War Machine – Brad Pitt’s look at how We’ve Lost Our Way.

Brad Pitt in War Machine

I heard Brad Pitt talking up this movie on NPR yesterday and had mild interest in seeing it.  I was in and out of the car, so didn’t get the whole thing, but the interview was about the war in Afghanistan and meeting with soldiers – heroic soldiers – who had lost limbs – and about constructing the film – using humor to draw the audience in – and about how successful Brad Pitt as an actor and as a producer is.  Imagine my surprise when I got home and the reluctant son, who almost never watches movies, had just started it and invited me to join him in watching it.  OK, it doesn’t get any better than this.  I grabbed a bottle of water and sat down to be entertained and enlightened.

Unfortunately the movie was more enlightening that entertaining.  It was unfortunate because the enlightenment is, I think, terribly important for us and I fear that those who most need it are not likely to sit through it – they are likely to turn it off – when they feel preached to or at.  And there is a scene where the preaching is being done by a woman with a German accent.  The preaching is great – indeed it seems to be psychoanalytically based – the essence of it is that she fears this man’s “sense of self” is what is driving him into war rather than a sense of what is best for the planet – but preaching to the unconverted is rarely a way to win them over (A film produced by Brad Pitt, Moonlight, is also guilty of preaching - though there it is more contained - the narrative flow as a whole is not contaminated).

The movie’s title is a double entendre.  The War Machine is the Eisenhower’s Military Industrial Complex and it is also the title character, Gen. Glen McMahon, a pseudonym for the real life general Stanley McChrystal whose behavior was chronicalled by Rolling Stone writer Michael Hastings (and also in the pseudonym form) the person who is the unnamed (for a very long time) narrator of this film.  McMahon is heavily and poorly played by Brad Pitt.  Pitt voices him as a gruff, mean and tough guy who is a WWII throwback.  McMahon only sleeps four hours a night and he runs seven miles every morning.  Pitt portrays him doing this in multiple scenes with his arms locked in place – I think intending to look tough or mechanical, but in fact looking oddly comical – like Julia Louis Dreyfus dancing with locked arms on Seinfeld, but also with a certain simian silliness.  Pitt’s face, unfortunately, continues to be boyish, and, despite grey hair that is supposed to age him, his matinee looks don’t match the gravel in his voice nor the coldness that he displays in his relationship with his Plain Jane wife who has only seen him for less than 30 days a year for the past eight years.  It’s like he is a little kid playing at being a tough guy.  Which is too bad – in films like Fight Club, Pitt has been a convincing unhinged person bent on physical and moral destruction, as McMahon is supposed to be.

In their review, CNN maintains that the pseudonym was used in order to create greater laterality in building the character and to avoid libel suits.  As Irv Yalom has pointed out, historical figures, reading about themselves or walking away from a movie, can experience themselves as having kept the secret of who it is that they are – while when we read a novel we really get a sense of the person depicted because they are created out of the psychological guts of the writer.  We get a peak at what makes the character tick in the best biopics – Ali and Julie and Julia, for instance – because the actors are not playing the person they are depicting, but they are fully inhabiting themselves as that person.  Pitt, instead, is playing at being McMahon – who is a made up character based loosely on an historical one - so he should feel less inhibition than he does.  Sometimes a cartoon – the book and movie Ove – portray something important about the human condition, which this movie aspires to do.

And, weirdly, this movie does, in fact, make its point.  The problem is that it is as ham-fisted as the worst of my posts.   It tells us rather than shows us, in the words of the narrator and then in the speech of the German Assembly woman, why the counterinsurgency strategies that are good in theory just won’t work.  Or, as Click and Clack on the radio said yesterday, reality frequently confounds theory.  In the moments when the movie shows us rather than preaching to us, we see McMahon, the true believer, preaching.  He is preaching to his soldiers and later he is preaching to the Afghani tribesmen.  His men don’t get “it” – just how it is that attacking a country that they maintain they are helping – is going to work either for them or for the people they are shooting at.  Similarly, the Afghani tribesman don’t agree with his vision, and they respectfully and simply say, “Please leave.”

The intent of the film is a very good one – and a psychoanalytically valid one.  It is trying to show us that we are engaging in what we deeply believe is a good cause.  We are doing that for good reasons.  And, in ways that we are not conscious of, those beliefs are misguided.  Consciousness raising is a very good thing to do.  It can help us shift our efforts so that they are more fruitful.  The events chronicled in this film really have the potential to do that.  Brad Pitt, with his past portrayals of off the rails people that we can identify with, was a good choice for the lead.  Unfortunately, his execution of the role leads me to believe that it won’t likely change many people’s minds.  In order to do that, the audience needs to be softened not by humor, but by identification with the lead character.  We need to be pulling with and for him.  We need to see how we could be like him – and then to experience the tragic moment as one that involves catharsis – the expression of feelings that, from a psychoanalytic perspective, are the result of more fully understanding the true impact of the attitudes and behaviors that we engage in.  First Aristotle, and then Nietzsche best described this process.  “War Machine” is billed by Netflix as a comedy.  And I think, unfortunately it is.  And the tragedy is that we treat something as important as our disavowed imperialistic “nation building” attempts in the form of counterinsurgent attacks aimed at the flimsy infrastructure of third world countries as something laughable – the hijinks of the biggest bully on the block – look, ma, we messed up again – rather than as a very seriously misguided effort to do good that ultimately creates the worst form of evil.

McMahon himself does the math.  When you have ten terrorists and you kill two of them, how many do you get?  The answer is twenty, because the relatives and friends of the murdered person who were undecided become galvanized by his or her death and become converts.  This math is a very serious problem that we need to confront.  It is a security issue.  I have long maintained that it is a criminal issue – not a military one.  The military is intended to protect a country against the aggression of another country.  The problem of terrorism is a problem of disaffected individuals – who are sometimes supported by states – and in so far as states are doing that we need to address that diplomatically and even militarily, but the elimination of terrorism will, I think, require that we address the individual behavior.  To do this, we need to support the rule of law – not simply supporting supposedly democratically elected governments as the government of Afghanistan that, in the person of Karzhai, is lampooned by Ben Kingsley in this film.  But the rule of law is inconvenient.  Justice - and treating all men and women equally - is a messy business that threatens the established order in profound ways.

Sorry to go off on my own preaching, but, in addition to having a hero that we can identify with – so that we can see the error of our ways – we also need to come up with a way - to see a way to effect the change that we so desperately want to effect in order to achieve a therapeutic outcome.  It is not enough to be shown what we should no longer do, we also need to know what to do.  Now that is beyond the scope of this movie, perhaps.  Indeed, the movie ends with Russell Crowe coming in to take over the command (looking, by the way, much more convincing as the new grizzled true believer), as we double down on the only thing that we seem to know how to do despite just having seen that it won’t work.  

Post Script:  I talked with a friend of mine who treats veterans and I was concerned about the impact this film might have on them.  His position was that while it would be difficult for some, many would feel validated - the film as described (he hadn't seen it yet) would square with their experience.  This led me to wonder if the monstrous/machine like quality of this general was something that Pitt just couldn't quite see himself being - his critical stance towards the character interfered with fully inhabiting it.  The stupidity of his character - instead of being a tragic flaw - and therefore invisible to the actor - was all too apparent to him - and he couldn't quite manage to be the idiot he was portraying.  Unfortunately keeping him at arm's length allows us all to laugh at him, and not recognize how real he is - how central he is to who we all are who support these wars in the various ways that we do.

Post Script: The preaching that Brad Pitt does in this film my highlight his particular ability to understand and inhabit the role of someone like the war machine general he plays in this film.  He fails here - I think because he is playing at being this man - the parts that Pitt clearly enjoys playing are the cool guys - what is hidden in those parts are the ways in which the cool guys - the anti-establishment guys - are exerting control.  If Pitt can come to terms with his inner need to control and inhabit that in a role that he plays - in something like this film - it will be a truly great movie and may change some minds of people in ways that this movie hopes to but will likely fail at doing.  I think Pitt needs to acknowledge his own tragic flaw before he can portray it on film...

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Mad Men Season 1: The Impostor Phenomenon as the American Male Experience

The Reluctant Wife introduced me to Mad Men after she was addicted to it, so I initially had a kaleidoscopic experience of it – watching episodes without having seen the previous ones.  Kind of the way we used to watch TV series, when we would fill in what we didn’t see in the summer in re-runs.  That said, when I did hunker down to binge watching from the beginning, it didn’t feel that different - we join this story – just as we joined Olive Kitteridge – midstream.  And just as in Olive, this feels like a series of short stories, many of which could stand on their own – and so it seems to be a show about characters rather than about plot.  We get some information in flashbacks, but I was as able to pick things up from watching ahead with the Reluctant Wife almost as effectively as by watching from the beginning – which is to say that there are big holes in the backstory of this drama.  We are, I think, disoriented from the beginning.  Television serials have the advantage –maybe even the necessity - of doing this – the authors don’t know if the pilot will be picked up much less how the story will develop across how many seasons when they write the first episode.  So they, like we, might be meeting a character that is formed – or half formed, and they may be trying to figure out, as we are, what has gone into the formation of that character.  And this feels very much like meeting a client as a therapist.  Here they are – a fully formed person – and we will get to know them – to a certain extent together – as they tell – and reconstruct – and construct their story.

The Reluctant Stepdaughter tells me the word on the internet is that Don Draper (played by Jon Hamm) is a misogynist.  I disagree with this (at least in the first season) and, further, think this is a weirdly feminist series.  But I could be biased.  Draper bears more than a passing resemblance to my father, who, like Draper, was incredibly handsome (apparently these things skip a generation).  Donald Draper is the assumed identity of the lead character in this series about advertising men working on Madison Avenue, with the first season taking place during the year after my birth – 1960.  During that year, my family moved to Connecticut and my father, like Draper, would commute into the city while my mother stayed home with me in the burbs.

Draper, like my father, is gone from home a lot – Draper stays over in the city rather than travel home on the train – ostensibly because he has work to do, but frequently it is to stay with his mistress.  My Dad, a travelling salesman, was frequently gone for two or three nights in the middle of the week – and occasionally for longer spells when I was really little and he was doing international sales.  There was an air of mystery to my Dad’s absences – what was he really doing when he was away for that time (my fantasies tended to head towards being a spy or something dramatic, though he could have, from my perspective, been having affairs, who knows?).  In any case, there is more than a little air of mystery to Don Draper, even from the perspective of the all-knowing TV camera, as there was for my father.  So my denial of Draper's misogynism may be a misplaced effort to deny my father's misogynism and/or to deny that my father, an incurable flirt, was having affairs. 

Draper is, on the surface, an impostor because he has assumed another man’s identity.  He is also an impostor because he is revealed in the very first episode to be carrying on an affair (or later two or more) while also being apparently happily married with two kids to Betty Draper (January Jones).  He is also, I think, an impostor on a much deeper and more pervasive level – a socio-culturally saturated level that we all, to some extent, participate in and that is essential to the culture that Madison Avenue was (and is) creating for us and delivering to us.

Draper is a Korean War Vet who is working with a boss who is a WWII vet and supervising boys who have not fought but come straight from (mostly) Ivy League Colleges.  He is working as the Creative Director at a fictional medium sized ad agency that handles accounts of brands that we are familiar with.  Lucky Strike, the cigarette company, is their biggest brand and it pays the bulk of the bills.  I grew up with stories about the advertising geniuses behind Lucky Strike.  Their package used to have a Green Background behind the red emblem but, during WWII when so many things were being rationed, they changed the background to white, advertising that “Lucky Strike green has gone to war” and somehow they had done their patriotic duty to give up the green ink in the printing process to slap on tanks and jeeps and thus it was patriotic, by association, to smoke the cigarette of a patriotic company. 

None of this is referred to in the first season.  In a later season (I think) Draper comes up with their next slogan – “Lucky Strike cigarette – It's toasted”, something that every other cigarette is but that gets them out of the area of asserting that they are or are not health promoting.  Both “Lucky Strike Green Goes to War” and “Lucky Strike cigarettes – It's toasted” are lies; and this series is filled with lies of all sorts.  (And, based on the attached pictures, the timing of the various campaigns have been changed to fit the needs of the plot - another layer of lying)  

The primary lies are the lies that the men are constantly saying to women to seduce them or to assuage them – to manipulate them into being what they need them to be at any given moment.  It is shocking to observe the nakedness of a powerfully sexist culture in which the men have all of the power and the women are seduced by it (apparently because they have no choice, though the three main female protagonists have very different relationships to their assigned femininity).  I believe this is a feminist series in part because it is somewhat realistically portraying (God I hope they are exaggerating it just a little bit) our recent sexist past – and thus are raising our consciousness about just how complex but also frankly bad it was for women – but I also think for men.  And this is another reason I think it is a feminist series – because it demonstrates how much better it is for men to work from a position of balance with empowered partners rather than to flounder around having to pretend to know-all while being essentially clueless.  The documentary RBG about the supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg also does a good job articulating how bad it was for women - but does so more directly, by describing sexism and the ways it hurt women (and men) not just showing it and seeming to celebrate it, as this series does.

Pete Campbell

Draper’s hated enemy – and would be nemesis, but he never gets the upper hand – is Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser).  To me he appears to be an alternate version of Draper – as is Draper’s boss - Roger Sterling (John Slattery).  Pete Campbell is smarmy and comes from old money.  We could almost empathize with him – he is emasculated by his parents, Draper, his wife and his in-laws in one episode - if he weren’t simultaneously such a creep.  Roger Sterling – the son of one of the two founding partners – and thus also someone who is born into money and an identity - is also smarmy, but in a more sophisticated – even debonair way, and there is a sense that Draper (and we) can learn a thing or two from him.  Both of these men’s treatment of women, however, is despicable.  Campbell thinks he knows what he is doing but he doesn’t have the first idea that what he has that is of value is not at all what he thinks it is and he lashes out when others, who actually love him, sometimes in spite of himself, get fed up with how boorish he can be based on his own lack of self-awareness.  Sterling, on the other hand, lives “like a sailor on shore leave” and believes that the highest compliment he can pay a woman is to flatter her on her looks.  If there is a shallower character in Television, I haven’t met him.

Roger Sterling

So Draper is an impostor – like the other men (and many of the women who are looking for husbands or just liking the attention and the sex with wealthy men or men who one day may be wealthy), but he is by far the most authentic impostor on the block.  Unlike Sterling and Campbell, he is generative.  Not only are his ideas creative – indeed, at times, they are lyrical.  But he really gets people.  Part of his generativity is with these people.  Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss) starts the season as his starry eyed Good Catholic Girl Secretary from the Boroughs and ends as the first female copywriter at the firm since the War.  Draper teaches her the craft – in part by criticizing her, which she is strong enough to hear as useful – and in part by being genuinely connected with her and concerned about her – supporting her as she develops into a professional woman.

Peggy Olson

But Draper is also an engaged and devoted father.  He is able to connect with and nurture his children in a way that his beautiful but neurotic (and looks and self-obsessed) wife cannot.  He is genuinely interested in his mistresses – and mystified by them – he does not see them as simply a piece of ass the way that the boors do.  And while Sterling is the chief boor, the other men are all boors of one stripe or another – with the exception of the well-meaning Harold "Harry" Crane (Rich Sommer) who gets caught up in an inadvertent romance and presumably tells on himself leading to a separation from his wife, and the Zen-like partner of Sterling, Bertram "Bert" Cooper (Robert Morse) who somehow keeps this ship of loons headed in the right direction.

So what do we make of Don Draper?  On the one hand, he is a classic tragic figure.  At the end of the first season, he is able to land the Kodak account by naming their new “wheel” slide projector the carousel and describes the carousel, while showing pictures of his marriage, as a time machine that lets us get on and go back and forth in time, delivering us back to our doorstep after we have been able to spend some time in a place called nostalgia, where we are truly loved.  This deeply felt presentation gets to the Kodak representatives, and it even gets to at least one member of his creative team.  It also leads Don to reconsider staying behind from going to Thanksgiving with his wife’s family – and we see what we think is that happy ending, only to realize that what we are seeing is his fantasy - perhaps only an intention - and that he actually returns home too late to join them.  This is a man who would be a happy family figure if only he could believe his own narrative.  What gets in the way of his doing that?

In addition to being a sentimentalist, Draper is also a prying man – hiring a psychiatrist/ psychoanalyst to treat his wife and then talking to the psychoanalyst about the content of the sessions.  Now, this is, I hope, fiction.  The only time that a therapist – even in 1960 – should talk with a third party about a treatment is with that person’s permission or if that person is a child and, if the child is over the age of about five, the therapist should let the child know that they will be talking with the parents (the law had not yet decided about the issue of a court demanding to know what had occurred in a treatment in 1960).  So I think this is a poetic fiction that allows us to see the ways in which Draper is treating his wife as a child – as if she were in treatment with a child therapist and he needed to care for her as a child.  Whether this breaking of a sacred boundary is an accurate depiction of the practice of the day or not (and there may have been therapists who practiced in this way, I cannot say),  it is nice to see his wife discover what he is doing and using her therapy as a pipeline to communicate to Draper what she can’t directly say – two can play at this game.

But the point of the therapy is that Don is willing to pay for it because he feels that his wife is broken and he needs her to reflect who it is that he would like himself to be – and, while her beauty does that – her inner insecurities reflect an aspect of himself that, I believe, he cannot tolerate.  He keeps his anxieties and fears and concerns buried under a surface of self-assuredness and calm and by staying focused on that surface – on the material goods that he turns into things that reach deeply into the self – promising to his consumers and to himself that these things will bring what can only actually be delivered by human relationships.  But those relationships both draw him in and repulse him.  He is afraid that others will see what is inside of him and run from him.  That is his secret belief - that he is essentially unlovable  – and that scares him so much that he avoids exposing himself to others and thus creating the kinds of ties that would bind him securely.

The men in this series are empty shells or experience themselves as being that, and I think it is no accident that this series took its current form because the Sopranos had established itself as a popular series, and has the same producer.  These men hope that the women will fill them up, but they end up pursuing vain and empty ends.  They are in positions of tremendous privilege, and they squander that privilege on attending to surface qualities; all of which drive the great economic engine which is the United States.

I think that what the Madison Avenue Men provided was a cogent vision of ourselves – one that united us.  We were the Marlboro men.  We were the ones who knew that “Plop, plop, Fizz, fizz” would bring relief (so we didn’t have to worry about overindulging – overfilling ourselves with stuff).  The Madison Avenue men created a dream – the shared collective conscious dream – that was intended – in a weird kind of parallel to the dreams we dream at night – to hide the realities of the life we were plunging headlong into – a life of quickie satisfaction that papered over inequities – if we all can have a Chevrolet, we all will be equal (and we all want Mom, apple pie, and Chevrolet – what more could we need?).

Draper needs and wants more than this.  I think my father did, too.  There was an ongoing joke in my family that each of his children would one day provide what was missing in our family – one would give him a castle, one a boat, and one a plane.  I think this had to do with his being seen – and seeing himself – as the guy who provided.  And he wanted to turn the tables on that script.  To blow it up.  I think Draper likes being the guy who provides.  It gives him a great deal – and leaves him sorely longing for more.

In the climax to the first season, Draper runs, in a crisis, to one of his mistresses and offers her what she has wanted – to run away with him.  She recognizes what he is really doing – that he is not running away with her but running from something and her calling him a coward for doing that helps him see what he hasn’t to that point – that the consequences of what he fears are not as terrible as he imagines them to be.  He is able to “man up” and call the bluff – it happens to be of Pete Campbell – the man who would be his nemesis.  His relationship with this strong, independent woman helps him be able to be a strong independent man – but he has to expose the cowardly little boy inside to her – a little boy whose cowardice contributes to the death of a family member in this first season – in order to become what he would be.  And in the process of doing this, he is likely to have lost her (I haven’t seen the second season to know for sure). 

My father had a hard time knowing his true value.  I don’t think that he was unique in this regard.  I certainly question my value and the existentialists among us suggest that this is a universal question.  My father carried a secret in his life.  Draper carries many.  I think we all carry secrets, and they end up dividing us.  The psychoanalytic promise is that these secrets, when spoken, can help us begin to heal.  I think there is some truth to that.  I also think that some divides are wide enough and the secrets big enough that we have to continually rediscover them and inch towards being able to reconcile ourselves with them.  And, unfortunately, as I have learned about psychoanalysis, the process is never complete.  There is always more to discover.

The consumer society offers us the promise of putting a monetary value on everything and on everyone.  In one of the last images of the season, Draper has to let one of his principals know that he has to let him go because there is a competitor of greater value that might be coming on board – something the principal expected of him – though it was something Draper fought against.  It is the smarmy Campbell, who uses a grief that he is not mature enough to access to forge a relationship with the new, shinier principal.  This is a series that suggests our monetary value – our worth to the company - may not square at all with the value of our actions;  we “sell-out” all the time – as individuals and as a society.  And this constant selling out leads us to stand on increasingly shifting ground – a flimsy, jerry rigged series of lies that suspends us above what feels like a cracked foundation.

I have finished the first season – perhaps I will write about later seasons, but the first season has a nice contained feeling to it.  I expect that in later seasons the initial focus on gender inequity will expand into racial inequity and the civil rights movement of the sixties.  Meanwhile, I think that this conservative ad agency will try to continue to manage to maintain our collective conscious experience (the American Dream) while the unconscious elements of the world shake, rattle and roll beneath the surface.  I continue to find this compelling, if disquieting, viewing.

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Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge – My Companion in Teaching Personality Theory

As I reported earlier this year, my department decided last semester to no longer require our doctoral students to learn the Rorschach; it will now be an elective course.  This semester, in order to add a newly required course, “Affective Bases of Behavior”, into the curriculum, they decided to remove the Personality Theory class that I have been teaching for the past ten years – and that was taught by others before that as long as we have been teaching clinicians.  So this past semester was the last time I will teach that class.  I am bummed about that for a number of reasons (Aren’t psychologists supposed to be treating people?  Isn’t personality central to getting know the people that we treat?), but not least among the reasons I am bummed is that I will no longer be revisiting an old friend, Olive Kitteridge.

When I started teaching personality theory, I redesigned it from the ground up.  It had been being taught from a text book, which I leafed through.  Each of the chapters was a description of a contribution to personality theory from a particular person.  At St. John’s College, the “Great Books” school, our curriculum was exclusively from primary sources.  We read Plato and Aristotle and Shakespeare and the Bible instead of reading about them.  Why not read Freud and Skinner and Beck and Rogers?  At the same time, at the national psychoanalytic meetings, a psychoanalytic teacher talked about using a book, Winesburg, Ohio in her personality theory class.  It is a 1919 book about the people in a fictional Ohio town.  Each chapter is about one of the people in the town.  She (and I copied her) used chapters from the book to facilitate students applying theories to characters.  This provided the glue that held the course together and that allowed the students to turn the theories into something useful – ultimately what they would be doing in the consulting room.

The first class was, based on the course evaluations, an unmitigated disaster.  The students felt confused and angry that they did not have a text book.  They were also frustrated that I taught the class, a la St. John's, as a discussion course rather than lecturing them about each of the theories.  The one thing they did like was Winesburg, Ohio.  To my way of thinking, the class was a great success.  The students were so upset at me that they closed me out of the discussions – dismissing me as someone who did not assert the proper authority to run the class.  This meant that they came to be deeply engaged in the reading of the material and the discussion of it.  The evaluations were tough to take, but after talking with other faculty I decided not to change the essential structure of the class, but did work to better articulate that structure and also worked to be more active in structuring the work in the classroom.

While Winesburg, Ohio was a good book, it was not, as I had imagined, a book that was published before the influence of Freud – which would have helped to clarify that the characters were created by a writer uninfluenced by psychological theory.  In fact, Sherwood Anderson, the author, was using Freudian theory to construct his characters!  The stories were also dated.  So when I read Olive Kitteridge, set in a fictional small town on the coast of Maine but in the era of Bush II and the wake of 9/11, it felt both more contemporary, but also more complex.  Like Winesburg, Olive is really a set of short stories – each story is a self-contained unit, and it is a novel by dint of the stories occurring in chronological order and building an increasingly complicated vision of the central character. Instead of the town and its functioning being the focus of the book, it is Olive who makes an appearance, sometimes only as a passing figure but in other chapters as the central character.  We learn important events in her early life - but mostly we get to know her as she is and, to a certain extent as she was - in the minds of the people with whom she has interacted.

What makes Olive a good teaching device, however, is that while she is an organizing factor and makes an appearance of some sort in each chapter, different people in her life take center stage in each chapter.  The central application of this week’s theory is not, then, to Olive week after week (though she generally comes up as we try to understand her from this week’s perspective), but to the character who is at the center of this week’s story.  This device ends up illuminating Olive’s character, as I am thinking about the structure of the book, in an organic way.  We learn not primarily about her thoughts, though we hear plenty of those, nor her actions, though we see her in a variety of activities, but mostly we learn about her impact on others – the good, the bad, and the ugly.  And what we learn about her is never complete.  We aren’t told why Olive is the way she is any more than my students were told by me what each of the theorists we read had to say.  We (and they) have to figure that out for ourselves – with the help, in Olive’s case, of a master story teller.

Olive is a battle ax.  This is one reason that I love her.  She is reminiscent of my paternal grandmother – a woman whose wedding dress was black and who was the only democrat in a solidly red county - mostly just to be ornery.  Olive makes waves.  She is not happy – but she is deeply invested in living, sometimes against her better judgement.  She is a Junior High School math teacher, but she teaches her students more about life than about math.  And what she teaches is, “Don’t be a ninny.”  Meaning – think for yourself – make your own life – don’t let your fears hem you in.  And, of course, Olive’s fears do hem her in.  She is a mother who deeply loves her son and also deeply damages him.  She is married to a man who is as nice as the day is long – and nothing could be worse for her.  And yet we doubt that she could have stayed in a marriage with anyone who was less accepting of her.  She cares deeply for strays and others who have been hurt, in part because she can resonate with them, but she is also deeply disdainful of thoughtless others.  At one point she is helping others help an anorexic young woman who complains of being hungry and Olive – big hefty Olive – states that she knows exactly what the girl is talking about.  Look at me, she says, do you think I got this fat because I’m not hungry?  And we suddenly see how these two very different people have some essential shared humanity.

Reading Olive recursively has been a satisfyingly humbling experience for a psychoanalyst who listens to people’s stories and offers interpretations about what is going on in their lives.  Each year I have gotten a new level of understanding about this or that character – and many additional layers of understanding about Olive – partly as a result of picking up on details that I missed in the previous reading.  This book is extremely well crafted.  There are subtle details that illuminate aspects of character and that, at least to me, are all too easy to miss because it also reads like a novel – easily and effortlessly – it goes down like cold lemonade on a hot summer’s day - and this can lull the reader into a sense that all is taken care of so that we don’t need to attend to the details of what we are reading.

When I am in sessions with patients I take extensive notes on what they are saying.  I do this for many reasons, including that it helps keep me quieter – so that I listen instead of interrupting the flow of their thoughts; it helps me attend to and concentrate on what they are saying – so that my mind doesn’t wander too far (though some wandering is inevitable and integral to the process); and also so that I can review what took place in a session.  When I review, I frequently find – as I have with Olive – that I have missed details – and sometimes entire subplots.  I wrote them down – I must have heard them.  Just as I remember now the pictures that emerged from reading the story last year.  But there are other ways of hearing – other ways of reading – the material that has been presented.  That is, I think, a reflection of the way our minds are built – and having Olive be as rich and complex as she is – and having her story be as filled with useful but subtle detail as it is – makes it feel as organic as any clinical material that I could bring to the class to articulate the concepts we are learning.

But we do need to attend to the details in Olive in part because the narrative of the overarching story – and not just because it is told as a series of short stories – is full of holes.  It is full of holes because, in so far as a book can imitate the lived experience of getting to know people; our knowledge of each other is patchy at best.  Even when we do attend to the details, we end up making up the people in these stories.  They are constructed every bit as much as our parents, children, students, therapists and patients are.  I also think it is full of holes because it is partly a story that is told by Olive – and, if we are good empathic readers – we read her story – as Strout wrote it – from her perspective.  And how can we know what the impact of who we are is on those around us?  Was the experience of the first time personality theory class, or any subsequent class, adequately represented in their evaluations of the class (certainly in the case of the first class, I hope not)?  And yet don’t we do what we do to affect those around us?  Wasn’t I, on some level, intending to be disruptive to the students?  Didn’t I want to make them uncomfortable?  Didn’t I want to put a stick in the hornet’s nest?  Isn’t that a big chunk of why we do what we do?

When Olive’s son gets married, the reception is in the house that she and her lovely husband Henry built for her.  As she is lying down in her son’s (and now daughter-in-law’s) bedroom relaxing after the ceremony, she hears her daughter-in-law talking about her with other guests in the backyard.  Olive, this crusty battle ax who doesn’t give a damn about convention or what others think, is intensely interested in what the guests and her daughter-in-law are saying about her.  Who wouldn’t be?  And this book allows her to imagine what it is that she has done – in marrying a man, in raising a child, in teaching, and in being a citizen of the community.  Wouldn’t we all like to know that?  I certainly would like to know what radiates out from the work that I do with my children, with my students, my readers and with my patients.  Is the world a better place for that work?  Is it worse?

In the afterward to the book, there is an imagined conversation between a representative of the publishing house, Strout, and Olive.  Strout imagines that she has brought Olive to life and gets to talk with her about the book.  I don’t think that Strout has actually brought the same Olive to life that she brought to life for me.  In fact, I find her characterization of Olive in the afterward to be flat and not true-to-life – as if the Olive in my head were the alive and real one.  I think that Strout has done something better than bring her Olive to life – she has allowed me to bring my Olive to life – and it is not the same as hers. 

When we are discussing the book in class, it has been helpful to struggle with the ways in which the students perceive – and idiosyncratically perceive – the characters in the book.  We create characters – just as they will later create their patients.  We need to be aware of that process.  It is a powerful one that can help us help others – as Olive and others help each other in this book – but it can also lead us to miss each other.  As a patient, it can be tremendously gratifying to be understood by one’s therapist or analyst.  It is also a necessary part of the process to be misunderstood.  Sometimes to be misheard, but sometimes to be simply misunderstood; to know that another who is trying to “get” us, and who can be quite good at it, in this moment fails to do that.  We, as therapists, don’t want that to happen, but we have to learn that it will – and that our patients will survive that – just as Olive does – and they may even grow from it.  Our misperceptions will sometimes allow them to see themselves in a different and useful light.  We can imagine them as more fully alive than they are able to experience themselves in this moment and, while that can feel like an empathic failure, it can also be a resonance that can come to fruition.  They can also wrestle with what it means to know themselves as no one else can – to realize that they are ultimately their own selves, for good and ill.

That said, it is also important to understand our patients.  And the devil is in the details.  It is important to listen closely - to get what it is they are saying by hearing how this detail relates to that one.  Having a shared text that we can refer to can help us read together and understand who it is that Strout is writing about - not just who are we imagining as she prattles on.  It is sometimes helpful, I think, to ask a student to reread a chapter when their reading of the chapter is at variance with the rest of the class.  They will sometimes find that they have imposed their own views on the ways that humans work - let their theory override what is actually taking place - and I hope this serves as a useful warning to a budding clinician.

Another reason that Olive is a good book to teach – as I am trying to bring an overly long post to a close – is that it is full of old people – and her old people are thinking about and having (and not having) sex.  Strout sometimes talks about this in oblique ways – her characters are small town folk from an older generation – but sex is present and enlivening the story lines – not in a commercial kind of come-on titillating way, but in a real, lived middle aged kind of way.  And our students need to know that sex is a genuine part of our patient’s lives – and that it will frequently be referred to obliquely.

Strout has just released a new book, Anything is Possible.  It is a book that, according to the Fresh Air review, is very much like Olive.  It is a series of short stories about a person who lived in a small town – this time in Illinois – but the person is even less in the stories than Olive was – and Strout has already written a novel about her – My Name is Lucy Barton - one that I posted on before.  I look forward to reading Anything is Possible – and intend to post about it when I get there – but I had to say good bye to Olive first, and, sadly, to teaching personality theory.  I think I have become better at it - and whether I have or not, I still believe that studying personality is integral to the development of good clinicians...

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The Worst Hard Time – The Psychological Experience of Empathy with those who are besieged.

Dust bowl is both a term that is part of my professional vocabulary and one I grew up with.  I live in a fly over state.  It is in the Midwest, but I like to think of it as the true Midwest while the Plains States are the other Midwest.  The Dust Bowl happened in the other Midwest – as what I think of as the drive through states – Eastern Colorado, Western Nebraska and Kansas, and the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas.  States that it takes forever to get across when you are headed to your destination - the mountains.  States that are flat and boring.  Our Midwest, the one east of the Mississippi river, is one that used to have the Big Ten Schools firmly in it (while the plains states had the Big Twelve), but those conferences are now all muddled, and, frankly, psychology has always muddled them.  The psychology departments in both conferences are in huge land grant institutions with huge enrollments and huge available undergraduate populations to engage in psychological experimentation on, and they have long been bundled together as Dust Bowl Psychology Departments – distinct from the departments on the coasts (and, truth be told, some in their midst) that have more traditionally been involved in psychoanalytic and humanistic psychology – the dust bowl psychologists have focused on the average person by looking at the herd, not, as in the other camp, on the individual. 

Statistical analysis is at the heart of dust bowl psychology – and the statistics come from: agriculture.  The land grant institutions were places where farmer’s sons (and daughters) went to study how to grow better crops.  They planted those crops in plots and determined whether this plot or that plot grow better with statistical tools like ANOVA and its split plot function.  We lifted that methodology to see whether this or that psychological treatment had a better outcome (as if treating clients is a bit like growing healthy crops).

 Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time – a book about the actual dust bowl itself – is a brutal book.  It is about the people who are similar to J. D. Vance’s Hillbillies in his Hillbilly Elegy – a group of Scots-Irish descent – the other WASPS – the ones who came here not as landowners, but as indentured servants.  The ones who Ta-Nehisi Coates equated with the first slaves but who, slowly, over time, came to see themselves as poor but better than the blacks.  And it is this group of “whites” – along with other groups of “whites” (as if white were a culture or an ethnicity or a race that had some kind of integrity) - that were a significant group in propelling Trump into the Presidency (and the characters in this book are white and overtly racist - against both blacks but also, to a lesser extent, native Americans).

So, I read this book with curiosity.  Who are these people who live among us and think so differently from the way that I do?  Who are these people who are so susceptible to the populist rhetoric that Trump preached and who are an important component of the people inside of the coalition that elected him?  This book portrays them as a wide ranging group of people who have in common grit – well-earned grit.

I also read this book with interest because I grew up with the dust bowl as a symbol, and sometimes it felt like the causal agent (though this book makes clear it was not - though it certainly contributed to it), of the Great Depression.  It spawned John Steinbeck’s Okies, travelling west to California in broken down cars to escape it in the Grapes of Wrath.  It was symbolic of a time when my parents were young and stuff was hard to come by.  My Mom’s parents had to sell their own car to be able to pay the hospital bill in order to take my Mom home after she was born.  But this book is not primarily about those at a distance – the Okies who left or people like my Mom (though it does mention someone who, like my Mom’s family, was in Chicago, who sold their child to pay a hospital bill – I guess it could have been worse).  This book is about those who lived in the Dust Bowl.  The ones who stuck with the land that was literally disappearing from beneath their feet and showering down on their heads from above. 

The author is writing history – and he chooses five or six characters to follow through the dust bowl.  Here he is at a disadvantage to the novelist.  As Irv Yalom pointed out in the introduction to his classic (West Coast Psychology) book on Existential Psychotherapy (p.21), when the historian writes about Queen Elizabeth, she, upon reading the book will say, “I still have my secret.”  His point is that the novelist is able to imagine him or herself into a character with abandon – they are able to infuse the character with their own human essence – in a way that the historian, constrained by facts, cannot.  We are told about characters in this book, but we don’t actually get to know them.  So the vehicle for psychoanalytic understanding is not vicarious – it ends up being much more direct than that.

What we get instead of the phenomenology of the characters in the story, partly by hearing the stories of those characters, but mostly by dint of fact and description, is a more direct experience – I would almost say the lived experience – of being attacked by the land we are living on.  We become the agents of the phenomenology of living in the dust bowl as we live through the dust storms and their impact as described in vivid detail.  And these are not trifling storms.  They infiltrate the best insulated homes.  They occur 14, 16, 18 times a month, sometimes for 15 days in a row.  They fill our mouths, our ears, our eyes with dust.  Because there is so much stuff rubbing against itself in the air, there is static electricity everywhere there is a conductor - it shorts out our cars - it knocks us down when we touch each other - and it sparks across the barbed wire in the fields.  Some of us go blind from the dirt that is ground between eye and eyelid.  Many of us, especially the young and the old, after three years of this, get “dust pneumonia”, something that is akin to coal miner’s black lung disease – but it comes much faster.  We wear masks and we put Vaseline on our noses, and still the dust gets into our lungs.  The clouds rain dirt.  When there is a little water mixed in, they rain mud.  We live in dug outs, carved in the ground, alive with centipedes and spiders.  And our roofs, which shed the dirt, let the dust seep through to build up above our ceilings so that our ceilings sag and we have to drill a hole to let the mounds of dust come into a bucket to be collected and carried outside.  And every year, year after year, it gets worse.  Occasionally there is a big storm – one that dumps twelve million tons of soil on Chicago and blankets New York and Washington in brown and that even rains dirt on ships hundreds of miles out at sea – but for us – this stuff coming from the sky is a daily occurrence.

Why did we subject ourselves to this?  We were drawn here by a variety of factors.  Some of us are ranchers or cowboys who ran the Indians and buffalo off the prairie to herd cattle.  Some of us followed and plowed up the land to plant wheat – something that worked well in the wet years and we became rich, so others followed us.  And they came with something new – gas powered plows that could plow up more land than anyone had ever thought possible.  We could homestead.  We could get land for free, just by agreeing to work it – to plow it up and plant it – something that we had done elsewhere as sharecroppers.  Here we did it as landowners.  We were now part of the American dream – we were no longer supporters of the lifestyles of the rich – we now owned a piece of the action.  And we built towns and we carried around a 100 dollar bill in our hand just to let people know just how rich we were.

But our enthusiasm laid bare land that had been protected by the drought resistant buffalo grass – and drought here is not a rare phenomenon.  Half or so of the years there is not enough rainfall to support crops so those are considered drought years.  And those years tend to come in batches.  This land would be desert without the grass – and it quickly became that when the rains stopped.  The topsoil was blown away now that it was uncovered, and it was replace by dust – sand – that heaped itself into dunes.  There is now nothing living – nothing green – to be seen for miles and miles.  Horses are gnawing at fence posts to try to get some nutrition.  We have wells that support small patches of vegetables, but these can be quickly covered by a sandstorm and our homes – even if we have gotten rich enough to have a frame house – become windbreaks that allow the sand to pile up against the sides – we have climb out a window to shovel a path to our front door to unblock it.  And it is the wind – the ever present wind – and the clouds of dust – that are enough to drive a person mad.

In the midst of reading this book, I began to fear the nice comfortable Midwestern rain clouds that would roll in.  Would they release clean rain or would they rain mud?  Nature suddenly became harsh.  This experience reflects the book, where nature's danger was unrelenting.  When Roosevelt’s man Hugh Bennett finally got the farmers to start contour plowing (not, as in this part of the Midwest, to follow the contours of the land – but there, in the other Midwest – to be at right angles to the prevailing winds), and, when just a little rain did come and just a sprig of green came up – the grasshoppers descended on the green and destroyed it – ate it in a heartbeat.  No longer constrained by the snakes and the birds – the snakes dead, the birds staying away from the now vast desert in the middle of the country – the grasshoppers had a field day.  Just when we thought there was hope, those hopes were dashed.  Recovery from this condition was slow and, at least in Egan’s mind, never complete.

When I was a Junior in college in Santa Fe, a friend and I decided to strap some tents on our bikes and ride home to Ohio for the summer.  We rode out of Santa Fe and south, around the mountains and then went diagonally northwest across the upper corner of New Mexico crossing the tip of the panhandle of Oklahoma into Western Kansas.  Santa Fe is high desert as are the mountains in New Mexico, but as we approached the flatlands of Oklahoma and Kansas the land got greener. 

It was late spring as we started – the last light snow fell the day we started out.  My memories of the trip were some of the most vivid of my life.  The combination of being outside all day – having the feel of the road along with the sights and smells led to a fuller experience than I had before or since. I remembered more detail of those three weeks than I have ever had.  But then, a few months later, we developed the pictures we took, and I could feel those memories collapsing and attaching themselves to the images – limiting themselves to what was in the picture book.  It is hard to reconstruct – and it was early enough in spring that crops would have all looked pretty much alike, but I think that by the time we hit Oklahoma a lot of what was on either side of us was grassland. 

Western Kansas was a series of rides from one grain elevator – in a tiny town with a gas station and 10 or 20 houses – to the next grain elevator that appeared on the horizon – with its gas station and houses.  We stopped in each town for some water or a meal (we would buy food at the local grocery or convenience store) and to put some air in my tires – they had a bunch of slow leaks and there wasn’t a European inner tube to be had in Western Kansas – and we answered the same questions – Where are you going?  Where did you come from?  How many miles do make in a day?  The people were very pleasant.  One carful of kids handed us each a Coors light – which tasted pretty awful warm on a hot day while riding a bike, but the thought was in the right place.

The wind was our constant companion and scourge.  I naively thought that the prevailing winds would push us across the land.  Most of the time they were in our face and it was really hard to make headway.  One day the wind blew from the south and, rather than leaning at 45 degrees into it as we pedaled east, we simply turned north and let it push us.  We rode 125 miles that day and barely pedaled – we just sat high in our seats and became sails that propelled us.

Egan maintains, and I don’t doubt him, that much of the green we were seeing around us was a mirage.  The wheat is now supported by deep wells that go down to the Ogallala aquifer, a huge underground lake left by the last retreating glaciers.  The problem is this water is not being replenished.  It is being used at the rate of more than one million acre feet per year – and it is a nonrenewable resource.  Ultimately Bennett was able to save the plains from becoming a Saharan desert through conservation techniques – and a social system where everybody looked after everybody else’s planting habits.   Egan maintains that the soil conservation districts are the only grassroots portion of the New Deal that is still functioning.   The Ogallala aquifer helps to maintain the illusion of a sustainable crop agriculture system in a climate that is too dry to support it, and Egan believes that this is another ecological disaster waiting to happen.

Years after our bike trip, I was driving across western Kansas on a road trip to the mountains and there was a stretch of the interstate that was closed so we were shunted onto a US highway that paralleled it.  Every pickup truck driver that passed us acknowledged up by unwrapping his (or occasionally her) finger tips from the steering while to hold up their flat palm – the hand never left the steering wheel.  And I quickly began returning the salute.  In this country we are all in it together was the feeling I had, even before reading this book.  Now I have a better sense of what that is about.

There are no deep analyses of character in this book – there are plenty of characters, but we really don’t get a sense of why the men who joined the “Last Man Club” did that – vowing never to leave no matter how bad it got.  And we can’t blame some of those who left despite that pledge.  There was a kind of grim fatalism to just finishing the book.  It was cruel and unusual punishment that the story just kept getting worse, it didn’t get better and the bit about the desert being saved came way late and didn’t feel all that hopeful. 

I think we are encouraged by this book to imagine the lives of these people – the deprivation they survived to hang onto land that was their own.  And when we begin to wrap our minds around this, we can begin to imagine that there is an attachment to that land that is as powerful as the attachment of a child to an abusive parent - and there is also an attachment to the dream of what that land can bring.  Both of these are attachments that are deeply felt by those who have chosen to stay.  I think there is also a deeply felt sense of tribalism – of kinsmanship between these white people – people who generally have no shared roots save those that extend into the land – and a sense of “we-ness” that is very territorial (there is one ethnically homogenous group of farmers – Volga Germans who had migrated to Russia under Catherine the Great's largesse and were no longer welcome there - who brought the seeds of the red winter wheat that can survive on less water – and the tumbleweeds that survived in the desert that the wheat left behind when the water got too scarce even for it - did I mention that people ground up tumbleweeds to feed to their horses and cattle?). 

We may be generations removed from the worst hard time, but some things endure.  These people have banded together to survive a desert and then rebuild a grassland and “America’s breadbasket” – a swath of land that has been called on before and after the dust bowl to feed the world.  The attachment between the people and the land becomes as palpable as any other attachment that is primal.  A populist – someone who can articulate that attachment – who can call forth our patriot vigor - as well as the feeling of threat that something foreign might take it away – as the wind has done before – can awaken in these people a powerful sense that we need to band together to ward off an external evil.   We people of the plains, we who have survived so much, must prevent the next hard time from happening.

Maybe it is no accident that "herd" psychology - Dust Bowl Psychology - has happened in the middle of the country - the various midwestern states that have gone red in our last election.  There may be an illusion of homogeneity that we prize here - the sense that it is us against nature - and the us is a group that looks like us - even if we don't have much in common beyond how we look and that we feel that we are fighting for our survival in a vast space that can both support and vanquish us.  That said, the experience of the dust bowlers parallels, in an eerie fashion, those who chased whales in the Atlantic, until they had hunted them to exhaustion, and then chased them into the Pacific.  In the Heart of the Sea - the story of those hunters - is also a brutal read about people who live close to nature and have to fight to survive when nature turns on them.

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