Adrienne Harris comes to the hinterlands… Perhaps in part because we have baseball.

Adrienne Harris, one of the seminal psychoanalytic theorists of the relational perspective and a leading writer on women’s issues, came to visit our Institute last weekend.  The chair of our workshop committee made it clear that the scheduling of the workshop was contingent on the Mets baseball team being in town that weekend.  I have written about other visitors in the past (Andrea Celenza, Kirsten Dahl, Peter Goldberg, and Anton Kris) and psychoanalytic luminaries have been visiting us since long before I began blogging.  Dr. Harris’s visit has been harder for me to wrap my mind around than previous visits.  Unlike others, she did not seem to come with a particular set agenda.  She did not want to inform us of this or that new thought, perspective, or population that we should be working with.  Though she had a prepared paper, she referenced it but did not spend most of her time reading from it during her formal presentation.  She seemed, instead of to be espousing a thesis, to be working it out - in her head, and in the room; sounding it out before us rather than asserting it.  There was a way, then, that her visit seemed less like a discrete event than – frankly – a dream state for me.  It has taken me a while to figure out, then, how to write about it.

Perhaps the best way to characterize Dr. Harris’ visit is to compare it to something that Anna Freud said about her father – “All the other analysts seemed so certain, but not Poppa, he was always questioning.”  It seemed to me that Dr. Harris, like Dr. Freud (pere) both in his writing and in his thinking, was practicing analytic functioning – that is, when she was here, in the informal talk, in her formal presentation, in the dinner, and when she was consulting on a case; she was working out of a state of evenly hovering attention.  This did not mean that she herself was dreamy, evanescent or unclear – her encyclopedic knowledge of analytic authors was constantly on display as she referenced specific works of individuals to support the points that she was making – and she had a laser like ability to hone in on certain clinical issues – she really got aspects of the patient that was presented on Saturday (my own patient, actually, so I felt as certain as one can that the inferences she was making were on target) – and she seemed to float in an easy interactional space with the people that she came in contact with throughout the weekend.  Actually, to be truthful, she didn't just get aspects of the patient, but brought the patient to life - my understanding of the patient took on a deeper, richer, three dimensional quality as I heard her sensitively and deeply engage with the material that I presented.

The central dilemma that she seemed to be referencing through the weekend, in so far as there was one, is the dilemma – or tension – that exists between the duality of genders – a categorical difference – and the fluidity of the gender identities that seem to proliferating at a dizzying pace.  She illustrated this with a conversation she had with her ten year old grandson who had impressed her with his description of some of the “63” gender variations he was aware of.  And what seemed remarkable to me is that this woman, who has thought and read deeply about gendered living – seemed as open to the basic confusion that this plenitude of genders creates in a ten year old boy, and in me, and in my peers.  That she, like all of us, is letting this new world of gender identity rattle and roll around in her head even after she has written scholarly papers on it and treated many patients with gender issues.  She radiated an approachable uncertainty about such issues as sex reassignment surgery – a procedure that she regularly consults about with patients.

Again, I don’t mean to say that she couldn’t be appropriately definitive.  She talked about some of her cases where she had reservations that were solidly based in a sense of the time that it takes for a person to make the psychological transition from a predominantly masculine (or feminine) identity to a predominantly feminine (or masculine) identity.  This is a gradual and iterative process – but the physical transition of surgery is dichotomous – and irreversible – and she expressed human concern about the potential for a person to feel that they had made a permanent mistake – and she seemed committed to helping people avoid such a mistake while also wanting to facilitate supporting transitions that people are deeply psychologically committed to.  But, again, this was not stated as anything like a dogmatic position, but felt more like a feeling out and an attempt to feel into a space that is highly contingent on the psychological experience of the individual person that she might be working with at this particular moment.

I think that part of the complication that Dr. Harris is addressing as she works through this – and that was implicit in what she was saying (and if it was explicit, I am not recalling it), is that our binary gender identity (and sexuality, for that matter) is a biological and social construction – and, as such, becomes categorical, but our psychological reality, especially from the relational perspective that she talked about creating with Steven Mitchell, Lew Aron, and Jeremy Safron, (while she was also processing the loss in the past couple of years of both Lew and Jeremy), is multifaceted – and we actually have multiple self-states that get evoked in a variety of contexts and that these shift and slide and relate to each other in fluid configurations.  I don’t think that, from this perspective, it makes sense for any of us to be this gender or that – this sexuality or that – and yet we are – and settle into a reasonably reliable state of being.  We organize ourselves around a central identity, I suppose, with states that are more and less consistent with that.

At the same time, though, Dr. Harris was advocating – in part by talking about how Lew Aron had advocated for her – a kind of psychoanalytic freedom that the psychoanalyst should not just facilitate in her or his patients, but experience for him or herself.  That the psychoanalyst should pursue thoughts and initiatives that are fascinating – that they should explore areas that are of interest – as she has done in pursuing more information about Freud’s interlocutor Sandor Ferenczi, a Hungarian psychoanalyst who was able to question some of Freud’s most ardently stated positions.  Ultimately, with Aron’s encouragement, she helped open the Sandor Ferenczi Center at the New School in New York, where she teaches.  This example did not call attention to her accomplishment – instead it encouraged in me a certain sense of permission – one that I have found lacking within the analytic ranks – to follow my nose and explore what is of interest to me.

One of the central concerns that Dr. Harris articulated was the way that our central identities – she cited the early American feminists as an example including the suffragettes – can become narrowed - so that, in her example, the suffragettes' conviction that human rights belonged to all did not get extended to African Americans.  We need to keep ourselves aware of how our central beliefs should influence aspects of our functioning that may be in our blind spots.  So she was encouraging us to be thinking about the intersectionality of identities – not just gender, sexuality, race, or class, but the ways in which these overlap.  She extended this into thinking about how our institute can become more involved in helping individuals in our community across the range – especially of social and economic class.

The problem becomes, how do we remain open to the parts of ourselves that are invisible to us?  And isn’t this the central problem of psychoanalysis – how can we know that which is unknowable – the unconscious?  And Dr. Harris’ response had less to do with specific content or positions – though she was able to access these as needed to help shape her and our thoughts about the issue that was at hand – but it was an analytic attitude that pervaded her openness to us, to her patients, and to our patients as we talked about them with her.  This is complicated by a world that is evolving - it is becoming a new and different place as we become new and different people who are interacting with it in new and different ways.  We need new theories and new ways of understanding the dilemmas that we and our patients confront.  Dr. Harris' openness became a model - that we should be open to the world and to thinking about it in new and different ways.

This openness extended to her broader experience of the weekend.  After being with us, she joined one of our faculty to take in a baseball game, where her beloved Mets, not yet mathematically eliminated from the play-offs were playing.  She stated that her love of the game was partly the result of her love for her father, who shared his love of the game with her.  She also explored our Underground Railroad Museum and lingered in this fly-over state as a source of information about the world at large.  She was surprised, on her return flight, to see that it was filled with Mets fans.  “Aren’t the Mets the team of the working class?” she wondered to me.   When I responded that everyone in New York is rich these days, she responded “Oh, of course.  I forgot.  And the really rich folks live in Brooklyn.  Yikes.”

 

Yes, we live in very strange days, but thankfully there are people like Dr. Harris to help us figure out how to do that.    

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Psychoanalytic Self Help: What would it look like?

I have just written a scholarly essay about the relationship of what I call “the experimental mind” to “the clinical mind”.  Of course, both of these are imaginary – or rather caricatures of ways that the human mind can function, but I think they are also deeply conflicting ideals within me.  I have been cajoled and encouraged to follow the one in particular – the experimental mind – both quite consciously and directly by my profession and particular mentors in it – but more subtly and insidiously by the culture and perhaps especially and most problematically by writers who are encouraging me, on the surface, to have a clinical mind but are actually functioning out of the experimental mind.

The experimental mind is the mind of the scientist – it looks for a single solution – a means of explaining how this phenomenon is caused by that event.  The clinical mind is intended to cull through reams of information – not looking for a silver bullet – but for the best course of action at this moment in a constantly shifting theater of opportunities and threats – that will best get us from this place to that with the most advantage and/or least loss.  If the experimental mind is definitive, the clinical mind is tentative.

 

Because it is tentative and uncertain (we could say feminine), the clinical mind is not to be trusted, it is feared, and frequently disdained – including by those of us (all of us) who must operate in this mode.  In fact, this is how we operate all the time.  But we pretend, I believe, to function as experimentalists – and we work towards having the kind of certainty that only experimentation – or, I think more accurately, mathematical proof, can provide.

Of course mathematical proof rests on axioms – and these are shifty things.  We have to agree to accept them – and what mind can do that but the clinical mind.  The point here is that even in clinical writing, the author presents their formulation – their understanding of the individual they are working with – their description of the intervention they make – as the proper one.  And we learn from that.  

If they were to write about how lost I feel when I am deeply in the mode of clinical listening, we wouldn't want to read that book - who wants to feel that way as a therapist - or as someone who is trying to help him or her self.  We need to be definitive and firm and clear – which, on occasion, all too frequently perhaps, I also am.

But what certainty (or perhaps false certainty) keeps us from seeing is that the multiplicity that the clinical mind – or I might say the mind of the dreamer – opens us up to is a strength not a liability.  It says not this OR that, but this AND that.  The trope about improv comes to mind – whatever the other player says, you reply, “yes and…”.

 

We live in a world that is filled with yes/and – especially because we are engaged with people who are as they present themselves – and they are so many other things as well.  Part of the clinical process is to help people get to the core of themselves – to articulate among those many versions of themselves which are the more central and important ones – which ones fit best for us at which moments.  And this is the job of not just the clinician, but the politician, the novelist, and every kind of artist.  Or rather both are.  We articulate the palette of possibilities – when we are functioning with the clinical mindset – and then we foreclose on a particular perspective with the experimental mindset.

 

Clinicians who work from my perspective work to remain in the clinical mindset as the patient forecloses on this OR that or this AND that result. Clinicians in other camps – ones that are more fundamentally informed by the experimental mindset – are more likely, like the politician – to articulate the preferred mindset – this will get you from here to there.  Their self help book reads - "Think this way" or "Don't think like that!"

How would a self-help book from the clinical mindset read?  It would say things like, “Stay open to possibility”, “allow things to emerge”, and “Don’t foreclose”.  And people who do this don’t ever quite get anything accomplished.  We need to shift into an experimental mindset – but the longer we can hold that mindset at bay while we come to consider the many available possibilities – and the more we can use the clinical mindset to realize when we have arrived at a critical mass for following a particular path – the more likely we are to follow a path that reflects more of the complicated and conflicting but relevant aspects of ourselves that will allow us to achieve something that is likely to help us feel that we are being who we feel ourselves most authentically to be.

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The Goldfinch at the Cinema: The Reluctant Psychoanalyst realizes the difference between novels and films.

The Goldfinch is an 800 page Pulitzer Prize winning novel that I read and posted on about five years ago.  It is also a book the reluctant wife has never read.  I was excited to see it at the theater, despite the fact that it had a very low rotten tomato rating (24%).  The reluctant wife and I both loved it and we are concerned about this rating because the audience for this film – people who care about good films – is going to be particularly responsive to the critic’s perspective.  For what it is worth, we think this film – which is slow and complex and does – as some of the critics point out - retain the failings of the book – worked for both the reader and the non-reader.  And I argued, in that prior post, that the failings of the book are part of what makes it great art.

I have a notoriously poor memory, so when I was pitching this movie to my wife for a weekend date and she asked about it, I had to go back and read my old post to remind myself of it – especially because she was concerned that – it being a film about trauma – it might be more violent than she could tolerate.  Reading my post, I realized that I had written it to someone who had also read the book – and I wrote it as someone who had read a long and confusing book that felt a bit like a dream and a bit like being inside the mind of someone who is recovering from a trauma (while additional traumas are occurring and they are feeling more and more isolated), and their mind is becoming more and more disjointed, and my mind became somewhat disjointed and dissociated as I did this and the post therefore did as well.

The film – despite mirroring aspects of that process – in particular telling the story in flashback and with additional interjections and partial reconstructions of scenes that become more clear across time – puts the plot front and center in a way the book does not – because the hero – Theo (the young version played by Oakes Fegley, the older version by Ansel Elgort) – is an object to be viewed rather than a subject to be identified with.  So, from this more objective perspective, it is clear that this film (and the book before it) is about the guilt of Theo's surviving a terrorist bombing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art that him mother did not.  It is about the ways that the guilt insinuates itself into Theo’s functioning, leaving him feeling that he cannot act – and therefore allows him to act in ways that he is able to disown and be distant from.

 

Theo is a flaccid hero – perhaps another reason the critics don’t like him – they want, in the age of the Marvel Universe, heroes who are intentional.  The only intentional hero in this film is Boris (the young Boris is played superbly by Finn Wolfhard and the older Boris played equally well by Aneurin Barnard), and he is complicated.  Boris is an antihero, at best, but this is a great role and I think a truly great character to come out of the book.  As little of the rest of the book as I remembered – Boris loomed large – and the movie got him spot on.  The character reminds me of the essence of one of my true friends – a deeply troubled and deeply human person who, despite his hatred of all mankind, was one of the most loving and true people I have ever known.

Boris is a character that plops into Theo’s life after he is torn from the creepy but sheltering care of a family headed by Samantha Barber (Nicole Kidman) in the aftermath of the bombing.  Theo’s alcoholic father (Luke Wilson), a small time gambling hustler always in debt to his bookie, shows up to claim Theo and take him to an empty development outside of Las Vegas, where Boris, a Ukrainian  living with his abusive father, helps Theo make a little bit of sense out of his senseless life and helps dull his pain by teaching him to snort Vicodin, drink Vodka, and drop acid, including on the night when Theo learns of his father’s death.  Scared that his father’s floozy hook-up will send him to foster care – Theo grabs the one thing that is important to him - The Goldfinch (as well as the floozy’s dog) and heads back to New York – not to live with the well-heeled family on Park Avenue, but with Hobie (Jeffrey Wright) the business partner and housemate of a man that Theo had been standing next to when the bomb went off.  This stranger in the museum – and his niece Pippa (Aimee Lawrence as the young Pippa and Ashleigh Cummings as the older one) – play an overly large role in the movie.  The stranger directs Theo to take the painting of the Goldfinch and he also directs Theo to Hobie, where Theo finds Pippa again – he had been taken with her in their two minutes together – and he had chosen to stay back to ogle this girl with whom he seemed to make a connection when his mother went to check out another painting – and subsequently died in the explosion.

The Goldfinch is a highly saturated symbol in this film.  It is, as I noted previously, a trompe l’oeil painting by a young student of Rembrandt’s who was killed when a gunpowder plant exploded, leveling a third of Delft.  The Goldfinch is one of the few surviving paintings by this young master.  It is a painting of bird chained to a perch – yet the bird is so lifelike that it appears ready to fly right out of the painting.  The symbolism of this painting as having survived a prior bombing, of it representing the ways that Theo is chained to his mother – but also, as the film unfolds, to his fate – and how we are all chained to various and sundry entities is important – and I think I got that before.  What I didn’t get is that Theo keeps this bird under wraps – it is literally wrapped in the pages of the New York Post – and therefore keeps, as Hobie puts it, this thing of light out of the light.  He is also keeping his grief for his mother out of the light – and hanging onto the painting is a way of hanging onto her – but not appreciating her.  He literally cannot see her face in his dreams – she is forever marching away from him into the distance, marching towards her fate.

Hobie is a complicated character whose avuncular care for Theo makes him seem quite simple.  After the harrowing experience in the desert, Hobie takes Theo into his shop and home.  Hobie is a craftsman who restores antique furniture.  He teaches Theo about this, and Hobie takes on the role, as he matures and becomes an adult – of the dealer – the role that Hobie’s partner, whom Theo met in the museum, played before.  Hobie creates new pieces out of old and Theo – channeling his dead and hustling father – sells them as if they were the old, with the prices that go with that.  He is caught in the act of doing this, which Hobie is disappointed by, but not surprised at – he has known that the success of the store has been extraordinary- but this is exposed by someone who is interested in the Goldfinch and someone who thinks he knows that Theo has it.

Hobie is disappointed that Theo has stolen the Goldfinch from the world.  Hobie, who embodies human caring – in his relationship with Theo and his relationship with Pippa – talks about how important things are.  He maintains that things live on after us – and that it is things that allow us to connect, not just with each other, but with those who created them and have had them in the past, and it is the things that will be handed down to those who come after us.  Ironically, it is the force of the relationship that Theo has with Hobie that allows this materialistic creed to add to the heavy burden of guilt that Theo has been carrying to this point.

Well, Theo can’t set things right because it turns out that, unknown to him, he doesn’t have the painting.  And here things do get a bit wacky and farfetched.  Boris shows up again, now as a well-heeled drug dealer who confesses that he stole the painting in Vegas when Theo, in a drunk black out, confessed that he had it.  Theo never suspected it was gone because he had kept it under wraps all this time.  Boris used it only as collateral to build his drug network, but finally it was stolen from him and is now out of Boris’s control.  Theo is confused and leaves Boris, returning to a weird world that Theo has recreated as a means of sustaining himself.

In the aftermath of the bombing, Theo had fallen in love with Pippa – and Pippa was taken from him before they had a chance to consummate that love as her Texas aunt became her guardian as next of kin.  When they meet again as young adults in Hobie’s store, she comes with a lover from England.  Theo, deeply disappointed, reconnects with the creepy family on Park Avenue, and woos the youngest daughter, who, it turns out, is in love with the guy that Theo is angry with for having fingered him to the principal that brought his mother to spend time with him in the museum where the bomb went off when they had a bit of extra time on their hands on the way to be being chewed out for a crime he didn’t commit.  Yes, that is too tightly wound to make much sense, but I think all of these windings are important – more on that in a minute.  So, primarily to get close to the creepy mother, and now with no pretense of love from the daughter, Theo is about to marry her.

But what about Pippa, you might ask?  She shows up, after Theo is engaged, and has dinner with him when she comes to New York without her boyfriend for a visit.  Theo confesses his love for her – a love that he has kept alive by writing to her on a regular basis.  In one of the most poignant and well-handled scenes I have seen between young lovers, Pippa acknowledges that she misses New York, that she misses Hobie, and that she misses Theo.  But she also misses who she would have been if the bombing hadn’t robbed her of being the musical prodigy that she was – but more importantly it robbed her of the solid psychological base that she would have had from which to love him.  And she knows that he doesn’t have such a base from which to love her because it has been taken from him, too.  She, rightly, I think, diagnoses them, tragically, as needing to be involved with someone other than each other in order to be functional.  They are thus condemned to being romantically disconnected from each other as soul mates – in so far as souls can be mated in a moment – and the connection can be sealed – but also threatened – by the trauma they shared.

At a Christmas party, when Theo is facing a bleak life with no hope of righting his relationship with Hobie, who is furious with him for robbing the world of The Goldfinch (which is now in the hands of people who have stolen it from Boris); Pippa, who has rejected him soulfully; his fiancée, who is heartless and as empty as everyone in her family save her mother; and Boris, from whom he has retreated, who should show up at the party to set things right but Boris himself.  The miscreant with the heart of gold engages Theo as his partner in arms and they go off to set things right.  Suffice it to say that they do that, but they go through hell to get there.

So the critics don’t, I think, get that this film is a fable.  It is story, not about the world as it appears to be but as it actually is – not according to physics and chemistry and biology – but according to the laws of the soul.  This is a movie that makes sense in the way that all parables do – they explain the unexplainable – they make the senseless have a place in our lives and in our hearts.

 

In its essence, I believe this is a film about the functioning of terror.  Of how terror works and why it works.  Some of the critics have objected to a film about the woes of the privileged class – as if that class does not – or should not – have woes.  I think that all of our woes are borne out of privilege – or of our sense that we deserve privilege.  Terrorism is born, I believe, out of a wish to let those whose lives are, compared to our own, privileged – and to let those who are using that privilege – know what it feels like to have one’s life torn apart by a power greater than oneself.  The terrorists want us to feel what they feel.  This is called, in psychoanalytic lingo, projective identification.  A crude, primitive, and highly effective means of depositing in another person those feelings that are most disturbing to us so that they can understand, viscerally, what it feels like to be them.  It is essential that the people in this film – that all of us who enjoy the privilege of living in America – know what it feels like, on 9/11, to have what is most important to us torn from us. 

But the film does not stop there – thank God.  As an allegory, it points us to a solution.  Or perhaps it is a comment on the solution that we have come to.  In reality, we need to deal with our pain – and to confront the consequences of our actions – to experience our guilt – as crazy and disconnected and disjointed as it feels – and to know – despite what everyone tells us – that it is real.  Theo, the kid with no treatment and few people caring for him, gets this, even if he can't accomplish it.  In fact, this is impossible for all of us when we are in the thrall of it, and we become passive - rote - and go about being seemingly good while spreading more difficulties around like daisy petals just as Theo does.

Here I am aware that I am opening a can of worms – perhaps the can that at least some of the reviewers sensed and so wanted to close back down.  I am, at this moment, noting that Theo feels guilty no matter what people say and that he does not have access to his mother’s face until he does something to set things right again – until he starts to engage in the literally bloody task of taking on what needs to be taken on to get things aligned again.  I think it is up to us to make sense of this metaphor and how it applies to things like 9/11 and the things that we have done as a result of that event- have we put things right?  Does Theo put them right?  Were we guilty of something that brought 9/11 on?  These are dicey questions perhaps not best stated directly.

The solution, in the book, the film, and in life, is not clear.  I think that the conclusion of the movie has been cleaned up a lot from the conclusion of the book.  But even the clean conclusion is plenty muddy and confused.  I don’t think that we, as terrorized and traumatized individuals, can think clearly about how to set things right.  We want to do unto others as we have been done to (as Theo does as Hobie’s partner – and, arguably, as does at the end of the film as Boris's partner in crime).  Indeed, I find myself wondering - in one of the plotlines I did not include - whether the angry son of the creepy family killed the father and younger brother - as a kind of variant on the central theme...  

We also don’t want to do anything.  We want to hang onto a picture of how things were – knowing full well that if we were to take it out and look at it, it would look nothing like what we want to remember it as being.  So we keep it wrapped up.  We don’t expose it – and ourselves – to the rawness of who we are and were and the rawness of the world.  And yet, despite our best efforts, that rawness keeps forcing its way in.  Ultimately we are forced to act - even as we disavow it.

This is a movie that demands a lot of us.  Like the book, it is long.  Like the book, it requires that we engage with it – that we make sense of it – even though it hits us over the head with a few things that are easier to see from an objective vantage point.  But both of these – the book and the movie – will reward us if we allow them to get under our skin – if we allow ourselves to become – as the book would have us – Theo – or if we take a look at him – as the movie would have us do – as an object of interest – a painting if you will – a bird on perch – there to be seen.  I think a good discussion of the unclear moral underpinnings would reveal just what a wonderful parable this is.  I think it, like all parables, can inform in multiple ways.  It is far from the simple and dismissable movie the critics would have it be. 

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