those traumas, the deepest feelings of pity and fear, that we can’t otherwise tolerate, and, through confronting them, to experience an emotional catharsis.  Now I think therapists have found catharsis to be overrated, but ORLAN seems to think – or perhaps to enact – the potential for confronting various emotional experiences – the most central of which, Dr. Knafo pointed out, for ORLAN, is the idea that, at some point, and completely out of her control, a biological switch will be turned and she will die.  If there is a more universal fear than this, I don’t think Freud found it.  And if there is a more universal dichotomy – the living and the dead – I don’t think we’ve discovered it.  And yet we, tragically, can’t transcend it and so we, as one of the group pointed out, like Prometheus, are condemned to having a piece taken out of us each day.  At least ORLAN determines which of those pieces will go and under what circumstances.  And that can weave a sort of magical – one might say artistic - if sometimes ugly – spell.

So the opening question has new overtones for me: what does it mean to be healthy?  I think that if we define health as coming to grips with our mortal limitations and deciding to live our lives within the confines of those limitations, ORLAN is quite pathological.  But I also think that this definition of pathology doesn't acknowledge that our existence is monstrous - that the burden of being mortal - the burden of having flesh - is huge.  I think, then, that if we define life as a challenge - one in which we need to figure out how to channel our frustration at the limitations that we are confronted with into living the best life we are capable of living - ORLAN could be seen as the pinnacle of mental health.  Dr. Knafo's clinical experience, and that of her son, are that ORLAN is a reasonably psychologically healthy person - though she is a bit of a control freak.  My own and the group's recoiling at the images that ORLAN creates suggests that ORLAN struggles to channel her chafing at the limitations (some of the intensity of her emotional experience sloshes over onto the viewer - bruising him or her), but I think, on balance, she is able to destabilize herself (and us) in productive ways - at least I found the discussion she prompted in us to have been an afternoon very well spent.


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

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St. Ignatius and the Jesuits - Psychoanalysis peaks at Religion

This a This is a re-posting.  Originally posted August 2, 2011, I am reposting because I was not aware at the time how to title posts so that they could be easily searched.

In addition to being a psychoanalyst, I am a faculty member at a Jesuit Catholic University.  There are 28 Jesuit Universities in the United States (the most Universities of any Catholic order), and many more high schools than that.  There are additional Jesuit Universities and High Schools scattered around the world.  The Jesuits were founded by St. Ignatius Loyola in the 16^th Century.  Loyola was a young courtesan and minor royal in Basque Spain who was injured by a cannonball when he was leading a foolhardy defense of a castle.  During his convalescence he discovered that he was not drawn to read the tales of Chivalry that he thought he would have preferred, and instead found himself reading about the life of Christ and the lives of the Saints.  This inspired him both to reconsider his life as a young knight, and to become an academic - in part so that he could learn more about Christianity.  After training at the University of Paris, and in company with ten others, he founded an order of activist priests who ended up creating an international confederation of High Schools, Colleges and Universities.

The Jesuits in the United States have a problem.  They are not attracting members at the rate they once were.  Fifty years ago, virtually all of the faculty and administrators at my University were Jesuit priests.  Today, there are about 12 Jesuits at a University that employs roughly 500 teachers.  Our President has publicly mused that he is likely to be the last Jesuit President.  In the last 10 years, 10 of the 28 Jesuit Colleges and Universities have hired lay presidents (who are all white, male, and Catholic).  So I spent the week at a retreat for faculty, administrators and board members of Jesuit schools.  The retreat is a kick-off to an 18 month process that is meant to mirror the formation of Ignatian priests so that we can, in effect, maintain the Jesuit or Ignatian character on our campuses.

Formation for Jesuits involves becoming a priest.  That is not on my to-do list.  But the group leading this effort wants to both inform; that is, to teach us about Ignatius, and to form us; that is to help us become emotionally resonant with a Jesuit position with regard to issues that emerge in an academic setting. 

From the information presented this week, I came to be able to articulate things that I have felt about the Jesuits but have not had a knowledge base that has allowed me to know why I have felt them.  Ignatius, it turns out, is not unlike Freud:  He was a revolutionary thinker who emerged at a propitious moment in history and built an organization that promulgated his ideas.  Ignatius was roughly contemporary with Luther and, like Luther, he proposed that the individual person could be in direct contact with God.  This “protestant” idea did not lead to a schism for Loyola and the Jesuits because he worked very hard to remain connected with the church, but his ideas were consonant with those who split away.  And, raised in the Episcopal Church, I think I resonated with both the “protestant” views of my Jesuit peers, but also with their organizational loyalty – the Episcopal Church has been called Catholicism without the Pope.

The “protestant” position of the Jesuits is important as a cornerstone for Colleges and Universities.  From Ignatius’ position, knowledge is something that is acquired by direct engagement with the world, not through indoctrination at the foot of an authority.  This position was essential to and a product of the zeitgeist of the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance; Freud’s discovery of the unconscious – deposing the authority of consciousness, like Ignatius's and Luther's deposing the authority of the pope, was both a product of and essential to the transition to modernism.

                 













Ignatius reminded me of Freud, though, not primarily because they were both transitional thinkers, but because Ignatius created a method of listening that is eerily reminiscent – or presages - Freud’s listening method.  Ignatius created the Spiritual Exercises.  They were based on the conversion process that he went through in the wake of his injury.  These exercises are engaged in by a spiritual director and a retreatant who has a particular problem that he or she wants to address – the Jesuits have always used the exercises as a means of helping a novitiate determine whether he was truly called to be a Jesuit.  They are intended, in their original form, to be undertaken over the course of a month, give or take.  The part that seems to me to be centrally parallel is that the spiritual director is to help the retreatant engage as directly as possible with God – indeed, where possible, the director is to try to facilitate without interfering with the conversation that emerges between the retreatant and God.  The listening perspective for the spiritual director is supposed to be one that is attentive, reverent, and devoted, which feels very much, to me, like the evenly hovering attention of the analyst.  What does not feel strictly analytic is that the retreatant is asked to imagine particular scenes from the life of Christ rather than to simply follow his or her own associations.

The analytic process can be thought of in many ways, but one of my orienting thoughts is that one of the analyst’s central tasks is to facilitate a conversation between the analysand and his or her unconscious.  Ideally this conversation becomes an ongoing, dynamic conversation where the unconscious, instead of being always unknown and even hostile to a person’s conscious personal intent, becomes an ally, using different but very powerful processes and data to work on the very problems the conscious mind is struggling with and to propose an array of solutions that can be implemented in ways that become more and more consistent with the consciously experienced self.

Ignatius used the Spiritual Exercises as a means to facilitate a dialogue between the retreatant and God – an entity that, like the unconscious, is not directly knowable by most of us most of the time.  In my own analysis (and in my current life), I have been confronted over and over with evidence that I do, indeed, have an unconscious that attempts to communicate with me; sometimes by engaging in outrageous or embarrassing behavior, but more frequently through dreams that symbolically – through the use of images and narrative - represent problems that I am wrestling with.  Dreams do not necessarily offer solutions, but might offer a representation of the problem in ways that clarified aspects of that problem that I was uncomfortable representing to myself consciously.  For instance, if I am struggling to help a patient articulate a particular thought, a dream might help me realize that this has to do, in part, with the ways in which that feels like an expression of affection that feels, on some level, sexual, and therefore forbidden.  Recognizing this, I can reflect on the amount of sexual oomph behind the idea and determine whether pursuing it is likely to be more useful or more distracting to the analysand.  

From the perspective of dreams as informing our consciousness, when the spiritual director in the spiritual exercises proposes that the retreatant imagine an episode from Jesus’ life as clearly and vividly as possible – imagining the sights, sounds, feelings and smells - the director is encouraging a guided dreamlike experience.  It is then up to the retreatant to discern (this is another Jesuit technique that I may discuss in a later post) how God would have the retreatant engage with the current problem.  As a central component of the formation process, I will be going through the spiritual exercises – probably in about a year.  I don’t yet know whether I will still be blogging at that point, but should I be, I intend to report on the experience of parallels between going through the exercises and going through analysis, not just the theoretical parallels that I have reported on here.

Postscript:  I did both continue with this process and continue blogging.  Part of the formation experience included a trip to Nicaragua to appreciate a very different world view.  I blogged in anticipation of going here, and then wrote about my experiences while there here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.   I returned from Nicaragua and, a week later, did a condensed version of the spiritual exercises, which I blogged about here, here, here, here, and here.  I am now aware, in putting together this compendium, that I did not write about the final, concluding retreat, nor a kind of summary blog of the experience of being a participant in the ICP.   

It is also the case that, through the rest of the ICP experience, my views on Ignatius changed.  I came to see him less as a protestant who didn't leave the church and more as a mystic - a person who truly believed that direct access to God was possible.  In addition to being a mystic, he contributed to the reformation of the church in many important ways.   In terms of education, he reintroduced Plato and Aristotle as important thinkers.  The church had marginalized them as being pre-Christian and thus necessarily unenlightened.  Ignatius disagreed with this position, pointing out that the world has always been God's creation and that we have always been able to learn about God by learning about the world.

As to the process of discernment that is at the heart of the spiritual exercises referred to in the post, the very simple version is that Ignatius taught us to notice how we feel about things that we engage in - as he noticed that he felt energized after reading the lives of the Saints and depleted after reading the exploits of the Knights.  This process is, of course, more complex than that, but this is the foundation on which it rests.  The intent, from Ignatius' position, is to discern what it is that God has in mind for us - to read His will through our experience.  The psychoanalytic version of this is to live a life where our unconscious needs - the entire range of them - can be met by the life that we lead - a life that we become deeply invested in leading.  Or, as Confucius is reported to have said, at 70 I follow my heart's desire without breaking moral principles. 

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