Countertransference: The Reluctant Psychoanalyst's Take on a Central Psychoanalytic Concept

 

I cannot advise my colleagues too urgently to model themselves during psychoanalytic treatment on the surgeon, who puts aside all feelings ... (Freud, 1912, p. 115)

 

Countertransference is the transference of the analyst or therapist towards the analysand or patient.  For Freud – at least at the beginning – this is something that the analyst shouldn’t have.  When countertransference emerged it was considered to be a sign that the analyst was not properly analyzed because it indicated that the analyst was experiencing the patient as a version of a person from her or his past, not as the person who was present here, in this moment. 

 

Somewhat crazily, Freud imagined that a psychoanalysis (he was the only psychoanalyst who did not go through his own analysis – he analyzed himself, but that’s not the same thing, believe me) would rid the analyst of feelings towards her or his patient.  This sounds very strange to our modern ear.  But it had two roots.  One was in professionalism.  A doctor should not feel things towards his patients – he should have a “professional” relationship where his only concern was in treating the illness that the patient has.  The second was in science.  A scientist should not be swayed by his feelings but view the world “objectively”.

 

Especially when trying to establish a science which includes aspects of human functioning that are not objectively observable; consciousness, but even more so, the unconscious, it is important that the scientist not be imagining, not be projecting into the person being analyzed the things that that are being reported.

 

The surgical metaphor captures both the professional aspect (the surgeon must ignore the repugnance against cutting through perfectly healthy tissue to get to the diseased tissue) and the scientific one (the scientist must not have feelings towards the observed object.  This would interfere with his objectivity).

There is, actually I think a third reason.  And this may sound really weird, but I think that Freud believed that a good analysis would lead to a kind of Buddhist state of living totally in the moment.  If you don't believe me, read his very brief and beautiful essay, "On Transience".  It was composed as a rebuttal to the Poet Rilke and his lover, Lou Andreas Salome, after Freud had gone a walk with them.  In it, Freud maintains that our ideal state is to live within the present moment.

 

The problem with the ideal of a feeling-less professional or scientist is that this is not, according to analytic theory itself, possible.  The surgeon, as Freud points out elsewhere, has sublimated – that is hidden and transformed – feelings of aggression.  The surgeon channels those feelings into the destruction of good flesh – not ignoring the repugnance about it.  Similarly, the apparently detached scientist is able to maintain her or his detachment because, for instance, she or he is deeply emotionally attached to the particular view that she or he has of the world and when this is threatened the depth of this attachment is betrayed by the power of the feelings that are expressed about an alternate view.

 

As later generations of psychoanalysts have come to grips with our limits to manage or eliminate our feelings about our patients and the work with them that we are deeply emotionally engaged in, there have been two major shifts.  The first is a shift in understanding countertransference (and therefore transference).  Countertransference has been broadened to mean the feelings that are evoked by working with this particular patient.  While some of that may come from our experience of early development figures – it is also related to feelings towards others in the more recent past – including other patients – but also this patient – so that it is acknowledged that we feel things and engage in characteristic behaviors with this patient because we are attuned to them, connected with them, and working closely with them (just as they do with us).

 

The other major change has, then followed from this – that countertransference is a source of useful information about the patient and our relationship to them.  Just as transference became something that was not exclusively pathological (indeed, the “unobjectionable” part of the positive transference came to be seen as a necessary part of the working alliance), so countertransference feelings helped to inform a fuller view of who the patient is – and is especially useful to identifying the objectionable aspects of the patient’s impact on those around them.  Essentially, “This guy is making me mad because he is so obstinate.  I bet that happens in his other relationships.”

 

So, countertransference has been an essential conceptual element in the relational turn of psychoanalysis.  Psychoanalysis has transitioned from a “One person” psychology in which that objective surgeon views an unrelated object and reports on it, to a “One and one half person” psychology where the analyst or therapist is a benignly concerned person caring for the other, to a true “Two person” psychology – where both people are experiencing each other on a deep and very powerful level as they interact in a relationship that is intense and transformative for both of them, though the focus of that change and the primary focus of interest is imbalanced – the focus is on the analysand’s mind and psychological functioning, but there is at least an implicit and at times an explicit focus on the analyst’s mind as well.

 

This has led to a greater awareness of enactments between the analyst and analysand – unconscious replays or entirely new ways of managing disturbing material that bypasses conscious awareness.  In essence, the problematic behavior gets replayed instead of understood.  This is a considerable concern.  At its worst, this becomes a path towards a sexual relationship between the analyst and the analysand, something that early analysts, including Jung, though could be beneficial to the patient.  There is now universal agreement that this is damaging to the patient and should be avoided.  Less apparent damaging interactions are possible results of enactments, and the analyst needs to be vigilant to these and to call the pairs attention to them so that they can be analyzed when they have emerged.

 

The positive aspect of enactments and acknowledging their presence (they have certainly been a part of both helpful and damaging treatments since the dawn of psychoanalysis) is that they allow for an awareness of what takes place interpersonally in a treatment.  Thomas Ogden, for instance, has posited an entity he calls the “the analytic third” that emerges between the analyst and the analysand – a kind of shared mind that develops as the two get to know each other.  This leads to each learning, for instance, to dream in the language of the other – and to work towards thinking in tune with the way that the other works.

 

Imagine the mind of the analyst who has tendrils reaching out towards the various analysands that they are currently working with or have worked with in the past.  What an image – but then expand that to think about the ways that we are connected to all of the important people in our lives.  Don’t we all reach out to find a private language that we use between us with these important people?  Isn’t this related to the complicated ways that we feel toward each other – in a word – the transference/countertransference interaction that is part and parcel of being alive in our relationships with others?

 

Related posts: Transference, What is Psychoanalysis?

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Transference: The Reluctant Psychoanalyst’s take on a central Psychoanalytic Concept

 

Transference is a phenomenon first observed by Freud.  Like another phenomenon, resistance, it was initially seen as a problem for the treatment, but then, as part of his genius, Freud was able to recognize transference not just as something that was getting in the way, but as something that would help him better understand the way that the mind works and therefore help better help the people who were coming to him for help.

 

The garden variety definition of transference is that is reacting to a person in a current relationship as if the person you were interacting with were a figure from earlier in your life.  This is true, as far as it goes, and it is what Freud observed – his patients interacted with him as if he were their father (primarily) or mother or brother or sister.  Instead of hearing his interventions as the brilliant and useful understandings of his patients that he knew them to be, his patients heard his interpretations, for instance, as a means of controlling them – just as others had done.

 

For Freud, this is most tragically seen in his case history of Dora.  The 19 year old girl was brought to him by her father (whom Freud had treated in the past).  She had been sexually assaulted by a close family friend – and her father was having an affair with the friend’s wife.  She felt, on some level, that her father was offering her to the friend in exchange for the friend’s wife – and that he was bringing her to Freud to help silence her about the affair.  In any case, she felt herself, not at all surprisingly, to be used by many of the important adults in her life. 

 

When Freud tried to point out to her that she was an active participant in all of this – which Freud intended as a tool that she could use to help her extricate herself from the drama – she experienced him as something akin to what would later be called “blaming the victim” and fired him.  Freud was confused by the case – and why it fell apart – he had been proud of his interpretations of Dora’s dreams – and didn’t understand why she ran from him. 

 

When we read the case, we are able to see that the transference caused it to fall apart.  In particular, as is often the case, Freud’s actions – in this case being more excited about his interpretations of her dreams than attending to what the impact of his interpretations on her would be, lined up closely enough with the perception that Dora had in mind that others were not interested in her well-being but in how they could use her.  All that said, we can’t completely blame Freud for not seeing this – he hadn’t yet invented the concept of transference!  He couldn’t see what he didn’t yet have a label for.

 

We transfer material from an old situation onto a new one for many reasons, but the primary one is that it is inefficient to go into every situation without a plan of action.  So we learn – we overlearn – steps to various interpersonal dances and we practice them so much that they become automatic.  Daniel Stern studied the ways these dance steps are learned by observing infant/parent interactions and called these proto-transference interactions Representations of Interactions that have been Generalized (RIGs).  Stern was studying parents playing peek a boo with their kids (among many other things), but we can see that we teach our kids how to interact by playing with them – and they learn the rules of interaction by doing that.

One of the nice thing about thinking about transference as a RIG is that it clarifies that the transference is not simply an iron-on procedure of transferring something in-tact - applying it like an iron-on transfer - to something new.  The mind actively looks for strands and elements of a current situation that are consistent enough with an old one to "fit" more or less - it is an approximation that gets reworked.  The therapeutic danger is that it becomes a replay rather than a new way of playing with a similar situation.  The idea of the RIG, however, opens up the possibility that it will occur.

 

Freud chose the term transference to describe this phenomenon, however, because he understood our current interactions that are guided by the past as essentially transferring material from the unconscious into action, where it is observable, and thus can be made conscious.  So, as analyses lengthened and analysts worked to be more neutral, the patient would experience the analyst as a more and more “pure” form of the unconsciously “remembered” person, generally from early in their life and the quality of the interactions that took place with that person could be inferred from the ways that the current interaction unfolded.

 

A psychoanalytic interpretation of the transference, then, serves two functions.  It helps the analyst and the analysand track what the analysand “recorded” in their early interactions with significant figures.  So, the expectation that the analyst would be critical – or, more telling, the interpretation of something benign that the analyst says as something critical – clarifies to the analyst and analysand that the analysand was brought up in a household where they so consistently expected authorities to be critical that they hear this in even relatively neutral material.  This helps the analyst and the analysand reconstruct the analysand’s early life as a means of understanding how their character was shaped.  It is an important caveat that this is the perceived life of the child.  And it gets muddied by all of the other dances that the person has engaged in between now and then (and the dances the analyst has been engaged in - despite Freud's hope, we don't become blank slates after we have been analyzed).

Btw, transferences can be positive.  We generally focus on the negative or problematic transferences, as in the paragraph above, because these are the ones that create the difficulties that people come to us for help with.

 The second function of interpretation is to disrupt something that is unconscious – what the neurologist Mark Solms sees as having been stored in a kind of interpersonal muscle memory.  The disruption is important because it allows us to engage in the inefficient process of consciously evaluating whether it is a good idea to keep interacting with others in the ways that we have unconsciously been doing (though here automatically may be a better descriptor than unconsciously - it is both).  When our automatic processes get interrupted and we think of new ways of doing things, we can lay down new “tracks”.

Transference is part, then, of what makes psychoanalysis necessarily an interpersonal process.  Something that resides within us - what analysts call intrapsychic material - gets enacted in the relationship with the analyst, and it is the ability to discuss this - to be curious rather than judgmental about it - that allows it to become conscious.  And, by the way, I am referring to it - the transference - in the singular as if it were a single, concrete thing.  What we expect of others is actually tremendously complex and multifaceted and emerges in subtly and wildly different guises across the course of treatment and "it" hardly captures it - "they" even seems too puny.  What we are trying to get at is how the person constructs their interpersonal world - and this cannot be reduced to a single or even a few perspective - even though there may be a single or a few dominant perspective(s).  But even when that is the case - once those dominant perspectives are interrogated, in my experience, they turn out to be fronts for much more nuanced and situation specific expectations - that get expressed and experienced in manifold complexly intertwined interactions.

Sounds easy, doesn’t it?  The problem is, it is very hard to teach an old dog new tricks – and it is even hard to teach a new puppy tricks.  You have to be patient and do it over and over again.  If you will pardon the pun, we are re-RIGging the machinery.  And, as Solms notes, muscle memory is hard to gain, and even harder to forget.  For this and other reasons, psychoanalytic treatments take time.  This time is called “working through” and involves engaging in the automatic behavior – having a transference reaction – having it interpreted or pointed out – and saying, in effect, “There I go again” in a slightly different way with a slightly different situation and, once again, interrupting it.

 

Part of the analytic process, then, becomes internalized and is self-analysis.  This part of self-analysis is self-checking for the ways that we are taking this particular situation and turning it into my particular situation.  When we get far enough along in the interpersonal process of psychoanalysis, we can begin to sense, in other relationships, without the presence of the analyst (except, if you will, as a transference figure), we can be curious about why we are reacting so powerfully in this particular situation.  This interruption in our functioning means that we are necessarily less efficient, but we are likely to feel more confident about whatever it is that we have to say or do in a situation, or repairing it in the aftermath of having messed it up, once we have gone through the process of checking out what the situation calls up in us.

 

Transference is, I think, ubiquitous.  We have to operate on auto-pilot most of the time because it would be tremendously inefficient to handle all of the nuances of interpersonal interactions consciously.  Instead, we simple do what is called for.  And when we do this, we advertise to the world how we (unconsciously) configure human interactions and our part in them.  Especially in intimate relationships transference is like pushing down on the sustain pedal on a piano that takes the pads off all the strings.  When we strike one key, many strings beside the one that the hammer hits resonate with it.  We hear the richness of the unconscious formation of the mind if we listen carefully for it when we really listen to and engage with another person.  

Related posts:  Countertransference;  What is Psychoanalysis?  

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Da 5 Bloods: Brutal History Comes to Life in the Present

Da 5 Bloods, Movie, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, PTSD, Spike Lee, Chadwick Boseman

 

Da 5 Bloods is a deeply disturbing movie.  

It is the beginning of summer.  I have not taught in a few weeks.  My clinical work is going well.  I have been sleeping well.  But not the night after watching this film.  It took forever to get to sleep and then I woke twice, each time for an hour.  I know that I had been dreaming, but I was unable to recall the dreams that, I presume, woke me – and I think this meant that they were too difficult to dredge up – they contained, I believe, ghosts of the film that I had blocked from conscious awareness but that were haunting me.

 

Da 5 Bloods is a buddy film.  Four of the five “Bloods” get back together – they reform the gang – and have a reunion in Vietnam – the place where they met and fought together.  The opening video – in true Spike Lee style – integrates real life footage (which he does throughout) of Muhammed Ali talking about why he is not going to Vietnam to fight against people of yellow skin who have done him no harm at the behest of the white man who has done the black and brown skinned men and women in the United States great harm.  This statement returns to mind when, in a flashback, the North Korean radio propagandist points out to the black men in the trenches that though they make up 13% of the people back home, they make up 35% of the people fighting in Vietnam.

 

The opening scene is of the reunion of the four in the hotel in Ho Chi Minh City.  Paul (Deloy Lindo) is the one we are worried about from the get go.  First of all, he is wearing a MAGA hat and defending voting for Trump – a weird thing in a Spike Lee film – but he is also just a bit too boisterous, a bit too paranoid about the people buying them a drink in the bar, a bit over the top about everything.  We aren’t the only ones worried about him – his son David (Jonathan Majors) shows up unannounced to watch over him during this trip.  The war has destabilized him and he is returning to the scene of the crime.  We sense that there will be lots of triggers for him.

 

The ostensible reason for the reunion is to recover the body of the KIA leader of the bloods, Stormin' Norman, played in the flashbacks by the actor who played the Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman).   The hidden reason is that this will also allow them to recover war booty – CIA gold that was to be delivered to allies.  Da 5 Bloods were sent to retrieve the booty when the plane carrying was shot down, but they were fired upon, losing Norman, and they buried both him and the gold before beating a hasty retreat.  Their agent for converting the gold into cash is the war time girlfriend of one of the bloods, Otis (Clarke Peters),  Tien (Lê Y Lan) who brings in a French agent as a go-between.  Otis discovers that, unbeknownst to him, he is a father.  

 

The 4+1 Bloods hire a guide to get them to the edge of the bush and then to pick them up a few days later.  To skip spoilers you may want to go to the next paragraph.  As they travel to the site, the events that led to the death of their leader and the burying of the gold are told in flashback.  We learn that the leader taught the men Black History – and we get a very contemporary lesson about Black Lives Mattering.  As they recover the body of the leader, they also find the gold.  This creates the kind of divisions that large amounts of money create, and they run into the Viet Cong whom the French Intermediary has tipped off, and they have to fight for their money and do not emerge from the jungle unscathed – the firefights and the fear of mines are, I assume, a big part of what fueled my lack of sleep, along with the archival footage and photographs of war atrocities that were sprinkled throughout.

 

The relationship between Paul and his son David and Paul’s personal arc are at the center of this film.  One of the features of the Vietnam War was that our soldiers were not paired up based on geographic commonality, as has been general practice in wars.  This particular group of Da 5 Bloods clearly forged close bonds in the war, but after the war they went their separate ways because they didn't come from the same community – and therefore returned to disparate parts of the country without any of their war buddies to support them and with a country that was hostile to the war and taking out that hostility on the veterans.  Alone and besieged, Paul found love.  He married a woman whom he loved and they had a child.  This should be where the narrator says, “And they lived happily ever after.”  That did not happen.

 

I believe that one of the semi-universal experiences of men when their first child is born is that they are displaced in the hearts of the woman they have been loving.  This woman becomes enamored of an interloper – their infant child.  Fortunately for the child, the father feels love - boundless love - for the child, too.  But I think that Freud’s vaunted Oedipal triangle – which he tells from the perspective of the male child wanting to murder the father and marry the mother, glosses over the parental involvement in this triangle – and especially the father’s envy and (usually fortunately quite unconscious) murderous rage towards the child.  (There’s a lot more going on in this little triangle, but let’s just stop there for now…). 

 

Paul’s love for his son was complicated by not just losing his wife’s love, but her life.  She died in childbirth.  And the open hostility that Paul bears towards his son is difficult to witness.  Especially because his son is, despite the hostility, basically a good kid.  We see Paul’s love – and his son’s desire for that love, but we also see Paul’s paranoia crush his expression of his love – and we see Paul abandon his son after accusing his son of being disloyal and after having humiliated his son in front of a potential love interest.  We see Paul as the worst kind of monster - the unchained Oedipal father.

And then we see Paul taking off through the jungle on his own, and we are privy to his thoughts.  We hear him working out, in his feverish way, what has brought him to this moment.  We finally are able to go back to the heart of the firefight and to see the intense guilt that Paul has borne – his sense that he is responsible for too much for any one person to bear.  And we transition, from hating this dangerous and trigger happy guy to feeling for and with him – partly as a result of seeing that his paranoid suspicions have been borne out – but mostly as a result of seeing how dangerous it is for him to love, and what a relief it is for to be finally freed from his obligations (and the symbol of his backpack hanging out of his reach is a brilliant poetic statement of this).

 

This film, as an historic piece, is, I think, intended to help us share in the outrage of the ways that the ghosts of our forebearers have created a mess of things for us.  There are ghosts galore in this movie.  If the goal of psychoanalysis is, as the analyst Hans Loewald has maintained, to make ghosts into ancestors, this movie makes some progress towards that goal by humanizing this group of GIs who are haunted by those ghosts.  The Vietnamese do not fare so well – but I think they are casualties of friendly fire.  We need to resonate with heroes – and in this case, those heroes are the African American men who served in a war that was not of their own making, one that still rages within them.  We can, through empathizing with the crazy among us, see their sanity.  And when we do that, we can begin to spread that empathy – to understand (and this is very difficult to do) how the ravages of slavery and then almost two centuries of post slavery oppression continue to play a part in complicating their lives.  If we can do that – if we can practice the kind of radical empathy that this film encourages us to engage in – if we can see Paul (as we were able to see the Joker) not as biologically paranoid – or raging – or defective person – but as a human being, we might begin to make a step towards the kind of reparations that matter.  Doing that is not going to be easy - we need to allow his ghosts to haunt us - we will have many sleepless nights.  But we might begin to welcome our brethren into the society and the country that they have helped build and defend because they are what we are, citizens and humans, with all of the complicating factors that go along with both of those designations.  Black Lives Matter.

 

Btw, Spike Lee complained in an interview that if NetFlix had given him the money that was given to Scorcese to make the Irishman, he, too, could have made the old men in the movie young in the flashbacks with CGI.  This film is much stronger for the contrast of the old men being themselves as young soldiers.  Their age and Norman’s youth – and his leadership and shaping of them – sends a message that I think may register unconsciously – we are never too old to learn.  We are also never, no matter how old we get, not the people that we were when we had formative experiences.  Just as the censors ended up helping Casablanca become a great film, I think the lack of CGI money helps deepen the impact of this film and to create it as a much more powerful moral statement.  Stagecraft often trumps effects, and here I think that is nicely done. 

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.

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COVID Craziness at the University Continues – With No End in Sight

 

One advantage of an executive team for making decisions is that the group is small and therefore nimble.  They can come to a consensus and act.  Even if they don’t agree they can get things done.  Decision making in a large group is painful.  It is slow and cumbersome and problematic.

 

The executive team at our University has made a lot of decisions recently.  They have decided we will be having in person classes, at least at the beginning of the year.  They have also decided, because of budgetary uncertainty, to cut our salaries and to institute across the board savings.  They have also offered buy outs to help reduce the number of faculty and staff to create additional savings.

 

The faculty and staff assemblies are (I think rightly) concerned that though the executive team thinks that have collaborated with us in the spirit of “shared governance” that is intended to be a hallmark of the university, we have not experienced it as this at all – it feels like we have been told that we will have to make do with less or leave. 

 

The response of the faculty assembly has been to revisit the changes that have been rolled out.  We have a more equitable plan for changing the salaries.  We want to be reassured that if enrollment returns our salaries will as well.

 

I get this desire, but I think our efforts are misplaced.  We should, I believe, be looking at what is coming up, not at what has already been decided.  We can revisit that stuff later.  If the imposition of salary changes has been unequitable, then the reinstatement of salaries can be crafted to create a more equitable relationship between those who make the least at the institution and those who make the most and we can work on that.

 

I think it is our job to remind the executive committee why we are here.  We are a public trust.  As a Jesuit Catholic institution, we also have particular obligations to particular constituent groups.  We serve the general and a particular public, and we have a central mission that is invaluable.  In a time of uncertainty, we need to look to our core values and to preserving those as we move forward.

 

The central part of our mission statement is that the University exists to teach.  That’s what we are here for.

 

One of my, but I believe, our central beliefs is that synchronous, in person teaching is the best pedagogical tool that we have.  Conversation as a means of communicating – even though, and perhaps partly because, it is such a difficult way to communicate – is central to the best learning. 

 

Conversations are hard because the ideas we cherish are being questioned and we have to hold onto the idea while also hearing the concerns that others have with those ideas.  This is a tremendously complicated psychological and cognitive task – but it is one that is critical to the learning enterprise. 

 

Conversation becomes more difficult when we are remote.  We can and will assign asynchronous tasks as we always have – papers, long and short and with varying foci will be part of the pedagogy.  So will we assign homework with problems to solve and ideas to react to.  But discussion – the verbal communication between two or more people is at the heart of our pedagogy.

 

Discussions are necessary because we need to see people thinking – to hear the thoughts being formed – and to see how they are shaped in the cauldron of conversation in order to a) not follow our own thoughts into a rabbit hole of logical sense divorced from consensual reality and b) to hear from others so that we can learn from their experience and perspectives.

 

So: we should move towards having in person classes because those are the best kinds of classes to provide the kind of teaching that we value most highly.  And we should do this in the context of protecting the safety of the students, staff, and faculty to the best of our ability.  If we are to open in the fall we should do so as safely as possible.

 

This means that: masks should be available to all students, faculty and staff.  It would make sense for the University to provide both cloth masks for those who don’t have them but also plenty of disposable masks for individuals who forget them.  We should work on signage and other means of getting out the message that “No Masks, No Class”.  We should make it clear that wearing a mask is cool and considerate of others.  Taiwan, with a population of 20 million people, has under 500 cases of COVID and fewer than 10 deaths at this writing, AND THEY ARE NOT USING SOCIAL DISTANCING.  They are using masks.  Everyone is wearing them.  This virus is transmitted through droplets born on breath, coughs and sneezes.  If we are going to breathe the same air, let’s make sure it has been filtered at the source.  Everyone must wear masks.  It has to become basic to our culture as an extension of our valuing consideration of the other.

 

Because social distancing is required where we are, we are being told to prepare to teach to sections of class that are in the room while other parts of the class are joining remotely or not in the classroom.  We need tools to be able to teach in this way.  The classrooms need to be fitted with adequate cameras that will broadcast good quality images and with very good microphones.  Our laptop cams and mics are not up to the task.  We need the tools to be able to use the white board on Zoom as a true whiteboard.  Our laptops have pads that are TERRIBLE for drawing on the Zoom white board.  We need, at minimum, mice that will work well, but ideally some form of tablet that can be connected to the zoom whiteboard.

 

It also means that we should be regularly testing students, faculty, and staff and demanding quarantine for those who test positive – even, or perhaps especially, when they are not symptomatic.

 

Oh, and by the way, we should also meet in person because this is important to the economic health of the University.  But economic health, while an important consideration, is not primary.  What is primary, and needs to be kept primary, is that we have a culture of learning.  And this culture, which is dependent on direct contact in ways that we can’t appreciate until it is taken away (including extracurricular contact between students as well as contacts between students and faculty and students and staff) should be protected in the concrete world as long as we can safely do that, and when we can’t, we should make the best virtual analogue of that so that we can deliver the best possible education we are able.

 

And we should bear in mind that the reason that the economic well-being of the University is important is that it is necessary to support the culture that supports the students doing the necessary and important work that they are doing.  Economic well-being is necessary to our survival, but not the reason for our existence.  The reason for our existence is the culture that we have created that at its best can lead to improving the lives of our students.

 

As a corollary of that, we should continue to do the best we can to work together – executive team, faculty, and staff, to craft the best possible experience that we can for our students – including one that is safe for them, for their families, and for those who serve them. 

 

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.

For other posts on COVID:

I:       Apocalypse Now  my first posting on COVID-19.

II:      Midnight in Paris  is a jumping off point for more thinking about COVID.  (Also in Movies).

III:    Hans Selye and the Stress Response Syndrome.  COVID becomes more normal... for now.

IV:    Letter on the occasion of a Town Hall Meeting

V:      COVID craziness at the University continues with no end in sight.

VI:    Get back in that classroom  Paranoid ruminations.

VII:   Why Shutting Classes Makes Fiscal Sense A weak argument

VIII: Catholic Social Teaching Marshaled to support Rationalization...

IX:    What will school look like?

X:     Denial is not just a river in Egypt...

XI:    Back in the Classroom

XII:  Labor Day is for WORK!

XIII: Ennui

XIV. Where, Oh Where have my in-person students gone?  Split zoom classes in the age of COVID.

XV.  The First Complete COVID Semester is Done.

XVI.      More of the Same: The Second COVID Semester begins.

XVII.     Surviving the First Year of COVID: Will education be the same?

XVIII.    I miss my mask?

IXX.      Bo Burnham's Inside Commentary on the commenter.

XX.       The Olympics Mark the Oddness of the Time In Between.

XXI.      It's baaaack...  Joy and Horror and Maybe a Little Bit of Hope

XXII.     The Great Resignation Hits Home

XXIII.    The Great Resignation (cont.): A Family Reunion

XXIV.    COVID in the Classroom: The Great Dis-integrator

XXV.     First COVID, Now No Snow Days?

XXVI.   Not with a Bang but a Whimper: COVID is over... or is it?

XXVII.  Post COVID (we can hope) reflections on morale and morals...

XXVIII. How will we move on from our Empire of Pain? (Also in books)

XXIX.    A New Year's reminiscence.

Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School

 

This Memoir disguised as a novel – more than a Roman a Clef – a memoir that uses the novel form to clarify that it is subjective history, but one that retains history, and slightly shifts it – is weird to read as someone who has lived in and among many of the people in the book and has shared a culture – the culture of the Foundation – the Menninger Clinic – that is at the heart of this book.  And as much as I initially read this book with prurient interest – and as much as it tells truths about the people and places that author and I have in common, the center of the book is about language.

 

This book is divided into chapters that are sandwiched in between updates about the internal world of a minor character in the main story – a boy, Darren, who is the antithesis of the hero Adam.  Darren’s family are Topeka natives, unlike Adam’s family – and the families of the rest of the Foundation kids.  The distinction is a little like a college town where the townies are indigenous and the students and faculty belong to a different group.  But Darren belongs to neither group.  He has difficulties – with language and thought – that Adam indicates could be helped by the Foundation – by his father in particular – if Darren’s parents had the means or the insurance, but they don’t.  So Darren’s story is both integral and marginal to the story as a whole.

 

The main story is about Adam (clearly a version of Ben), his family, and about his coming of age.  It is a subtly brutal story – brutal in an odd way that is the mirror of the brutality in the novel by Ben’s student, Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re BrieflyGorgeous, in that the instrument of the brutality in this story is the hero himself.  Or rather both of them.  Darren is also brutal in the moment that hangs in the air throughout the story, but we understand the sources of Darren’s brutality – he, like Ocean’s alter ego, is abused by society and he reacts to that (which Ocean’s hero does not – Ocean’s hero is somehow able to understand and metabolize the brutality that is visited upon him).  Neither Darren nor Adam can contain their anger – both harm those around them, including women whom they admire and denigrate.

 

The main story is told through different lenses.  Four of the chapters are told from the perspective of Adam, though they are written in the third person.  Two of the chapters are told from the perspective of Jonathan, Adam’s father.  Interestingly, these are told in the first person.  And they are startling on target.  I happen to know Ben’s father.  The reluctant first wife and I saw him in marital therapy when I was working at the “Foundation”.  But it is not knowing him as a therapist and a person that this rings true, but from my identification with Jonathan as the father of Adam – and my fathering of my own son – who could not be more different in some ways than Adam.  This raises a question.  Is Ben more comfortable inhabiting the mind of his father than his own mind?  Does he now identify with his father more than he does with the person – or this version of the person – that he once was?  Or does he need to find some distance from himself in order to be able to identify with himself and to help us identify with him?

 

Finally, two chapters are told from the perspective of Adam’s mother.  Adam’s mother speaks for herself to Adam – or Ben.  He, Adam, goes home as an adult to get background information and Adam’s mother tells him what he wants to know, knowing that what she tells him will go in his book.  Adam’s mother – a version of Harriet Goldhor Lerner, the author who was famous for writing the Dance of Anger and then a series of additional self-help books with Dance in the title, is no stranger to the effects of having a public life.  In the novel, she talks about handling the calls of men who were angry about her book, and the sneers of men in the grocery store who were mad about the ways her books empowered their wives – or ex-wives.  Ben, through Adam, gives Harriet, in the character of Jane, the ability to tell her own story – and to clarify that she is continuing to knowingly live a very public life.

 

Language is at the heart of this book.  Ben is an accomplished poet and this is his third novel.  He has written for the New Yorker and, though he couldn’t have known this would happen when he was writing the book, this book was the runner-up for the Pullitzer Prize.  He knows how to put words down on paper.  Adam, his alter ego, becomes (spoiler alert) the National Champion in Extemporaneous Speaking.  He wields words as a debater, as an extemporaneous speaker, and in his mind as the sharpest of weapons.  He brutally demonstrates, near the end of the book, how Amber, the attractive, popular girl whom he chooses to date over his debate partner – is of no real long term interest because of the paucity of her language.  But, unlike Ocean, this is not done with charity, but with malice.  It is almost shockingly hostile – more so because his victim doesn’t know – perhaps until she reads this novel – how summarily she has been dismissed.

 

But language, for both Adam and Darren, is at best a treacherous means to an end.  Darren is all but mute because the thoughts that he has can’t be represented in language – they are too weird – he is too weird – to talk to others in anything like consensual English.  Adam is deathly afraid that his words will leave him.  He fears that he will get on stage and be unable to be articulate.  Back to that spoiler alert – I could find no record of Ben Lerner having won a National Extemporaneous speech contest, though there was a record of a boy from Topeka winning it twice – in the era when the mentor that Adam has would have won it.  Did Ben invent a different ending for himself?  One in which, unlike in real life, when his mother withheld valium from him at Nationals, she actually gave it to him and this helped him manage his fears so that he, as Adam, won?  Is Ben angry enough at Harriet over this to expose her in this book in the ways that he does?

 

But I think language unites Adam and Darren on a much deeper level.  I think that language fails both of them.  The book opens with Adam talking to Amber on a rowboat while they are on a lake at night.  Unbeknownst to Adam, Amber slips overboard and swims off while he prattles on, telling the moon and the dragonflies the deep and important ideas that he wants to convey.  This is followed by an eery, uncanny wander through a stranger’s home, thinking it is Amber’s.  Adam is lost.  His words, as much as he has control over them, do not convey what he is feeling.  They do not connect him to others, but they divide him from them.  Adam, like Ocean’s Little Dog, and his own Mother and Father, has insights onto other’s psyches.  But unlike Little Dog, Adam uses those insights to feel disdain towards those he has come to know – just as Darren does.  Adam hates where Little Dog loves.  Adam has learned from the townies how to use his elbows rather than his fists to land blows that are more powerful – that do more damage – and that are surprising because they come from closer in.

 

Ben ends this book rather abruptly and, I think, cutely.  It is heralded as a book that is about the divide that language has created in the country in the age of Trump and his cronies.  The MAGA days.  And Ben has framed this book so that it can be understood in this way.  That we have left behind reason – that the spread of point counterpoint in a debate gave way, in the Reagan – Carter debate, to taking the moral high ground – Reagan winning by saying, “There you go again…” as Carter would use a fact to demonstrate what he meant.  And, of course, the irony is delicious.  Who is the more moral ex-President? 

 

But I think this book is much more personal than universal.  Not just because I have had a little access to some of the principle characters and to the culture that is being examined here; the culture of the “Foundation”.  The culture of a community of people deeply and at times dangerously involved in each other’s lives and the lives of their patients.  A culture of people perceived as having a magic elixir that could impart to the chosen healing – something that has always been associated, in our culture, with miracles.  But I think it is also the case that these miracles are never quite enough – especially for those from whom they feel withheld.  I suppose that Darren ends up being an odd fun house mirror for Adam.  Like Darren, Adam felt shut out from something deep and mysterious – something like love.  Something like the communication that language promised.  What he saw around him felt to him, I think, tawdry and disappointing.  Cheap, like the mass produced tins that his mother was led to believe were unique works of art.  He longed for Duccio’s Madonna and Child – a personal devotional that is scarred by the heat of candles that are a measure of the love that the viewer feels for the Mother and Infant that are depicted there.

 

This, then, is a book about the anger that white men feel.  An anger that is surprising to those who, from the outside, say, “What have you got to be angry about?”  As if power were a reasonable substitute for love.  As if being in charge were the same thing as being loved.  And as if our language, with all of its fine gradations, would allow us to articulate this need in such a way that it could be met without our having to become vulnerable.  We fear, from the inside of our safe space, that vulnerability and, so, may end up being locked in a tower or, as our President is this week, cowering in a bunker…

  For the accompanying post on Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, link here.

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.

 

 

 

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous – Ocean Vuong and the Ephemeral Quality of a Visceral Life

 This is a book – something the author calls a novel.  But it is also poetry, a memoir, and a letter to a mother who cannot read – indeed, a mother who cannot speak English.  It is a work of art – and a tour de force by a kid who has been beaten and bullied – who is the product of a war he never knew but that lives on in him none the less.  And it is the product of a relationship with Ben Lerner – a poet, novelist, memoirist and teacher, supporter and promoter of a stunningly honest style of writing that transcends memory to become a statement – of oneself as the product of one’s history, but also of oneself as one sees himself, and as he is seen through the eyes of another – in this case, the mother to whom he is telling things that we would never tell our mothers -  but that he must tell her – and cannot, because she does not have the words to understand them.  Yet, I think it is important that he see himself through her eyes – her eyes that have seen so much that they can stand to see him in his most raw and vulnerable state, but also to see beyond what he has been through – to see who he has become, and to realize with him that they, despite the flimsy foundation they have been afforded, have built a table – a place where they can eat – together – and know each other – on a deep and visceral level because they have lived within each other’s skin.

 

So, this book is not something that I can write cogently – or certainly not encyclopedically - about.  It is, I think, intentionally confusing as it skips between times and places, lingering in one when you think you have returned to the other.  It becomes taken with itself (or Vuong becomes taken with himself - his virtuosity with language is a slap down to all those who have slapped him down in the past he is narrating) and the beauty of the language interferes with the story – or is it the other way around – this brutal story interferes with the beauty of the poetry? 

 

I guess I ought to define my terms if we are going to have a solid place from which to appreciate this work.  Poetry is, for the sake of this post, the language of dreams.  It is the language of symbols that mean multiple things – it is the visual turned into the linguistic – it is a song that can be sung many times because it will reveal new meanings each time it is sung.  It is a narrative that is held together by the survival of the author, something that we are only sure will happen because we continue to hear his voice in our ear – indeed, he needs to reassure himself on a regular basis that he is there, that he hasn’t been destroyed in this moment or that, that his heart is still beating and that his words are still potent.

 

Ocean Vuong – whose given name was Beach, but this was pronounced by his Vietnamese mother Bitch, so he changed it to Ocean; in the novel his alter ego's given name is Leader of Vietnam, but we never hear the Vietnamese pronunciation of that because he goes by the name his grandmother gave him – Little Dog.  This is the name that is given to the runt of the litter, so that the runt is not stolen by roaming evil spirits.  “To love something, then, is to name it after something so worthless it will be left untouched- and alive.  A name, thin as air, can be a shield.  A Little Dog shield.”

 

So I worry for Little Dog.  This is a big book - even though it is short.  As big and certainly more beautiful than the pink Schwinn Little Dog learned to ride only inside after it got the paint scratched off it by bullies who said it was a sissy color.  How was his mother to know that pink was a sissy color?  Is pink a sissy color in Vietnam?  Is my own Reluctant Son lucky that his mother and father could send him to a Hippie school where he would not be bullied because pink was his favorite color?   Was the reluctant son unlucky because he was bullied not for the pink colors of his gloves and scarf, but because he was a good kid who was loving and kind and could, therefore, be used by others?

 

Ocean has opened his heart to us in this book.  And we see how he has been brutally treated by everyone who has loved him.  He is able to see the love through the brutality.  Indeed, he is able to separate himself from those who brutalize him and to see their pain while experiencing his own.  And he can feel superior to those who have more power over him – and this gives him a special power – his own super power.  It allows him to connect with those who are themselves brutalized – to find a safe space within the blows that they rain down on him – and to love them – and, I think just as importantly, to feel loved by them.

 

So I find myself thinking about Ben Lerner – the author who is pioneering this form of novelized memoir, though he is far from inventing it.  But Ben taught Ocean.  And Ocean – whom I have come to be fond of here – exposes all of his complicated identities in this book.  He lets us know that he is gay and Vietnamese and the grandson of an unknown G.I. who had sex with his grandmother when she was a comfort woman.  More intimately, he lets us know just how hungry he is for love – so hungry that he will endure a great deal. 

 

Were I his therapist, I think I would trust myself to help him appreciate this, and therefore to be curious with him about he could protect himself in his loving.  But I fear that others, hearing this naked exposure, might not be so careful.  I have to trust that Ben, and the readers of this volume will learn from it what it means to be, as he says, briefly gorgeous – and to appreciate his beauty without exploiting him.  But I think more importantly, I have to trust that this man’s resiliency is such that he will not be destroyed in the way that I imagine him to be by exposing himself so openly.

 

Since writing this far in this post, I have finished The Topeka School, and I think now, more clearly, that the more powerful of these two writers – Ben and Ocean – is certainly Ben.  He has resources that Ocean does not.  But it is clear to me that he is not as strong a person as Ocean.  Ben’s power is brittle and there largely by dint of social class but also by virtue of, as is case for Ocean, command of the language.  But language, for Ben, is a tool – it is a weapon.  It is used to keep him safe.  For Ocean, language is a means of connecting – this book is a letter to his mother – a mother who will never read it.  So we, his readers, become his mother.

 

Both authors talk quite intimately about their mothers – as intimately, in many ways, as they talk about themselves.  I am not able to be anything close to an objective observer because Ben’s mother is someone I know, not closely, but I have worked with her and been a part of her world.  Ocean’s mother could not be more foreign to me.  She beats her child.  She is impoverished.  Her schooling ended in the second grade when her village was destroyed by the US Army.  She doesn’t speak English – except to say “Sorry” to her customers as she cares for them, and she does understand enough of what they say to empathize with their losses.  But I don’t feel sorry for her in the way that I feel for Ben’s mother.  Ben’s exposure of his mother has an edge of malice.  Despite all the complications of the relationship between Ocean/Little Dog and his mother, there is a deep sense of caring for her – of understanding her and the world she lives in.  And a need to have her understand him.  Ben needs his mother to understand him, but he doesn’t seem to know that.  Ocean/Little Dog does know that he needs his mother's understanding, and he helps us to realize that the strength of knowing the other is not to have power over them, but to realize who it is that you are in relation to the other – and to realize who it is that they are and just how important it is that they are to you.  Ben and his alter Ego Adam can inhabit his father - write in his voice, but must hear from his mother.  Ocean/Little Dog can write to his mother - can create her in the ways that he needs her to be.  I think this allows him to more fully realize himself.

 

   My post on Ben Lerner's The Topeka School can be accessed here.

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.

Letter on the Occasion of a Town Hall Meeting at a Jesuit University in the Midst of Three Health Crises

First, I want to thank the executive team for meeting in a town hall format with the faculty and staff.  I was particularly appreciative of the opening prayer and its call for us to think about life over property, especially at a time like this; not an easy thing to do.  I also appreciate that we are all concerned about property – meaning compensation and the continued financial well-being of the campus.  Certainly the questions were focused on them and therefore channeled the conversation in that direction.  But I was struck at the contrast between the prayer’s calling us to reflect on the marginalized and on living in a stratified culture long after the need for that has disappeared while, in the meeting proper, we focused on preserving the source of our collective livelihood. 

 

A Jesuit education accomplishes many goals – some of which are internally contradictory.  We are educating men and women for and with others while we simultaneously elevate them to being able to be employed in ways that will let them join the upper middle class (or maintain their privileged position in that class).  I fear that those we would elevate are often saddled with debt that will prevent them from crawling out from a lower class and instead will plunge them deeper into it.

 

As a society, we have moved, in my lifetime, from seeing higher education as a bare bones means of helping society train their future leaders and investing in training those leaders because that is good for society, to charging students (generally by putting them deeply in debt) because of the benefits that they as individuals will reap from that education.  And providing cushy seats for them while they do it.  In the process, we have moved from a society that supports service for others to one that supports entitlement of the individual because they have “suffered” (in luxury) and thus deserve the disproportionate income they will one day achieve.

 

One writer, the gifted novelist Marilynne Robinson, has posited that this is ultimately based on a shared experience of scarcity, which she finds remarkable in the richest nation the world has ever produced.  Her thesis, and I agree with it, is that we are prey to anxieties about survival and therefore lose track of what it means to embrace the all too brief life that we have been given on this earth.  I think this was on ample display in this town hall – and I think we all shared in the creation of a general experience of that anxiety.

 

This COVID-19 thing is a bump in the road.  We don’t know how big it is – but it will be something that we will address.  While we are addressing it, other issues emerge.  Certainly the second health crisis – the crisis of racial and class inequality and its consequent health (including mental health) sequelae has exploded into our collective consciousness.  But so has the third issue of the health of the planet.  The wisdom of creating climate change and the other consequences of continuing to be a fossil fuel dependent and blindly hurtling forward let’s consolidate wealth for the wealthy society we are is becoming clearer (I’m a deeply invested player in this game, btw – please don’t hear me as being above any of this).

 

But the silver lining to all of this – if we don’t spend every single freaking second of our time trying to fix it - is that it gives us an opportunity to pause.  To realize the brevity of our existence.  To evaluate our values.  What do we care about?  As a University, as individuals, as spiritual and religious people, and as a society as a whole, we care about many internally contradictory things.  And this moment is pregnant with all of those contradictions and difficulties.

 

So, as we are attending to the things that we are worrying about and trying to fix them, please also let’s spend some time remembering that we are being given a big, ugly, difficult and unwanted gift.  Melanie Klein, a notoriously cranky but prescient psychoanalyst once observed that there is nothing more aggressive that we can do than give someone a gift.  The Universe (God?) has given us a gift.  A complex difficult, multilayered gift.  And we are in a relatively privileged position from which to engage with it – or should be.  If we can lift our heads up from all of the dross – we may be able to recognize that we are being confronted with the kinds of issues that can shape our souls and our futures. We should be thinking not just about how to balance the budget (and build in a surplus at these times?  If this isn’t a time to tap into our rainy day fund, I would hate to see the storm that will empower us to do that…), but to balance ourselves.  To figure out how to surf on the waves that this storm has produced, using the board that we have been waxing throughout our lives as a means of conveying not just ourselves, but each other through these treacherous tides.

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.

For other posts on COVID:

I:       Apocalypse Now  my first posting on COVID-19.

II:      Midnight in Paris  is a jumping off point for more thinking about COVID.  (Also in Movies).

III:    Hans Selye and the Stress Response Syndrome.  COVID becomes more normal... for now.

IV:    Letter on the occasion of a Town Hall Meeting

V:      COVID craziness at the University continues with no end in sight.

VI:    Get back in that classroom  Paranoid ruminations.

VII:   Why Shutting Classes Makes Fiscal Sense A weak argument

VIII: Catholic Social Teaching Marshaled to support Rationalization...

IX:    What will school look like?

X:     Denial is not just a river in Egypt...

XI:    Back in the Classroom

XII:  Labor Day is for WORK!

XIII: Ennui

XIV. Where, Oh Where have my in-person students gone?  Split zoom classes in the age of COVID.

XV.  The First Complete COVID Semester is Done.

XVI.      More of the Same: The Second COVID Semester begins.

XVII.     Surviving the First Year of COVID: Will education be the same?

XVIII.    I miss my mask?

IXX.      Bo Burnham's Inside Commentary on the commenter.

XX.       The Olympics Mark the Oddness of the Time In Between.

XXI.      It's baaaack...  Joy and Horror and Maybe a Little Bit of Hope

XXII.     The Great Resignation Hits Home

XXIII.    The Great Resignation (cont.): A Family Reunion

XXIV.    COVID in the Classroom: The Great Dis-integrator

XXV.     First COVID, Now No Snow Days?

XXVI.   Not with a Bang but a Whimper: COVID is over... or is it?

XXVII.  Post COVID (we can hope) reflections on morale and morals...

XXVIII. How will we move on from our Empire of Pain? (Also in books)

XXIX.    A New Year's reminiscence.