Echo in the Canyon - A Movie about Music and Listening

When I was about 15, I went to see the movie Woodstock.  One of the things that stuck with me was the statement by David Crosby asking the crowd to go easy on Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young because this was only the second time they had played together.  I remember thinking, “What a stage to start your career on.”  Well, not so much.  These guys had been singing and playing together for years – they just hadn’t been a band in that particular configuration…

Echo in the Canyon is a documentary put together by Bob Dylan’s son, Jakob Dylan, to commemorate a period of time – roughly 1965 to 1967 – when a group of musicians, living in and around Laurel Canyon on the west of LA, redefined pop music by marrying folk with rock and roll and creating something that appealed to the masses, but was much more sophisticated than bubble gum pop.  As my reaction to David Crosby betrays, despite this being music that was formative for me in various ways, I was not tuned into this scene when it was happening (I was between five and seven years old during this time) nor did I have much access to knowledge of the players in Buffalo Springfield, the Mamas and the Papas, or the Beach Boys. 

This is film is not, at least in Dylan’s mind, aimed at me and educating me – though I am likely to be the tail end of the audience that is most interested in it and, based on the highly unscientific sample of the others in the audience who were humming along with most every tune at the screening on Friday night, this is the once hip and now hip replacement age group that turns out for it.  But his intent is to show musicians of his generation (he was born in 1969) and those younger than him, what happened in Laurel Canyon so that it can inform their artistic growth.

This is a project with an interesting intent then – to (to quote Crosby Stills and Nash) “Teach your children well” and to pass the creative torch.  And the story that is told is, I think, inherently interesting.  Essential to the story is the Beatles, coming to America with folk informed tunes – the chord changes they were playing were known to the folk artists in the various groups – and those individuals recognized the folk roots with a rock and roll beat and realized they, too, could become pop stars instead of being counterculture people eking out a living in smoky bars (O.K., they never said anything like that, but the implication was there – what they said was that they were excited about the possibilities of stretching their art form).   They began writing and performing folk informed rock and popular music (The Mamas and the Papas song that begins “All the leaves are brown” and is called California dreaming epitomizes this for me), and they lived near enough to each other in Laurel Canyon that they could drop in on each other unannounced and simply play together.  And when they did this, they also wrote songs together.

If the Beatles were the creative inspiration, it was Brian Wilson, of the Beach Boys, that was the artistic genius at the center of this group.  Perhaps the most interesting bit of lore that is at the heart of this movie is a tale that is quite well known in musical circles.  Brian Wilson, who would go mad at some point, and who had as successful an interview in this film as perhaps he has had in decades, wrote the album “Pet Sounds” while the rest of the Beach Boys were on tour.  He wasn’t touring with them because it was distracting.  When Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas dropped into his home, she asked his wife what was going on with the house – all of the furniture was gone from the living room and in its place was six inches of sand on the floor with a grand piano, a beach ball and a bench.  Brian Wilson’s wife replied, “I don’t know, but he’s making some incredible music.”  That incredible music was Pet Sounds which was the first rock and roll concept album – an album of music that used instruments and sounds that couldn’t be recreated in the concert hall – so it was an album not made to support touring and other typical band activities.

The Beatles, who were no longer planning to tour because they couldn’t hear themselves play above the screaming of their fans, were so enamored of Pet Sounds that they produced their own concept album – Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – the album Rolling Stone Magazine rates as the number one Rock and Roll Album of all time, with Pet Sounds rated number two.  Now, I don’t know, but I think that the these two albums are very good, but my sense is that they may be given pride of place because they heralded to the world that Rock and Roll was not just for teeny boppers, but that it was art – and created a whole new way for the genre to think of itself.  It was, of course, also one of those echoes that this film is trying to capture and to create in the generations that will follow.  The Beatles inspired the Laurel Canyon musicians and one of them, Brian Wilson, inspired the Beatles in return – and the history of music changed.

The culture that supported the creative exploits of the musicians was a boundary crossing and mixing culture.  Not only were they mixing folk with rock, which of course had been appropriated from the blues, but they were mixing with each other.  Michelle Phillips describes her sexual relationship with fellow band member Denny Doherty that caused her husband John, also a band member, to write the song “Go where you want to go” encouraging her to engage with whomever she wanted wherever she wanted with, as she pointed out, the snide but unstated “bitch” at the end of it.  Watching the group perform that song was poignant, but watching a cover being done by Jakob Dylan as John and Jade joyfully singing the part of Michelle as she is able, guilt free, to revel in the freedom that is being afforded her was absolutely delightful.  In other words, as much as free love was part of the culture, that did not mean that the sexual boundary crossings did not come without cost - but also carried with them a creative enthusiasm.

Similarly, the musical boundary crossings involved “taking what didn’t belong”.  Who knew that George Harrison’s “If I needed someone” is modeled after what I assume is an old folk song that he heard Pete Singer singing, “The bells of Rhymney”.  Or that Eric Clapton would cop to outright stealing (if not being conscious that he was doing it at the time) “Let it rain” from Buffalo Springfield’s “Questions”.  I am reminded at this point of a book that I have not written about but probably should someday called “Steal like an artist” by Austin Kleon.  It’s hard to write a post about it because it is so brief – but in its pithiness it proposes that we are less likely to create something out of nothing than to discover novel ways of rearranging things that already exist – and that we should, as Eric Clapton did, just cop to that.

  

Creative communities engage in all kinds of boundary crossings – as did the early psychoanalytic communities, as portrayed in the film A dangerous method – another thing I should post on.  I have posted on the importance of boundaries, especially sexual boundaries in current psychoanalytic practice, but I think this movie raises the question of the relationship between boundaries of all sorts, including sexual boundaries, and creativity.  Is there something about exploring who it is that we are in the eyes of others – is there something about relating to a variety of people in a variety of situations that evokes feelings that get portrayed in poignant and important ways?  Do we have to experience certain things in order to express them?  As I write this, I find myself saying how could this not be the case?  But I also hear another voice saying that we can imagine ourselves into the minds of others – we don’t have to experience the loss (for instance) of a child to know what that would feel like – and to write, or sing, about what that would be like.

The film also raises questions about the relationship between using drugs and creativity – but also madness.  I was struck by a story about Brian Wilson requesting speed to power a twenty four marathon of working on a single tune – one that he kept banging away at without stop apparently during the entirety of a trip that seemed to be based on a high dose.  What the relationship between his pre-existing predilection to madness, his use of drugs - including LSD, and his creativity was and how these are related to his going off the rails is purely speculative, though I think there is evidence that each of these aspects played some role.  One of the things that I liked about the interview with Wilson was his talking about the sound qualities of each of the recording studios in LA – he clearly viewed them as instruments in their own rights.  And I think it important to remember that the individuals who created these songs and this genre were incredible musicians in addition to being members of a unique and highly interconnected community.   

Competition was also clearly an important motivating factor in this group of musicians.  As George Harrison said in another documentary, when I saw that people like John and Paul could write songs, I thought, well why then can’t I?  There was clearly competition between the Brits and the members of this group, and also a great deal of competition within the group to achieve greater popularity and to produce better material than the last guy had done.

I would like to end with a comment on the film.  It exists because of an idea of a record company executive that this community and its products should be remembered.  But it also exists because of the interest of Jakob Dylan.  His presence as the interviewer of so many of the artists in this film is essential to it – and his presence – as the son of Bob Dylan and as a musician in his own right – is essential to the integrity of the film, but it is more the way that he is present – in a very un-ego motivated way – listening with curiosity and no agenda – that binds the film.  He becomes, in the film, a psychoanalytic exemplar – listening without determining – present and engaged but without his own agenda.  Wanting to know what it was that this place was – and wanting – as best he is able – to get a sense of that and, because he is doing that, we are able to get some sense of it, too.

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Romeo and Juliet – Star crossed lovers or emblems of the essence of romantic love?

Charles Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet – an opera that we saw last night – boils a familiar play down to its essential elements and presents them in a straightforward way.  How can you not know that Romeo, a Montague, goes to the costume ball of his sworn enemy – the Capulets, with his trusty friend Mercutio?  While there, he falls deeply in love with Juliet, the daughter of Count Capulet, though she is being betrothed, by her cousin Tybalt, to Paris.  Romeo woos Juliet, first at the ball and then, when he is kicked out, beneath her window in the famous balcony scene.  Then, the next day, after being secretly married to Juliet by a priest who imagines decreasing the warring tensions between the families, Romeo is confronted by Tybalt.  Romeo, who cannot say the real reason, refuses to fight his new secret brother-in-law.  Tybalt calls Romeo a coward at which point Mercutio takes up the challenge to defend Romeo's honor.  Romeo, intending to stop the fighting, disarms Mercutio just as Tybalt attacks, killing Mercutio.  To avenge Mercutio, Romeo kills Tybalt – and runs to Juliet, his new wife, after killing her cousin and being exiled from Verona by the Duke.  They have their wedding night – she forgives him for she knows that his murder was an act of passion.  They plan to escape Verona together and part with sweet sorrow after the dawn arrives. 

The next day, Juliet discovers that she is to marry Paris and the priest who wed her to Romeo concocts a plan where he will give her a potion that will make it look like she has died and her funeral will prevent the second marriage and she will wake up in the tomb and escape with Romeo, whom the priest will inform of the ruse.  Romeo, distraught at hearing of her death, heads straight to the tomb (picking up some poison on the way) without receiving the intended message from the priest.  After he takes the poison, he sings again of his love, and Juliet awakes (unlike in Shakespeare, the two have one last moment together).  When Juliet realizes that he has taken all of his poison and is dying, she kills herself by plunging a knife into herself.

This play – and the opera and the many other art forms (Shakespeare in Love and West Side Story spring to mind) is so familiar – and so frequently billed as the tragedy of star-crossed lovers, that I found myself wondering, as I listened to it, whether it wasn’t really just the tragedy of romantic love period.  The first moment that this occurred to me was in the balcony scene.  The beginning of this scene in the opera involves Juliet ruminating out loud about her new found love for Romeo – not knowing that Romeo himself is hiding in the dark beneath the window, and when she discovers that he is there, she is not overcome with joy, but with fear.  She worries what he will do with the information that he has surreptitiously received.  I realized how we protect ourselves when we truly feel romantic love.  To let anyone else know that we have feeling for someone is scary business.  We feel, and the music wonderfully portrayed it when Juliet discovers Romeo listening, vulnerable.

Now, there is a bit of a double standard here.  Romeo was loudly proclaiming his “love” for Juliet earlier in the evening – without acknowledging the least bit of vulnerability.  We could chalk this up to gender differences, with men traditionally having less to worry about in pledging their troth – they won’t become pregnant and they are the empowered members of the pair – but I think that, while that can fall along traditional gender lines, the issues are actually shared by both lovers.  There is a bravado to sharing our feelings for another – to letting the world know of our love – and in doing that, we are vulnerable, but also prepared to protect ourselves if that love is not returned.  But when we let the other know that we are not just casting around, but actually feel something profound for this particular individual – particularly if the other has already expressed interest, we are suddenly standing on the edge of an abyss – everything will be different if we cross that divide.  The divide is concretized in the play and the opera because marriage is a necessary outcome of love at that time between these people, but I think the feeling of crossing a divide is an important component of romantic love.

The chasm that separates the Montagues and the Capulets – enmity between these two families – has been the explanation for the dividing line between Romeo and Juliet – but, just as with the gender differences above, I think there is a potential that a more universal experience is being covered up by the particulars of the families.  I think that allying with another family – any family – is a foreign experience.  Even if you grew up next to each other, the habits and traditions of the family next door are slightly different than your own.  And each of the members of the marriage will experience the traditions of the other family as foreign.  So that loving – and especially marrying – another is moving into foreign territory.  From this perspective, all marriages are cross cultural.

But it is not just that the traditions are different; marriage – at least a romantic marriage – is a kind of death.  At its best, it is the (partial) death of one’s selfish regard for oneself.  We have to give up being the cared for one within our family – the one whose cousin Tybalt will find a suitable marriage partner for – and we have to become executives in the family.  But we also have to take our lover’s needs into account.  Indeed, we strangely want to put them at the forefront (in the best of loves), even if that means that our own needs don’t get attended to – that our own needs become dead to us.  And we revel in this.  In moments of true love, we feel good giving something up for someone we love (O. Henry’s Gift of the Magi comes to mind here).  Romantic love has, at its base, a kind of selflessness.

Now, whether a lover is, in fact, moved to be selfless – well, there’s a rub.  Many of our romances don’t turn out to be so romantic.  But when our cultural expectation is that romantic love will result in something like the experience of Romeo and Juliet, if our lover isn’t willing to split with his or her family for us – if our lover isn’t willing to commit suicide at the thought of not being with us, then we question whether they really do love us.  And this becomes the source of endless bits of friction in the marriages and the relationships of so many people.

Perhaps that has something to do with the treatment of dreams and sleep, daytime and nighttime in the opera.  In the opening scene, Romeo is hesitant to go to the party, and Mercutio makes fun of his anxieties by essentially calling them the product of a nightmare.  We know that he should be wary, for we know what the ultimate outcome of the night will be.  The scenes between Romeo and Juliet happen only at night - at the party - beneath the balcony - early in the morning when they are wed - their wedding night - and then in the crypt.  Daytime is filled with the nightmares of murdering Tybalt and Juliet being pushed towards marrying Paris.  The two lovers play with extending the night - it is the place of dreams and also of love for them - and welcoming the day, when they want to cut short their interaction because it is going in unwanted directions.  Romeo at one point commands the day not to come - essentially telling the earth to stop revolving - so that he can have more time with Juliet.

But their time together is dream time - it is, on some level, not real.  They don't really know each other.  They have barely met.  They are attracted to each other - and imagine each other - and discover, in the little time that they have, that they are as the other imagined them - but they don't spend time outside of the night together - they don't leave the world of dreams to discover the realities of the world.  When those realities intrude - when Juliet discovers Romeo has killed her cousin, she quickly forgives him, even before he has asked for it.  They are each who the other imagines them (dreams them) to be - and they are, together, who we dream them to be - the legendary lovers.

A little discussed aspect of the psychoanalytic relationship with a therapist is that this is one of the few places where the form of the relationship is not just fair game for discussion, but it becomes central to the work.  Further, there is an emphasis of the experience of the relationship from the perspective of one of the partners in that relationship – the patient or client.  Their experience of the relationship is privileged.  The therapist’s experience of the relationship, while important, is used to better understand the experience of the patient or client.  If the client is disappointed because the therapist did not act in a particular way, the client’s disappointment becomes a focus of discussion – why and how was the patient disappointed?  This doesn’t necessarily lead to changes in the relationship – but it does lead to being able to talk about what the expectations in the relationship are.  In love relationships it can be hard to talk about those expectations – for among other reasons because to articulate something like the belief that the other’s actions betray their lack of love; well, that is putting the complainer in the position of Juliet letting Romeo know that she loves him and fears that he does not return that love– it makes her vulnerable and gives him power.  So those thoughts stay underground.  In good psychotherapy, those thoughts surface to be discussed and, when things go well, to be understood and worked through.

I once joined a group of men in monthly discussions.  We called ourselves a men’s group, but, though two of us were therapists, we didn’t have a “leader” and we didn’t really have an agenda.  We got together to talk about the things that were important in our lives.  I found it oddly gratifying to discover that one of the other members, not a therapist at all – in fact he worked on the grounds crew of the local parks board cutting grass – noted that relationships were the hardest things in life to navigate.  It helped me realize that people outside of my profession get that what it is that we do is both difficult and very important.

As a side and ending note, I once attended a workshop by a group of family therapists who were demonstrating how their family therapy suicide prevention plan worked with families who had a suicidal teenager, and they used the Capulets, with Juliet as the suicidal teenager.  It was a fascinating model and a fascinating demonstration, but it was also the case that it came with a disclaimer – they wanted people to know that great art – in this case tragedy – would not be prevented by their therapy.  I would disagree and agree with that statement.  First, I think that some kinds of tragedy, teen age suicide among them, can be prevented by discovering and addressing the forces that are leading towards that as a viable option.  I think that, as upsetting as it would have been for Count Capulet to welcome a Montague – especially the murderer of Tybalt – into the family – he would prefer that to losing his daughter.  How that would be navigated, I don’t know.

But I agree with the other side of the coin.  I think that marriages – truly romantic marriages – and then those that aspire to be but aren’t – are tragedies.  They involve the deaths of the lovers – who end up on a funeral pyre together.  In the best of those tragedies, a new pair of people emerge – a couple that has been transformed – for good and ill – by the process of loving each other.  And we continue to hold out hope – more than 400 years after Shakespeare first introduced them to us – that we, like Romeo and Juliet, can be transformed by love.

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King Lear – What folly it is to grow old.

King Lear, Glenda Jackson, Into the Wild, The Marriage of Figaro, Psychoanalysis of Shakespeare, Psychoanalysis of King Lear, Trump

We decided to see a version of King Lear that was being staged in New York.  It starred Glenda Jackson and the write-up in the Times emphasized what an amazing actress and then labor party leader she was.  We YouTubed her lambasting of Margaret Thatcher and were excited to see her.  After we had made our travel plans, the play opened to mixed reviews and was to close the day after we saw it.  Oh, well… perhaps we should have waited until the reviews came out?  Actually, it was good to see a flawed version of the play – I think it revealed some of the fault lines in it.  And, flawed though it was, there was some very fine acting and it is, after all, one of Shakespeare’s great plays…

The first lines of the play involve the Duke of Gloucester introducing his bastard son Edmund to the Earl of Kent.  In his introduction, the Duke pays particular attention to the pleasure he received in fathering the child, but the excruciating quality of the introduction rankles Edmund (no surprise) and he reacts by providing the first soliloquy of the play.  This particular Edmund was played by Pedro Pascal whose read on Edmund is that he is exasperated in an adolescent way about his forever being libeled for something that he did not participate in – his parent’s coupling.  He swaggers through the play, gleefully playing at pitting this person against that person in order to achieve his desired ends, but there is no moment when he seems to really feel what it really means to be a bastard – to hate himself for that (I imagine) and, as a result of this hate, to hate the world that cares most about this aspect of himself that he had no part in forming.  I think that this part could have been played with the gravitas as well as the absurdity of the bastard perspective more in mind.

In prepping to see the play, I read Harold Bloom’s criticism of it.  He said that he has never seen a good version of the play because there are three critical roles – not one.  And he has never seen the other critical roles – Edmund, Gloucester's bastard son and Edgar, Gloucester’s legitimate son, well played when there is a good Lear.  That was certainly true in this performance as well.  But, if this is always the problem, could it be that the roles rather than the players are the problem?  Or, even more deeply, is there something about this play that is too deeply disturbing about us for us to be able to enact – certainly it is the case that Lear is among the least self-aware characters in the Shakespearean canon, and, despite Edmund’s and Edgar’s soliloquys, they don’t seem particularly self-aware either, though each in different ways.

After this play, we saw a presentation on a very different book and film, Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild.  The book is an account of the life and death of Christopher McCandless. The film version of the book is told from the perspective of Chris’s sister Carine McCandless whose position is that Christopher chose to leave civilization because of his discovery that his parents never married.  His father was married to another woman, when Chris was born to his mother and his father had a child with his wife after Chris was born.  Though the father ultimately left his wife, he never divorced her and he never supported his other son.  Christopher was mad at his father both for making him a bastard and for failing to provide for his half brother, and was distressed that he was illegitimate.  The irony of the comparison is that Edmund tries to heal his wound by grabbing for legitimacy, while McCandless tries to erase his wound by leaving civilization and its judgement of him behind.  Neither of them is successful.

The thesis of the presenter at the Krakauer event, Alex Menrisky, was complex, but included the idea that going into the wild represented a reversal (in fantasy) of the developmental arc articulated by Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents.  Essentially the fantasy is (and here I am committing a sin – Dr. Menrisky worked very hard to avoid reducing ideas to two dimensional pastiches) that the damage done by civilization to the individual – the destruction of the primal person that we are – can be reversed by leaving civilization and going into the wild.  The idea is that nature is a better parent than any we can find in the human world.  Menrisky was suggesting that Krakauer saw this as a long standing fantasy played out by various nature writers in our American history – going back to Thoreau.  If we want to carry it even further, Lear might be the first example of this, with his wandering madly onto the heath when the humans who professed love for him failed to follow through on that love within two weeks of his bestowing his kingdom on them.

But I am getting ahead of myself.  In that first scene, after we are introduced to Edmund, we are introduced to Lear and his three daughters.  Lear is most connected to his youngest daughter.  He promises, pretty much out of the blue, to reward his three daughters with lands proportionate to their praise of him as he has decided to retire from being king.  The elder two daughters, Goneril and Regan, falsely praise him, and he gives them their lands, each after their respective speeches (which undercuts the proposed apportionment strategy – he decided ahead of time who would get which lands and simply expected them all to say he was wonderful), and then when Cordelia, his youngest and the only child who actually does love him, refuses to make false claims about her love and explains why not, Lear becomes enraged, divides her portion between her sisters, and asks her two suitors if they still want to marry her.  The Duke of Burgundy backs off, but the King of France, one of the few stand up guys in the play, accepts her and she is whisked off to France.

So, Lear becomes a king without a kingdom.  He expects that his two daughters, who have professed their love for him, will support him, and his party of 100 knights, as she shuttles back and forth between their homes.  Well, that lasts for about two weeks, then Lear is out in nature – who turns out, just as she did for McCandless, to be a cruel mother and not very hospitable.  Lear survives her which, (spoiler alert) McCandless does not.  Lear seems to misunderstand that a king is loved not for himself – not because he is such a wonderful guy – but because he embodies the state.  In psychoanalytic terms, the people project onto him something of the paternal – something about taking care of them – and love him because he is doing that – he is caring for them.  I suppose in the same way, daughters (and sons) care for their fathers – love their fathers – because they are loved by them.  Lear loses the love of his country and the love of his daughters when he abdicates from his role as their king and as their father - as the one who loves and cares for them.

By chance, we have also recently seen a wonderful production of Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro.  In it, the Duke has rescinded the law where he had first right to have sex with any woman who was married in the Dukedom (before her husband would).  This may sound strange to our ear, but it was a right in various places – including a right exercised by priests in some places.  The Duke gets it that this is a bad law, but he also lusts after Figaro’s bride to be, Susanna.  Serious hijinks follow as the Duke's wife ends up dressing up as Susanna to catch him trying to woo another woman and the Duke, who is really the cad in this play, asks forgiveness of his wife – something that seems out of character – and something that fixes the rupture between him and his wife – but also between him and Figaro, who is his servant, and, most broadly, between him and those he governs.  He returns to being a Duke of integrity.

Reparation is part of what is missing from a tragedy.  Acknowledging a wrong doing and setting things straight does not occur.  Cordelia tries – she returns from France to fight Regan and Goneril who, before she showed up, intended to fight each other, and do fight over Edmund as each has fallen more in lust with him than the other.  The sense of entitlement that each has – Lear for affection unearned – and greater than is warranted, as Cordelia points out; Edmund for the love that he has never received – but (I think because he did not know true love from his father) can’t recognize that the sparring sister’s lust for him has nothing to do with love; Gloucester, who feels entitled to fealty from Edmund despite his abuse of him, so that his being blinded in the play is a playing out of his being blind to the impact of his treatment of Edmund and to Edmund's not surprising duplicity; Goneril and Regan, who feel entitled to love in much the way that Edmund does – and who, like Edmund, have not felt their father’s love, and feel entitled to look for love wherever they might find it and to break the oaths that they have made to their fathers, and even Cordelia, who feels entitled to tell her father the truth even though she knows he can't hear it – things end very badly for all of them. 

Lear’s time upon the heath, unlike McCandless’s romanticized time in the Wilderness (especially in the movie, but apparently by the readers of the book), is brutal and he is saved from the savageness of nature only by the love and caring of Kent, the fool – who also despises him, and Edgar – who knows the value of a father, perhaps because, as the legitimate son, he did feel loved by Gloucester.  But Edgar cannot reveal himself to Lear or to Gloucester, when he comes upon him, nor can Kent reveal himself to Lear.  Both Lear and Gloucester have rebuked and disowned Kent and Edgar respectively – turning against those who genuinely love them to depend on those who would abuse them.  After they have lost their power to harm their caregivers, they are pitiable, and it would be shameful to them to have their state be known by those who love them; so, out of love, Kent and Edgar keep their identities hidden and help as they might.

Unlike the Duke in Figaro’s marriage, the realization that they have done wrong comes to Lear and Gloucester only after they have lost their power to repair things, so they are doomed.  Unfortunately, they bring down those they love as they do this – Cordelia is sentenced to death by Edmund, acting in Goneril and Regan’s name, and Edmund’s repentance for having ordered the death of the legitimately loving daughter comes too late to save her.  Lear dies of a broken heart after finding her.  Edgar is left (along with Regan’s husband) to reign over a kingdom whose concept of ruling has been corrupted.

Menrisky, in his interpretation of Into the Wild, maintains that what is underlying the romanticization of McCandless is the idea that undergirds psychoanalysis: that the process of civilizing us – the process that leads us to have an ego – is undoable.  We can return to a natural state and rebuild ourselves.  Menrisky sees this as a false promise.  But it is a promise – a promise that I felt and wished for in my own analysis.  I remember a supervisor commenting that the people she saw coming out of psychoanalysis (co-workers at a psychoanalytically oriented hospital – people she knew well before and after their analyses), were more like themselves after the analysis than different.  She saw them as better versions of themselves - but still very much themselves.  The analyst and the analysis do not erase what has come before and start over with a blank sheet – going back somehow to the beginning of time and (despite the claims of some treatments) reparenting the person in a new and healthy manner.  Our task is to figure out how to take who we are and become better at being ourselves.

Lear and, I think in the mind of Menrisky and Krakauer, McCandless abdicate from the responsibility of being themselves, of becoming the executives of the lives that they were meant to live.  The fool was played wonderfully in this (and other productions) by the same actress who played Cordelia (Ruth Wilson – the only Tony nominated element in the production).  Doubling the role allowed us to see that the love that Cordelia holds for Lear is filled with disappointment as well as reverence.  The fool is downright disdainful of the king, who seems to be too self-involved to be aware that he is being made a fool of – or more accurately – that he has made a fool of himself.  But I also think the fool is the tiny voice of self-awareness that we sometimes hear but disregard. I think this play, not unlike Hamlet, may be hinting at something about the arduous process of coming to know oneself – and the tragic character of that process inevitably involves significant pain – and despite Edgar’s trying to protect Gloucester from that pain, it will come home – despite Cordelia’s love, Lear will despair – and despite his best efforts, Edmund is still a bastard.  Accepting our role and playing it, accepting what life has dealt us, is difficult – and we rail against it.  But all of our ranting and raving doesn’t change the paths that are open to us.

The exception to this, of course, is the path laid in the comedy, The Marriage of Figaro.  Here the Duke recognizes the corruption of his position – the ways in which it imperils others – including his wife, whom he loves – and his citizens – whom he ultimately cares for and about – to a certain extent in spite of himself.  Mozart seems to be telling the Austrian King that if he wants to avoid the fate of Lear – and that of his sister Marie Antoinette – he needs to value the lives of those he rules.  This caution is an important one as the governments of the world made the transition from despotic, Middle Ages rule to a rule that the enlightenment would ultimately make possible, the rule of the people.  But the people would have to step up.  So: a couple of notes about this particular production of Lear.

King Lear in Trump Style Gold Leaf...

This Lear was set in Trump Tower – the set was floor to ceiling gold paint.  If the point wasn’t driven home by that, the fool pointed to his American Flag socks when delivering a soliloquy on the corruption of Lear and the country and the blood money in Act five were ruble notes.  OK, we get it, when we are hit on the head.  Trump is Lear – he has abdicated from responsible governing and all kinds of malarkey is going on when his hand is off the tiller as he wanders from Washington to Palm Beach to enjoy games of golf, and even more goes on when he shows up to “govern”.  And we get it, the American people abdicated their responsibility when they elected this Lear.  We are the Gloucesters of the world who are blind to the foibles of those we serve who should be serving us – we are the Gonerils and Regans who offer the fawning message of false love and then proceed to do what we need to do to have the government serve our needs.  Will Trump wake up, though, and realize what he has done and mourn the death of Cordelia?  Who among us is Cordelia?  

I found it much more compelling, in our conversation about McCandless, when a fellow conversant noted that while McCandless imagined the wild as a nurturing presence, it really was a repetition of – not a replacement for – the hardships that he suffered at the hands of his father – hardships that went beyond fathering him out of wedlock – hardships that included locking him in a closet with his hands bound above his head for hours at a time.  The speakers point was that the European taming of this continent is written as if we were all Daniel Boone’s who loved the challenge of the wilderness when the wilderness was, in fact, a traumatic place to live.  So, when we say “Make America Great Again”, we are asking for a return to a time when we had to be brutal in order to survive – and thrive – and we were brutal to each other.  In this sense, Trump is the return of the father who never has to say he’s sorry – the return of the unapologetic – the man who will be neither a tragic hero – nor a comic one – but one who will simply continue a tradition, not alter it – in the ways that both tragedy and comedy can do that.  He is, then, artless.  I think this play fails as a referent to him because we have no evidence that he will ever realize his folly - though of course we had no evidence that Lear would either.  But I do wonder if Jackson's Lear here was less sympathetic than the Lear she played in London to rave reviews because she was also playing a man for whom she has nothing but disdain.

The second point is that the cast included a woman as Lear – and also as Gloucester (and, yes, as the fool, though that is not so unusual).  Maybe there is something about our aging that makes us less gender bound.  Both actors were convincing in their paternalism without pretending to be men.  But certainly we are discovering that we can be less gender bound than we have led ourselves to believe.  And, perhaps, as we emerge from a gender bound past, we can become able to be blind to ourselves (and discover those blind spots) in manifold new and interesting ways…

The third point is that this casting included a deaf actor as Cornwall, Regan's husband.  This necessitated including an American Sign Language translator on stage.  In a play that includes blindness - it was interesting to have that blindness instigated by a deaf man - one who was deaf to the true nature of his wife.

Finally, to return to the beginning, I think that portraying our blind (and deaf) spots; whether we are Lear and don't realize how pompous and vain we are, or Edmund and don't realize how our sense of being uncared for has made us uncaring, or Edgar and we don't realize how our fear of doing the wrong thing keeps us from doing the right thing - are difficult to portray.  We are beings with an unconscious for a reason - we need to not know.  To ask three different actors to portray to the audience who they are without somehow knowing themselves and to do this simultaneously and in different ways, may simply be asking too much.  And, since each of these characters springs from the mind of one man (or perhaps a small group of men with a lead author), that these aspects of known and unknown should reside simultaneously in the mind of that one man and interact with each other on the stage (or not - Edmund and Lear never actually communicate directly with each other) becomes a representation of just how complicated it is to be human - to try to transcend that which we are and, in the process, to discover that who we are limits our very ability to do that thing that we would most desire being able to do - to become something greater - something or someone that is not bound by our own nature and by nature itself - and to fail at that in not just one arena but several simultaneously - perhaps that is just too much for us to take in at one moment. 

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The Overstory: Trees are more important than we knew.

Environment, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, The Overstory, Richard Powers, Pulitzer Prize

I just read the most enthralling book about trees.  I have also recently published my 250^th post as the Reluctant Psychoanalyst.  Virtually all of those posts are about people – in all their confusing complexity.  Many of the posts are about wrapping my mind around people at the margins – and wrestling with the idea of how to value all people.  And then this book lands in my lap.  It is a Pulitzer Prize winner – so I decided to read it.  The Pulitzer Prize in fiction is awarded to the book in a given year that, in the opinion of the committee, best describes the American Experience.  Of course, this is a matter of opinion – but those committees – over the years – have recommended some very fine books.  And this is no exception.  Except that, early in this book, it turns all of my work as a blogger on its ear.  It seems to say that people are not that interesting.  They are a carbuncle on creation.  The center of creation – and perhaps creation’s best exemplar is – the tree.  And the tree, this book suggests, has been marginalized by people.  As the book progresses, this idea becomes more nuanced and ultimately shifts, but it remains the author’s position that human beings’ well-being is dependent on the well-being of the trees.

Because this is a book that is ultimately about people (and the American experience), and because we are much more likely to resonate with people than with trees, it is a book about people who resonate with trees – and, as we resonate with these people, the author hopes (I think) that we will follow the lead of his people and that we, too, will resonate with the trees.  So the heroes in this book emerge – slowly (we get to know them as complicated individual people first – people who have some connection – sometimes visceral but often seemingly tangential – with trees.  They have very different backstories – they come from vastly different biomes, as it were) – but they come together as tree huggers.  They get there mostly by accident.  Trees figure in their lives, but their passion for trees is just one of many threads in their lives until that thread is revealed to be a wrapped skein of threads that unravel and then weave themselves into a pattern with trees as the central motif.  Most, but not all of the characters end up becoming interwoven not just with trees, but with each other.  By the end, each of them has touched all of the others, even if only in their imagination.

As I write this post, I sit in my study and look across the street at a magnificent hemlock.  Actually, it’s a pretty run of the mill hemlock.  We used to have a magnificent hemlock in our front yard, but it was blown over by the remnants of a hurricane that traveled through the Midwest ten years ago.  I learned then that the hemlock is a shallow rooted tree – held in place not by a tap root but by spreading shallow roots that form a large mat that is its base.  The tree across the street is still there because it is planted in the middle of a yard, and there is a lot of room for those roots to spread out in all directions.  Our tree was planted near the intersection of the sidewalk and the driveway, so that its mat could only spread in two directions.  Fortunately those directions helped it stay upright in the prevailing winds, but the hurricane winds were not only strong, they sucker punched it from weak side – they blew from the direction of the driveway rather than towards it and the tree came down – all sixty feet of it - fortunately between the houses, with the root system pried up and exposed for all to see the root, as it were, of its demise.

As a kid, I grew up in the generation immediately following the hippies.  I grew my hair long and wore jeans that were more patches than denim.  I hitchhiked across the country – including to Washington D.C. for the bicentennial to join a protest that I didn’t completely believe in, but I wanted to protest something and maybe get teargassed – somehow that seemed romantic from a distance.  As I grew older and pursued traditional jobs and then a profession, I realized that some of my hippie buddies were much more closely tied to that movement than I was.  Oh, I believed in the principles (though I’m not sure I ever saw them spelled out overtly) of living closer to the land and being respectful of creation and focusing on love – not war.  And, I think, caring for the marginalized.  Though I never became a vegetarian, much less a vegan, I respected those who did.  But my friends who were more clearly living the hippie creed, if there is such a thing, followed courses of life that led them into things like carpentry and massage therapy.  Oh, I’m a therapist, too, but I don’t touch my patients, except to shake their hands – and very rarely to offer a hug when they are particularly distraught or when we are parting for the last time.  I am cerebral where the true hippie is, I think, more – quite literally – in touch with the world.

Compared to my hippie friends, who I keep up with on Facebook and in other ways, I feel that I have lost my way.  This book helps me feel that gap more profoundly.  Despite being tall for my species, I am dwarfed by trees, of which the book reminds me constantly, not just physically dwarfed but psychologically - by the trees themselves, but also by the characters in this book.  I have tried throughout my life to keep the small parts of me hidden and sequestered, but I think they actually take up much – perhaps most – of the space inside me.  And the small part of me that this book highlights is my focus on myself – on my survival – as if it were ever in doubt.  I am worried about whether I will have enough.  So I am always in search of more – whether that is food or things or books to read or movies to watch.  I am constantly hungry and my hunger consumes many things – and this book points out that it has consumed many trees.  Heck, just buying the book consumed trees (it is 500 pages long).  Facing this leads to feelings of guilt, of course.  These are familiar to me.  They have lurked around in the back of my mind for some time – and they have not done much – OK they have done nothing to curb my appetite.  But somehow, in the midst of this book, I feel differently.  I feel not just guilty, but overwhelmingly concerned about something much bigger than me.  I am not concerned so much for myself, but for us all – at least for the moments when I am reading.  I feel sucker punched by this book – uprooted and exposed, for all to see.

So this book surprised me.  First because I found trees – and their biomes – more fascinating than I imagined possible – and because I found that I was drawn to tree huggers in ways that I have not been before.  The characters in this book, each in his or her own way, has gotten a sense of urgency – an urgency that I think we are all beginning to share – about what it is that we have done to this planet and what we must do to undo it.  Oh, the planet will survive – but I think we are beginning to realize that we may not.  I was raised with a vision of the way the dinosaurs died out – slowly – as the result of volcanic smog.  Recent science has proposed that they actually died in a heartbeat.  After a huge comet crashed into the earth sending tons and tons of liquefied mud into space in the after-splash, if you will, the mud froze and turned into glass shards that ringed the earth and then they were pulled back, by the earth’s gravity, after they had encircled it.  When they re-entered the earth’s atmosphere, they burned up, and so much stuff burning simultaneously all around the earth raised the temperature on the surface of the earth to 400 degrees, boiling the dinosaurs alive!  We exist because of some mice that were burrowed under two or more feet of earth - enough to insulate them from the heat.  I think our end will be drawn out – the way we used to think of the dinosaurs end.  I may well be wrong – but I do think we are in for a big shake up – and figuring out how to balance our growing populations against the abilities of the planet to sustain us will be difficult.  We may be the most precarious creatures on the planet – dependent in ways that we have worked to keep ourselves unaware of on many layers of creatures and plants.  But I don’t think that my going on shouting from this soap box is going to do to you (or me) what the book did.  The biggest surprise is that this book got under my skin.  I realized, in a creepy way – it itched and I wanted to scratch it  - that I am a part of the problem.

I’m not quite sure how that happened.  I think that one aspect is that I came to care about the characters.  But another thing happened.  As one character was listening to the trees – and then, much later, another character was listening to other people on a profound level while neither she nor the other person were talking – they were just staring into each other’s eyes – somehow the book started talking to me.  Partly this was based in the chance ways in which the characters realized their relationship to the organic world.  It wasn't just one story about this, but it happened for each character in their own unique way, from one perspective and then from another, and a part of me had identified with each of these characters.  Part of it was the idea that these tree huggers were actually rational people of all different sorts (and one who was not so rational, but was seen by the other tree huggers as being the most rational of all – the one who could hear the trees talk - a character I fell in love with on top of a very tall tree), and that each of them got broad sided.  As I identified with them and then got hit when they did, I got uprooted.  Of course it didn’t hurt that the book is incredibly well written – and that it is filled with fascinating facts about trees and the relationship between trees and people – but I think it was the cumulative effect of sucker punch after sucker punch – and it is, of course, man's sucker punches that have led the trees to be in their besieged state - so that I was toppling and, on my way down, identifying with the trees.

But it wasn't just the sucker punches that they received, it was the blows that they gave.  This group of people was wide in terms of gender and personality style.  Though there was some ethnic diversity, they were all members of our culture - but also counter-cultural in their identification with the trees.  They were, I think, embodying something even deeper than the hippie credo, whatever that is.  They were each, in their own way, living a life that, despite the pressures of the culture around them, was true to who it was that they were.  I think I was envious of that clarity of self - that clarity of purpose.  I think part of my desire was not to be them, but to be myself, doing what it is that I could do to live more purposefully - to live a life that was more focused and therefore more effective.  That each of them was focused on trees made that seem attractive - and it is a worthy cause - we all should be more focused on trees.  And if this books makes better ecologists of those of us who read it, so much the better.  But I think its clarion call, if I can adequately hear it, has to do with hearing our own calling - not the calling of the trees - and following that.  As a wannabe hippie, I was joining with others who were identifying against a culture.  As a professional, I am identifying with those who are following a particular current.  I think the itch this book introduced was one that I need to keep scratching - who is it that I am and how is it that what I am doing at this particular moment is consistent with that? 

As I think about this, and about the central activities of the tree huggers, which were violent activities that I recoiled against – and that were ultimately not particularly effective – I think about the process of helping someone to change (or find) their mind.  To move from what we call in therapy the precontemplation stage to the contemplation stage.  When we are in the precontemplation stage, we don’t see that we are part of the problem.  We might go to treatment to complain about someone else and have a weird kind of magical idea that the therapist will change the other person.  At some point in treatment, if treatment is to become effective, we have to realize that we are part of the problem – and this empowers us, then, to address the ways in which we are.  This is, this book suggests, a violent process.  We have to be sucker punched out of our feelings to complacency.  We have to discover, in ways that are uncomfortable – that topple the world as we know it – that our sense of rootedness is, in fact, shallow and that despite having felt solid in the ways that we think about things, there are other ways to think of them.  Fortunately, we are more capable of quick transformations than the trees.  Fortunately, we are able to adapt more quickly.  I hope, just as I do in therapy, that we are able to translate our increasing awareness into actions that will have an impact.  I am appreciative of Powers' ability to get my head a bit off the dime on this.

I think the strand that unites the characters is that they live in the most affluent nation on earth and that each of them is able to chart his or her own course.  They could make choices that would endear them to others, they could make choices that would lead them to be more - to have more - but they, by and large, do not.  They choose to live for some other reason than consumption.

As I neared the end of the book, I wondered, as I often do, how the various threads would come together and what the ending would be.  But then I noticed that what happens in the book isn't what really matters.  What happens in the world - how trees - and the human race - fare - is what really matters.  This book, as beautifully painted as the characters are, is not about the characters in the book, nor is it about the trees there.  It is about us and our relationship to the organic world.  Are we going to recognize that to address our anxieties about surviving - those dark corners of our soul that we would rather keep hidden mostly from ourselves - we will have to trust ourselves and the environment to support us - to learn to live with less so that we can all have more?  That question was not going to be addressed in the book, but in our lived world - so what happened to these imaginary creatures who had so fired my mind became less important that what happens to us... Or, perhaps more importantly, what we do to make the world the kind of world that it will be.

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The Professor and the Madman - Truth in Historically Based Fiction

Movie, Professor and the Madman, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Psychoanalytic interpretation of the move The Professor and the Madman

The movie The Professor and the Madman  - starring Mel Gibson and Sean Penn was recommended to me by a reluctant colleague who is an experimental psychologist.  She thought that the scenes with antiquated treatment of mental illness might be of interest to my history of psychology and/or clinical psychology students.  I think she also thought the portrayal of madness by the film and enacted by Sean Penn in the role of the madman, Captain William Chester Minor, a U.S. Military Officer and surgeon who had run to Britain in order to escape a man he believed were chasing him and, in a fit of madness, shot and killed another man he assumed to be his tormentor, would be of interest to me personally and perhaps also my students.  And here she hit the bull’s eye.  I think Penn sympathetically portrays a complicated bit of madness and, though the narrative strays quite widely from the historical facts, I think the production is a telling study of the human condition.

In the real world, Minor was found not guilty of the murder by reason of insanity and institutionalized at Broadmoor Hospital from 1872-1910.  He had served as a surgeon in the Civil War, and he is imagined in this film as being haunted first by the memory of having branded a man with the letter D on his face after the man was caught deserting.  It was this man that Minor feared was chasing him – both to England and on the night when he shot and killed an innocent man, George Merritt, who, together with his wife Eliza, had six children and a seventh on its way.  The movie imagines a relationship between Minor and Eliza being central to Minor’s rehabilitation, but also to his subsequent relapse into madness – which provides one central and psychoanalytically interesting narrative in the film, though apparently a fictional one.  The other – one that is clearly at least somewhat historical - is the relationship between Minor and Sir James Murray, the man who was responsible for compiling the Oxford English Dictionary (O.E.D., as it is known).

For those who have not had the pleasure of perusing the O.E.D., let me recommend that you spend some time with it.  In its original version, it runs to 26 thick volumes, and, while it defines over 414,000 words, the really neat part of it is that it traces the use of each of the words through history – so that you can see the development of a word from its use by Chaucer, through Shakespeare, to its use by Dickens.  In total, there are 1,800,000 plus citations.  In the 1980s, when I was in graduate school, a two volume version of the O.E.D. was offered as an incentive for joining some book club.  They squeezed the 26 volumes into 2 by reducing the pages into miniscule form, and they included a magnifying glass with the dictionary.  I was tremendously envious of my friends who had them – though not envious enough to sign up for the book club.  I suppose I was only slightly more envious of my friends who had a complete set of Freud (which I have since secured – maybe someday I will have an O.E.D. as well).

 

Murray in front of the slips

The irony is, that if you have never held a volume of the O.E.D. in your hands it may be because you no longer need to.  Every single one of the links in the first two paragraphs is to a Wikipedia link – and the facts about the O.E.D. are taken from one of those links.  Wikipedia a tremendous tool – and there are many on-line Wiki- and regular dictionaries.   The idea behind the Wiki projects is that they are open sourced – that people – people like you and me – can create or edit entries.  And the first Wiki project was….  the O.E.D.  This book, with its almost 2 million citations, is not the work of a single author – or even of a small team of authors.  James Murray, a brilliant philologist and autodidact, was given the task, by Oxford University, of creating the encyclopedia – and he made the task even more mammoth by deciding not just to define every word, but trace its lineage.  He realized that he could not do this alone, so he asked people all over to help him with the project.  He provided slips of paper to book dealers and coffee shop owners throughout the United Kingdom and asked them to distribute them to readers.  The slips asked the readers, when they found a word written somewhere – anywhere – they were to write on the slip the word, how it was used, the meaning, and the source of the word and to mail it to Murray.  The postal system ended up building a special mailbox to deposit the mails to Murray in.

Minor, effectively imprisoned, but given a great deal of free rein by the superintendent of the asylum who recognized the Yale educated man as a kindred spirit, discovered one of the slips that Murray had sent out in a book that he read, one that a bookseller had likely slipped in there.  As dramatized in the film, this was a book that the guards had given him in appreciation for saving one of their fellow guards by amputating the guard's leg when it was trapped under a spiked gate (If you have not seen the film, this is a particularly gruesome scene and involves flashbacks to amputations during the war – I don’t actually know how gruesome it is as the reluctant wife and I looked away during the worst of it).  His discovery of the request for volunteer help became an organizing factor for him and benefited the dictionary.  He ended up being on its most prolific volunteer contributors, with over 10,000 of the citations being authored by him.  

Again, as dramatized in the film (we don’t, I don’t think, have detailed historical notes about what actually took place), Minor was suffering from a paranoid reaction to traumatic events in his life.  In paranoia, the individual is convinced that something that other’s don’t believe to be the case is actually happening.  In this case, Minor is convinced that the defector and his henchman is pursuing him.  In fact, Minor feels terribly badly about what he has done – he who has pledged to heal people has harmed one.  Minor’s guilt becomes projected outside of himself – relieving him of the pain of guilt, which he can’t bear, but creating an entity that contains it – the imagined deserter that pursues him.  Of course, killing George Merritt only compounds things – as he now becomes chased by the “ghosts” of both men – Merritt and the defector - who together personify the guilt that he has projected onto them.  All of this comes in the context, as the brilliant but still reluctant wife pointed out, of the overwhelming trauma of tending to thousands of mangled men – cutting off their legs while they literally bit on bullets – flattening them out – to manage the pain.  To save men’s lives he had to inflict pain – as he did with asylum guard.

Obsessing over the task of providing the needed histories of words (and having the time to do the research in an institution where he wasn’t allowed to do much else) helped Minor organize himself – and led to his becoming incredibly productive – in the film, James Murray credits Minor with having allowed the first volume to come to fruition.  My guess is that Minor contributed to many volumes – even those that were published even after He and Murray had both died.  I’m not sure, but I think that they were reading works and tracing important usages of words as they emerged so that he was not just working on the As, but on all the words that emerged in his reading.  In any case, both men had reason to be thankful for the other.  Indeed, in the film, one of the story lines is an attempt to remove Murray from the editorship and the politics surrounding this.  Minor is portrayed as a liability – Murray is employing murderers to get his dictionary published – but also as the key asset that allows the book to move on.  My guess from the chronology is that the film compresses a longer period of time into a smaller window, for which I don’t fault it – the film is engrossing enough– and how often do you get to say that about a film that is about the writing of a dictionary at the end of the 19^th Century?  Yes, there is critical concern about this film,  including the chronology of it, but the central story is compelling and not getting distracted by the irrelevant details of a decent work of art is a skill that I am working to cultivate.

The other liberty that is taken is with the relationship between Minor and the widow Eliza.  As far as I can tell, this story line is entirely invented.  In the courtroom, she is portrayed as angry that Minor is not killed for killing her husband.  When Minor directs that his civil war pension be directed to her, Eliza refuses it because she does not want to give Minor the satisfaction of feeling that he has made compensation for killing her husband.  After she turns to prostitution to support her children, and the kindly asylum guard intercedes on Minor’s behalf, she grudgingly allows Minor to support the family, but then also begins visiting with Minor.  He discovers that she is illiterate when she does not know the title of a book she has brought as a present, and Minor proceeds to teach her to write.  Their relationship brings him peace – he has helped her and the family – but when she professes love, the guilt of having killed her husband not just in cold blood, but also in her heart, propels him back into madness.  He castrates himself, apparently as a means of preventing any kind of enactment of their love but also perhaps as a sign of contrition and retribution (again, though not as graphic as the first scene, this was very difficult to watch – or turn away from).

The biographical Minor did castrate himself, but apparently in response to fears that he was being abducted and taken to other lands where he was sexually abusing children.  I think that this speaks to a schizophrenic – by which I mean a chaotic loosening of thought – element in addition to the paranoia.  The film portrays a touching and, I think, very realistic secondary curative element beyond the obsession with words – love.  It also presents some of the limits that love affords – that we cannot essentially change aspects of others through love.  Though Eliza’s hatred of Minor was softened by her love for him (her hatred was nicely preserved by her daughter, but she works to help her daughter understand how she has developed – and, in the process, I think helps herself understand this), Minor's sense of guilt is not soothed – quite the contrary, it gets compounded by his feelings towards Eliza – or the arousal of feelings towards him that he feels that he has contributed to in her.

The movie has both Eliza, but more centrally Murray, intercede on Minor’s behalf to secure his release from the hospital.  After his relapse, Minor is “treated” by the superintendent in ways that I am not familiar with from my history of psychiatric treatment.  The treatments seem barbaric and sadistic – and Minor’s agreement to undergo them seem to be a signal of his continuing madness – specifically his inability to handle his guilt internally and the hope that others harming him will serve as a kind of sin easing punishment – and the efforts to help him appear to us and to the kindly guards, but also to Minor (in a gratifying way, I think) as painful ways of attacking him rather than true efforts (borne out of love) to reach him, all despite the superintendent’s initial attachment to him.  It leads me to wonder whether the superintendent, invested in his treatment in part through identification (they are both well-educated physicians who love books and are members of the upper class), feels betrayed or let down by Minor’s relapse – and, having as strict and rigid a sense of justice as Minor, he became the perfect instrument of Minor’s punishment – better even than imagined stalkers and ghosts.

The movie and history intersect again with Minor being released from the asylum by none other than a young Winston Churchill, who, in true political savvy mode, protects the British people by releasing him to: the United States.  Minor is deported and then treated in a hospital in Washington DC.  As mentioned earlier, both he and Murray die before the completion of the project, and some of the most endearing scenes in the film include the affection between the two of them and their respect for each other’s roles in the project – Murray as the definer – and Minor as the elucidator of the words – of the language – that they both so madly love.   

A quick note on my reading: This movie is based in historical facts, but it is a work of fiction.  It is about the prescribed treatment of early 20th century psychiatry and about the organic improvements and relapses in the functioning of a patient that I have chosen, in line with the title and a long tradition, to call mad.  I think that, though my "diagnosis" benefits from an additional 100 years of scientific work, it is still largely descriptive rather than causative.  I think the treatments that are being described are most human.  The first, finding meaning - and even obsessing over that meaning - could be described as a defense rather than a treatment.  But that is why we have defenses - to ward off things that are even less adaptive.  The second, love, in the form of the esteem and connection with Murray, but also with the (as far as I can tell) imagined relationship with Eliza, is an artistic description of the power of love to both relieve suffering, but also to create it.  I find that story, while imaginary, compelling.  I am reminded of a very paranoid patient that I treated long ago.  I won't go into the details to avoid exposing him - and they also do not map directly onto Minor - but I find the parallels to fit - and the underlying premise to be supported by theory.  The superintendent, especially at the end of treatment, again is, I think, a made up character.  I am still analyzing him as if he were real because there is something about this part that holds together as well.  I think that much psychiatric and psychological treatment is, in fact, the result of organic human contact, and I have worked to learn something about that from this film, which rings true for me.

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