Horror! “Bride of Frankenstein” as a portal to thinking about the Genre from a Psychoanalytic Perspective.

Matt Bennett is the president of our local Association of Psychoanalytic Thought (APT).  He is also a professor who teaches about film and film interpretation from a psychoanalytic perspective.  What a treat it was to have him teach us about film interpretation in a recent APT meeting during which, in part since Halloween is approaching, we screened a seminal 1935 film “Bride of Frankenstein”.

“Bride of Frankenstein” seminal?  Horror as a genre worthy of study?  Perhaps in part in response to the second question – and because our beloved psychoanalytic library is being refurbished and there weren’t books surrounding us as there usually are when we screen films – Matt passed around a stack of books that interpret Horror films from a psychoanalytic perspective.

I never would have thought.  Matt began the conversation by asking us to think about horror films and what leads us to categorize them as that.  We named a number of films –Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Psycho, Alien and The Rocky Horror Picture Show.  And suddenly there are subgenres – slasher films, suspense, science fiction, and camp/parody films.  Subgenres!  Of Horror!  Oh, the horror…

Matt clarified that some people object to classifying any film as a horror film.  The whole idea, for these people, is that horror is transgressive and so putting boundaries around what is and is not a horror film flies in the face of the transgressive nature of horror.  He noted, though, the large overlap between science fiction and horror, and went on to say that both Frankenstein (Mary Shelley’s novel and the movie), and Bride of Frankenstein, (again the novel and the movie), are warnings to us – warnings that have been around since at least the Greeks and the myths of Icarus and Prometheus – warnings that too much technical knowledge can lead to a very bad end.  One of the audience members took this all the way back to Genesis and the eating of the tree of knowledge.

Matt asked us to think about what horror is and what makes a film evoke horror.  We agreed that horror is a bodily feeling – it is corporeal.  This led us to think about our hair standing on end.  It is also related to terror, to the feeling of the uncanny (about which Freud had a lot to say), and with some help from a quote from Stephen King – to disgust based on being grossed out.  But we also noted that horror – especially in horror films – is right next to the ridiculous.  We find many of the horror situations ludicrous – and horror audiences are notoriously garrulous – saying out loud, “Don’t open the coffin!”

Horror films have tropes that help us to experience horror.  It is not just the plot and the dialogue, but the lighting, the use of frame (when the horizon is at an angle, we feel unbalanced), music, lighting (lighting faces from underneath, as with a flashlight when telling scary stories, distorts the features of the characters), and also the physicality of the actors – the quality of the make-up.  Frankenstein’s monster – though the film was in black and white – is often portrayed on posters with green skin. 

This lead into a discussion of the monster – and for the first time I thought of Joker, a film that I we saw recently and that I just posted on, as a horror film.  And as I was thinking this, we talked about the identification of the audience – that it can be with the people being victimized, but it can also be with the monster, and that we may feel both kinship with being traumatized, but we may also master that through what is glibly called identification with the aggressor – we find the monster more interesting – something that is certainly the case in Joker, but then showed up in unexpected ways with Bride of Frankenstein.

So we watched the film with a few tools in our pockets.  It is a brief film – 1 hour and 9 minutes running time – but it was the longest 69 minutes of my life.  It reminded me of watching Monty Python episodes when I was in High School – those were the longest half hours of my life.  I think both Monty Python and Bride of Frankenstein cram a lot into a relatively few minutes – but I also think that neither of them follows a linear narrative path.  Indeed, Bride of Frankenstein, the Movie, seems to be made in much the way the monster is – with bits and pieces of this and that all mashed together – and there is a strange coherence to the whole – but it is, not just in the content, but in the jangliness of the whole thing,  unsettling.  It feels like a dream that takes random bits and pieces and projects them one after the other and says, in effect, “Here – this is the dream.”  And you, as the one who have watched the dream, have to say, “Oh, OK, that’s it then.  Huh…”

The movie begins with Mary Shelley telling her husband Percy Shelley and Lord Byron that there is more to her tale of Dr. Frankenstein’s monster.  As they gather round her, we are reminded of the highlights of the original tale, with Dr. Frankenstein’s monster running amok through the countryside, but coming to his apparent end, along with Dr. Frankenstein, on Dr. Frankenstein’s wedding night in a great fire in a windmill.  As we pick up the story, neither the monster, nor Dr. Frankenstein is actually dead.  Dr. Frankenstein is revived when he is brought to his home, and the monster comes to life and starts killing people wantonly again.  Dr. Frankenstein is nursed back to health by his future bride, while his monster goes looking for help in the world – but finds that people have decided he is a monster so they try to hurt and kill him. 

The monster saves a little girl from drowning, but is discovered by hunters and shot at. He tries to get help from gypsies, but is burned  Then he is captured by police and hauled off to a dungeon which he promptly escapes from.  Ultimately he finds brief solace with a blind man in the forest – his savageness is tamed by the blind man’s violin playing.  The blind man also teaches him some rudimentary words – including, quite poignantly, the word friend. 

Dr. Frankenstein, meanwhile, is pursued by his friend and mentor Dr. Pretorius who wants his help in crafting a bride for the monster.  In one of those odd, dream-like moments, Dr. Pretorius shows off his ability to create life – four or five miniature human beings he has grown from some kind of basic organic matter.  This is an entertaining and odd kind of side moment.  And somehow Pretorius views the monster that Dr. Frankenstein has created as greater than his little dolls – and he works to convince Dr. Frankenstein to return to his building of monsters – something that Dr. Frankenstein is loath to do.

While collecting a corpse to bring to life, Dr. Pretorius and the monster, who has been fleeing a mob, discover each other.  Dr. Pretorius lets the monster know that he wants to create a mate for him, and the monster becomes his ally against Dr. Frankenstein, first threatening Dr. Frankenstein directly to get to work, then kidnapping his wife, whom Dr. Pretorius assures Dr. Frankenstein will be unharmed as long as Frankenstein works with him to create the bride.

So, create the bride they do.  Igor secures a heart from a living person, they add that to a corpse and to the brain that Pretorius has grown and, right on time, a storm kicks up, lightning starts, the bed is raised into the air, lightning strikes the kite – and Frankenstein has his bride.  There’s just one hitch.  When she – played by the same woman who played Mary Shelley at the beginning of the film, but now with iconic hair with white streaks – sees the monster, she, instead of swooning, screams. 

The heartbroken monster goes on a rampage, destroying the laboratory – but he decides to release Dr. Frankenstein and his wife – telling them that they should live – while he keeps Dr. Pretorius and his mate/monster in the tower with him – and destroys the castle, condemning the three of them to death.

So this film is part horror, part melodrama, and, thanks in no small part to a character I haven’t mentioned – one of Dr. Frankenstein’s household servants – an hysterical woman who swoons and screams and preaches – a comedy.  It is a bit of all over the place.

Matt described a number of interpretations of the film, but the one that I liked the best was one that is based in queer theory.  From this perspective, the director, who was an openly gay man in the queer embracing Hollywood of the thirties, tells a story of two men – Dr. Frankenstein and Dr. Pretorius – who want to make a baby without having to bother to include a woman in their scheme.  They do this bit of alchemy with the intent of starting their own race – but it goes wildly wrong – and they pay the price. 

The problem with this interpretation, as one of the audience members repeatedly pointed out, is that the book, which the movie is faithful to, was written by a woman.  But it is interesting to me that this woman is portrayed, in the opening scene, as someone who is being courted by both her husband and his friend – as if the boys want to connect with each other through this female go between – supporting the queer reading.  More centrally, though, Mary Shelley is a woman in a man’s world – a world where men have all the power – except the power to make life.  Wouldn’t it be nice, she might think, if, from their perspective, the woman – that envied and secretly powerful other – could be eliminated from the mix?  And wouldn’t that square with a larger, societal queerness – that we envy each other’s different capacities rather than admiring them – and that we are looking not for diversity, but for sameness – for mates who mirror rather than compliment us?

Whether we read this as a queer film or not, it does contain some other important attributes of “otherness” that are part and parcel of later films and also of our lives more generally.   In particular, the monster’s mates scream when she sees the monster.  What is that about?   Is she afraid of him?  Or is she afraid that, in looking at him, she is seeing herself?  Is there some kind of recognition of our own monstrousness in the other?  In this reading, is Mary Shelley as guilty of wanting to create a world in which procreation is mechanical, not organic, just as the men around her my wish to be able to do?  Wouldn’t a woman want to avoid the harrowing difficulties of pregnancy and childbirth, but also feel guilty about not wanting to use her superpowers?

Even before we get to the final scene, the monster, who has been so monstrous through the first film, becomes much more sympathetic.  He really seems to be reaching out to the people, trying to connect with them, but isn’t he, like Christ (and the images are there in the film to support this reading) rejected by the people who, instead of welcoming him, want to crucify him?  How do we understand our rejection of the message of love that comes from a figure like Jesus?  How do we justify turning that, in the myriad ways that we do, into a call for violence and aggression?

Despite, or maybe because of the primitive means that movie makers had available to portray this material – it gets at some deep and profound aspects of our existence – all the while feeling campy and unreal.  Matt reminded us that the gaze of the camera is a masculine gaze – seeing things as objects and appealing to men who come to the theater to look at stuff while being safely protecting by viewing that stuff from behind the lens – so that they are able to see objects – not subjects.  And horror invites us to become subjects – to feel afraid – to be scared.  To live inside our creeping skin.  No wonder it has to be ludicrous – we can’t stand being confronted by the inner gushy guts that we stick our hands into in haunted houses – and at the movies when we go, seemingly against our wills, to be titillated by horror.

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Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker: Empathy Not Violence is the Psychoanalytically Understood Message of the Movie

Joker, Joaquin Phoenix, Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalysis of Film, Psychology of Movies

The Joker is a film the Reluctant Wife and I intended to pass on.  We had heard that it was violent, and we try to avoid introducing unnecessary additional violence into our lives – the news is full of enough of that.  We also were concerned about a couple of reviews that suggested that it was providing a rationale for a white supremacist or at least a white male as victim narrative that we weren’t interested in supporting.  But then we got a couple of recommendations to see it from a friend and a student of mine who had found it illuminating and disturbing in a psychologically promising way, and we decided, despite the violence, to see it on date night.

The violence in the film is considerable – but also, with one exception, not as graphic as we expected.  But the film was unrelentingly bleak and the lack of empathy between the characters – except in fantasied scenes was, as the reluctant wife pointed out, the centerpiece of the film, and the reason that it felt so interpersonally violent.  The Joker himself is uncared for, but so is everyone else – the film portrays people who are living in an uncaring and very dark world.   This is, of course, the world of Batman – and the young Bruce Wayne makes an appearance and this becomes, almost by accident, part of the origin story of Batman – but this is not a super hero movie.  It is also not a villain movie.  Surprisingly, out of a cartoon world, a deeply human story emerges.

Joaquin Phoenix’s performance as the Joker is transcendent.   From the opening scene, where he, as Arthur Fleck, appears from afar, to be just a guy dressed as a clown to advertise a going out of business sale, he seems to be a kind of goofy character – like the guy who dresses up as the statue of liberty at tax time and does a dance outside the tax return place.  When he has his sign stolen by high school bullies, we begin to see the promise of the movie as Phoenix chases the bullies with a physicality that will permeate the film and that is reminiscent of the great mimes – his loose limbed running – gangly and un-athletic, but desperate – allows Phoenix to portray his character’s all-inness to the pursuit and to his life at a level that is reminiscent of the great Charlie Chaplin – who makes a cameo appearance later onscreen in a movie theater in Modern Times.  Phoenix carries the physicality into his dancing – whether in costume as a clown – or alone in his apartment, naked except for white jockey shorts that are falling off his too skinny and too ugly frame – we are forced to confront his physicality – the imperfections of it, and, in our exposure to it, as he bends and shapes it, we see its beauty.  The beauty of being inside a body that, no matter how misshapen, is our own and can magically express something about who we are that we can revel in and truly enjoy.  Like Chaplin, Phoenix falters on the edge of falling off a stair, or losing us – only to recapture us with a recovery that is so unexpectedly solid that we are more breathlessly in awe than we would be if we were in the hands of Fred Astaire, whom we fully expect to hit his mark.

Phoenix captures another complicated aspect of the character with the physicality of his laugh – an out of control laugh that he carries a card for – a card that explains that his laugh is a mental condition.  This laugh is inappropriate and inopportune.  There may be something funny about what he is observing, but there is also something – at times cruel and at times just off-putting about it – and the laugh is both forced but also painful – it feels likely a deeply felt cry – a painful howl – as well as like a cough that he just can’t stop even though he knows that it is interrupting everything else that is going on and drawing unwanted attention to himself.

Or, is the attention unwanted?  At some point, as he is transitioning into the Joker, Arthur realizes that the laugh is not a condition – it is part of who he is.  He also realizes that he has never been happy – and it seems that the laugh is a sign of that – and perhaps a cry for others to see his pain – to realize how badly he has been hurt.  Being a clown – making fun of himself – is a way of calling attention to himself – something that he fantasizes about doing successfully. 

In his fantasies, he is confident and capable and able to make people connect with him and enjoy his perspective on the world – but when confronted with the actual possibility of being with other people, even if he is just a member of an audience, he consistently calls attention to himself in unwanted and awkward ways and he ends up evoking laughs of derision rather than joy – and he ends up feeling isolated rather than connected.  It is only when he realizes that the laugh is not something alien that has been visited upon him – it is not some kind of condition – when he realizes that it arises from deep within him – it is an expression of something about his connection, or lack thereof, with a cruel world, that the laugh ceases – to be replaced by his being more and more comfortable living within himself as an alienated character.

Phoenix – even if Jack Nicholson hadn’t played this role – would evoke comparison’s with Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of feigned madness in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest – but this madness of Phoenix’s – while scary and barely riding the rails of holding him together – does not seem maniacal – but poignant.  While none of the other characters in the film empathize with him, we do.  We see how deeply wounded – and essentially hungry he is.  We resonate with this guy who, to put it mildly, has never caught a break.  We want the world to be a different place.  We feel for him and with him in his fantasies – and we don’t recognize many of them as fantasies – because we, like him, so much want them to be real.  It is only when the fantasies are realized to be fantasies – and we realize that he has been angry that he has not been treated as we would have liked to have been treated, does our sympathy turn towards those we now realize are only present in his mind as fantasies – and we are, thankfully, spared from seeing how his rage at being disappointed by some of them is expressed – and even though we might be able to understand the roots of his rage, because we have become attached to these characters through his real and imaginary contact with them, we would not be able to forgive him if we were to know what happens.

The reality of his life is grim.  He lives with his mother, Penny (played by Frances Conroy) – in uncomfortable proximity to her.  He shares a bed with her and washes her hair in the bathtub before lifting her naked body out of the tub to clothe her.  They live in a tenement apartment in a slum.  And she expects that they will be saved by the man she worked for – and, he discovers, might be his father – Thomas Wayne, the rich father of Bruce Wayne – or is she delusional about that?  Can she be counted on for anything?  Has he ever been able to count on her for anything?  Or is she all that he has so that he has had to cling to her, even though she is a deeply and powerfully unreliable caregiver.  He is held together with baling wire.  He barely makes a living as a clown for children’s parties and going out of business sales and the other clowns he works with at the clowns for hire company are mean.  He becomes violent by accident.  Another clown – the meanest of the lot – inadvertently sets him up by providing him with a means of protection – but Arthur rightly feels betrayed by becoming an accidental aggressor – and, ironically, becomes murderously revengeful.

I cannot, at this point, avoid the plot any longer (I have already given away too much), so be forewarned….  It is at the moment that the most graphically violent reprisal takes place that we also, surprisingly, see empathy from Arthur.  He spares the life of the short person clown – the one whom we thought he was meanly laughing at but now realize that the laugh arose out of anxiety when others were making fun of his only friend whom he is too scared to protect, and we then also realize that Arthur is capable of making loving and reasonable human contact.  Arthur, despite what we have just witnessed, is not a monster, but a caring person, even as we watch him careen towards more and more monstrous acts.

Arthur is also a mental patient.  His weekly contact with his social worker, in her overstuffed office with terrible musty air – we can smell that along with the cigarette smoke that pollutes almost every scene in the movie (remember when smoking onscreen was cool?) – and the pills that this meeting facilitates – seven at this point – mark him as mentally ill.  Our friends commented that the film is supporting the need for more mental health services.  OK, check, but one of the questions that will then arise, especially to someone like me, is: what is his diagnosis?  And the answer is that he has multiple diagnoses.  Not because he suffers from multiple mental illnesses, but because he is a complex character who is being depicted and so, descriptively, he will meet criteria for such diagnoses as schizoid, paranoid/schizophrenic, post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), delusional disorder, perhaps a developmental or learning disorder and maybe a bit of speech pathology, but also, to return to the question of unwanted attention, narcissistic disorder.  Please understand – he doesn’t suffer from any of these disorders.  He is a cartoon character who is bubbling up out of the minds of the writers who created him and the actor who brought him to life.  And his madness – a human thing – mimics aspects of clinical madness as it exists in the real world, but it is a much more intrusive and immediate thing because it comes out of the minds of healthier people.

What was personally disturbing about this film was not that Arthur reminded me of my patients, but that he reminded me of myself.  The histrionic suicide fantasies – they’ll realize what they’ve done to me when they see what I do to myself – mirror some of my more dramatic adolescent thoughts.  These occurred during a time when I was worried that no one (meaning the princess of fairy tales) would be interested in me – I would never find the promised true love.  And this is the concern about the film connecting with groups like the incel community, an online group that emerged out a 20 year old woman’s concern that she was INvoluntarily CElibate and went as far off the rails as Arthur does when he becomes the Joker.  The question about the impact of this film is whether it will do what the Joker does in the film – incite copycat mayhem – or not.

I think a far more interesting and poignant concern is that we do, in fact, live in a world where we are becoming more and more socially isolated.  Our American anxiety has always been that we won’t make it (so we worship the Frank Sinatra’s of the world who can “make it anywhere”), and for the Arthurs among us who don’t make it – and even for those who are in the process of making it, we don’t feel that we will – perhaps even the thugs who worked for Wayne Industries and were Arthur’s first victims are confronting that anxiety – and handling it very poorly – and our response to that – the response of Thomas Wayne – is to forge ahead with more of the same.  He, in the film, turns to politics with a promise to solve the woes that were caused by his own industrial system which created the kinds of economic inequities that lead to the closing of mental health facilities.  That appears to be the line drawn by the film – but I would propose that even more deeply, our anxiety about whether we will make it causes us to focus too much on making it and not enough on connecting with each other.  And having Tomas tell us to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps – to work harder – flies in the face of just how hard Arthur – and the rest of us Arthurs – are working to do exactly that.

We are, as the reluctant wife pointed out, living on the edge of a new industrial revolution – our “Modern Times” will focus on how Artificial Intelligence has driven us out of a whole variety of jobs – from truck driving to lawyering.  Indeed, we went to a Movie Theater at the center of what had been a thriving shopping center in the heart of town for the last two decades of its existence – we hadn’t been there in a year or so – and we were surprised to find that almost all of the retail shops were boarded up and most of the eateries were gone as well.  A social and entertainment as well as retail hub appears to be another victim of the convenience of Amazon, just as countless small town downtowns were shut down when Wal-Mart arrived a generation ago.

So the scene where Arthur confronts Thomas – where we expect that Arthur will violently attack his paternal figure – there is, instead, an expression of hope for a connection with him – a hope that Arthur will finally get the paternal nurturance that he so desperately needs.  But he gets exactly the opposite of that – he is, once again, as he was with the boys who stole his sign, on the receiving end of violence.  And so it is not surprising that he begins to react against real and imagined parental figures with violence himself, even if that is hard for us to stomach – no matter how deeply empathically connected we are with him.  As creepy as his mother is – as creepy as his relationship with her is – as lousy as her parenting is revealed to be – we find matricide – and the execution of whatever fate he chooses for the other maternal figure – his imagined girlfriend – it is too much to ask for either to be gory – and for the second to be even seen onscreen.  The director wants us to understand what drives him to this, but doesn’t believe we can – or should – I identify so closely that we can stomach it, much less celebrate it.

But we do revel in the death – or at least I did – of the other imagined parental figure.   Arthur and his mother have always enjoyed watching the local late night talk show – Murray Franklin (played with requisite bonhomie by Robert De Niro).  Arthur has imagined – this is the place where we first enter his fantasy life and are cued to realize that he has a fantasy life – being embraced by Murray and being told by him that he is the son that Murray always wanted.  But when he embarks on his ill-fated comic career, carrying the evidence of his madness – the journal that his social worker has encouraged him to keep and that is filled with his ravings – to refer to so that he can tell lame jokes between painful laughing episodes – a video of his poor performance is played by Murray on his show as he ridicules the fool who tried to be a comic.  Arthur is mortified.  When, after the violence has started to take place, Murray’s show calls to invite Arthur onto the show to be ridiculed in person, Arthur accepts and practices for his role, which includes the suicidal fantasy played out in front of an audience of millions.

And here’s another weird intersection – one of my fantasies in high school was to be invited onto Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show and to have a real conversation with him – not some kind of hyped up conversation.  I talked about this with friends – and we agreed that the fake conversations on TV talk shows were problematic.  Arthur asks that Murray introduce him as the Joker – and he comes out and plays it straight – he is himself – in clown make-up.  But the make-up he wears is not the mask of the copycat clowns who are creating mayhem in Gotham – it is the make-up that we have seen him cry through – it is the make-up that reveals rather than hides his pathos.  This, not surprisingly, does not go over well with the audience.  They are not there for real (not artificial) reality TV.  But it does go viral on the TV news shows – where audiences gobble up the clown going off on TV.  Meanwhile, those imitation clowns are marauding through Gotham – and one of them murders Thomas Wayne and his wife in front of young Bruce – creating a slightly new version of the Batman backstory. 

Our entertainment is meant, I suppose, to distract us from the grim realities of our life – especially at times of economic turmoil (Modern Times was created during the depression to both entertain and point out how industrialization had dehumanized us).  This film is intended, I think, to counter that.  It is intended to point towards (at least in my mind) the importance of the kinds of human connection that, thankfully, most of us enjoy in enough measure to help us not just survive from day to day but to have moments of joy.  But I think it highlights how we, as a society and as individuals, sabotage our ability to more fully do that – and exposes how our dissatisfaction with the lives that are available to us can lead to rage when we don’t feel the kind of empathic contact that Arthur so desperately craves.  My hope is that I won’t see too many copy-cat clown masks at Halloween; that people will understand that the distorted enactment of violence – the mayhem – is not the point or the intent of the movie.  That if we connect with the Joker, we are connecting not with an essentially angry person, but with a person who is poignant and needy.  That the identification he invites is not of being like the bullies who abuse him, but like the little guy who takes care of him.  But, of course, there will be those who can’t face their own vulnerability and will identify with the violence – we just have to hang onto the idea that this is not the intent and work to build a world that would welcome the Arthurs (including ourselves) who live in it.

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The Reluctant Psychoanalyst gets tested: Aptitudes as understood by Johnson O’Connor

Thirty years ago, while in the middle of post-doctoral training, a number of friends and my now ex-wife traveled to Chicago for aptitude testing at the Johnson O'Connor Institute.  I was not excited about the prospect of learning that I might be in the wrong profession after having devoted as much time as I had (and was) to training, so I did not invest in learning more about my own aptitudes then.  Now, with retirement looming at some point in a rapidly oncoming future and with kids who are trying to figure out what to do with their lives, the reluctant wife and I decided to see what this aptitude stuff was all about.  Though there are centers in major metropolitan areas around the country, the reluctant son is going to school in Chicago, so we booked two Thursday/Friday testing sessions with a joint feedback session Friday afternoon and decided to stay through the weekend to enjoy Chicago and have some family time.

Much to my surprise, Johnson O’Connor, the founder of the institution, was not a psychologist, nor are the folks who administer, interpret, or do ongoing research on the battery of tests that he developed.  He worked for General Electric in Boston in the 1920s, which I knew, but he was an engineer, not an Industrial-Organizational psychologist, as I had assumed.  I learned from the materials that were handed out at the end of the testing that the plant where O’Connor worked needed to figure out how to hire people who would do well there, and he came up with some tasks that assessed skills needed to do industrial work.  He approached this as an engineer – which is essentially the same as an I-O psychologist’s approach.  He gathered data and looked at how well the tasks he used (two that are still in the battery today – tasks that I massively failed at doing well in) predicted the productivity of potential workers.  Well, they did predict as he thought they would.  And soon, with GE’s blessing, he opened a non-profit research group to look at how to help people match their aptitudes – or basic skills – with the work that they would be doing.

My understanding of his theory – which does not seem to be articulated in the current book – and may be flawed as twenty years have passed since I heard my friends talking about it – is that he believed that we would be happiest when we are doing what we do well.  He also, as I remember it, believed that we would NOT be happy if we weren’t using the parts of our brains that work the best – we would essentially always feel that there was an itch that needed to be scratched.  So he looked for tests to add to his battery that would tap into a wide variety of aptitudes – or basic abilities.  He believed – and apparently gathered data to support – that the tests to be of most use would not be tapping into learned skills, but into abilities that we are essentially born with.  So a recent test has been added that taps into aesthetic sensibilities – and to determine if it is really doing that students at the Chicago High School for the Visual Arts (or something like that) were tested when they entered and when they left and their performance on the test did not change.  This was seen as evidence that the test was not something that is based in learning some sort of skill or perspective, but on something inborn.

A quick caution from a psychologist is in order here.  In the first half of the 20th Century, we thought that IQ tests were based on aptitudes alone, and this caused us to take all kinds of positions that are today totally indefensible.  I do not know how the O'Connor staff has researched or what their thoughts are about the intersection of experience more broadly - cultural and class experience - with aptitude, but I think this is an area for study rather than assumption.

To return, though, the second part of O'Connor's hypothesis – the idea that people would be happy when they were doing work that tapped into their skill sets - he ascertained by testing people doing a variety of jobs and measuring what the job required of them, what their aptitudes were – and the fit between these – and how happy the people were.  He also evaluated how productive they were.  Not surprisingly, the “natural” salesmen in sales jobs rated their happiness highly and they were productive.  But a “natural” salesman working as an isolated researcher was less likely both to be happy and productive.

Normal Curve

A final piece that I remember is that, in order to find the “natural” part of ourselves, O’Connor was looking for tests that had a particular unusual statistical quality: instead of people being normally distributed on the tests, the way they are on IQ tests or with weight or height, he wanted to find tests with a U shaped distribution – that is people either do well or poorly, but not so much in between.  Now I don’t know if this is true.  In the interpretation of the results of our tests, Michele simply referenced the percentile scores and said they were interested in the tests that were high – above the 70^th percentile, and those that were low – below the 30^th percentile.  So, whatever the distribution of the tests, it is the things that we do well and those that we do poorly that are of most interest.

u shaped curve

We arrived at the building – which is right off Michigan Avenue’s Magnificent Mile and is an old, somewhat seedy place, with a salon on the first floor and a design studio of some sort beside it, with an architecture firm somewhere in the back, but a brass plate over the door stating that we were in the right place.  We came into the lobby and, after trying the wrong door, found the sign to ring up and we were buzzed in and told to come to the second floor.  The stair case tilted a bit and felt like it might fall out of the wall at any minute, but once we got to the office, the floor was steady enough, even if the area looked well used in, as the reluctant wife put it, the way that a graduate student office looks well used.  We spent Thursday afternoon and Friday morning being traded back and forth between sitting in front of a computer screen to do paper and pencil tests in response to visual and auditory feedback and then working with one of the staff on tasks that they presented to us in person and evaluated as we went along.

The staff were friendly and deeply engaged in their work.  A few other people were being tested at the same time and everything moved quickly and efficiently.  As the in-person testing proceeded, we were given feedback after each test both about what it was measuring and about how we had done on it.  The staff seemed to have drunk the water – they seemed really to believe that what was being tested was not something we could study for (test scores don’t improve much when people retake the tests) nor was a result of anything other than an aptitude – and we all have some aptitudes and not others – and what the testing can do is help us realize what our strengths and weaknesses are – and this will help us lead better lives.  So there was not a sense that we were being negatively evaluated when we didn’t do well – it just was what it was.  Nor was there a sense of praise for having a skill – again, it was what it was and it was useful to know that we had that.

The feedback session, then, was quite helpful.  I have not had a chance to review all of the materials – to let all of the ideas sink in – nor to integrate the materials with a master life plan, but even at what is the beginning of a process, I have a sense that the information will be helpful as I work towards whatever it is that comes next – and it helped me understand some things (like why it is that blogging has been so useful to me that I have kept it up for six years despite having more than enough other things to do) and, somewhat surprisingly, it helped illuminate some of the areas of friction between the reluctant wife and me – places where our ways of functioning are determined by our differing aptitudinal patterns – and I think this will help us navigate some of the predictable pinch points that will continue to come up with slightly more grace and aplomb.  I think we will be able to say something like – "Ah ha, this is a place where you are ready to move ahead with a plan and have already come up with a sense of how to get from here to there, but I am still generating options and thinking about how we might skin this cat from a very different angle."  Perhaps we will be able to laugh about this rather than to simply devolve into being grumpily frustrated.  In any case, a guy can hope…

The feedback is primarily focused on vocational applications, but quite a bit of it has avocational implications as well.  One area of assessment, for instance, has to do with musical ability.  And there are many ways that one’s musicality is related to vocational performance.  A sense of timing, for instance, is going to play a big role in that natural salesman’s ability to close a deal.  But it also has implications for avocational interests.  Timing plays a bigger role in some sports than in others.  And O’Connor is very interested in people using their musical talents – if they have them – as an important component of that elusive quality of becoming happy.  The assessment of musical aptitude includes tone sensitivity as well as sensitivity to melody and different musical instruments are recommended depending on the abilities of the person tested.

Traditional career counseling is based in preferences rather than aptitudes.  My own thinking is that preferences are likely related to aptitudes, but not as directly as we might imagine.  The last exercise was to engage in a standard preference test – the Holland Self Determined Search test.  This asks about one’s interests and self-assessment of abilities to engage in a variety of activities and careers.  I last did something like this when I was in 7^th or 8^th grade.  It was interesting to take a preference test, then, as an adult and recognize some things that I might have thought of as glamorous or interesting earlier were just drudgery as I have had to do them at some point as an adult, and other things that I thought I would do well at I wasn’t particularly well suited for.  One of the uses of the Self Directed Search is that it will recommend many occupations - and these can be checked against the aptitudes for fit.  There really is a sense of open ended exploration in the process.

The results of the testing as a whole, while not surprising, were also not predictable.  I learned not just about individual aptitudes, but about what it means to have two or three in combination and there were various strategies that were proposed that would help me scratch some itches that have largely gone unscratched.  Psychoanalysis – the practice of coming to understand the unconscious functioning of the mind – does not tell us much about things that we are better measured objectively than subjectively.  The objective measurement of this testing led to the beginning of a different kind of insight based on (what I hope will be) growth.  I think the two kinds of growth should be complementary – indeed synergistic.  Of course, part of the way I work (I learned from Johnson O’Connor) is to think that more data is almost always good.

One of the central reasons to undertake the testing at this point – how to plan for retirement activities that will allow the reluctant wife and me to plot a course where we can utilize our aptitudes together – is still very much a work in progress.  Of course I will probably still be thinking about permutations on it long after she has settled on a plan.  One of the realizations we had as we discussed the testing during one of the many breaks is that having a sense of what each do well might be something that we should do more of – and not feel guilty when the other does that (or resentful when it is ourselves) as long as there is a general balance.  So I will continue to do more of the cooking (and gardening) as we move forward. 

What we might end up doing – what kind of work we might do together as we drop some of the time consuming things that we engage in to make a living – is much more complicated than just doing things that we do well.  It also has to do with investing ourselves in things that we feel passionate about.  Finding the overlap between our separate passions and abilities will be complicated, but having data – and a feedback session focused on how our abilities overlap and intersect – feels like an important component of that process.

In the meanwhile, the Johnson O'Connor group is going to sell the building they are in.  So if you go to the place in Chicago it may look new and spiffy.  They assured me it would still be downtown.  Some of the testing materials are based on stimuli that have proved tried and true, and have been around a very long time - much like my dearly beloved Rorschach test and some of the other instruments that I use.  They are likely to feel out of place in a new building, but be reassured that they come from a place that has been much loved and cared for as it has grown worn and creaky from useful service.

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