Captain Fantastic – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst watches a man who catches himself in the trap he tries to escape from.

On vacation, the youngest and currently most reluctant stepdaughter told us about a film released a couple of years ago that had entered none of our radar screens.  She stated that it was her favorite – Captain Fantastic – which, she assured us, was not a superhero movie – it is, rather, an arthouse release about a father (Ben Cash played by Viggo Mortensen) who is raising his six children in the backwoods of the American Northwest and they are working to grieve the loss of their mother (Leslie Cash played by Trin Miller).  It turned out that their mother has died of suicide – she had bipolar disorder and had left the family to seek psychiatric treatment in a hospital out in the real world four or five months before the  the action starts on the day after her death when the father finds out, via phone call, that cutting her wrists has led to her death. 

I am going to start describing this flawed film by telling the backstory – this will be an imaginary voyage on my part – put together by the clues in the plot and the descriptions of the characters.  The attempt is to anticipate the flaws – flaws that exist in our culture – flaws the protagonists were attempting to address in their alternative lifestyles – but flaws that, I think, they carried into that lifestyle – and that then get reflected in a story about their efforts to create an Eden – and the efforts to even imagine this Eden - the movie – which I think of as a dream of the writer/director – and apparently the actor – Viggo Mortensen who shares some of the Director’s (Matt Ross) ideals.

In my mind, the protagonists met in college.  He was from a Midwestern town.  He had always been the smartest in his class, and his father had always been smart, too, perhaps he was mechanically gifted and worked as an engineer and, while they had a nice life, perhaps both father and son always felt that it didn’t match their expectations of the kind of life they could or should have.  They – but certainly the son – felt entitled to more.  She was from a wealthy family – a family that had made its money in oil or mining but despite the tumult that had gone into creating the wealth, she was raised in a cloistered and strict environment, but she was rebellious, headstrong and very smart.  Her father was deeply in love with her, but also did not understand why she was not more like her sister, who was a much more conventional and docile person.

They met at a prestigious school where they had the best teachers, and he excelled there – drinking in what the professors and the other students had to offer, but he was idealistic and a little hard to get along with – he would correct his teachers and he was like Will In Good Will Hunting – a force of nature who did not suffer foolish teachers or students easily.  She was drawn to his idealism – it reminded her of her Dad, but he seemed to be so focused on the things that mattered – spiritual, philosophical and moral things – not material things.  They studied Buddhism together and became converts, learning about and practicing the religion both as an expression of their shared beliefs and also as a way to begin to carve out a life for themselves.

They married, much against her father’s wishes, likely in a big church wedding with lots of her family and friends there, but without so many from his family, which is smaller and not as well connected – and he felt uncomfortable inviting many of his friends.  Or perhaps they eloped, infuriating her father.  They decided to have a large family and raise them to embrace the world in a very different way than their parents had done.  About this time, she had her first manic episode – perhaps becoming terribly excited about all that they had in mind, but then she crashed, and he was devastated as he tried to console her with little effect.  He used his charm and charisma as best he could, and she returned to a more stable mood in her own time, and had their first child or perhaps decided to resume having children – perhaps her first depressive episode was a postpartum depression. 

They had six kids total, giving each of them a unique name to help them understand that they were unique in the universe.  Meanwhile her moods became less and less reliable and her lows included suicidal thoughts that she found more and more difficult to manage.  During her slide into less controlled behavior, they tried various ways of managing the environment as if that would help her symptoms resolve.  Ultimately, they moved “off the grid” into a remote and beautiful wooded area, and built a rustic but highly functional camp.  It was as if the ills of society were what was causing the ills in Leslie’s mind.  They “home schooled” the children – having them read the classics as a means of learning everything from math to political science, with a very heavy dose of philosophy based on communist and other liberal principles that were concerned with concentrating too much wealth in the hands of very few privileged people. 

The education was not just about books, however.  The children went through rigorous physical regimens on a daily basis to get them in top physical form.  The parents were very careful to be truthful to the point of being blunt with their children as a means of treating them with respect.  That said, the children became increasingly socially isolated and lived in a cocoon that did not reflect the “real” world.  They were book (and survival – each of them used knives and bows and arrows with skill) smart but socially awkward when interacting with people outside the family and their knowledge of the current social world was nil.

So, when we are introduced to the family, they are processing, confronting, and beginning to work on coming to grips with the loss of their mother.  The opening scene includes the eldest son who is about 18 using a disguise to stalk and kill a deer with his knife.  This is a rite of passage marking his becoming an adult.  Meanwhile, their father is told by his father-in –law that if he comes to the funeral he will be arrested.  The family must decide whether to travel across the country to go their mother’s funeral.  Of course they do – with adventures along the way as they interact with people from a culture that is wholly unknown to them (one of the younger children asks what’s wrong with all the people whom they see who are clearly ill because they are so fat and bloated – and we are stunned to see the people that we see every day through new eyes) and we get to know them by how they interact with each other and with the world.  The children have very different interests and styles and different reactions to their mother’s death.  Some are scared, and one, Rellian (played by Nicholas Hamilton), is angry, lashing out at the father repeatedly and blaming him for their mother’s death.

Physically, the father resembles Charlie Manson, and there are more than a few cult-like aspects to the family’s existence.  But there is also a great deal of warmth.  The experience of watching the film is captured by a daughter’s description to her father of what reading Lolita is like.  She says something like, what is disturbing about the book is that the reader comes to understand and appreciate the mind of the child molester so that the molestation, while on the one hand gross, is, on the other hand, not just understandable, but you are sympathetic to the love that the molester is offering – and this is disturbing.  In this film, we are witness to the warmth Ben feels towards his children – we envy them the family that they have – and we are appalled by Ben’s tyrannical parenting – and his off the wall behavior.  When he feigns a heart attack in a rural grocery store so that the distraction frees the kids to “liberate” necessary grocery items, we are taken aback at the immoral actions that he is teaching from a highly moral perch.  We haven’t quite bought into American Capitalism as the Sheriff of Nottingham’s corrupt and arbitrary treatment of the king’s subjects that he would have us buy into – and that he is foisting off on his children.

At one point, Rellian objects to a critical component of the system; that they celebrate Noam Chomsky’s birthday rather than Christmas.  Ben invites Rellian to articulate more fully what he means – and he says that if Rellian can convince him, he is happy to reconsider.  Rellian – all of fourteen and too angry to think straight - turns away – and as open and genuine as Ben appears to be – we know that Rellian is right to do this because he is the fly being invited by the spider to argue the he would not be a good dinner – for as smart as he might be, his father is much smarter and, at least at that moment, the other kids are on Dad’s side and will lend him support. 

Rellian ends up finding an ally in his Grandfather, Lisa’s Dad, who is outraged by Ben’s shenanigans.  Rellian defects, and Jack Bertrang (masterfully played by FrankLangella) uses this wedge to demand that Ben give up custody of the kids.  And this creates the first flaw in the movie – Ben agrees.  He confesses to the kids that he did, in fact, contribute to Leslie’s death.  And, even though the two times that she visits him as a ghost the warmth between them is obvious, he seems to lose the connection to both her and to the kids at this moment.  He drives away from Jack’s mansion crying tears, but I, who cry at Coke commercials, could muster no tears.  This moment felt false.  He would not give the children up without a much bigger fight (yes, he was outgunned, but when had that stopped him before?).

I think this plot flaw – like the moment in a dream that is so incredulous it almost wakes us up - was introduced to manage what was an unmanageable element in the “reality” of the relationship with the family.  It is a moment when the underlying fantasy – the hope that, as David Letterman put it in his interview with Jerry Seinfeld, our children will grow up to be just like us – in his case, to sit on the couch next to him and like the same shows that he does – runs up against the equally powerful reality (and, in the case of this father who intentionally gave each of his children unique names) that our children will become the people that they become – people that they carve out, not just of us (even if we limit almost all competition, as Ben has done) but of everything they have come in contact with. 

The flaw in the film is that this is presented as an absolute rather than an ambivalent break.  Now, the psychological truth of the matter is that we experience these breaks as absolute.  Our children’s rejection of us – the system’s rejection of us – our failures – are not experienced as complex and nuanced reactions to us, but as complete and utter rejections.  In these moments, we are utterly unworthy – utterly hopeless.  We are (in one way of reading suicide) guilty of a sin punishable by death.  In this moment, we are utterly alone and irredeemable.  And the movie presents that internal state as an external reality – one that Ben acts on rather than defends against.  He acts as if he is as helpless in the face of Rellian as Rellian was in confronting him earlier in the movie.

The next flawed moment is when, seemingly days later, the children emerge from their hiding place in the family bus to rejoin him – they have snuck out of the castle of the evil grandfather – even Rellian is among them – and Ben is reunited with all of them – including Rellian.  They are one big happy family again – and in the epilogue, we see that Ben has learned the error of his ways – they are still the absurdly close and obedient family – but he is now, through his benevolence – supporting them in connecting with the world.  His Eden does not have to be quite so separate from the real world, but it can still exist, and they are still obedient and delightful, but diligently engaged, children.

This analysis has, I fear, drained some of the magic from what is an enchanting film – one that is a kind of counterculture Sound of Music.  Unfortunately, a counterculture world of raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens brings with it the very authoritarian strains that it would overthrow; our efforts to manage the wayward children that we have – whether actual children or the conflicting thoughts and feelings that stir within us – require order and organizing to accomplish what we want to – and this involves conflict and compromise, but also disappointment and failure – as well as triumph.  Living is a messy business.  The director, who wrote this movie (and who is likely, like all directors and strivers in general, likely a bit of a control freak), can’t quite keep all the light and beauty that he would like to in Eden.  It turns out that it recreates the complex world that it would distance itself from.

Ultimately the film does track well as a dream – it resolves the conflict that Ben (and the director) feel between raising children that are not polluted by the dominant culture – and therefore isolating them – which is something that they will resent the father for doing, but also enriches them – and makes them, in some very real sense, superior to those around them – and for this the children will be grateful.  The ambivalence that is felt – and the love that somehow binds this ambivalence into a package that binds them together – does get represented.  But we need to remember that this is a dream that is being presented and that the edges of the reality that our twisted efforts to raise and direct our children will bring more mess than the idyll presented here and we, including the reluctant stepdaughter, the reluctant wife and I, will have to figure out how to deal with that.

Post script:  There is something about this film that galls me and makes me feel old and cynical at the same time.  For all of its counterculture feel - and for all of its anti-Trump foment (not explicitly but implicitly), it mirrors something about the Trump phenomenon.  This is a film made by and about people of tremendous privilege - privilege afforded them by a culture and a country that has at its roots a constitution that supports a balance of power because absolute power corrupts absolutely - that is a celebration of - not anarchy - but imposition of a kind of authority that is exceptional - this authority - whether that of Trump or that of the extreme left - is an exception because it knows what the proper way to live/ to govern/ to be is.  In fact, much to the chagrin of a naive and conceptually driven guy like me who wants to live in a Utopian world, there is no such place.  

Perhaps it is the oldest son's experience of proposing undying love to the first girl he kisses - someone that he meets in a KOA campground on the way to the funeral - that captures the frailty and tenacity of the idealism of all Americans, myself included.  I have known idealists who are cynical - back to the landers, disaffected children of immigrants, and my own more suburban version - and we all to a person think that this could be such a better place than it is.  And thank God we do - it keeps us working towards making that place better - but none of us should be given absolute control of it.  Without a balancing opposition - one that is not cowed as Killian originally was - we who are running it will run it into the ground.  We all need to be on board for this bus to work...

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My Next Guest Needs No Introduction: Is Donald Trump’s Presidency the David Letterman era’s Legacy?

David Letterman has hosted a series of six conversations that are currently streaming on Netflix.  He has titled them, “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction.”  The guest list is an august one:  Barack Obama, George Clooney, Malala Yousafzai, Jay-Z, Tina Fey, and Howard Stern.  Plus there is a follow-up interview with Jerry Seinfeld - but this one has a slightly different turn as Jerry interviews David as much or more than the other way around – and this is the interview that I would like to start with.  Jerry maintained that David Letterman changed US television.  He did this, I think Jerry maintained, by introducing a style of talking that was new and different – it was immediate, genuine and real.  David was not “playing at” being the host or emcee of his show, but was being himself, in all his native Indiana goofiness, and trying to evoke from the people he was interviewing a similar kind of honesty.

Jerry stated that he resonated with Letterman’s approach and that he emulated this ideal in his own work.  Jerry, in writing for the Seinfeld show, used the test of “If this is funny to me and Larry David (his co-writer), that’s good enough for the audience” to determine what to put in the show.  Jerry then noted that David did things because he thought they would be fun or funny – he dropped things off of buildings – he solicited the population for stupid pet tricks – and stupid human tricks (an acquaintance of mine bent back a broom to shoot an album cover out from under four eggs sitting in paper holders and they neatly dropped into the waiting water glasses that the album cover had been sitting on in one trick that aired) – and he brought his mom from Indiana on the show (and sent her to cover the Olympics).

David, in another interview – the one that, to me, seemed to stand out from an otherwise all-star cast, noted that he himself had emulated the work of Howard Stern – who was known as a “shock jock” – the D.J. who would and did say anything on air, including things that the FCC fined him for in increasingly huge quantities.  I had always seen Stern – in the limited exposure that I had – to be a petulant adolescent who refused to grow up, fixated on adolescent interests like sex and fart jokes.  In the interview, I was surprised to discover a reflective man who had an impressive level of self-understanding (which he attributed in large measure to his psychotherapy) that included a sense of what had driven him to engage in the outrageous behavior that he did and how that stuff was no longer necessary in his continuing drive towards – wait for it – authenticity.

Howard Stern maintained that his approach to radio was to be pure id – to say whatever came into his mind at any given moment and to give vent to it.  Because he was extremely angry at the time – a lot of what he said was suffused with rage.  Interestingly, his broadcast icon was an early conservative talk radio host – a person who predated Rush Limbaugh and his generation – but a person who was able to exude anger at a time when the airwaves were dominated by false nice voices – voices that, to Howard Stern’s ear (and I think to Letterman’s, and to Seinfeld’s, but I think also to millions of listeners) were saccharine and false – inauthentic – and he wanted to portray something real – something genuine – emotion that meant something – on the airwaves.

The format of Letterman’s new show, one in which the interview lasts for an hour, more or less (more, but it has been edited down and, with some of the interviews, other material is included – for instance, David goes horseback riding on land that used to be federally protected before Trump did away with that on the interview with Howard Stern that derided many things about Trump) is a format that mirrors in some ways the interviews that Letterman did on late night television – there is space for the guest to hawk their current project.  But, in addition to the length, the arrangement of the seating is different.  On his talk show, Dave sat at a desk and his guest sat in a chair that was angled towards him, but placed in front of him, so the guest had to awkwardly crane their neck to see Dave – and when they were engaged with him it was hard to keep their usual decorum – the awkwardness seemed to pierce at least a piece of the persona that they intended to present to the world.

In the current rendition, which is noteworthy for Letterman’s gigantic Santa Claus-like beard, he and his interviewee both sit in comfortable chairs at the same angle towards each other on a bare stage in a small auditorium with a crowd that is limited to the main floor – the balcony is empty and there is a feeling of intimacy.  There is also a kind of intimacy in the interviews.  Letterman seems to be intensely attuned to affect.  There are moments when he detects something and he stops the person and asks them to amplify something.  There are also moments that have intense affect that are deflected with humor.  We get to know both the guest and Dave – and then we don’t – there are areas he is comfortable exploring in detail and others that he closes the door on.  This interviewing style – one that follows the affect in the conversation – is a very psychoanalytic interviewing one.  It creates what we call a deepening of affect, but also, by being attuned to the intensity of the emotion, allows for protection from overwhelming feelings, though in this case it seems to be the case that Dave is frequently protecting himself rather than the person he is interviewing from feelings that – if not overwhelming – would be inconvenient to address.

Each interview has its own dominant feeling state.  The interview with Howard Stern was matter of fact.  Both David and Howard seemed quite comfortable in their own skins and with each other.  It was like two good old boys sitting and talking.  The conversation with Jerry Seinfeld had an edge – partly because Jerry was trying to interview Dave, who was not all that comfortable with Seinfeld turning the tables, but also I think because of tension between them – perhaps a kind of competition.  Tina Fey, whose verbal skills are impressive and whose voice was calm, chose to sit on the edge of the comfy chair with erect posture, she did not sink into it.  She was alert and wary, and David worked hard, I thought, not to threaten her.  But it was the interview with Jay-Z, who also sat forward in his chair, that had the most poignant feel.  Jay-Z felt vulnerable and uncertain – wary, but not cagy like Tina Fey – he seemed on the edge of something that felt very soft and uncertain – yes he was wary, but it was unclear how much he was wary of Dave and how much he was wary of himself – or what he might say that he would regret – seemingly not to us, the public, but to David, whom he appeared not to know well.

In what might have been the rawest moment of that interview, when Dave was asking Jay-Z to talk about what it was like to have his – Jay-Z’s – behavior threaten to blow up his family – David let Jay-Z off the hook by talking about how he felt about his own behavior coming close to blowing up his own family – and Jay-Z was left to assent.  With Jerry, who was guarded, David was even more guarded, but with Jay-Z, who was incredibly vulnerable, David used his own vulnerability to protect Jay-Z, who could then assent to what Dave said, without having to reveal the particulars.  Jay-Z was able to say that he and Dave, unlike his father who left when he was 10 or 11 and whom he was angry with for years, stayed.  And he was able to do this without blaming his father, but acknowledging that not having that as a model complicated the staying, which is hard to do, even if leaving involves even greater pain.

A theme that runs throughout these discussions, and one that is clearly a dominant realization for Dave, is the ways in which having a child taught him what love is and that it humanized him.  He sought reassurance from Jay-Z that he had experienced this as well and he tried, in many of the interviews, to dig out of people the ways that having a child changed them for the better.  Most of them complied (except for Malala, who has no children).  I certainly resonate with the experience he is describing and I know as a clinician and a researcher that the impact of early attachment on later functioning is huge for the child, but it was as a parent that I realized how huge it was for me as an adult.  

We are currently having a national crisis of identity around the issue of separating children from their parents when the parents are caught immigrating illegally into the U.S.  We know that the separation will cause real and lasting damage.  I remember how heartbreaking it was to leave my child at preschool when he was three just for a few hours – I can’t imagine him alone with no ability to contact me then or when he was 10 or even 15.  His first year at college has gone well, but we have been in pretty frequent contact by phone, text and in person.  Recently I had a chance to talk with him about the experience when he was three of being dropped off at preschool, and he still remembers it as something that he hated for at least the first half hour that he was there - day after day.  Connections between children and their parents – genuine, authentic connections – complicated connections - are vitally important.

I think that Dave is critical of Trump because he threatens these kinds of connection on a broad scale (with the immigrant situation being just one example), but it was Stern who pointed out that Trump was actually the perfect person to interview because of his authenticity.  To Stern, Trump always told you exactly what he thought – he was completely genuine.  In some ways, with Trump, as with Dave, what you see is what you get.  This is a strange kind of post psychoanalytic world – one in which the romantic curtain that we drew between our best intentions and the more sordid parts of who we were allowed us to convince ourselves that we were more noble than we actually were.  Hamilton – the man and the musical – is an example of the complexities of human functioning being played out first on the political stage – when he introduced us to our first sexual imbroglio – and then on the Broadway stage when his portrayal from a post Freudian perspective allowed us to imagine him as noble while realizing he was also very human.  Politicians have always lied to us – as Trump and many others have pointed out – but when Trump lied to us, it was transparent.  We knew he was lying.  When someone has convinced themselves that they will do something, they are convincing liars, but liars none the less.

Hillary Clinton was called lying Hillary by Trump repeatedly.  She may have lied about this or that substantive issue, but her wish to be elected drove her to try to appear to be what people wanted in a presidential candidate.  Trump – like Letterman and Stern and the angry voices of Republican and Libertarian radio – did not try to court people by telling them what they wanted to hear – he told them what he and they wanted to hear by being straightforward – being the person he actually is.  As intolerable as that person is to many of us, it is a refreshingly genuine person – someone who is what he is.  We have seen what genuineness from a celebrity looks like – Howard, Dave – I would add Roseanne and Oprah into that mix as well – people who don’t say what they should say, but say what the “really” believe – meaning that they are speaking with the public as if they were in a private room with them – not editing what they say.  From this perspective, the id is not so much unconscious as it is something that is private and hidden from others, as Mark Solms maintains.

My friend, the reluctant co-teacher, who taught a Freud class with me this spring that I have written about elsewhere, maintains that what Freud did in creating the psychoanalytic consulting room was to create the Shtetl, the Jewish village in Russia, where, after a long day of cow-towing to the Russians, the Jews could let down their hair and say what they really think.  And as we have heard people like Stern say what they really think – no matter how gross or disgusting – we recognize a kindred spirit.  Someone who is able to say publicly some of the things that we think in private but would never dare articulate, except to close friends, and when we hear someone speaking in our own voice, we identify with that person and we move towards supporting them, even if they don’t agree with all of the voices in our minds.  We feel connected to a genuine part of the person – and this kind of connection is worth its weight in gold and worth a vote in an election.   

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The Lathe of Heaven – Ursula K. LeGuin Explores the Future Through Dreams

Science fiction is a genre that gets no respect, but it certainly should.  Ursula K. LeGuin is the Grand Dame of this genre, though I have never read her work – frankly, because of her Grand Dame status, I thought it would be too difficult to approach when I was an adolescent and reading lots of science fiction and fantasy.  Her reputation as a “great writer” put her, in my mind, in the league of people like Tolkien, whose work was hard for my fourteen year old self to follow – I was more a Vonnegut, Bradbury and Heinlein guy.

A few years ago, when the reluctant son was eight or ten, he and I read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 which was a summer reading for incoming first year students at my University.  We were both struck by the ways in which Bradbury was able to accurately foretell aspects of the world that we currently live in – one that can seem dominated by large screen televisions (not yet the wall size that Bradbury imagined) and a world in which books did not have the cachet they once did (even if they are not outright banned as they were in the novel).  Among other things, Bradbury’s imagining of far off wars that don’t seem to ever come to a conclusion rang true for us, even then. 

Ursula K LeGuin

Ursula K. LeGuin, writing a few years after Bradbury and much more in the style of my guys – incredibly approachably, is also predicting a world – or many of them – that exist now, more or less, from the vantage point of 1970 or so.  She is even more precise in her predictions – that there will be conflicts between Afghanistan and Syria that will draw in troops from Pakistan and then India and that these wars will drain the resources of the United States, and she places her hero not in a vague general place, but in a very specific one – Portland, Oregon (where she lived).  The worlds that she paints are colored by the anxieties of her era, anxieties that were epitomized by me at the time in the book The Limits to Growth, which foretold, using the limited but biggest and fastest computer technology of the day, doom and gloom based on overpopulation, pollution, and exhaustion of natural resources.  It is a bit uncanny, then, to be living in the world that she and I imagined and feared and to recognize aspects of it, but not others – and to have an eerily parallel world or worlds articulated by this writer that I knew of at the time but never read. 

In the first iteration of her future vision, the people of Portland are more densely packed than Manhattan at its busiest point and the total human population on the planet has ballooned to 9 billion people.  Global warming has melted the snow pack on Mount Hood that overlooks Portland and imperiled, through rising seas, New York and Florida.  Well, this prediction partly came true.  In addition to some warming of the environment, Google tells us that the world’s population is 7.6 billion and it was 3.4 billion or so when she was writing, though the US population has not grown at the same rate – it has grown from 210 million to about 330 million – it is about 50% bigger while the world has doubled.  Portland, which is surely larger than it was when LeGuin was writing is not the unrecognizable city of skyscrapers – what she is describing better fits a city like Singapore, perhaps.  Another difference is that Portland is not suffocating under the haze of a caustic air pollution that is all but unbreathable – it – and most cities in the U.S. – have relatively clean air – cleaner now than in the seventies.

In the second iteration – the first alternate vision of the city as a whole – the city is considerably smaller and the pollution is less because history has been rewritten and a plague has happened.  In this iteration, the world population is only 1 billion people.  The odd thing is that many of the people who were living in the first iteration are now dead, and the people who knew those people before now know them as people who have died.  They mourn the deaths, but are not aware that there was an alternate universe that existed in which these people continued to live, with one or maybe two exceptions.  The only person who knows and remembers the alternate reality is the hero of the book – a rather non-descript fellow named George Orr.  And what is the vehicle for the transition from one reality to another?  George Orr’s dreams. 

Wow.  This book is, forgive the pun, a psychoanalyst’s wet dream.  George Orr is referred for psychiatric treatment because he has started abusing stimulants to keep himself awake so that he doesn’t fall asleep and cause some new catastrophic change to happen as a result of his dreams.  We don’t believe that his dreams are changing the world, at least not at first.  The dreams that he has are not yet of the size of the alternate realities I have traced above.  He confesses to the psychiatrist that he is referred to that he dreamt that his Aunt, who had come to stay with his family five weeks earlier and was sexually intrusive in an unwanted way with him, was represented as a cat in his dream, run over by a car and, when he awoke, his aunt was now dead – she had died when a car hit her before she ever came to stay with the family.  His psychiatrist, a sleep specialist and hypnotist, believes he is delusional and hypnotizes him to fall asleep - and the first hint we get that the problem is real is when the wall poster in the hypnotizer’s room has changed when he awakens.  George hopes the hypnotizer will notice this because the hypnotizer was present during the transformation and aware that it was going on, but the hypnotizer appears to be unaware of the changes, but we are not – we now know that George really is changing the world.  The hypnotizer asks him back and provides “guidance” to his future dreams, apparently with the intent to convince him that the changes are not real and to reduce his anxiety about dreaming so that he doesn’t need to keep taking the drugs to stay awake, even though bigger and bigger changes occur, including the dream that kills billions of people, and this dream results in the death of the hypnotizer’s wife and children.

The premise is intriguing.  Not all of George’s dreams change the world – just the most vivid ones.  But those that do are gratifying a wish – to be rid of the aunt’s intrusiveness – and then to have a world that is less populated.  Both wishes are gratified in the ways that dream wishes are gratified, in fantastical, final and symbolic ways that we don’t worry about because “it is only a dream”.  But this guy, who is the kind of guy you would never notice and that the hypnotizer sees as malleable, dreams not just in his mind, but in the universe – and the vivid dreams – the ones about the important stuff in his mind, are heard by the universe and the universe rearranges itself to grant the wishes that are being expressed in the dream.  “Dear Universe, the subway was crowded this morning. Yours, George.” ”Dear George, got it.  Will have to go into the way-back machine to make this work, but tomorrow there will be way less people to get on the subway with you.  In fact, they won’t have built a subway because there will have been no need.  The Universe.”

At this point I need to warn you that, because this novel, which is short (less than 200 pages) and very readable, has touched off so many nerve endings that I am going to move in multiple directions and write, somewhat paradoxically, a longer than usual post. 

While the mechanisms of dreaming that she is describing make sense to me, LeGuin offers some bad data about hypnosis.  It is NOT the case that we have evidence that people under hypnosis will do things they would not do in other conditions.  We can offer direct and indirect suggestions to people (e.g. “Take your clothes off” and “It is getting very warm in here and you are free to do anything you might want to do to make yourself more comfortable”), but they will not do things that they would not have done without hypnosis.  On the other hand, someone uninhibited about their nudity will take their clothes off based on indirect and direct suggestion, regardless of whether they are hypnotized or not.  Stage hypnotists get people to do things that most of us wouldn’t do primarily through selecting those who are highly suggestible – and these people likely would do the things they are asked to WITHOUT hypnosis – but the stage hypnotist has to find out who these people are by calling a herd of people on stage (anyone who volunteers has made the first cut) and then apparently gets them to do things they otherwise wouldn’t do, when in fact they would have.  By the end of the act, the hypnotist has chosen the most suggestible to do the most outrageous things.  That said, we can do things under hypnosis – especially bear or be unaware of pain – that we could not do were we not in a hypnotic state, but I digress.  LeGuin is using the hypnosis as a tool to clarify that, as terrifying as it is to be responsible for one’s own dreams, it might be relieving, but the effects could be much more problematic, to relinquish control of one’s dreams to another.

All that said, having the mental health treater function as a hypnotist who can make suggestions that override the conscious and unconscious intent of the hero is a great plot device.  Irv Yalom, a psychotherapist who wrote a wonderful text about existential psychotherapy, maintains that freedom is one of four great existential dilemmas.  From this perspective, freedom, which we think of as desirable, is actually problematic in that we are responsible for our actions.  We can be held accountable and, just as George feels guilty for the effects of his dreams, we feel guilty for what we have done in the world.  George, who, I think, embodies a kind of everyman, does what many (most) of us would do – as we did in the classic Milgram experiments where we acquiesced to the orders of a person in authority to shock someone in a laboratory -  he turns over the responsibility for his dreams to the hypnotist.

The act of turning over the dreams creates one of the central tensions in this text:  it becomes more and more apparent to the dreamer that his therapist does, indeed, know about the effects of George's dreams and that the therapist may be exploiting the dreams to achieve his own ends, but the therapist won’t acknowledge to the dreamer for a long time that he is onto the power of the dreams.  But, as a result of the dreams, not only do 8 billion people die in the plague, but the therapist gets a window, then a corner office with windows, then he is the director of a whole center of dream research and hobnobs with the governmental officials who oversee mental health.  He also, I think, becomes more physically attractive.  The tension is a tension that is present to some level in every treatment – does the treater have my best interests at heart?  Is he interested in what he can help me do for myself or is he interested in me for what it can do for the treater – does he care more about me or the fee that he gets from me or the appreciation he receives from me or the gratification he gets from watching me change?  Freud, naively I think, thought that the analyst’s own analysis would “cure” him or her of wanting anything beyond the fee from the patient. 

It was at about this point, as the dreamer is creating new world after new world under the hypnotist’s guidance that the book went from being uncanny and intriguing to being destabilizing.  I became aware of the ways that I work with the dreams of my patients – and their conscious hopes and dreams – and, in doing this; I am working with them to create new worlds – and neither they nor I know the ramifications that the changes in their worlds will bring.  We don’t change the past, but, in so far as the treatment is effective, we are having an impact on the future – it will be different than it otherwise would have been if we had not worked together.  This is always background in our work, but while I was reading the book this came very much into the foreground and I felt keenly aware of the possible directions that each intervention might lead.  It felt a little giddy – like flying down a slope on skis and deciding whether to take this trail or that one – even as I was doing the work that I do every day, helping people to make sense of what it is that they are thinking.

It also has ramifications for the current state of political affairs.  We don't have overpopulation in the developed world because women there have control over their reproductive functions in ways that are not always available in third world countries where population growth can be explosive.  We don't have the kind of local pollution that was forecast in this book because of government regulation through the EPA that ended such things as acid rain.  At the time that I write this, a woman's right to manage her own reproduction is being attacked, and the head of the EPA is someone who has fought against what the EPA has worked on for decades to achieve.  If the governmental regulations change, what will be the outcome of the dream that is our reality forty years from now?

In order to protect himself from the treater, George Orr (who is white, as is his hypnotist) hires an attorney – a black woman, who figures out how to be present in the treatment interactions without the hypnotist knowing that she is there as an advocate for his patient.  This raises a host of cross cultural or diversity issues that are addressed by LeGuin in ways that seem a bit dated because they are not as sharply defined as I think they would be if they were written today – I think our discourse about race is miles and miles from where it was then – and is simultaneously surprisingly fresh and current. 

As the relationship between Orr and the attorney develops across a series of dream induced alternate universes, one of the dreams eliminates skin coloration as a means of reducing racial tension in the world and everyone has the same grey shaded skin.  This creates a decided loss for George (though not for the rest of society that doesn’t remember alternatives).  He finds that the attorney is fundamentally different – a part of what he liked about her was shaped by her experience as a member of what we would now call a marginalized group – and he finds her less attractive both physically - the beauty of her brown skin is gone - but also psychologically - she no longer has the edginess she had before - as a result of this transformation.  I also think LeGuin overreached in this change.  How would history have brought the same individual to Portland if the history of race relations had never occurred?  This is a moment when the novel, spinning as it does a hypnotic dream trance, seems, like one of those dreams that awakens us, to spin perilously close to losing the integrity of the dream in order to make a symbolic point - or to gratify a wish that is beyond the reach of even this dreamer.

I think that “vivid dreaming” is a concept that has emerged since LeGuin was writing.  As currently described, vivid dreamers feel that they can direct their dreams.  The vivid dreams of this man are being directed by the hypnotist, not by himself.  But LeGuin, as the author who dreams up this book, is creating a text that is complex, vivid, but also, in some sense, more linear than it needs to be.  Though she was awarded many science fiction awards and was often a finalist for such awards as the Pulitzer, she was never awarded it.  I wonder if part of that has to do with particular limitations of the genre, particularly the introduction of concrete technical mechanisms to address some of the messy psychological issues that are at the heart of the book. 

In this text, the lathe of heaven is a reference to an Eastern mystical premise that getting too close to an understanding of the workings of the universe (the lathe of heaven) will end badly – we need to know when to step back and realize that some things simply can’t be known (NeilTyson DeGrasse notes that we can only know about that part of the cosmos that is close enough that light can reach us from it – things located farther away than that – the light of their existence will never reach us).  If we get too close to the lathe, we will be chewed up by it.  This very intriguing idea – one that goes against much of what we in the West strive for – and that should give up pause – as I felt a pause in my interactions with patients – gets played out in a very concrete fashion in the plot of the book. 

I have all but spoiled the ending, but won’t talk about it, not just to prevent providing additional spoiler damage, but because I think the ending is not the point of the book.  I found the initial premises incredibly interesting – and I also think the premise that this might or might not have been the functioning of a deluded mind – one in which George alone experiences the world as altered by his dreaming – could perhaps have been an even more tantalizing book.  I think there is something about the mystery that LeGuin is both respecting, by noting it and having us “step away from the lathe”, but also collapsing, by articulating a particular mechanism for it that reduces it to something that we can approach with our technology – as if we could in fact dial up the universe with the right gear – something that I think doesn’t give the universe’s mysteries enough credit.  I ultimately found this book which I liked tremendously to disappoint as it reduced rather than expanded the mystery and turned something mystical into something more like a boiler plate thriller with an ending that I felt didn’t live up to the promise of the premise.

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