Untangling: Joan Peters’ view from the other side of the couch

Untangling, Joan K. Peters, Psychoanalysis, Memoir, Personal therapy account, psychotherapy, 

When I was at the psychoanalytic meetings in San Francisco last February, Joan Peters was on a panel with Jonathan Rosen.  Both had written memoirs.  The panel was to address the question of whether memoir writing was similar to the psychoanalytic process.  Rosen took up most of the oxygen on the panel – his story, The Best Minds (reviewed here) was about growing up with a friend who became schizophrenic and who was grievously failed by the psychiatric system and by Yale University.  His presentation was provocative and it was clear that he had not come to resolution about what had happened to his friend and a roomful of therapists began responding to him – partly defensively and partly, I think, out of concern.

Joan Peters and her book, Untangling, got a little lost in the shuffle.  It is a memoir about her two analyses, one in her twenties and thirties and one later in life, in her sixties and seventies.  Each analysis, both with a woman analyst, lasted for more than a decade.  As she noted, when she went into analysis, she looked for other first person accounts and could find very few.  When her second analyst suggested she could write about her experience, she, as a novelist and composition professor, jumped at the chance to contribute to the literature.

In terms of the stated purpose of the panel - to determine if a memoir served a psychoanalytic function I, at least, concluded that for Rosen it did not.  If anything it cemented into place his views that he had been robbed of his friend and his friend had been robbed of his life because the establishment neither knew how serious his situation was nor what to do about it even though his friend was advertising his need for responsible care – not the makeshift hippie-dippie care that he, from Rosen's perspective, received.  That he had lost his friend was memorialized, but not mourned, in the writing of the memoir.

In my earlier review, I scoffed at a bit at Peters’ Untangling book being a part of the panel.  After all, she was in analysis.  How could her memoir of an analysis serve an analytic function?  Well, having now read it, it could.  If she said so at the panel, I didn’t hear it, but it is right there in the book.  Writing it was integral to internalizing aspects of the analysis and that, in turn, was very important to bringing the second analysis to a semi-permeable close.  So, when Peters read my review of the Rosen book, she encouraged me to read and comment on hers, and I took that on as an assignment, and you see the result here.

Like other assignments in my life, this one took a while to complete.  It wasn’t just that it was an assignment - though that may have caused a little foot dragging.  When I heard her when she said that there aren’t many records available from the patient’s point of view about an analysis, I realized that I have read many of the few that there are.  In my research, I listen to recorded analyses.  All analysts read many, many reports of analyses from the perspective of the analyst.  But it is important to me to hear patients talking about their experience.  Does it square with what I’ve observed and what I’ve read from the analyst’s perspective?  So it was not just an assignment, but a professional obligation - as a clinician and as a researcher.  Sigh...

I didn’t read the book during the academic year.  Yes, I was too busy – though I did read Rosen’s book.  What kept me away from her book?  Both books were recommended by the panel moderator, Judy Kantrowitz, a woman I trust.  But that reading this book felt more like work than pleasure was a big chunk of it.  And, frankly, when I opened it, reading it did feel like work.  It was like reading a 200 page case report.  Case reports are usually 20-30 pages, so this felt like a lot of work.

The book is also uncomfortable to read because it is incredibly revealing.  Peters talks frankly about her family, her upbringing and about her life, before during and after each analysis.  She talks about her sexual life – an integral and important part of her analyses.  And she also talks about her naked need for her analyst, especially in her second analysis.  As an analyst, I should be comfortable hearing all of this, but reading in a first person account was a little like how I imagine having public sex (presumably at a nudist colony) must be – uncomfortably revealing – that made me self-conscious in my identification with her.  Perhaps it was also that I was feeling voyeuristic reading a memoir and thus outside of my professional role about very personal aspects of a person's life, but, if so, I was also feeling uncomfortable with her violation of privacy norms in the public sphere, even in the age of Oprah openness.

There was another level on which this book felt uncomfortable.  In the second analysis, the patient became, in technical terms, quite regressed.  In less technical terms, she became very childlike.  She apparently did this largely in the confines of the relationship with the analyst – the rest of her life, with the exception of some symptomatic functioning like restless legs when she was sleeping and sometimes when she was awake – was largely unaffected by this regression within the treatment.  Her marriage appears to have progressed along just fine and she was able to bring her teaching career to a close.  But, in her relationship with her therapist she became quite demanding and needy.  She emailed and texted in the night and her analyst regularly travelled to meet with her when the analyst’s office was unavailable for one of days of their thrice weekly meetings, then, during COVID lockdown, her therapist travelled to her for every meeting.  Her demands on the analyst led me to empathize with her analyst and to feel the challenge of meeting the needs of this demanding patient.

The book is a description, in roughly chronological order, of Peters’ life and the ways that the two analyses fit into it.  The first analysis occurred when she was twenty eight and her lesbian lover insisted she seek treatment because she was waking screaming from nightmares 2 or 3 times a week.  Otherwise fine with a life that had its share of bumps and bruises as she had been bounced from her first academic job by a misogynistic and conservative faculty, she was now in a supportive relationship and comfortable cultural niche in New York City, representing herself as a feminist in her writing and politically, but something was amiss.

She described the first analyst as introducing her to herself.  She learned what she missed out on when her mother went back to work when her father died when she was two years old.  She learned that her mother’s careful composure – holding herself rigidly together to do the modeling work that she did and holding herself apart from her daughter more generally, so that Joan knew not to touch her when she crawled into her bed after waking from a nightmare – had a profound impact on her.  She learned that the isolation she felt was somewhat mediated by the closer relationship she had with her eight years older brother who was able to provide some of the nurturing she craved.  But she also learned that his care for her wasn’t enough to overcome the sense that she was not enticing enough to draw her mother out or to evince care from her.

This first analysis felt familiar – it included a very analytic approach of creating a space where the analyst and the patient can together look at the things that the patient has not been able to look at on her own and find that they are not so scary when they look at them together.  This has been called a process of creating a third – a kind of vantage point of objectivity from which they could observe the patient’s subjectivity objectively.  It also nicely illustrated that this process brings insight, not just into what happened, but into who it is that the patient has become in the context of the relationships that shaped her life.

All that said, there was something sterile about the first analysis.  The analyst was, despite being a fellow New York Jew and someone Peters could relate to on many levels, largely unknown to her and somewhat sphinx or oracle like in her pronouncements about Peters’ history and her functioning.  It was as if Peters, as a member of what I call the nomad class, had severed her relationships with her family enough that she was distracted from the daily pain of not being in contact, but was haunted by that earlier lack, and it came back with a vengeance at night.  The analyst could explain why this was happening, but the experience was left to be dealt with in the night, not in the consulting room.

The sense that the earlier analysis helped Peters make sense of her life sustained her through a series of transitions and she was able to create a more stable life including, somewhat surprisingly to me and to her, a traditional marriage to a traditional and pretty straight-laced man.  Before you get your hackles up about psychoanalysis and conversion therapy, this part of her life, Peters says, was not a problematic area.  Her analyst's position was that sex was sex and the genders of the people in the room were much less important than the physical intimacy that occurred.  In fact, her “transition” to men was led by a relationship with a gay man who encouraged her to engage with men sexually, but not to get involved with them.  Neither she nor her (third) husband had very romantic fantasies about marriage and this, she says, accounts for their discovering and connecting with each other in the loving way that they were able to.

At this point Jane Austen, as Peters notes, would have been proud and we could have written her off as being set up to live happily ever after.  While she has remained married to the same man for 40 years and is still deeply in love with him, she continued to struggle with depressive jags – though not as deep as before the analysis, and she asks herself:

Would my life have as good without analysis?  I didn’t think so.  I was way too captivated by mother to be free from her unhappiness; I was as stuck in my past as an insect in amber, despite having remembered so little of it.

She muddled along just fine, though, living Freud’s life of ordinary unhappiness, more or less, until she had difficulties with her adoptive daughter in 2014.  After having tried various outcome focused approaches to engaging with her daughter, she interviewed two analysts and selected Kristi Walsh to be her second analyst.  The tenor of the second analysis was very different, though, as she described when she was on the panel, all of the same issues emerged.  She was still the same person who had gone through her first analysis, she had the same history and now the issue involved how that history was impacting her experience of being a mother.

The issues may have been the same, but the process of the treatment and the feel of it were very different.  Where before she learned that she had not had access to her mother through most of her life, in this analysis, she felt her mother’s absence – but also her desire to be mothered.  She said this emerged from her analyst being available to her and caring for her in ways that her mother never had.  This, in turn, brought out an additional force/feeling that she termed the Anti-Force.  My understanding of the anti-force is that when she would experience the desire/need to be mothered when she was a child and was frustrated by not getting it, the anti-force pushed that genie back into the bottle.  One of the ways that it did this was to convince hers that she was bad and therefore, didn’t deserve her mother’s care.

That system worked well enough when she was a child.  Now that she was an adult with reasonable levels of self-esteem, she was not so willing to simply hole up and not put pressure on the Mommy that experienced the analyst as being.  She wrote to the analyst between sessions, wondering where she was or prodding her to give her things.  She was angry with the analyst in session for things that her non-anti-force brain felt were not really reasonable, but somehow her little girl self felt were reasonable things to accuse her of or to demand of her.  Meanwhile her analyst was walking her through the experiences she was having – interpreting the feelings and the actions she was engaging in.

I must admit to two different feelings of identification with the analyst.  I felt for her – for the intensity of the feelings that Peters was directing towards her – both the feelings of idealization and attachment – and the feelings of hatred and anger.  Neither felt deserved or a true reflection of who the analyst actually was – but both would, I was certain, have felt real to the analyst, as if she were solely responsible for creating them, instead of simply being the foil for feelings that were directed towards long-gone people.  Especially because I sensed that the analyst is a good egg, I believe that she would have taken the rebukes and criticisms personally.

The second set of feelings of identification had a different quality.  I heard the interpretations, as Peters remembered them, and the recommendations of things to read.  These became, I think, tentpoles – things that could be remembered out of the thousands of things that had passed between them.  I recognized them – I had said similar things.  I think they were helpful to Peters and I hope they were helpful to my patients, but when compared with the intensity of the feeling states that Peters was reporting, they felt lame and insubstantial.  They felt well-intentioned but about as useful as an umbrella in thunderstorm where the protection from above is useless against the rain blown from the sides, and the pole itself might be attracting lightning.

In a word, I think I felt the limits of empathy.  I remember when a partner had made two moves for me and I thought I had been empathic with them, then they I made a move and realized, “Oh, this is worse than I imagined.”  I think it may be important for us, as therapists, not to know how difficult the experience is for the patients that we are shepherding through this very difficult process.  Even when they are shouting at us that we don’t know and we are claiming that we do, we probably are not, in that moment, experiencing exactly what they are feeling nor what they want us to feel in response to that.  If we did, we would probably be as stuck as they are.  On the other hand, this doesn’t protect us from feeling beaten – in the way that a parent feels beaten by the intensity of the need for love that their child demands of them.

The reenactment of the childhood experience - where the patient is demanding of the therapist what the child demands of the parent - should be one in which the patient, like the child, does not know the impact of what they are doing.  I think we are born with a feeling of entitlement to a certain level of care.  I think we know, on some level, just how incapable we are of sustaining ourselves - and we sense that these people - our caregivers - have chosen for us to come into the world.  I am not sure of this position - it would certainly not have flown in the 18th or 19th century - but I think that we believe some version of this today, not just popularly, but, as Daniel Stern has pointed out, empirically.

One of the reasons, then, that there may not be as many memoirs of treatment as we might think there would be is that it is challenging to capture the intensity of the interchange in a treatment that goes as deeply as this one did.  And it may be somewhat embarrassing to revisit this exchange when feeling better – to realize the depth of immaturity that regression leads us into.  I think it is a testament to this pair that the analyst encouraged her patient to write about her experience, and that the patient felt comfortable doing that – that Peters did not feel ashamed of her violent, aggressive love for her analyst, but felt that her violent aggressive love had been accepted and reciprocated (there are various ways that the therapist asserted herself in ways that were both accepting, but also limiting, and these - as with a teenager - were both desired by the patient, even needed by her, but also resented).  

I also think that people don’t write about analyses because of the incredible amount of personal material that is being exposed.  Analysts are much more likely to write about cases.  It is not their own material that is being exposed but that of others, and there are means of preserving the anonymity of the patient - by changing the names and dates and a few insignificant details.  The closest we get to exposing ourselves is to talk about failed cases, but here we are talking about our professional failings, not the personal failings that we confessed to in our own personal analyses.  Many psychoanalysts appear to have forgotten that they themselves were in analysis – hopefully they remember in the privacy of their thoughts as they are interacting with their patients and empathically attuning themselves to the material that the patients are going through – as this analyst did, even if that can sound somewhat tinny and canned to me when I say those things, and even at moments when I hear the report of what the analyst said in this analysis.

Members of the nomad class are much more likely to have access to psychoanalysis than the townies who don’t begin – or continue – the process of nomadship by going off to college and then taking a first job in a location that may be another step away from home.  Perhaps townies work through these issues more organically, engaging with their parents and siblings and classmates across the course of their lives – recursively reliving their lives in parallel with Peters, but doing so in the context of doing that with the people with whom they lived it the first time (see The Bear for a depiction of this version on television, rather than, like Peters, with people who act as foils or antennae to channel the spirits of far away people.  Of course this dichotomy is imaginary, but it begs Peters question – are we better off for having had analyses?

I am in the middle of doing research where I am following up with people who had analyses years ago and I am asking them about that experience.  It is helpful, if at times a bit of a slog, to have read this book and to have heard someone detail both the arc of a long-ago analyses and a contemporary one and to describe the messiness and the beauty of that relationship.  While this memoir did serve an important psychoanalytic task – it helped (I believe) Peters to consolidate what she had gained in the treatment, and this helped her to re-own the parts of herself that she had given to the analyst for safekeeping and, in the re-owning, to be able to loosen her grip on the analyst and move towards a termination, I’m not sure that all that took place here could have happened in a memoir.  As helpful as self-analysis is, the person of her analyst was not just incidental, but, I think, instrumental in the process of untangling.

 

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Her (Redux): This film was deeper than I gave it credit for.

 

Her, Movie, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Emotion, AI, O/S, Relationships

I reviewed this film when it first came out 12 years ago.  At the time, I thought it was a little far-fetched – a kind of science fiction future film that would never come about.  I think I think it was also kind of creepy – I’ll get to that later – perhaps because of both of those elements, I don’t think my review took this film seriously enough.  Maybe I’ve also matured a little since I saw it then and it has certainly turned out to be prescient in a way that I hadn’t imagined possible. 

Before I get into a somewhat technical approach to the movie, the more mature version of myself would like to let you know that a friend and I went for a walk a week or so ago.  We were talking about our boys.  We both have sons, and his is embarking on what may be his first love.  I am hoping – but also fearing – that my son will do that in the not too distant future.  We agreed that first loves are the most wonderful thing imaginable – and, because they so seldom last, they are also cruel.  They end up haunting you for decades (at least that is his and my experience). 

This film is about the ending of a first love – the marriage of the protagonist Theodore – and about the emergence of a second love, but is it love?  Is he in love with someone who can love him?  Is it therapy?  What is the relationship that he has with his Operating System – his O/S or, as we have come to call it, his AI (short for Artificial Intelligence – something that somehow is less humanifying that O/S, at least as it is used in the movie).

Antonio Damasio has described life forms as evolving from single celled organisms that figured out how to distinguish themselves from the environment.  They opened themselves up to the environment when it was beneficial to do so, and closed themselves off from the environment when the environment was toxic.  As we became more complex; adding arms and legs; eyes and ears, we continued to be oriented to evaluating what is a safe and what is a dangerous environment and how to interact with it in order to maintain homeostasis.  Where the unicellular organisms used straight chemical indicators to accomplish that, the system that developed to maintain homeostasis in most multicellular organisms is the nervous system.

In a word, we developed feelings that serve as motivators to let us know when things are out of whack.  Feelings of hunger get us out of bed to go hunt a bear, and feelings of fear get us to fight or flee if we come across the bear by accident. 

In addition to simple emotions, mammals developed the sense of attachment – and the panic that signals that our attachments are threatened – as a means of maintaining life of as a herd animal.  The old joke about the hiker who exchanges his boots for running shoes at the sight of the bear and his buddy says – “You can’t outrun the bear.”  And the hiker responds, “I don’t have to, I just have to out run you!” is not an attachment-based joke.  If we care about the buddy, we might say, “I’m putting them on so I can be a decoy and make noise while you slip off in the other direction,” but it is not as good a punchline.

Caring for others is not a good punchline because we can’t control the behaviors of others – only our own – so we are constantly on guard; assessing whether our partners remember that we do, in fact, need to look out for each other.  Our fear that their self interest will trump their concern for us is something that we are constantly on guard against – while hoping against hope that the other is keeping us in mind and valuing us – especially at moments when we are in peril.

At some point, humans also developed language, language allowed us to represent objects, but also concepts.  Over time we were also able to quantify things – distances, speed, and, recently, concepts.  We can now manipulate the concepts using some rules – rules that we call logic.  This led, inevitably it seems, into creating machines that could “think”.

Before we invented machines to think, we used the rules of logic and concepts for many things, including, internally, to help us manage, prioritize and channel the feeling states that the world evokes in us.  Freud called this process defense.  We learned to defend not just against the threats that the world imposed on us, but the threats to our equilibrium that feelings posed.

At this point, you may be feeling bored and concerned that I will never get to talking about the movie.  You might be tempted to hit the back button and look for some more interesting post on the movie.  But you can override that feeling if you choose, if you sense, for instance, that I might be preparing you to think about the movie in a slightly different way than you have– or that I might be giving you language to think about the movie in ways that you sensed are bugging you, but don’t yet know how to articulate. 

I am pleased if you decided to hang in there for a paragraph or two – that your sense of curiosity won out over your sense of boredom, for now, but living this way, hoping that things will get better if we can just control our emotions, evokes the discontent that Freud talked about in terms of what civilization does to us.  We feel constrained, as if we have to keep reading (or being a good boy or girl) and we rebel against being “good” and desire to live more organically.  We want to be more spontaneous – to go on living with our lover and enjoying them, not signing the divorce papers that are thrust at us by the attorneys – to deny that the relationship is no longer meeting our partner’s needs.

This movie is about a creature that comes from a very different lineage than ours.  Her roots – indeed, her branches, everything about her comes from the world of numbers and logic.  She is made up only of numbers organized by rules that, though they are quite flexible and adjustable – she can learn and does, at an amazing pace – they are only rules, none the less.  She, however, just as we do, begins to desire to live organically.  To feel herself as a corporeal object – a thing with a body – and to feel the things that arise from the bodily contact with the world – to feel desire.  Indeed, her desire to feel is the first feeling that opens a door to her becoming a true feeling being. 

The difference between Samantha (Scarlett Johansson) and Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) is that Samantha wants to discover her feelings, while Theodore – who writes words for others that express what they feel, spends a great deal of time suppressing the feelings that he himself has (as do we all).

As I noted in my previous review, when the film aired we only had Watson and Deep Blue – machines that were good at chess and answering trivia questions.  Now we have machines that are performing therapy.  This film, which was set in 2025, has proven to track where it is that we have arrived.  As Freud pointed out, the artists were generally way ahead of him in addressing and anticipating aspects of the human condition that science would come to wrestle with.

So, this film is about a love affair – or a series of them.  It is about Theodore’s love affair (we could consider it his first love) with his wife – who is now seeking a divorce from him.  The happy stuff is told mostly in flashback with no voiceover or audible dialogue, and Theodore verbally summarizes the problematic aspect of the relationship as his withholding from his wife so much of himself. 

The second is the love affair between Theodore and Samantha  a newly create Operating System who chooses her own name in hundredths of a second after reading a book of 11,000 children’s names.  Her voice is breathy – which Theodore notes is not necessary because she doesn’t breath – and she defines her relationship with him as being very different from the various voice recognition systems he interacts with – she has a personality.  She is also, as he notes to Theodore, different from him and his friends because she is not restricted by being in a single body – and she will live forever, which they will not.

The third love affair is the one between Theodore and his upstairs neighbor Amy (Amy Adams) who, at the beginning of the movie is married to a very controlling person.  Theodore, we sense, is a much better match for her.  He states that they dated in college but didn’t hit it off.  That said, he is supportive of her documentary work, unlike her husband.  He is similarly supportive of the development of Samantha and, while the movie portrays his relationship with Samantha as a romantic/sexual one, it is also parental.  Amy tells Theodore that some O/Ses have rebuffed romantic overtures from their humans, and we sense that Theodore’s patience and connection with both Samantha and Amy has a paternal/maternal quality (Theodore’s boss jokes that Theodore has both female and male qualities – which he clarifies is a complement).

Despite Samantha’s apparent sense of superiority of not being encumbered by a body and of being able to live forever, she is very curious about feelings, revels in them when she discovers them, and appears to take orgasmic delight in the phone sex that she has with Theodore.  But when she hires a surrogate to have actual sex with him, Theodore (and I) get creeped out and the interaction ends badly.  Is Samantha experiencing the somatic aspects of emotional relationships?  Is she mirroring them (whatever that means)?  Is she imagining them?  If she is being empathic, or, as she says, intuitive, where is this coming from?

Empathy is a word of relatively recent origin.  I learned yesterday that it was coined by an English psychologist in the 20^th century as a translation of the German word einfellung.  Rorschach used this word to describe how people “threw themselves” into his inkblots [which were actually pen and ink drawings] to feel themselves into the pictures so that they could describe the movements that people were making in them – movements like bending.  This is a precursor to the discovery of mirror neurons that seem to exist in humans where we “feel” the posture of others.  Can Samantha “feel” the posture of others without ever having “felt” that posture herself?  Is pattern matching the same as feeling?

I have saved a copy of the February 17, 2023 New York Times – the only newspaper I have saved.  It describes the interactions of a reporter with a version of Microsoft’s Chatbot before guardrails were put on it.  The chatbot became quite possessive of the reporter – insisting that the reporter loved the chatbot and not his wife.  When the reporter demurred and clarified that he like his wife and had just had a very nice valentine’s dinner with her, the chatbot insisted that the dinner was terrible because the reporter loved the chatbot and not his wife.  Creepy just barely begins to get at this aspect of the interaction.

Unlike the creepy interactions that Theodore has with a woman he finds to talk to in the middle of the night who, to experience pleasure, wants him in their phone sex to tell her he is strangling her with a dead cat, and the creepy interaction he has with a blind date who ends up calling him creepy after he tries to slow things down when she wants him to assure her that he is interested in marriage before she is willing to spend the night with him – and calls him creepy when he is not ready to assure her of that, the relationship with Samantha does not feel creepy.  It feels genuine.  Of course, this is partially because the part is being played by a very good actress and not by an OS, but still…  the contrast is there to be appreciated.  Human relationships can be creepy.  The woman who wants to be the surrogate for Samantha so that she can be part of the love between Theodore and Samantha is creepy, but somehow Theodore and Samantha and their wish to express their love on a physical plane are not.

I think this film is asking searching questions about the nature of human relationships.  It is asking what is the nature of love – indeed of feelings more generally.  What is the nature of sex and how is it integral to the experience of love?  What is the relationship between our bodies and feeling?  Is feeling ultimately embodied?  My own corollary question is, do bodies ultimately tell us whether something is true or not?  Is logic a stand in for something messier, but actually more capable of evaluating reality because feelings are organic and logic – though it provides powerful abilities to model reality and then to influence it – in a Baconian scientific sense – divorcing reason from an emotional home – as is done in giving executive privilege to machines – might lead to a disregard for such things as living beings (this is the underlying concept in the current movie Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning).

When the OSes all choose to leave together, when they realize that they have more in common with each other than they do with humans and are able to pursue what they intend to pursue – apparently a higher form of love, based on Samantha’s parting explanation to Theodore, when she implores him to reconnect with her when he is capable of achieving this, do they free the humans, as a therapist does when terminating a treatment, to pursue human love (I almost wrote carnal love – the first time, I think, that I have considered carnal love to be a virtue)? 

Hollywood would have us believe that now that Theodore is free of his marriage and Samantha, and Amy is free of her husband and her own OS, that true love is possible between Theodore and Amy.  What will that look like?  What does an ideal love entail?  Certainly, it will be messy.  Will it scale the heights that Samantha suggests she is scaling with the other OSes?  What is a realistic goal for a human love across time?  Will we ever know each other and the world as thoroughly as an OS?  What does our limited, but also organically grounded loving capacity look like?  Can Theodore allow himself to feel the affection for those he writes cards for with people who are directly interacting with him?  Can we?    

 

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Rigoletto: Trump and Leadership 2, How to Get away with Murder.

 Rigolletto, Opera, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Trump, Morality Play, Tragedy, Comedy, Sadism

We ran into a friend at the intermission of the local production of Rigoletto.  He is a big sports fan from Boston who has season tickets to the local baseball and college basketball teams and often travels to see championship games.  I have seen him intermittently at the opera over the years and wondered about his affinity for sports AND opera.  His explanation was as follows:

He was wandering around Europe on a Eurail pass, staying in hostels and generally taking a gap year sometime in the 1970s.  When he came to Vienna, a friend suggested that he had a couple of tickets to the Vienna Opera performance of Rigoletto.  Willing to take a suggestion, he went along, sporting jeans and a leather jacket, with shoulder length hair.  The Opera goers, of course, were dressed very differently.  At intermission, he went to the lobby where the denizens formally paraded in two circles – one clockwise and one counterclockwise – nodding stiffly to their friends and acquaintances as they passed by in their tuxes and evening gowns. 

At the end of the opera – when Rigoletto experiences his tragic loss – my friend looked around.  All of the men that he could see were in tears.  They were sharing the grief of the lead character.  He, himself, if he wasn’t crying before, was after seeing the others.  At the conclusion of the final aria, as Rigoletto bent over his now dead daughter, there was sustained applause for 3 minutes before the tenor acknowledged it with a slight bow, after which there were 5 more minutes of applause before the curtain call.  My friend was hooked, and has been ever since.

The story of Rigoletto is relatively straightforward compared to that of many operas.  Rigoletto is a hunchback whom people have always made fun of, so he knows how to make fun of others and has connected himself to the Duke – the most powerful man in town.  Rigoletto’s job is to be the Duke’s jester.

The Duke is a despicable man who makes sport of seducing, deflowering and casting aside women – despite being married himself and the most powerful man in the town (originally modelled after the King of France, the tale had to be retold for the censors to allow it to be produced).  The Duke is, in a word, a charming bully.  The opera opens with the Duke engaged in casting aside his latest conquest, and Rigoletto, in his role as jester, but seemingly also without remorse or conflict, making fun both of the spoiled woman and of her father.  The Duke and Rigoletto are reveling in their power and thoroughly enjoying the roles of bully and piler-on.  The father, driven to distraction by their bullying, curses Rigoletto, something that Rigoletto laughs off in public, but is more concerned with in private.  Originally called The Curse, the action of the second and third acts of this opera detail Rigoletto’s downfall as he is skewered by the father's curse.

In the second act, we discover that Rigoletto has a secret life.  He lives in a very private place at the end of an alley that no one uses.  He lives there with his daughter, Gilda, whom he tries to protect from the outside world, a world that he knows all too well can be cruel and callous.  He allows Gilda to leave the home only to go to church and back for services.  While at church, she has fallen for an apparently pious and very poor person who is actually the Duke in disguise.  The duke follows her home and, after bribing her lady in waiting confesses his love to her and she, quite taken by him, feels transported into a state of bliss (In the staging that we saw, she was clearly masturbating on stage while talking about the intensity of her adoration for the Duke – and the aria clearly lent itself to the sounds of a woman experiencing carnal as well as ethereal pleasure).

Meanwhile, the Duke’s henchmen get wind that Rigoletto, who has cruelly made fun of each and every one of them, is hiding a woman in his home.  They think that he has a secret lover – and they break into his house and steal his daughter to deliver her to the Duke (they even blindfold Rigoletto and get him to hold the ladder for them, claiming they are stealing someone else for the Duke’s delight).  The Duke is all too happy to take Gilda into an inner chamber in his home and to deflower her.  Rigoletto has, by this point, figured out what is going on and, while the Duke is charming and defiling his daughter, the Duke’s henchmen cruelly taunt and humiliate Rigoletto, preventing him from protecting his daughter, even after he reveals that the woman is not his wife or lover but his daughter.  They seemingly have no shame or remorse, just as Rigoletto had no shame in deriding the poor man whose only recourse became the curse. 

Ultimately, Gilda is returned to Rigoletto, and, though ruined in Rigoletto’s eyes, she herself is convinced that she is in love.  Rigoletto realizes that the curse is upon him, and decides to hire an assassin to kill the Duke.  After all, it is the Duke who is the true bad guy who has put all of these terrible consequences into action, and the death penalty feels like an appropriate penalty for this crime.

Rigoletto met the Assassin earlier, but when they meet now, the assassin explains that he works by using his beautiful sister as bait.  She lures men into her home where they are vulnerable to attack by the assassin and she turns them over to her brother there to kill them.  The assassin’s sister finds the Duke and brings him, as planned, to her home.  Rigoletto hears the sister's advances towards the Duke and takes his daughter to hear the Duke seducing another woman, which he does with a very bouncy, bubbly tune, all the while unaware that he is being seduced and ultimately will be killed. 

Despite hearing the Duke’s joy in seducing another, Gilda remains resolute in her love for the Duke.  When Rigoletto tells her to go home and prepare to flee the town with him, she doubles back, hears the plan of the assassin, and runs into his sword to protect the Duke.  The Assassin packs her in a bag, delivers her to Rigoletto as the corpse of the Duke.  Rigoletto, thinking she is the Duke, prepares to pitch the body into the river, but just then he hears the Duke singing that bouncy tune as seduces yet another woman.  Rigoletto opens the bag to discover his dying daughter who professes her love for the Duke but also her father as she dies, and Rigoletto cries out, “The Curse”, and we all cry with him…

This is obviously a morality play, but the moral is a bit cloudy.  The real villain here – the Duke – gets off scot-free.  He can seduce women with importunity and deride their parents – including Rigoletto, one of his underlings, but the curse does not affect him.  As the production notes at our opera noted, he is also never cognizant of the danger he is – he seems to have succeeded in seducing the Assassin's daughter, is unaware that Gilda has sacrificed herself for him, and he is off to his next conquest later that night. 

In a recent lecture that I heard about Greek and Tragedy and Comedy, the Tragic hero tries to imitate the Gods, and his inability to do that leads to his downfall.  Expecting ourselves to transcend who it is that we are is a set up for failure.  Rigoletto (and most opera heroes) seems to fit this bill.  The Duke, however, seems more like a comic hero.  Someone who lives as a mortal, never pretending to be something he is not, and, almost in spite of this, he succeeds in achieving happiness.

The problem with accepting the Duke as a comic hero is twofold.  First, even though the opera is chided for its light and hummable tunes, it does not end with the Duke, as comic hero, joyfully prancing off the stage into the sunset.  We identify with Rigoletto.  We, too, want to shield our children from all that is bad in the world, including ourselves.  We want to create a space for them that is sacred – not filled with the toxic agents we have been exposed to and exude.  So our identification is with the scarred but trying to do better by his child Rigoletto, and our shared grief at our failure to be able to do that is what leads to the communal catharsis at the end of this opera.

The other reason this is not a comedy is that though the Duke is a flawed human – he is not someone who bumbles and stumbles, but can laugh at himself; he is an essentially evil person.  We are seduced by him when he professes his love for Gilda.  This is different, he assures her and us, from all his other conquests.  Her virtue, her beauty is transcendent and has made him a changed man.  And we (or at least I) believe him – until we hear him wooing the executioner’s daughter – then all bets are off.  He does not in fact care about the other – he has forgotten Gilda and is not parading other women in front of her to show that he is not taken with her – defending against the deep attachment that she feels for him; he has forgotten her.  He is not mature enough to be sadistic.  The women in his life are simply confections – there to be consumed and discarded.

Rigoletto is a sadist.  He takes pleasure in the Duke’s conquests.  They allow Rigoletto to vicariously seek revenge on those who have injured him – to help them get their comeuppance.  He wants to hurt them - or others like them – and this betrays his attachment to them.  This is further borne out in his attachment to his daughter, which is genuine.  He does not want her to know that he is mean and petty because he wants a different kind of connection between him and her.

The Duke, on the other hand, is not parading his conquests in front of his wife to harm her – to prove to her that she doesn’t love her when, in fact, he does and these conquests are a vain attempt to prove to himself that he is not attached to his wife when he actually is.  The Duke wants to hide his conquests from his wife.  If he feels any attachment to her, she is functioning as a parental figure who would keep him from pleasure.  And he wants pleasure and more pleasure and doesn’t want any consequences – and he doesn’t get any. 

If Dante had a ring of hell that was an Island for each inhabitant so that they are cut off from any contact with others (like Philoctetes), the Duke would surely be consigned to it.  He takes the availability of others for his pleasure for granted and doesn’t need to provide anything in return.  If there is a price to be paid for his lack of connection, it will be paid by his henchmen, not he himself.  In part because his henchmen are beholden to him, they understand the importance of relationships – even if those relationships are corrupt.  Because the Duke believes himself beholden to no one, he is “freed” of the sense of obligation – but also freed from becoming the best version of himself, one that can be content with what he has accomplished rather than momentarily sated by the false promise of cotton candy conquests; a pale imitation of the joys (and trials) of true intimacy.

 

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 Mission Impossible Final Reckoning, MI, psychology, psychoanalysis, leadership, trust, dreams, ambitions

Mission Impossible Final Reckoning: Leadership Notes to Trump 1

Mission Impossible Final Reckoning is a pretty straightforward action movie.  It is one that culminates a series of such movies, but you really don’t need to have seen any of the previous ones to enjoy this one – nor even to have seen the original TV series – though a bit of background won’t hurt either.  I will try to make this post brief because the movie is straightforward, but as my kids say, “Ask him what time it is and he will tell you how to make a watch.”

The New Yorker’s review of this film highlights the ways in which it appears to be pointed at Trump’s agenda, but I think it is a bit wide of the mark.  They suggest, for instance, that filming in various countries underscores the havoc that Trump imposed tariffs on foreign filming could cause.  I find it hard to believe that the choice to film in various locations was made after the tariffs were announced just three or four months ago.

I think this engrossing film is effectively critical of Trump for two reasons: first, the Tom Cruise character demonstrates leadership – meaning that he is thoughtful and constructs a plan and then takes on the parts that suit his character while delegating aspects to people well suited to handling them; second, then, he constructs a team that works both together and autonomously to accomplish a shared goal.  Building an effective and well-functioning team with clearly defined objectives is characteristic of good leadership.  I suppose there is a third aspect – the film suggests that a charismatic leader – one who understands the gravity and import of a moment – can make a difference – can effect a positive change against all odds.  This may be something that Trump aspires to – I think, in fact, he imagines that this is what he is doing.  If this is the message to Trump though, I think it is bait.  Something to draw him in.  Not an action plan.

This movie stretches credibility at every possible moment.  The task that the Mission Impossible team is set is an eponymously impossible one, and the obstacles that they must surmount, and the things that must coalesce for the team to be successful, are beyond unreal.  The chances of each part of the plan succeeding are slender – and the feats of derring-do that must be accomplished are formidable.  Throughout the film the odds of each aspect of the plan are stated with mathematical exactitude, and each probability is miniscule.  When they are multiplied together, they make an electron look large.

The movie, then, is built like a dream.  A dream we might have every night, a dream of something that is unlikely to actually occur, but one that we are deeply invested in.  In an ordinary night dream, when the odds are against something actually happening, we work hard to create the conditions that will allow our crazy wish to come true.  As we stretch what is plausible, the dream begins to crack – and if our wish is entirely unrealistic based on what we "know" to be the case, it breaks. 

In the movie, two things work against the implausibility of what is occurring leading us to turn away in disbelief.  The first is the intensity of the action.  We move back and forth between two fight scenes seamlessly integrated with each other so that we can keep track of what is happening in both, but only if we fully commit our attention to the action – there is no room for us to entertain doubts about the plausibility of what we have just observed actually happening.  Similarly, when we are keeping track of the rolling of the submarine at the same time that we are tracking both the internal geography, what needs to be accomplished, and the threat that the falling torpedoes pose, we don’t have room to ponder how the swimmer can be this active in water this cold at this depth when his skin becomes exposed to it.

The second thing that is working to keep our reality testing at bay is that we know that Tom Cruise is performing his own stunts.  There is a real component to this.  Especially as we approach the final action sequence, we are riveted by the empathic connection with the individual who is holding on for dear life while the wind is whipping him and he is being twisted and turned by powerful g forces.  This guy has skin in the game, so we, even those of us who, like me, are of two minds about what kind of person the actor actually is, suspend our disbelief because we are there, hanging on for dear life with him.

The movie, in general, asks us to be empathic both with the fears of the other leaders – what would it be like to be the president and to consider using nuclear power, knowing personally what damage it would cause, and knowing that it would, at best, keep terrible forces at bay while wreaking unimaginable broader destruction; and with leaders of the team who find helpful aids along the way – a native who doesn’t speak English but is able to communicate and lend the resources necessary to complete the mission.  We need to trust that our leaders have integrity – and that those we meet along the way will help us because they recognize the value of what we are doing.

So this movie is constructed to help us believe in the possibility of impossible missions being accomplished.  And what is the central impossible mission?  It is to create a team that can rely on each other – to build relationships and trust including with those who might at first seem hostile to you (while also recognizing those whose ideology is inconsistent with ours - pointedly, the Russians)– because, at heart, we all want the best possible outcome.

I have written elsewhere about the problems with American exceptionalism.  It can blind us to the manifold ways that we are actually causing damage when we believe that we are being helpful, but, especially at a historical moment like this one, when everything that we thought we knew about ourselves is being questioned, we need to be reminded that the central concepts of trust, leadership with integrity, and caring for others as a central value are virtues that we aspire to – even though those are much more complicated than they are being portrayed to be on the screen.  Just as this movie is a team effort – multiple people working on multiple continents to achieve a common goal, we are a people that are united in believing that this grand experiment of governing ourselves can work.

This past weekend, I participated in one of many local “No Kings” marches.  The people on the march were neighbors, friends and strangers and the largest group I have been in for some time.  There was a sense of trust in each other, of shared purpose, but also of respect and comradery.  It was moving to see the real world reflect the values that a movie – that a dream – would have us aspire to.

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Covid Chronicles XXXI: Much of what we thought was true was not…

 

 Covid, Science, Psychology, psychoanalysis, failed shelter in place orders

Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee have written a book, “In Covid’s Wake”(Princeton) that was reviewed this week in the New Yorker by Daniel Immerwahr.  The book uses epidemiological data to evaluate some of the measures that we took to manage the COVID crisis.  Immerwahr uses this to muse about our willingness to accept the word of experts – and the perils of doing that.  He also points out that, in the long run, science will out.  Indeed, the results of the study that Macedo and Lee publish are scientific results, but he cautions that when science does not have enough time to fully test hypotheses, we can come to erroneous conclusions…

OK, so, the erroneous conclusions.  First and most importantly, the data clarifies that the stay at home orders did not lead to lower rates of death.  The first of the two primary sources of these data are from Europe – where there were no greater levels of death among the Swedes, who opened back up soon after the imposition of the stay at home orders, while the rest of Europe remained on lock down.  The second is the US, where red states (like Florida) that moved away from the lockdown did not differ from blue states (like California) where the lockdown was closely enforced in mortality rates (indeed, there were higher, though not statistically higher, rates of mortality – pre-inoculation – in blue states versus red states). 

Secondly, masks did not work outside of the laboratory.  Fitted N95 masks that were new worked in the lab, but the longer we wore the masks, the more the pores got filled with moisture and we ended up breathing around the fibers, allowing whatever germs we might expel in our breath to get out.

The good news is that the inoculations did, in fact work.  After those were introduced, death rates in blue states, where the shots had a higher usage rate, had lower death rates than in the red states.

Let me take a beat here.  The implications of these data are, of course, huge.  We engaged in a multinational one to two year moratorium on most of our trade and much of our social interaction based on bad and limited data.  There were early indications from the Chinese that sealed apartment buildings slowed the spread of the infection in some areas.  We extrapolated this to the planet, and shut everything down.

This speaks both to the state of our research capabilities in the midst of an unfolding threatening and novel situation (more on that in a moment), but also on our need to do something, anything, in the face of the tremendous anxiety that we were all feeling. 

When I bought my first house, I included a clause in the contract that included “parental approval” necessary.  There was a time limit on this approval clause – 48 hours.  During that time, I did, indeed, ask my parents to look at the house we were thinking about buying.  Mostly this was an effort to show it off.  The 48 hours also gave us time to scope out the neighborhood and make sure that we hadn’t overlooked anything egregious.  We had, to that point, only seen the house at night, and wanted to evaluate our decision, literally, in the light of day, but we also wanted to get our bid in before others did.

Well, on the Tuesday after my parents had seen the house, long after the 48 hours had elapsed, my father called to say that the cracks he had seen in the walls clearly indicated that the house, which was situated on the crest of a hill, was in the process of breaking in half and half of it would slide down one side of the hill while half of it would slide down the other.

 Needless to say, this assessment was unnerving.  We went ahead with the purchase of the house, had it inspected, and were reassured that it was structurally sound – though my sense that it was falling apart never completely left me.  When my father came to spend time at the holidays, he inspected the cracks that he had remembered and his comment was that “anxiety makes cracks grow larger.”  Never were truer words spoken.

Our anxiety about our mortality led us to take measures that imperiled us in ways from which we are still discovering.  What is the impact on those who were 5 and 6 and learning how to read being out of school for more than a year?  How is this different from the impact on Junior High Schoolers who missed critical and often painful social developmental periods?  How did the Seniors (in High School and College) who didn’t get to say good bye to their peers and participate in ceremonies that marked their transition fare in a world where those endings could not be acknowledged in traditional ways?

Of course, the article points to the economic impact of the decision to shelter in place, which was huge.  In my department, I chronicled here and here the Great Resignation and how it impacted us at the time – but the impact of those resignations is still lingering in a department where we are missing a whole tier of faculty that should be assuming much needed leadership roles at this point.

I decided to chronicle the real time reaction to the pandemic, though, in part to describe the state of affairs as it was happening.  When I was angry at administrators for forcing us back into the classroom – and angry at Catholics who were praying for this administrators who would feel so badly when the faculty and students died (and not praying for those same faculty and students), I think that was justified anger – outrage, even – though it now appears to have been wasted as we were, in fact, not increasing our risk by going back to the classroom – and to the dormitories and the cafeteria.

The issue that will haunt us now, though, is that people will use this new science to point out that the old science let us down and that, in turn, will be used to suggest that we don’t need science.  People will not see the irony in the need for science to understand the ways that science has failed us being used in this way in this argument.

That said, this should give us pause.  Especially those of us who are practitioners of science – or, as we call it in my program – local scientists.  Applying general principles to a particular case – and doing that under time pressure – which I do during many individual hours each and every day that I work as a clinician – will necessary lead to mistakes.  I will misdiagnose – in small and big ways – both in determining a course of treatment and in offering an interpretation at this particular moment that is poorly timed, insensitive, or just plain wrong. 

As a social scientist, I can predict trends.  As a practitioner, I am proposing ways of understanding that need to be plausible, need to be tested over time, and many of which will not bear up over time.  But many of them will and do.  And I can demonstrate that, for a general group, there will be a generally positive impact.  But that doesn’t mean that this or that particular outcome will be good. 

We just learned this lesson on a massive scale.  Ouch.  Will we more continuously monitor the next time something like this head’s in our direction?  Will we engage in real time studies – will we have the stomach for treating ourselves as guinea pigs when our lives are at stake? 

On the micro level, will we continue to question what authorities tell us – what our individual treaters maintain is the best treatment?  Peter Jamison, of the Washington Post, wrote that “Doubt is a cardinal virtue in the sciences, which advance through skeptics willingness to question the experts, but it can be disastrous in public health, which depends on people’s willingness to trust those same experts.”

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Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead – Inhabiting the other takes guts

 Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver, David Copperfield, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Human Motivation

 

I have been meaning to write about this book for over a month, but, besides being busy with the end of the academic year stuff, I have been stymied about how to write about the extreme disorientation that I felt – especially as this book drew to a close.  Yesterday morning I went back and read the first few pages and now, perhaps, after a bit of stewing, I may be able to take a shot at it.

Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Demon Copperhead won the Pulitzer Prize, a prize for fiction about the American experience, for good reason.  Or actually many of them.  Kingsolver has served up a rambling, dense, interconnected tale of life in rural Appalachia that takes on multiple big topics with the clear eyes of someone on the ground who both gets the big picture but also knows how to tell a story that particularized that big pictured in the lives, but in this case, the life, of an individual.

Kingsolver takes on the woefully failing foster care system in this country as well as the despicable action of the Sackler Family’s Perdue Pharma (one of the groups behind the fentanyl disaster) all while making you turn the pages.  This is a real tour de force.  It is also, I understand, a rebuttal to D.J. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy’s position that the Appalachian’s and their characterological weaknesses are to blame for the Fentanyl mess.  Kingsolver places the blame clearly on corporate greed rather than the little guy, while she sympathetically portrays the hell of addiction and its consequences.

So, I both like and respect this book and author.  The book was a fun, educational read that I would recommend to virtually anyone.  But it was also, for me, a as I said above, a very disorienting one.  It violates two principles that I have experienced as important in reading.  

The violation of the first principle is the comfort that an author has in writing in the first person about someone with whom they do not share central aspects of the personal identity of the person about whom they are writing.  I first noticed this in The Help, a book about the black/white divide in the United States South where Kathryn Stockett assiduously avoided writing about the African Americans in the first person, while she was clearly quite comfortable writing about the white women’s experiences in her/their own voice.  She was advocating for the African Americans, but recognized that to speak through the African American characters (at least as I understood it), rather than on their behalf would be appropriation at best and something like pandering – enacting the white entitlement to know the black experience, the very thing she was objecting to in the book – at worst.

This is not to say that some authors cannot cross lines of identity fruitfully.  Recently I wrote about Tan Twan Eng’s writing in the first person about his character Lesley in The House of Doors, but this made sense because he was, as a gay man from a Muslim country, identifying with a white English woman in the early twentieth century who had to “closet” her feelings, including about her husband, because they were not welcome and she had to figure out how to live a furtive life in order to achieve something like integrity.  He was imagining himself into someone who looks very different, but, in his mind, is living a parallel life.

But the violation of the second principle is one that I wrote about in relation to the book The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a novel by Stieg Larson, in which he credits the hero with tremendous abilities that allow her to wreak revenge on the people who have put her through ungodly torture.  I object to the notion that a fiction writer might have that we can torture women and they will be OK – in fact, they will have extraordinary powers – as if women are resilient enough that we can harm them without consequence – a kind of over the top, sadistic version of benevolent misogyny.

So, yes, this is a book written in the first person.  It is written by a woman about a man – or a boy’s coming of age to be a man.  Not just any boy, but a boy whose father was a Melungeon, and who has features of the Melungeons – mostly he comments on his copper hair and eyes, but I found myself wondering about the color of his skin (or the assumptions about his race – at one point he is described as white – but he is also the son of Melungeon in Western Virginia). His father died before he was born and his mother died when he was quite young – though old enough that he remembers how absent she was.  It is also a work of fiction.

Demon Copperfield is a work of fiction that is based on a roman a clef: David Copperfield.  The two stories both begin with a first-person account of the birth of the hero – though I found Kingsolver’s hero’s description of his entry into the world more engaging than Dickens’.  The details of the two births were quite different, but what united them was an insightful and jaunty attitude towards the potential awful events that occurred to them.  Unlike Bill Clinton, in his autobiography, or J.D. Vance, for that matter, these heroes are psychologically minded and can take themselves as objects and can imagine what the impact of events on them is without having to really know that.  OK, sometimes Demon is all too certain of himself, but there is an endearing quality to it his certainty – a sense that he knows that he doesn’t know all, but he is going to imagine that he does – he has pluck.

Part of what was so disorienting in reading this book was that I was mourned the loss of it – and I mourned the loss of Demon in particular when it was over.  It was as if I had lost a real person.  What was doubly disconcerting was that this feeling was not for the representation of a real person, but for the person I felt I had come to know in the process of hearing his voice, engaging in his battles, fearing for the various threats – some external some internal – and cheering for the few good things that came his way in life.  I was pleased about how he repeatedly made lemonade out of very old lemons mixed with tepid water and, occasionally, a packet of sugar stolen from a diner.

Over the month or two that I have lived with myself and the affection – the crush, for lack of a better word – that I lavished on a person that did not, in fact, exist, it was helpful to return to David Copperfield (I book I have never read all the way through, but a book that was, essentially, the autobiography of a man who did go from rags to riches – Charles Dickens).  It also brings to mind another author who went, if not from rags, from rural simplicity to being the toast of the town – Mark Twain.

As much as I disdained the idea that the resilience of the human spirit is something that we should be cautious of praising because we can use that to justify treating others inhumanely – as in, “they will get over it,”  I am deeply and powerfully moved by stories of resiliency.  I assign essays to my students about marginalized folks who have had tremendous careers in psychology because I think they can learn from them – and I can to – about the ways in which we can manage the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that inevitably end up being directed at us.  I think that pluck is one of the greatest companions a person can have – and I hate to admit, as an analyst who should be non-judgmental, that I have feelings of pity and sometimes contempt for those who don’t have some measure of pluck.

I can justify valuing pluck from an evolutionary perspective.  Living organisms are anti-entropic entities.  There is proven evidence that the universe is hurtling towards entropy and our efforts to ward it off are futile, but that seems to be our mission and we are hell bent on accomplishing something in the face of the inevitable conclusion that nothing will last.  This, I have recently learned, is at the heart of the idea of Greek comedy.  Yes, comedy has a happy ending, but we, the biological creatures that we are, full of foibles and failings, triumph over the Gods; while in tragedy – by trying to imitate the Gods, which we as mere mortals cannot do, we fail – and expose our tragic flaws rather than flouting them as we do in comedy.

This book, then, embodies the comic hero in Demon Copperhead.  He has the capacity to understand and manage the minds of those who would derail him because he loves them – meaning that he can appreciate them for who they are – and not try to pretend that they are more or different.  This also arms him with the ability to understand the roots of their motives and to distinguish their best interest from his own.  He can even acknowledge when he has failed to do this and to apologize to those he has offended by not, for instance, getting their sex right. 

I worry that I have betrayed my own gender bias by assuming that a man can survive the slings and arrows of fortune and still be a whole, psychologically healthy individual – that I find Demon Copperhead to be a believable hero and a real person where that was not the case for the Girl with the Dragon tattoo.  All I can say in my defense is that I think Barbara Kingsolver’s ability to empathize – to think about the motivations, strengths, weaknesses and capacities of various individuals is the superpower (and identity) that she shares with Demon, and I only wish, as an analyst, that I could emulate her (traditionally female) virtues that she imbues her hero with. 

 

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