So Big: Edna Ferber’s American Dream feels a bit more like a nightmare than a tragedy.

 So Big, Edna Ferber, Pulitzer, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Chicago, History

So Big is the 1924 Pulitzer Prize winning novel by one of the most successful authors of the first part of the twentieth century, but both it and she appear to be on the brink of being forgotten.  I get and understand this.  My reaction to this book was, at first, strongly dismissive.  Edna Ferber’s true love was drama.  She wanted to write for stage – and Giant – another of her works, was turned into a screen classic starring James Dean.  But I dismissed this book as being two dimensional – the characters seem constructed from the outside in rather than the other way around.  I wished it were a play so the actors could blur the fine lines that her character articulation created.

Despite my critical eye and ear, this book is an easy read.  It is visually stimulating and it tracks not just the development of its heroes, but also one of my favorite cities, Chicago, from the late 1880s through the early 1920s.  Even though I didn’t trust my narrator, I found myself enthralled, almost against my will, by the unfolding story of this neat and tidy family who experience both the poorest and richest ends of the economic spectrum as this city was gaining its broad shoulders.

By the way, this post contains multiple spoilers.  The author includes many spoilers in her story.  She begins the book very near the end – she promises that things will turn out well – but it is the process of getting from here to there that she wants to interest you in.  So, she is not so much spoiling as teasing.  She is also promising a happy ending.  I will include the ending in this post so that you can judge with me whether it is happy or not…

Selina DeJong (nee Peake), the stalwart star of the early part of this novel, seems to be spun from spunk and resilience in the face of adversity.  She embodies the kinds of virtues that the Boy and Girl Scouts would have us aspire to.  My reaction to this was not just dismissive – it was more visceral and profound than that.  Edna Ferber seemed to have created the kind of character that my Mom would have had me be and, to be fair, the kind of character that she strove to be.  And this raised my hackles because I have both desired to be and become that person, and have desired to be and become someone entirely different – my own person; whatever that might be.

So, I listened to a podcast on Machiavelli this week and the author made the claim that Machiavelli is responsible for the modern world.  Machiavelli lived in Florence, Italy, and he, like seemingly everyone else in Florence, the cradle of the renaissance, worked for the Medici family.  And Machiavelli’s writing did something the Greeks and the Romans, but also the religious writers rarely did.  He wrote not about how people should be, but about how they actually were.

Writing about things as they are, the podcast author maintained, led directly into the scientific writings of Galileo, Bacon, Descartes and thus Newton.  Unlike Aristotle, whose science was based on how nature should work (Nature abhors a vacuum; therefore, a football is propelled by the prevention of a vacuum forming behind it in flight), these men based their science on what they actually saw in the world (a body in motion tends to stay in motion).

Similarly, in writing about politics, Machiavelli wrote, in the Prince, about what he observed the Medici to be doing – not what they said they were doing.  They were corrupt rulers who created a space for a morally and spiritually free society to flourish.  So, where the ancients were writing morality plays about what heroes like Achilles, Odysseus, and Oedipus were doing as positive and negative models of how we should and should not act, Machiavelli was writing about how people did act, and this opened the door to Hobbes, but then Locke to write about the state of nature and man as a creature of nature (yes, Darwin would be one of Machiavelli’s intellectual offspring).

Thomas Jefferson, in writing our declaration, managed to create a mish-mash out of the reality-based grievances he articulated and the aspirational moral goals that still haunt us – particularly as he applied them only to land owning white men.  And Ferber is writing in and against that tradition, as a highly accomplished woman in a country that is just granting women the right to vote and that still holds onto the rights and ideals of white men.

So, her hero, this Selina DeJong, carries a lot of freight.  She needs to lead us into a modern world that includes women and that is open to the world.  But Ferber uses the means - the rhetoric - of the ancients.  She creates Selina as a moral model; an almost inhuman or even godlike version of a woman.  She embraces and uses traditional male virtues, but she articulates them in a profoundly feminine way.  I suppose it makes sense that I objected to her; my Mother confided in me once that she wanted me to become the kind of man that my father was not, and I think she meant by this that she wanted to inculcate me with feminine virtues.  I think Ferber wants us to do the same for society, and I rebel against this, while recognizing its value.

So, Selina, when her father dies, leaving her nothing but a good private school education at the tender age of 19, sets out to teach the South Chicago Dutch truck farmer’s kids.  As the spunky and resilient kid that she is, she experiences the cabbages growing in their rows as beautiful, something the farmers and their wives never considered as possible – they are a commodity and a job, not aesthetic objects.  She not only survives, but somehow manages to embrace cold, hard work filled living conditions as a boarder and teacher – and she, somewhat surprisingly, to her and to us, falls deeply, passionately, and very sensuously in lust and in love with a hardworking, but pretty dimwitted Dutch farmer who bids for her box lunch at a church fund raiser despite the wealthiest widow in town clearly wanting him to bid for hers.

The newly married couple work his lowly farm – the poorest of the farms in the area – and she proposes improvements which he rejects, and they have a child.  This child, Dirk, becomes known as So Big because of his response to the question, “How big are you?” by spreading his arms wide and saying, “So Big!”.  When her husband dies, spunky Selina packs So Big into the wagon and drives the team to market, something that the other farmers clarify is never done by a woman.

When Selina arrives at the market, bringing her washed, sorted and well-presented materials to compete with the others, she arrives on the worst day of the year, the Jewish holiday, and many of the buyers are in temple, so she tries to sell her wares door to door and, just when she is about to give up, she stumbles upon the home of one of her old private school mates, the daughter of one the Chicago butchers who has turned himself into an Oscar Mayer figure with the wealth to go with it. 

When the Oscar Mayer figure offers to gift her money, she virtuously refuses, accepting a loan that she then pays back, against his protests, with interest – we might be thinking that this is a Horatio Alger story about Selina – but her whole reason to become wealthy, which she does become, is not for the selfish consumeristically focused reasons, but to raise and support So Big. 

So Big goes off to the University of Chicago – then to Cornell for architecture once he finds his calling.  He comes back to practice his craft, but gets stuck doing draftsman work for a big firm.  He falls in love with but can’t marry the girl of his dreams – the daughter of his Mom’s rich girlfriend from school.  This girl marries into truly extravagant wealth and but manages to stay connected to, and, we sense, in love with So Big.  She expresses her love by steering So Big towards making more money as a bond salesman than he ever could have as an architect.

As he develops, So Big repeatedly moves away from his mother’s wishes for him.  He becomes, instead of the artist she envisioned him to be – the architect that there is evidence he has passion to be - a man about town, someone who listens and observes and moves quickly up the developing ranks of the elite in the city.  This process begins early, when he goes off to the University of Chicago and befriends then abandons a woman much like his mother, and one whom his mother likes.  He shuns her as part of being seduced into become a fraternity boy.  But the challenging part of all this is that he is both leaving his roots and what his mother would have him do, but he is also moving into a life that better suits the aptitudes and virtues that he develops in this new world.  He seems to become the best possible version of himself in the context of this apparently nurturing and supportive, if judgmental, world.

(After writing this post, I had a long conversation with my mother about her parents - both graduates of the University of Chicago later in the twenties.  Her mother was born into the class that was being groomed there, her father came from more humble origins and, though he successfully went into the insurance business in Chicago, my mother reports that he never felt himself to be a member of the ruling class; he always felt like an outsider.)

Despite becoming the best version of himself, in the concluding chapters, So Big comes to realize that his mother’s vision and way of living is far superior, even though he looks down on her.  He ends up desiring a woman who is a self-sufficient commercial artist who embodies all that he could (not) have become and this woman won’t have him because he has not become the artist that he could have and because he does not embrace the world as broadly she would have a desirable person do.  Instead, this commercial artistic woman feels a kinship with his mother, and with one of Selina's students from long ago that Selina helped to emancipate from the small farming community with its narrow views. 

So Big now experiences himself as small.  When his mother asks him how big he is, he responds by holding his thumb and finger a half inch away from each other and says, "So big."  He begins to disdain both himself and the woman he has adored and who has helped him become this best version of himself, the version of himself that not long before he wished his mother would have seen and appreciated, but now realizes would not measure up to what she expects of him.  He sees that the student from long ago who has gone off to Paris and become an artist is her true son.  This realization guts him and the curtain, as it were, falls.

This is, in other words, an odd tragedy.  It is not by trying to avoid his fate, but by embracing it – by being true to himself or at least significant and important parts of himself, that So Big ends up betraying himself.  The Pulitzer Prize in literature is awarded to the book by an American author that best exemplifies American life.  On some level, awarding that prize to this book underscores the American dilemma.  We, like So Big, want to become ourselves, but in our pursuit of happiness, we get distracted by the wealth that we acquire on the way.  Or do we?  Is it that what we are good at is making money?  Are we essentially commercial, without the art?  Are we, at heart, needy, greedy people who want something until we can have it and then we decide that we want something else?  Are we boats with very shallow keels?

Edna Ferber was encouraging us to travel into deeper waters, but the vessels she gave us – both Selina and So Big – did not have the kind of deep keels that would allow them, together, to traverse those waters.  So Big did not have the wherewithal to be who he was on his own.  He needed to be coaxed into becoming himself, and once there, he was unhappy with what it brought him.  We could view this as a Machiavellian (meaning clear-eyed) vision of the American soul.  William A. White, who championed this book to its Pulitzer Prize, might have supported this position.  I fear, though, that it both recognizes and underestimates us.  The book repeatedly praises the first generation – the Oscar Mayer character is stronger than his son, Selina is stronger than hers, and in each case, the child is seduced by money into becoming, as almost every member of the most selective eating club in Chicago is observed to be by So Big when he joins it, bloated.    

We, as Americans, might aspire to be like the rich English who engage in highly stylized and clearly classist traditions like fox hunting.  When the North Side Rich Chicagoans import a bedraggled fox to chase, it underscores that we have not developed this tradition, as the British did, to address a domestic problem (too many foxes) and then turned it into something that is our own – but we are more like the Romans, appropriating Greek art forms.  Ferber seems to be asking whether we can be artists or if we simply copy from others.  

Edna can remonstrate us to become artists – to be become open to the world, embracing and enjoying diversity, but she is preaching to and holding a mirror up to people who are isolated in the middle of a big country and are more concerned with survival than with aesthetics.  As a nation of immigrants, we are here because there was something intolerable where we came from, but when we arrive, we simply want to be insulated from all that was intolerable, but we don’t trust ourselves to build social institutions that would do that, and, Ferber suggests, we are, with rare exceptions, not sturdy enough to accomplish this on our own.

Despite Ferber’s clear-eyed, Machiavellian vision, she can’t resist some old-fashioned hero worship as a means of keeping a dream alive. Unfortunately, the kind of brow-beating and template based creations of heroes may be as prone to failure as so many other American institutions – Hollywood, with whom Ferber had a long relationship – comes to mind.  Perhaps art emerges from within – and trying to impose it from without – whether as a parent or an author, is, as this book suggests, doomed to failure.  We may recognize it, but we, apparently, cannot create it.  Perhaps we can, in our best moments, not snuff it out, but instead stay out of its way.

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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 been 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 her 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 she 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 nor 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 I made a move for them 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 it.  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 (as Tom Ogden points out) 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.

Afterward:

I had a brief correspondence with the author after this was posted.  After letting her know that I had posted it, and before hearing back from her, I reread the post and was concerned about how, for lack of a better word, brutal it was.  In the post, I talked about how we, as analysts, don't truly know our patient's experience and I think that, in analysis, we intentionally don't know things that are available to us for a whole host of reasons.  Of course, I was speaking as one particular analyst, not as her analyst and, as Peters pointed out in her response, it was her analyst who asked her to write between sessions and invited extra-analytic contact - she did not cross that boundary uninvited (as I think I crossed a boundary by empathizing with her analyst).

In our back and forth, I also untangled a bit my reaction to the book.  I was reacting out of two very different positions.  I think I was reacting to parts of it as a lay person - it was written for a lay audience, and there was a naive part of myself that was reacting to the openness about her life that Peters included.  I have chosen to write this blog with a pseudonym ostensibly so that this does not show up when my patients do a google search on me, but also so that I have some cover from public scrutiny.  I admire Peters courage - and appreciate her contribution to our understanding of the analytic process as both a researcher and as a clinician - but naively; as a lay person, I feel some concern about the public exposure she invites.  Peters assured me that the readership of the book, it turns out, is mostly professional - it does not have much of a lay following - at least not to this point.

 

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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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