Nomadland: A dream or a nightmare in disguise?

 Psychology of Nomadland; Frances McDormand's Fern, Psychoanalysis of Nomadland

Stark.  Barren.  Austere.  Slow.  And somehow, out of this austerity, beautiful.  Nomadland is a movie that, on the one hand, feels like a documentary – the close ups are very close and it turns out that the people in the movie are – with the exception of the stars – playing themselves.  On the other hand, this feels like a Hollywood movie.  The cinematography is good, there are shots of wonderful vistas, and the narrative storyline of the heroin, Fern (played by Frances McDormand), let’s the story tell the story – there is no need for a narrator to explain things to us.  We are pulled into a feature movie and experience it as if we were following along on a wonderful, barren, desultory, and beautiful road movie unfolding before us – moving slowly, deliberately, languidly, towards whatever end it might reach.

So what is Nomadland and who are these Nomads?  Fern has been uprooted from what became her hometown – a company town built by a mining company – when the town closed down as a result of the mine closing down.  Without enough money to quite make ends meet when using her social security, she works at Amazon to get enough scratch to take her van (named Vanguard) on the road and live in it, staying in campsites when she can afford it and parking in gas stations and rest stops when she can’t.  Intermittently she does labor; cleaning toilets at a KOA, helping with the sugar beet harvest, working at Wall Drug in South Dakota for a spell, and then, when she is down on her luck, going back to Amazon to pick up much needed cash.

In graduate school Wolfgang, my enthusiastic roommate from Germany, was interested in spending summer vacation not in our cities with our museums, but roaming our vast Western Wilderness.  I helped him map out a route and joined him for part of it, spending time in friend’s homes out west.  Wolfgang, who was studying to be a designer, was floored by the panoramic beauty and the opportunities to go on hikes under the blue dome in what we aptly call “big sky country”.  He was charmed when he was able to spend the night at the home of a Native American.  He loved hiking in our forests and climbing our mountains.

The Nomads in this film are not tourists in the traditional sense.  Fern is a widow and many of the others seem to be individuals – and individualists – who, like her, do not have the resources to “retire” and, according to the Reluctant Sister who is reading the book, to pay the rent if they are retired, and they certainly don’t drive the RV with built in washer/dryer that the nomads check out at the bright and shiny RV dealership.  So while the vernacular of being on endless summer vacation is evoked, it is false.  These are hardworking people nearing the ends of their lives who, despite having worked their whole lives, don’t have the capital that it takes to support themselves.  They are continuing to scratch out a living and they are engaged in a swap based economy with each other, but the economy is strictly cash with the mechanics who maintain their homes and the grocers who provide their food.

Our country, as one of my patients and I recently discussed, is made up of townies and nomads.  I was brought up in the nomad class – my Dad was in corporate sales and we moved 10 or 12 times before I was 18.  My patient’s father was a foreman at a factory.  They lived in the town – actually the neighborhood – which their family had lived in for generations.  She has five or six groups of relatives living within two blocks.  She is now a member of the Nomad group, transplanted to our city because of chasing the job that her college education and post graduate degree (earned in different communities necessitating several moves) has created for her.  She is wealthier than her parents ever were, but still sees their home as her home even though she is raising her family here.

I was entranced by the ingenuity of Fern’s character and the ways that she used the small space of her van to become her home.  Perhaps this has something to do with being intrigued by the Reluctant Sister’s living in a tiny house – also an extremely tight space and one that my sister has chosen, as Fern seems to have done.  In being entranced, I was drawn into this drama in a way that I am now thinking may have been subversive.  “Oh, look, isn’t that cute – you can put the cutting board over the sink, creating more counter space.”

Furthering this seduction is Fern’s character.  She has two options that would take her off the road.  Her sister lives in the suburbs in a very nice house.  The sister enters as a character when Fern is in need of some cash for that darn mechanic.  Her sister has an extra bedroom now that the kids have moved on with their lives, but Fern wants nothing to do with that life – and never has.  She has disdain for the suburban comfort and expresses that in a fight with her sister’s husband during her visit with them.

Fern also has a love interest – Dave (played by David Strathairn – the only other equity actor in the film, I think).  Fern meets him on the road.  He is a nice guy.  She keeps running into him.  She stops by his family’s house where he says he is camping out, but Fern sniffs out that he intends to stay – and she, phobic of sleeping under a roof – takes off.

Fern is, at heart, a nomad.  And this film becomes a Hollywood western – romanticizing the life of the sheriff who keeps riding into the next town as a stranger, but bringing order before moving on.  And what is wrong with that, you might want to know – don’t we nomads deserve to be acknowledged and celebrated?  Isn’t our culture about the rights of the individual – including the right to move on when the spirit so moves us?

Well, not so much for the townies.  Frankly, staying in place, watching the grandchildren’s soccer games and going to their first communion or bar and bat mitzvah’s – this is the stuff of the stable life.  I deliberately chose an academic career to put a halt to my nomadic lifestyle (which continued after I left home – amassing more moves seeking training than I had accumulated as a child).  I landed in a place that is so parochial that professionals include the name of their high school on their Curriculum Vitae – it locates them for the other professional townies who have grown up in this area, left for an education, and returned here to practice their profession.

That said, it is the Urban Core here that is more or less permanent.  This city, like many, is ringed with suburbs that are filled with the intentionally nomadic – more of them in the suburbs that are furthest from the city center.  They are working corporate jobs and come here to do that, and then to move on.  That said, some of them settle, and some of them are townies – third and fourth generation families within a suburb – perhaps with roots in the city before white flight was a thing.  They enjoy good school systems and an insular lifestyle where everyone looks more or less alike.

The people in the film who are not equity actors are not, by and large, nomads by choice.  They are people who can’t pay the rent.  They are travelling by necessity.  And the hardness of their life – portrayed in Francis' itinerant jobs – is romanticized away.  The nominal leader of the camp that provides an annual rendezvous for some of the nomads is a grounded, sincere guy who is making the best of a bad situation and helping others do the same.  We admire his stoicism.  But we are also seduced by the sense of esprit de corps, the shared vision, and the kumbaya moments around the campfire.

A review in Slate posits that the movie is set five years ago so that Trump mania does not have to muck up the works.  And this movie is not mucked up.  It manages to fly above the troubles, the cares, the inconsistencies, the problems that it both portrays, but it also makes them majestic through beautiful cinematography, a tremendous lead actress and a haunting story of her finding herself at home in places that we would find inhospitable.  See, it’s not so bad.  It’s a roadtrip…

My own profession, which requires the nomadic life to get into it, is moving towards a nomadic model as Universities have decided that tenure is no longer something that is needed.  Originally a means of protecting academic freedom, tenure became a means of keeping employees stable at an institution.  And of giving an institution that was a springboard to the nomadic life the aura of stability.  This has all kinds of benefits until there is an economic downturn and those tenured employees can’t be shed.  Also, with an oversupply of people prepared to teach, universities have discovered that those without tenure will teach more classes for less money than those who are tenured.  Unless we unionize (which some universities have done) we will be a profession that is on the open market and we will have to move to improve our lot.  The nomadic life: here we come…

The world is increasingly fluid.  Gender is no longer stable.  In the age of COVID, we have learned that we can attend and teach classes (and see our patients) from anywhere.  There are great gains associated with fluidity and acceptance of it.  But there are also great losses associated with giving up our stable, tactile, personally grounded and connected lives.  This movie would minimize those.  Retirement – It’s an endless vacation (when you aren’t working side jobs)…  Is the future – for all us – migrant labor?  Are we, like capital, going to flow around the world in an endless whirl – seeking jobs when we aren’t running from political turmoil, war, or natural disasters that may be increasingly manmade? 

If this movie wins the best Oscar on Sunday, which it may, I think we should realize that the Hollywood’s dream factory is, in very Freudian fashion, working to dress up our bleak future as something that is to be deeply desired.  Our fears are being transformed into wishes before our very eyes.  Just as the suburbs lured us out of the city and onto a particular road – so, too, this movie would suggest that the lure of the open road is woven into our DNA.  We are the people who came to a new world and we would continue to be explorers.

But I think, and this is certainly partly my own way of countering what I see as a projection on the part of the moviemakers, the stable life has virtues and is desirable.  I think it makes sense to find some earth and put a fence around it, and welcome your friends, neighbors and family to share it with you.  Fern disagrees – and that’s fine.  But don’t extend her dream to those who can’t access mine and suggest that they, too, are going to find themselves on the road…

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Catfishing, Perversion and our Multiple Selves: Danielle Knafo's avatar comes to town.

 Psychology of Catfishing, psychology of perversion, Danielle Knafo 

Recently, Danielle Knafo presented a paper at our local psychoanalytic institute on the topic of catfishing – and the oddest thing occurred.  I wondered whether I, when working as a psychoanalyst, am catfishing? 

First, though, what is catfishing?  Catfishing has gained prominence as a cultural phenomenon from a documentary movie and then an MTV series about people who present themselves as someone they are not in virtual space as a means of engaging through an avatar of some sort with other people.  A lot of this is good old scamming, where someone is trying to separate someone else from some or all of their money.

The term catfishing emerged when one of the members of the crew that produced the documentary was lured into a relationship with a women who was supposedly the aunt of a child prodigy.  The documentarian engaged in a long and deep relationship with her, thinking she was a 19 year old woman.  When he went from New York to Minnesota to meet her, he discovered that the aunt and the child prodigy never existed.  They were the creations of a 40 year old woman who was supposedly the mother of the nonexistent child…  Disorienting.

As the documentarian was trying to put together what was happening, the woman’s husband told the documentarian about a myth that involved a process of maintaining live cod in boats that were sent from Alaska, where the cod were caught, to Japan, where they would be sold.  Catfish were supposedly shipped with the cod to nip them in order to keep them fresh and energetic on the journey.  And this came to be the source of the new verb “catfishing”.

Dr. Knafo became interested in the phenomenon when she discovered that her patients were engaging in the process.  As she relates it, the patients were not interested in bilking other people out of money, but wanted to relate to them. 

Dr. Knafo pointed out that many of us, especially on dating websites, engage in a form of catfishing when we exaggerate or alter our profiles in order to attract others.  She cited research that 80% of us do this to some extent.  Men are more likely to exaggerate their height and the social value of their occupation, women are more likely to shave a few pounds and years off of their descriptions of themselves. In more extreme cases, people can borrow the picture of a more attractive person and post it as their own as a kind of “bait”.  She discovered that her patients were fishing for people they could connect with, but then, ironically, they couldn’t actually connect with them in person because, for instance, they didn’t look anything like the picture they posted of themselves to attract others.

The experience of interest to her and to us, then, was of talking with people who were desperate to connect, but felt that, in their present form – and we can think of this as physical, but it is certainly also psychological – they would not be attractive.  So they construct themselves in such a way that they are attractive.  And these ways include constructing themselves as idealized versions of themselves. 

The world of catfishing, then, becomes a laboratory to look at identity.  Who is it that I believe that I am?  Who is it that I would like to become?  What aspects of myself do I expect others to devalue (and therefore, on some level, devalue myself, while, perhaps also holding them in high esteem – I am white (or black or gay or straight or up or down) and I am proud, but also don’t feel that others will accept me for who it is that I am proud of being, but, because you won’t accept it, also a bit (or a lot) ashamed of being?)

And isn’t this, on some level, how we construct ourselves all the time?  Don’t I have an identity that I draw on when I am in a position of authority that is very different than the one that I draw on when I am having a beer with friends?  I experience myself as continuous between these two experiences, but if you asked me to take a personality test as the authority figure, I would score differently than when I am the buddy.  There would also be differences in how I would answer personality items as a parent versus a spouse and these would be somewhat different from how I would answer them as a teacher or as a therapist.  Knafo offered the analogy of the self being like a weather system rather than a rock (something Tom Waits would agree to...). 

Now the reasons for these shifts between roles are manifold, but catfishing encourages us to consider the ways in which they are determined by my desire to be “liked” by the other person.  There is a way in which I am trying to seduce the person that I am interacting with in each of these situations – to help them find, in me, the exemplar or an exemplar of who it is that they are looking for in that situation – the exemplary teacher, buddy, or therapist.

And we are suddenly very much in the midst of a rich psychoanalytic field.  Dr. Knafo’s previous work on perversion is directly relevant to this area.  She concluded that perversion, which ranges from the “normal” perversity that we all experience to quite harmful variants of it, is at root the result of the conflict between being loved – which is overwhelming – and being isolated – which is equally problematic.  So, by extension, I think we engage in “normal” catfishing on a regular basis – organizing ourselves to appear to be the person that the other person desires us to be in this moment.  The danger is that in doing that – becoming the exemplary analyst, analysand, husband, wife, or lover –  we are not being authentically ourselves with the person we are interacting with.

Perversion allows us to “love” an object rather than a person – or an aspect of a person rather than the whole person – so that we have a safe means of loving a manageable part of the whole person – so that we don’t become overwhelmed by the act of loving – of embracing in all of the richness and unpredictability – the totality of the other.  And if we only offer an aspect of our self to the other – if we are only the analyst in the interaction – or only the romantic hero – we protect the other from being overwhelmed, and ourselves from being rejected for the flawed aspects of ourselves that we would rather hide.

Succinctly put, Knafo’s take on the catfisher is that he or she is engaging in a variant of the “normal” behavior that we all, to different extents, engage in all the time.  As with all things psychological, when this “normal” behavior is extreme it causes damage – both to the fisher – who feels they have to hide – and to the fish – who is yearning to discover someone they can embrace.  In a world where an increasing number of marriages are between people who first meet in online dating sites, extreme catfishing is likely to become a verb that we all become more familiar with.

Btw, it is worth noting that, in what we hope are the waning stages of the pandemic, Dr. Knafo’s presentation was virtual.  Our usual protocol with out of town guests is to meet with them in our library.  It is a warm room, and about 35 or 40 people can fit into it.  It is where we hold all of our classes and it is particularly nice to mingle with the group – most all of whom know each other, some of us quite well. 

Unbeknownst to me – and I think to most of us in attendance – our virtual event was more widely advertised than usual.  In fact, it was nationally advertised to people in other institutes.  So, in addition to the usual suspects, the virtual room included people that were new to me.  And not only were they present, they dominated the early part of the after talk discussion – focusing on the catfishing aspect of the talk rather than the psychoanalytic content of it.  It felt more like being a member of the audience at an interactive daytime talk show – Oprah perhaps – than like an analytic meeting.  When a few members of our local institute tried to drag the conversation back along analytic lines, it felt to me like we were intruding on a “fun” conversation about catfishing.

Had we catfished them into a conversation by advertising it as a talk about catfishing?  Were they catfishing – acting as if they did not have analytic interests when in fact they had been brought to the party by their own institutes?  Or were they people who had heard about the talk in other ways and were merely there to hear about catfishing? 

In a case of life imitating art – or the parallel process that is deeply rooted in the ubiquitous phenomenon of transference - our discussion of avatars became enacted by all of the participants in the room.

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What is Neurosis? What does it mean to be neurotic?

 What is Neurosis?  Neurotic? Basic Psychoanalytic Ideas

What is neurosis?  Am I neurotic?  Isn’t that better than being psychotic?  Well, Freud’s answer to the latter question is yes – neurosis is a sign of greater psychological development – and presumably that means health – than psychosis.  This distinction, as arbitrary as it will turn out to be, is important in Freud’s early developmental theories.

The Id, or the unconscious, is, for Freud, what we are born with; a demanding, needy self that simply wants stuff from the environment.  But we have a trick that we can use.  We can give the id what it needs (food), but we can also give it an image of what it needs (a picture of food – we can dream of ice cream), and this will satisfy it, up to a point.  We can hallucinate (as in a dream – and in psychosis) the needed thing, and this will get us through bad spots of desire when there is no possibility of acquiring the thing we really need.

Of course hallucinated food is not as nourishing as real food – and it is the ego, the part of our self that is run by the reality principle, that develops out of the id to figure out how to find real objects in the real world rather than simply crying out that we are hungry and waiting for someone to provide – or fail to provide – for that need. 

In order accomplish its goals, the ego needs to restrain the id – sometimes by providing hallucinated substitutes for what it wants – sometimes by what Freud call repressing it, though I think we can talk about that as suppressing (and using a host of other defenses as well) to manage the urges of the id.

And this is part of Freud’s genius.  He figured out how to build a model of the mind that included two separate centers of operation that could be in conflict with each other.  And neurosis is the description of that condition.  It is the felt conflict between one part of our mind and another. 

When one part of ourselves that wants to be “good” and is in conflict with a part of ourselves that is intent on more selfish or pleasurable ends, we are experiencing a neurotic conflict.  One of my crazy fantasies about my own psychoanalysis is that it would deliver me to some post neurotic state in which I would “know” and “do” one and the same “right” action (I would become a sort of Yoda-like being).  Would that life were like that and we could achieve a post neurotic nirvana. 

In fact, most people who don’t apparently experience conflict are not functioning at a neurotic level – but at a more primitive level.  Yes, it is a somewhat problematic characteristic in this schema that people who are psychotic function with relatively little conflict, but we have come up with a term to indicate that some people intermittently function at a non-neurotic level – and this term is borderline ego functioning – a term that has been repurposed to be a much narrower diagnostic term.  But in its original sense it indicated a consistent pattern of inconsistent functioning somewhere in the borderland between "pure" neurotic and "pure" psychotic functioning where the power of the id’s needs intermittently overwhelmed the ego’s ability to constrain it, and the person would act with apparent unity of purpose towards shortsighted, selfish and ultimately self-defeating goals.

So, neurosis is a frustrating state of conflict between parts of the self that result in a compromise form of behavior that allows the person to meet more long term goals at the cost of foregoing short-term desires.

But I ran – completely by accident – into a new definition of neurosis this week that seemed to address another aspect of how we use the term.  As part of my ongoing psychoanalytic research, we were rating defenses that a patient used in a recorded psychoanalysis.  A new member had joined the team.  She is a first year graduate student interested in the psychoanalytic approach to therapy.  She (correctly) rated each of the segments that five other people rated (including me) as demonstrating a variety of lowere level defenses as examples of neurotic level defense – the highest level of defense on the scale that we use. 

I think she was right – and I think we were, too.  She, in her brilliance and naivete, was noting, correctly, that the patient was observing her defensive functioning and reporting it to her analyst.  From this perspective, this person was not simply defending against her impulses, but noting the functioning of her mind.  This is the second definition of neurosis that analysts refer to.  The rest of the members of the research were rating the actual functioning of the patient's mind – the functioning that she was (neurotically) observing and reporting.

From this perspective, neurosis is the capacity to observe, report, and reflect on the functioning of the mind, not just to act on it.  Neurosis is, then, the ability to use the ego as an observing instrument and to trust that the relationship with a competent other can help us get a better handle on the things that we do that perplex us – to realize that there are conflicts and to ask for help in figuring out how to resolve them in a more adaptive way.

This capacity is what analysts look for – and help foster – in patients so that they can become partners with the analyst in analyzing their own minds.  We want neurotic – meaning in this case self-observant – patients with whom to work on analyzing – that is understanding – the conflicts they are experiencing – their sources but also how to resolve them. 

Would that we all could be a little bit more neurotic.    

  

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