Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche’s Americanah: Does a foreigner’s eye better reflect ourselves?

 Americanah; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; psychology; psychoanalysis; 

Americanah is a masterfully written novel about a Nigerian immigrant woman. It is both a roman a clef (a novel that is a disguise of actual events – in this and many cases the actual events of the author’s life – Asymmetry is a recent example where the author tells of her love affair with Philip Roth but changes the names) and a bildungsroman (a coming of age novel told by the narrator in retrospect, after having come of age – To Kill a Mockingbird is a classic example).  And, I think, its vision is on a par with the great novels (Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex) and historical works (Alex De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America) that expose something essential about the American character – in this case about race.

 

The Novel interweaves three stories.  The first is the story of the moment the heroine, Ifemelu – decides, after having come to the United States and establishing herself here, to leave the country and return to Nigeria.  This is the story that the novel begins with and is “home base” throughout it.  It is the story of a pivotal moment – the coming of age moment and the owning or re-owning or defining of the self-moment.  Much of this first story – after we learn that Ifemelu has entered into rarified American air, becoming a scholar and financially successful blogger about race, takes place in the confines of a hot, decrepit space where is she getting her hair braided by other West African immigrants who have not been as successful as she, and she is listening to the stories of their lives while she tries to make sense of the story of her own and prepares to return home.

 

The second story is the story of Ifemelu's history that leads up to the present, transitional moment.  Ifemelu’s childhood in Nigeria takes time to articulate – we are being introduced to a foreign culture – and then, much later, we follow her arrival in the United States and her slow, difficult and incomplete acculturation to two foreign cultures – White American culture, and the culture of the African Americans – those who were taken generations ago as West African slaves and who now reside in this their country not as equal citizens, but as a marginalized minority – even when they are tenured professors at Ivy League Universities. 

 

One the criticisms of the Netflix film adaptation of the novel Unorthodox is that the acculturation of the heroine to modern day Germany occurs in the course of less than a week – a pace that feels impossibly rushed compared to the real world necessities of making such a transition.  Americanah is almost 600 pages long, and so is able to devote considerable time – on the page and in the life of the heroine – to the transitions that she makes and fails (or refuses or can't) make.  We’ll have to see whether the HBO series from the book can keep us as enthralled as the text does while immersing us in two cultures that are so foreign to each other.

 

The third story is what unfolds after Ifemelu’s decision to return home.  Though this story dominates the last hundred pages of the novel, it seems to flit past too quickly.  Ifemelu doesn’t seem to quite get her feet under her, or perhaps I didn’t as a reader, before an ending that seemed like too simple an answer to the questions raised in the book.  Of course, the answers will also come from the life that is led after the book is over, so perhaps I am feeling a bit like the analyst whose patient has left and who will not be exposed to “the rest of the story.”

 

Woven into these three dominant stories are multiple sub stories – especially the story of Obinze, Ifemelu’s college boyfriend who takes his own emigrant/return home arc – a journey that, because it lands him in England, allows for some comparing and contrasting of “foreign” Anglophone cultures.  Obinze, who is known as “Zed” in college – presumably for the Zee in his name – is a rock steady and loyal character in a book full of people who are neither.  He, like Ifemelu, is clear in his understanding of the world.  This does not mean that he is naïve.  Quite the contrary, he is worldly wise and understands that people are complex and internally inconsistent critters.  So, when Ifemelu’s beautiful Aunt Uju’s boyfriend, who is a married general in the military, is killed, Zed and his family of academics rally to protect Ifemelu and Uju from the general’s wife’s wrath, now that wife is no longer restrained by her husband from taking her wrath out on her competitor.

 

The foreign perspective is essential to the insights that Ifemelu brings to her blogging about race, and to her (and our dawning) understanding of American Culture as the book unfolds.  As Ifemelu’s African American boyfriend’s jealous sister says about her, “You know why Ifemelu can write that blog, by the way?... Because she’s African.  She’s writing from the outside.  She doesn’t really feel all the stuff she’s writing about.  It’s quaint and curious to her.  So she can write it and get all these accolades and get invited to give talks.  If she were African American, she’d just be labeled angry and shunned.”  But I think that, at its core, a person from a country where one’s blackness does not cause prejudice can experience the shock of this in a way that neither European Americans nor African Americans can experience.  We are oddly bound together by the normalcy of our racism.  By the way that it has wound its way into our personal and cultural norms so that we cannot take it on as an object; it is a deeply felt, very subjective part of our very beings.

 

So Ifemelu inhabits, in America, the space that the analyst inhabits in the intrapsychic world of the analysand.  The analyst enters this world as a transference object – as a foreign object that gets painted with the familiar.  Just as Ifemelu gets painted by both black and white Americans as black, something that she is both aware of, but also not used to as a stimulus that arouses this particular kind of reaction from others, so the analyst, who is male or female, more frequently white, but occasionally darker skinned, but more importantly caring at moments and negligent in others, is able to experience the reaction of the analysand as the analysand welcomes the analyst to become part of their interpersonal and intrapsychic world as a member in the way that all other members are welcomed.  The analyst is able to observe the odd tribal traditions that are part and parcel of that treatment, because of the analysts essentially foreign nature.  The analyst can say, as Ifemelu does, isn’t is strange that you are treating me in this way - and to be curious about that – rather than to take it as the usual way of doing things and to react in the usual way evoking the usual kind of dance.

 

Because Ifemelu is African she can feel racism all the more acutely.  Growing up in a culture without blatant but hidden racism, it assaults her when she is the target of it in the United States.  Another way of saying what I said in the paragraph above is that part of why analysis is so much easier with two is that the “foreigner”, the analyst, can feel the power – the weight – of oppression that is so much part and parcel of the experience of the “native”, that the person who has borne it for so long, ironically can no longer feel it as an outside force because that weight has become a natural feeling extension of their being.   The analyst, the therapist, and, I would add, the lover can experience the native experience as foreign and can question it. This helps the natives with the first of two problems – to recognize the size and scope of the problem – rather than seeing it as just the way things are.  The problem is, to give up something, no matter how problematic, that has worked for us in whatever ways it has – even though it has also worked against us, is terribly difficult - whether on the couch or in a culture.

 

To be clear, Ifemelu primarily addresses her observations of our culture to African Americans (she shortens this to AB for American Blacks and distinguishes them from NAB – Non-American Blacks), but she is also implicitly addressing a white audience that is blind to their racism – she is speaking to the vast liberal white American that Get-Out was trying to wake.  Ifemela works with an upper middle class white couple, nannying for their children while dating the mother’s rich cousin.  She is concerned for the woman she works for who doesn’t see how she is being treated and, I think, she is concerned for the rich cousin who is adrift in his wealth.  It is not just the oppressed, but the oppressors who are blind to their condition and to the costs of them of the condition they are (unconsciously) wrapped up in.

 

Meanwhile, Ifemela does not just articulate her own immigrant experience, but she stays in touch with her Auntie Uju, with whom she can be more candid than she can be with her parents who are tied to the mores of Nigeria.  She is able to watch and narrate Uju’s struggles as a physician coming to a foreign country, which is very different – and demeaning in its own way – from Ifemelu’s entrance as a college student.  She is also able to trace Uju’s son Dike’s growth and acculturation as an immigrant mother’s son in this foreign country.

 

At this point, I should remind us that the novel is a different form of writing than the memoir.  This novel, which is certainly also part memoir, is told from the third person, and we are given particularly close access to Ifemela’s internal experience and it is told primarily from her perspective.  But the third person, as opposed to the first person, allows the author to take some distance – to be a bit of a foreigner even to her own experience and therefore to have a critical relationship to it.  And we can join the author in the criticism of the main character, which interferes less, I think, with our identification with the heroine than if we were reacting to her as she was talking in her own voice.  We become, as it were, allied with the narrator in our criticism, and we feel the way we feel when we are criticizing ourselves, which is, of course, what the author is doing.  We see and criticize, but also forgive.

 

And we are willing to forgive in part because we are held in such capable hands.  We are shuttling back and forth between the three stories (and many subplots) which means that we are moving backwards and forwards in time.  This is momentarily disorienting – but only momentarily.  The narratives are woven together so that they form the kind of integration, the kind of clarity that occurs when a person tells their own story in the way that it occurs to them (here I am referring to the process of free association in psychoanalysis but also of a parent telling the story of their life to a child) but, because we can’t ask questions to help orient us, Adichie has made the connections for us.  I have quoted before Stephen King’s concern about the wheels falling off in long books like The Goldfinch.  Suffice it to say, there is no such fear here.

 

Ifemelu remains solidly grounded throughout this book, which is a bit of a puzzle.  Almost everyone else in the book is off balance.  Partly they are off balance because of Ifemelu.  She does not play games.  Her observations bubble out of her like an out of control burp.  She can’t keep from accosting people with what she thinks about them and the situation they are in together.  Blogging becomes a natural outlet for her.  Her posts are short, pithy, and filled with wit.  By the time she makes her decision to return home, she seems to have found the reins to these thoughts – and she seems to be more and more to be on top of her game in articulating them.  She becomes more and more self-sufficient while staying connected with a world that she cares deeply about, feeling for it, but remaining open to the contradictions that are central to it.

 

I spoke earlier about being disappointed by the ending of the book.  If you don’t want a spoiler, skip to the next paragraph.  Ifemelu ends up finding, or rediscovering, her soul mate in Zed at the end of this book.  On one level, this is disappointing because it follows the tried and true girls meets boy, girl loses boy, girl finds boy arc.  However much this may reflect reality – and however much Zed may, in real life or in the mind of the novelist (not the memoirist), reflect what would or did happen in the lived life of Ifemelu, I am less distressed by this ending as I realize it is also a symbolic dream ending, if you will.  That is, Zed is not just a flesh and blood character, but he is also a representation of who it is that Ifemelu actually is.  Discovering him – returning to Nigeria to find him – becomes less about a lovesick girl’s dream of reuniting with a lost lover and more about a person coming of age by discovering and connecting with her true nature.  Her mirror self has – as she herself has – strayed from who it is that that they were – but these mirror selves are both tuned to the vagaries of development – they get that living is complicated – and they are able to reunite – to square themselves with the insults of having been foreigners both abroad and then, inevitably, when they have returned home.  To discover home is not a passive act – it is the activity of creating the home space that we deserve.  Whether we are doing that within the walls of our own home – or within the walls of the country that we want to own as our own, we have to not take it as it is, ultimately, but make it into what we want it to be.

 

I am grateful for the recommendation of this book to a French Analyst who mentioned it in a podcast about Covid.  I was struck by the parallels between this book and the Frenchman De Toqueville’s Democracy in America, as I mentioned before, but I did not remember that book well, having read it 40 years ago.  So I pulled it down from the shelves and leafed through it.  I found the yellowed translation to be quite accessible and modern.  But the most surprising piece was that De Toqueville devoted fully half of the first book (he ultimately wrote two volumes) to the issue of race.  His position was that, as much as we had been able to create a country that had the potential to balance equality of opportunity with personal freedom, we had failed to do this with the African American and the Native American populations.  He concluded that the oppressed (the African Americans, who were largely enslaved in the 1840s) had it worse than the marginalized (the Native Americans who were pushed off their land and out of the consciousness of the majority).  But his position was that we, as a nation, had the reckoning with these two populations as our major unfinished business.  Almost two hundred years later, another foreigner, Adichie, helps us see that this is still the case.

 

 

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

For other posts looking at Race in America see: James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree, and applied to a Rock Musical, Dorothy Holmes presents to the 2016 Psychoanalytic Convention, 2017 Convention Aktar, Powell and Trump, hearing Ta-Nehisi Coates talk, Black Lives Matter,  John Lewis' March, Get Out, Green Book and Blackkklansman, The Help, Selma, August Wilson's Fences, Hamilton! on screen, Da 5 Bloods, The Black Panther, and Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me.

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text.

 

  

Dead to Me Season 2: Guilt is the Culprit

 

If you, like me, have been feeling that Dead to Me Season 2 is a guilty pleasure, rest assured that it is also a primer in guilt.  The first few episodes seem to be filler – getting us back into the swing of things, reminding us of who the characters are, and cementing the relationship between Jen (Christina Applegate who is also the executive producer of the show) and Judy (Linda Cardellini) and Jen’s two boys and establishing this modern family unit as the central group.  Added to this is the surprise appearance of the murdered Steve Woods’ near identical twin Ben (both played by James Marsden).   This last entrance helps clarify that we are watching a Soap Opera – especially as Ben is the “good” twin and Steve was the “evil” twin.  That this is a Soap Opera is underlined by the number of main characters who sleep together and the way that seemingly minor characters either become main characters or show up to or three segments later to underscore an important plot element.

 

In my comments on the first season, I noted the absence of back stories.  These finally start to come thick and fast in the end of the second season, and the underlying psychoanalytic logic of the series starts to emerge.  Remember that Judy met Jen, whose husband she had murdered with her car, in a grief group.  Judy lied about her grief, claiming that her husband had died of a heart attach when, in fact her fiancée, the “evil” twin Steve, had dumped her after insisting that she not go to the police about the accident.  Judy feels terrible guilt about what she has done to Judy, but her guilty relationship brings more grief to Jen than redemption, at least at first, as Steve’s dogged pursuit of Judy leads him to confront Jen and she reactively kills him at the end of the first season – a crime that also goes unreported and provides the drive for the second season that Jen's husband's death provided for the first season.

 

It should come as no surprise then (though I have to admit that I didn’t see this coming) that there are layers of guilt for Jen and Judy that precede the current imbroglio they create for themselves.  Both harbor tremendous guilt that stems from their relationships with their mothers – and one way of thinking about this guilt is that it is unresolved grief. 

 

Judy’s grief and guilt is, not surprisingly given how much difficulty she has in getting her life on track, much deeper and more difficult than Jen’s.  It parallels Jen’s in that both feel guilt over the anger they feel towards a parent who disappointed them before they, each in their own way, lost that parent.  Both secretly blame their parent for failing them, while simultaneously being doggedly loyal to them, and, to a certain extent, less in Judy’s case, idealizing them.

 

The conflict they feel about their guilt – the sense that they must keep their anger hidden (at least intermittently unconscious and/or out of their “public” narrative) binds them tightly to their parents as Freud described in his 1917 book, Mourning and Melancholia.  In a very dense sentence he says, “Just as mourning impels the ego to give up the object by declaring the object to be dead and offering the ego the inducement of continuing to live, so does each single struggle of ambivalence [in melancholia] loosen the fixation of the libido to the object by disparaging it, denigrating it and even as it were killing it.”

 

What Freud is saying is that mourning or grieving is a process where we give up our ties to the objects (people who now live in our minds), but that melancholia, depression, or “pathology” involves hanging onto the object by “as it were” killing it – which only loosens but doesn’t sever the tie to the object.  We stay stuck to the object, banging away at it while also hanging onto it - not letting it go.  

 

The dilemma is that we can’t live without connection – both to people in our current world – Jen and Judy cling to each other (often against Jen’s better judgement) even though they have done terrible things to each other because they need a friend in a very cruel and unforgiving world.  But they are clinging rather than simply connecting in part because they, ironically, haven’t let go of the objects that still haunt them.  They haven’t in the words of the psychoanalyst Hans Loewald, allowed ghosts to become ancestors.  It is the guilt that they feel that is forever blunting their ability to see the world, including the people in the world who would do them harm, in unrealistic ways.  They keep hoping that this time the other will actually be the one that they can count on, and blind themselves to the ways in which they are not.

 

So, Judy relies on Ben who tells her not to come clean – but she feels badly about Jen and so connects with her.  Only in the context of that relationship can she see the problems with Ben’s exerting harmful control over her.  Jen cannot come clean about her murder of Ben to the authorities because she fears that she will, in being arrested and incarcerated, abandon her children (who have already lost their father) as her mother abandoned her.  She avoids identifying with her mother.  She doesn’t come clean to Judy because she feels guilty about having harmed someone that Judy loved, no matter how ambivalently.  Again, she doesn’t want to be seen by Judy the way that she views her mother.  She feels tied to her mother and feels that others will react to her as she has reacted to her mother.

 

Surprisingly, it is Judy, in this second season, that comes to terms with her guilt.  She recognizes that her feelings towards her mother are not something to be ashamed of, but reasonable reactions to her.  She is able to see her as she really is.   This is surprising because Judy is the one who is always seeing the good in people – even the evil twin – perhaps because she has had to wall herself off from her mother to keep herself from her mother’s evilness – this has left her with a wall within herself that protects her from seeing the bad in others.  Perhaps it is because she has come to see that Jen – despite being a good and well intentioned person – is also bad.  Not just a little bad, but murdering bad, and is still good, that she can see the ways in which her mother’s badness is not, in fact, balanced by good.

 

This would (whether it is the intent of the writers or not) parallel the psychoanalytic therapeutic process where the patient’s realization of the analyst’s flaws – the deidealization of the analyst – facilitates a more balanced views of others – just because they have good qualities does not make the perfect, but also, paradoxically, this realization also helps analysand's mourn relationships with people who have been less than perfect – it helps them realize that those who have been harmful are not necessarily evil – or, in Judy’s case, to finally see that those whose primary intent to harm are not essentially good – at least not currently and in relationship to her – but that doesn’t mean that she is bad.  She can still be good and recognize that they are bad.

 

So, at the heart of this soap opera is a very deep and compelling truth.  How will this play out in season three?  Will Jen get hit with this kind of realization as well?  Or will she end up in the slammer?  In addition to articulating psychological truth, the writers of this saga are interested in more seasons, so stay tuned, there is certainly more guilt laden binge watching to come!

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text.

The Medici Season Three: Lorenzo the Magnificent and Morality

 

Lorenzo the Magnificent

The Reluctant Wife and I watched the first two seasons of the Netflix Medici series out of curiosity after discovering Florence last year when we visited the Reluctant Daughter as she spent a semester abroad (something that, in the days of COVID-19 seems a very long time ago, and related to a world very far away, indeed).  While there we discovered, much to my surprise, the dawning of the renaissance.  This intimate, walled city was home to a myriad of figures who moved us from the middle ages to the age of reason – Botticelli, Michelangelo, and Da Vinci at the head of the parade in the arts, but Da Vinci joining Copernicus in Science and Machiavelli in Political Science.  But as we wandered the streets of this town, the force that had clearly held these minds in place was plastered above the door of every prominent church and building in town – it was the crest of the Medici – the powerful family that was the political leader of this place symbolized by both Donatello’s and Michelangelo’s sculpture of David – the small powerful kid with a sling who downed the giant (nearby Rome) to rule the world.

Michelangelo's David

 So we watched the Netflix series first two seasons and were mildly disappointed.  The drama that we expected seemed to be mostly wasted, especially in the second season, on the intrigue of marriages and family alliances within a small town – one that had not yet hit the big time, but contained all of the drama of a daytime soap opera.  We learned a great deal (especially as we fact checked) about the origins of the Medici dynasty, but we didn’t get the sweep of history that we were really hungry for.  So we were pleasantly surprised when the third season dropped and ours hopes for a history of the place and the renaissance itself were realized.  Lorenzo the Magnificent (Daniel Sharman) was, indeed, magnificent – and, at least in this tale which I am certain has been varnished, also quite maleficent.  He is both a figure of great good and great evil.

So I was surprised, when I was teaching a class this week on the very modern term of self-esteem, to find Lorenzo coming to mind.  It seemed almost an insult to his greatness – a reduction to the arc of his tremendous life – to use a term as simple and prosaic – and so modern – as self-esteem to understand the psychology of this great and terrible man, but there it was.

Self-esteem catapulted to the top of the things that parents should care about supporting for their children in the last half of the twentieth century.  As Nancy McWilliams points out in her book “Case Formulation”, this is related to many factors, including our becoming, especially for the upper middle class, an increasingly mobile society, both in terms of moving to get jobs, but also in terms of being able to pursue professions that had to do with our own interests and aptitudes and not with the family business.  When our neighborhood, our parent’s occupation (which was now ours) and a familiar family role no longer defined us, we began to ask ourselves about out our identity – and looked to define our worth in novel ways.  This was an important thread in our culture’s movement towards wrestling with narcissistic issues more centrally than neurotic ones.  Where before we had been neurotically inhibiting ourselves to fit into prescribed roles, we were now worried that the roles we had defined for ourselves – and that therefore defined ourselves – were lacking.

Now Lorenzo is not a modern kid who was raised to believe that every little thing he did was great and should be enshrined on a bulletin board of blue and red and yellow ribbons.  Well, OK, he was woven into a tapestry with gold thread that showed him leading the family into the future.  But he was primarily neurotic, not narcissistic, in the sense that he had to bend his life to fit the mold of what the family had in mind for him.  He married the woman that his father chose as his political mate despite his various passionate wishes.  He became the leader of the family reluctantly – that was his role as eldest child.  And yet he took to it like a duck to water.

 

Now, you may think that the man who had a vision of himself as the unifier of Italy, the person who made Florence the beating heart of a new Europe, and the person who had no empathy for any enemy who crossed his path would qualify as a narcissist.  And I think the third season of the show suggests that he went off the tracks and became not just narcissistic but psychopathic.  And I certainly think we could look through that lens.  But we might look through a different lens – that of self-esteem – a construct that is central to narcissism, to discover that his character his really neurotic, and thus learn something about our own narcissistic age.

 

What was most surprising to me about reading about narcissism and teaching the material is how central morality becomes to self-esteem and thus to identity.  That which we value – that which we hold as an ideal – our moral compass – becomes a powerful motivator for our behavior.  If we value being highly esteemed – as the narcissist does – we will work very, very hard to receive kudos from others.  Psychoanalytically, the superego – the part of our mind that begins to develop at a very early age and that is built in part on incorporating the perceived values of parental figures – has a hand in determining many of our actions.  We say, “I will do this versus that,” because this is consistent with my values – this is consistent with who I am – and these kinds of actions are, therefore, what I will build my life around.

 

Lorenzo’s moral compass was built concentrically around valuing family first, then Florence.  And these two frequently became one in his mind – Florence was an extension of his family.  He also valued art and science and saw Florence and the family as a means towards achieving a world that had greater beauty and was built on scientific principles.  But he was raised by his mother to have a different moral compass than the family had always relied on – his great-grandfather’s motto was: “To achieve a good end, it is sometimes necessary to engage in bad deeds”.  His mother would substitute “Good deeds can secure good ends.” Of course, Machiavelli, who appears in the third season but whom we didn’t recognize until the reveal at the end (even though we were looking for him), summarizes his great-grandfather’s position succinctly as: “the end justifies the means”.  This is the hallmark of psychopathic functioning and it was based in no small part on Machiavelli’s observations from quite close at hand of Lorenzo the Magnificent’s functioning.  How can I maintain that Lorenzo was neurotic and not psychopathic (and thus narcissistic)?

The difference between Lorenzo’s functioning and that of, say, the Tiger King, the Howard Ratner character played by Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems, or the current President of the United States, is  that Lorenzo’s basic values are clear to him and are not primarily about himself as a lone wolf – as a an individual in a world of individuals who are either out to get him (though that is manifestly the case for Lorenzo) or able to give him what he wants, but rather that he is so deeply and powerfully connected with his family and with his city that they are foundational to his values, and he sees himself as serving those entities, not acting as a free agent.

O.K., the last paragraph is, I think, true, and highlights the central difference between neurosis and narcissism that I will return to in a moment, but it is not what I intended to point out.  The weird thing is that what orients Lorenzo throughout the film is what he thinks is in the best interests of the family and the city and these entities – as values – and organizing his actions around these values leads him to be able to think clearly and strategically when others who are focused simply on what will be self-aggrandizing, do not.  Those who are in it for themselves, when push comes to shove, take their eye off the ball of what the next best move is.  

Lorenzo has other core values.  He is also concerned about leaving the world to be a more beautiful place, and finally, but in a tertiary place, he wants to live up to his mother’s value of doing good in the world. 

In thinking about values and self-esteem, it becomes apparent how our values hold a central place in our behavioral identity.  It is what we hold dear that drives our behaviors.  We do what we think will allow us to achieve what we want to.  And this, in turn, highlights that, to make changes in our personality – to go through the personal transformations that are part and parcel of the analytic undertaking – we will shift our values.

When we shift our values, we are unstable.  We feel on shifting ground, even if we are moving from a position of having poorly articulated values to having “better” values (hopefully what happens in the analytic process).  The shift in values that provides the dramatic tension at the conclusion of this series is the loosening of the “by doing good” part of the moral imperative that Lorenzo received from his mother.  This is portrayed as being fueled by his “anti-therapist”, Bruno Bernardi (Johnny Harris), a person who presents himself as a clerk, but who turns out to be the brother of the ruler of Sarzana, a rival Italian town.  Bruno is called Lorenzo’s “shadow” by Lorenzo’s wife, Clarice (Synnøve Karlsen), and he functions to erode the peripheral values – those espoused by Lorenzo’s mother to do good to achieve good ends, while supporting the importance of the central values of family, Florence, and the achievement of a unified Italy that will support the arts.  Bruno does this by embodying clarity, subservience, but most importantly solidity.  He is the constant and trusted advisor who provides the feel of solid ground as Lorenzo slides towards a much more slippery spot.

I can find no evidence of this darker angel Bruno Bernardi as an historical figure in my quick internet search.  He functions much as previous bad guys allied with the Medici have in this series.  The bad guys do the dirty work so that the Medici can maintain plausible deniability – to the courts, to their consciences, but, I think for the writers and directors, in the minds of the audience.  The production wants us to be able to maintain our image of the Medici as the good guys in this complex saga – as if it were possible to be good and powerful in the midst of a system – both political and religious – that is rife with corruption.  But, if that was their motivation, I think it serves a nice psychoanalytic function.  It illustrates how the mind works.  We develop defenses to buffer us from actions that we find reprehensible.  This doesn’t just lead us to be able to deny that we did something, we can rationalize or use other means to come to believe that objectively reprehensible actions are, in fact, virtuous.  These defenses are a hallmark of neurotic functioning.

Lorenzo is a neurotic character because he continues to believe that what he is doing is just and virtuous, even as he murders not just his enemies, but his countrymen; even his best friend, and plots the murder of a priest.  He does not forget these deeds, nor does he lie about having done them – these would be the hallmark of the narcissist/psychopath.  A narcissist defends against the knowledge that he is not all that he imagines himself to be not by deluding himself, but by replacing those fears with evidence that he is good – or has done something estimable.  Janus faced, he looks away from the evil components of himself and part of his driven quality is the insatiable need to earn rewards from others – as if he could prove to himself and everyone around him that he actually is good.  Of course these attempts are doomed.  He is trying to escape a part of himself that disdains himself for being reprehensible – for not being deserving of those accolades.

The neurotic, on the other hand, chafes under the restrictions that lead him to be good.  And he remembers when he has done bad things and, instead of feeling shame about what he has done (shame is an inescapable and unwashable sense of being essentially bad), he feels guilty.  So when Lorenzo confesses to his wife and to his son that he has harmed them, he feels genuine remorse – a sense of having done harm to someone that he loves.  When he confesses to a priest, he acknowledges his sins – the actions he has done that are reprehensible – but he does not feel the least bit guilty about the accomplishments that his sins have allowed him – and Italy – and, indeed, the continent of Europe, to attain.  And his smirk is one that we share.  We know that there is glory in his accomplishments – and, by neurotically identifying with him – we either forgive him his sins, blame them on his darker angel, or acknowledge them and agree with him that, despite their gravity, on balance we live in a better world because of them.

When Lorenzo looks at the world that he has helped midwife, he does not take credit for the work of Michelangelo, he praises it.  He sees himself as the person who created the political climate, the intellectual climate, and the educational climate in which that genius could be recognized, supported, and flourish, but he does not see the work as his creation.  Despite the fact that Florence is littered with Medici crests, homes, art collections, and examples of what it means to have been rich and powerful, the story of Florence is the story of the Renaissance, and we go there to learn about the artists and thinkers who created it.  We have to come home to piece together the story – in whatever form we find it – of those who crafted the space in which it could happen.  

 

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text.

   

Unorthodox (the movie): Disruption Comes at a Cost.

      

Those Hats!

Unorthodox on Netflix is a very brief series – just four episodes long – that chronicles the escape of Esty Shapiro (played by Shira Haas) from the clutches of the Satmar Hasidic Ultra-Orthodox Community (or Cult) in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY.  This is a partially fictionalized and psychoanalytically interesting story based on the memoir of Deborah Feldman, Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots.  The title of the memoir captures something of the tension in the series.  Unlike a memoir like Tara Westover’s Educated, where the oppressive family’s culture is idiosyncratic first and we realize only later that it reflects cultural norms, here we have a repudiation of a culture that is internally consistent, depicted with care and even reverence, while simultaneously being questioned, both by the scandalous repudiation of an individual leaving it, but also by the public depiction of the rituals in a respectful manner that exposes the cracks in a system intended to be entirely self-contained.   

As the movie explains, the Satmar group formed in Williamsburg in the wake of the Shoah.   These Jews decided, in responding to unspeakable trauma, that turning away from connecting with a world they had assimilated to and that had betrayed them was the only meaningful way to survive.  They turned back to their roots and, in the process of doing this, looked to antiquated rules of living that predated a modern world.  In this they resemble, to my mind, the Amish who live near us here in the rural parts of Midwest, but might as well be living in another era.  The Satmar, on the other hand, are living in the middle of the most densely populated part of American.  And they are living apart – as if in their own country.

I have never been to the Satmar area of Williamsburg, but I have been to Chinatown.  One time, when I visited in the mid-1980s, it was reputed to be one of the lowest crime precincts in New York, largely because it was self-policing.  As my girlfriend at the time and I were approaching a Chinese restaurant, we, along with hundreds of others on the street, watched as a man was chased  up the street being beaten with sticks by four other men.  A silence fell over the street as everyone watched them corner the man they were beating in a store front across the street from us and continued beating him.  When my girlfriend, braver than I and versed in the bystander effect, shouted “Stop” (and then stepped behind me), they did, indeed, stop.  They ran off down the street, and the beaten man hobbled up the street in the other direction.

The isolation of one group from another – something that is currently much in vogue the world over in part as a response to the neo-liberal value of diversity – has been going on by the Satmar group at least since the Hungarian core of this group immigrated in 1946.  Esty, while privy to this history, is, like her arranged marriage husband, limited in her ability to compare and contrast this world with any other.  When first introduced to her husband, she hesitantly lets him know that she is “different”.  He believes he understands her when he takes it to mean that because her father, who is a drunk (a very rare and shame filled thing in Jewish culture generally) and her mother, who left the community, were unavailable to raise her and she was raised by her aunt and grandmother that she is – as her aunt and mother characterize her – an orphan.  This, in turn, implies that she is grateful to her future husband because she is damaged goods.

In fact, what Esty means is much more complicated and becomes clearer to us (and, I think, to Esty, as the series unfolds).  It means, I think, that Esty finds it, as she puts it, difficult for her to live up to what God has in mind for her.  She is aware of the constrictions that the Hasidic life is putting upon her in a way that she does not yet know is a life destroying constraint.  She is alive and capable in ways that her husband cannot know and does not see until the penultimate scene in the series.

This film, then, documents the cultural repression of women in a culture that is intentionally repressing all spontaneous engagement with the world as suspect and dangerous – so that the repression of women does not stand out, from within the culture, as particularly remarkable.  It is part of the package deal of repression.  The culture is, I think, bound by rules that prevent intimate relationships between that culture and the outside world, but therefore (and I'm not sure that it follows, but it is certainly also the case) between the members of that world, especially the men and women; the husbands and wives.  

As I learned this week from my reluctant co-teacher in a class on Freud, Eve Sedgwick had a lot to say about the repression of difference in the broader culture 30 years ago in a paper on masturbation and Jane Austen that she published in 1980.   In the paper, she proposed that masturbation was the first “queer” identity – and masturbators were universally vilified by all kinds of people – including Freud – for causing their own pathologies, by which Freud meant that broad and poorly defined pathology neurasthenia. 

Esty is then, in this reading, telling her husband, when she says that she is different, that she is queer.  And two distinct ironies grow from this as the series develops.  Esty is queer not because she is resistant to orthodoxy, but because she is so deeply invested in it that she enacts it in her symptoms.  She is not able to have sex with her husband – her basic and necessary duty as a wife that is needed to repopulate the world with the six million that were killed in the holocaust – because of vaginismus.   She cannot allow herself to open herself up enough to admit her husband just as the Hasidim will not open themselves up to let other cultures in.  She is rigidly and perfectly pure.

She and her husband successfully copulate only once – when, after a year of failure, she encourages him to press ahead no matter how much it hurts her.  He does – and experiences so much pleasure at his first climax that he is blind to the pain and isolation that she feels at having been violated.  But this is not new – it mirrors his failure to understand the pain she has felt as he has violated her confidence by continually informing his mother of their marital difficulties – and not working them out directly with her.

The tragic loss of intimacy between them gets finally enacted when Esty races home early from a Seder dinner to test her pregnancy, discovers joyously that they have been able to meet the dictates of the community, only to have her husband preempt her telling him that they are pregnant by announcing to her that he intends to divorce her because they have so consistently failed to be sexually intimate.  The psychological gulf of intimacy between them at this moment could not be greater, and this propels her to enact her scandalous separation from the community.  Though she does this (as the reluctant co-teacher pointed out) at a moment that is culturally significant - she is escaping from her own Egypt as her people are celebrating escaping slavery at the hands of Pharoah.

Now, I have to admit to no small sense of empathy for her husband.  He really is, I think, a nice and humble guy – sensitive to many things – everything it seems but Esty.  He is, I think, blinded to her by a culture that disregards the value of the subjective being of women, though also I think of men – and instead would dominate and control the subjectivities of all of the members of the group.  Ritual is used to contain and direct libido into serving the rules of God.  The little irony contained here is that the husband turns to his mother for guidance.  But my personal theory – not unrelated to others’ theories – is that it is the power of the maternal connection – the power of women to procreate – the power of women to decide whether they will let the man in or not – and our relative powerlessness in the face of all this power that has led us to dominate them.  To constrain and define women's power as subservient to our aims and to focus on helping them limit their field of operations to areas that are in our interest.  It is only recently, as we have felt less at the mercy of the natural world, that we have felt we don't need to control women as well as nature.  It would fit with this narrative that the Hasidim's fear of the greater culture, grounded as it is in trauma, leads them to revert to a greater need for control, which includes controlling women - and controlling our wish to connect with the world more generally rather than to do what we are driven by our libido to do - to connect indiscriminately.

The second big irony, of course, is that the Hasidim are the queers in the mainstream culture.  They, with their funny side curls and crazy black hats – and $6,000 mink hats on Sabbath (see the wedding picture of the groom) – are the bizarre ones who are aberrant and unnatural.  And I think that this represents an extreme version of Freud’s observations in Civilization and Its Discontents, outlined a bit in the paragraph above, that we need to limit our libidinal wishes in order to enjoy the advantages of being a member of civilization.  In the case of the Hasidim, we need to do that so severely that we become constricted, not only in terms of our relations with the outside world, but also in terms of our relationships with each other.  So the Hasidim become a queer mirror of the culture as a whole – or a looking glass into our past that may allow us to see the versions of our selves that persist into the present.

But the present that Esty discovers in Berlin couldn’t appear more different, on the surface, than the Williamsburg community that she left behind.  Welcoming and warm, embracing queerness of sexual orientation, and the queerness of Jews in Berlin, it is also hostile – warning Esty that she does not belong among the elites because her sheltered/repressive existence has prevented her from exploiting her natural talents to the extent that she has not practiced what it takes to belong with this exclusive group that is explicitly inclusive of queers.  Of course, because she is also different in yet another way, we see that this may not quite be the case – that this woman, this excluded and queer member of a queer culture has a voice that needs to be heard – thus creating a parallel between the imagined Esty and the actual Deborah Feldman, whose voice was her writing.

When the class was discussing the masturbation paper, it became clear to us that the transition from masturbation – from Freud’s narcissistic love to the love of objects – from, in this case, the cloistered and smothering love of Esty’s husband, with her (and their child, when he discovers that) as a narcissistic object – one who would fulfill his purpose of repopulating the world with people like him, to the love of Esty for a world that includes her queer mother, who turns out to be more whole than she or we could have imagined – is a transition that involves both opening up – allowing others in – but also narrowing our focus, not, in fact being in love with everything that crosses our horizon, because this is too distracting.  We need to focus – as the musicians do – to create the kind of beauty that humans are capable of producing both in art but also in relationships.  Freud’s acknowledgement of the tragic constraints that are part and parcel of being a member of civilization hold true.  And, while we cheer the choices that Esty makes, we also recognize that they are, indeed, scandalous.  They break the bonds that allow us to do as we were intended to do – so that we can, we hope, better serve a higher purpose and, in Esty's case, connect, on a deeper level, with her Jewish heritage of breaking free - living with self defined rather than other defined constraints.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text.

The Tiger King: Narcissism/Psychopathy on Netflix keeps us Entertained during Covid-19

The Tiger King is a documentary series that features the life, time, and crimes of Joseph Allen Maldonado-Passage (neé Schreibvogel); better known by his stage name Joe Exotic or his self-proclaimed title, the Tiger King.  Currently in prison, Joe is a very interesting character – one that is psychodynamically and, I think, politically intriguing.  He is also sensationally displayed in this series – and my ability to make sense of him as a person is necessarily compromised by his depiction – by the filters that the director has placed between him and us in order to tell what is a very compelling story.

The Tiger King has become a streaming sensation during the time of COVID-19.  Sequestered at home, caged, if you will, like wild tigers, we have become intrigued by Joe Exotic and the other private or “for profit” zoo leaders and zoos depicted in this documentary series.  The reluctant son was the first to recommend it, but one of my students in my now online Freud class wondered about what we, as a class, thought of it, so I became intrigued and convinced the reluctant wife to watch it with me.

We were struck by the parallels of the depiction of Joe Exotic and that of the character played by Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems.  Both seem to be best understood as severely narcissistic characters who might qualify as psychopathic.  Both are depicted as spiraling towards a tragic ending – careening from one bad decision to a worse one as they attempt to keep their increasingly stretched worlds – worlds that are stretched by their need to sustain their self-esteem – afloat.

The keeper of our local zoo – one that has some national renown – lives in our neighborhood.  As the reluctant son and I were on our nightly walk, he jogged by and we asked him about The Tiger King.  He has not seen the series, but he knows of and/or knows many of the principle characters, including Terry Thompson, the private zookeeper who apparently killed himself near here after letting his exotic animals loose, resulting in their deaths when police killed them to prevent people being harmed.

The zookeeper has empathy for these individuals.  From his perspective, many of them took in injured wild animals and nursed them back to health.  Once they became known for this, when people would discover an injured animal, they would bring it over and, before you know it, they had a menagerie that was increasingly difficult to maintain. 

Though not detailed in the documentary, this seems not unlike the origin story of Joe Exotic’s zoo – with the initial acquisition of a few animals, and then an increasing fascination with them combined with a limited knowledge of how to care for them (there is early footage of Joe Exotic transporting a snow leopard in an un-air-conditioned van across Florida at the height of summer with no apparent knowledge of the stress involved), but with Joe, this became combined with the lure of showing the animals – using them to create a circus like show where we could star both at home, and on the road with a travelling version of the zoo that went to malls.

As Joe added to his collection of animals, he also needed to add to his staff in order to manage the animals.  So in addition to collecting animals, he began to collect people.  His favorite place to do this seems to have been on the streets in the seedier sections of town.  He would pick up folks who were just out of prison, or down on their luck for other reasons, and offer them a meal and a place to stay.  They, like the audience, became fascinated with the animals and began working – apparently with little or no pay. 

Feeding the animals (and the people) became quite an ordeal.  Road crews learned they could bring road kill to the zoo, horses that were too old to be ridden were brought in and summarily executed and fed to the tigers and other animals, and Wal-Mart was convinced to send along the meat products that had passed expiration dates, and these were used to feed the animals – but also, apparently, the staff (Full confession – as the person in my family who will eat anything, and who believes that expiration dates are simply guidelines, I did not find this as problematic as those with more squeamish attitudes towards food might have).

Part of the economic problem of the zoo was that it attracted people to the gate by giving them the opportunity to have up close and personal encounters with tigers.  Putting people in a cage with a full grown tiger is not something that even Joe Exotic would attempt.  So the money was in tiger cubs who, for about three or four months, are cute balls of fluff that can be handled by and photographed with visitors who are willing to pay an arm and a leg for a unique representation of them with a wild animal.  Bonanza!  But then, once the animal is four months old or so and begins to become a wild tiger, it has to be retired from the petting trade.  But now it will live for another few decades…  Only so many tiger cubs can be sold off – and many that are end up being returned – feeding and caring for a full grown tiger is complicated business.  One of the allegations is that Joe would shoot and bury old tigers.

When my cousin was a student in Chicago many years ago, she lived down the street from Muhammad Ali.  Ali, according to her report, had a lion roaming his yard, which I’m certain had a high wall.  I’m equally certain that the lion, probably given to Ali by an African leader when he was in Africa, perhaps at the Rumble in the Jungle, was a very good deterrent to theft, and, perhaps for him a cheap security system.  But for most of us, managing a wild beast is expensive and time consuming.

The Tiger King found it expensive and time consuming to care for the animals – but it also fueled his wish to be on stage – to be important – and to be in charge.  His wish to be in charge was expressed politically as well.  He made a somewhat comical run for president, but then made a more or less serious run for governor of Oklahoma. 

The less serious part is that he hired a campaign manager (whose previous job was to sell Joe guns at Wal-Mart) who put together a platform that Joe did not care about or understand.  He went around to rodeos, fairs, and parades and glad handed, promoting the zoo and himself.  This, it seemed, was a lark and maybe not bad for business.

The serious part is that, though he came in third in the election, he garnered twenty per cent of the vote.  One in five Oklahomans voted for a man who had no idea what he would do once he got into office.  In so far as they were voting on the issues, the platform that the former Wal-Mart employee put together for him (who was much more thoughtful than my demeaning comment makes him sound) was a libertarian one, arguing for reduction in government.  In so far as they were voting on character, they were voting for a person who treated the electoral process as a joke that was not to be taken seriously. 

I have written recently about our wish to evade the mandate of the founding fathers to self-govern and have perverted their message into one of revolting to produce no government, but, after recently reading a political science text of the reluctant son’s on the populist movement, I have become convinced that being governed by others is what we come to feel like when the government is run by “elites”.  The elites are the kids who did well in school and made us feel like idiots because we didn’t know the answer in class.  And to see someone like us running things helps us feel competent rather than looked down on (or, in the left leaning populism, over looked).

Narcissism has been called the common cold of personality disorders.  Part of the reason for this is that we all have narcissistic issues – we all struggle to manage our self-esteem.  And we are all vulnerable to narcissistic injury – when someone devalues us or makes fun of us, it hurts – frequently quite deeply.  Management of our self-esteem is an ongoing, lifelong undertaking.  And when it gets out of whack, we can react by turning to others for reassurance. 

But when we are never quite able to actually feel competent – when the taunts of the other kids have cut too deeply and there hasn’t been enough reassurance from those back home that we are, in fact, OK despite what those mean kids say – we can build a seemingly unfillable reservoir of self-doubt that leads us to more and more frantically work to pour good stuff into that reservoir.  This pushes us towards more extreme activities that we imagine will finally, once and for all, fill the void.

Of course, we are also angry about having to do so much work to achieve the recognition that our hard work clearly should have earned for us.  I say “of course” as if that were the rationale and logic of a mature, thoughtful person.  But when we are feeling narcissistically depleted, we don’t feel rational, logical or mature.  We feel like a little kid who, once again, is not getting what he wants. 

Joe Exotic's anger gets focused on Carole Baskin, who runs an animal “rescue” park that mirrors Joe’s park in almost every way – including the “volunteers” that she collects who end up working full time for no money to care for the animals.  Her sanctimonious attacks on Joe are met with amazingly unmeasured responses – and we are drawn more and more deeply into a cat fight that is embarrassingly interesting.  We are like the rubber-neckers who slow down traffic on the other lane of the highway so they can get a good look at the aftermath of an accident.

Why are we more and more deeply drawn into this series as it becomes more and more primitive?  I came across an idea about this from an unlikely quarter in the class about Freud this week.  My co-teacher recommended an article about masturbation and Jane Austen by Eve Sedgwick, and in it, Sedgwick demonstrates parallels between pornographic medical descriptions of masturbation in the 1800s and scenes in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.  One of the hidden things that she points out is that the motivation of the scientist/physician and that of the pornographic reader are very closely related.

I think it is not just that, on one level I fancy myself one of the elites – and am slumming in spending time with Joe Exotic – I think it is also that Joe Exotic and the life he is leading parallels aspects of my life.  And I think this happens in multiple ways.  Joe’s immaturity mirrors my own.  Joe’s immaturity mirrors that of our current President – and so it is a spectacle on a smaller scale that may help us understand the larger one.  But frankly, Joe’s social world mirror’s some of the politics at my University – and probably within my own family, in ways that I find fascinating – both on a conscious, but also on many unconscious levels.  There is an unvarnished quality to this slick production that suggests that we are getting a look at the essential nature of “Trump’s America”. 

I think we need to be careful about thinking that we are tourists in that America when we watch this spectacle devolve.  It is not just about those who would use tigers to prop up their self-esteem, it is about my use of petro-chemicals, and the engineering expertise of Detroit and the real estate business to have external evidence of how powerful I am.  It is about the ways that I use the classroom and the consulting room – hopefully only some of the time – to prop up my self-esteem rather than teach my students and help my patients.  It is about how hard we are driven to work and to achieve without thinking about the cost of this to our families, communities and the planet.

I think that Joe, based on this video, has a very limited ability to empathize with others – the tigers and other animals in his menagerie, the people who work for him, the people who come to his park, and the men that he has married.  He is generous to some of these people – and to strangers.  He prepared a Thanksgiving dinner for the poor public every year and appeared to be genuinely distraught when he lost a husband.  And one of Sedgwick’s most undermining critiques is that my diagnosis of “psychopathy” should carry no more weight than the identity of being a “masturbator”. 

As one of the mothers of queer theory, Sedgwick was, I think, arguing that we are all queer.  Which, in this context, means that we are all fluid, and that we move from identity to identity as we move from moment to moment.  One of the questions that this series asks is whether Joe Exotic deserves to be in jail.  We can ask whether he committed the crimes that landed him in jail, and the series explicitly focuses on that.  But implicitly it is asking a much more important question.  Are we guilty if our “identity” accounts for actions that can’t actually be proven?  In so far as prison is neither a place to rehabilitate nor to punish, but a place to protect us from those who cannot be trusted to live with us, the series is asking, “When are we no longer queerly related to our identity – when have we become so closely identified with that aspect of ourselves that cares only about ourselves that it is unacceptable for us to live among others?"  In other words, when do we deserve to be caged for the protection of others?

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text.