What is Psychoanalysis?

I blog as the Reluctant Psychoanalyst, but I have never defined directly what it is that I mean by Psychoanalysis.  Here is a description of what I believe psychoanalysis to be – and why I think it is an important perspective (even if I reluctantly identify with it) for us to be aware of when we think of all things human:

Though psychoanalysis as a discipline and a field is largely the invention of one man, Sigmund Freud, it has been practiced, altered and thought about by a myriad of individuals.  In fact, Freud first learned of a new technique of treatment from his friend Joseph Breuer, who called it “the talking cure”.  Breuer was reporting his work with a patient, Bertha Pappenheimer (they called her Anna O), who, when she first started to recall the things that had preceded being symptomatic, had called it “chimney sweeping”.  Most people, when they think about psychoanalysis, think about it as a psychotherapeutic technique – one where the psychoanalyst sits behind a couch that the patient is reclining on; this has been the staple of New Yorker cartoons for decades.  Psychoanalysis is also, though, a theory of how the mind works that is derived from listening – yes, frequently from behind those couches – to how it is that people think – what they say when they are encouraged to say whatever comes into their mind – the primary and explicit direction that Freud offered to his patients.  This theory of mind is used not only to understand and help individuals who are confronting difficult lives, but also in understanding the worlds of art, literature, politics and business.

So, psychoanalysis is, first and perhaps foremost, a way of listening.  What Freud was encouraging was the process that he called free association.  “Just say what comes to mind” might sound easy, but it turns out that freely associating is much harder than it appears.  On our way from thought A to thought B we frequently get sidelined by thought Q or Z.  We feint and dodge rather than moving smoothly through our thoughts.  One way of thinking of the goal of psychoanalytic psychotherapy is to help us think more freely – to be less encumbered by the defense mechanisms – the feints and dodges that Freud and others discovered and described as they listened to people engaging, as best they could, in free association.  Psychoanalysts have spent a great deal of time working on how best to help people learn to think and talk more directly and clearly – frequently by helping them discover and evaluate what it is that they fear – what they feint and dodge to avoid – and once that has been identified, helping them decide whether that feinting and dodging continues to serve them well – or whether they can more directly face uncomfortable or even terrifying thoughts and learn to move through and address them rather than to skirt and avoid them.  An important part of this process is providing a safe place – a relationship that is reliable – in order to do the work required to face these difficult thoughts.

So, by listening and hearing how people’s minds work, psychoanalysis also becomes a theory of the mind.  The theory emerged from seeing that we are not driven solely by “rational” or “conscious” thoughts, but that many of our most important decisions and actions – things like whom we choose to marry, what profession we choose to pursue, and how we respond to people that we interact with in the course of a working day – are driven by unconscious wishes and desires – and by our efforts to avoid being aware of those wishes and desires – the feints and dodges of the analytic hour end up being the stuff of lived life – the stuff that is part and parcel of our everyday functioning and interactions.  The idea is that the unconscious is not just a place where we store stuff that we aren’t remembering at the moment and, in some cases, can’t directly remember even when we try, but that it is where the action is – where we weigh what to do, it is where the deals are brokered that lead us to do this rather than that – choosing a course of action, for instance, where we don’t get all of our needs met, but we also think that we won’t take some of the hits that we would expect if we were to do something else that would more fully satisfy us.  We believe or state that we are acting rationally – or doing this because of that, but in fact, there is a much more complex process going on and most of our important decisions involve a great deal of compromise, much of that unseen – having taking place under the radar; unconsciously.

The psychoanalytic mind is, then, a very rich place where a lot of things are happening simultaneously.  On the most basic level, we are breathing and regulating our heartbeat – usually outside of our conscious awareness, but not always.  We are reacting emotionally to situations and we may be struggling to manage multiple competing emotions aroused simultaneously.  We are considering what courses of action are open to us and imagining what the consequences of doing this versus that will be.  And we are engaged in activity – we are talking – and perhaps walking and chewing bubble gum – all at the same time.  Psychoanalysis has been parodied as a process that reveals what we are “really” thinking – as if there were some simple thought that was responsible at any given moment for what was going in a tremendously complex system.  I have come to think of psychoanalysis not as reducing us to what is “really” going on, but expanding our ability to think about what is “also” going on – psychoanalysis is, then, a means of exploring the multiple parallel processes that occur within our minds all the time and that are intrinsic to being human.

When psychoanalytic thought has been the axiomatic system for scientists studying development – Daniel Stern is an example of such a scientist in his book the Psychological Birth of the Human Infant; or brain structures -   Mark Solms and others have done extensive research in this area – we are able to put together information into a working system that ends up describing how we as people actually work.  Instead of having a bit of information about this or that part of our functioning, we have an overarching theoretical system that helps us relate the various results of basic scientific work together into a working model – one that helps us better understand why we as individuals – and as a culture and even, at times, as a species – do the things that we do.

Our research, both the basic research of people like Stern and Solms, but also the continuing work of analysts listening to their patients, informs how psychoanalysts can better hear and engage with our patients so that those patients can, in turn, have more access to more of their minds – and so that we can help them function more and more effectively – spending less time feinting and more time working cohesively toward desired goals – more and more freely associating.  Metaphorically, as we begin to organize our minds to work more like a symphony – we are more likely to conduct the symphony – to orchestrate glorious work that is more frequently harmonious and when it is discordant for that to be an important component of who we are at that moment – not something to run or hide from- to recognize that there is discord and that this is part of the process of being complex people – instead of feeling that we are the victim of a mind that is intentionally and consistently working against itself.  (Paul Wachtel, a psychologist/psychoanalyst, noted in the 1980s that part of reason psychoanalysis works in this way is because of the behavioral treatment principle of exposure therapy.  The more time we spend with thoughts that are anxiety provoking, the less anxiety provoking they are - we get used to them - and they have less power to derail us.)

The psychoanalytic perspective, then, is important because, in so far as it accurately represents the ways that the mind works – the architecture of the mind, as it were – it facilitates our getting a better handle on this very complex thing; the most complex closed system in the known universe.  Something this complex needs a road map – a more or less accurate description of the terrain – for us to make headway on an individual level – improving people’s psychological functioning as much as possible – and on a scientific level – articulating how the mind as a whole works in a way that fits with our lived experience.  A perspective that attempts to do all of this is going to draw on other disciplines and it is also going to be internally inconsistent as we try to determine which elements are most important – and it is going to evolve as we learn more about the human condition.  Psychoanalytic theory does all of these things – which makes it a complicated perspective to study, but, in so far as it is accurate to depict ourselves as actively working outside of our awareness to engage with the world, it is a critical perspective to help us understand human functioning – in the consulting room and in the world at large.

The writing that I do in this blog is, then, applied psychoanalysis.  It is the mind of one person - me - reaching out through that of another - usually through a product of that mind - a book, a movie, a work of art - and reporting some of the impact of the other on this person - to you, the reader.  In my reporting, I include the ways that I wonder about how the work is indicative of the functioning of the other person's mind - and I invite you to wonder about that with me.  Ultimately, I suppose that I am maintaining through the writing that I do here that the deeply human process of communicating is enriched by a psychoanalytic way of listening - by trying to hear the reverberations of the creator's mind in the creation and, from that, in my own unconscious mind.  I am then hoping that what this causes for me resonates with something within you.  Of course, the mechanism for doing this is consciousness.  I don't have the ability to directly tap into my unconscious - it's called an unconscious for a reason - but I have worked to be more attuned to the ways in which the unconscious influences my own and other's conscious functioning.  I hope that you, in turn, find this process useful in your own thinking about the material addressed here.     

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Y Tu Mama Tambien - Sex and Sorrow

  

When my only biological child was born, I was glad he was a boy.  I was scared to death about navigating adolescence with a daughter – in part because adolescent boys (not to mention creepy older guys) just seemed so dangerous.  Having been gifted with two adolescent stepdaughters, their self-awareness is a bonus – and the lack of it on the part of most of the reluctant son’s friends (he seems to be an exception – or maybe just hiding it from me well) should have given me more pause about having a son – and this movie would have clued me in had I seen it when it first came out in 2001.  I didn’t see it then because the trailers made it seem raunchy, which it is, but what the trailers didn’t capture was that the raunchiness is one the more realistic integrations of sexuality and, in one moment, sensuality into a film that I have seen.  Somehow these Mexican filmmakers have allowed their adolescent males’ sex lives to be part of their lives – and this has led the film not to be tawdry but rather deeply human.

It is not just sex that is realistically portrayed, but a country that has a small elite ruling and moneyed class, a small middle class and a very large indigent population – and it notices – off to the side - many of the class tensions that are inherent in that structure – a structure that in my worst moments it feels like our current government is hurtling us towards (shortly before we saw this film the new tax code was passed that seems like a handout to the rich and a guarantee that avenues for the other classes – including good education and health care - to rise will have to be even further closed off to pay for the largesse). 

The film begins with two buddies having very different but similarly hurried, though very affectionate sex with their respective girlfriends before those girlfriends go off together to spend the summer in Italy.  The boys reassure themselves that they will have a great time getting laid a lot while they are away while also reassuring themselves that their girlfriends will be faithful.  They then fall into a summer lassitude where they are largely hanging out with each other.  Tenoch's (Diego Luna) father is a the Secretary of Economics in the doomed PRI party that has held power for 71 years but that will fall in the next election.  Because of his father’s position, Tenoch lives in a lavish mansion with servants who don’t just wait on him but care for and about him – he is a little prince.  His father is on the board of the local country club, so he has access to it on Mondays and he and Julio (Gael García Bernal), his buddy, who lives with his mother who is a corporate secretary, have the run of the place – and it is there that they have sex – masturbating – each on his own diving board and offering images to each other that will help them orgasm.

The image that does the trick is that of an older woman – the wife of one of Tenoch’s cousins, Luisa (Maribel Verdú), whom they had tried to talk up at a wedding they both attended – a wedding where, Tenoch pointed out, the body guards outnumbered the guests.  Luisa gets a tearful phone call from her husband who confesses to having been unfaithful to her over the phone.  She then calls the boys up and lets them know that she is interested in the road trip that they have offered to the secret hidden beach called “The Mouth of Heaven” that they have boasted they know of – though in fact they have made the name and the idea up.  But, hey, you can’t pass up an opportunity like this, so they borrow a beat up car and the three go off on a road trip together to an imaginary destination.  What could go wrong with that plan?

The car trip affords them the opportunity to get to know each other – meanwhile we, the moviegoers, are introduced to the country they drive through.  And I think I failed to mention a fourth character – the omniscient narrator’s voice that tells us what is happening – with the individuals – with the country – and he points out the fates of incidental people and animals at various points – his voice is unhurried and matter of fact while foretelling various deeply concerning and even outrageous futures.  So what do we learn inside the car from this troika?  Luisa, who is married to someone with intellectual pretenses – a published author – is pleased to be mistaken by the boys as a member of the intelligentsia when she is, in fact, a dental hygienist.  She confesses that her marriage is largely empty – that she was drawn to her husband by their shared experience of being abandoned as children and we learn, over time that he has abandoned her on multiple occasions – she has been aware of previous affairs – he has just never confessed before.  We also learn that the boys belong to a society that they have created themselves in which they have pledged undying devotion to each other and imagine themselves, as the members of this secret society, as great faithful and undying friends.  And we learn everyone’s sexual histories – with the boys transparently trying to embellish their sexual prowess, which we strongly suspect is nothing but a series of hollow boasts.

On the second day out, the car breaks down and the three are stranded in a marginal hotel with a pool filled with leaves.  Tenoch goes to Luisa’s room to borrow some shampoo and she seduces him – not because of any particular attachment to him, we learn later, but because he was first through the door.  This has a tremendous impact on Julio, who is reminded of the first great betrayal of his life when he discovered his mother in the arms of his godfather.  He pays Tenoch back by confessing that he has slept with Tenoch’s girlfriend – and now Tenoch is stricken with the self-same sense of emptiness and loneliness.  The next day, to make everything right – Luisa has sex with Julio.  Of course this complicates things even further – but it also does create a certain détente – and more importantly a shared sense of emptiness and betrayal – they have all now been betrayed by someone they deeply trusted.  It also lets us know – and Luisa as well – that both boys are inexpert lovers who are too excited about the idea having sex with another person to be present to that person – and so excited that it is over almost before it begins.

Through the miracle of randomness – and as can only happen on an epoch voyage – the troupe finds its way – quite by chance – to a hidden beach that is every bit as glorious as one that they would have conjured out of thin air.  They set up camp and go swimming – and they discover a fishing family who gives them shelter at a nearby waterfront cantina and hotel.  They have a night of heavy drinking where they address all that is problematic between them – offer carnal toasts – and end up in the motel room together where the only truly sensual moment of the movie occurs.  As Luisa is pleasuring both boys – the boys kiss each other tenderly and deeply.  We cut away to the next morning where they wake up in each other’s arms and then recoil from each other.

Luisa, who has broken up with her husband over the phone, decides to stay in the fishing village and the boys have an uneventful ride home.  They drift apart and, two years later, they have lunch together – and Tenoch explains that, unknown to both of them but not to her, Luisa had cancer when they went to the beach – she knew that and knew that it was untreatable and she died two months after their trip.  The boys decide to get together again, but, the narrator tells us, they never do.

I don’t think this bare bones account of the plot can convey the depth of pleasurable melancholy that this film gave me.  I think there may be a word – triste – in French – or maybe a word in another language that conveys a pleasurable sorrow – something that feels bad – but at the same time lets you know that you can only experience this kind of sorrow if you are truly alive and care and are connected to the world and that it has disappointed you not by being something other than what you’d hoped for but by being exactly what you’d hoped for.  This trip – this coming of age moment – this shared journey – one that is deeply embarrassing to both Tenoch and Julio, because it reveals the depth of their love for each other including its erotic elements – something that was apparent to us – and to Luisa – long before that tender, sensual moment – has been expressed.  This is a rare and precious moment –one that comes all too infrequently to any of us.  And it is too much for them to bear – to know that they are, in fact, deeply in love – erotically in love – and that they are unable to handle that – on the surface because they are very straight adolescent boys, but also because as erotically attached to the world as they are the intensity of that attachment is too powerful for them to directly experience – it is too much for them to bear.  They don’t have a place to put these feelings – a category to describe it – a container for it – any more than Tenoch can bear to know the life of the servant who cares for him – to know the village that she comes from and that they drive through without looking at it.  The boys are no longer snapping towels at each other in the locker room but directly expressing all that was being playfully denied in those actions that also expressed a much more limited version of this fuller, richer and therefor intolerable experience.

Luisa’s sadness – something that she is able to communicate to each of the boys by having them betray teach other so that they can all experience it viscerally together – the sadness of losing a husband and losing her life – and deeply loving her life – and wanting to live it fully but knowing that it is limited – this all becomes shared among all three of them.  She can bear this feeling on her own no better than the boys can bear openly acknowledging their love – or their sense of being betrayed by the other.  The sadness is shared among them – she can experience it with and in them – though it is never openly acknowledged.  They are snapping a very different kind of towel together and we don’t know it – the full extent of it – until the narrator fills us in.  But we do know it – under the surface –not quite consciously – because the narrator has been telling us all along of the tragic endings that are all around – how can they not be here in the central story that we are watching?  This is not the beery bacchanal that the trailer suggests, and that this movie appears to be offering on the surface – it is not about two randy adolescents having their way with a young cougar, though it appears to be that at times to them and to us – it is three people sharing something profoundly and deeply connecting – their love of life – their love of each other – and a fragile moment that will tie the three of them together only for that moment - a moment that is both the most profound moment of connection they may ever experience – and the most profound experience of isolation they will ever know.  How privileged we are to be able to share in moments like this.  What a gift this film turned out to be.

It is a gift that I turned away from twenty years ago because I was embarrassed by what looked like an adolescent fantasy film.  Little did I know how potent adolescent fantasies can turn out to be – and how adolescent sexuality – filled with its bravado and its anxiety and its rush to nothingness – may signify something very central to the human experience more generally.  By marginalizing the sexual – by turning away from it – as we do time and again – I protected myself, as the boys were able to do early in the film – from the experience of the intensity of sorrow.   

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The Serpent King – Jeff Zentner’s Coming of Age Novel for Adolescents (and the rest of us)

When I was an adolescent, I primarily read fantasy and science fiction.  The reluctant son’s reading has skewed more towards sports stories – some fiction and some about real life events, but mostly, as my reading was, fantasy focused – the kid who is in some way an outsider becomes the winning quarterback or pitcher or whatever just as, in science fiction, the kid at the edge of the universe ends up saving it.  I suppose that the Harry Potter series, which I read before I began blogging, is also adolescent literature – though Rowling maintains that she was always writing with an adult reader in mind.  Young Adult lit was, in part, a category that was developed on the New York Times bestseller lists because they got tired of Harry Potter books dominating the fiction list, but I think it exists because there are people like this author, Jeff Zentner, who write for the audience – and the sales support this as a viable genre.  Hey, anything that gets kids to read is a good thing, right?

Zentner’s goal seems to be loftier than that, though.  He wants us to know that Southerners are people, too, even those who handle snakes.  The novel’s protagonist, Dillard Early, is the grandson of Dillard Early, the serpent king, whose son, Dillard Early, was the snake handling preacher, and this Dillard Early – Junior, even though he is the third, because, in a southern tradition, when his grandfather died his father became senior is the hero of the story.  His grandfather died of grief over the loss of his daughter who was bitten by a copperhead.  As a means of expressing his anger, he started killing copperheads, not knowing which one had killed his daughter.  He wore their skins and became a sad and vacant person who, consumed by his grief, ultimately killed himself by drinking poison while lying atop his daughter’s grave.  His son, emboldened by Mark 16:18, which states that those who believe shall survive being bitten by snakes and drinking poison, started a church where the believers passed around snakes, occasionally being bitten by them and, if they believed, surviving the bites, just as the believers survived drinking the poison.  The grandson had a crisis of faith and chose, while singing for the church, not to handle the snakes just before his father was sent to jail for having kiddie porn on the computer. 

Wow – what fertile psychoanalytic soil that is!  I could easily spend the rest of this post detailing the ways in which the Serpent King’s attachment to his daughter and failure to connect with his son set in motion a multigenerational tragedy that would make Oedipus blush at being such a piker – but that would be pure speculation because the book lets this backstory remain just that – and we focus instead on the current life of Dill Early, Jr., a kid who, as a senior in high school, visits his weird Dad in prison, lives with his Mom in meager housing, is, not surprisingly, heckled by the kids at school, and works to help pay off the family debts at the local grocery store in the small town of Forrestville Tennessee.  He is saved from misery by two friends – Travis, who reads the Bloodfall series of fantasy books (I checked – they don’t really exist anymore than the small town of Forrestville supposedly named for Nathan Bedford Forrest (apparently a real confederate general, and one of the founders of the KKK)) and Lydia, a super cool girl with a relatively well-off and super supportive Dentist dad, a devoted on-line following, but not a friend beyond Dill and Travis at their hick high school – where none of the three of them are appreciated by anyone who is not in their circle.

Perhaps the most refreshing thing about this book was that the dialogue – the banter between the friends – was a wormhole that transported me back to being an adolescent hanging with my friends.  I found myself pining for the easy jocularity with close friends where there was little fear of alienating them because our shared affection was so transparent.   The healing power of this kind of comradery cannot, I think, be underestimated, and Dill is, as he comes of age, healed in this book.  But healed from what?  And prepared for what? 

I am concerned that the author takes liberties with understanding others as if we were all the same when they may in fact be fundamentally different in ways that may be dangerous to his readers and to their contact with “others” to assume is not the case.  It is clear from the biographical material in the book that there are many links between Dill and the author.  They are both musicians, and it is Dill’s musical ability – his ability to channel his father’s charismatic intensity into the songs that he writes and performs – that is one of his tickets out of Forrestville.  So I think that Zentner is in solid literary ground when he writes a first person account based on an identification with the hero of the book.  The question that I have is whether he came from similar fundamentalist roots?

A quick survey of various interviews and statements online suggests that while religion of some form was important to Zentner, he based the part of Dill on the musicians that he knew who hailed from places where snake handling occurs.  He did research on evangelicals and their religions and how they worked – so he had a sense of what the back story would be – and I certainly appreciated learning about how the religion worked and the sense in what seems to be a senseless religious expression – he has a compassionate curiosity about the phenomena that I think he lends to Dill – who is somewhat (and reasonably) appalled at what his father does and is doing.  I think this brings us as readers along with him into a place where we can walk with a guy we would otherwise look past.  But the question is whether we are still looking past him – and seeing a weird reflection of ourselves in foreign territory.

When Kathryn Stockett wrote The Help, she wrote the white characters in the first person, but she intentionally wrote about the black characters only in the third person.  To inhabit the mind of the “other” involves a great deal of presumption.  I think that someone who has been raised within a fundamentalist church and has been abused in the ways that Dill has may not have some of the facile ability that Zentner imagines Dill to have in distancing himself from his father and seeing him as an oddity.  I don’t know about that, but I suspect, for instance, that the views that he has been raised with are more likely to be seen as truths than as oddities.  For instance, I have a friend, one of the brightest guys I know and one of the first people I felt the kind of rapport that bloomed in adolescence that I describe above – I met him when we were about 10 and in a gifted kids class a million years ago – and he still maintains – despite his having achieved a Ph.D., that creationism is a reasonable description of the world that we live in – in fact the only plausible one.  This is one area where our easy rapport simply slides away and we have to agree to disagree.  It is not worth our friendship, to either one of us, to go to the mat over this.  We go to the mat over many things – but this has a different feel to it.

I think that what Zentner is doing here is both deeply entertaining – I cried through much of the book – as many of his other readers did – I was fully taken by this very well told story and empathized deeply with the characters in my own particular way – and educational – I think he wants us to learn that the South, for all its mystery and all of the prejudice that we have about it – is a place that is deserving of our engagement.  And I applaud both of these goals.  But if we achieve them on shifting and false grounds, we are going to be severely disappointed on both sides – as Southerners (if you will) and Northerners when we actually convene around a table and discover that despite our similarities, we also have deep and powerfully divisive differences that are not as easily reconciled as this book would suggest. Lydia is, I think, Zentner’s more convincing “Southern” voice, because I think she more nearly mirrors who it is that Zentner is.  But Dill’s voice – as lovely as it is – does not feel as authentic.

What am I proposing?  I hope that this book would be made into a movie someday.  I would also hope that, should that happen, Zentner would work with a screen writer and a director to think about the character of Dill and to consider how we might a love a person – as Lydia and Travis do – in part by realizing that they are not living, in some ways, in the world that we are.  Zentner is, I think, indulging, as Dill, in a fantasy about being loved by Lydia that he also recognizes is an unrealizable fantasy.  We know throughout the book that Lydia’s horizons are different than Dill’s.  This is beautifully portrayed – and the work that the two of them do to find a narrative path for Dill that will help him work towards who he will become is beautifully described.  But the tragic divergence of their paths is also evident.  And this is not just because she is into fashion and he is into music – it is because her place is a place like New York City and NYU – the school that she is accepted into – and his is Murfreesboro, Tennessee and Middle Tennessee State University – the school that he is able to head towards.  Their paths from there will diverge – they will stay in touch, but they are not soul mates.  This does not mean that their souls are of different value – just that they are different.  To not acknowledge the fundamentally different tenor of these two people could lead to one or the other being co-opted and becoming a wholly owned subsidiary – something that would leave the world a lesser place.

That last bit may seem a bit opaque.  I think what I am stating is something like what Jordan Peele points towards in Get Out – that disavowing fundamental differences between people leads to reducing us to a common denominator that is, in fact, not common, but imaginary.  Indeed, no lesser a light than Freud did this in the case of Dora where he assumed that men and women – and he and Dora – were the same underneath.  Maybe so, but it is so far underneath, and there are so many layers of difference between here and there that the “essential” aspect of the other is something that they themselves don’t recognize.  That is, would the real Dill – as if there could be such a person – recognize himself as well as we – a presumably empathic and receptive audience – recognize the Dill that Zentner describes?  He, unlike we, might, instead of crying, be appalled that anyone could think that he would, for instance, feel anything but profound and very deep loyalty towards his father and mother – and that this would be the essential conflict – a conflict within himself – not between himself and his parents – as he wrestles with coming of age by finding a path that will allow him to be true to who he is – as a son and a grandson – and as the person who wants to write a different kind of gospel music – the gospel of the love he feels towards someone who is as alien to him as the person he loves most and wants to be most deeply in harmony with – Lydia.   

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...