Casablanca: Isolationism’s Cure

A couple of years ago I blogged about my Mom’s continued productivity into her eighties when I reviewed a play of hers about Frank Lloyd Wright.  This year, for the eighth year in a row, she and her troupe have written and she has directed them in producing an original play.  I found this one particularly timely and instructive – it was about the film Casablanca – its creation, its meaning, and its place in our collective experience of film going.  After the play, the reluctant wife and I watched the film – for me it was my third time.  The first time I saw it was in high school – I found the film difficult to piece together.  Without historical context, I found the city and the agendas of the inhabitants and the bar to be foreign.  I was even somewhat confused by the love story – who was this Rick guy – this hard-hearted guy and what was the tenderness that he had experienced in Paris in that filmy flashback?

The second time that I saw the film was ten years ago when it was shown at our local institute and the love story was interpreted from an analytic perspective as the classic oedipal triangle with Rick being in love with the maternal figure of Ilsa who was married, unbeknownst to him, to Victor Laszlo, the hero of the underground movement.  She, for her part, allowed herself to fall in love with Rick only because she thought Laszlo dead, and so Rick’s heroic disavowal of their love at the end was the healthy resolution of the oedipal romance, with Rick choosing to quit mooning for someone who wasn’t his own, to make sure that his parents had the marriage they deserved and he set off with new friends for new adventures, free to love in whatever way he chose.

Mom’s troupe presented a very different historical – political perspective based on recent books about the making of the film.  They did this in the context of the troupe starting out as a kind of book club interested in the film, and the members of the club morphed into characters in the play and then the film, but also into the characters who wrote and produced and watched the film, and the censoring board (hilariously played as a “church-lady” type) – as well as being the actors in the film off stage – being the people that they really were.  It was an enchanting play – including a moving sing along to “The Marseillaise” at the moment in the film when it was sung in defiance of the Germans in Rick’s bar.  After seeing the play, I could appreciate just how tightly written this film is and that, despite Bogart’s experience of it as just another of the many studio movies he was under contract to churn out, it was, in fact, anything but.

The play, “Everybody Comes to Rick’s”, was purchased by Jack Warner – one of the two Eastern European Jewish brothers who had come to the U.S., changed their names to Warner, and built a movie studio – as a vehicle to help the U.S. move out of its isolationist position with regard to World War II.  Everybody Comes to Rick’s, in turn, was based on the experiences of an American watching the torturous route that refugees were taking to try to escape the ever expanding grip of the Nazis and reporting on this trail to a friend who was a playwright.  The play was written but never produced before being bought by Jack Warner for $20,000.  There aren’t many editions of the play currently available, but a librarian friend of my Mom’s was able to find a copy and the troupe was able to produce some of the scenes.

Ilsa, who is so effective as the morally torn woman at the center of the film was, in the play, a floozy with another name who had toyed with Rick’s heart in Paris – exactly the kind of person that Rick unjustly accuses Ilsa of being when he is drunk and angry with her in the film.  But this would not do for Jack Warner and the producers and writers he hired to turn this into a movie that would help move the US off the dime.  You see, the government had put an embargo on films about the war.  We wanted to stay out of what was seen as a European problem.  Let them sort things out for themselves, we said.  We will stay over here - even after Paris fell – and having knowledge of what was happening to the Jews – we did not want to commit ourselves to a problem that was not of our own making.

I get that.  In the wake of September 11^th, when we were gearing up for a war with Iraq, I had a conversation with a fellow faculty member’s 18 year old son who was arguing that we should go and fight for a variety of reasons – including that the Iraqis were living under the rule of a dictator who was taking their right to a free life away.  I agreed with him that this was not right, but I also said that I was reluctant to risk his life, which could certainly happen if the draft was reinstated, so that the people of Iraq could live freely.  This brought both of us up short and made an argument that had seemed hypothetical and philosophically obvious suddenly immediate and uncomfortable for both us.

 So Jack Warner’s crew needed a hero, someone who never stuck his neck out for anyone, but also someone who embodied who it is that we, as Americans, would identify with, someone who had deep convictions about right and wrong.  So Rick had a very important relationship with Sam – his piano player – an egalitarian relationship with someone who called him boss, but with whom he shared the profits of the casino and with whom he worked as a sort of “colleague".  It was important that our exceptionalism, our vision of ourselves as doing well by our former slaves – a fiction that Ne-Tahisi Coates and many, many others have exposed as a lie – be depicted.  Rick's character, as portrayed in his relationship with Sam was (ironically) written to appeal to our better selves, to the self who always rooted for the underdog.  And Rick needed to be principled - having helped the underdog in wars, but also helping a very visible underdog - an African American.

In this film, only three of the named actors were born in the United States.  Most of them were recent immigrants and some of those playing Nazis were Jews who had just fled Europe.  The actor playing Victor Laszlo was a European star who was now in exile and angry about being outside of the central romantic lead that he was used to playing.  Ingrid Bergman, one of the few actors of her day who kept her given name, was working hard to understand her character and how to play her – which was difficult because the conclusion of the film had not yet been written – no one knew how the conflict was going to be resolved – and because Bogart was incredibly remote and unresponsive – disappearing into his trailer when not on set.

So Mom’s troupe explained that the pivotal scene, when the Germans start to sing a patriotic song in Rick’s bar using Sam’s piano, was constructed in an interesting way.  Rick, the person who was so firmly in charge of his nightclub that no one was admitted to the illegal casino without a nod from him, the man who never drank with a customer, and the man who didn’t bat an eye when a man who relied on him was shot when Rick refused to intervene to save his life, gave the nod to the band to play the Marseillaise when Victor Laszlo stood up to lead them.  In the filming, Bogart was told, "This will be a light day, just come on set and give a nod.", which he did before retiring to his trailer.  The actors who sang the Marseillaise and the band who played, many of them recent immigrants, cried real tears of grief and joy at this show of mettle in the bully’s face.  And Jack Warner had the moment he needed – the taciturn isolationist who remained staunchly neutral giving tacit approval to the resistance.

Of course, the real drama occurs in the last few minutes, when neither we, nor apparently the cast, know how the movie will resolve.  Rick is selling his business to Ferrari, the owner of the Blue Parrot across the street who has coveted it, in anticipation of running off with Ilsa, who has entrusted their future to Rick, as Rick double crosses Laszlo and delivers him to the Nazis.  When it becomes apparent that this is not, in fact, Rick’s plan, we are left with the fear that the Nazi commandant, who has been contacted by the brilliantly played French Captain Louis Renault, will prevent Laszlo and Ilsa’s flight to Lisbon.  All is nicely resolved and Rick and Louis, who have just worked to double cross each other, recognize that each of them, with their long history of being spineless exploiters of the plight of the Jews fleeing Europe through Casablanca, is, in fact, a deeply principled person and they resolve together to begin a new kind of friendship based on that shared resolve.  In that beautiful moment, we witness Rick’s transformation through Renault’s eyes, and we identify with Rick’s being the good, decent and just man we always knew him, and we, ourselves, to have been.

One of the things that my Mom’s production clarified was the integral role that the censorship board played in making this a truly great movie.  They would not allow the most egregiously immoral aspects of the Casablancan milieu to be directly depicted.  Thus, they censored out the original versions of the script where Renault’s trading sex for visas were spelled out, so the script had to be clean enough that the censor’s wouldn’t object, and Claude Rains’ performance had to be smarmy enough that we couldn’t not know.  Similarly, Rick giving a key to Ilsa to come to his room, and Ilsa showing up the next morning in the dress she had worn the night before, had to be cut – Ilsa is a married woman, after all – so Ilsa has to take a back stair – and they have to be interrupted mid reconciliation by Laszlo’s appearance in the bar – and all of this heightens the tension as we experience their unrequited love burning and smoldering and not being consummated. 

I think, for what it is worth, that all of the censor’s work and that of Jack Warner to have Rick be the person the US as a country could identify with, also led to my objection to the straight Oedipal interpretation ten years ago.    I think it is Ilsa, not Rick, who is in the infantile position.  She was a child who had an Oedipal crush on the older, wiser, more worldly Laszlo – and the oedipal “victory” (which is really a defeat because it imprisons the child in the infantile position admiring the distant and superior parent) of being loved by a father figure.  His apparent death in the concentration camps relieved her to fall in love with someone more like her – a peer – and created the possibility of her having the kind of romantic life that a mature woman should have – with a person with whom she can discover the world – together – as peers.  But this man – Rick – betrays her need for just such a relationship.  He could have put Laszlo on that plane and run off with Ilsa to fight the bad guys together in their own way, but he doesn’t do that.  He decides for her – paternalistically (just as he apparently decided for Sam, despite his protestation that he doesn’t buy or sell people, that being “owned” by Ferrari was in his best interest) that remaining the adored young child, is the best role her.

So, to summarize, Jack Warner won the war.  He got the US to get out of its isolationist Rick mode and helped us recognize our better selves.  But he did this, in part, by censoring something about ourselves that is very important but that we didn’t want to know or couldn’t yet know: that we infantilize minorities and women – we use them to our own ends while claiming that we are doing what is best for them.  Coming to grips with these hidden aspects of ourselves is put off while we fight a greater evil.  Yes, we needed to defeat Nazism.  And, in the process of doing that, Rosie the Riveter and the armed services as a promoter of racial equality began to chip away at the enemy of paternalism, but Jack Warner’s support of the American Dream, of our exceptionalism, also allowed us to continue to slumber.  Perhaps now we are awakening from that sleep – but it is a rude awakening.  We had to elect a President who promised to Make America Great Again – which, for some of us, was code for Make America Paternalistic Again – make us the kind of country that Rick personified.  The kind of country that is certain of itself and assigns roles to people that work – as we imagine it, for the people we are assigning the roles to – but in fact, and outside of our awareness, those roles are assigned primarily based on what is good for ourselves.  Perhaps we need to see our narcissism personified on a huge stage in order to actually see it for what it is and to recoil against it – to redefine ourselves in new, more humane ways.

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

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Between the World and Me

Ta-Nehisi Coates visited our campus last year and I have been looking forward to reading his memoir, Between the World and Me, since then.  He had me at the opening words, “Dear Son,”.  He is writing to his son about what it means to be an African American Male, but he was speaking for me – in a parallel world vernacular – as the reluctant son prepares to go off to college.  How do we tell our children – how does a man tell his son – what he needs to know?  I want to know.  I am reading with Coates from the first line.  And what he is telling me about is something that I balked when I first heard a black analyst, Dorothy Holmes, say it, but that I have, across time and as a result of many experiences, including with Mr. Coates himself, come to appreciate.  He is telling me that the primary concern of the American Black Male is with the integrity of his body – a body that he does not feel is, in some primal and fundamental way, his own.

Had I read this a couple of years ago, I think he might have lost me at this point.  Wait a minute, I would have said, we are 150 years out from the civil war and the emancipation.  What do you mean that your body is not yet your own?  But Coates patiently walks us, his co-author of the letter to his son, through the experience of growing up in a culture where a boy is beaten regularly by people who love him to protect him from acting in ways that could lead to his being arrested or worse.  He is also, if he is growing up in a ghetto, as Coates did, fearing for his life from other quarters – he has to know which blocks are safe to navigate and which are not.  And then he becomes puzzled and envious of those who, as he would and does provide for his son – provide a different kind of protective layer so that his son does not have to experience the same fearsome forces determining his life – until his son discovers that an innocent black boy has been murdered by a policeman and the policeman will not be charged – and his son, despite his privileged and protected life – is confronted by his own variant on the mortal fears that have plagued the father.  And isn’t there something universal about this wish of a father to have his son escape the traps and turmoil that he has found himself in only to find that the son, despite his best efforts, must confront some variant of them?  And don’t we want to provide some succor, some guidance, as he does this?  And, at least for me, I wish that I could be as eloquent – as readable – as Coates is.  I wish that my son would read what I wrote or, barring that, that someone would, as people have read Coates.

So he tells his son about his experience – about going to Howard University in Washington, D.C.  And I have told my son about my own experience of going to college.  And he has chosen to go to a college that was not mine.  And Coates acknowledges that his son will have to make his own choices in life – but I sense that he deeply and powerfully wishes that his son would experience Howard – the Mecca – as he experienced it, filled with celebrities – some of them known to me and some of them not – as likely his son would hear the names – it is amazing to me how many people I know on a first name basis who are unknown to my children and to my students because of the barriers that time erects – and between Coates and me there are social barriers where he is reciting names of people that are celebrities within the African American community, but not so much within mine.  He is building bridges to, but also necessarily pointing out divides between, he and his son and he and me.

Coates revels in his blackness – he celebrates it – and then he pulls up short of imagining that the black universe is the entire universe, something that he once wanted to do.  He connects with me (the “white” reader – whatever and whoever “white” is) when he owns the entire human race and all of its magnificent production as his own.  I am proud of my family – and proud of their products – they get some extra juice and vigarish and I overvalue them because of my knowing and being related to them.  I am also proud of my various brushes with fame and overvalue the production of those individuals.  But I am also proud of and feel related to the whole human race – what we have accomplished – despite all the trouble we have also managed to cause – is nothing short of miraculous – and Coates shares in that appreciation – and that becomes another connection point.  Implicitly, at his moment, he invites me to appreciate “his” world as he is appreciating “mine” and I feel more comfortable acknowledging what he would have me see – that African Americans, despite my prejudice of being a drag on the economy, have been one of our most important economic engines.  This land is our land.

I experience this as the result of a kind of openness that feels like it flows off the page.  There is an honesty that is palpable and, while I think I have been as honest with my son as he is being with his, sometimes in ways that make me wonder (for both of us) “Should I have told him that?”, when I told a psychoanalytic friend that I was reading Between the World and Me, he commented on how defended Coates is in it.  By this he means that the flow is not free – that this is not a series of Freudian free associations unencumbered by what we call defensive functioning – where we craft our sentences to hide as well as reveal.  And I suppose he is right.  This is a very well-crafted book – it reads like poetry or spoken word soul – which sounds spontaneous but is deeply and carefully crafted.  And, as a reader, I appreciate that.  I have the sense that I am in the hands of a craftsman.  That this sentence, this paragraph, this page, this section will resolve.  So I suppose that crafting a piece of writing is like interpreting a dream and then using that interpretation to address a problem area.  Sometimes I will flat-footedly say, “I had this dream and I think it was about this and it resolved in this way and I think that is a really good idea, what do you think?”, but I frequently get more mileage out of the dream if I think about how to engage with a person so that they, too, feel the solution that the dream presented or the way that the dream articulated the problem is useful for us to consider as we work on the problem, and this requires crafting – working the solution into the interaction between us as we work together on the problem.

Coates has taken what I think are real, raw direct experiences of the world and worked them into a form that engages the reader.  He wants to connect.  He wants us to be with him.  This requires craftsmanship – especially when working across racial, ethnic or social lines.  It requires honesty, but also appreciation of how what we have to say will be perceived.  We have to write – and then read our writing not just as editors but as the Other – how will this be heard by someone who is not me?  And he has, at least with this me, allowed me to read it as if it were me – as if I had written it, which of course I couldn’t have.  What could be further from my capacity to write about than the subjectivity of a black man?  In an earlier post, I noted that the white author of The Help was wise to avoid writing in the first person about any of the blacks (she did with the whites) in her book.  It may be that I am able to read this piece in part because I have been working to understand this perspective, but I think I am able to read it as something that I might have written because Coates has crafted it to be that.  I can imagine myself in his shoes.  I feel his concerns to be my own.  This is an accomplishment that is partly based on the crafted nature of the writing, but also I think on the honesty of it.  While it may include defensive components, it comes, I believe, from a heartfelt and genuine place – the kind of place that we can discover when we sit with the parts of ourselves and the world that are beautiful and ugly and see them as directly as we are able.

The writing then, is the writing of an empowered person.  A person who feels free to say what he believes and to do that without inhibiting himself - though doing that with sensitivity to his audience - not because he is kowtowing to them, but because he cares about them as equals.  He cares about them as similarly free people who will necessarily relate from their own place to what he has to say, just as he will say what he has to say from his own place. 

This book has become an Important Book – but it is not weighty or tough to plow through.  It does not deliver all that it might promise to a hungry son, but we have been warned that what we want and what Dad wants is not the same thing – and I think more than that, that Dad is a seeker, too, and that he has not come to the end of his search.  I did think Dad was going to become a hero – by taking up the task of reporting on the wanton killing of black men he moved from passive victim to actively working to address the situation.  I was rooting for him.  But the resolution was less complete than that.  And, in the wake of the events this week in Charlottesville – where white supremacists gathered to promote racial hatred and were tacitly supported by a President who had not yet been elected when this book was written, anything like a resolution to the issues that are raised in this book would be way premature.  This book is about engaging us – Coates’s  son, his people, and all people – in an ongoing struggle.  There is hope here, but it is the hope that comes from Coates’s capacity – and ours in sympathy – to look at a situation and to appraise it honestly and directly, no matter how painful and uncomfortable that might be.  For me, because of that, this is a quintessentially psychoanalytic book.     

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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Thank You For Being Late

Thomas Friedman feels like an old friend at this point.  His voice is calm and rational and he talks about things that seem irreconcilable or impossible in measured tones of patient optimism.  His most recent book, subtitled An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations, was given to both me and my son by another optimist, my Aunt Julie – someone who has, at best, cautiously embraced technological change – the central theme of this book.  So she must have been taken both by the evidence that Friedman marshals that we have passed a critical moment in technological advances, and he does, indeed, make a compelling argument for the confluence of the technologies of the smart phone, Artificial Intelligence and the capacities of the cloud creating a new world order he characterizes as a supernova that we don’t yet appreciate, and that this wave is something that we should stay on top of especially if we, like my son, are about to enter the workforce.  If we don’t stay on top of it, the message is, we will be drowned by it (can you tell that I am returning from a vacation that included body surfing in big waves generated by a distant tropical storm?).

This book was published before Trump’s election and it was anticipating – or aware of – some of his early campaign rhetoric, but did not, I don’t think, take seriously the possibility that he might get elected, even though the British Exit from the European Union was cited as a current measure of our cultural zeitgeist.  Friedman is terribly concerned by the breakdown in the ability of Washington to work collaboratively, something that has, at least to this point in the summer of 2017, only been exacerbated by the Trump presidency.  Even more, the country is deeply divided, with Trump having historically low rates of approval at this point in his presidency – 40% of the electorate disapprove of him – but incredibly high rates of approval among registered Republicans – 85% of whom approve of him.  So the only way, I think, to get that 40% overall number is to realize that almost no one who is not a republican approves of Trump, but almost everyone who is, does.  Ouch.

My Aunt Julie is a political conservative – but a liberal human being who has travelled to over 100 countries.  She has done a lot of travelling in what Friedman calls “The World of Disorder”, the places where the rule of law does not exist.  She is, I think, an old school conservative – and Friedman lists the progressive accomplishments of a variety of republican leaders – though he neglects to include Nixon’s opening of trade with China – something that Aunt Julie used as an opportunity to become one of the first American tourists there in many, many years.  All that said, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Julie had voted for Trump – though I haven’t asked her.  But I think that Aunt Julie, in part by her having recommended this book to me, is not really the person that we need to worry about.  And we do need to worry about people.  You see, Friedman is proposing that, to move forward in this new world, we need to do that as a community – we need to have support from others to make transitions – we need to figure out how to harness the power of the hurricane while living in the relatively still center of it – a center that is always moving – but one that we can stay safely inside of when we have others who are working with us to track the progress of the storm.  To simply stick a stake in the ground and stay here – as Trump seems to be proposing with his Make America Great Again agenda – and the do nothing congress is doing with gridlock – would, in the long run, doom us to failure.

So who is it that we need to bring on board?  Who do we need to convince that what Friedman is saying makes sense?  And how do we go about doing that?  Friedman’s proposal is that we have leaders who do that.  Fortunately he is banking as much or more on local as national leaders; people who work to build communities wherever we are.  Friedman literally goes home to the town of St. Louis Park – a town that can be seen as a suburb of Minneapolis – St. Paul, but a town that Friedman takes pains to point out is a complete community – not a satellite.  This town was the first to welcome Jews who emigrated from the Minneapolis ghetto they had shared with African Americans until the 1950s.  The town today has held onto the embracing ethos that was in place then and more than 40 languages are spoken by its 47,000 residents.  At its heart is a strong school system that is well funded by local taxes and attracts superb teachers.  Also at its heart is a sense of trust – among and between city leaders who work together to solve problems – and between the leaders and the citizens, citizens who understand that the leaders have the best interests of the community in mind and, when those leaders mess up – as they did when they bought a Wi-Fi system paid for by the city that would provide free internet access for the town and it failed when the solar panels driving it didn’t melt the snow and ice covering them – the citizens forgive the council members and asked them what is the next thing that we are going to try because they get it that the council members were doing their best to do something that would make everyone’s life better.  Friedman acknowledges, however, that one thing that has buoyed this community is the relative stability of the local economy – one that has led to real economic growth of 2% per year for decades – and one that has meant that people’s children end up earning more than their parents did – a pillar of the American dream that has not occurred in the places chronicled in Hillbilly Elegy, a book that discusses rust belt cities in Ohio and holler towns in Kentucky.

Somewhere in between Friedman’s St. Louis Park and HillbillyElegy’s Middletown lie a lot of people.  These people are frequently smart and capable.  They may own small businesses or work for them.  The central metaphor of this book will, however, be lost on many of them because the central metaphor is that our society should mirror mother nature and evolve a la Darwin’s theory of evolution.  I hate to tell you this Tom, but a lot of people don’t buy evolution.  In fact, according to my history of psychology text, fewer people believe in the US today believe in evolution than did in the 1920s.  Ironically, as we become more enamored of technology and as it takes over more and more of our lives, we seem to have figured out how to separate it from the science that spawned it.

Evolution was a hard thing for me to wrap my head around.  When I read Darwin, much of his evidence for evolution had to do with relatively quick adaptations to the environment.  Moths that were white and were quickly eaten when the bark was black were suddenly dominant after white ash from industry covered the bark and the black moths were easily spotted prey.  Evolution as a whole has taken a whole lot longer and has involved many more parts than Darwin could have known about.  I learned at the natural history museum in Chicago last summer that that our atmosphere was generated by sea plants and animals – land animals couldn’t have existed until millions of years of oxygen had been collected in the areas around the earth – and the atmosphere fended off many of the deadliest of cosmic rays.  Or at least that is how I remember it.  In any case, it took me a long time to realize that a million years is a long time and that a lot of mistakes can be made in that time in the process of discovering a mutation that is helpful rather than harmful.

But some very smart people don’t buy that.  They have a much narrower view of history and, on top of that, they have some kind of belief system that generally includes the ways in which the world will end in the relatively near future – and some kind of grand cosmic scheme will be realized.  There is an almost surreal fascination with this.  But I am getting derailed.  The point is that Friedman thought he was preaching to the choir – he thought he was talking the rational majority of us, but at this moment it feels like the rational ones are in the minority.  I think if he were to rewrite the book today he would have to acknowledge that our “world of order” has many more powerful lines of disorder in it than he originally imagined.  And I think he would have spent more time talking about the importance of education – in both the world of order and the world of disorder.  We need a population that can think in order to stay ahead of this supernova.  We can’t just access facts on the web, we have to have a cogent approach to the world as a whole and to learn about how we use evidence to make decisions – not just intuition and folklore.

One of the striking moments in the documentary about building the biggest house in America, The Queen of Versailles, is when the mother of the title is worried about their losing their wealth and that the children may have to get an education because the wealth would have protected them from having to prepare for a vocation, which is what she experienced college and graduate school as being about.  Unfortunately the board and administrators of my liberal arts college agree with her and are trying to market us as a means to a financially secure future.  I don’t disagree that this is a byproduct of a college education, but my belief is antiquated one – one that is a holdover from when landed gentry were the only ones eligible to vote.  Education should provide an informed electorate.  If we are going to govern ourselves, we need to be prepared to think like governors – and we need to cooperatively utilize our strengths to build the best possible union. 

As a psychoanalyst and an educator, I am aware of multiple ironies at this point.  One is that education, like evolution, inevitably leads to change, so those who are entrenched in positions that don’t acknowledge the supernova and its impact are not going to support education.  At this point I can hear the reluctant wife quoting the former secretary of the Veteran’s Administration, Eric Shinseki, who stated that if you don’t like change, you will like irrelevancy even less.  The more immediate ironies are that teachers like me, who are change agents and tend to be supportive of personal and cultural change -  tend to work in institutions that are very conservative and slow to change.  Well, the supernova, I think, has us in its cross hairs.  We need to figure out how to use it to educate – though it is, in its current configuration, best at conveying facts, not at teaching how to think – and interact – like governors.  I am also aware of psychoanalysis as a discipline that emphasizes the functioning of the individual over the functioning of the group – not that we haven’t, since Freud, had a lot to say about the ways that groups function.  But I think we need to up our game on that front – and even more to track the ways in which the supernova is impacting the functioning of the individual.

Ironically in terms of the culture as a whole, which seems to be headed for a foxhole, and the corners of that culture that I am most identified with, this book clarifies that the supernova positions us to be able to cooperate on a scale that was unthinkable before.  We are within spitting distance of a worldwide community where we can figure out how to be virtually in touch with virtually everyone on the planet.  We can (and Friedman maintains will) build communities that address and solve problems and, he maintains, our diversity as a species – the range of abilities that we have and that can be harnessed, will continue to allow us to adapt to the changing environments in ways that allow us reap the rewards of the problem solving that we accomplish.  Implicit in his thinking may be that, despite our potential for huge communities, it is smaller ones - ones in which we actually know the others in the group - even if they live half way around the world - that may best fuel the kinds of changes that we need to adapt to survive as a species.  In a week when our president seems to be urging North Korea, the most disordered part of the disordered world, to wreak havoc on the world of order – and is encouraging us to be barbaric towards them, I am ready to bet on small rather than large communities.  I am also hoping that Friedman’s (and Aunt Julie’s) optimism is well placed.

Post Script: This post led to a correspondence with Aunt Julie in which she clarified that she did not vote for Trump - she is a fiscal, but not a social conservative.  We have not finished the conversation about our values and how they mesh and contrast, and probably never will; one of the joys and frustrations of being human.

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

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The Inkblots Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and the Power of Seeing

Damion Searls’ new biography of Hermann Rorschach is excellent.  His description of the test and how Rorschach crafted it is both intriguing and, from the perspective of a clinician and teacher like me, both spot on and helps me experience the test in a new way.  After talking about Rorschach himself, Searls talks about the development of the test and the place that it has played in our collective psyche – but also how it has been in favor and fallen out of favor - all the while being a useful clinical instrument.

I am reading this book on vacation and, about a third of the way through the book, I took the reluctant family with me to visit two people who have been very dear to me – and one of whom was a mentor when I was a trainee at the Menninger clinic which, at the time, was a very psychoanalytic place.  My mentor, Fred Shectman, the former director of outpatient assessment, was curious about the book and asked if it had been written by a clinician.  I noted that the author was not a clinician – but, at least to that point in the book, I didn’t think that was relevant.  Searls seemed to be doing a very good job describing both Rorschach and his test.  This book is well written and would be a good read for the neophyte – but I would caution that neophyte that Searls makes the same mistake he accuses the users of the test (rightfully) of making (and that I think Fred intuited) – he does not remain balanced.  After the biographical section, when he is describing how the test develops after Rorschach’s premature death, Searls chooses psychoanalysis as the bad guy in this drama, even though he also praises the insights derived from it.  I think Fred anticipated something – not for the first time in my experience.  It takes a clinician to understand the complexity of the test and its application – the opportunities and the perils associated with it.  But I have gotten ahead of myself.

Searls contextualizes Rorschach in a way that I have not previously been able to do.  Biographical details have been sketchy.  I knew that he died early – shortly after publishing his test – so he was not able to direct its development and use.  I knew that he died of appendicitis, but did not know that his wife, a Russian physician, minimized the symptoms and despite his being doubled over in pain, did not call for help until it was too late.  She, apparently, was a piece of work and, when Rorschach’s sister’s appendix burst at his funeral, she accused the sister of trying to upstage her brother’s death.  In fact, Rorschach’s relationship with his wife was tempestuous and difficult.  More importantly, though, I did not know that Rorschach was taken with the Russian people as a whole, and with their art in particular, nor did I know that he was a very early feminist and, as a student of Bleuler – about whom I learned a great deal and came to admire in this book  – and Jung, he was exposed to the best psychiatric teaching of his day.  I did know that he was an artist and that the inkblots were not inkblots, but works of art – something that we did not know until about twenty years ago or so because he stated in his book, which took forever to publish, that they were blots and by the time it made sense to articulate what they really were, he was dead.

What Searls is able to clarify is that the blots are skillfully crafted.  He does not state that Rorschach originally wanted to use 16 blots and because of the expense of printing so many, they were cut to ten.  Whether that is true or not, the ten blots are carefully constructed and arranged.  The first blot is in black and white and like all of the blots, has more structure – meaning more shape to it – than the blot that Rorschach modelled it after – and originally used, but found lacking.  It has more structure – it looks like something – but more precisely it looks like many things – and nothing in particular.

The second card also looks like something – actually many things – but it, unlike the first card, is not just black and white, but has some red in it, too.  Searls does a nice job of describing the roles of black and white and red in our color vocabulary – and pointing out that, after black and white, red is the next color to enter our vocabularies.  He does this using anthropological data, but I am struck by the developmental aspects of the Rorschach.  You see, Rorschach, the son of an artist and an accomplished artist himself, was working both intuitively and interpretively.  He was developing a test of perception without a theory of perception – or at least not a stated one.  But he did some things that indicated that he had a latent theory.

All of the blots, in their basic structure, include depictions of movement – people are bowing – birds are flying.  This was an important aspect of our perceptual worlds that Rorschach wanted to evaluate – how much motion does each of us see?  But he also wanted to evaluate how much color we used in reporting what we see – he intuited and then demonstrated that if we focused more on movement we were more likely to be what he called introversive in our style – Searls pointed out that he wanted to have an adjectival use of the word rather than using Jung’s noun – to describe people’s functioning rather than to categorize them.  Similarly, if we were weighted towards producing more responses based on the colored aspects of the blots we would be seen as being extratensive in our style.  To capture this difference, the blots need to be balanced in what they pull for – he could, as an introversive himself, have crafted even more movement into the blots and neglected color.  But he was seeking balance.

Now, why does color equal emotional processing – a critical component of the extratensive style, while movement is related to thoughtful, but also less social means of functioning?  The rather lame position that I have taken traditionally is that the essential task is a cognitive one – the examiner asks, “What might this be?” and the appropriate response is one that is based on formal qualities of the blot (including noticing tension states that get perceived as motion).  From this perspective, color is a distraction - and emotions can be a distraction from various tasks that require pure cognition.  But color can bring a painting to life, and emotions can lead us to creative solutions, especially to interpersonal problems.  Searls' description of the artistic zeitgeist that Rorschach was working in supports a more theory based understanding – though I draw this theory from a psychoanalytic clinician and researcher, Daniel Stern.  The idea that Searls all but articulates is that we are built (Stern provides evidence of this in newborns) to translate experiences across our sensory modes.  This cross modal integration, essential to our functioning, allows us to depict feelings with – of all things – colors, though also with verbalizations and with kinesthetic experiences.  The appreciation of the tension state in an object requires a certain kind of projection that Searls points out Rorschach called, in the tradition of the philosopher Robert Vischer Einfűhlung literally feeling-in, which was translated with a new word in English, empathy.

Another possible connection between theory and the blots that Rorschach created has to do with symmetry.  Rorschach was insistent that the symmetry in the blots be vertical – so that the left side is the same as the right side of the blot, not horizontal or diagonal.  He also insisted that the symmetry be present (other inkblotters have experimented with asymmetrical blots, but without much success).   Stern noted that developmentalists have long seen a preference on the part of newborns for vertically symmetrical arrangements of material.  Stern posits that this is due to our being “programmed” to gaze at our mother’s face while nursing and to begin to “read” that face.  We are built to appreciate faces and face-like works of art – they tap into something that is deeply part of our essentially social selves.  This was not something that Rorschach could consciously articulate – but it was something that he intuited – that a vertical symmetry – and a symmetrical blot – would elicit more useful responses for interpreting things about the person looking at it.

Another thing that Rorschach did that Searls did not call so much attention to is that he intentionally mislead the person he was evaluating; he put colors on things that didn’t belong with them and appendages that shouldn’t have been there (pink bears and men with breasts and penises).  He was working to develop a test that would identify those of us who were struggling with minds that were not working well.  He was trying to find what would tell us about the misfunctioning that we were experiencing.  I think that, while we are born prepared to cross modally integrate, we also learn how and when to over-ride that.  Part of what we see on the Rorschachs of those who are most disturbed among us is more “primitive” functioning – part of what we lose when we lose executive function is that we lose abilities to override “instinctive” functioning – and the Rorschach reveals the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) ways that we are vulnerable to this. 

To go back to that first card: most people see a bat.  I, like Rorschach, don’t really see it, but most people do.  Then a funny thing happens; the next most frequently seen thing is seen about a third as often, and the next most frequently, about a third as often as the second and so one – until we get to individual things – and there are a great many of those things.  This is something like the English language and many other naturally occurring things, where “the” is the most common word and it is three times more frequently used than “to” and so on until we get to a whole bunch of words, like catecholamine, that are infrequently used.   Rorschach intuited an instrument that functions in this organic way – it allows for both assessing how someone is like others – do they see the bat? – and how they are themselves – isn’t it interesting that they see something I have never heard of before but that can be seen in the blot – isn’t it telling something important about this individual?

After telling Rorschach’s personal history, Searls then tells about how the Rorschach has been used – and misused – and how it became all the rage and has recently fallen out of favor.  The arc of this story is partially familiar and I have lived some of it.  What was novel and intriguing was Searls descriptions of ways that it was used in high profile evaluations – like of the war criminals at the Nuremberg trials.  This is a fascinating read – and the conflict between the two evaluators is well told and leads to painting with a very broad brush the war between the academics and the practitioners about the use of the Rorschach in the 1990s.  But Searls paints this as a war between the empiricists and the psychoanalytic interpreters – as if the interpreters didn’t give a damn about the empirical basis of the test and just practiced wild interpretation. 

Searls holds up Steven Finn’s work on Collaborative Assessment as a hallmark of how to rectify and bring together the two factions.  I greatly admire Finn’s work and I am a big fan of what he has done.  But I learned collaborative evaluation long before Finn started writing.  Collaborative assessment was practiced at Menninger in the context of giving psychoanalytically informed, empirically supported test evaluations.  Searls obliquely referenced Rappaport and Schafer, painting them with the brush of being tainted psychoanalytic thinkers – and this really rubbed me the wrong way.  I think that the best clinicians have always tried to collaboratively work with their patients.  There are many clinicians of every brand name who have failed to do this.  They are likely to tell their patients what is wrong with them rather than ask them.  If they are psychoanalytically oriented, they are likely to provide an explanation of an unconscious mechanism that is mysterious and never supported as a means towards exercising power over a situation rather than helping the patient increase their own power in that situation.  This is the fault of the psychoanalyst, not of psychoanalysis, just as when a cognitive behaviorist does a similar thing by explaining the power of the situation without empowering the person to affect it – it is not the fault of cognitive behaviorism that the person feels disempowered but of the practitioner.

Searls seems to understand the dilemmas faced by practitioners who are forced by the legal system to answer yes or no questions with an instrument that provides adjectives and ranges – not with categorical definitions.  Should a person who tends to freak out under less pressure than most be entrusted with the care of a child who puts pressure on a caregiver?  Should the caregiver, if it is the child’s parent, have custody of the child denied because of this?  That is a judgment call – and one that should use lots of information – including from the Rorschach – but neither the Rorschach nor any other instrument should make that decision – indeed, I don’t think that is a clinical decision, but one that a judge should make.

Ironically, Searls gets that the efforts, first of Exner – which were helpful in important ways and misguided in ways that Searls articulates – and more recently the R-PAS system which supersedes Exner’s Comprehensive system for coding and interpreting the Rorschach, to improve the instrument has led to narrowing it – making it more reliable – we are less likely to make an egregious error – but has also limited its ability to articulate what is unique and delightful about this particular person.  The irony is that our ability to articulate the unique aspects of a person, to put forth hypotheses about that, requires a theory of human functioning – and the psychodynamic theory of human functioning is the broadest and best articulated one that we have.  Tony Brams and Mary Jo Peebles’ book, Psychological Testing that Matters puts the Menninger system of testing, which includes psychoanalytic interpretation of the Rorschach, alongside using the Comprehensive and R-PAS systems, as a means for clinicians to use psychoanalytic thinking in ways that are responsible and useful.

I have taken Searls to task about his dismissal of psychoanalytic thinking as a viable way to understand humans.  I obviously strongly disagree with him, reluctant as I may be about my own psychoanalytic identity.  Part of my reluctance is the realization that I have an unconscious – something that foils me at least as often as it helps – or at least I am aware of the ways that it interferes with my functioning on a relatively regular basis.  I don’t think that Searls criticism of the psychoanalytic perspective is going to make mine or anyone else’s unconscious go away, so I’m not worried about the long term well-being of the psychoanalytic perspective.  It is frustrating, however, that a person as sensitive as Searls is to the human condition – and as aware as he is of how the particular person should be connected with and enjoyed – doesn’t realize that a psychoanalytic approach is the best means of opening that up.

The Rorschach itself provides an excellent example of this.  The best measure of dependency on the Rorschach turns out to be a highly psychoanalytic theory based code called the Oral Dependency code.  To use this code, every time a person taking the test mentions something that is orally related, like eating or cigarettes, you need to note it.  This makes some minimal sense to the members of the Rorschach group that do the stats, but the thing they find most frustrating is that the code is less predictive of dependency when you eliminate the really obscure and tangentially orally related items - such as silverware being included in what is seen.  It turns out that a purely content based code is a very good predictor of central personality feature.

Another layer of my frustration is that my own program has recently changed the requirements of our incoming students so that they don't have to take the Rorschach class.  I am, in the referenced posting, upset about this, particularly because one of the stated reasons for that is that psychoanalytic approaches to people and other means of getting to know them deeply were not seen as something that it is important to teach our students.  Searls would, I am sure, be my ally - though he would fight as a humanist - in the importance of connecting with individual people.  I don't think that he gets that psychoanalysis, at least as I understand it, is a humanistic enterprise.  

In a conversation with another friend on this trip I was pointed in a very different direction.  He remembered a conversation with Gabriel Marcia Marquez about his fiftieth anniversary.  When asked what the secret to a long marriage was, Marquez, in my friend’s memory responded that the secret was to realize each day that you are married to someone that you know less about than you knew the day before.  We are infinitely complex, and when we get boxed in, whether by a diagnostic label or by the prejudices that are learned from secondary sources – as I think Searls has been – something truly remarkable is lost.  Don’t let his prejudice get in the way of reading this fascinating book.  You will learn more about philosophy, psychology, the currents of the twentieth century and how they flowed together than you will think possible.  Just don’t take Searls moment of imbalance as an indication of the value of the entire work.

I have previously posted on teaching the Rorschach here.  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...