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.

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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.

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