Go Tell It on the Mountain: James Baldwin’s Coming of Age roman a clef that Comes together in One Day.

 Go Tell it on the Mountain, James Baldwin, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Civil Rights, Personal Narrative, Power of the Concrete

When I was a kid, I lived in segregated West Palm Beach, Florida.  The woman who came to clean our house every other week was African American, but she was one of the few blacks that I saw, and I don’t remember speaking with her.  I think one of the fifth-grade teachers at Belvedere elementary may have been African American – but I almost never interacted with African Americans. Blacks were, therefore, fascinating to me.  When we went to New York City, I wanted to go to Harlem, because what little I knew about African Americans was that they lived in Harlem.

This summer, reading Eddie Glaude Jr.’s book, Begin Again, about the process of maintaining forward progress on civil rights in a world that seems to think that they have been taken care of them when that has most decidedly not been the case, got me interested in James Baldwin, an author whose works I had not read.  Glaude was using Baldwin as a guide to rethink civil rights and how we should begin the civil rights movement again. 

Going to the source, I picked up Baldwin’s first novel.  Surprise, surprise, it was about Harlem.  One day in the life of a family, but more particularly, a boy in Harlem.  I have read Circadian novels before, Mrs. Dalloway being the quintessential tale in a day, but this day, though ordinary on the outside, is extraordinary at its center.

Go Tell it on the Mountain is not an easy read.  It is particularly hard to get oriented.  Who are these people?  What is the source – not only of their poverty, but of their rich internal worlds that are filled with moral striving, interpersonal conflict, and wide varieties of spiritual and emotional experience?  If I had picked up this book instead of wishing to drive through the streets of Harlem, where I would probably have been overwhelmed by the poverty and seen little beyond it, I would have learned a lot more about what I was looking for.  And I would have found complex, human beings engaged in living meaningful lives not, as I would have thought, on the margins of the world (though the violence and poverty within and around them are palpable), but in the center of a rich culture that oddly mirrored and contrasted with my own.

I think, though, that this book is not an easy read because Baldwin wants you to be disoriented.  It is pretty clear that this is a roman a clef (a thinly veiled autobiography), though I think Baldwin has invented a narrative that allows for the emotional experience of growing up in his family to be communicated by introducing elements in the plot that are not part of his known biography – at least as he relates it in the essay Notes of a Native Son, which was a quick and easy read after this novel.  In the novel, he both simplifies and complicates the family – primarily with the aim of helping us become as confused as the central character – John – by the hatred that his father has for him.  

Rather than being loved as the eldest – rather than being loved for the apparent gifts that he has, gifts that will allow him to take on his father’s mantle and join him in the family calling, John is scorned by his father who dotes over his younger, wayward brother.  The father, who is a laborer by day and a preacher by night in a storefront church and who surrounds himself with angels of the parish, is crestfallen when the younger son, Roy (probably short for Royal) is knifed in a fight, leaving him bleeding, scarred, but unrepentant. 

We are introduced to John in church, on Sunday morning, with his family, immediately after the knifing and we find, to at least my surprise, that he is not a believer.  He has not been taken by the spirit – he has not come forward to be embraced by Christ and welcomed into the community of saints.  He knows this – and the rest of the congregation knows it.  He is both a member of the community and not.

I was raised in the Episcopal Church, and the rite of becoming a Christian was formalized.  You were baptized shortly after birth – and then you went through confirmation – where you confirmed your faith – when you were 14 – John’s age.  But this was a formal procedure.  It involved classes (I must have learned something in those classes, but all I retain now is a dim memory of being required to go to them), and then a group ceremony where the bishop anointed you.  This felt a little like the scene in The Crown where Elizabeth is crowned and the Archbishop watches closely to see the spirit of God enter her at that very moment – but I don’t think anyone was watching any of us in the confirmation class all that closely – we just stood there while the Bishop did something.  Neither we nor the queen was an active agent – the magic of God was visited upon us with, at least to me, no visible shift in our being.

That is not what happens in John’s church.  If you are going to be a member, you need to choose to be saved.  You need to express a desire and have the community respond to that desire.  Part of what felt disorienting in the first part of the book was how alone John seemed to be – and how alone I felt as I empathized with him.  Not only did he not belong with the saints, and didn’t seem to want to, it felt that no one, with the possible exception of his mother, was recruiting him to join the saints – no one was encouraging or supporting him.  This led me to feel, through him, a tremendous sense of isolation – even as he was clearly socially a member of this group of saints – and there was a positive expectation that he would not, as his brother had done, transgress the bounds of the community.  John was a good boy who was not welcome in the inner sanctum – and didn’t, somehow, want to be there.

Confusing the reader is, then, a vehicle for helping the reader to empathize with the hero.  The hero (John) does not understand, any more than we do, why his father hates him.  Our confusion drives the desire to know, which keeps us reading, and keeps John working to make sense of his relationship with his father.

John does want to transgress some boundaries, though it is not quite clear why – or more particularly how he would do that.  He feels guilty for various homoerotic stirrings – and we wonder whether his father, on some level senses them and therefore is rejecting him – or perhaps John fears that his father will reject him and so does not reach out in a way that would lead him to be loved.  We are puzzled by the sins that John wants to commit – they are not clearly articulated, so they seem willful in the sense of being desired in order to prevent him from being pulled into the community, or perhaps he is afraid of being pulled into the orbit of his raging and inconsistent father.

In the second part of the novel, after introducing us to John, Baldwin introduces us to Gabriel, the father.  Here we discover the complicated relationship between Gabriel and John, one that John is apparently unaware of and one that John will, presumably, come to know later so that he can write the book.  In the meantime, he (in the form of Baldwin as author) does write some of Gabriel’s sermons, and this was the point where I woke up to the pleasure of reading this book.  The sermons were beautifully written, and I suspect a point of pride for the author.  Though they were attributed to the father, they clearly flowed out of the pen of the son.

It turns out that Baldwin did become a preacher – and these sermons are certainly his.  And they may be both an homage to the father – and the glory of his father's early preaching, when he was a fiery force to be reckoned with – and they are, I think, a point of personal pride – they are saying to the one who withheld his love, look what I can do.  What I can do is every bit as good as what you did – and perhaps a mite better  (I just heard the childish jingle, “Anything you can do, I can do better” ring in my head).

A friend who was reading the book with me commented that the language in the book became somewhat repetitive and almost hypnotic.  We posited that the source of the author’s linguistic abilities was in his reading of the King James Bible, and the vehicle of self-expression was in first hearing and then, for some, the delivery of sermons.  I began to think of the church as being not just the spiritual home of many African Americans, but also of its being their intellectual home.  This would, I suppose, mirror the ways in which the church helped bring Europeans out of the middle ages and into the renaissance.

After we are introduced to the rest of the family and the characters, already broadly known, take on nuance and three dimensionality, we return to the church, for the evening service.  John opens the building up to prepare for the service (he does a lot of work for a non-saint, I’m just saying), and he cleans the building and wrestles with Elisha, an older teenage boy, one who is saved, but in danger because he is interested in a girl at the church.  Again, the excitement of wrestling with another man, the theme of homosexuality, is a prelude to this final act.

The family, and a few other saints, gather in the church.  The service begins – and so does John’s awakening.  I don’t want to spoil this moment for you – or compete with Baldwin’s writing if you have read it.  Just let it suffice to say that to get to heaven, John has to go through hell.  And part of that hell is moving from being confused and isolated by that confusion to becoming furious – tapping into the reservoir of anger and hatred that has built up over a life time of being unacknowledged.  And wrestling with this anger takes the place of wrestling with Elisha.   He is now wrestling openly with God and the devil, and doing it in the aisle of the church as those around him look on, realizing that he is in the midst of a terrible struggle.

Perhaps the wish to sin that he has been holding onto is driven in large part by the wish to express his anger directly at his father – to confront him, wrestle him – perhaps to murder him.  The desire to transgress is strong within him, despite his being the dutiful son – the one who, on the surface, is without apparent passion.  But the passion is apparent in what one would assume would be his physical writhing - the others in the church can see his conflict express itself through his body - but we get to observe it from the inside - and the turmoil is intense.

The outcome of the struggle is as powerful (at least to me) as the struggle itself.  We are rooting for him to express the wish to be saved – we fear it will not arrive – but when it does, he is able to achieve it without giving up or succumbing to the father.  The competition that I saw play out with the writing of the sermon becomes a preview of the integrity that he maintains in his acknowledgement of his need to be saved.  He will become a saint with integrity – and the wherewithal to protect that.  He is not his father’s son – doing his father’s bidding – he is his own person, embracing his own belief – one that he can own on his own terms, not the terms of his complicated and, ultimately, corrupt father.  He finds his own way to becoming part of the community while retaining the position of one who stands apart.

At this moment, there would be a lot of directions to go in discussing this book.  The relationship of the father and son is very rich psychodynamic material.  I could reduce it by generalizing it – showing that it fits under a particular Oedipal umbrella.  And while that would work, and might even be edifying, and would be worth discussing, it would also leave us without the texture of the very particular struggle that John has gone through, and something essential would thus be lost.  Such a process would also be a second reduction.  The rationale that Baldwin gives for his father’s hate in Notes of a Native Son is that his father was increasingly psychotically paranoid as he aged. 

The beauty of this story is that the richness of the struggle of the son to be confused, to be angry, to be afraid is preserved by the anti-diluvian process of complicating the father – not washing him clean with the clinical diagnosis of paranoia, but filling him with a backstory of sin, betrayal, and brokenness that leads him to harbor secrets from the son, secrets that the son fills in with his own explanations, and his own judgements of the shortcomings of the father – explanations that are only hinted at, only poorly articulated, but that are deeply felt, expressed and wrestled with as the son comes to grips with becoming a man and a man of faith.

Creating a narrative, changing the facts of his upbringing, allows Baldwin to own the essential, felt nature of being the son of the man his father was – and the son of his mother – and the 14 year old in contact with the world that he was in contact with – not as that world, including his mother and father, existed in an objective sense, but as it was constructed by him as a subject – a very particular subject with a keen sense of what is right and what is wrong.

When I was wrestling with this book – trying to like it – I complained to the reluctant wife about the difficulties of reading it.  She suggested that the book on Baldwin is that his essays are where his brilliance lies and where he best expresses himself.  She was somewhat surprised that I had chosen to enter his world through the novel.  Having completed my own mini version of his conversion, I am glad that I chose this entry point.  Whatever is in the essays (which I may or may not get to), springs from this fountainhead.  His understanding of the injustices that necessitate a Civil Rights Movement spring from the lived experience of mad and crazy father – one who is rich with contradiction, with a moral compass and a rigid and errant sense of justice; one who can see in others the rot that he cannot see in himself and sometimes unloads his own rot there rather than discovering.  It is not a great leap to see the white patriarchy in this country as a version of Baldwin's father.

I am now in danger of doing what I said I would not – reducing this story, as Baldwin might have done were he to have become a psychoanalyst and presented the case of his paranoid father – and a country with paranoid tendencies – to a gathering of other psychoanalysts.  We would together come to a better understanding of the puzzling aspects of the current political climate, but I think that conclusion would not have been as useful as his political essays were at the time they were written and, according to Eddie Glaude, Jr., as they can be now. 

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Blessing America First: David Buckley’s take on the first Trump State Department transition

 Trump, Populism, Psychoanalysis, Religion, Foreign Policy, Psychology

Our local Association for Psychoanalytic Thought (Apt) was thinking about the year’s program of events – and we hit on the theme of passages, especially given that it is a BIG election year.  A member of the board from Louisville knew David Buckley, a political science faculty member at the University of Louisville, who has just published a book detailing his experience as a one-year academic fellow at the State Department from 2016 through 2017.  Because his particular area of expertise is the intersection of religion and foreign policy, he was assigned to work with (and observe) the State Department Office of Religion and Global Affairs.  This afforded him a front seat to watch the impact of the Trump Administration on the functioning of the State department.  His book is an academic/scientific report on what he observed.

When Apt decided to start the passages group of presentations, we thought that something about the election would be good.  We put together a panel with the psychoanalyst from Louisville, Bill Nunley, myself, and David Buckley to describe populism and how it works.  In preparation for the event, I spent a month and a half reviewing other analysts’ take on populism and reading David’s text: Blessing America First: Religion, Populism, and Foreign Policy in the Trump Administration.  I actually finished the book the morning of the presentation.

As the election drew closer and I became convinced that Trump would not be elected, I was framing my remarks in the context of populism as a historical phenomenon that has recurred throughout history, is spearheaded by Trump now, but I was concerned about who might take over his mantle after his defeat.  The panel was presented the Friday after the election, and I had to pivot towards thinking about populism in the present tense rather than preparing for some distant moment as the results on Wednesday made it clear that he had been re-elected.

I actually had to pivot a bit before that.  Apt is a separate organization from our local institute, but it is sponsored by the institute.  When I sent the materials to advertise the event to the institute director to distribute them to the institute’s mailing list – which is routine for our organization – the request was held up and then denied.  Because the title included Trump, the institute did not want to be associated with the presentation.  I was so confused when this news was delivered to me that I couldn’t quite figure out why they objected.  Psychoanalysis (as my posts on a wide variety of topics attest to) is relevant to the entire spectrum of human functioning.  I’m not actually sure went into the decision, though I was told it had something to do with not wanting to alienate anyone in polarized times, but it still brought me up short.  Was this censorship?  Was it fear of reprisal?  I became paralyzed in the moment that the news was delivered.

Though I think this was a bad decision on the part of the institute, it was a helpful one to my thinking about how to frame the evening.  My job was to talk about what drew people to Trump – and I had been engaged in somewhat slippery and lazy thinking – wanting to attribute things that I think about Trump to those who voted for him, which I think is both unfair – and way too reductionistic.  The factors that go into any decision are manifold and, especially with decisions as complicated as choosing a leader, it does not make sense to isolate a single factor.  That said, I do think there were important factors at play that influenced this election – more on that later.  For now, the meeting did go ahead.  I was able to cobble together (with the institute's help) a mailing list and the usual sized group materialized - about 30 people - and we had a good conversation.

Blessing American First is a difficult read.  Dave is a careful and thorough thinker.  He has biases and, as a scientist doing qualitative field work in an area that he is passionate about, he wants to make sure that his positions are scientifically defensible.  This makes his writing tiresome, even tedious at times, as he cites sources to support his observations (it could be a lighter and much easier read if he chose to follow populist guidelines regarding truth and facts...). The book is also dense because it is based on a sister discipline that shares many ideas with psychology (my first scientific language), but it is not my discipline, so the terms and the methodology are similar, but just enough different that I have to keep on my toes, which uses a fair amount of energy. 

All that said, the book is enlightening.  The first and most important point of information that Dave defines populism.  This term is used to refer to Trump (and to Andrew Jackson) and I have had the vague sense that it is related to popularity – as in, this is a candidate who promises people what they want to hear and so he is popular and wins the election because of the popular vote (even though Trump did not win the popular vote the first time). 

Jonathan Lear, a philosopher and psychoanalyst, was using a definition like this to tie Trump's appeal to Plato’s Republic.  In the Republic, Socrates proposes that the next logical form of government after democracy is dictatorship.  I remember reading this in college and thinking that it made no sense because citizens in a democracy would never give up their power.  Lear pointed out that Socrates argument was that in a democracy, everyone improves financially – and once the citizens get a taste of wealth, their appetite for it increases and they are happy to install a dictator if he promises greater wealth.  We are willing, Socrates maintains, to sell our freedom for the promise of more earthly goods.  Hearing this argument again as an older man, I find it convincing.

David is helpful with the definition of populism by first pointing out that there is no single definition.  People use it in a variety of ways and contest which definition makes the most sense.  Dave argues for two definitions of Trumpian populism: First that it rests on “thin” ideological grounds that distinguish “the people” from various undesirable outgroups.  I have heard fascism defined in a very similar fashion.  A second definition – or characteristic of Trumpian populism - is that there is a “personalistic strategic logic that rejects institutional constraint.”

Both of these definitions – or descriptions – proved useful to both Dave and to me in thinking about Trump.  Dave is very much an organizational person.  He praises the virtues of a bureaucracy.  From his perspective, a bureaucracy was something that founders built into the federal government by virtue of the checks and balances they created between the three branches of government.  Each branch is overseeing the other two, and this is because the founders, who had successfully overthrown a king whom they believed to be a self-interested ruler, recognized that anyone in power could become self-interested, so they designed a government to check that self interest.  They even mistrusted the people,  creating the electoral college so that the people would not be entrusted in a direct vote for the president, but that state representatives would actually do the electing.

From his perch at the USAID, David was able to see how the bureaucracy was able to create stable relationships with religious leaders in other countries so that they could help communicate, through the pulpit as it were, ideas that the State Department saw as important.  So, for instance, in Nigeria, where corruption was a major problem, contacts with religious leaders helped to communicate how those in power were being corrupted, helping the country's turn away from corruption (Of course, if another country were to exercise this type of influence in our country, we would call it election interference, but American Exceptionalism allows us to do things that we would not accept from others).

The effect of a bureaucracy is that getting anything down requires a great deal of time and effort.  This is a virtue from Dave and the founder’s perspective.  It means that the government will be stable and non-reactive.  But Trump has been able to paint that as a liability rather than a virtue.  The bureaucracy has become the dictator that we need to rebel against, and Trump’s personalism is the needed antidote.  He will not be constrained by the bureaucracy – in part because he will upend and or eliminate it.

Growing up, bureaucrats were referred to in my household as loafers who leached their incomes from the working people of the world who were accomplishing things.  The bureaucrats, for unknown reasons, seemed to be opposed to production, profit and self-determination, so eliminating them would be a good thing.

As an adult, watching my wife work in the federal government, I have come to have a very different view, but I still have sympathy for my family members’ views, including that the world is a simpler place on the local level – and that, when we know the character of our neighbors and their needs, we can provide for them more effectively that a distant nameless and faceless entity.  Certainly, my battles with insurance companies to meet the needs of my patients across the course of my career has not endeared me to all bureaucrats as an adult.  On the other hand, I am very aware of the ways that bias can be expressed unconsciously, to that our local well-intentioned help can have negative consequences.

Dave helped me recognize that what Trump effectively does is to mobilize fear – fear that some unknown person working for their own ends – or the mindless ends of a thick ideology, one that is freighted with all kinds of compromise and red tape, will not be as effective as directly meeting the needs of the people as he will be.  Which leads to the question of why the people who are drawn to the message are not stopped short by the character of the person.

One of my patients says that Trump comes across as trustworthy because what you see is what you get.  With politicians in general, there is a pause as they process information and think about what the import of what they are about to say will be on this population or that – how it will affect this country or that.  With Trump we do not get this.  He is quick to provide a response – and there is little evidence of conflict about what he asserts at any given moment – even if what he is saying is inconsistent with what he has said at another time, he believes what he says to be the case in the moment when he is taking that position.  He thus feels genuine and reliable in the way that the high school quarterback, now grown older and drinking in a bar, seems likable, and we cut them both a little slack if they exaggerate things a bit to make the story better.

More to the psychoanalytic point, we actually want someone who plays a bit fast and loose with the facts and who is suspicious of others when we are dealing with an enemy, and Trump consistently reminds us – as part of the in-group out-group aspect of  populism – that we are dealing with an enemy.  As the manager of the rhythm and blues band formed in the movie The Commitments maintained when he was questioned about hiring a savage as a drummer and bouncer, “He is a savage, but he is our savage.”

What I mean by that last statement is that when we go to war, we want someone who is ready to fight to lead us.  War is both a very real phenomenon, and a metaphor.  Psychoanalytically, we can arrange our defenses (a military term to describe how we handle interpersonal relationships and our own feeling states) from primitive through neurotic to “healthy”.  Our primitive defenses are used when we feel most constrained, disempowered, and unsafe – our healthy defenses are used when we are more trusting and open.  We measure the psychopathology of the patients that we work with based on their defensive structures.  So, those who use the most primitive defenses are psychotic, those who use more advanced defenses are neurotic, and those in between are referred to as engaging in borderline functioning.

The problem with this system is that we all use defenses all across the board.  Chris Perry, a researcher in Canada, has rated the use of defensive functioning in ordinary conversations between psychologically healthy individuals and has noted that about 20% of the defenses being used are from the psychotic end of the spectrum - we dip into primitive processing on a regular basis.  Under pressure – when we are scared, or disempowered, this percentage will necessarily increase.  When Trump tells us there is an enemy that we need to fight against, we become, momentarily, more primitive in our thinking.  In this regressed state, we engage in thinking that is more circumscribed and simplistic – we think in black and white terms.

Lest we get too excited about the impact this effect this has on others, we should check the impact that it has on ourselves.  How narrowly do we begin to think when we are riled up – whether because we agree with Trump or because we agree with the other person?  (How quickly did I devolve into primitive thinking when my request to send the invitation to the panel through the institute's listserve was thwarted?)  The answer is – quite a bit.  In fact, the best ways to influence an election are two: Get out the vote and talk dirt about the opponent.  Negative campaigning works.  It just does.  We are herd animals who are trusting by nature, but this means that, to protect ourselves, we have to be overly sensitive to negative information – we weight negative information about four times more heavily than positive information – and that negative information leads us to regress and look around for a bully – or a strong man – who will take care of things for us.

Hannah Gadsby decided to quit doing stand up comedy because she realized that she was making people laugh by helping them reduce the tension that they were feeling – but that, in order to reduce that tension, she had to make them tense to begin with.  She thought this was sadistic – and so she went on tour to apologize to her fans and to promise to quite harming them and, because the tour was a smashing success, she decided to rethink her retirement and has been working as a comic ever since.

Trump’s approach is much the same.  He gets us anxious, and then he promises that he will be the cure.  And that is how he functions in office.  What Dave was able to document are the ways in which Trump bypassed the structures of the State Department, and the ways in which people began to be able to function based on the relationships they either had previously had with Trump - and they were put in positions of power in the State Department because of them – or because of the ways they were able to establish relationships with Trump – or with the people within his orbit.

Bureaucracy, for all of its’ inefficiencies, tolerates and even thrives on dissent.  When Trump would propose something, like the Muslim ban, that the career staffers at the State Department objected to, they would sign off on statements indicating their disagreement and thought they were doing their bureaucratic duty and helping Trump see an alternative perspective.  Trump’s response, through Sean Spicer, was to tell those who disagreed to pack their bags.  This language has been mirrored by those Trump would appoint to cabinet positions in his second term.  The message is clear – your opinion doesn’t matter, what matters is whether you align with the leader or not.

Of course, this does lead to concerns about a second term.  Where there were some adults in the room in the first term, those have been driven out and said they don’t want anything to do with Trump indicates they will not be in power in the second term.  Trump is apparently stocking a war chest funded by his allies in the business world to campaign against Senators who disagree with him.  We will see if this Senate takes any more seriously their need to advise and dissent than the previous one did.

Ultimately, I found the investment in reading this book worthwhile.  It helped me get my bearings for this disorienting passage back into the Trumpian state.  Seeing, in detail, how Trump operated before helped me make sense of the concerns that people across the political spectrum were voicing.  Once he has power – and, in a normal world, this would be his last administration, but I don’t think we can count on that with him – he can exercise it in ways that suit him and those he turns toward.  The populist, according to Dave, is most interested in maintaining power – so he does – to go back to my naïve understanding – what is popular.  Of course, the question at this point is, who is his constituency?  Who will help him retain power?

Long ago I opined that Trump could be a nuclear terrorist.  I think he has assumed office in part by terrorizing us (again) and he has therefore assumed control of the nuclear arsenal and the military apparatus (again).  I am not opposed to reducing waste or limiting the size of the bureaucracy – but the necessity of many governmental services is not something that Trump seems tuned into.  I think he imagines, like the kid born on third base who thinks he hit a triple, the country as simply been waiting for him to fix it rather than building itself into the beacon of freedom and power that has made it the world power that it has been for the last 75 or 100 years.  We survived Trump's term of office last time.  We will have to see what is on his mind this time.

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Conclave: Leadership, surprisingly, requires uncertainty

Conclave Movie, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Leadership, Uncertainty 

Conclave

This is a film about uncertainty.  I am going to be an advocate for uncertainty in this post about it.  But I am certain about one thing: this is a film worth seeing – and seeing it in the theater if you have the opportunity to do that.  In fact, I think that the scene during which Dean Thomas Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) articulates how a new pope should be chosen should be required viewing before any political convention, but also before making a decision about hiring or appointing a person for any executive role.  The essence of the speech, I think, is that we want a leader who is uncertain, not one who is certain; a leader who is curious, not one who already knows the answer, including to questions that have not yet been asked, but also to those that have been visited many times.

But don’t we want a leader who knows the way?  Why would we hire a guide to lead us through the jungle if they didn’t know something about the paths that are available, the risks that exist, and how to prepare for them?  Well, I do think that is one of the shortcomings of this film.  In reaching for the answer to this two-pronged dilemma – the need for expertise, for knowledge, for a plan; and the need for openness and the ability to embrace novelty – we can err on either side, and I think this film portrays that in a very provocative way.  I won’t reveal the particular provocative twist – one that was clearly intentional and intentionally corrective and therefore critical of the church – but will speak to the more prosaic difficulties of erring on the side of openness.  As my wife says, we should have open minds, but not so open that our brains fall out…

What is portrayed in this film; richly, lushly, but also realistically, is the process of making a group decision – a political decision – and the intrigue but also the personalities and characters that are involved in that process.  In order to make statements that are universal, this film anchors itself in the particular, and that particular contains within it some stark realities that are represented in terms of the process, but also visually as well as in the plot and the dialogue.

One of the odd particularities of choosing a pope is that the chosen person must come from a very tiny pool – the Cardinals that are assembled for the conclave.  They must choose one of the people assembled to make the decision, all are voting members, and they are locked onto seclusion – conclave – until they reach a decision as the result of an iterative process where they cast one secret ballot after another until an individual emerges as the choice of the majority.  Initially there are many options, but those get winnowed down across time and, eventually, a leader emerges – a leader who (at least in principle) has not campaigned for himself but is discovered to be the best candidate as a result of the lived process of making the decision.

Visually, the Vatican is the particular place of this decision making and the vestments of the church play a not insignificant role in defining the film.  The colors are arresting.  The crimsons of the cardinals’ clerical garb are lavish.  The build up towards the pageantry of the decisional process is a visual feast.  At the same time, there are more prosaic elements.  Putting the Cardinals on a bus to drive from the dormitory to the Sistine Chapel to engage in the voting procedure allows the modern world to intrude into this highly ritualized ancient rite that is intended to be hermetically sealed from the outside (modern) world.  That seal is even more dramatically and violently broken at a critical moment in the vote casting to underscore the ways in which no process, no matter how sacred, can quite rise above the outside influences; the very real political environment, that surrounds every decision of import.

On a smaller scale, there was something depressing about the communal eating space for the Cardinals and the cells of the dormitory they stayed in.  Yes, the eating space emphasized the gender differences between the Cardinals and the Nuns who served them, but it was more than the privilege of the males, it was the feel of the room that the food was served in that reeked of gender differences.  Even though the silverware and china and crystal goblets were meticulously curated, the room itself felt much more like a school cafeteria than a noble or even holy space.  It felt hollow – in a way that (forgive my sexism here) spaces designed by men for function rather than form – feel.  There was a kind of Dickensian bleakness; the conspicuous consumption couldn’t quite hide the underlying lack in lives that are devoid of a feminine engagement with the textures of cloth, the softness of upholstery, and the warmth of wood that make the ceremonial spaces seem more inviting than the hard marbles of the living spaces; the living spaces that seem to be designed to be cleaned rather than lived in.

The decisional dilemma is presented as one that has initially has five viable options for the next Pope – and they are each members of pretty traditional categories.  At one end of the spectrum, there is the conservative MAGA candidate (the film was released before the US election with, I think, the now apparently vain hope that it would influence that decision).  The candidate representing this conservative, let’s put the genie back in the bottle vision is Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto), who wants to return to the Latin Liturgy and return to having an Italian Pope; himself.  More centrally and controversially, he sees the interactions with other faiths as a war – especially with the Muslims, and he wants to arm the Christian soldiers to engage in a fight to the death with infidels.

Two other conservative, but less reactionary candidates are also in the mix.  Cardinal Tremblay (John Lithgow), a power motivated political operative in a culture where open campaigning for the office is forbidden.  His bid for power is defeated when his scheming is exposed – in a very powerful scene where Sister Agnes (Isabella Rossellini) clarifies that though the women are given no official power, they have eyes and ears and can influence the process through sharing what they know.   Cardinal Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati) is an African Cardinal whose blackness would help modernize the image of the church as representative of its entire congregation, though his strong stance against homosexuality keeps him solidly in the conservative side of the group.  Ultimately his youthful behavior exposed by political skullduggery will scuttle his candidacy.

On the liberal end of the spectrum is Cardinal Bellini from America (Stanley Tucci) who pushes all the liberal buttons in terms of issues like sexuality and expanding the role of women in the church and acts the part of the liberal candidate, pretending he is not interested in becoming the Pope while deeply wanting to have the position and especially the power that comes with it – and assuming that all of the others, like him, not so secretly want that power.  The first dark horse candidate to emerge is Dean Thomas Lawrence, also a liberal.  In his opening speech, intended to set a tone and apparently endorsing Bellini as the liberal (uncertain) candidate, Lawrence demonstrates the kind of leadership that at least some in the group long for and that his speech both cries out for and embodies.  Not surprisingly, then, he garners more votes on the first ballot than he bargained for – or actually had interest in receiving.

Lawrence asserts himself, then, as an interesting character – one whom we know was very close to the deceased Pope (along with Bellini), who is interested in the church changing, but genuinely has no interest in leading those changes.  He has had a crisis of faith and wanted to leave the post of Dean – among whose duties is to lead the group through the discernment process for choosing the next Pope – but the prior Pope put pressure on him to remain in his post, and it becomes apparent that he is the right man for the job – and apparently for the Papacy.  Plato let us know in the Republic that the philosopher king who has no interest in the job can be exactly the right person for it.

But Lawrence is not the only dark horse candidate.  There is a new Cardinal – the Cardinal of Kabul – who shows up at the conclave.  This Cardinal was made a cardinal in secret to protect him from the cabal in Kabul who would surely have executed him if he was known to have a high office in the church.  Lawrence meets him, makes the decision that he belongs in the conclave, and befriends him, as do an increasingly broad pool of other Cardinals.  This relatively young and certainly new memeber of the group of Cardinals, Cardinal Benitez (Carlos Diehz) is originally from Mexico and has served in war torn areas. 

When the ultra-conservative Tedesco makes his impassioned plea for war on the infidels, it is Benitez who is able, in a very Christ-like fashion, to confront him.  Pointing out that he has served in multiple war-torn communities – most recently in Afghanistan; he takes the position that the church should not be stoking war, but making the case for peaceful resolutions to conflict.  The impact on the Cardinals (and the audience of the film) is powerful.  It felt like the moment in my life when I was at a basketball game where the players for the college where I teach got into a brawl with the players from our cross-town rivals and I was screaming “kill them” or something equally inappropriate and my 12-year-old son – standing beside me in the stands – said, “Dad, those are our friends.”

So, Benitez, unknown to the Cardinals (and played, in this cast of notables, by an unknown actor), becomes the darling of the conclave.  This may seem like a spoiler, but I don’t think it is.  Benitez’ role as the dark horse who becomes the favorite son is more than hinted at.  He is compared to the turtles that inhabit one of the fountains near the chapel.  These turtles keep wandering off and need to be brought back to the fountain which is their home.  Turtles seem to me to be creatures who are benign – they don’t hurt others – they are cold blooded and need heat from the world to survive.  They are laconic – somewhat other worldly - and have built shells to protect them from a dangerous world.  Benitez, like the turtles, seems both soft on the inside, but also hard enough on the outside to be protected against those who would attack him or, in the position of Pope, sway him from his principles.

Of course, my concern, as it became apparent that the film was tilting towards anointing Benitez, is that empowering a stranger to lead the community is fraught with danger.  We should thoroughly vet candidates before we appoint them to positions.  What we discover after the fact may turn out to be something that we should have known ahead of time.  That turns out to be the case here, but the discovery (which I won’t spoil) is presented as both revolutionary and benign – even noble. 

Ultimately, the Cardinals listen to Thomas – they choose a leader that they are uncertain of – and one who articulates the value of being uncertain.  That said, the pragmatics of running an organization as complicated as the Catholic Church (or the United States Government) without deep knowledge of the institution and the people inside it seems to be realistically risky, at best.  My conservative roots would make it hard from me to join that consensual decision at the end.  But I admire and resonate with the intent behind the film – to help us have faith that our intuitive selves, and the intuitive beings around us – are not just competent, but the preferred leaders in our communities.

Uncertainty is scary.  When I was an intern in Houston, we had a clinician, an expert in psychoanalytic and in suicide present to us.  His position was that suicidal clients need to come to terms with their desire to kill themselves.  He told a particularly chilling story of driving away from a multi-story  parking structure after a session with a suicidal patient, leaving her standing at the railing on the top floor thinking about jumping, not knowing whether she would do that or not.

The traditional thing to do at that point would be to call the police to come to intervene to prevent her from hurting herself.  His position was different.  It was that we need to trust that people have the right – indeed it is necessary – to sort out the most difficult aspects of their life in a way that will ultimately make sense to them and that will allow them to live with the decisions that they make.  To force someone to live – by keeping them away from the ledge – does not resolve the difficulty.  Only they can do that.

While I am not endorsing his decision to leave while his patient was in a dangerous space (and the research suggests that suicide is also an impulsive decision and if we reduce access to easy means of suicide the rate of suicide in an area goes down), the ability to hold still while a patient considers options – to let the material emerge without knowing where it will go – to provide an environment that allows people to feel safe in not knowing and safe in trying out hypotheses and doing thought experiments to see what the consequences of particular actions are – these are all essential tools of the analytic therapist and part of the engagement in psychoanalysis proper.  The leader of the psychoanalytic treatment, like Thomas’ ideal leader of the Church, should learn or by nature be prepared to be uncertain – to be curious – but also to have faith that the uncertainty will lead in a fruitful direction.

The analytic paradox that the movie portrays in the political setting is that Lawrence is certain that his methods – being uncertain - will lead to the best possible outcome.  The particular outcome that the movie lands on is being used to argue against the value of the method – at least from more conservative commentators – because the process takes a decidedly liberating dimension that can be read as a traditional liberal position.  Of course, that is inherent, I believe, in the psychoanalytic method – even if psychoanalytic politics are frequently quite conservative and we seem to get to the table very late on a number of liberal issues where we could have been leaders, but we end up contributing our considerable fire power to the cause often after the fact (and here I am talking about our history of misogyny, homophobia, and racism).

 

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