Jaws - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Watches a Classic for the First Time

Jaws was a cultural phenomena, and I must be one of the few surviving members of my generation who had not seen it.  Apparently it arrived in theaters after a new kind of blitz advertising where the airwaves were saturated the weekend of its release - it didn't matter what kind of viewing or listening you did, you heard about Jaws.  That weekend I happened to be camping in the woods or on some type of unplugged vacation, so not only did I not see the movie, I didn't really get it as a cultural phenomenon.  So my kids determined that my cultural literacy was in peril and insisted that movie night this week should revolve around Jaws.

And it is a cultural piece.  Released in the summer of 1975, it is clear from this vantage point that it was a post Vietnam protest coming-of-age movie for baby boomers.  As they (we) were transitioning from anti war protest and the kind of free love that reliable birth control supported to becoming parents and taking over responsibility for a system of authority that we had been not just opposed to and frequently disdainful of, we needed models of authority that we could identify with.

Enter Roy Schneider as the chief of police of the small island summer resort island of Amity.  He has retreated there with his family, feeling that he can have an impact in a community of a more reasonable size than New York; a nice hippie, back-to-the land sentiment.   And in the person of a cop, no less, just to underscore the authority aspect.   But a cop with a problem - he has chosen to live on an island but is scared of the water.  He is immediately confronted with ethical dilemmas as the shyster mayor insists that the beaches stay open even though a shark has eaten a skinny dipping hippie chic (The not so subliminal message: "OK, boomer kids, its time to grow up and distance yourself from skinny dipping, it'll kill ya!").  Schneider buckles to pressure and doesn't close the beaches and, even though he tries to protect his kids by keeping them in an inlet, he is responsible for the death of a kid and imperiling his own.  This being in charge is complicated stuff.

Enter Richard Dreyfuss as the whiz kid marine biologist, a privileged scientist with his own super modern yacht decked out for shark hunting.  Together he and the police chief clarify that there is a killer shark out there.  Then for obscure reasons that clarify that we have entered the world of allegory, they hire on with the local grizzled shark hunter, played by Robert Shaw. He represents the World War II generation who accomplished so much, but who seem crusty, bitter and ready to give orders.  These three get on Shaw's whaler and head out to get the Great White Shark, who might as well be named Moby Dick.  When Shaw bashes the radio so that we can't call in the coast guard, we know that we are locked into that allegory and that these three men will have to figure out how to defeat this monster - the source of the anxiety about whether life as we know it, filled with commerce and fun, can continue, or whether it (and we) will be destroyed.

The old man (Shaw) turns out to be drawn to shark hunting because he, like the Dreyfuss character, had an earlier traumatic interaction with sharks; in his case because, after he delivered the bomb that would end the war, his ship was sunk and he and three hundred others had to survive a shark attack - something that only about a third of them did.   So he has devoted his life to rectifying this horror, mastering it by killing, over and over, the threatening ones - seeking vengeance, but also mastery over his own sense of very real vulnerability.  His scars are the most harrowing, but all three are scarred, Dreyfuss from his early experiences, and Schneider in ways that are only hinted at.  He, as the hero, bears whatever scars each of us bring to the interaction - made visible in his fear of water, something that he must master on this trip.

This film feels very much like a Hitchcock film.  The framing of the film, but also the sense of "suspense" (verging on terror) is reminiscent of Hitchcock's work.  Hitchcock's father was friends with the local constable - and his father had the young Hitchcock locked up for some minor infraction.  Hitchcock is said to have stated that he wanted to engender in his viewers the feeling of terror that he experienced in the slammer, when he didn't know whether his parents would ever come to get him.  For Spielberg, whose direction of Jaws gives it the feel of a Hitchcock film, the original anxiety that he works to portray and then to manage is the fear that he experienced in the wake of his parent's divorce.  That fear, at least as portrayed here, feels to me like a fear of making one's way as an adult in a world without adequate models - having to figure out how to deal with whatever it is that is trying to bash in the sides of the boat - whatever it is that is threatening to drown you, and, in solving the problem without adequate direction, to use whatever it is that you have at hand to achieve a resolution, now matter how chaotic that means things become.

In the movie, Shaw throws everything but the kitchen sink at the monster, but it is still coming back for more, so he turns to the college kid - Dreyfuss - who enters into hand to hand combat, only to lose his weapon when he is caught by surprise, and, after being pummeled, is forced to hide and wait out the ultimate battle.  It is Schneider, clinging to a sinking ship who, after the shark consumes Shaw (in so far as Shaw is a father figure, what better Oedipal victory can there be than to have him eaten by his nemesis whom you are fighting?), who must confront him with the weapons available to him.  What does he use?  The very things that have almost destroyed him as he has naively tripped around the boat, almost causing them to explode.  Now he uses them to cause the shark to explode, and, at least for me, there is some sense of loss that this great warrior, this great adversary, this thing that Shaw wanted to take to the taxidermist as the trophy of all trophies, is destroyed.  I guess we get attached to the things we fear.

So this movie becomes a rallying point for a generation seeking to manage the fear that authority is corrupt, that it cannot be trusted (Watergate is in the immediate rear view mirror, and it is just the final fatal blow that follows My Lai, the bombing of Cambodia, but also the failures of the antiwar movement).  We are in danger of becoming paralyzed by our fears, or of being drawn into the water because this is, after all, why we have come to the Island, despite the risks.  The movie suggests that we can ally ourselves with those who have come before us, despite their apparent shortcomings, and despite, or maybe because of their scars, we can compare ours and join with them, and then use all that has come before: the hard won wisdom from the school of hard knocks; the fruits of modern technology; and our own, new version of Yankee ingenuity that integrates the new wonders, and we discover that we can step into the breech and perform, protecting ourselves and the world more generally from whatever it is that is knocking down the walls.  Despite the failings of the previous generation, despite their self interest to the detriment of the common good, and despite our fear that we can't do it - that we can't make it across the water - we can.

So, if this movie is an allegory or a dream, it is one that is reassuring because it takes our most primal fears and masters them.  We beat the monster.  My daughter told the story of her high school teacher, who stated that he was afraid to walk across the puddles to get to his car after seeing the film in the theater.  If so, I think he missed the point.  Yes, it is scary that there is stuff out there - could be in the nearest puddle - but Spielberg is telling us (and apparently enacted in the making of the film - the special effects sharks did not act as planned, so he increased the intensity of the experience by referring to the shark only obliquely) that we can handle whatever it is that life will throw at us.  We are capable.  Of course, the only way to get at that is to mobilize our most intense fears.  Doing that and resolving them in only two hours is quite a trick.  Perhaps it is easier to take the high ground watching the film 25+ years after its release.  I can see not just how the movie, but how the cultural moment will play out.  We will take the wheel, and we will navigate some treacherous waters, but will make progress.  If you ask me what will be coming in the next twenty five years, I will not be quite so sanguine and might find a similar, contemporary film more disturbing - not just because the effects would be superior - but because the feelings that would be stirred would be more contemporary.

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Richard Ford's Canada - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Learns How to Get Away with Murder

This book is about how to get away with murder - or three of them actually.  One is accidental, but two are not.  In one sense, I'm not giving anything away - the murders are mentioned in the second sentence of the book.  That said, they are mentioned in what I believe to be an intentionally misleading, and therefore clarifying way.  Thus a spoiler alert: the rest of this essay will necessarily interfere with a first reading of the book.

The book is told from the point of view of Dell Parsons, a 15 year old fraternal twin of Berner.   They are the children of Bev and Neeva.  This nuclear family is accidental.  Bev is handsome, blond, and Alabaman.  Neeva is small, Jewish, and the child of immigrants.  They hooked up in a night of passion that created their children and thus, unintentionally, their family.  They became an itinerant Air Force family, reliant on each other as they disdained the military culture and never got connected with the civilian culture because of their constant moves.  I think the unintentional creation of a family that must be self reliant, and one that does not have the resources to sustain the nuclear functioning of that family, is the real crime that is at the heart of the book.  The action, such as there is, revolves around two other crimes both referenced in the first two lines of the book:   "First I'll tell you about the robbery our parents committed.  Then about the murders, which occurred later."

The first two hundred pages of the book is about the robbery, the second two hundred is about the murders, and the final 25 pages are about the rest of Dell's life.  I believe that the robbery and the murder are mirror images of each other - the second is a reworking of the first - a reworking with a "happy" ending - Dell, who is "saved" by his mother's scheme, participates in the second crime, and creates a life that is unremarkable, but stable and consistent; a life that has a better trajectory than Berner's; she who is condemned to a life of four marriages, drug abuse, and barely being able to hang on.  The first crime leads to broader tragedy; the incarcerations of Bev and Neeva, her suicide, and Dell and Berner's being cast to the wind.  The protagonists of the second crime get away with murder without apparent consequence.

The first two lines suggest a book of action, but this book only qualifies as an action novel if you find watching paint dry riveting.  It is about the internal life of Dell, a kid whose mother sees him as being most distinctive in his ability, we learn very late in the book, to engage in "reverse thinking."  This skill, poorly directly defined directly by the author, is perhaps best exemplified by the telling of the book.  The twins throughout the book - Dell and Berne; the US, where the robbery takes place, and Canada, where the murders occur; Bev, who bungles the robbery, and Arthur Remlinger, the American in Canada Dell is shipped to, who gets away with murder (I bet you, like I, if you haven't read the book, thought Bev and Neeva, or maybe Dell, committed the murders); the two police officers who follow and arrest Bev, and the retired cops who suspect Arthur of the first murder, follow him, but are murdered and disposed of by him; etc.

I think the central twinning - the central "reverse thinking" - is the difference in the way that the current time crime is committed in each of the stories.  In the first, Bev considers taking Dell as his accomplice.  He has a well thought out plan, one that involves stealing a car from a ranch house that is currently unoccupied - with a vehicle with the keys in it in front of it, and using this vehicle as the get away car - returning to pick up the Chevy Bel Air that is the family vehicle - from the ranch, and then driving back across the border to the family home in Montana.  Dell is appalled when he learns that this was his father's plan, but also wistful about the possibilities, especially compared to the clear failure of the alternate plan, where his mother drives the family Bel Air as the get away car - a car that stands our in the pickup truck plains states world almost as much as she, a jewish immigrant, does - ultimately being part of what leads to their demise.

Arthur Remlinger is an enigmatic figure.  He is the person that Dell has been entrusted to in a sketchy plot that his mother hatched to keep Dell out of the orphan's home.  So, Arthur, his putative stepfather, emerges as a man who wrote anti union tracts while working for Chrysler at a job that compensated him well enough (thanks to the Unions) to attend Harvard, something that fell apart when he lost his job by arguing with the Union steward  (This mirrors Dell's retirement from the Air Force in part in relation to a sleazy scheme to sell stolen beef to the commissary).  Arthur responds to this setback by bombing what was to have been an empty union hall on the part of the anti union group he is connected to, unintentionally murdering the union official who had gone back to get a forgotten document.  On the lam, he, like Dell, lands in a business of marginal repute, but unlike Dell, he is successful.  Remlinger keeps the books at a sketchy hotel that services laborers, including their needs for bed, bath, and prostitutes, and the seasonal goose hunters who come up from the States.  He keeps the books so well, and scrupulously sends the profits to the owner so that, when the owner dies, the owner wills the hotel to Remlinger, who is able to finance his expensive tastes in clothing and to support himself and his girlfriend, an attractive artist who has had children in a previous marriage, but whose only "child" in this relationship is Dell, whom she looks out for after his arrival.

Dell mucks out the rooms in the hotel and lives in a shack near Remlinger's creepy lackey who sometimes shows up wearing make-up and guides the hunters to the geese.  Dell observes Arthur from afar and their relationship only begins to become real as the police detectives, following the cold trail of the union hall murder twenty years later, begin to bear down on Arthur.  Arthur (like Bev before him) takes Dell for long rides in the country.  He uses him as a wingman, including in the fateful encounter with the ex-cops.

The cops, thinly masquerading as goose hunters, are now barracked in Dell's old shack, after he has moved into a garret in the hotel.  Remlinger pretends - in a pretense that no one seems to buy - that Dell is his son, which of course, he is in this through the looking glass world I believe him to be in.  He is dismissed from the room before the shooting begins, but witnesses it from Remlinger's car and participates in the clean up, being most grossed out not by the blood, but by disposing of the toupee of one of the cops.

And somehow, and this remains a bit of a mystery to me, this second version, this revision, this reworking of the crime, has a better outcome.  The murderer gets away.  Dell is sent to Remlinger's girlfriend's brother's home, where he will be educated, something he has craved throughout the book.  He is cared for and, despite being necessarily derailed by the events - by the bank robbery, by the loss of his family, by witnessing the murders and the disposal of the bodies, and by being relocated again to another family - he is able to achieve something of the stability that he has craved and to have a life, while not worthy of the attention that the two crimes receive, suits him well enough - certainly better than her sister's fate serves her.

I do not understand all that is being portrayed here.  Part of what is delicious about this book, besides the quality of the writing, is that it unfolds in ways that are satisfying precisely because they are messy and intricate and, perhaps, unfathomable.  It seems to me that this is a meditation on guilt and reparation.  I think that Ford may be encouraging us to consider the implications of our decisions to have children.  We are guilty from the moment we conceive, because we are responsible for the most important part of the lives of our children - their childhood.  I think that Bev was guilty not so much for stealing meat, or for robbing a bank, but for not including Dell in his hijinks; for not recognizing that Dell was an essential part of his own life, which was necessarily and integrally linked with Dell and Berner's lives.  To put it slightly differently, Ford may be writing a morality play not as a diatribe against all that Dell stands for and, through that, a condemnation of intermittent and distant parenting, which Remlinger represents; but rather he may be imploring fathers, disconnected though they may be, not to disconnect from their children, nor to underestimate the capacities of their children to appreciate the complexities of life, especially when they are engaged in their own most difficult and even heinous tasks.  If the child is engaged, Ford may be telling us, there will be consequences, but they will leave the child with a sense of being responsible for their own destiny rather than feeling that he or she has been left to the whims of chance. Knowing, quite literally, as Dell does, where the bodies are buried, and who did it, allows a child to develop with a sense of agency.

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Freud's Last Session - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Learns about Freud, C.S. Lewis and God at the Playhouse

First came the book, "The Question of God", by Armand Nicholi, then the PBS series, and then, in July 2010, the off-Broadway production of the play, "Freud's Last Session" by Mark St. Germain.  We did not go see it when we were in New York, though it was on the list of things that we might have seen.  But then it showed up locally, and has sprung  up around the country.  The premise, first proposed in the The Question of God, is that there is a last conversation between Freud, who has been exiled by the Nazis to England, and a young English Don, C.S. Lewis, who has written some important essays about faith, but not yet become the author of such works as The Screwtape Letters (Used by I.H. Paul as the basis for a book about how to do psychoanalysis reviewed here) and The Chronicles of Narnia.

Nicholi is a psychiatrist at Harvard who teaches a seminar annually in which he and his students read Lewis and Freud and wonder about the validity of their arguments - Freud's against religion and faith, stating that they are defensive efforts to ward off our anxieties, particularly about death; and Lewis, a man who was an avowed atheist who converts after a series of conversations with various people - including theologians and J.R.R. Tolkien, with whom he is an Inkling - on a motorcycle ride to the London Zoo (sort of like Paul on the road to Damascus, I guess).  Nicoli's book, then, is a comparison of Freud and Lewis - including description of their ideas and their lives, and Nicholi imagines a discussion between them about faith.  The book, and perhaps to a lesser extent the PBS series, feel unsatisfyingly and somewhat surprisingly corrupted by the author.  His proselytizing is apparent.  He Believes with a capital B, and he further believes that your life will be improved if you Believe as well, and so his look at these two people, their lives and writings, are slanted by his wish to convince you that the believer's life is the more satisfying one.

It is a relief, then, that the play is more balanced.  It, too, imagines a conversation between the two men.  If such a conversation ever did happen (there is apparently some evidence that Freud did meet with an unspecified Don from Oxford in the last months of his life), there is no record of it and this is a purely fictional rendition of what might have taken place.  So, the first question, to my mind, is whether such a conversation is plausible?

From the perspective that Freud, one of the great thinkers of his generation, and one who devoted his entire career to exploring something that is, by definition, unknown and unknowable - the unconscious mind - and as someone who was fascinated by religion, also the study of something that is essentially unknowable, even if he denied the particulars of religion as he understood it as a plausible explanation of the world, I think it reasonable to think that he might have summoned an academic - a bright young man - who had experienced a religious conversion - to engage in a conversation.  He might have been curious about the evidence that this man had of religion's validity, just as he produced evidence of the unconscious functions and functioning of the mind.

Might Freud, as portrayed in the play, have been more vulnerable than he appears at other points in his life as he faced death?   Perhaps somewhat.  I think that the play takes tremendous liberties with what would have likely occurred in a conversation in order to introduce drama into what is actually a rare thing these days - a prolonged civilized conversation between two men - almost a Socratic dialogue.  And I think the drama helps the audience stay engaged, though (and I am not a typical theatergoer I suppose) the dialogue, and just the fact of the dialogue, is pretty gripping.

Does Lewis present data that is convincing to Freud?  No.  He makes a series of arguments - first that moral codes betray an underlying moral order to the universe - pointing to a deity - then that our desire for God proves God's existence (we desire food and water, and they exist) - next that the life of Jesus is NOT a myth - in part because it is not constructed as a mythological narrative, so it must have been factual - and then they end by discussing the existence of evil in the world and the ways in which that is consistent or inconsistent with the existence of God.

The play portrays Lewis as having an impact - a subtle one, but an impact none the less - on Freud.  Freud does not miraculously convert, but he does become more open to aesthetic components of his own experience - to music concretely, but perhaps, from Lewis's perspective, to joy.  It is a satisfying, if circumscribed experience, and it certainly falls far short of answering the question of God's existence.  And that should come as no surprise to the viewer.

What it does do, though, is to portray these two men, Freud in particular, exposing them as individuals and their work, to new generations of theatergoers.  This does not mean that the theatergoers are young, at least based on the experience of seeing two performances locally, but none the less theatergoers are curious about Freud - who he was and how he has affected our lives.  He is known - as Einstein is known - as one of those people whose ideas have shaped the modern world.  But he is not known, at least to the members of these two audiences who stayed after to discuss the play in a talk back session - in any detail, either as a historical figure nor in terms of how he has directly contributed to what we know about the functioning of the human mind and how to help improve its functioning.  This play, which presents Freud at the end of his life and includes many historical elements about the man that are puzzling but also interesting, may help people become more familiar with a character who is, in fact, more important in their lives than they know.

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Love Actually - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Engages in a Holiday Movie Tradition

The reluctant analyst and the reluctant wife annually, more or less, engage in a holiday viewing tradition.  When we can find time away from the kids (this actually is a movie that, were it not for some necessary and in some ways silly nudity would be wonderful for our teens), we escape for a couple of hours into the romantic fantasy world, set during the Christmas season, of Love Actually.  This star studded British comedy (Emma Thompson, Hugh Grant, Liam Neeson, Colin Firth, Keira Knightley, Alan Rickman, Laura Linney, and a bunch of really good character actors) seems like it should be an ensemble piece, but it is more a collage of individual love stories woven together by the affiliations that the players have with each other.  The stories range from the absurdly carnal - the British loser who goes to a random bar in Wisconsin and, because of his cute British accent, beds not one but four women; to the touchingly sweet - the naive couple that are playing stand-ins in an X-rated film, so get to know each other while wearing no clothes and yet manage to engage in an innocent love affair, and the writer who falls in love with the woman who is cleaning his home and she with him even though neither can speak a word of the other's language.  In between are stories of love on the rocks and how couples survive, romantic love shelved by fraternal devotion, the love of the rock star for his fat manager  (and of the masses for an aging rocker who is cheeky), a story of first love guided by paternal love, the love of a hopelessly klutzy prime minister for one of his staff, and forbidden love left unconsummated because of respectful friendship.  Left on the cutting room floor, but available in the out takes, are more love stories - stories of maternal love and committed love in the face of death.  It is a banquet - a feast of love.  More love than one has the right to imagine - and it is sandwiched between the opening and closing sequences of anonymous lovers, parents and children, and friends greeting each other at Heathrow airport.  As Hugh Grant intones over the opening montage, "Love actually is, all around."

This cornucopia of love, necessarily surfacy in any individual story, builds, one after the other, to a climax of not one but three (or is it four? or five?) powerfully told moments of romantic consummation - the moment when the lovers acknowledge their love for each other - the moment when they pledge their troth - the moment when what has been private, hidden, hoped for, feared, but deeply deeply desired becomes public, shared, acknowledged - and a feeling of unbridled joy, of deep and powerful satisfaction, of happiness that moves us to tears occurs.  And in that moment - or these moments - layered one on top of the other, the director/author, Michael Coulter, is addressing the question that my esteemed British analyst colleague Peter Fonagy has asked the analytic community to consider - it is a question one of his patients posed to him - why is sex alone so much less satisfying than sex with another?  Now this question could also be phrased, "Why is the love of another so much more satisfying than self love," but I think that the sex part is essential both to Fonagy and to Coulter - there is something about sex itself that is perhaps the most powerful cohesive agent known to man.  And why is that?

For Freud, the answer was easy.  Sex is the engine.  It is the primary drive that powers everything else.  In fact, all of the loves, not just the romantic but the fraternal, the maternal, and the star worship depicted in the film are, for Freud, expressions of the sublimated sexual drive.  But Freud, too, struggled with the question of what love for and from the other has to offer that self love doesn't.  For Freud, the first sexual act was the pleasurable feeling associated with breast feeding - or its equivalent - and thumb sucking became the first masturbatory activity.  Sometimes accompanied by rhythmic ear tugging, this pleasurable activity was, to him, clearly a self controlled position where the infant could provide a feeling state analogous to the deep satisfaction that the warmth of maternal care - and milk - produces, without the bother of having to rely on someone else to provide it.

So, without getting caught in some of the logical loops that derailed Sigmund, we can ask, "What is the milk of love - what is the nourishment of being pleasured and known by and knowing and pleasuring another that leads to the pleasure that is so much more satisfying than providing pleasure for ourselves?"

The answer that this film provides, at least to this viewer, comes in the form of satisfaction that the ending provides.  To me, the end of this movie is more satisfying than the usual cotton candy of a romantic comedy ending.  Aristotle proposed that the satisfaction of tragedy is the catharsis that comes from identifying with the protagonist.  Catharsis is a BIG experience - it is an emotional cleansing.  Romance doesn't usually provide this sort of experience.  Roxanne, another favorite rom-com, is great until the last ten minutes.  Once she says I do, the air goes out of the movie.  In part, I think, because we don't have access to the manifold ways in which she means that - C.D. has sent her hundreds of letters and she has known him in many many ways.  But we see two people, somewhat two dimensional, on the screen - excited to know each other, but incongruous.  She, beautiful but ditzy, having fallen for the dumb attractive guy who used C.D.'s words, and he, smart but wearing a stupid nose.  Suddenly the identification falls away and we are looking not at two loved or desired people, but at two people who will have to find a way through life together - and that seems full of problems and they seem, somehow, ordinary - no longer imbued with the tension that the anticipation of their knowing each other provided.

In Love Actually,  the climax romances all share important components.  Each involves a bumbling lover - the writer who has been cuckolded by his brother and who now woos a woman with what he thinks is pidgin Portuguese but is really just pigeon, the Prime Minister who feels more like his Aunt Mildred than the powerful leader of a nation, the boy who has a crush on the most popular girl in school but fears she doesn't even know his name - and in each case the beloved falls in love with the inept lover not in spite of their ineptness, but, in part, because of it.  Each is inept in his own way, each is competent in his own way, and we (or perhaps I should speak for myself here - I) identify with each of them.  And in the multiple identifications, the mirroring of true love may start to emerge - it is not just that the other can know and appreciate this about me - not just that they can know and appreciate that - but they can know more and more of me and, as they do that, they continue to want to be with me.  Simultaneously, as I get to know this other person, more and more of them is revealed.  They are glorious in ways that I didn't even know - and I already thought they were pretty glorious.  The layering of the discovery process, the depths of the knowing - and sexuality is certainly one of these - that she or he can know me and want to know me, to touch me, to pleasure me - to respond with pleasure to my touch, is sublime.  I feel truly awake and alive - physically, sexually, emotionally, cognitively, and in every other way, in the other's presence.

This experience, while not as cathartic as the identification with the tragic hero, is hard to portray on screen - hard to present as an analogue in part because it is so particular - he or she loves ME.  Also because, a propos of this discussion, the viewer is, ultimately, alone.  Watching others engage in an activity is not the same - even with the powerful identifications that occur with attractive and vulnerable movie stars.  But this movie comes close - closer - to the experience of love in part because of the multiple plots, the multiple identifications that get resolved one after the other - it is like multiple orgasms of consummation - and I think that reflects the experience of falling in love - a spiral of discovering multiple overlapping connections - multiple ways of being accepted, touched, appreciated and appreciating as the single relationship unfolds between two complex individuals who reveal and discover multiple aspects of themselves, in some ways multiple selves, to bring to that single relationship.    And the conclusion of the movie - with each of the couples reuniting at Heathrow airport - continues the sense of more - one analytic writer has described love as the feeling of excess - that the basic resolutions involve, and they fade into the tens and, in the final montage, hundreds of reunions between actual people at Heathrow - people who are less luminous on screen - their skin is not as clear, their eyes are not as bright - but the love that they feel for each other is real, palpable, and all the more intense for their having recently tasted the loneliness of separation and for now dipping into the joy of reunion - of connecting again with people that we know and love, and who know and love us.  This bridging, this sharing, is much more profoundly joyful than being the emperor of our own well controlled, pleasurable but ultimately empty kingdom.

Love does not sustain this peak - this high - we don't live happily ever after.  The other also discovers things we don't want them to know - and things we don't want to know about ourselves.  We discover that they are not all we imagined them to be.  In that sense, perhaps Roxanne, with its flat final ten minutes is a better reflection of part of the reality of love, but in lasting loves - in those that sustain us - we do continue to have reunions - to rediscover ourselves and the other in ways that are enchanting - in ways that give us hope and joy in living.  Not a bad thing for the reluctant wife and I to rediscover in our annual rite of movie watching...

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here. For a subject based index, link here.

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The Nature of Determinism - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Leads a Case Seminar

Presenting our clinical work to others is one of the most terrifying, and sometimes fun things that we analysts do.  There is a nakedness when we do this.  We are showing our work, and, while there will hopefully be moments where others appreciate and understand what we are doing, there will almost inevitably be criticism, which is hopefully presented in the spirit of being constructive, but exposes areas we have not thought of, interventions we did not make, and ways in which we have somehow failed the people, our patients, about whom we deeply care and whom we are invested in  helping.  Presenting our work to our peers can, thus, be terrifying.  I believe that the experience of presenting to our peers is parallel to the terror our patients feel when they are in a psychoanalytic - or, indeed - any exploratory therapy session.  The experience of terror is manifold, and I want to address one layer of it, though there are certainly many others.  When I ended my own analysis, I was flabbergasted at the amount of energy that I had.  On reflection, I surmised that one aspect of the increase in energy was that - though I consciously felt like I had settled into my analysis and had woven it into the context of the rest of my life - in fact, I think that I was girding my loins on a daily basis - preparing to see and be seen in a more naked and raw form, and that this was psychically expensive.

This week I substituted as the facilitator/teacher/supervisor in an ongoing clinical case conference.  The presenter was describing work that she was doing with a man, a man who had considerable difficulties and a man whom she was just beginning to get to know.  I noticed that the therapist and the man were working together to understand the man and how he functioned.  That is, the therapist would offer an interpretation of how the man had engaged in a particular action and she and the man together would evaluate how it is that he had done that.  The group, too, was engaging with the therapist in this way - how can we understand this man.  On the surface, this was a very psychoanalytic process, both between the therapist and the patient, and in the collegial interaction that the seminar participants were having with each other.  What, it can seem, could be more analytic than to be trying to understand what is causing a series of behaviors on the part of a client?  But I found both the clinical material and the discussion to be frustrating.  I felt, somehow, that we were missing something in the consulting room and now in our meeting room by focusing - I think prematurely - on the root causes of the behavior.

As I thought about it, and then talked about it, I realized that my frustration was based in part on the fact that we did not have access, in these interactions, to the man's feelings - to what his direct experience of the moment and of the world was.  I felt that the therapist's focus on the dynamics that were underlying the interactions the man was having felt premature or even defensive to me.  When I presented this position, there was some sense that it made sense and then we worked to try to get an understanding of why the therapist was working in this way (OK, I guess it's just what psychoanalysts do...).  I quickly realized, and pointed out to the group that we were again engaging in the same activity, but now it was taking place between the therapist and me.  That is, we were wondering about what the dynamics were that were leading the therapist to wonder with the patient about what was causing his behavior.

I asked the group and the presenter if we could try to approach the material differently.  I then asked her what she was feeling in the room.  She said that she wasn't sure, but she thought that she was feeling terrified.  This man she was treating was potentially suicidal and was alienating people who were important to him at work.  She wanted to support him so that bad things didn't happen.  She had, very early in the hour, offered a summary statement of some material that the patient had presented, and he experienced her observations, which the group did not see as deep at all, as coming in from left field - specifically he was relating what a person had told him and the content of that included a brush off.  When the therapist noted the brush off, he was surprised by it - he hadn't heard it and further was a little puzzled by how the therapist had heard it in that way - again something that was obvious to all of us in the room as a brush off.

So, as we talked further, it became clearer that the therapist was terrified not just of the circumstances surrounding this particular hour, but perhaps of the patient's demonstrated inability to accurately perceive and make use of information that others provided in emotionally charged interactions (as a therapy hour can be).  To allow him to describe his experience of the world can, then, become scary because we are moving further and further from what moors and tethers us to the world.  It felt like it would be better - meaning safer, and more supportive, to tell him about this world - through interpretations and through working with him to create a shared understanding of how he operates than to simply listen to his distorted understanding of the world, not knowing just how badly distorted it is.

This was a new understanding of what the therapist had been doing with the patient.  It was based not on her articulation of what she intended to be doing, but on discovering what was occurring - at least partly unconsciously - between the two of them.  Moving from the conceptual to the concrete, and simultaneously moving from the intellectual to the emotional, with the therapist trusting that this would be helpful, allowed us to think differently about what was taking place in the consulting room, and allowed something different to happen in the room between the therapist and I.  We had a new, shared understanding of what had happened, and we were more directly engaged with each other.

At this point, one of the participants asked a question that is typical for case conferences.  "So, what would you have done differently."  I was stumped.  I didn't have an answer, and I thought it would be unkind to offer an alternate way of intervening.  But the real reason for my being stumped didn't emerge until after the case conference.  And that was, there was no other way for the therapist to have intervened.  Given who she was, and who the client was, at that moment she did the best that she knew how to do.  She may have thought about other options - don't we often do that when we are engaged in any kind of conversation - but she could not, I don't believe, have said anything other than she did.  That is the nature of psychic determinism.  We do what we are determined to do.

This then, becomes the reason for a consultation or for a supervision session or for reading about the analytic process.  By engaging with other sources, we expand the possible ways of intervening.  The question is not what I would have done differently in that session, but what the analyst has available to do in the upcoming session that she might not have had before.  Will she be able to feel less tied to figuring everything out and be able to float a bit more on the sea of this man's thoughts?  Will that prove useful or it will it unmoor him and her?  Does he need the kind of work that she is doing with him?  Will this become apparent to them if she let's loose of the reins a bit?  Or might he become better able to describe his world when he is less worried about making sense of it?

It might seem that some of the questions in the last paragraph are rhetorical - as if I know what the answer is and am asking to make some kind of point.  In fact, I intend them as actual questions - questions that will, depending on what emerges from the interaction between the analyst and analysand if the analyst does engage differently, inform the analysis as it moves forward in an iterative process.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.   For a subject based index, link here.

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The Life of Pi and Getting a Dog: The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Contemplates the ways that Life Imitates Art

The Life of Pi

We live in an urban neighborhood, one that was once grand, and still is, but it is now surrounded by decidedly mixed neighborhoods and ours becomes, periodically, the target for individuals or groups.  Most recently a group of teenagers has been going around the neighborhood, casing houses, and returning to those that are not well protected to rob them.  I stupidly left a basement door open after a weekend of working in the yard, and these kids discovered that and returned to rob us.  The reluctant wife was, understandably, furious about this (as was I).  She also felt violated and concerned about our well - being.  So she decided that we should act on a long held notion of getting a dog - not someday, but now.  She fell in love, on an internet website for adopting dogs saved from the pound, with Mack, a two year old bull mastiff mix who is, in person, a handful.  He is a delightful, exuberant dog who has, in the words of our dog trainer, not learned his manners, and our job is to teach them to him.  But to do this, we have to establish dominance and maintain it on a consistent basis.

That is also the task of Pi, in the book and now movie Life of Pi.  Named Piscine Molitor Patel after a beautiful swimming pool his Uncle enjoyed in Paris, Pi shortened his name when Piscine, which sounds like pissing when pronounced, became a way for his schoolmates to snicker at him.  The aggressive reclaiming of his identity by transforming it and owning it is a beautiful foreshadowing of what will be the center of the later narrative.

Born and raised in French Colonial India, an economic downturn leads the late adolescent Pi's family - he has an older brother, his mother who is the botanist in the family business, a zoo that his father, a business man, runs - to leave the country on a freighter with the animals from the zoo which they will sell to establish a new life in a new country.  They never get the opportunity to do that because the freighter sinks in a terrible storm and Pi ends up on a lifeboat inhabited by himself, an orangutan, a hyena, a zebra, a rat, and Richard Parker, a bengal tiger.  The zebra has a broken leg and is eaten, shortly after the rat, by the hyena, whom the orangutan hits.  The hyena then kills the orangutan and Richard Parker emerges from below the canvas, where he has apparently been sleeping off the effects of the seasickness medicine he was overdosed on, to kill the Hyena, leaving only he and Pi to face over two hundred days together on the open sea as they drift across the Pacific to finally make landfall in Mexico.

Pi was initially taken by Richard Parker when he shows up at the zoo.  He imagines that he sees some intelligence in his eyes and tries to connect with him.  Pi's father disagrees and asserts that Pi is merely seeing the reflection of his own soul in the eyes of the tiger.  Being stuck on a lifeboat with a tiger and a bunch of crackers let's Pi test his father's theory and discover how we mirror each other - as humans and as animals - as we engage with each other and, in the process, discover who it is that we are.

As harrowing as this story is - and it is harrowing, and here I offer a spoiler alert, it is not nearly as harrowing as the alternate plot.  Pi reveals this alternate to a writer who has come to hear his tale at the urging of Pi's Uncle.  After telling of surviving with Richard Parker, and Richard Parker disappearing into the Mexican jungle without so much as a look backwards, Pi tells the alternate version - that he was not on a lifeboat with animals at all, but with a sailor, the surly and subhuman cook from the freighter and his mother - oh, and a rat.  The sailor, like the zebra, had a broken leg.  The cook, after eating the rat, killed the sailor, in part to use his meat as bait - and perhaps to dine on him - and then kills Pi's mother in rage when she slaps him for his barbarian behavior.  Pi, a vegetarian pacifist, is horrified and angry.  When the cook leaves the knife that he used to kill the sailor unguarded, Pi murders him, unleashing a part of himself, portrayed by Richard Parker in the first version of the story; a wild, unbridled part that he is absolutely terrified by, but that also gives him the will to survive on the open sea as he struggles with and tries to protect and save himself - a person who is more complicated and dangerous than he ever had any idea.

The book and now the movie are brilliantly done.  The images in the movie powerfully bring to life a representation of the inner world that is rarely attempted on screen.  And it does so by persuasively telling the story of a boy surviving on a lifeboat - and the raft that he makes of life-preservers that he makes to float alongside the lifeboat - with a tiger - for over 200 days.  The boy must learn, in very tight quarters, to master the tiger.  To create separate spaces; his raft, but also places that he pees around on the boat; to kill fish (despite his abhorrence of killing); to leave an island they discover that would house them indefinitely, but that would also consume him; to wrestle with this animal and to care for it - despite his fear of it and his anger at all that it has destroyed.

The book and movie work on this level.  My struggles with Mack, while not as dramatic, mirror Pi's struggles with Richard Parker.  When Mack, who initially was friendly and more or less willing to go along with the program, first objected to a command, took a nip at me, and then growled and barked, I was both scared, but also angry and ready to assert myself; to become, in the current vernacular, the alpha dog.  I think that, when I do that in the rest of my life, I do it in such a cleverly hidden way that I can delude myself into thinking that I am not being aggressive.  I can, for instance, ask my son if he wants to take out the trash when what I am really saying is, "Take out the trash."  But with Mack, when he jumps on my bed and starts pulling at the covers with his teeth, my grabbing him in an instant by the scruff of the neck, lifting him into the air, then dropping him to the floor and forcing his neck to the ground to show him who is boss, all while saying quite firmly (bystanders might say shouting) "No, bad dog," there is no hiding my own aggression, my assertion, my commanding the situation.  For Pi, this is magnified, both by the contrast with his consistent, deeply held pacifism, and by the extreme aggression with which he has to engage a tiger - not to mention the fear that he will become his next meal.

I can return my Richard Parker to the pound.  The thieves have been caught, and, for now, there is no imminent threat.  Pi could, theoretically, kill Richard Parker, until we remember the other version of the story.  The only way to kill Richard Parker is to kill himself - an act of violence that will require Richard Parker's cooperation - meaning he will need to engage his own violence to bring about his death, but he is working to tame - to limit - to humanize - the very primitive force that he would need to kill himself.  And the convolutions in that last sentence illustrate the wonderful thing about this narrative device:  Yann Martel, the author of the book, and Ang Lee, the director of the movie, have figured out how to portray internal, psychological struggles, struggles that are ineffable and difficult to witness, even or especially from the inside, in vivid, concrete fashion.  Because it is through our engagement with the world, whether talking with our friends (or analyst), training a dog (or a tiger), or surviving in an open craft in the Pacific, that our unconscious selves emerge, guiding the (somewhat) conscious actions of engaging with, battling, anticipating and parrying to maintain our physical and/or psychological well being.  And thus the story of Richard Parker brings to life what would otherwise be a dramatic but invisible story, one that we would not be able to follow - the struggles between a man's conscience and his knowledge of the actions he engaged in when enraged as he is swept across the ocean by wind and waves.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.     For a subject based index, link here.

 Post script:  We did ultimately return the dog.  When it was continuously threatening and scaring the children - jumping on their beds and growling at them - and tearing up whatever was in reach while we were out of the house and it was caged - it was too much even for the the reluctant wife.  Much later we did a sweet dog that was found after it had survived one of the coldest winters on record on its own.  It is small enough that I can comfortably return to being largely unaware of how frequently I assert my alpha dogness.

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), if you are on a computer, hit the X button on the upper right of this screen and, on the subsequent screen, hover your cursor over the black line in the upper right area and choose the pop out box that says subscribe and then enter the information.  I'm sorry but I don't currently know how you can subscribe from a mobile device - hopefully you have a computer as well...

Stegner's Angle of Repose - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reads a Pulitzer Prize Winning Novel

Life is hard.  It doesn't matter - rich or poor, privileged or not.  Life is hard.  I was not excited about reading another book about America - another Pulitzer prize winner.  I was tired of hearing how wonderful we rich Americans are after having seen us through the lens of the poor in Nicaragua this summer (see posts starting here about that).  But a friend recommended this book about the American West.  It is long, and  captivating.  It tells of how the west was won - not by cattle barons, and not by gunslingers (though those certainly also won the west), but by engineers.  Oh, the engineers wore six shooters, and used them when they had to, but primarily they mapped mines and built dams; they created places for people to live, and figured out how to get water to parched soil so that wheat would grow and livestock would be fed.

The Angle of Repose in the title is the angle of a dirt hill, like one that would hold up a ditch or a dam, and the angle of repose is the angle at which dirt does not roll down the slope.  This is the most efficient angle to use - using a shallower angle requires more dirt, while using a steeper angle causes the dam to self-efface until it collapses.  But it is also a metaphor that is used in various ways.  One application might be the angle a person takes towards themselves that allows them to live with themselves and with others.  Too harsh, and they can't live up to strictures, too lenient and they consistently fail themselves and others.  Written in the first person, the book is primarily about two people: the protagonist, a historian writing in 1970 about the life of his grandmother, which he knows both from having known her when he was a child and from her letters and other records which he is now organizing and turning into the second story, one told in the third person, about her.

The author is looking to his grandmother, who lived before Freud's work (and other factors) ushered in the changing mores that the author self consciously complains about.  The author speculates about the conscience (and consciousness) of people in the late 1800s - people who lived in a more rule governed time.  The author is writing across multiple divides, however.  He is a man writing about a woman.  He is also, almost in spite of himself, a citizen of the late twentieth century - a post Freudian/post modern time, writing about people who lived in the modern era.  From that position, he can't write in the style of the time about the people of that time.  He can't know their subjectivity in the ways that authors in that period pretended to know them, nor can he impose a subjectivity upon them.  He can speculate about the subjective experience of his heroine, and he does, but he also knows that it is much more complex than he can portray and likely than even she knows.

Almost twenty per cent of the book is written by an actual historical figure about whom the fictionalized account is written.  Her letters - beautiful, poetic, and indirect (She lived before Freud pushed towards an era that, probably to his personal horror, includes Oprah-openness as a hallmark) - make up a significant portion of the book.  Some criticized the awarding of the Pulitzer to a man who did not write a big chunk of the work.  OK, then, two pretty talented writers teamed up to write this book.  Mary Hallock Foote also deserves credit, because she lends her voice to this work, which is essential to it. As skilled and talented a writer as she is, her writing hides as much as it exposes - or refers to states through metaphor rather than describing them directly.  And she is a romantic - imagining the world to be a better place - imagining the friends she has left on the East Coast to be living an idealized existence - in ways that seem, at times, implausible.

A book of this size and scope - a book that takes on so many things, that is simultaneously so complex and readable, is a book that I naively expected to deliver a good solid conclusion - to wrap things up in a way that makes them comprehensible.  But the question that drives the narrative of both the characters in the 1880s and 90s and the characters in 1970, is one that is left unresolved.  And I can't imagine that it would be otherwise.  The question is multi-layered.  On the surface it is a question about guilt and forgiveness.  How do we forgive ourselves?  How do we allow others to forgive us?  How do we forgive others?  Concretely, the question is put in the form of a mysterious illness which is petrifying the 1970 figure - the writer - who suffers from a disease that is locking up his bones, making him more and more constricted - unable to bend or turn or see behind him, and, filled with anger and spite that emotionally constricts him - anger and spite that are based on a very real, very painful betrayal, can he rise above this?  Can he become something that he is not - flexible, malleable, and able to connect with others - including in and through his and their vulnerability?  Do we, despite our novel ways of thinking about ourselves and others, still have a character based core - a deep seated conscience - that keeps us locked up in ourselves and isolated from those around us?

For the author, in the 1800s there were external constraints - the constraints of society that simply did not allow marital ruptures, for instance, to occur.  But more importantly, there were constraints of character - and a belief in character - both the character of others, but one's own character.  These constraints came from the depictions of people in novels and in the proper upbringing that many in the upper classes received.  And a central part of this was the construction of a self.  This led to a self consciousness that created a narrative arc that was unbending, no matter what else might occur internally or in the environment.  When things got in the way, the person reassessed the goals and strove for them.

The author's grandfather and grandmother faced a myriad of challenges.  They lived in the developing west and, though they were living privileged lives relative to those around them, they were living in primitive conditions.  His grandmother, raised to be a lady, functioned as one in a whole variety of primitive conditions, convinced, especially early on, that their sacrifices would be rewarded.  Life, especially among those worthy of the kind of consideration that this book gives, involves self conscious self construction that would have a certain kind of integrity and would demand that of others.  Now the book is not as naive as this sounds.  There are many in the book who do not have character of this sort.  But the heroes do.  And, as heroes do, they have tragic flaws.

The author's grandmother, a woman who was privileged through birth, natural talent and education to live as very few women lived, married a man who, though virtuous in many ways - he was hardworking, a brilliant engineer, and highly principled - was not verbal in the way that she was - he was not what we would now call her soul mate, though they were bound together as if by baling - or even barbed - wire, and though he loved her deeply and unswervingly; she was lonely.  She imagined more - believed herself to be deserving of something greater - something warmer, more responsive, more engaging.  And she found this, or thought she did, in her husband's doppelgänger, a look alike who worked for her husband and who, while in love with her was loyal to both of them.

Suffice it to say that no good came of this triangle, and the question of the grandfather's ability to forgive the grandmother becomes central, though I think that her ability to forgive herself is at least as important.  In any case, the primary question is whether the grandson, betrayed by his wife, can display the kind of keen empathy towards his betrayers that he does for his grandmother.  And can he, a grotesque, twisted by his anger and his disease - rise above himself to re-engage with his child, but more importantly, his wife, who has betrayed him?

Steven King was hit while walking on a rural Maine road and severely injured by a driver who was reaching into the backseat to both fend off his dog and grab another beer.  An interviewer commented that the driver sounded like a Steven King character, and Mr. King corrected him; he stated that any human being is more complex and more real than the best character that he could construct.  Stegner, I think, recognizes this as well.  To ask deeply human questions of any character narrows the question.  Our humanity is more complex than any character's handling of it will allow us to appreciate.

Stegner may also be asking us to think about our own character.  Are we strong enough to go where our ancestors, as gifted and capable as they were, could not dare to go?  Can we, with the privilege that they have bequeathed us, exceed them?  Does the privilege they have afforded us serve as a platform from which we can exceed them?  I think this is a question that Stegner does not know the answer to.  And we will answer it based on the complex way that we live out our lives - both individually and collectively as a culture.  Will privilege lead us to waste what we have been given or will it spur us on to new heights?      

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.   For a subject based index, link here.

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), if you are on a computer, hit the X button on the upper right of this screen and, on the subsequent screen, hover your cursor over the black line in the upper right area and choose the pop out box that says subscribe and then enter the information.  I'm sorry but I don't currently know how you can subscribe from a mobile device - hopefully you have a computer as well...