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...

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

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), if you are on a computer, hit the X button on the upper right of this screen and, on the subsequent screen, hover your cursor over the black line in the upper right area and choose the pop out box that says subscribe and then enter the information.  I'm sorry but I don't currently know how you can subscribe from a mobile device - hopefully you have a computer as well...