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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

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Nope: Jordan Peele continues to articulate hidden aspects of power politics

 

Nope, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Jordan Peele, Meaning of Nope

Nope dropped last summer, and, though I was interested in seeing it and have enjoyed Peele’s two previous feature films, Get Out and Us.  The second was disorienting enough, and so clearly in the horror genre, that it was both difficult to write about and scotched the reluctant wife’s interest in seeing Nope.  After seeing a review that suggested the horror element was deemphasized and after she had heard from the reluctant stepdaughter that it was a good film, we decided to watch it last night.

Nope is a violent film and deeply disturbing.  Neither of us was very surprised to discover that the reluctant wife had nightmares last night.  She does not remember the content, only that she awoke to the fear that she would see a bloody chimpanzee staring at her.  And this is a central image in the film, one that is hinted at early but lies, I think, close to the core of understanding one layer of the multilayered film.

In addition to being violent, this film is complicated and, despite being extremely well made, disjointed in ways that made it very hard to piece together.  On one level, it is a basic western film.  OJ (Otis Junior: Daniel Kaluuya) and Em (Keke Palmer) are brother and sister trying desperately to save the family ranch (OJ more than Em) after Otis Senior is mysteriously killed.  It is also a film about the aftereffects of trauma, and the splotchiness of the narrative, and the returns to such things as the bloody chimpanzee where we learn a bit more each time about that scene, mirror traumatic memory systems.

There are two twists.  One, OJ and Em are black. They are the great-great-great-great grandchildren of the first person to be filmed in a moving picture – the jockey on the back of the horse filmed by Edward Muybridge.

The second twist it that it is not the bank that is trying to repossess the land; the land is being haunted by an extraterrestrial form that looks, when it can be glimpsed, like a flying saucer, but turns out to be a voracious flying octopus.

So, this is a black science fiction western movie.  But wait, there’s more that makes it complicated to understand… 

The ranch next door is where the true evil lies, but we don’t discover this until we are so deep into the movie and so scared of the extraterrestrial flying octopus that we don’t recognize how evil it is at first.  It is the latter day theme park/ dude ranch owned by the now grown child actor who was terrorized by the bloody chimpanzee when the chimpanzee was a character in the child actor’s sitcom.

I hope you can understand why we were trying to puzzle through how the film hung together (which it clearly did – but how?) and wondering what Peele intended.  Don’t get me wrong, it was a thriller.  We were on the edges of our seats, just as one should be in a horror film, but why?

In the reviews we read, Peele stated that he intended Nope to be a metaphor for our addiction to spectacle.  He intended a morality play with OJ and Em as the embattled movie industry trying to hang onto the old fashioned story telling that movies have been to good at, and the ranch next door as CGI promising the allure of bigger and better spectacles. 

The metaphor works – you’ll have to trust me on that, I haven’t articulated all of the elements that tie the two together, but I just didn’t resonate with this reading of the movie.  There was something more terrifying and unsettling about the movie than this level of read would suggest (even though I can resonate with it as being, in my profession, like the war between therapists who are trying to help their clients find meaning in their life – a complicated and difficult process that requires relying on therapists to think on their feet and therefore is tough to study scientifically – and the scientists who would tell therapists to do exactly what they say they should in order to help patients get rid of their symptoms – essentially turning therapy into a form of psychiatric medication.  In this reading of the metaphor, thinking therapists own the family ranch...).

My reading of the film came to me this morning.  It is idiosyncratic and may not have been at all what Peele intended, but I think it may be valid (and is not in competition with what he has proposed, but is, perhaps, complimentary to it).

A key to the movie is eye contact.  OJ discovers that the monster is drawn to eyes – or representations of eyes.  It is what pulls the monster out of its lair and how it discovers its prey. 

Twenty years ago or so I participated in two versions of a runaway slave enactment.  In both versions, we were instructed, as runaway slaves, not to make eye contact with any white person.  To make eye contact would be enraging to a white person and would evoke their wrath, so we were to keep our eyes pointed downward.

This was very disorienting.  I immediately lost 20 IQ points.  It was harder to understand the meaning of words when you couldn’t see someone’s face, and it was also hard to read their emotional intent without having access to their body language.  I felt myself to be afloat in the world, even before having to withstand some of the insults and the terror that were part of the enactment.

Of course, in traditional psychoanalysis, the analyst sits out of view of the patient.  This was traumatic for an early patient of mine and I have adjusted my consulting room since then so that the patient can see me if they choose, but also so they can easily look straight ahead and have me be, at best, in the periphery of their vision.

In the film, OJ is the quiet, industrious brother.  Em is the flaky, outgoing sister.  Em’s trauma was having the horse that was to be hers taken away when she was a child to be trained for a movie.  She stood upstairs looking into the training arena, willing her father to look at her, but he wouldn’t.  It was OJ who had his eyes on her – who knew of her pain.

OJ is sensitive to the horses and their needs, but not so good at managing relationships with human beings.  He works more on feeling his way through interpersonal spaces, not asserting himself; he does not look others in the eye.  He is smart about people precisely because he doesn't look directly at them but senses them instead.  It is he who figures out that the monster is attracted by eye contact, and he devises a plan to capture the monster on film based on this understanding (capturing the monster on film will allow the kids to keep the ranch because they can sell the photos to Oprah and become rich and famous).

Jupe (Steven Yeun) is the grown-up child actor next door.  He had eye to eye contact with a monster: that bloody chimpanzee.  The chimp became enraged on set when some balloons from his birthday party started popping.  He proceeded to maul some of the other actors and crew.  Those who were able ran from the room, but Jupe was forced to cower under a table and watch the chimp’s rampage with nowhere to escape to.  There was a sheer table cloth that came over the side of the table and would have hid the upper half of him, more or less, from the chimpanzee.

After the chimp has attacked and hurt others, and when the chimpanzee is alone with Jupe and the now nearly unconscious costar of the sitcom on stage, the chimp finally catches Jupe's eyes through the sheer tablecloth and approaches him.  We are afraid for Jupe.  But somehow, seeing Jupe through the cloth, Jupe’s eyes don’t insight the chimp in the way that, presumably, other’s have.  The chimp is able to make contact with Jupe, not as another victim, but to remember their shared language and offers the fist bump that has been an indication of their previous affectionate relationship.

Eye contact can, apparently, go both ways.  We can see the other as another animal - as prey - and we can find them, attack them, and consume them when we identify them.  Of course, the chimpanzee is insighted by fear - the balloon popping is scary - and when we are afraid, we project our aggression onto others which frees us to attack them (think of war and slavery here).  On the other hand, making eye contact also allows us to empathically connect with others -  we experience our shared humanity.  It is dangerous to make eye contact with those we assume are other - they may turn out to be made of the same cloth we are.

Unfortunately, Jupe, who has been terribly traumatized by the situation on stage (as has the current audience), decides to hide that part of the experience and to, instead, pass it off as something that he had more mastery over than he actually did.  In fact, he turns the experience around to indicate that he is the “chosen one” who is immune to being destroyed by powerful creatures.  This allows him to lure the monster in to feast on the horses that he has bought from OJ in a spectacle for paying customers.  OJ, of course, has no idea that his horses are being consumed.  It is only when his second best horse, Lucky, refuses to leave the cage when the monster arrives at the appointed hour, that Jupe and all of his paying customers are consumed.

It seems to me, then, that Jupe may also be representing the white man (and it would not be beyond Peele to hide the white man in an Asian actor).  This white man misunderstands his survival of contact with the dangerous other – the chimp in the case of Jupe, but the African slave in the case of the white man – as due to some inherent superiority on Jupe’s/the White man’s part. 

Jupe didn’t learn that the monster is drawn out by seeing into the eyes – which I can’t help saying are the windows to the soul, but also mirrors of the soul – and didn’t learn to be cautious and canny about how to manage monsters. OJ, as a horse trainer, but I think, more centrally, as a black man, knows that eye contact incenses the monster.  He decides that the eye contact will happen on his terms, so that he can draw the monster out to be seen and to be shown to the world.

If you are still following me, then, the monster is really a representation of voracious white people.  The people who are drawn to uppity (eye contact making) people of color and are incensed by them and consume them.  But those white people are tricky.  They hide in plain sight.  You wouldn’t know that they are dangerous (The monster pretends to be a fluffy white cloud – you only know that it is not a cloud because it does not move in the wind, perhaps a metaphor for those whites who are not willing to give up their privilege).

One other feature of the monster is important.  It sucks the electricity out of the air, rendering modern technology useless against it.  OJ must ride a horse – he must be a real cowboy – to defeat the monster.  I am now getting, perhaps, too taken with my metaphor, but it seems to me that this might be a  commentary on the ways in which modern whites are figuring out how to undo modern curbs on their behavior – the voter’s rights act, for instance – and it will be up to people of color and their allies – OJ and Em enlist the aid of a Latino tech operator and a white cinematographer to try to get the picture.  Ultimately, though, it is the old analog system, run by Em, that ends up working to get the needed image.

I don’t know if Peele is telegraphing that we will need to return to nonviolent demonstration to capture the monstrosity of white aggression, but this film seems to be making a case for that, at least in my mind.  The destruction of the monster comes not because the cowboys want to kill it, but because they want to publicize what it is doing.  Its own rampant hunger is what ultimately does it in.  As Ruth Bader Ginsberg quoted Sojourner Truth saying, the goal is not to harm men, but to get them to "take their feet off our necks".  It is their own hunger to destroy that will, in this reading of the allegory, destroy them.

The piece that doesn’t quite fit into this analysis is the chimp.  The chimp must ultimately be, I think, symbolic of the white man and his aggression, aggression that gets projected onto the people of color.  Could it be that the chimp represents the white man pretending to be civilized and that the pretense of civilization is a very thin veneer  over his essentially untamed bestial qualities?  Freud would not argue with that assessment.  And, if you grant me that we are barely on top of our most primitive selves, but we pretend to be holier than others, they become receptacles for what we cannot tolerate seeing in ourselves - our monstrousness - our unbridled rage and entitlement.  And we project that outwards - assuming that it is others, not ourselves, who are the danger.  Could the chimp have been afraid and imagined that everyone was going crazy after the balloon popped?  Could he have seen the fear in their eyes and imagined that it mirrored his state, not realizing that he was the one who was scaring them?

Part of what sets the movie into motion is a moment when Lucky has a mirror put in front of his eyes and he starts to buck, scotching a job that might have helped save the ranch.  When we see what lies within us, when we see our fears mirrored in others, we react instinctively, if you will.  

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Hamnet: Maggie O’Farrell’s Novel of Shakespeare's Female Sensibilities

 Hamnet, Maggie O'Farrell, Hamlet, Shakespeare, Femininity

Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet focuses on the process of grieving.  She does this by imagining Hamnet as a twin – both of his sister, but also, I propose, of his father.  O’Farrell most completely imagines the grief of Hamnet, though, through the eyes of his mother, Agnes.  Agnes does not overtly, I don’t think, imagine him to be her twin, but mostly to be her child.

Hamnet is, of course, a version of the name Hamlet, and O’Farrell is writing about Shakespeare of Stratford's son, a child named Hamnet who she imagines to be the model for his Hamlet (That said, O’Farrell never calls Shakespeare by name.  To treat Shakespeare as a character in one of her novels felt profane to her.  I will refer to him by that name to avoid confusion but also to articulate the ways that the absent Shakespeare deeply affects the arc of the novel).  O’Farrell imagines Hamnet to have been felled (mild spoiler alert) by the plague.  She imagines this because Shakespeare, apparently, never once mentions the plague in any of his plays – which just doesn’t make sense. 

The plague was rampant not just in England but throughout Europe.  It was the hallmark of the Renaissance; a symptom of the improved trade routes that the Renaissance afforded, and (from a very current perspective) perhaps nature’s way of trying to limit the expansion of the European version of humankind that would, one day, so perilously endanger her.  Be that as it may, I do wonder about how the plague and its concomitant losses may have strangely fueled the artistic blossoming of the Renaissance, and that is part and parcel of O’Farrell musings about this boy.     

I don’t think Shakespeare came from Stratford: I am an Oxfordian.  But I do think that the idea that Shakespeare came from a small town has spawned a great deal of very interesting thinking about him and about creativity.  Maggie O’Farrell’s vision is less of Shakespeare and more of Anne Hathaway (whom she considers by the name Agnes – for there is some evidence that was the name of the name of the woman married to the man whom some take to be Shakespeare).  This book turns out to be incidentally, but crucially about Shakespeare while it is primarily about Agnes and the ways of women.

Agnes is, in O’Farrell’s imagining, a witch.  She is a seer.   When she first meets the boy Shakespeare, who is the loser son of a shady glove maker in a small town coming to her family’s house in the country to tutor her brothers in Latin, she takes his hand in hers, as she does with many people, and reads, by pressing between thumb and first finger, him.  She discovers within him vast vistas; distant horizons, and she seduces him, becomes pregnant, marries him, and they ultimately have three children; an elder daughter and then twins – a boy and a girl.  Having three children confuses her because she sees herself in the future with only two children.

Agnes is an herbalist.  She grows her own herbs and harvests wild ones.  She dries them and makes tinctures with them (something that is still practiced by women: see the book Educated).  She then dispenses them to the people in the town, to the consternation of the physicians, whose competence at neither treatment nor comfort is as great as hers.  She does not accept payment for her cures and treatments, but instead appreciates gifts that come from the labors of those she serves.

In this she is different from her Shakespeare and from her oldest daughter Susanna.  The two of them are shrewd business people with heads for figures.  They amass broad holdings that Agnes inhabits but doesn’t value.  Agnes, like the younger twin, Judith, is, in these matters of the world, simple.

Just as in a Shakespearean play (we saw this in Midsummer Night’s Dream just last night), there is both a symmetrical relationship between the characters and then something that throws that off.  Here, Shakespeare and Susanna are “twins” (alike in their having urban and urbane sensibilities) and Agnes and Judith are “twins” (alike in being creatures of the earth – organically rather than transactionally attuned to others).  The twins at the heart of the story – Hamnet and Judith - are deeply organically entwined with each other, but Hamnet is deeply grieved by both Agnes and Shakespeare.  Oddly, Agnes accuses herself of having been out of touch with Hamnet when he needed her most (against her character) and Shakespeare, too, imagined and feared that Judith, not Hamnet, would be lost.  Agnes imagines that Shakespeare does not feel the loss of his son, but ultimately they are, of course, united by their grief.

The death of a child is unimaginable.  When my son was born, I could not watch TV for a year.  The death of a character (which happens more frequently than I ever knew) was the death of somebody’s child.  When asked at Julliard to write about what terrified him, the author of Rabbit Hole said, “I got nothing.”  And then his child was born. 

O’Farrell has had to live with the reality of her one her three children being consistently on the verge of death.  When O’Farrell was taught that the death of Hamnet was not a significant event for Shakespeare, she recoiled from this idea.  She reimagines Shakespeare as being; yes, a creature of the theater and of London, and therefore urbane, but also as someone who is tied to the earth, as someone who is resonant with flowers and winds and water, and she imagined his domestic life – and his marriage to Agnes – as the conduit for this.  And out of this imagining she conjured what became, for me, a spellbinding tale.

Freud noted the importance of doubling to the sense of the uncanny.  He was describing what causes us shivers when we hear ghost stories, but also when we recognize something as true.  We feel something Heimlich (Homelike or canny), something familiar, in something novel.  This might be a version of the link that Aristotle was pointing to when talking about tragedy – we connect with the hero and feel a sense of catharsis because of an identification with them.  For Freud, the sense of identification and the sense of canniness are both linked with a sense of a double – a person in the present who is very much like a person in the past.

Kohut, a psychoanalytic thinker whose writings in the 1970s and 80s opened entirely new ways of thinking about people and analysis, noted what he called a twin transference.  I am imagining the twin transference, in this moment, as a doubling, as it were, of the self.  Seeing in someone else not a version of a familiar other, but seeing in them a version of ourselves.  There is an uncanny sense that I am not alone (the way that I generally feel), but that I am connected with someone who gets me not because they have some kind of concept of me, but because they are shaped like me.  They get me because they are living within a bone structure that is the same as my own.         

O’Farrell’s really good story telling becomes movingly, powerfully excellent when Hamnet offers himself to Death, who is walking around the room as Judith is dying of the plague.  He trades himself for her.  As he and Judith are lying, entangled in her sheets as she is fighting with the plague, “He feels again the sensation he has had all his life: that she is the other side of him, that they fit together, him and her, like two halves of a walnut.”  Perhaps those of us who are not twins imagine this connection more powerfully than those who have lived as twins and sense the yawning differences between each other as well as the similarities – and I have no evidence that O’Farrell herself is a twin – so perhaps this is the wish, the hoped-for twin transference rather than the thing itself, but it is a convincing rendition of the sense of not being alone that the yearning for another or the feeling of connection with them can bring.

And I think this is an important part of the intense love that is part and parcel of becoming a parent.  There is the sense of this other creature – a creature that is dependent on me in a way that no other creature ever has been; a creature that is deeply connected to me – and yet is an autonomous being – and there is a sense of caring for this creature in a way that is unlike any caring that we have experienced before.  We would, as Hamnet does for Judith, offer ourselves up to death so that this creature could go on living.  When God asks Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, there is no greater sacrifice that can be asked – and part of the power of the Christian narrative is God’s sacrifice, in turn, of his only son.

In O’Farrell’s imagination, this loss is so great that it drives Shakespeare away, he cannot bear to be in the presence of the reminders of his lost son, but Agnes is therefore left to suffer her grief alone – losing her connection to Shakespeare in the process.  She then imagines him as unaffected, and we imagine him (in our psychoanalytically informed minds) powerfully defending against this immense loss.  Agnes can sense the hands of other women on Shakespeare when he returns home, and we don’t doubt those hands to have been there.  But we also glimpse his care for her – his concern – including the way that it is expressed in his careful wooing to win her back.   We also see his transactional care as he directs Susanna to acquire more and more things for them in his home of Stratford - only at the end of the novel do we appreciate that London has never become his home, despite the time that he has spent there.

It is the play; however, that stands as his testament of love to a child he could not have known – a boy, eleven at his death, who had not become a man. O’Farrell provides an interesting portal into that play.  She posits that Shakespeare imagined his son having grown.  She imagines (I think – this is not explicit) that the father has imagined that he has been able to sacrifice himself so the son can live.  He returns then, in the play, as a ghost.  A ghost who is able to direct his son, perhaps as he could not have done in a real life cut short.

OK, now I am going to play a bit with the play itself in a way that O’Farrell does not.  Shakespeare, imagining a child whom he did not see to manhood, imagines him as a fatherless child – one who did not benefit from having known his father.  As such, he is uncertain.  Visited by his father’s Ghost, he does not trust the ghost, nor himself.  He does not know how to proceed; he does not know how to manage the powerful feelings that are moved inside him by the machinations of his uncle and the treachery of his mother.

To mix a bit more of O’Farrell’s backstory into the play, Shakespeare’s betrayal of Agnes (falling into the arms, though apparently not the hearts, of other women in the wake of Hamnet’s death) is reversed.  He distances himself from his own philandering by accusing her – Hamlet/Hamnet’s mother - of betraying him with the uncle.  He absolves himself of the sin, while preserving the feeling of the necessity of it. 

How can two parents who, together, created this child not be reminded of that child whenever they are intimately in contact with each other?  Must they not distance themselves from each other in order to manage the intensity of the feeling of loss?  But doesn’t this seem like a further betrayal?  An additional loss heaped on top of an already unbearable loss?

Is Shakespeare also imagining himself into the role of Polonius, the foolish father of Ophelia and Laertes, who, despite his foolishness offers some of the sagest advice ever, including “To thine own self be true” and “Never a borrower nor a lender be”?  Might this be the longed-for advice that Shakespeare would have liked to have given Hamnet? 

Is Shakespeare mocking himself when he characterizes Polonius as someone who cares only about appearances (Polonius states, “Clothes make the man”), as O’Farrell imagines Shakespeare is mocked by Agnes for putting on the airs of the city and is Shakespeare mourning having run off to London when Polonius pines for his earlier life ("Old friends are the best friends")?  And as Shakespeare, the writer, is finally able, after a period of intense but distant mourning, to re-inhabit the mind of his son, does he experience himself as spying on him the way that Polonius spies on Laertes and, ultimately fatally, on Hamlet himself?

I offer these O’Farrell inspired musings not to substantiate her particular take on Shakespeare (and Agnes), but to acknowledge that they fit into a tapestry of mystery that surrounds the transition that Shakespeare marked, the transition that the Renaissance promoted in the arts more broadly of taking the individual as an article of study – to know more about what it means, in its particulars, to be an individual human; and to value that perspective. 

I remain an Oxfordian, but I am appreciative of the ways in which O’Farrell clarifies that Shakespeare’s voice can be better understood by wrestling with the ways that it is influenced by his feminine identity – the self that I am viewing O’Farrell as having embodied and split off from him in the person of Agnes. 

O’Farrell portrays the young Shakespeare as ignorant, even stupid about plants.  Who taught him?  Did a woman?  A witch?  Is his appreciation for the subtleties of the human condition informed by the desires of women, not just of men?  Was he, as a passive observer of the human condition, twinning with a woman?  With his own feminine perspective?  Isn’t the world of hearth and home, the world of deeply felt connection, the world of women?  How did women shape the mind of the man who allowed humans to think so differently about themselves?  This book offers interesting and arresting ideas about this while telling a poignant and evocative tale that would stand well on its own. 

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Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms – A brief report

 

Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms is an important book that has not aged well – at least not at first glance.  It seems to be two books – a very good antiwar story that is a thinly disguised Roman a Clef about Hemingway’s experience as an ambulance driver in Italy during the First World War, and a very bad love story that is also a thinly disguised Roman a Clef about Hemingway’s first love.

The enthralling quality of the first book – including the fabled dialogue – is overshadowed by the insipid quality of the book that chronicles the love affair – especially the hollow dialogue that betrays s a love that seems entirely imaginary and incredibly immature; the dialogue idealizes hollowness and reeks of emptiness rather than charting the connection between two people.

From a certain vantage point, though, this still remains a powerful novel - including and partly because of the insipid love story.  Hemingway, as his alter ego, drinks like a fish, connects with men, and is toughened by war.  He ages himself a few years in the novel and makes himself worldly – as if that would make love (and war) more manageable. 

The war is brutal and nonsensical.  Thrown back into the war after his injury, Hemingway’s alter ego leads a small band through a chaotic retreat, and, in the process, loses touch with what it means to be human.  He orders death like he might order a hamburger.   

Ouch.  He appears to be death's master.  He orders it instead of suffering it.  And this helps keep his fear at arm’s length.

But then it gets weird.  Because he is not the man he is pretending to be.  He is a little boy who wants his Mommy.  And she shows up.  She nurses him.  

Your Mommy is what you crave when you are far from home, in a foreign country and people are wanting you to get back into a war after you have been injured and after you have seen an army fall apart.  You run away from war - with Mommy.  And she takes care of you.

Or you do if you are writing a book and you are trying to rewrite history.  But it didn’t quite work out that way in reality, so it rings false on the page.  Mommy got tired of you being a baby and left you.  So in the book, you change that.  You get her back – and instead of her leaving you, you do her in – and the baby that that would have replaced you.

And this second book, then, is perhaps the better antiwar book because it more clearly than the first shows the effects of war. 

I don’t know which of Hemingway’s wars caused him to feel so needy.  It may have been a war that was waged at home between his parents.  Perhaps his parents were too absent.  Perhaps he was too wild.  But there was a war that sent him to Italy at the age of 16 to study architecture only to get caught up in an actual world war, one in which he was injured at too young an age.

The scars from the wars he was in show up in the insipid relationship that he portrays as if it were mature love.  As if it were intimacy.  It is not.  But it is what gets imagined and then presented as love in a failed attempt to keep the horrors of war, and being abandoned, at bay.

As we recoil from the two dimensional quality of the love, we recoil from the effects of the trauma.  We recoil from the painful efforts of his traumatized mind trying to set things right by typing a missive to readers who can sympathize with the man behind the bravado.  He pulls for us to care for him the way that his imaginary lover would done.

And 100 years ago, people did.  But we don’t do that so much, now.  Or at least I didn’t.  We are not willing to watch him try to nurse himself back to health with platitudes.  We blanch at his sense of privilege and his disregard for those around him who would help him, including the mother figure.  His pretending to be mature feels like just that: pretend.

I don’t know that we are more mature now, but we do have a better sense of what trauma is.  We also have a better sense of what love looks like – something that takes us out of ourselves, rather than driving us deeper within ourselves.  The love in this book, this immature love, plainly caused by the stunted growth of this man, may be the best testament to the ravages of war, if we can only hear it for being just that.  When we witness perhaps the greatest writer of his generation being driven to write such drivel it is surely cause for concern about the long term effects of war trauma.

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The Vegetarian by Han Kang: Madness is at Our Core

 Psychoanalysis of the vegetarian by Han Kang; Psychology; Schizophrenia in the Vegetarian; Psychosis in the Vegetarian; Analysis of the Vegetarian

The vegetarian at the center of this story is a Korean woman whose meat-eating family cannot understand her decision to refuse to eat meat.  They are right to be worried – her shift, precipitated by a vivid dream filled with the blood of dead animals – is not just a choice of what she will and will not eat, but the beginning of a slide into madness. 

Young-hye, the vegetarian, could be dismissed as simply being a person with catatonic schizophrenia.  All of the symptoms that are needed are present.  She can become rigid.  She is worried that any activity on her part will cause damage to others.  Though this now rather rare variant of schizophrenia is rarely seen in its full splendor because the major tranquilizers knock out the most characteristic symptoms quite quickly and effectively, the diagnosis is a poster child for the problem with modern psychological nosology (classification of disorders).  As is often the case in the DSM, a term that describes a pattern of symptoms is used to identify a disorder, but then it is also used as if it were the cause of the disorder. 

Young-hye could be dismissed in the following way:  Who is she?  She is a catatonic schizophrenic.  Why?  Because she has the same symptoms as other catatonic schizophrenics.  What causes her to be this way?  Catatonic schizophrenia.  Fortunately this book, unlike the DSM, does not do reduce her to a diagnosis.  Quite the opposite.  It invites us to imagine the person who is at the heart of the madness.

In this book, we come to appreciate the complexity of the central character almost exclusively through the eyes of three important people in her life, each of whom misunderstands her in his or her own unique way.  Each of these people is also, in his or her own way, every bit as mad as Young-hye, though none of them will be hospitalized for any length of time and none of them will be treated.

We get direct access to Young-hye’s dreams and little bits of what she says, but mostly we hear how other people observe her, and we build, across time, our own version of her internal world – and perhaps only become conscious that we have done this when the protagonists badly misunderstand her internal world in the manifold ways that we perceive them to be doing.

At the same time, I think that we become more and more suspicious of our own ability to build a veridical model of Young-hye’s internal world – or we should be.  And, since the central character is mad – and has a particular diagnosis – catatonic schizophrenia – we might begin to question what we know about madness – and we might begin to wonder about own madness.

So – the story is told through the eyes of three people.  Roughly a third of the book is devoted to each perspective and the story generally moves forward in time, though the second and third stories revisit events previously told so that we can understand the perspective of the new individual on what happened earlier.

Yeong-hye is the vegetarian.  She is initially seen through the eyes of her husband Mr. Cheong.  This third of the story is told in first person, but we barely get to know Mr. Cheong.  He is so intent on being ordinary that he has all but stripped himself of personality.  He has chosen Yeong-hye because she, too, appears so ordinary that she would never attract anyone’s attention – including his.  He is, therefore, free to live his life unencumbered by her.

This sounds strange and perhaps Korean-typical to my western ear, but it is also not all that different from the ways that some of my (mostly male) patients have presented over the years.  They turn out to be much more interesting than they allow themselves to be at first, but the effacement of self cannot, I don’t believe, be attributed entirely to our stereotypes of the orient.  That said, this man’s inner life cries out for us to imagine him as devoid of any special attention – except perhaps our revulsion that his central wish is to live a life that is entirely unremarkable.

This book could easily be read as a feminist tract – there are essentially no good men in this book and the vision we have of a society that caters to these dominant but ineffective men is revolting.  But it is not just revolting to our feminine selves.  The men, despite being in positions of power, are far from happy.  Their attempts to deny the passions that would make their lives human is deeply disturbing.  And Young-hye’s father, whose abuse of Young-hye both as a child and as a vegetarian is harsh and disturbing, lives a life that is far from enviable.

When Yeong-hye has a dream – a vivid, horrifying dream – she decides to become a vegetarian.  This is horribly unwanted in Mr. Cheong’s life.  It is as problematic to him as her decision not to wear a bra – but much more public and therefore disruptive.  He is ashamed both that his wife does not wear a bra and that she refuses to eat most of the meal at a company dinner that he has finally been invited to, and then he enlists the aid of her family to convince her to become normal again – to eat meat.

Here we learn that Yeong-hye has more to her than the bland appearance and bland life that Mr. Cheong describes.  Her father is and always has been brutal and dictatorial.  He attempts to force Yeong-hye to eat meat – and she, through clenched teeth, refuses.  We realize that control over what goes into her mouth, the most basic control an infant has, may be an important symbol of her assertion of herself as something other than the property of her father – or, perhaps, her husband.

After a tense standoff with her family, Yeong-hye uses a knife to cut her wrists, and she is carried to the ambulance by her brother-in-law.  We never learn his name, but the next segment of the story, while told in the third person, is told from his perspective. 

The video artist, married to Young-hye’s sister, In-hye, has been derided by Mr. Cheong as a do nothing who sponges off his wife and pretends to be artistic.  When he takes over the narrative, we don’t disagree with Mr. Cheong’s perspective, though we do have more access to and sympathy with the artist’s aesthetic perspective.

The artist has a perfunctory relationship with his wife.  He realized quite early on that he was much more interested in her sister than he was in her because of her sister’s physical features – he imagines her to have been his truly intended, but this thought disappears from his consciousness until the sister becomes a vegetarian and he witnesses her being forced to eat meat and then cutting herself in his home.  There is something enlivening to the artist about her plight – and taking her to the hospital covered in her blood.

Even more exciting is the Mongolian Mark – a blue birth mark that is common to most Asian people – but one that generally fades.  When the artist learns from An-hye, his wife, that her sister Young-hye’s birthmark has never faded, the artist becomes obsessed with imagining it – and imagining painting flowers all over Young-hye.  In his imagination, the painting of the flowers is ethereal, not pornographic.  But he is also terribly aroused by the thought of painting her and of filming the painting and of filming her having sense – a non-sensual sex – with someone who has painted flowers all over him.  There is a deep split within him between his high minded aesthetisicm and his visceral sexuality - which is complicated by the ways that both use the same sensual pathways.  One and the same thing is both (in the western vernacular) holy and profane. 

That he could get his sister-in-law to consent to all of this seems very far-fetched.  He offers to check up on his wife's sister, now that Mr. Cheong has left her, and his wife is surprised and appreciative that he would do something to help her in any way (she is the bread winner in the family – and appreciates that her husband lets her work outside the home, but we continue to see him as more of a leach than his wife appears to).  When he goes to Young-hye's apartment, the artist discovers that Young-hye prefers to be naked at home, and he discovers that she is amenable to being painted.

One of the virtues of this book is that what I am writing here that sounds pretty preposterous actually makes sense.  Young- hye is open to the world at this point in a way that mirrors the artist’s openness, and also seems more genuine.  The artist is conscious of trying to represent something, but he doesn’t quite know what.  Young-hye is not trying to do anything except perhaps to live in the moment and to accept what that moment has to offer – as long as it is not meat.  At this point in the book, she seems serene to the point of being close to enlightenment - especially through the eyes of the artist, but also through the eyes of the third person narrator.

Long story short (which is weird to say about a book that is less than 200 pages), the artist paints Young-hye, then another artist, and video tapes all of this.  The other artist refuses to have sex with Young-hye, because it would be pornographic, so the artist paints himself - presumably in order to be able to realize his artistic vision - but also because he has been sexually rebuffed by Young-hye because he is not painted.  He and Young-hye have sex in all their painted glory and In-hye discovers the videotape of this the next morning and calls the health authorities to take them away.  The artist considers killing himself by throwing himself off the balcony, but does not.  He is briefly hospitalized, but Young-hye is now deep within the clutches of the mental health system and is hospitalized at a long term care facility.

It is now time for the last third of the book, told in the third person from the point of view of In-hye.  She divorces the artist, who becomes a marginal person, barely able to care for himself who is estranged not only from In-hye, but from their son.  He is too ashamed to object to the divorce.

In-hye becomes the caregiver for her sister who begins to refuse to eat not just meat, but food of any kind.  She believes she will become a plant and be able to live on sunlight alone.  We no longer see this as a sign of being enlightened but as a symptom of being mad.  In-hye reflects on how she was able, as the older sister, to duck the violence from their father, and to watch what happened to Young –hye without intervening.   This leads her to feel less guilty – though there is certainly plenty of that – than a deep sense of empathy with Young-hye – so deep that she herself becomes suicidal and begins to have the kind of burning images that have haunted Young-hye’s sleep.

This book supports Harry Stack Sullivan’s one genus hypothesis – that we are all, including those who are most disturbed, first and foremost human and therefore more alike than different.  In fact, it goes Sullivan one higher, suggesting, I think, that that we are all first and foremost mad, and in that way more alike because we are fringy rather than alike because we are mainstream.

Setting this book in a collectivist culture that values conformity makes this point all the more stark.  Setting this book in a culture that views mental illness as deeply shameful because of its profound aberrance from the norm drives home the point that we can’t escape our essential humanity – and therefore madness.

This book is written by a Korean woman who spent some time learning her craft at the Iowa writer’s workshop.  It is translated by an English woman who was more intent on translating meaning than slavishly transliterating language, so it has been called, by some, an adaptation rather than a translation.

Just as it is hard to know Young-hye because we see her, largely, through other’s eyes, so it is hard to know the author as a representative of her culture when we hear her in loose translation and when she has learned her trade outside of her culture.  What is the Korean position on madness?  In what ways does this book represent that?  I don’t know.  The book was, not surprisingly, not well received in Korea, where it was seen as transgressive.  It has been awarded a Man Booker prize in translation, perhaps in large part because of its transgressive nature.

I think that Mr. Cheong is intended to be (I’m not sure to what extent by the author and to what extent by the translator) the stereotypical Korean man.  He is focused on fitting in and, in the process, creating a space for himself that allows him to become so invisible that he can do what he wants to do without interference from others.  This may sound foreign, but I continue to think that this is actually a way that people – perhaps men more than women – operate much more frequently than we might imagine.  I think the author and/or translator wants to point out that this way of being – far from being healthy – is deeply pathological.  Mr. Cheong cannot empathize with his wife – he all but berates her for the manifold ways that she interferes with his ability to serenely detach from the world – and when she doesn’t support him in his effort to do this, he divorces and abandons her – presumably to search for someone who is actually as bland as his wife appeared to be.

The artist, rather than being driven by an internal vision of himself as Mr. Cheong is, devotes himself to being open to the world.  This openness means that he is not a reliable partner to In-hye and it resolves into a position of being as unempathic towards her as Mr. Cheong was to Young-hye.  And let’s not even talk about Young-hye’s father and his crazy wish to force people to conform to the types of behavior they should emit.  If Mr. Cheong is remote and clueless, the artist is sensitive, but only to what the world evokes in him, not to what is occurring inside of others in the world around him.

In-hye, who becomes more sensitive to her feeling states, becomes overwhelmed by them.  Her son senses this – tuning into her suicidal thoughts – thoughts that In-hye doesn’t quite let herself acknowledge that she has.  Figuring out how to live within the confines of a culture, a family, and the parameters of our own mind, is incredibly challenging.  This book helps us appreciate just how difficult that can be.

I don't know whether it might not also be suggesting that enlightenment might be greeted as madness if it comes in the form of a woman, a vegetarian, or perhaps just by virtue of its being an aberration from what we expect.  Further, enlightenment might become madness as a result of our efforts to treat it - to drive it from the person, rather than helping them embrace and explore what it means to be serenely unaffected by the world; to realize, perhaps in part as a result of being traumatized and feeling angry and aggressive in return, that we are violent creatures and that we should consider trying to re-work ourselves in ways that might be considered to do violence to who it is that we are expected to be.  The danger of the diagnostic system that I referenced at the beginning of this post is that when we reduce our patients to being the symptoms with which they present and we then work to eradicate the symptoms, the patient can experience us as trying to eradicate them, which is, I think, how Young-hye experienced the mental health system.  In so far as she did, this was a re-enactment of her father's attempts to annihilate her and exacerbated her difficulties rather than helping her recover. 

As we sit in a world that is ravaged by a pandemic that we can't seem to take seriously enough to kill and by an environmental crisis that may be beyond repair, this book seems to offer an interesting perspective on our seeming inability to accept how radically we may need to rework ourselves in order to save our species - and how unlikely it may be that we can do something that will be viewed as madness by so many of us.  In-hye's final, empathic connection with Young-hye's dreams - something that is clearly too little too late, should be a warning to us that we need to here those among us who are having nightmares and acknowledge that we share them - before it is too late.

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Why Fish Don’t Exist: Lulu Miller’s journey to self-acceptance can be writ large.

 

Psychology of Lulu Miller's Why Fish Don’t Exist, Psychoanalysis of Why Fish Don't Exist, Depression and Recovery

 

A friend asked me to read this book mostly to fact check on the chapter that quotes psychologists and psychological studies.  I agreed to do that, and because it felt from the start like a lively book, I offered to read it aloud to the Reluctant Wife (she is also a psychologist) in part so she could weigh in on the psychological chapter, but also as a nice nesting activity (as if we needed more of those in the middle of the pandemic – though it is amazing how little we see of each other given that we are in the same house all day).

Long story short, we were not familiar with the psychologists or the studies that were cited.  The book’s author, an NPR science writer, Lulu Miller, acted as if this research were widely known and pivotal in the field.  If that’s the case, we’re not at the center of the field.  Entirely possible.  But, despite that, we were taken with the book, and, when I was talking this book up with a second friend who is an essayist and is writing a memoir/historical reference, which this is, he acknowledged that he had read it, but was quite critical of it.  “It doesn’t have complete sentences!  I had to include it as an example in my book proposal of something like what I am doing, but I was somewhat embarrassed to be doing that.  It isn’t well written.”

Yet, this book worked well for us, especially as we try to come to grips with a world that is increasingly fluid and as we are confronted with ideas that are novel and, at times, difficult to wholeheartedly embrace on many fronts.  Maybe because we were reading it out loud, we didn’t mind (and frankly didn’t notice) the syntax issues.  Given that Lulu writes for Radio, maybe this is a book that should be read aloud. 

The memoir part of this book focuses on a personal crisis – we might call it a midlife crisis – for Lulu.  She hits a depressive wall that seems insurmountable.  It is partly an existential wall.  A crisis of loss of meaning.  It involves the realization that all that you have believed is real and reliable in the world isn’t quite as stable and reliable as you had imagined it to be.  But the weird part is, what she has been told is not what she believed.  She was not told that you can rely on God, or family, or that the Cubs will never again win the pennant.  Her father told her the same thing that our first friend who recommended the book had been told by her own father.

Lulu’s father, a scientist, told her, when Lulu asked him at the age of seven what the meaning of life is, that the meaning of life is that there is no meaning.  And her father, a big guy, comfortable in the world, used this realization, much as Alexis Rose in Schitt’s Creek uses her knowledge that others don’t really see her, to more freely engage with the world.  His attitude was, nothing matters, so I am free to be whoever it is that I want to be. And he is, somehow, very comfortable with a world that is not predetermined and in which there are no givens – just a set of circumstances, randomly arrived at, that need to be navigated.

As freeing as her father experienced his realization to be – it had the opposite effect on Lulu.  She was made of different stuff than him.  Even or maybe especially at seven years of age, she wanted the things that she did to matter.  She wanted to live in a world where she could make her mark.  A world where she could be important.  A world where one's value could be determined by where you were relative to others.

As she grew older, it came to be that a particular aspect of that world that mattered is that she should be a person who was attractive to men.  When she, as a young adolescent, was judged to be unattractive – to not be at the top of the heap of attractive women – she felt (as many of us did) crushed.  And she bought into this evaluation that others had heaped on her – and she evaluated herself as being unworthy of others’ affection.

When, then, as a young woman, she fell in love with a “curly haired man”, he became someone she loved from a distance, pursued, and finally, much to her surprise and delight, captured.  The world was finally right.  He was just the kind of man she had always wanted to have a relationship with and, to her surprise, when she suggested that they have such a relationship, he was receptive.  She was now OK.  But then she screwed up.  She found herself attracted, in what seemed like a meaningless way, to a woman and she was, for one night, unfaithful to the curly haired man. 

Though in her mind this should have been forgivable, it was not.  The wonderful curly haired man was cut from the same cloth as she.  He apparently measured the world in terms of categories.  She was a woman who was reckless – he didn’t want to be with a reckless woman.  Not spoken, but perhaps thought: he didn’t want to be with a woman who was attracted to other women.  That would put her in another category.  I don’t know.

In any case, Lulu now found herself cast back into her feared space of being unattractive – at least to the curly haired man who now shunned her.  The attachment to the curly haired man had given her life meaning by putting her into a variety of spaces – being attractive, being connected and being able to rely on his support as an anchor point that helped her know that she was a chosen person – just as, ironically, her attachment to her father and all his goofy ways (that included the idea that none of us are chosen – we are all just randomly inhabiting spaces) had also given her a sense of being connected and living a life that had meaning.  But to return to her father’s ways and to accept her father’s conclusions about the meaning of life?  This would have felt like a self-betrayal.  She would become a chaos person – and this would mean that she was not chosen – that she was not at the top of somebody’s heap.  Instead it felt too close to feeling, as she did, that she was on the trash heap.

So, in a sort of compromise, Lulu began exploring the life of a scientist who was the antithesis of her father – an ichthyologist – a fish scientist.  She read a bit about him and his passion for organizing drew her to him.  He claimed to have identified fully one fifth of the species of fish known to man by the end of his life.  And even when his specimens were destroyed by the San Francisco earthquake (an earthquake that coincidentally destroyed my great-grandfather’s collection of North American bird’s eggs), his faith in his ability to organize and categorize was not shaken and he worked to fight against the chaos that Lulu’s father, relying on the second law of thermodynamics, assured her underlies the apparent order of the universe.

So, Lulu immersed herself in the world of David Starr Jordan, a person whom she hoped would be the anti-Dad.  A scientist like her father, but a person like herself who realized that the universe has order and, within that order, a hierarchy of meaning that organizes the world and clarifies who (and what) has value and who (and what) does not.  David Starr Jordan, the ichthyologist, the man who, when told by his puritanical parents to give up categorizing bugs, switched to categorizing flowers, the first president of Stanford University; a paragon of scientific credibility and determination; and a man who believed in a set order, became Lulu’s hero and obsessional focus of interest.  She would dig herself out of the hole she was in by using the spade that got her there to begin with.

And this was my second friend’s second criticism of the book.  Jordan was, in his mind, despite Miller’s attempts to pretend he was going to save her, flawed from the get go.  He could, he maintained, see the twist coming from a mile away.  OK.  I don’t deny that I could, too.  But I think my attitude toward it, like Lulu’s Dad’s attitude towards life being different from hers, was different from my friend’s.

I didn’t like David Starr Jordan from the get go.  Maybe I didn’t like David Starr Jordan because it’s just that I am, by nature, a messy guy.  Maybe I was jealous of his scientific and academic success.  Maybe I was envious of the home in Northern California that Stanford provided, and that he filled with plants and animals, easily moving from indoors to outdoors in that world with no winter. 

Unlike my second friend, I gave Lulu a pass on choosing a flawed hero because I wanted her to knock Jordan off that pedestal.  But I don’t think I was alone in that.  I think Lulu hired him to be the guy who could be knocked off the pedestal.  I think that I wanted what she did; to somehow find a way to come back into the orbit of her father – on her own terms, I hoped – not just because her father was a much more likeable guy than Jordan initially was and certainly than he turned out to be, but because we both know, to our dismay, that the world is entropic.  Indeed, part of the reason I am a reluctant psychoanalyst is because of the scientific, and therefore limit-based nature of the field.

And Lulu did have to knock someone or something off a pedestal in order to get better.  Freud’s description of mourning – which he likens to depression – which is what Lulu described herself as fighting – involves an interminable fight with an object (a representation of a person – or people – that have lodged themselves in our brain).  The fight is interminable because we can neither kill the person off (and be alone) nor can we rely on them, because they are no longer there.  So we get stuck in an endless battle that never seems to resolve.  If she had to cut someone loose to get free herself, I wanted it to be Starr.  But I think I knew she also would, in the process of doing this, loosen the tie both to her Dad and, weirdly, to herself.  But those ties would be loosened, not severed.  I was rooting for her to sever the tie with Jordan.

By the way, we are also of course talking about transference, that psychoanalytic concept that Freud observed where we discover in new people aspects that are reminiscent of people we have known before.  In this case, Lulu was hiring David Starr Jordan to stand in for the curly haired man – but more centrally for her seven year old self.  She wanted to emulate Jordan, to collect and organize and create a well-tended world, one where she was on top of it (including, perhaps, being the apple of her father’s eye) but this would mean that Jordan would, like the curly haired fellow, not have created a place for her as she actually was rather than as she wanted to imagine herself to be – and she, oddly, would also not be able to keep that place for herself.

OK, that was a bit heady, but the essential idea is that we have to get over ourselves.  But we absolutely do not want to do that – because we fear that this means that order that has supported and sustained us will disappear beneath our feet.  We will be lost without the organizing structures that school, and scouts, and our (not quite so scientifically oriented) parents have provided us with – and perhaps, Lulu argues, with the parts of our brain that are built to organize the world.  We create a sense of order where we have a necessary and important niche to occupy.

And this is perhaps the most useful part of this book – something that I think I (and we) have to learn over and over again.  To move forward, to learn something new, we have to unlearn what we already know.  We have, as a species, been working on this idea for a long time – I think the Platonic dialogue Meno includes this as a central theme – to be a good student, to be a virtuous person, to be someone of excellence, we have to recognized that what we know – what has held us in good stead – what we have relied on to get us from point A to point B – has been serviceable, but we need to get it that it is not the most effective means of transportation.

When we are seven, and our mode of transportation is the only one we have access to, being told that we should shed that vehicle is too scary for us to do.  How will we get from here to there without this particular boat?  But when we are thirty, things shift.  We begin to appreciate that there are multiple craft that will get us across the river – and that we might want to trade rowing for sail, especially when the wind is at our backs.

What Lulu learns is that being rigidly attached to categorizing leads to all kinds of hell.  Is it any accident that David Starr Jordan, the king of categories, let’s things slide when one of his buddies doesn’t follow the rules?  Does is make sense that he bullies those who would call him on it – threatening to point out that they are gay and ruining their careers?  Is it a surprise that word leaks back and Leland Stanford’s wife prepares to take David out of his job?  And does it surprise us that he responds by (perhaps) murdering her? 

(What?  Did I just say that the wife of the founder of one of our great institutions of learning – the Harvard of the west – was murdered?  By its first president?  Did I not warn that this was a spoiler alert?  Did I just drive us off a cliff?  Was this, though, the cliff – the details of which we couldn’t make out – but the outline was there – that both my second friend and I saw coming?  By the time it arrives, isn’t it a forgone conclusion?  Hasn’t Lulu already spoiled it?)

So dethroning David Starr Jordan is just the beginning (Oh, he is much worse than just a murderer.  There are other abominations that he is involved in that I won’t spoil for you with the particulars.  But they can all be traced to his incessant need to categorize and organize so that he ends up being at the pinnacle of every org chart).  And it is not really David who is being dethroned.  In the vernacular of the analyst, he is the transference figure and the anger that is directed towards him is displaced from the real person she is directing it towards.  And certainly it is the curly haired man she is angry at.  Or is it?  Perhaps he, too, is a displacement of her own categorizing wish – and the person that she needs to dethrone is none other than herself and her own judging ways with herself.  And that she is able to do this is, I think, the genius of this little text.

It is one thing to dethrone Jordan. We can say bad things about him and whoever else it is that does unethical and immoral things and we can disown him as one of those people.  It is quite another to recognize that he is, in fact, a mirror – a reflection of our own wishes, desires and nefarious capabilities.  We are not guilty of the sins of our ancestors because we have inherited their wealth, but we are guilty because we think and act like they do – and we don’t even know it.  The beauty of  Plato’s Meno is that we have to be stung – we have to be paralyzed – we have to realize that our way of functioning is problematic.

The beauty and the strength of this book is that Lulu is able to make that transformation not because someone makes her do it.  And she doesn’t make it completely.  The chance that she will not just metaphorically but literally kill herself continues to haunt her.  Maybe just shedding her earlier version of herself is not enough.  Maybe that earlier version is still alive and hostile enough towards her to judge her as guilty of having committed a capital offense.  She asks herself, then, if she has done something that is a crime against nature.

So it is reassuring for her to discover that the category of fish does not exist.  It turns out – much to her (and my) surprise, that biologists recognize that scaly things that swim is not a legitimate category.  That lungfish (there it is, right in the name) are more closely related to elephants than to tuna.  Go figure.  Nature does not appear to agree with what to us are very apparent categories.  The surface structure of things is not the same as the underlying order - and order that needs to be discovered through hard and careful work in a world that is constantly shifting and changing.

And this gives her some of the measure of the freedom that her father enjoyed to re-categorize herself.  She does not have to be the best or the brightest to be loved – and, somewhat paradoxically, to have value.  She actually doesn’t, in very fundamental and important ways, end up changing herself or her nature.  She simply seems to – as occurs in the most successful analyses – more fully inhabit herself.

So my reluctant wife is intending to use this book to help people who are struggling with issues of diversity equity and inclusion – especially members of the dominant culture.  She believes that this is a model of acceptance of disowned aspects of ourselves that will lead to acceptance of others.  If we recognize that we are all queer – if we recognize that we are all, in fact, prejudiced (for instance) and that we rely on prejudice to keep us afloat – but that it is an artificial buoy we are holding onto – this book may help us let go of that and lead more joyful lives.

That is the hope, anyway.

We let the first friend know that the psychological research cited in the book was not known to us.  We have not yet had a chance to talk with her about the book.  We will finally be able to get together without masks on soon and we are looking forward to being able to discover the ways in which she has both been challenged by and enjoyed the freedom that goes along with being raised in a family where the parameters of the universe were open to interpretation...

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