Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow; The Game is Rigged

 Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow; Gabrielle Zevin; Psychology; Psychoanalysis; fantasy; Sadie Sam characters; Play; Gaming's limits

How weird to be reading a book about gaming (something that I do very little of) while learning about playing games at the American Psychoanalytic Association’s annual meeting from a neuroscientist, Mark Solms.  Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow takes its title from Banquo’s cry of lament after losing his wife in MacBeth.  The speech – and therefore the book – is a meditation on the ephemeral nature of life – its brevity, but also our unwillingness to admit that.  Indeed, the criticisms of online games at the conference were two; one that the interactions are not real (more on that in a moment) and two that gamers never die truly die, they just restart the game – there is always another tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

In the magical land of Harry Potter, where seemingly anything can happen, Rowling put in one absolute boundary; death.  Once someone has died, they are dead and no magic can revive them.  This parameter would, from Mark Solms’ perspective, make the books “real” rather than a game.  In a game everything is imaginary – and it is when the real intrudes – when a player in a football game actually dies – that the game quits being a game and becomes reality. 

So, computer games – including first person shooter games, but also games in which virtual worlds are made or a script is followed – are not real because you never die – unless, perhaps, you reach the highest level and solve the problem.  But even then, apparently, you can play the game again to try to do it more efficiently or effectively.  I once had a friend who didn’t like the character that he had constructed in Dungeons and Dragons (a game I have never played), so he set about to kill himself so that he could be assigned a new avatar.  It took him forever to die.

Games, according to Solms, are fun to play precisely because we don’t die.  We play them again and again, but only if we can “win” somewhere between 40 and 60 per cent of the time – or maybe, if we stretch it, between 30 and 70 per cent of the time.  We find it “fun” when there is a chance that we will win, but also a chance that we will lose.  Computer games capitalize on that by having us do better than we did before – winning, if you will, often.

But they don’t have the same kind of interactional capacities that real life games – the rough and tumble games of wrestling or the interactive games of skill that are played between real people rather than with avatars include figuring out, for instance, how to make the teams fair enough that either can win.  So, the psychoanalytic concern is that children growing up with avatar driven games don’t learn how to interact with people in the real world – they don’t learn how to read when the other has had enough and won’t play anymore unless you let them take the lead role for a while.  They won’t learn the subtleties of relational dynamics (and intrapsychic defenses) that are essential to becoming equipped to play in the very real and rough and tumble world of adulting.

I think this book is also written as a game rather than a novel.  One example of how it imports game architecture into its structure it the way it uses time.  We are constantly going back in time to discover the backstory of the characters. The way this works in gaming is illustrated by the protagonist, Sadie playing a game that she played as a child where she learned that she has to pick up a screwdriver rather than the more satisfying cudgel to bash in the brains of zombies because, she knows, the screwdriver will later be necessary later to fix the elevator.  It is only possible, then, to know in retrospect what we should have done in the game, and it is only in retrospect that we discover in this book what some of the most important elements of the story are.  Psychoanalysts use the term “apres coup” to articulate this sense of wishing to know then what I know now, or only being able to figure out “after the fact” that something is important. 

We, then, are playing a game when Zevin gives us those necessary details in retrospect.  We know that the other central player, Sam, has a broken foot which is a central dynamic in the plot, but we don’t know for a very long time how it was broken nor do we know the full impact on his character of the broken foot until that point and we find ourselves rethinking the role of the foot in Sam's life.  We need to pick up the pieces, carry them along on the journey, but also to assemble them once we have the tools to do that. 

This is both a book about gaming, then, and it is centrally a game about three people that are brought together by games and who end up making games together.  The book is highly structured – it is written as if it were a multi-level game that we, the readers, are playing.  If it were truly a game, the object of the game would be to help the two characters (Sadie and Sam) who are destined to come together accomplish that.  This premise (and the consummate story telling) make it hard to put down - will they get together?  How will they get together? - so I was confused that I was finding it vaguely unsatisfying until I figured out why. 

The author brings us into the book in the same way that a designer brings us into a game, she has us identify with the characters in the story.  To do this, she spells them out in broad strokes – they feel like fantasy figures, rather than real humans.  I want more detail from her, more grit, more character, but I think she is expecting that we, the readers, will bring that to the characters, just as I have noted in other posts that actors bring their lived experience (and their imagination filtered through that lived experience) to the characters that they play and this helps flesh those characters out.  Banquo comes to life because of the felt grief of the actor who plays him, not because the lines, by themselves, lead us to feel sorrow. 

A play or a movie is a collaboration between the writer, the director and the actor (as well as the set designer, the make up artist, the cameraperson, and certainly the other actors) to bring a relatively flat script to life.  This book, despite its length, reads more like a script than like a novel.  The ending feels inevitable from early on and we are invited to figure out how it will be accomplished.  Ultimately, though, the collaboration has to be with the reader, and this reader, while he admired the architecture of the game, and he kept turning the pages with joy, was ultimately not satisfied because the characters were not given the kind of detail that allowed not just the scripted, plot driven ending to occur, but that allowed the psychological ending to hold true.

I went back and looked at my critique of Zevin’s previous book, The storied Life of A.J. Fikry, and the complaint was the same.  The characters weren’t complex there either.  This woman is very good at creating worlds, at building a suspenseful plot, and at putting the players in position.  Weirdly, these characters were interesting.  I cared about them.  But they didn’t end up feeling real.  In particular, Sam, the character who is matched with Sadie and it seems that they are destined to come together is not, I don’t think, ultimately believable.  He is a fantasy character.  Someone whose desire to connect with others, so apparent throughout his life and his pursuit of Sadie, is imagined by this author to be satisfied by becoming her play partner rather than her lover.  And Sadie's remoteness - her comfort with this compromise solution - is not, to me, adequately communicated as a lived component of her character rather than simply being a fact about her.  I don't feel the pain or the conflict or the even just the mistrust that makes her remote.

On some level, I get that a play partner is a better connection than a lover.  As grandparents say about their grandkids, we can play together and then they go home.  The domestic, and all its squabbles, gets separated from the messiness of the real.  Sadie saves Sam early in the book, then Sam saves Sadie. They also deeply disappoint each other.  This is the stuff of real play.  Then, towards the end of the book, Sam saves Sadie again, and he does this by creating a space where they can be together virtually and she can both know and not know that she is interacting with Sam.  He works to rebuild her trust.

In psychoanalytic psychotherapy we call this progression rupture and repair.  In the virtual space, they marry, something Sadie in a real space is deathly opposed to.  I wrote that last sentence and then deleted it.  Deathly seemed too strong.  But maybe it isn’t.  Maybe for Sadie (And perhaps for Zevin) marriage feels like a death sentence.  Mark Twain wrote that it made no sense to write about the life of a married man because he had no life.  And for women in our culture, many have commented that this has been even more the case.  I can get that on a sociological level, but I read novels to get the particulars of how that plays out for this person.

Sadie remains unknown to me.  This is frustrating.  She is remote - from her early lover who is a cad, from the man at the other end of the triangle and from Sam.  All of that is fine.  But her being remote from the reader - and leaving it to the reader to connect with her remoteness out of her own is, apparently successful - the book is selling very well - but it leaves this reader at a loss.

I’m tempted to take the easy path and say that Zevin’s a grown up a gamer and has learned about life from video games, not from playing games on the playground.  That would, I’m sure, be incredibly reductive.  But I do wonder if she spent more time gaming than reading and playing with friends.  I was also surprised to learn that she has been in a relationship for the last twenty years and that she is has been writing for that long as well.  I had thought that her writing would get more complicated as she matures, but I’m now thinking that she is letting us know that this is her version of a well lived life. It does not surprise me that she is also a very successful writer for a young reader audience. 

I think this book may best be understood as fantasy and a version of an online game and enjoyed as such.  The danger, of course, is that if this book is imitating life, the fears that the analyst's have about gaming feeding the need to play without providing the nourishment that play does may be realized when we turn to entertainment in our books that is as thin as that provided in our consoles.

Postscript:  I have been thinking about this since I posted and I don't think that I articulated the concern about the lack of character.  When Zevin goes back to fill in the backstory on one of the characters, it is frequently to relate an event - often a traumatic event.  This event is supposed, I think, to explain something about the "current" functioning of the character.  It does "explain", in the sense of filling in a back story, but she fails to explain how the incident impacted the character.  

As an example: the character in the first game that Sam and Sadie create is Ichigo.  Ichigo, the lead character, loses his parents when he is preverbal and has to figure out how to fend for himself.  This terrible thing happens - it impacts him - and his development is going to be completely different from every other human, but his avatar is nondescript.  I am referring to him in the masculine, but the avatar has a indiscriminate form.  The characters in the novel are not as nondescript, but they are on that continuum.  We are not just the sum of what happens to us, we are what we have done with what has happened to us, and I want to the author to more clearly articulate how that has occurred in her characters. 

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Mark Solms at the 2023 American Psychoanalytic Association Meetings – Play is the Thing!

  

Mark Solms, Play, Drives, Psychological Defense, The Unconscious, Models of the Mind, Free Association, American Psychoanalytic Association

Mark Solms presented, as he often does and I have often chronicled, at the American Psychoanalytic Association meetings this year.  He was once again discussing a case that an analyst was presenting, but this time it was a child analyst presenting her work with two five-year-old girls both of whom had divorcing parents and both of whom she helped through play therapy.  And play therapy, I think, turned out to be a fast ball down the middle of the strike zone for Solms to talk about how neuroscientific results can impact psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, but also how our knowledge as therapists can expand our neurological understanding, and, for me at least, how neuropsychology helps me understand the human condition.

Solms began with some introductory remarks about play.  These felt both familiar – I have heard him talk about play before – but also somewhat novel.  I think he has developed his thoughts about play since he last presented in person three years ago, and maybe it was different for me to hear them in a new context.

He started out by pointing out that, by definition, play is not real.  When it becomes real, when a dog actually bites another dog, it is no longer play.  He went on to state that play is one of theseven “psychological” drives that include two attachment drives, aggression, seeking, and etc., but that, unlike the other drives, neuroscientists have not been able to articulate a particular neural location for the play drive (there are also lower physiological drives of hunger, thirst, etc.).  Partly this is because it is a superordinate drive and recruits the other drives in the process of playing – but also, so it seems to me, it is a drive that may be a later drive that developed later - it may be unique to mammals (and perhaps birds) – and thus might have a different neural “location” than the other drives – more on my naïve theory making in a moment.

Why is play a drive, then, if Solms can’t locate it in the brain?  Partially this is definitional.  Neuroscientists describe drives as homeostatic systems.  When we play, we are driven to win.  But if we win all the time, other people don’t like to play with us.  So, we have to manage our play so that the others get to win and so that we get to win – there is a sweet spot that we need to find between winning all the time and having people to play with.  From Solms’s perspective, all play is hierarchical, so when we are wrestling (most mammals wrestle), the other player has to win some of the time, but if we are playing doctor/patient or teacher/pupil, the other player has to have an opportunity to spend time playing the dominant role.

Play is also considered a drive because all mammals play.  And, if we deprive a rat or a dog puppy of ½ an hour of play today, they will play an extra ½ hour tomorrow as if to make up for this pre-determined need.  Play is both a drive, but also a means of satisfying the drive; like aggression, which is both the drive and the means of satisfaction of the drive.

After his brief introduction to the terms, a child psychoanalyst presented two examples of her work.  Each example was, to my mind, brilliant.  And, in each example, the critical intervention(s) that helped move the child from being a non-patient to someone who was working with the analyst to address their problems had occurred when the analyst was a.) able to engage the child in play b.) accompanied by the statement from the analyst that she didn’t quite know why she made the intervention that she did, but she could see, in retrospect, that it was a very helpful intervention.

Both children were having difficulty at school and were surly in one way or the other.  The analyst’s interventions invited them to take what they were doing in the room, which could be interpreted as hostile – and, indeed, seemed to be intended to be hostile, and treated the actions as if they were a kind of game or, more precisely, made them into a game.

One of the little girls started throwing the therapist’s toys out of the 2^nd story window of the therapist’s office.  The therapist turned that into a game of constructing Kleenex and string to attach to the toys as a parachute and the game became whether this parachute worked or not, and whether the character that was being thrown deserved to have a gentle or a hard landing. 

Solms was able to demonstrate how redirecting the aggression into the play turned it from an action directed against the analyst into a symbolic action that the analyst and the patient could appreciate together.  He also clarified that play and language serve similar ends, they allow for an “as if” quality to occur – and when the therapeutic relationship has an “as if” quality, then problems can be worked out without having to, in fact, engage in activities that are dangerous or that solve one problem (harming through aggression the figure that the child is angry at) while creating another (threatening the relationship with a needed figure without whom the child feels panic).

In this interpretation, Solms equated play and language.  They are both a means of manipulating symbols rather than manipulating things.  When we make this transition – and Solms was playfully asked by the presenting analyst to address the ways in which play develops across the lifespan – when we can symbolize in play and in language, we gain a tremendous amount of power – but it is power in a different realm.  We don’t have to hurt the other to establish dominance.  We don’t have to construct something in order to see if it will work – we can construct it in words or on paper and we can create equations to test its strength. Of course words and play are also both means of communicating with another - and we can see from their response the impact of our speech/play on them.

Play, then, is Solms’s key to civilization.  There are consequences in words and ideas that don’t – indeed shouldn’t be – worked out in actuality.  We should play cops and robbers to be able to learn right and wrong – we shouldn’t have to go to jail to learn not to do certain things.  Similarly, the Oedipal situation, one that is viewed by so many with a kind of disgust because of thinking that we actually want to kill our father and have sex with our mother, is viewed that way because they are seeing it through a concrete lens of actual action – at which point it is no longer play, but something else – trauma and/or tragedy.  For the Oedipal situation to be successfully navigated, the child and the parents need to be able to play with it, and the sexual and aggressive drives need to be sublimated.

For Freud, sublimation was a process of keeping the drive out of awareness through defense.  It could then be “enacted” in a dream or in some version with a therapist (in my version, played out with the parents.  In both cases presented, the parents were divorcing or divorced at the time of the engagement- and they were not playing with the patient).  For Solms, sublimation is a process of play – acting on the aggression – throwing the toys out the window – but doing that in the context of a relationship with someone with whom you want to maintain that relationship – this strange woman who is happy to throw her toys out the window if they are given a means of floating rather than hurtling to the ground is a keeper.   In this case, the aggression only became sublimated in the context of creating a game.

In the last three paragraphs, I acted as if I was reporting verbatim what Solms said.  I did not.  I played with his ideas, just as he played with the clinical material and organized it in a new and fascinating way as he did so.  I hope that I have stayed true to Solms’s ideas, as I think he did to the ideas of the presenter, while also articulating them in a way that organizes my ideas and thinking about the situations – the situation between the analyst and the children and the situation between Solms and the analyst.

This also allows me to think that it may be no accident that we, as mammals, have language.  It is a representational process – as is playing.  And play may be, at least in our evolutionary history, a necessary precursor to speech?  In this case, the drive to play (and to speak) would be located in the part of the brain that is unique to mammals – and to birds – the cerebral cortex.  As I said, I don’t know what I am talking about here – Freud’s language would be that play and language are ego drives.  The other drives are located in the “lizard” brain, with projections into the cerebral hemisphere.  Play, language, and then the checks on the drives would be in the cerebral hemisphere – and would be inhibitory rather than expressive drives.  OK, I’m done playing amateur neuroscientist and, if you are a neuroscientist, you are free to scoff…

What was most useful about this talk was the idea of play as central to treatment; whether kids’ or adults’ treatment.   The therapist’s job is to create a space for the patient to play – and this requires creating a space that is safe – where things that happen will be “as if” they are real, but never actually real.  And the consequences of the play will be played with – will be discussed rather than acted on.

Earlier in the day I had attended a talk asking whether free association was still a cornerstone of psychoanalytic technique.  It was hard, after seeing the Solms presentation, not to think that free association is a version of play.  It is creating a space where the patient feels free to talk about whatever seems relevant – or irrelevant.  The patient's job is to wander through their mind and report what they choose to, and the analyst’s job is to play with what is offered, to wonder with the patient about their mind works and how it is organized.  One of the things that the analysts presenting in the morning agreed to in that session was that a patient should be able to keep some of their experience private.  This is essential to psychological safety and to fair play.  Free association is both a personal exploration and a joint endeavor, something that the presenting analysts were not so comfortable with thinking about.  Perhaps introducing the idea of play would have helped them think about analysis as an interpersonal as well as an intrapsychic event. 

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Carol Gilligan and the Dobbs decision at the American Psychoanalytic Association convention – again!

 

Carol Gilligan, Research, Dobbs Decision, Roe v. Wade, In a Human Voice

Three years ago, after having been awarded an honorary membership in the organization, Carol Gilligan gave an address at the American Psychoanalytic Convention .  Then we didn’t meet in person for two years – instead we met on zoom while the pandemic raged, and the format changed.  Instead of multiple presentations going on simultaneously, we all watched the same set of presentations.  Ironically, those presentations were, the first year, on diversity.  It is very nice to be back in New York and to be back to engaging in a truly diverse variety of small group interactions, including what are called discussion groups.  In these groups, anywhere from 10 to 50 members meet in a room and discuss material that is being presented.  Often that is a case or a particular way of intervening.  This morning it was Carol Gilligan talking about her next book, In a Human Voice, to be published on the 50^th anniversary of her revolutionary first book, In a Different Voice.

She began her talk by remembering how she came to write about women’s morality in the first book.  It turns out that it was by accident.  She had been working with Lawrence Kohlberg, the psychologist who revolutionized thinking about morality by tying it into a developmental framework.  He pointed out that we think about morality differently as we get older.  When we are five, we worry that we will get in trouble.  When we are ten, we worry about doing the right thing based on a set of principle-based rules and, when we are teenagers, and if we are really advanced, we might reconsider the rules based on our own understanding of how the world should be run.

Kohlberg studied morality by asking people what they would do in hypothetical situations.  Gilligan wanted to know how they would act when they were actually facing a morally complicated choice.  She intended to interview men who had been drafted to serve in the Vietnam war about their decision to enlist, but it was 1973 and Nixon ended the draft.  But then the Supreme Court legalized abortion in the Roe v. Wade decision, and voila…  Gilligan had a group of people who would be facing moral choices that were not abstract but very real.

She pivoted and began interviewing women in South Boston and some women who were students at Harvard about the decision that they were confronting.  It didn’t occur to her, at first, that she had moved from intending to interview an all-male cohort to interviewing women. 

What she discovered was that the Roe v.  Wade decision had given women a voice.  They were now empowered to make decisions that were incredibly complex and, unlike men, they did not make these decisions based on principles, but based on thinking about the relationships in their lives.

Pre-Roe, she maintained, the virtue of being a woman was being silent.  Roe raised the question; can you be a good woman and have an abortion?  But behind that lay the question; can you be a good woman and have a voice?

Gilligan asked one of the women how she was going about making this decision.  She said that she was concentrating on, “Being as awake as possible”.   And this, Gilligan noted (and I wholeheartedly agree), is a very difficult state to maintain.  

Being “as awake as possible” is the state that we try to help our patients achieve in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.  It is a difficult and frequently a painful state to maintain. 

One woman decided to have an abortion in large measure because she was supporting her husband while he was going through law school and he would not be able to finish school if she had to leave her job to care for a newborn.  He relationship with her husband outweighed the relationship with a potential child.

This was a decision that was made based on the care that she used to define her goodness.  But choosing to have an abortion would also have called into question (I am imagining) her goodness in her own mind.  Making moral decisions in the real world, with real world consequences, is difficult.

So, Gilligan maintained, the Dobbs decision is intended to silence women.  To take us out of the uncomfortable place of making relationally based moral decisions and return us to the more reliable solid ground of making principled decisions.

Of course, Roe v. Wade did not prevent us from making principled decisions.  In the session with Gilligan, I realized something about my own experience with Roe.  When I fell in love for the first time, a very long time ago, Roe was new in the land and I fell in love with a self-professed feminist.  I learned a great deal from her about feminism and what it meant to be a woman.  Her position with me was that, if we became pregnant, she would have an abortion.  This pronouncement was based on the principle that this would be best for her. 

Similarly, it would be possible to decide, on principle, not to have an abortion.  Fortunately, we did not become pregnant.  We did not have to decide (and I was told up front I would not have a voice in that decision).

The next two sessions at the conference could not, on their face, have been more different.  I went from a conversation about women having a voice to two meetings about the use of research in psychoanalysis.

There is a long history here.  Aaron Beck, who invented Cognitive Behavioral Psychotherapy (CBT), was a psychoanalyst, but he was kicked out of the American Psychoanalytic Association because he was doing therapy.  It was only when the CBT folks started producing a lot of evidence that CBT was an effective therapy that the psychoanalysts started clamoring for research to prove that what we are doing is also effective.

The two research presentations each focused on the efficacy of treatment, but more than that they focused on the elements of the treatment that lead to that efficacy.  They were not just asking; How is treatment effective?  They were asking; What is it that we do that leads to change?

This is actually quite dangerous.  If we follow the path of those doing CBT research, the researchers, who are not primarily psychotherapists will begin telling the psychotherapists exactly what to do in treatment.  They will be silencing the therapists, just as Dobbs is intended to silence the women.

I was not comfortable speaking in a roomful of feminists about my experience with my principled feminist girlfriend, but I did approach Dr. Gilligan after the talk, and we agreed that my example supported her concern that the face off between the pro-choice and the pro-life people misses the mark.  It is not about the principle of choice, it is about acknowledging our discomfort with complicated decision making.  It is about our becoming more willing to trust people to make difficult decisions – and to trust them to do this bearing both principles and relationships in mind.  It is about helping them be as awake as possible to what they are thinking and feeling when they are deciding what would be best in a given situation.

Ultimately, psychological research can empower therapists to have more rather than less options available to them at any moment in a treatment to meet the needs of this patient at this moment (and to assess whether what we thought would be helpful actually turns out to have been helpful).  I was able to articulate this position to the researchers in the room.

I’m not sure that the researchers got it.  The essence of the argument is that we, as human beings, have evolved over millions of years to be able – in addition to wreaking havoc in each other’s lives – to care for each other.  This a subtle and complicated process that takes place too quickly and too subtly for us to be able to choreograph from afar.  We need to be as awake to the moment as we can be – meaning that we have to feel as deeply and access as much knowledge and skill as we able to – in order to be usefully responsive to another human being at their most vulnerable moments.

The researchers who were presenting were learning from clinicians as well as informing them.  This thing that we do called living is very complicated business.  We cannot afford to silence women – or psychotherapists.  We need to hear every human voice and respond to each one as best as we are able.

  

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