The Madness of King George - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Observes Executive Function

I watched this film when it was released in theaters in 1994 and what I remember of it is that one of the friends that I watched it with, the chief psychiatry resident at the hospital where I worked, was able to remember that the obscure skin disease diagnosis that the film offers, porphyria, for King George’s madness was something that he somehow managed to remember from medical school based on its key identifying symptom – porphyria turns the patient’s urine blue – a symptom that King George manifested.  Now, many decades later, when the reluctant wife suggested that we watch it, I was intrigued, hoping that it would provide information about how King George’s madness was tied to our own revolution from the king, something that I had new interest in partly based on the musical Hamilton. 

Well, as a potentially historical film, this was a disappointment.  The events chronicled were at best loosely tied to historical moments.  This is a psychological study of a man – a character – who is perhaps the first of the kings whose job was less to govern than to reign – to serve as a figurehead who has a constitutional role, but a limited one.  This would become an art by the time Elizabeth II would ascend the throne.  But George (played by Nigel Hawthorne) was, unwittingly at times, creating the role of a non-interventionist but essential component of the governing structure of England – and his madness was a component of that.  The emphasis of the title clarifies that this is primarily a film about madness and only secondarily about History.

Madness is an interesting thing.  We are, and this is well portrayed in the film, not able to regulate ourselves when we are mad.  Antonio Damasio, in The Strange Order of Things, proposes that evolution has selected us to be able to regulate ourselves homeostatically.  From this perspective, our emotions are intended to give us information about internal and/or external states being out of whack.  When we are no longer able to use our feelings to exert the kind of controls that we would ordinarily assert – when, instead, those feelings propel us into being unbalanced, we are mad.  Thus, in this film, the king of England is suddenly taking his attendants – in their sleeping garments – for romps in meadows and, once assembled there, this deeply monogamous king is assaulting his wife’s lady in waiting openly trying to have sex with her with multiple onlookers present and in the light of day.

But madness, as portrayed by the author of the play the film is based on (Alan Bennett), does not divorce us from our essence.  As the king is returning to his senses his aid says, “Your Majesty seems more yourself.” And he responds, “Do I? Yes, I do. I've always been myself, even when I was ill. Only now I seem myself. And that's the important thing. I have remembered how to seem.”  This seeming – this appearing – is an important part of our “healthy” functioning.  We “appear” to be civilized – and in control – when actually there are all kinds of primitive and powerful thoughts and emotions roiling just under the surface of that seeming control.  When we are kings – or, in the current day and age, empowered in whatever way we may be, we may allow (or fail to control) our bestial selves – our uncontrolled and chaotic selves – to reign, imposing chaos on the world around us.

The remarkable thing about being king, then, is that we do exert control – that we function in the role of king on behalf of those we govern – that we don’t exert our will in selfish and immature ways but in ways that are in the better interests of those we are governing.  The subjects of a monarchy don’t choose who will govern them – the governors are born not elected.  So the Prince of Wales (also named George, played by Rupert Everett), the man next in line to be king, chooses to step in – he attempts to assert himself as regent – to take over for the unbalanced king.  He has a coterie of supporters who would emulate the United States and move further away from the rule of a king and move towards having those who are elected have greater power.  King George and his henchmen buy off the current representatives with titles and favors, ensuring their ability to exert monarchical rule in a nominal democracy.  Presumably his supporters see the younger George as more sympathetic to their cause – though they don’t seem to see that he has self-interest very much in mind and might become even more despotic than his father.

The prince states that “to be Prince of Wales is not a position - it is a predicament.”  Like the party that is not in power in our two party system – and like the Vice President – who is essentially a president in waiting without any true power in most administrations, the prince is simply waiting for the death of the king.  But this prince is not just making a comment on the position, but on his relationship with his father and his father’s consistent efforts to foil his activity – as if his father fears that his foppish and un-self-governed son would act madly if given the opportunity.  So it is with some trepidation that we see the son feeling that he must step in to restrain his father when his father is running amok – this becomes a family matter rather than a matter of government, he maintains.   The question that he raises is a very current one – both for those who are mentally disordered and for those who are governing in ways that others see as unbridled- is the man fit for office and if he is not, should he be removed?

OK, spoiler alert, in the film, King George, due to the cyclic nature of his disorder, returns, as referenced above, to “seeming” himself – and when he does this, there is no grounds for installing his son as regent.  Historically, this occurred a number of times, suggesting to me that the hypothesis that George suffered from Bipolar disorder in addition to or instead of porphyria.  Some have surmised that his blue urine may have been caused by some of the herbs that he was treated with rather than being a symptom.

In addition to the threat to his monarchy that comes from his son, King George has to confront Francis Willis (Ian Holm), who is called in to treat his madness.  This man, a former clergyman who knows nothing of Shakespeare or, apparently, the soul, runs a farm where the mad are treated.  He knows how to use punishment – strapping the King into a chair when he won’t control himself – as a temporary means of reinstating the King's ability to exert some authority over himself.  Dr. Willis states, “If the King refuses food, He will be restrained. If He claims to have no appetite, He will be restrained. If He swears and indulges in MEANINGLESS DISCOURSE... He will be restrained. If He throws off his bed-clothes, tears away His bandages, scratches at His sores, and if He does not strive EVERY day and ALWAYS towards His OWN RECOVERY... then He must be restrained.”  To which, George responds, “I am the King of England.” And Willis rebuts, “NO, sir. You are the PATIENT.”  Eli Zaretsky, a historian of psychology, cites Willis and his treatment of George as an example of the enlightenment approach to treatment - based in Lockean principles of associationism, it is an attempt to appeal to the little rational part of the mind that is still present.

While Willis' approach affords some nominal level of control, it is the King’s wife, Queen Charlotte (Helen Mirren) who, despite being kept from him by Dr. Willis during the latter stages of his madness, maintains a sense of who the King is – not just what he seems but who she essentially knows him to be – someone whom she loves – despite his flaws – and someone she supports.  And when he is returned to “health” and is confronting his son, it is she who is able to guide the King through the homeostatic process of forgiveness and working from a position of love – helping to guide emotions that are now more clearly shakily in the King’s control – the way that all of us exert rather shaky control over our feelings when we are functioning at our best.

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In MY Lane: Gun Control, the NRA, and a Personal Psychoanalytic Response

The psychoanalysts depicted in New Yorker cartoons have almost certainly never shot a gun, and you may be wondering where it is that I, as a psychoanalyst, have the wherewithal to weigh in on something that is so completely out of my purview.  The NRA, in fact, has determined that ALL health and mental health professionals should not weigh in on gun control – they tweeted on November 7^th (My father’s birthday) that "Someone should tell self-important anti-gun doctors to stay in their lane".  

So, first of all, let me state that I live in a flyover, red voting state – and that my family on both sides has hailed from the Midwest for generations (and has generally been dead red in their voting habits).  My Mother and Father went bird hunting together when they were dating – a sport each had learned and practiced with their parents.  Even when we lived in Florida for a time when I was growing up, I hunted ducks and mourning doves (yes, we hunted mourning doves – and ate them, too) in Lake Okeechobee and rice fields respectively.  I am the proud holder of what I think used to be called a Riflery merit badge (it is now called a Rifle Shooting  merit badge – if you scroll to the end of the linked BSA site, you will see an NRA banner) and learned to shoot a revolver as part of earning that badge.  I am also proud to say that I winged a bird – an actual bird called a snipe, not the fake kind you chase after on Boy Scout camping trips – the first time that I shot a shotgun, but more about that later.

The “stay in your lane” comment is one that the NRA made in response to a physician writing with concern about gun violence.  Within the psychology/psychoanalysis field there have been a number of professionally based responses.  Jane Tillman has written about this issue as a citizen and a suicide researcher and Todd Essig has charted in a Forbes magazine blog the ways in which the NRA and the politicians that they have supported have undermined our ability to use data to argue for gun control by preventing federal monies from supporting research on the relationship between guns and violence or suicide.  This post is more personal – coming from someone who has a long relationship with guns – including both the good and the very bad ways that they can affect a family (more about that later), but beyond that I would like to use my psychoanalytic mind to attempt to better understand some of our apparent irrationality about exploring the limits of our second amendment rights.  There are of course many reasons for the attitude that “we will only let them pry our guns out of our cold dead fingers” exists – I will not talk about all of them, but most of them are far from irrational.  But I do think that some of them– such things as profits that gun manufacturers make, while significant, are likely less important than what I am about to discuss.

My grandfather killed himself with a shotgun.  He did this shortly before my parents were to have married – they had to postpone their wedding in order to have the funeral.  There was some question about whether his death was a suicide.  He shot himself in the shoulder – he was dressed in formal wear (a tux, I think) in preparation for a celebratory dinner of some sort.  My father’s younger brother, my uncle Peter, found him and called for an ambulance.  There was an inquest because his life insurance policy would pay double the face value if it was an accidental death and nothing if it was a suicide.  Ultimately the insurance company split the difference and paid the face value of the insurance, but the record of the inquest remained and I was able to read it as an adult after my clinical training.

At this point, you might think that I would make a plea to prevent the sales of all guns so that catastrophes like the one that ended my grandfather’s life would never happen.  My intent here is different, though.  I would like to clarify two things – first that events like suicide and murder, have impacts across generations.  And second, to clarify, but this will take some time, what I think are some of the motives that lead gun advocates to be so rabid about avoiding what appear to be common sense limits to weapons proliferation – something that is relevant to my grandfather’s death – but likely not in the way you are thinking at this moment.

My father denied – in the court documents and throughout most of his life – that his father committed suicide.  He maintained that his father’s death was an accidental death - period.  And he did this quite vehemently.  Reading the court documents made it quite clear that, while the triggering of the weapon at the moment that it was triggered may not have been the moment that my grandfather intended to kill himself, he was quite likely intent on killing himself.  He may, for instance, have tripped on the way to killing himself or to storing the weapon for later use in killing himself, as my uncle Peter has surmised. 

My grandfather was the owner and proprietor of the family business – a department store that his father – my great grandfather – had started.  This business had survived the depression and was now, in the 1950s, a going concern that supported my grandfather and his family.  My father was employed at the store.  But a fire at the store about a month before my grandfather’s death had created a crisis for its continued viability.  For three weeks after the fire, my grandfather had been inconsolable – he blamed himself for the fire – fearing that he had not closed the grate on the furnace before going home on the night when the fire occurred.  For the last week of his life, he had returned to being himself and his mood seemed buoyant again. 

Reading the above account from the court documents as a clinician, I was struck by how frequently a positive change in mood occurs when people who are depressed have made a plan to kill themselves – they see a way out of their predicament and their mood lifts.  I became convinced that my grandfather had killed himself. I guessed that my grandfather felt something like, “I have gone from being the breadwinner for my family to having endangered them.  They would be better off if I weren’t here.” 

I am aware of having gone into more detail than I needed to in the story of my grandfather’s death.  I think I did this in part to give you context, but also because I needed to convince you that his death was somehow justified – or understandable.  I think that, though I never knew him, I am protective of him and that I want to prevent your negative judgment of him – and I think that betrays that I have judged him – I think I feel ashamed of having a grandfather who killed himself.  And if that is the case, I believe that it is even more the case that my father’s denial of his father’s suicide was, in large part, a way to avoid feeling the tremendous shame that I feel to a much smaller degree. 

I knew very little about my grandfather from my father.  He almost never spoke about him.  One little thing that I knew about him from Dad was that he wrote Dad a letter every week that Dad was in college.  I knew this in part because my father felt badly that he had not done the same with me.  But it was only when Dad was digging around trying to find evidence that he had been in the army because the records of his service had been lost in a St. Louis fire that I read the letters his father had written.  My father had letters that were written not only to him, but also to his mother and to another family member – in one case three letters from the same week.   Each of the letters was very warm and focused, despite being written in the same week, on very different events that had occurred in town.  Each letter was tailored to the interests of the reader – and my grandfather clearly had that reader in mind – weaving their interests into the stories that he told.  But it was not just that grandfather used content that was of interest to the reader, but he also clearly and warmly expressed his affection for the reader – talking about shared experiences and the way the reader had brought him joy at some point in his life.

It was very odd to discover that my grandfather – a person that I knew so little about other than the fact of his death – was such a warm and caring person.  I should have known that from the way that my family operated.  Despite his three sons having moved to very different parts of the country, we all regularly got together at Thanksgiving at one or the other brother’s homes.  Grandmother was always there as well as most all of the first cousins.  We generally had between 18 and 22 for dinner and the annual football game.  All was not peaches and roses – there were regular dust ups and a fair amount of bullying – especially at the football game – but there was also a lot of warmth.  And there was a contrast between the warmth of the family and the feelings between my father and his children.

My father, after he left the family business, became a travelling salesman, using the electronics skills he had learned in the military to sell electrical systems to engineers who were largely working to improve the functioning of automated factories.  This meant that he was generally on the road for two to three and sometimes four nights a week.  He was largely physically absent.  But he was also psychologically absent.  He had a hard time connecting with his children about their day to day lives – whether that was our sporting events or our homework and school achievements or our social lives.  At home he would frequently spend the weekends immersed in tasks that involved fixing things and our helping him frequently involved holding a flashlight so he could see his work better, but rarely involved interacting in a more give and take manner.

Now, we could just chalk his emotional distance up to his being a typically emotionally remote man of the mid twentieth century except that he could be remarkably interested in others and quite compassionate in his engagement with them.  This included both friends that he made through work and through his engagement at church, but also with our cousins.  At a recent family reunion, the spouse of one of my cousins talked about the importance of the letters that her husband frequently received from my father while my cousin was in college as helping to sustain him through difficult and lonely times, something I did not previously know about.  Additionally, there were things that my father could teach us – and teach us well and warmly.  One of these was skiing.  He was a good and patient teacher and truly enjoyed being with us and talking with us when we were riding up ski lifts together.  And I think it important that this activity was one that he learned on his own – this was not a family activity for him growing up.  It was also the case that, as the result of consistent efforts on my part, he and I became, as adults, quite close and were able to establish the kind of relationship that I had longed for as a child.

My hypothesis about the primary reason for my father’s physical and emotional distance when he was more actively parenting (or not parenting) my siblings and me is that this would have involved remembering his father and the interactions that he had with him as a son – and that this was too painful for him because he was, on some very deep level, profoundly ashamed of his action and, I think, he felt betrayed by his father’s choice to leave him through suicide. 

I have some support for my hypothesis.  As a result of my conversations with him, my father ultimately acknowledged that he had always believed that his father had committed suicide.  Unfortunately my father died before I talked through with him his reasons for denying his father’s death to be a suicide for as long as he did.  I tried out my hypothesis on my Uncle Peter recently, and he felt that it had some merit.  Even if it is “true”, there were certainly other factors that accounted for his emotional distance – I’m sure Freud would want us to work on the Oedipal elements, and personality theorists would talk about his being primarily introverted (though functioning, as a travelling salesman, as an extrovert).   I’m sure these and many other factors played into our relationship.  But I think his father’s suicide was a very important factor and one that was largely hidden from my – and likely from his – view.

So the point of this lengthy tale is that suicide has an impact to the third generation.  Indeed, I’m sure it is a factor in the relationship between my son and me.  And this in the context of a family that apparently recovered well from it.  The land the store was on was owned by the family and through a series of real estate deals, it became a consistent source of income for my grandmother who was able to live independently (and visit us regularly wherever we were in the US, and sometimes abroad) for the rest of her life.  For many families a suicide can have much greater and easier to track deleterious economic effects and these do not take the kind of psychoanalytic sleuthing I have engaged in to discover subtle impacts across time.  Neither suicide nor murder is good for the families in which they occur. 

So, to reiterate, this story is not that this suicide could have been prevented.  Suicides are as variable as the people who engage in them, and I think, for reasons I will spell out shortly, that my grandfather likely would have figured out how to kill himself without having access to guns.  But for many people, easy access to a means to kill oneself can be demonstrated by how suicide rates plummet when those easy means are not accessible – as a New York Times Sunday Magazine article articulated ten years ago.  All that said, I can’t help but wonder if my grandfather would not have taken his life if he did not have such an easy means to do it with.  But the point of the story is that suicide (and murder) are complex physical and psychological events that we should work to prevent with whatever means we have available to us.

Have you ever held a loaded weapon in your hand?  There is an awesome feeling of power that goes along with it.  There is also an awesome feeling – or should be – of responsibility.  This is related, in no small measure to fear – fear of what could go wrong if this thing fired unintentionally or hit and unintended target.  There is no going back from the impact of the bullet. 

If you have ever been trained in using a weapon – as I have – the first and most important part of the training is gun safety.  Recently I was talking with two men who first held guns in their hands in the military.  Both talked about how the rigidity of basic training became ramped up when gun training began.  Those in charge of the range laid down the law about when and where a weapon could be pointed.  In my own training the first and foremost rule was never ever point a weapon at another human being.  After that, there were many rules about keeping weapons unloaded except when prepared to fire them, etc.  As I later learned about the treatment of suicidal patients, the first three rules were safety, safety, safety and then, after that, other things could be introduced.

Weapons are very powerful tools.  Remember the snipe I injured the first time I shot a shotgun?  I found it on the ground flapping its one good wing and running in circles as its other wing dragged, broken, on the ground.  I felt terrible and wanted to put it out of its misery as quickly as possible.  I loaded my shotgun and shot it from point blank range, shooting its head clean off its body.  I was quickly told that this is not the way to humanely end the life of an injured bird – it is a waste of ammunition and can make the bird inedible as it is destroyed rather than killed.  The proper means to kill a wounded bird is to pick it up and beat its head against the butt of the gun until it is dead.

If you are not a hunter, that last line may have come as a bit of a shock to you.  It may feel brutal and inhumane.  In fact, it is very quick and effective and becomes common place when hunting.  It is also something that is a common part of consuming meat of any kind – most domestic animals killed for consumption are killed with blows to the head.  We, in picking up already butchered meat at the grocery store, are protected from the course of events that has led to our being able to eat another animal.  But hunters are not.  They are engaged in the control of the life and death of other animals on a regular basis. 

How individuals respond to this – the ways that they differ from each other and the different ways that each of them responds to it – is something that is worth studying – and here I am asking you to consider the manifold responses in a psychological thought experiment as an important aspect of the psychology of our attachment to firearms.  There is a feeling of power, as I mentioned earlier, and control that is certainly part of the process of hunting (and I assume, though I have never served in the military, that this is true of being trained to use weapons to kill humans and actually using them to do that).  There is also a level of comfort with our basic biologic being and with – as we prosaically call it – the circle of life.  We live until we die.  And death is a part of our lived experience when we hunt in a way that it is not when the dead are only occasionally confronted on our grocery shelves and in funerals.

When Essig, in the blog cited above, wonders about the irrational position of the NRA that the answer to gun problems is more guns, I think it may help to understand the psychology behind the NRA’s huge funding, the tenacity and shrewdness of their lobbying, and the appeal of their message to a broad swath of the American people.  As Antonio Damasio has recently pointed out in The Strange Order of Things (following and updating Freud’s insightful but flawed analysis in Civilization and Its Discontents), we have only been “civilized” for the past 10-15,000 years.  We have millions of years of evolution that selected us before that – and Damasio maintains that evolution consistently favored those of us (he starts with bacteria) that could band together against a common enemy over those who did not.  We formed clans or family groups long before we began to build cities, much less states and countries.  The sense that we will prevail by banding together in order to have greater strength against a foe is deeply coded in our DNA. 

My position is not that there is a simple solution to the impasse about how to properly manage the second amendment, but that our search for something workable may be more fruitful when we acknowledge the roots of apparently irrational positions like some of those of the NRA.  The second amendment was put in place to protect our ability to protect ourselves against an imperial and corrupt power that would control us from without – as England controlled the colonies.  As we self-styled educated folks band together to attempt to eradicate a force that threatens us (the NRA and unregulated guns) and we use the power of the pen (and word processor) to fight that dangerous and corrupt force, it might help us to realize that we are functioning, in that banding together, just as they are and that we may be driven by the same primordial forces that have kept us “safe” for time immemorial.  If we can view the NRA and its adherents as people who are driven as we are to protect ourselves, and if we see them as being as committed to safety as we are, we might be able to find some common ground – some way to assure us all that we are all better off with limited but powerful safeguards – the kinds of safeguards that are woven into all sanctioned forms of weaponry training.  We – both the NRA and those of us who do not believe that unlimited proliferation of weapons will protect us – want to live in a world that is safe.

My grandfather came, I believe, to see himself as being a source of danger to his family rather than being a force for good.  I feel great sorrow that he felt that to be the case – or something like it, I cannot know what he was actually thinking.  I think that when we are able to see each other as allies rather than enemies – when we are able to envision the world as an organic whole that it is ours to preserve and protect (and I know of no greater advocates for the environment than most hunters), we, together, can figure out how to better protect ourselves.  If we can delay the action of suicide, we can work to help change the perspective of those who believe that it is a rational action.  Over time, the formerly suicidal person can come to realize the value of their contributions and can become generative – and support that generativity in their offspring.  We can help them move from a position of feeling isolated and alone to a position of feeling connected - the best way to prevent suicide - and war.  I’m not sure that the kind of help that my grandfather needed to make this transition was available to him – not just because his small town likely did not have a psych ward, but because he likely did not feel that he could confide the things that he was feeling in others.  I think he, himself, likely felt both shame, but also reassurance at the course of action that he mapped out - he had, on his own - worked out a solution.  If we fail to connect with each other, to see each other as allies against what is truly threatening us, we sow seeds of poison that can take generations to purify. 

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...     

       

March – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Pictures John Lewis Remembering the Civil Rights Movement

John Lewis’ three part graphic novel March recalls in vivid, one might even say graphic detail, his experience of the Civil Rights Movement.  He joined a movement that had been gaining momentum and that already had towering leaders, and he emulated these leaders and interacted with them as he, in turn, led the younger contingent.  He led students and others in restaurant sit-ins and on the streets of the south to confront racism using non-violent techniques.

When I teach the History of Psychology, students have, at best, a sketchy knowledge of the civil rights movement.  We generally focus on the Brown vs. Board of Education case that went before the Supreme Court and that struck down Plessy vs. Ferguson where the court had ruled that separate railway cars for African Americans and for European Americans were fine as long as they were equal (which they almost certainly were not).  We do this because two psychologists, Mamie and Kenneth Clark played a key role in that trial – their data from the doll study – a study where they used colored dolls (their term) and white dolls to show that segregation had harmed African American Children by leading them to have internalized racism – to hate themselves because they were of African American decent.

Actually the last sentence in the last paragraph is wrong.  It is the historical way that the story is told, but when you read their data, the internalized racism, present both in the southern children in segregated schools and the northern children in integrated schools, was worse in the children in Northern Integrated Schools.  The paper does not make much of this – both groups clearly have internalized racism – but it does portend what may have actually happened – integration of the schools actually increased racism and the detrimental effects of it on blacks.

The class references this study because it is the first time that data from a social science experiment was cited in a Supreme Court decision.  And we note that it was two African American psychologists who were able to set this precedent at a time when psychology was struggling to be recognized as a viable and respectable science.  Mamie and Kenneth Clark – African Americans who experienced open racism from their doctoral supervisors - are the only two psychologists that I know of that changed not just the course of psychology but directly changed the course of history – contributing the deciding data that led to what many have cited as the most important decision of the Supreme Court in the 20^th century.  Pretty cool that this was done by minority persons – and minorities in the field.  Kenneth was the seventh African American to achieve a doctoral degree.  Mamie didn’t come much later.  And they did things no other psychologist has done.

John Lewis, whose graphic novel charts the work that he did to both call into question the failure of businesses to heed the court's call to end segregation and to work on establishing the right to vote for African Americans, picked up where the Clark's left off.  His story is an endearing one that follows an arc that was typical for many generations of important political figures in US history.  He started life as the child of poor farmers in Alabama.  He had aspirations of becoming a preacher – and his first congregation were the chickens that he was raising.  But he didn’t just preach to them – he became attached to them – and he would refuse to eat the chickens he had named when they were served for dinner.  He loved them.

Another feature of his story that is a very typical American theme is that he was driven to go to school and to do well there.  When he was needed on the farm and was forbidden to go to school because he was to work in the fields, he would hide until he saw the school bus coming and then he would run out to take it to school.  Ultimately, Lewis would see the world – as a teen he traveled to the big city of Buffalo, New York with an uncle – and he chose to go to college in Nashville, Tennessee.  It was there that he first began fighting for civil rights – he organized sit-ins at local diners.  It was also there that his work started to take precedence over his schooling - he prioritized the movement over his schoolwork.

I think that the graphic format is the right vehicle for this story.  The story is titled March and, though Lewis was erudite and gave speeches that helped the movement, his emphasis is on the actions that he and others took.  He will sometimes cite speeches (I will quote a surprising one in a moment), but it is the action of marching, not the “I’ve been to the mountain top” moments that he maintains is the reason that the civil rights protesters accomplished what they did.  And the visual emphasis of the books support this action based approach.  The story tells about deeds as much or more than it talks about words – and though there are plenty of words – they are mostly words of dialogue – decisions that are being made – they are frequently words about when and where to march.  Lewis presents himself as a man of action and this book is written and drawn to convey the actions that he took – and the actions that others took against him - not to articulate the fine grained thoughts that he had.

That said, the philosophy of nonviolence is pretty clearly articulated.  Perhaps more clearly, the teaching of the philosophy to those who marched – the training and the importance of the adherence to the principles – and the difficulty of doing this are clearly stated.  What is less clear – and perhaps it takes a bit of psychoanalysis to articulate it – is how it is that the nonviolent movement clarified how much aggression was being used by whites to suppress blacks.  The movement exposed the lie that is at the heart of American exceptionalism – an exceptionalism that maintains we are not the aggressors – we only come in when called upon – it is others that are violent and we are pacifists who are reluctantly drawn into war – and even more that it is we whites who are not the violent ones – it is the blacks (whether black hats or people of color) who are bad and do bad things (and doesn’t the doll study demonstrate that they know they are the bad ones?).

What the nonviolent movement was designed to do was to expose the truth that we are all aggressive – and that none of us are without blame – as effectively as any analyst’s couch ever did.  Whether it was furious counter clerks dumping bleaching chemicals on students who sat in at segregated lunch counters or the burning of the bus that carried freedom fighters to the south – or the murder of black organizers or the murders of white students who came south to help out – and whose bodies ended up buried in a dam being built – the peaceful assertion of rights – inalienable rights – exposed the hostility that those in power were using and had always used to retain that power.  And Lewis’ self-portrayal here as the student of Martin Luther King, Jr. is that while King articulated the tactics of nonviolence – Lewis, the student, practiced them more devotedly and more consistently than King did – and in doing this he pushed the issue in ways that words never could.  Lewis does not, however, try to elevate himself to a position of exceptionalism.  He feels violent impulses - most powerfully, ironically, when King is threatened and he moves to physically defend him.

One of the challenges in teaching about racial and gender battles in the History of Psychology has always been to help the students get a sense of the level of injustice that existed – and even more to get them to appreciate the levels that still exist.  OK, to be frank, this is something that I myself have struggled with.  James Cone’s visit to our campus helped me better understand this, as did Ta Nehisi Coates’.  But I think the unprovoked actions of Trump – and the actions of hate groups – and the nomination of Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court bench – have helped me and my students be much more aware and sensitive to the ongoing aggression that is at the heart of the repression of African Americans and other marginalized groups, including women.  I still have to do background work, but the students are more quickly able to see that we are not just talking about history, but the current state of affairs when talking about prejudice and marginalization.

An example of the vivid immediacy of the material that Lewis portrays is Nelson Rockefeller’s speech at the 1964 Republican National Convention.  In the speech, Rockefeller quotes himself as having said a year earlier that, “The republican party is in real danger of subversion by a radical, well-financed, and highly disciplined minority, wholly alien to the sound and honest conservatism that has firmly based the republican party in the best of a century’s traditions, wholly alien to the sound and honest republican liberalism that has kept the party abreast of human needs in a changing world, wholly alien to the broad middle course that accommodates the broad mainstream of republican principles.”  Despite this, the party nominated Barry Goldwater – who, unlike DonaldTrump, was soundly defeated in the general election.

These books are introduced and supported by Lewis attending the inauguration of a very different president – Barack Obama.  His reminiscences serve as a means of understanding how we were able to stand at that moment – the swearing in of the first president of clearly African descent – the first president who identified as a person of color.  But, it seems to me, Lewis might be asking whether that swearing in portended a backlash – a thinly veiled racist tinged backlash by the radical, well-financed and disciplined minority that would hijack not just the republican convention, but the country as a whole.  Just as the integrated black students in the north internalized self hatred more than the segregated black students in the south, northern and southern whites externalized their hatred of blacks in the wake of being ruled by one.  

Lewis' book has the potential to expose a new generation to the powerfully racist, sexist and repressive forces in their naked form that drive what I hope to be a minority of people to keep others from sharing in a privilege that we should be striving to allow all to have access to – the privilege of leading lives that are as free as humanly possible.  By focusing on denying access, I believe that those in power help to maintain the delusion that they are exceptions to the arc of being human – that they are the immortals who will always be on top.  Unfortunately this kind of thinking is not good for any of us.  It is my firm belief that a rising tide raises all ships - and by blocking the tide, we create a stagnant swamp that we will all be forced to wallow in until we are able to find fresh sources of water.

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.

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...     

Three Identical Strangers - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst watches a movie about experimenting with identity

Documentaries are not generally my thing in movies, but this week we have watched two – Free Solo – because the idea of man against nature was compelling – and then Three Identical Strangers – a movie that will be discussed at our local psychoanalytic institute without a screening there (we recently watched and then discussed Medea).

This film – intended to be dark – starts out on a light and high note.  There is an interview with a charming middle aged man who is remembering going off to a community college, but his reception there is almost dream-like.  He is met by people he has never seen before who are excited to see him – attractive women come up to him and kiss him and say that it is good to see him again – but they are calling him by the wrong name.  Finally an individual says to him that you look exactly like my roommate from last year – they call the roommate – and it turns out that both of these young men were born on the same date and both of them have been adopted.  They drive to connect with each other – and it is love at first sight – they have found a long lost twin they did not know and they roll around like puppies as they connect with a person who is a mirror image of themselves.

This odd happenstance makes the news and then things get even odder because it turns out they have a third identical twin – also adopted – also born on the same date.  Identical triplets.  How is this possible?  Identical twins occur when a fertilized egg in the womb divides and, instead of staying together, splits and two individuals with identical genetic material grow in the womb.  In this case, after having split once, one of the split off twins splits again – and three individuals with identical genetic material are now growing together in the same womb (though actually this happened twice - their fourth brother died at birth). 

Researchers love identical twins (and triplets is a bonus).  There is a long and rich literature that looks at what is inherited and what comes about as a result of the environment to try to tease apart the nature/nurture questions that we have about our human condition.  Identical twins that have been separated at birth and placed in two separate families – generally because of adoption – are particularly rich sources of such research because the similarities between them, sometimes uncanny similarities – can be attributed to some kind of genetic predisposition.  So we wonder whether such things as liking plaid versus plain shirts can be traced to our genes.  In a more controlled fashion, identical twins are used to study the inheritance of predispositions to certain disorders – and if your identical twin is diagnosed with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia (whether you are raised together or apart), you are much more likely to be diagnosed with that disorder as well than if, for instance, a twin that was from a separate egg and sperm combination – a fraternal twin – is diagnosed.

But that lurks in the background of the first part of this film.  In the beginning, the brothers reunite, they become minor celebrities – they go on talk shows – they fall in love with each other – and are attracted to similar women.  They are the toast of New York – and in early eighties New York, they get into Studio 54, hang out with celebrities and live the high life.  As they realize that they have something they can cash in on, they go into business together.  They open a restaurant where they are the main attraction and, in addition to the food, what attracts people to the place is the party atmosphere.  Each of the boys was adopted by a Jewish family through a Jewish adoption agency, and raised Jewish; in the restaurant they essentially put on a Bar Mitzvah party every night that everyone is invited to.  And people come to be included and have fun and the brothers do a million dollars in business in the first year.

But then things begin to get dark.  As one of the relatives points out, the boys did not grow up together.  They didn’t learn how to resolve differences between them.  They came together and looked at the similarities.  It was only over time that they began to see and to have to confront the differences (The reluctant wife and I noted that this is true of marriages as well – the similarities draw us together – and it is only after we have committed to each other that the differences seem to emerge – and to suddenly have more weight than we ever expected them to).  One of the brothers – the one who was interviewed first – decided to leave the business.  The second brother weighs in about how difficult this was on the third brother – and it is only then that we realize that the third brother – the most fun loving one of all – has not been interviewed in the present day.

Well – spoiler alert – he wasn’t interviewed because, in the wake of his brother leaving the business, he went home one day after work and killed himself.  Ouch.  The film takes on a decidedly different tone.   No longer light and airy and fun, we are now feeling the loss – and we begin to try to figure out what happened.

A million years ago, when I was in training, one of my wise supervisors, Fred Shectman, convened a meeting to do a psychological autopsy after a patient that we had worked with as a team committed suicide.   I had done the psychological testing of the patient.  I am embarrassed to admit that I did not remember him – in my defense it had been six months and I had tested many people during that time – but I did remember what Fred said at the beginning of the meeting.  He said that, in the wake of a suicide, we (meaning anyone who was involved in the suicide - treaters, family members, and friends) look to manage our feelings of guilt and blame – and that we can move back and forth between the two - assuaging the one by feeling the other - I am not to blame, I am not guilty - you are and, vice versa, you are not to blame, it is I who feel guilty about what I did or failed to do.

This film can, I think, be understood against that backdrop.  The question that was lingering took center stage – why had these boys been separated at birth?  The parents had gone to the agency when they found out about the separation (after the boys were reunited) and had confronted the director and others there.  The agency responded that they were concerned that the boys would not be adoptable as a package.  All three sets of parents said they would have adopted all three if they had known.  The agency stuck with their story – but one of the parents – going back to find an umbrella they had left in the meeting – found the people they had been meeting with drinking champagne and talking as if they had just ducked a bullet.

To make a long story short, the agency – a very well respected and powerful agency – was conducting research.  The boys had been intentionally placed in three very different homes – each of the families had earlier adopted a girl from the same agency – and now the boys were being placed in an upper class home, a middle class home, and blue collar home.  Why?  Well this becomes a mystery that the film tries to track down.  No results of the study have been published.  Why?  The data from the study have been sealed in a library at Yale.  Why?  We begin to look towards the researchers as the bad guys.  The central researcher, the director of the Freudian Archives, is now dead, but there is an investigative reporter who had tried to get the answers out of him when he was alive but failed.  Two research assistants are interviewed – one who might have been more aware of the design and one who did the follow up testing – he want into the boys homes and did psychological testing and observation on them on a regular basis.  From the first we get a sense of the research atmosphere – from the second we find that there are likely additional twin pairs that have not yet found each other (though a few have done so).  Ultimately there were 6 or 7 pairs, including the triplets, which were in the study.

What is going on here?  My guess is that this was a study to look at whether the environment – the different homes – was more influential on the intellectual and emotional development of these kids or whether the genes were predictive.  There is a period of time in the movie where there is a focus on the mental stability of the mother of the boys and there is some speculation that it is a study about the heritability of a mental illness.  While I think this is a possible research question, I think that the instability of the mother – she is tracked down by the boys who notice that she can drink them under the table – is based largely on her drinking.  This is too small a sample to have a solid study looking at the inheritability of mental illness – in my opinion.  But it is mysterious about the records being sealed and the air of secrecy about the design.

What is more poignant is the discovery that the three boys were kept together for the first six months of their lives and then separated – they would have been pre-verbal and couldn’t speak about the sense of being apart – but at least two of them would bang their heads as a means of soothing themselves when they were young.  Were they trying to communicate that they missed their brothers?  Were they more inconsolable for having lost brothers – something that might have had a distinct attachment code over and above the maternal attachment?  Hard to know.  The book is that object permanence – the sense that this person is different from that – comes on-line at nine months – but I think there is room to wonder about what being a triplet and then an only may have felt like on a visceral level for a kid who was six months old.

The movie shifts its sights and focuses on the father of the man who killed himself.  The father is portrayed as being a strict disciplinarian and distant.  And he was the father of the most outgoing boy.  Was there a fundamental mismatch between them?  The most outgoing of the fathers took all of the boys under his wing when they were reunited and the outgoing son connected most with him, and was the loss of that connection – when that father died – too much for the outgoing son to bear?  Who is guilty and who is to blame?

As haunting as these questions are, the movie keeps coming back to the mystery of the research.  What were those researchers interested in?  But a funny thing happens – as people are painting the researchers as villains they subtly and not so subtly end up asking the researcher's questions.  They wonder whether the difficulties that the adolescent boys had were genetic – or were they caused by the separation – or by the conflict with parents who weren’t a good match.  They marshal evidence to support their positions – pointing to when this occurred or how that emerged – or how something was mirrored in all three boys even before they knew each other.  The conclusions they reach – and these are smart people who know these kids well – are less interesting to me than that the family members – and we in the audience – are asking the very questions that it is likely the experimenters were interested in knowing.

Was it harmful to have separated these boys and the twins and to do that because of research interests?  Sure.  Shouldn’t the parents at least have known of the existence of the twin/triplets?  Absolutely.  And shouldn’t the parent’s permission have been sought to experiment on the boys?  Of course.  Would the parents have consented?  Perhaps not.  And that might have been a very good thing for the boys.  But the questions still would have been there.  What is causing the similarities in these individuals – and what is causing the differences?

Btw, I don't mean to be minimizing the ethical breeches that researchers - especially by today's standards - committed.  But I think that in fifty years we may well wonder about the "informed consent" that we engage in today.  How, our future selves may wonder, could we have consented, or been asked to consent, to whatever we consent to?  We do experiments because we don't know the outcome of the experiment - if we knew with certainty that the outcome would be positive - we wouldn't need to ask permission.  Even when something has been "proven" safe - say a psychoactive medication - do we really know that to be true?  If we start taking a medication that turns out to be a lifetime medication two years after it has been invented - we cannot know what the lifetime impact of taking that medication will be - no one has done it.  But I digress...  

We can’t know whether something as traumatic as the suicide would have been prevented – or if something worse would have been caused by raising the boys together.  But the questions would still have been asked.  We want to know what leads us to become who we are.  Is biology destiny?  And more than that – I think (and Heinz Kohut thought it long before I did) that there is something deeply intriguing about discovering a doppelganger – a twin – out there in the universe.  Wouldn’t it be interesting to look into another’s eyes and see your own reflected?  Wouldn't it be good to know what of our identity was in our genes - what was determined by our environment - and what was the result of the choices we ourselves made?  I don't think these questions can be definitively answered, but the existence of twins allows us to get as close as we can to these very tantalizing questions - questions that are tantalizing enough that we might not think about the best interests of those we are studying because we are so caught up in the possibility that we might be able to address questions that are unanswerable...

I will report back in January after the discussion of the film on additional perspectives that others have taken…


So: Postscript:  If I went to the meeting in January, I don't remember it.  I think it was rescheduled and I couldn't attend, but today I read an interesting article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) about the ethics of this case.  It is available (at press time 7/18/19) at:  https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2737146.  The thesis of the article is that the movie got some of the facts wrong about the ethics of the case.  First of all, the decision to split the boys (and in the case of some of the twins) girls up was not made by the researchers.  It was made by the agency.  And the decision was based on "wisdom" of the day - twins developed language late (probably because they developed their own language and didn't need to learn the adults), they didn't get as much attention form each parent (there are two to look after rather than one), and they get connected to their twin in ways that may impair their becoming their own person.  So it was the agency that decided to separate them - "for their own good".  The researchers saw this as an opportunity - they did not create the experimental separation - they just measure the impact.

One of the concerns was that the records were sealed - none of the data have been published.  The reason for this, according to the article, had to do with confidentiality of the records and the decision of the researchers to protect the privacy of those who unwittingly participated in the study vs. publishing the results of their work.  They decided, based on the small numbers, that any description could be traced to individuals and that would have violated their right to privacy.  So the records were not sealed to protect the researchers, but to protect the participants.

The authors of the article conclude - as did I - that it is problematic to judge the actions of those in the past based on current standards.  We would currently see the benefits - as well as the costs - of keeping twins and triplets together.  We would currently inform the families of what was being done.  Some of the participants in the study have now accessed their records as the privacy laws have changed and they can now do that.  This does not mean, however, that researchers can access the sealed materials yet.  By the time they can, I'm not sure how much interest there will be in the data - the instruments that they used will be unknown to current researchers and the group will still be so small that it will be hard to know whether the results are caused by nature, nurture or chance.

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

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Free Solo: The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Wonders What It Would Mean to Live Life Without a Net

Climbing, Oscar Winning, documentary, psychoanalysis.

When we saw the trailer for this documentary film about an individual, Alex Honnold, who decides to climb El Capitan without ropes – an even bigger and more imposing rock face than Half Dome, also in Yosemite National Park, and which Honnold has previously climbed without a rope – I expected a film about a daredevil – a swashbuckler who was interested in cheating death in a variety of ways – by climbing – but maybe by drinking or doing drugs – and I certainly think that I would have expected that he would have been a womanizer.  But this film is about a person and an undertaking that has daredevil qualities that are inherent in what is being done, but there is an odd aesthetic that is at the core of this film, this person and this quest that is much quieter, but certainly every bit as tension filled and vertigo inducing as the swashbuckling film I anticipated.

There are a number of themes that overlap and interweave in this film.  The first is the role of the filming of the undertaking.  Free soloing is the art of making difficult climbs – life threatening climbs – without any aids or ropes.  It is man or woman against the mountain.  Or more properly – against the rock face.  Not just getting to the top of the mountain, but doing it on the most inhospitable face.  Filming what is essentially a solo undertaking makes it public in a way that violates part of the freedom inherent in the name.  It also yokes the filmmaker to the climber – if the climber should fall to his death, is that partially the fault of the person who films him?  What role does the filmmaking play in the climb itself - including the potential to fatally distract the climber?

The second yoke that keeps this from being a free solo is the relationship between Alex and his girlfriend, Sanni McCandless, a woman he met when on a book tour describing his climbing and she, who had no interest in climbing at the time, on a lark, gave him her phone number when she got his autograph, and we are not told about the ensuing courtship, though we get to see them developing a relationship in the shadow of his attempt to engage in a solitary and dangerous activity that might rob her of him – and she has some thoughts about that.

The third yoke is the tie between this kid – it is hard to think of Alex as a grown man – partly because of his relatively slight stature, but mostly because of his gee-shucks approach to the world - and the mountain on one hand, and the need to keep body and soul together on the other.  He is living in a marginal world where his only home is his van and his only food is stuff he cooks on the burner in the van – and a real shower is a huge luxury.  Because of his accomplishments, he now has a reasonable income, but he is still incredibly uninterested in earthly goods that are unrelated to climbing.

But the center of the film is the technical, emotional, and physical challenge of making a 3,000 foot vertical climb with thousands of moves – each of which could prove fatal if not done correctly – and some of the moves are simply incredibly technically challenging under the best of circumstances.  How does one prepare for and undertake such an endeavor?

These elements, interestingly, overshadow the final climb – so that by the time it takes place, as thrilling and crazy as it is, it is no longer what it might have been – something overwhelming and poorly understood – instead it is, for the viewer as for the climber – the thing that has been pointed to since the beginning of the film and it seems somehow, oddly, destined to be occurring – and it is only through the cut-aways to one of the cameramen who can’t watch, who is afraid of what it is that Alex is doing and unwilling to watch him fall to his death – that we, oddly, become aware of the gravity (as it were) of what is occurring on the screen before us.

I did a little rock climbing in high school – mostly as part of a counseling experience that would ultimately lead me into the therapeutic profession.  This was the infancy of what would one day become ROPES courses that all kinds of people would engage in to learn team building skills and to learn to rely on their buddies.  We did that – holding the rope for each other while we engaged in scrambling up the sides of buildings and walls of rock cut by creeks in the middle of mostly pancake flat Columbus Ohio.  We learned to use carabineers and to belay down, which was great fun.  But we also learned something of the power of concentration – as we paid attention to each foot and hand hold and tested them before trusting our weight to them – not wanting to fall even if the rope would ultimately hold us.

Alex didn’t want to fall either, but he did.  He fell before this project began and his girlfriend was responsible for the rope that was to hold him, but she didn’t pay attention to how much had been played out and his fall led to compromising two of his vertebrae.  It was almost the end of the relationship, but she convinced him that he would not be better off for not having her.  He fell multiple times attempting the most difficult part of the climb up El Capitan while trying each of the two moves to get across a particularly tricky spot – he was in harness and practicing.  On another practice climb, near the bottom in a part of the climb that he found very challenging because of a lack of purchase on what he described as a glass-like wall, he fell, and, though Sanni had the rope, he sprained his ankle.

The ankle sprain occurred about a month before the end of the climbing season.  The camera crew was prepared to film the climb.  They followed him to the local gym where he climbed the rock wall with his boot on.  Other climbers told him it would be a six month recovery arc.  He thought he could climb again in a month.  When he started out to do free solo El Capitan a month after the injury – on a climb that, because of the time of year – had to start at four in the morning and he sported a headlamp to climb in the dark – he seemed as foolhardy as I imagined him to be.  What a relief when he – spoiler alert – aborted and decided to come back and do it the following year.

That winter, he and his girlfriend bought a condo together in Las Vegas and their relationship developed on screen.  He had been coy with her about when he would attempt the solo climb in the fall – and they began to play back and forth about how much he was allowed to know how much he meant to her as he prepared to attempt it again the next summer.  But it was also important that she knew that his primary interest was in the climb.  During the interlude, he also did some psychological testing on an fMRI scan to ascertain what was going on with him.  Looking at images that would cause distress and therefore brain activity in the amygdala to others, his amygdala was non-reactive.  He was essentially not anxious about things others would be anxious or aroused by.

I think there are two diametrically opposed but perhaps related constructs that might help with this.  One is the idea of Obsessive Compulsive functioning.  In this approach to the world, an anxious person defends against their anxiety by organizing their world so that the likelihood of something bad happening is greatly minimized.  This can be a very effective means of isolating anxiety, and if that is what has happened in this case, Alex has so effectively managed to distance himself from his fear reaction that he has interfered with it pre-emptively.  He no longer fears because of the disciplined way that he has managed fear.  Another component of that is that he has exposed himself over and over to the feared stimulus to the point where he is inured to it.

The explanation that requires less mental gymnastics is one that comes from the literature on thrill seeking.  Individuals who qualify as thrill seekers seem to have a lower base rate of arousal and need to engage in thrilling activity to, on some level, feel alive – to feel the adrenaline rush of knowing that this life really matters.  These individuals have been studied clinically as having more difficulty connecting with others – primarily in terms of being antisocial or sociopathic – though Alex’s mother refers to Alex’s father as having been on the Asperger’s spectrum – and this might be another expression of this fundamental lack of arousal.

What is interesting is that the other climbers and the film crew (who are all climbers) talk about not knowing Alex and what drives him – they don’t seem to have a sense of him as a person.  He is personable – charming even – both in his public interactions, for instance with students at his high school, but also in his interactions with his girlfriend – where he is, as I have said, coy.  He also talks with climbers from the generation before him and clearly venerates them – but his conversations are generally technical and when he is goofing around and responding to them about his girlfriend, again he is coy.  That said, there are cameras on for all of these interactions and, just as they, by their very presence, alter the climb, so they alter the person they are observing.

After the sprained ankle, we are treated to the preparation for the climb.  How many times does Alex climb El Capitan with ropes?  We don’t know.  He talks with another climber who prepped for a different free solo climb by doing the route he would solo forty or fifty times.  I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Alex made the El Capitan climb at least that many times – and that he practiced the difficult bits many more times than that.  By the time of the solo climb, I think he knew essentially every step that he would take – each handhold – and how he would navigate the whole thing.  It reminded me of Scott Hamilton’s commentary on a beautiful Olympic skating routine when asked what was going on in the skater’s mind at that moment and he replied that skater was thinking outside blade, inside blade, crouch, lift, turn, etc. – focusing on the elements of the routine – and not, as we the audience were, on the beauty of what was occurring.   In the final climb when Alex seemingly effortlessly handles on of the technically challenging bits we know the five or six step routine that we see him doing, he grins for the camera – clearly having enjoyed pulling that off – but he is also headed forward into the next challenge at the same moment.

Whether because of nature – an amygdala that is under-responsive so that Alex has to manufacture extreme ways of exciting himself – or because of nurture – anxiety that he manages by over-preparing to do what he does, this film is a record of single mindedness.  It portrays the discipline and isolation that is necessary for the arduous but ultimately gratifying work of free soloing.  

What does Alex do when he is done?  He looks oddly fresh – as if he has just been for a brisk walk in the park rather than having completed a grueling and harrowing four hour test that has taken him to the limits of what man can accomplish.  He celebrates with the crew at the top of the mountain and then calls his girlfriend – and, as we listen in on the conversation, he is clearly pleased with what he has accomplished and pleased that she gets what it is that he has accomplished – and then he goes back to his van and spends the afternoon working out – preparing for the next climb.

While it is possible for me to admire this singlemindedness, it is impossible for me to imagine engaging in any activity with this kind of relentless focus.  My mind reels at the paradoxical loss of freedom to achieve a free solo.

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...