The Great: Camp tells us something about neuropsychoanalysis?

Hulu Series The Great, Catherine the Great, Peter III, Russia, Bingeworthy fare, psychology and psychoanalysis of The Great.

The Hulu series The Great is a campy, anachronistic vision of the beginning of the end of the aristocracy in Europe told from the vantage point of Russia and the 18^th century Tsar, Catherine The Great, but also from 21^st Century views of diversity, equity and inclusion.  More essentially, I viewed it, as I walked through the TV room while the reluctant wife was watching it, as a high budget soap opera carried along mostly by badly choreographed softcore porn. 

Sadly, I became hooked…  but, then, it turned out to be more interesting and to have (some) more depth than it initially appeared to.  The story is originally subtitled “An Occasionally True Story”, but by the end of the second season it is more truthfully subtitled “An Almost Entirely Untrue Story”.  Catherine (Elle Fanning) is a naïve ingénue bartered into marriage by her scheming mother (who has married off two of Catherine’s sisters to kings and has the remaining one in the wings to marry the king of France).  Catherine, raised to rule as a member of the German aristocracy is married to emperor Peter III (Nicholas Hoult), son of Peter the Great.

Peter, to use Freudian vernacular, is pure id.  Never having been constrained and now being the head of a powerful but brutally primitive nation, he is who Trump imagined himself to be: someone who can kill whomever he wants in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue and get away with it.  This Fifth Avenue is, of course, the court of Russia and he is not killing random citizens but members of the court and scheming to kill his new wife, who has nothing but disdain and loathing for him.

Catherine is the ego to Peter’s id.  She is educated and wants to bring this backwards Russian country into, well, the 21^st century.  She wants to curb and redirect the Russian passion towards expressing love rather than simply naked aggression.  She wants to replace superstition with reason and enlightenment.  She is also consistently flabbergasted that Russia attaches itself so powerfully to its primitive and backwards ways.

This morning I was reading an account of the brain as understood by neuropsychoanalysts (Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing – Mark Solms is the titular head of this band of intrepid scientists).  One of the points they made is that we don’t have a single brain – but multiple brains that have very different purposes.  We have an invertebrate brain that becomes hungry, and then a vertebrate brain that knows how to move us from here to there – clumsily at first, but then, as it learns how to navigate the world, with more grace.  The greatest chasm is between our ancient feeling brain and the much more recently acquired conceptual one; the latter can organize and anticipate and, for all intents and purposes it manages the older more primitive one.  All of these brains (and others) are kludged together (I guess kludge is one of those super technical neuropsychological terms).  Antonio Damasio tells us the disparate parts are “mediated” by the hypothalamus – I guess calling fouls when one part of the brain oversteps the bounds of another part – or doesn’t respect its position, but also integrating them, when we are at our best, so that the parts function not as warring factions but as a symphony of complimentary parts.

So this series kludges Catherine and Peter together.  He is full of appetites – sexual, aggressive, and gustatory.  He loves truffles – both hunting and eating them.  He imagines that he truffle hunted with his father – who would in fact begin the truffle hunt, but abandon him to fornicate with whatever lovely had caught his eye that day.  This leaves Peter the son with a hunger for a father figure and, in the age of gender bending, the very, very feminine Catherine may be just the father figure Peter is looking for.

Peter, wanting to live up to the legacy of his father, is a person who has always had great privilege but he also is, in fact, just a spoiled little boy who is cruel and spiteful.  The courtiers who surround him love the power that they might wield as he focuses on his rather narrow and petulant interests, leaving the running of the country to them, but also by his embodying the unbridled passion of Russia.  They want to retain the status quo, one that supports their debauched ways and allows them to live lives that are unrestrained by concern for the citizens of the country – or for the plight of women.  

Catherine, on the other hand, is the embodiment of the enlightenment.  She believes that reason, and love, will conquer aggression and cruelty.  Catherine gathers an odd assortment of allies who are concerned about Peter’s inability to lead.  She convinces some of her group that reason should be the wave of the future, though some go along with her to get rid of the chaos of Peter’s reign.  Together she and her group depose Peter and, though still married to him, she imprisons him in his quarters.

At one point, Peter prevents Catherine from killing him by gifting her Voltaire as a courtier and she is all agog. Catherine begins a school for girls and threatens to free both the serfs and women.  When she impetuously frees the serfs in reaction to her frustration at the pace of introducing real reform, chaos ensues and she is ashamed of not having been better able to control her passions.  Ironic?  You betcha…

While Catherine and Peter are presented as diametrically opposed forces who are the embodiment of very different characters, they are also both human – and are able to appreciate each other and, across time, to recognize themselves in the other.  Church and state also force them to produce an heir and, when they do, Peter’s maternal connection to his son belies who has been to this point.  Meanwhile, Catherine’s rationality and convivial approach to international relations becomes sorely tested and she goes beyond being impetuous to becoming murderous.

Catherine takes on aspects of Peter, though she uses her drives that mirror his to further the dictates of her goals and aspirations.  She becomes, by the end of the second season (when this post is written), a truly duplicitous and therefore effective ambassador.  The vehicle for this transformation, ironically, is her love for Peter.  Meanwhile Peter’s transition to being a loving father and admiring partner is his love for Catherine, something that seems to occur almost in spite of himself.  Of course, despite his attachment to her, he cannot help being himself, which creates one of the critical tensions at the end of the second season.

In so far as this series was nominally grounded in the biography of Catherine the Great, this premise is strained as the writers, producers, actors and directors pursue a timely and relevant commentary on… what?  I think this may be a sophisticated commentary on our current political state – an international crisis of transition from the modern aristocracy of the developed world’s middle class, a privileged class that imagines itself to be moral (in the United States, to be Christian), while exploiting the resources and labor of those in less privileged countries, to a new order that promises to be more equitable.  Whether we will achieve this new state of affairs is very much a question.  While we paint the plutocrats, in this rendering, as the devils making this state of affairs continue, we are all complicit.  From this perspective, the series portrays the kludging together of the old and the new social orders.

While I think the series works on the level of social commentary, I think its appeal is more visceral.  I think the kludging that I have outlined above of the aspects of the self; the integrating of our disparate “brains” on both the metaphoric level of Catherine and Peter representing the single entity of a person at war with themselves, and on the level of the individual characters of Catherine and Peter coming to terms with aspects of themselves that they had worked to ignore, these kludgings ring true for us.  We know what it means to struggle with curbing our drives – while not even knowing that we are doing that.  We also know what it means to have acted on our drives without restraint.

The beauty of art – even this art which rather clumsily appeals to our prurient interests (clumsily presumably because of safe guards instituted to protect actors in scenes that imitate sexual interactions without quite being those interactions – though I do wonder if the clumsiness is, at times, an intentional commentary on that process of imposed restraint)- is that it is much more interesting than reading a journal articulating the brain mechanisms that are related to the action of this drama and the drama of our own lives.  The interesting thing is that both represent something essentially human, and therefore of interest to us.  (More on this particular primal attraction in other posts…).

          

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COVID Chronicles XXIV: Dis-Integration in the classroom.

 COVID, University Teaching, Impact of COVID on thinking

It is Christmas Eve and all through the house, everyone is dashing around madly preparing for the big day… and we are rapidly approaching the end of the second year of living under the cloud of COVID and omicron suggests a third may be on the way.  In a continuing attempt to chronicle what this looks like from a tiny corner of a hugely complex set of interactions, I will begin this report by talking about my students – and their integrative failures.

This fall, I taught a course that I continue to enjoy after teaching it for five years – History and Systems of Psychology.  I have grown into teaching the course more and more from the perspective of a disparate field that is at odds with itself.  It has been an opportunity to pull together the seemingly disconnected aspects of my professional identity as I work to help the students understand how this wide-ranging field belongs under one tent.

 The quest to understand and then articulate this field’s integrity has been mine since I first taught Introduction to Psychology in 1985.  How do Freud and Skinner belong in the same bed?  Why is it important for our students who, though they are majoring in psychology, and will mostly end up in business, learn about how the eye works?  How is it that the cold arithmetic of science belongs in a field that is curious about the warmly complicated relationships of parents and children; bosses, employees, and workmates; and the intimacy of both lovers and therapist/patient dyads and groups?

This fall, the intent at the beginning of the semester was for all of our classes to be in person, with everyone masked.  This was a relief, after teaching classes last year.  Then we wore masks in the classroom but only half or a third of our students, all wearing masks, were allowed in the room with us.  The unmasked ones were to be on Zoom and the “privilege” of being in the room rotated.  By the end of the semester, though, I was frequently the only person in the physical room as everyone else opted to stay home.

I was really looking forward to being with the students again – and they were clearly enjoying being in each other’s company.  There was a buzz in the room that I had really missed.  This  quickly began to fall apart.  Students would come down with symptoms and ask to be on zoom.  The camera was right there in the room – why not turn it on?  Then someone else had to go home to care for a sick relative, etc. 

Fortunately, through the semester most of the students stayed in the classroom for the regular classes.  But, in the age of COVID, testing of students is a challenge.  Our new president noted that her daughter, currently in college, has been taking open book tests for the past two years.  Why would we do this, you might ask?  When students take a test remotely, we can keep an eye on them through their computer screen.  We can lock the computer they are using, but when monitoring twenty or thirty students, we can’t make sure they have nothing else in the room with them, including another computer.  So we capitulate to prevent cheaters from having an advantage and afford everyone access to whatever they want.

So, since it is open book exam, and you don’t have to be in the physical classroom to take the exam, you just have to be on zoom, exam days were the only days that I was the only person in the physical classroom.  Everyone else opted to take the exam from elsewhere.  Some were in the library, some in their dorms or at home, but no one chose to take the exams in classroom.

One result is massive grade inflation.  My students are doing much better on tests than they ever have.  The average grade for the class has gone from a high C or low B to a high B or low A.  The students are pleased by that, but they don’t realize the downstream consequences (or maybe they do, but don’t care).  It becomes harder and harder for excellent students to distinguish themselves from mediocre ones.  Everyone is “above average”.  To compound things, there is a movement away from standardized testing as a determinant of who should be admitted to graduate school.  Partly this is related to concerns about testing being a measure of privilege rather than ability.  I think this is true – but so are grades.  Partly this is related to COVID, and I don’t follow this logic.  It is possible to take standardized tests remotely – there are means of having those exams remotely proctored. 

The average GPA of a graduating senior at my University was a 3.4.  This might have made sense if we were a highly competitive University, but we are not.  We have very bright and motived students, but we also have students how are neither so bright nor so motivated and all kinds of combinations of the above.  When there is grade inflation, there is also grade compression.  In order to stand out, you have to have close to a perfect record.  This means that we are picking students for graduate school who have not had a bad semester, because this “ruins” their record relative to others.  The students we are choosing are the students who have not had failed to achieve good grades all the time. 

When we select students with near perfect records to become clinicians, they frequently focus on grades and other marks of accomplishment as a means of valuing themselves and, inevitably, others.  They work to help their clients achieve As.  This can lead to an insidious replaying of our clients’ childhoods in which they are once again being exhorted by parental figures to do better.  This is antithetical to the psychodynamic principle of meeting someone where they are and understanding their situation so that the tangled web of their lives can be unsnarled.  Instead of asking client’s what is wrong, and tolerating the confusion of not knowing, along with their clients, these students learn what maladaptive thoughts are and teach their clients to avoid them.

OK, I seem to have gotten off the track and gone on a rant.  I hope to show you, soon, how this is relevant. 

Part of the problem with the open book tests that I have given is that a big chunk of the questions are asking about “facts”.  My students, and everyone else in the world, have become really good at chasing down facts.  “Just Google it” is the constant refrain.  This semester, for the first time, the upper level students had electronic text books that are provided by the University rather than buying paper textbooks.  There are all kinds of problems with this that I’m sure you can appreciate – e.g., the students don’t start building a personal library in college, and there is a very different experience of reading a written text and one online.  But the problem I want to focus on is searching the text.  Instead of nosing around in a text for an answer, the students are now able to search for a term.  This gets them to the sentence with the answer.

So, when I gave as a final exam a paper addressing the question that was central to course – How do all these disparate parts go together to be one science? – the students did not treat this as the integrative assignment it was meant to be.  Instead, they consistently searched the elements in the question and then pieced them together.  For instance, I asked about the tension between positivism (which is a particular scientific view) and holistic approaches to the human condition, and asked them to reference a psychologist who embodied each approach.  They searched for positivism in the text and wrote about August Comte, the philosopher who originated positivism, but they did not acknowledge that he was writing 100 years before psychology was invented.  They lost track of the big question as they ferreted out answers to little parts of the question.

Our students, indeed all of us, have become very good at picking out “facts” and then figuring out which of the options in the multiple choice is correct.  When they sew together “facts” taken out of context, they create an ill-fitting quilt.  The pieces are OK, but the whole does not blend into a coherent narrative arc. 

Creating a narrative arc has always been a challenge.  I’ve been working on creating the narrative arc that holds together my field for most of my career.  It’s still a work in progress – a bit of an ill fit together quilt.  But I worked on helping the students see how the strands came together across the course of the semester – or demonstrated it.  Some of the students in the classroom were able to engage in a conversation with me about these issues, and this is the time-honored way to work towards integrative thinking.

The semester this year was set up so that the students would go home the weekend before Thanksgiving.  They took the final after Thanksgiving.  The last class before Thanksgiving was virtual for everyone.  This was the summary for the semester – and should have helped them prepare for the final integrative essay.  Five or six of them had their cameras on.  Most did not.  Were they engaged in the class?  Did they think about the issues?  Did too much turkey interfere with their memory?  Were they afraid to write out their thoughts so they looked for the safety of the hunt and transfer means of addressing questions?

I know that 6 year olds have lost a lot during the pandemic.  So have 9, 12 and 15 year olds.  For each developmental epoch, there have been losses.  My students have almost certainly had social losses – but I think they have had cognitive losses as well.  Perhaps more importantly, they have been driven deeper into the morass of determining whether something is true or not based on whether it meets some external criteria of truth.  They are not being driven by, and therefore, for those who would head into becoming psychotherapists, are not going to feel comfortable facilitating helping others feel their way into what is true for them rather than looking around for the proper bar to jump over.

  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), please try using the service at the top of the page.  I have had difficulty with these and am looking for something better, but these are what I have at this moment. 

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.

  

Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms – A brief report

 

Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms is an important book that has not aged well – at least not at first glance.  It seems to be two books – a very good antiwar story that is a thinly disguised Roman a Clef about Hemingway’s experience as an ambulance driver in Italy during the First World War, and a very bad love story that is also a thinly disguised Roman a Clef about Hemingway’s first love.

The enthralling quality of the first book – including the fabled dialogue – is overshadowed by the insipid quality of the book that chronicles the love affair – especially the hollow dialogue that betrays s a love that seems entirely imaginary and incredibly immature; the dialogue idealizes hollowness and reeks of emptiness rather than charting the connection between two people.

From a certain vantage point, though, this still remains a powerful novel - including and partly because of the insipid love story.  Hemingway, as his alter ego, drinks like a fish, connects with men, and is toughened by war.  He ages himself a few years in the novel and makes himself worldly – as if that would make love (and war) more manageable. 

The war is brutal and nonsensical.  Thrown back into the war after his injury, Hemingway’s alter ego leads a small band through a chaotic retreat, and, in the process, loses touch with what it means to be human.  He orders death like he might order a hamburger.   

Ouch.  He appears to be death's master.  He orders it instead of suffering it.  And this helps keep his fear at arm’s length.

But then it gets weird.  Because he is not the man he is pretending to be.  He is a little boy who wants his Mommy.  And she shows up.  She nurses him.  

Your Mommy is what you crave when you are far from home, in a foreign country and people are wanting you to get back into a war after you have been injured and after you have seen an army fall apart.  You run away from war - with Mommy.  And she takes care of you.

Or you do if you are writing a book and you are trying to rewrite history.  But it didn’t quite work out that way in reality, so it rings false on the page.  Mommy got tired of you being a baby and left you.  So in the book, you change that.  You get her back – and instead of her leaving you, you do her in – and the baby that that would have replaced you.

And this second book, then, is perhaps the better antiwar book because it more clearly than the first shows the effects of war. 

I don’t know which of Hemingway’s wars caused him to feel so needy.  It may have been a war that was waged at home between his parents.  Perhaps his parents were too absent.  Perhaps he was too wild.  But there was a war that sent him to Italy at the age of 16 to study architecture only to get caught up in an actual world war, one in which he was injured at too young an age.

The scars from the wars he was in show up in the insipid relationship that he portrays as if it were mature love.  As if it were intimacy.  It is not.  But it is what gets imagined and then presented as love in a failed attempt to keep the horrors of war, and being abandoned, at bay.

As we recoil from the two dimensional quality of the love, we recoil from the effects of the trauma.  We recoil from the painful efforts of his traumatized mind trying to set things right by typing a missive to readers who can sympathize with the man behind the bravado.  He pulls for us to care for him the way that his imaginary lover would done.

And 100 years ago, people did.  But we don’t do that so much, now.  Or at least I didn’t.  We are not willing to watch him try to nurse himself back to health with platitudes.  We blanch at his sense of privilege and his disregard for those around him who would help him, including the mother figure.  His pretending to be mature feels like just that: pretend.

I don’t know that we are more mature now, but we do have a better sense of what trauma is.  We also have a better sense of what love looks like – something that takes us out of ourselves, rather than driving us deeper within ourselves.  The love in this book, this immature love, plainly caused by the stunted growth of this man, may be the best testament to the ravages of war, if we can only hear it for being just that.  When we witness perhaps the greatest writer of his generation being driven to write such drivel it is surely cause for concern about the long term effects of war trauma.

 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), please try using the service at the top of the page.  I have had difficulty with these and am looking for something better, but these are what I have at this moment. 

  

COVID Chronicles XXIII: The Great Resignation II: How I am Resigned

 

During the past 8 or 10 months, I have dreamt, at least weekly, that I am at a family reunion.  It is always pleasant and I feel a little sad on awakening to discover that I have been dreaming.  The dream is about a wish to be with my family, but also to reunite with the human family.  We have been estranged from each other for a very long time.

The dream reunion is with my father’s family.  When I was a child, my father and his two brothers’ families would get together every Thanksgiving.  With spouses, children, and grandmother we numbered between 15 and twenty.  We lived in three different northern states and would stay in one home, all together, cots lined up in the basement for the kids.

Cousins are a special breed of relative.  They are close enough in age to be good playmates, but because we don’t live together, there aren’t the kinds of conflicts that emerge between siblings.  I was friends with my cousins the way I would later become friends with my siblings, when we were old enough not to be quite so competitive and to be able to appreciate the differences between us rather than to try to exploit them.

The dream is a dream of the present day.  The cousins are now grown, with kids of our own, and even a few grandkids.  In reality, we no longer get together every year, but for occasions – weddings mostly but also for funerals; first for my grandmother and more recently for my father and for his brother’s wife, my aunt.  We have also gotten together in smaller groups to celebrate anniversaries or graduations. 

So when the announcement of my cousin’s wedding reception arrived this summer, I was excited.  We couldn’t go to the wedding itself last year because of COVID.  We watched it via zoom, which was less satisfying than kissing through a screen door would have been.

My entire branch of the family was excited by the reunion.  We all made travel plans.  COVID looked like it would be vanquished and we could finally be together.  Even the reluctant stepdaughters thought it would be fun to connect with this fun loving side of my family.

But COVID, our constant companion, returned.  And, since the wedding was in Texas, many were concerned about the lax local approach to managing the pandemic.  The numbers did not look good as a third surge raged.  My brother, who is selling his house and worldly possessions and moving with his wife to St. Thomas thought they could make it as one final connection with the family, but the crush of moving caught up with them. By last weekend, I was the sole representative of my Dad’s family.  Our branch was whittled to a twig.

The irony is that I am probably the one in the family who least likes to travel.  This is also the busiest time of year for me and I can ill afford to spend time away from work (though I was able to get a lot of work done on the plane, in a hotel room by myself, and I was, because we are now in the state we are, able to teach by Zoom).  But my dream was calling me.  I could not resist the pull towards community.

And I am very glad that I went.  I had rich and meaningful conversations with many people.  I caught up on family gossip and had fun just hanging out.  We were careful about masks until the after reception when the dancing started and, I swear, I was the only masked person in the place.  Later I found out that family members on both the bride and groom’s side were figuring that all of the guests were vaccinated.  But did they ask about the band?  (It is a week later and, knock on wood, I don’t have any symptoms yet and have not heard that others do).

A central topic of conversation was the great resignation.  A cousin who is a physician had an experience that closely mirrors mine.  For the past twenty years, she has worked for one of the top hospitals in the country.  When COVID hit, the hospital cut physician’s pay and quit contributing to their retirement and demanded that the physicians (and presumably the rest of the staff) work more hours because of increased patient demands.  Unlike me (but like many of my colleagues), she decided to quit working for them, and the family has moved to be closer to my uncle.  She is doing locum tenens work until she can find the kind of job she wants – part time with no evening or weekend work.  Without COVID she, and many of her colleagues who also resigned, would have continued where she was for another twenty years.

Her husband lived for a year on St. Thomas, where my brother is headed.  That cousin is envious of my brother's decision to buy a boat and move onto it.  My cousin is trying to whittle down his possessions, and he recognizes that living on a boat means never being tempted to impulse buy anything - because there is simply no place to put anything.  He wonders, though, about whether my brother and his wife will like living on an island - it is a small place, he cautions.  Kind of like living in our COVID concentrated worlds, I'm thinking.

A cousin with younger kids, quit her job so that she could manage the kid's schooling.  First their school shut down without notice.  Then, when it started up, classes were cancelled without notice and then their kids were sent home regularly when they were exposed to the virus.  The havoc that was wreaked in their lives and in her professional life became unmanageable and she resigned to manage the kids and their schoolwork while her husband continued to work.  

The cousins who were in High School and College were affected much as my kids have been.  One had his senior year of high school at home, over zoom.  He has now started community college and has only started to meet some of his classmates as some classes have returned to in person (with masks), though many are still remote.  He reported that the in person classes were vastly superior to those online – he feels connected to his teacher and to the other students in a way that he does not in classes that are being taught remotely.

At the same time, many cousins are preparing for a post COVID world in a variety of exciting and interesting ways.  One very thoughtful cousin is thinking about a career in the performing arts – an incredibly competitive field.  I listened to his father have a conversation with another cousin who has had success in the performing arts.  They talked about whether it made sense to get additional training or to simply try to get auditions, as she had done.  She acknowledged the tremendous amount of luck that went into her success.  The next morning, the very poised high school wannabe performer talked soberly about the various paths that could lead to different types of careers on stage, but also behind the scenes and the risks and benefits of each of these paths.

As we work to craft dream driven lives, we encounter obstacles the dreams haven’t anticipated.  The triple threat of COVID, climate change, and the ways that George Floyd’s death have caused us to rethink the structural (dis)advantages built into our system have contributed to my relational family and the family of human beings reassessing how we will structure our individual lives.  The great resignation – an unprecedented number of people walking away from jobs, partly as a result of having a safety net that will protect them as they regroup – is leading to a very broad re-thinking of what it means to live a good life.

My own life, one that has been led successfully (and sometimes not so successfully) pursuing a variety of dreams has felt at times like a high wire walk over the fear that a misstep will lead to financial ruin.  I have been frugal throughout my life, and, in the last half of it, conservative about pursuing things that might have involved financial risk.  At the same time, I realize that I have been extremely privileged and much of my anxiety has been manufactured.  I think that I would not have been in as much peril as I might have imagined if I had struck out in less fettered ways to pursue self-indulgent or socially conscious goals.

My own resignation is of a different variety.  I am resigned to having led the life I have lived – and to thinking about how best to live the remainder.  I cannot undo what has been done, and I don’t have the wide open field of possibilities that my younger cousins do.  I fear for the planet – in much the same way, to this point, that I have feared for my financial future.  I work to contain my own carbon footprint where I can, and feel guilty about where I do not (including flying to a family reunion in the midst of a pandemic).  Will I be more proactive with the last (what I hope to be) third of my life?

In a conversation with another middle aged cousin, one who is also an artist, he had resigned himself to moving from a position that appeared to be a dead end, to being offered an opportunity within that organization to play a starring role.  His performances will occur in March.  A number of us will convene to observe and celebrate that performance.  He talked movingly about the ways in which he dedicates himself to prepare for an ephemeral performance – one that lasts only as long as he and the audience are in contact with each other.  We all, I suppose, do this.  Not just within our profession, but within our lives.  We perform whatever we do, and leave whatever trace in the world that we do.  We leave that trace with our friends and family and in our neighborhood, and collectively that trace seems ephemeral; but, in fact, those actions can have far reaching consequences, for good and evil.

As we celebrate my cousin's performance in March, we will also be celebrating his marriage.  He is marrying a man who helps him, he says, realize that there is a world beyond the singular world of the performances to which he devotes himself.  This brings balance to his life, but also joy.  I know the joy firsthand.  I feel it in the presence of his husband and of their love for each other.  I also feel it in the love – much of it complicated – that my families feel for each other – both my family of kin and this family we all share – the family of humans.  As we become resigned to our limits, I hope that we also keep our eyes open to the possibilities that lie before us.

 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), please try using the service at the top of the page.  I have had difficulty with these and am looking for something better, but these are what I have at this moment. 

  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.

Sex Education: High School Sex and Intimacy – Can They Co-exist?

 

Sex Education, Netflix, Isaac, disability and sex, psychoanalysis of Sex Education, psychology of Sex Education, Intimacy and Sexuality

The Reluctant Wife began watching Sex Education a while ago and I would notice it as I walked through the room, sometimes getting caught up in it.  At some point, it caught my attention enough that I joined her to watch the second season and found myself anticipating the third season.  I was drawn in by the characters – by their teenage angst – by the interesting intersections of identities – sexual and otherwise, but I found myself being turned off by the sex.  I’m not a prude.  I like sex.  And there’s a lot of it depicted in this series.

I think some of the reason to be turned off is the staging of the sex.  It is clear that the sex is highly staged.  These are young actors and they are being watched over (I assume) by people who are walking them through how to act like they are having sex with someone else – and being coached on how to pretend to have sex and not quite have sex at the same time.  This is challenging for actors at any stage in their careers, but it must be particularly challenging for actors who are going through their own version of what they are depicting to be engaging in faux sex with many onlookers and the unblinking eye of the camera. 

But I don’t think the staging of the sex – the sense that this is just play sex and not the real thing - is what is off-putting.  Ironically that is part of porn, and it does not seem to matter enough there to derail the experience of getting excited.  I think that I am put off by the realistic aspects of the depiction of high school sex. 

The sex in Sex Education is urgent – frequently to the point of being frantic.  Sex is depicted, I think realistically, as being the result of powerful urges that feel like they have to be satisfied NOW.  And those impulses in high school are both so intense and so relatively rarely indulged that when then there is an opportunity to have sex, it feels urgent to have it now.  And the places that people have sex conspire to intensify the urgency – let’s have sex before we get caught, even when kids are having sex in their own bedrooms with the tacit or even explicit approval of their parents.  Someone might come in at any moment!

I think adolescent sex is urgent for other reasons as well.  Primary among them is that adolescent sex is wrapped up in the discovery of one’s identity, perhaps the primary adolescent developmental challenge.  So sexuality becomes partly about identity - who am I as a sexual person?  And so it partly had a defensive quality, as if the participants are so focused not just on their own pleasure but on whether they are being liked by the other that they cannot quite be open to the other - to engage with them.

This series is very much about identity – it includes an ensemble cast that is diverse racially, socio-economically, sexual orientationally, and on the basis of ability.  There is a kaleidoscopic quality to the characters and to the ways in which they interact.  There are the cliques of high school – and those who cross boundaries, belonging to one clique but consorting with members of others.  Who each person is - but also who it is that they are becoming - is very important to the characters and to the show 

There is also the discovery of the ways in which a person who is imagined to be one way – because of whatever aspect of their identity – is discovered, in the sort of accidental encounters that occur when many people are crammed into a small building for the bulk of the day, to also be someone completely different.   On this level, this series, even to someone who grew up in a different era, feels organic and true. The moments of discovery occur not just between the players, but within the audience as we discover that the cool girl’s home is not the friction free environment that her cool presentation would suggest that it might be. 

There is a kind of Structural Racism present as the principal protagonists are white and the secondary characters tend to be from other ethnic groups.  The principal protagonists are also predominantly heterosexual, but other sexualities are abundantly present and embraced in realistic ways.

Otis and Maeve

I would like to focus on a scene in the third season that was, unlike so many others in this show, erotic and arousing.  It caught me by surprise and I think it did so for three reasons.  (If you haven’t watched season three and intend to, you might want to wait to continue until you have seen it).  The scene is the result of a love triangle between the main protagonist, Otis Milburn (Asa Butterfield), his partner in crime, Maeve Wiley (Emma Mackey), and her disabled next door neighbor, Isaac Goodwin (George Robinson).  Otis, who is the son of the Sex Educator and Sex Therapist Jean Milburn (Jillian Anderson) of the title, opened a sex therapy clinic of his own with Maeve during the first season. 

Isaac

There is a simmering but unspoken romantic tension between Otis and Maeve that seemingly must remain unresolved in order to sustain the relationship (and, I suppose more importantly, the series).  When, at the end of season 2, when Isaac deletes Otis’ protestation of love  from Maeve’s voice mail (after listening to it), so that Maeve does not know that Isaac has a rival for her affections, we are set up to see Isaac as not just manipulative but evil.  Over the course of season three, as Maeve moves towards appreciating Isaac, he gets rehabilitated in our mind – but there is a lingering mistrust.  As Maeve increasingly comes to see Isaac as not just a neighbor, but a love object, and as he works to prove himself worthy of her love, he confesses his misdeed.  This complicates things for Maeve (and for us) but it also clears the decks, or should, of our mistrust in Isaac.

The scene, then, which is, at least to me, the most erotic and sensual scene in the series is the love scene that takes place between Maeve and Isaac.  It is also the most emotionally complicated for the viewer, in a series that seems to work hard to create emotionally complicated scenes of for viewers.  But this one exposes, at least for this viewer, a prejudice based complication that I sensed was at work, but that I wasn’t really certain of.

Because Isaac has been a morally repugnant, then ambiguous, then at least somewhat redeemed figure, my reservation about Maeve’s interest in him was revealed, at least to me, to also be about a reservation based on his disability.  As they talk about the ways in which his paralysis interferes with but also doesn’t preclude his having a sexual relationship and, indeed, heightens some forms of sexual pleasure and as Maeve begins to explore how to provide some of that pleasure, we suddenly find ourselves in a new and fascinating sexual landscape.

Maeve and Isaac’s discussion of his sexuality is frank – but other discussions have been quite frank.  This is new because it is tender in a way that other discussions have not been.  These two people, in this moment, seem neither to be focused on their own pleasure – they are focused on the other’s pleasure – nor do they seem to be defending themselves against being shamed or exposed as part of their experience of being open to the other.   They seem to be joined by their curiosity – and the pleasure that curiosity brings.  I, as the viewer, become aware of my own curiosity and the way it is being satiated by this discussion – and it becomes clear that what is arousing about this interaction is not just that it is sexually intimate, but that it is emotionally intimate.

I also become aware, as I am drawn deeper and deeper into experiencing this interaction, that part of my resistance to seeing Maeve be drawn to Isaac is something like horror at the thought of having a sexual interaction with a person who is missing a part of what I take to be integral to being human.  My horror turns slowly to fascination as I become curious about how this complex, devious, but also gentle person can use himself to pleasure and receive pleasure from another.

Sexuality does not have to bring emotional intimacy.  Indeed, many of the relationships depicted in Sex Education seem to use sex to prevent emotional intimacy.  But when sex is used to enhance emotional, interpersonal intimacy, it becomes an entirely new thing.  Instead of just being a means of gratifying a drive (and for adolescents, the gratification of that drive is a particularly powerful feeling), when sexual interaction also allows for accessing the parts of ourselves that crave caring for others and the parts of ourselves that crave being cared for, and we are using multiple senses to express and experience this interaction, the nuanced interactional possibilities transcend simple gratification.  At this point, we are able to experience an internal integration – an intrapsychic harmony, and an interpersonal one – an expression of multiple types of love simultaneously. 

The intensity of this experience certainly registers as sexual arousal, and the interesting thing is that the arousal occurs not through identification with the corporeal other – I am still fundamentally different from Isaac – so I don’t project myself into the scene in the ways that I usually do when I become aroused by imagery – I don’t imagine myself as if it were me interacting with Maeve and feeling what it must be like to be Maeve.  Nor am I quite taking Isaac and Maeve as objects – but instead there is a kind of transcendent identification that allows for imagining not myself into Isaac as Isaac.  That is, what it would be like, in those parts of myself that are similar to Isaac, to be Isaac.  Watching this scene allows me to be taken out of myself and into the other in a way that mirrors the experience of caring for and loving another – but I am doing that towards Isaac and, to a lesser extent, Maeve, simultaneously.  There is more at play here than in the usual love scene.

If sex is a portal that includes the possibility of imagining another and how they must feel in this particular moment, Sex Education, in this scene, allows for multiple simultaneous opportunities, at least for this viewer, to enter into being empathically connected with another – and using sexual arousal as a vehicle for transforming horror into solidarity.  If only we could bottle this, what a wonderful thing it would be!

In so far as the intent of the writers, producers, actors and directors of this series are to create a new level of empathy towards others who are different from themselves, for this viewer, this particular scene accomplished that goal.  It also helped illustrate a point that was made on a recent NPR interview with the novelist Jonathan Franzen who objected to eliminating books with morally ambiguous characters, pointing out that 20th and 21st Century novels have been focused on exploring moral ambiguity.  I hope that my self exploration (above) and revelation of my own moral ambiguity has not offended you (he said, somewhat defensively...).

 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), please try using the service at the top of the page.  I have had difficulty with these and am looking for something better, but these are what I have at this moment. 

  

COVID Chronicles XXII: The Great Resignation Hits Home – Colleagues Begin to Leave

 COVID 19, Psychological coping, psychoanalysis of the great resignation, what's up with the great resignation?

 

As the airwaves are alive with debates about COVID vaccination booster shots and the profits that would accompany those shots both for the manufacturers and the drugstores who administer them, the Great Resignation is also receiving lots of attention.  An NPR story stated that on some polls 90% of people polled said they are considering quitting their jobs.  The Reluctant Wife, who works with large amounts of job satisfaction data, states that opinion polls about retirement track reasonably closely to actual behavior with one half to three quarters of people who say they’re going to retire doing so, but only about ¼ to 1/3 of people who threated to quit actually do so.  But a quarter of 90% is big bunch of people!

In some of our industries, notably the restaurant industry, there are huge shortages of workers.  People who were laid off have found other things to do and/or are simply not returning – and many pundits are positing that workers are reconsidering their careers and deciding whether they really want to be investing the majority of their waking hours in washing dishes, peeling potatoes, or being spattered with hot grease while customers and managers complain that they are not working hard enough.

As compelling as this narrative is, and as true as it may be in any individual case, it is almost surely, in those cases where it is true, one strand in a really complex web of considerations.  We have just had one planned retirement, one unplanned retirement, one resignation, and one leave in our academic department.  One of the hallmarks of academic departments is stability, and this level of resignation is unprecedented.  There are, I think, common elements in each of the four resignations – and quality of (work) life, and work/life imbalance – is an important consideration in each of the four.  We have met as a departmental faculty to address work/life balance and are working to systemically improve that, but this has not proven sufficient to stem the outflow.

A significant factor within our little world has been an administration that is insisting that we be flexible with our students while they are inflexible with us, something that I wrote about in my last COVID post.  They are also being recalcitrant and not listening to our department about program issues and resources to handle influxes of students.  The most difficult part is the failure of the administration to realize the pressure that parents are under when daycare or school closes for extended periods of time due to COVID and a parent simply cannot leave an infant or a toddler to go to teach a class, something that they insist we do in person, even when virtually all of the students are attending by zoom - at which point we should use other, more effective forms of pedagogy than teaching with masks to small groups of students while the majority watch us interact via zoom.

If the reluctant kids were still at home, this would intersect with my own wish to be more present to them and the guilt that I felt about leaving them to fend for themselves in the world.  It was only years later that I learned that the plastic dinosaur that the reluctant son took to school every day had magical powers and would grow to life size and protect him when he needed it. 

COVID fatigue is also very real.  Teaching in the above mentioned split classroom with the majority of students on zoom and having to teach with a mask on to those in the room while also trying to connect with those whose cameras are turned off is a Sisyphean task.  It gets old. Fast.  But it keeps on being a thing...

This past week, after our initial rate of quarantine on campus plummeted from a new high to a much more reasonable level, I implored the zoom students to come back to the classroom.  All but about three of them did.  After class, as I was walking across campus, three students from the class stopped me to let me know how much fun it was to be in class again with their peers.  They acknowledged that it was better socially, but they also spontaneously offered that they learned better in the classroom than in the zoom room.  How could that not be the case?

I’m really not sure what we did before COVID that was so much less draining.  Was it really all that invigorating to teach in person?  On our free time, did going out to dinner with friends or going to a movie really improve the quality of our lives that much?  Or was it just not as concerning to be able to see people who are, horror of horrors, unmasked, and to wonder whether being near them threatens our well-being?  Is this an opportunity to have an empathic bond with paranoid people everywhere about how energy zapping it is to never be able to trust anyone?

I also think that there is a certain kind of isolation that takes place.  The loss of water cooler contact - the moments before a class starts, which on zoom are awkward at best.  You can't have a semi private conversation there.

Recently, I have been having many more dreams of family reunions – and there is a gathering planned for weekend after next in a state and county that has a very rate of infection.  We have reservations to go, but I fear the rest of the family is not going to risk the travel and the connection in public places that will be part of it.  I feel that I cannot miss it.  I feel so hungry for familial (and familiar) contact that the benefits outweigh any potential risks.  I will be masked and take precautions, and I will have at least some contact, so I will justify to myself going, even if I am going without my immediate family.

So I can get that my peers are crawling out of their skin.  What is remarkable about that is that faculty positions, not just in my department, are such stable positions.  The downside of tenure is that there is not an open market for faculty – except at the very very top ranks.  So our salaries are relatively depressed compared to what they might be in an open market (I’m not complaining a great deal – our salaries are reasonable, and in an open market, we would have moving expenses – and the psychological expense of adjusting to new communities on a regular basis). 

Tenure, as much as universities are trying to get rid of it, is actually a good deal for them, too.  They don’t have to spend time and money attracting talent the way they would if the market were more open.  We will have to do many searches over the next year or two – or we will have to figure out how to share a greater load among fewer people – who will burn out, so we will have even fewer people to share the work.  When things are functioning along the old normal, reunions – even twenty five year reunions – allow students to count on seeing faculty they remember and feel connected to.

But in the new normal, especially in fields like mine, where it is possible to go directly into business rather than working for an institution, will people flirt with academia – teach for a few years, and then move on to working in a practice that is more flexible than the University in terms of the work required?  Will a few old hands guard the administration of the department while adjunct faculty – teaching as a sideline to their more lucrative jobs as therapists – teach the courses?  Will this kind of specialization actually be good for students?  This is already the norm in many institution in the liberal arts.  We have largely avoided that at my University, but our administration has been limiting the number of tenured slots, especially when there are so many applicants for every open position.

Or is this resignation really more profound than that?  Will we move away from our current cultural norm of two income families?  Will we decide that a lower standard of economic living may allow for a better quality of life?  Will the pool of talent in many fields shrink?  Does our desire for greater connection with others predate the pandemic?  Does our concern about the consumerism that gets fueled by our incomes and then contributes to climate change cause us to pull back? 

Of course I am asking this in the context of incredibly privileged individuals frequently with partners who are able to support a family.  They are also individuals with very high levels of education that they can employ in alternative ways.  Is serving students like serving hamburgers?  It may seem like a tone deaf question, but are there points of convergence as well as divergence?  What do we want to do with the rest of our days?  It seems like the environment is conspiring to let us ask this question in a meaningful way. 

I first asked these questions in high school.  As a student at an alternative high school, I imagined running away to live in an agriculturally based commune (Twin Oaks, still running in Virginia).  When it came time to go to college, which I never doubted that I would, I had no interest in going to a school that would teach me a vocation.  I wanted to learn about the world.  I found that at a great books school, St. John’s College.  

After college, and working at jobs (in banking, construction and as an actuarial trainee) that I found unfulfilling, I went to graduate school to pursue a career that would be meaningful – both intellectually (I was interested in understanding how emotion and intellect are related) and in service (I wanted to help people lead better lives). 

I have worked at that career for more than thirty years in various ways.  I have a much better understanding, especially recently, of ways to address my intellectual questions, and I continue to develop as both a clinician and a teacher, hopefully helping others.  I have also had the opportunity to become a parent and a stepparent.  And, as an added bonus, plying my trade has provided a reliable and steady income.  I have lived my own version of the American Dream.

I am also discontent.  Something that the pandemic and social and climate crises have helped expose.  There have been considerable costs in pursuing the goals that I have set for myself.  Including that I don’t want to give up the pursuits that I have invested so heavily in being able to engage, even to the point that I don’t have a clear exit strategy for retirement.

On some very deep level, I admire the courage that my colleagues are showing in deciding to re-examine the decisions they have made that have led them to be in the places in their lives where they have found themselves.  I am glad that I am no longer chair of our department and don’t have to deal with the downstream effects of both the administration's foibles and the decisions of the faculty, admirable though they may, in some ways, be.  I am reasonably buffered from the decisions they have made.

The University will carry on.  The department will do so as well.  Both of those entities may engage in some soul searching of their own (the department has already begun that).  As someone recently pointed out, the only finite resource we have is time – and we don’t really know how much of that we actually have.  Sometimes we have to resign ourselves to determine how best to move forward and live the lives that we believe we were meant to live.

 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), please try using the service at the top of the page.  I have had difficulty with these and am looking for something better, but these are what I have at this moment. 

  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.