Hot Yoga: The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Becomes a Novice

The reluctant wife has enthusiastically dragged me to hot yoga - the modern version of the Indian practice of stretching/exercise that is done in a room that is heated to nearly 100 degrees F. and 40% humidity.  Not sure what to expect, but thinking it might be relaxing and improve my flexibility, I put on my gym clothes and tagged along.  What a workout!  I was drenched in sweat in no time and confused by how strenuous the simple act of doing this stretch and then that one could be.  I was also confused, but intrigued, by the instructions from the various class leaders we would encounter over the next few weeks.  There was a mishmash of languages - the poses were described in a foreign tongue, which I expected - but also directions that just didn't seem to make sense, like "relax the muscles at the backs of your eyes."  Do I have muscles there?  If so, do I have conscious control over them?

While not knowledgeable, by any stretch of the imagination, about yoga, I was not completely naive.  I knew that it was more than simply a course of exercise - and also knew that it was being publicly advertised and presumably privately consumed as an exercise routine, like jazzercise or aerobics at the gym.  I don't know this for sure because there is no talking before class - it is presented as a meditative activity - everyone enters the room and stretches out on their backs on a mat and waits quietly for the instructor to enter the room before continuing the practice with other choreographed poses (lying flat on your back is the first and usually the last or next to last pose), so I haven't talked to the other people in the class to find out why they are there.

And yet yoga is more than a physical exercise.  It is a mental one as well - one that is tied to various religious practices, practices that have been deeply explored by psychoanalytic thinkers as they have compared Eastern conceptions of consciousness with psychoanalytic insights about the functioning of the mind.  And this morning, my favorite instructor, Joe, who frequently makes the most bizarre recommendations, noted that the end point of the practice of yoga is not physical health, though that is part of it, but bliss.

What a goal!  And is this the goal of psychoanalysis?  The position that we analysts have patients assume, lying flat on their backs, looking at the ceiling, is similar to that first and last yoga pose of each session.  We try to limit the physical stimulation that would interfere with a person being able to follow their thoughts - and we also try - through our silence - to limit the interruptions that our thinking, that our words, would impose on the free associations that would emerge in the mind and then make their way to the lips.

But our goal, psychological health, seems somehow less noble, less lofty.  On the other hand, while we say that we are working towards health, there is evidence that our goals, too, are more far reaching.  Analysis frequently continues after "psychological health", at least as measured by lack of symptoms, has been achieved.  That is, our patients frequently feel satisfied by our treatment before we believe they have achieved our sometimes poorly articulated psychoanalytic goals.  Now, all this said, I feel the need to say somewhat defensively, that one of the strengths of analytic treatment versus other kinds of treatment, is that treatment gains are maintained - in fact they continue to improve after the end of treatment.  To what end?  Is the truly psychologically healthy person blissful?  Is the well analyzed person in a state of increasing bliss?

Well, my practice of yoga thus far has not been all that blissful.  And I daresay that the practice of analysis - as analysand and then as analyst - has been filled with difficult stretches.  Neither practice leads to bliss, if either does, in a day.  Both require dedication over a long period of time to achieve whatever it is that the participant achieves - whether physical, mental or spiritual "health", or something grander, greater and more joyful; bliss.

What impresses me, as a novice practitioner of yoga, is the ways that the crazy statements of the instructors are beginning to make sense.  Today, while we were in a pose that had our right thigh pressed against our stomachs, Joe pointed out that our breathing was more difficult.  This was because our stomachs, and, indeed our chests, could not expand in the ways that they usually do.  He noted that we could breathe through our left lung in a more normal way.  And I'll be damned if he wasn't right.  I could bring air with muscles on the left side of my body into my left lung - and not expand the right side as much.  I have (limited) asymmetrical control of my breathing!  Who knew?  Now my guess is that if I practice this, it will improve.  Amazing.

But the important experience in that moment was not about what was happening within my body, but the knowledge that Joe knows his own experience - whether through his own practice or as a result of being taught and retaining the information - that he knows and passes along to me as information about the functioning of my body - the ability of my mind to control aspects of the functioning of my body that, until that moment, and until being in that kind of position, I would not have been able to imagine or to comprehend - but in that moment, there is a sense that he knows something about my functioning because he knows something about his own functioning and there are two types of learning - one, that I can function in new ways, and, two, that others can know and apprehend this as well.

Now I think this is part and parcel of every moment of teaching, but there seems to be a different quality of this in the teaching that takes place in yoga and, I think, in analysis.  In analysis, as in yoga, the goal is to be present to the present moment.  To know what it is that is occurring right now.  This state of being is an incredibly autonomous one.  It requires being fully and completely immersed in oneself.  In yoga, and here forgive my rudimentary understanding, using the body as a vehicle to transcend bodily awareness and to be present to something greater - a sense of the universal in this particular moment - something that is not determined by, but that is entirely dependent upon, the physical and emotional alignment of all that is in tune at this moment is the goal of the endeavor.

Freud himself started with the body, and a model of the mind that is based on a conception of the functioning of the nervous system as a stand alone instrument.  He was trained as a neurologist.  And then, when his neurological explanations for people's symptoms failed him, he started listening to people's (and his own) thoughts and he started writing about our subjectivity.  And, at first, he was listening as a neurologist, and created models of the mind with entities (the ego and the id) and systems of functioning (one of his models of the mind is a hydraulic one), but, in his paper on Mourning and Melancholia, Freud noticed something paradoxical - that we, these individual units of functioning, are built to engage in relationships.  In many ways, 20th century psychoanalytic thinking was about coming to grips with the ways in which relating is integral to the functioning of the mind.

And analysis, from very early to the present, has been about creating moments between the analyst and the analysand that are alive.  Moments in which they are aware of themselves and each other in profoundly deep, but also very direct and immediate ways.  Much as Joe was aware of the capacity of my lungs to function in a very different way than I had ever imagined, an analyst is able to help an analysand appreciate that his or her mind can function in a very different way than he or she has ever been able to realize, and to do that in this moment in the context of this relationship.

I think this may be why the three part system of training psychoanalysts is important.  We must undergo our own analyses, read and go to classes, and be supervised in our work.  The function of being a student, but also a teacher, of being supervised but also supervising can help keep alive the sense of what it feels like to be on the couch, to be following our own thoughts - to have our metaphorical thigh up against our chest and to discover that we can breath with the other lung.  Many of my peers go into second and even third analyses, partly, I think, to address issues that they have not yet addressed, but also, I think, to keep sharp and in practice with being in the driver's seat - of being an analysand, of practicing this craft that we practice on others, just as I'm sure that Joe practices his craft and just as I'm sure that Joe knows about the functioning of the lungs not just because he has been taught about that, but because he has engaged in the practice of breathing, and of relaxing the muscles behind the eyes, something that, with practice, becomes easier and easier.  Whether it leads, through joy to bliss - and whether psychoanalysis is a parallel path is something that I am open to, though also aware, at least in the psychoanalytic community, of a tendency to idealize what psychoanalysis can achieve.  How often does yoga, psychoanalysis, or living in whatever manner lead to bliss?  I'd love to know...

Postscript: It is now one and a half years later (August, 2015), and Joe is leaving town due to family obligations.  I have continued to "practice" yoga - generally going to class once or twice a week - and on vacations we sometimes are able to be in class every day.  I do yoga stretches before and after other exercise during the week, though it hardly feels like "practice" - more like stretching.  That said, the quality of my appreciation of my stretches is significantly different.  I can feel separate muscle groups where before I simply felt a general stretch.  I am also able to function differently in games - enough that the people I play with have commented on it.

Joe has continued to be my favorite instructor.  His sense of the internal experience of the practice and his ability to guide us through the practice has been excellent - he has also given classes on anatomy that have explained what is happening on a muscular level.  I have learned, in these classes, concretely what he is trying to help us achieve when he gives us particular directions.

Joe has taught us that the point of yoga is to prepare us to meditate - to sit for long periods of time - 2,4,6, or 8 hours or more - in a deeply meditative state.  I have not engaged in this part of the practice - other than at the beginning and end of the active yoga - but some points of incompatibility between yoga and the meditation that is being described and psychoanalysis have emerged.  The goal of yoga, in my primitive understanding, is to achieve a thoughtless state.  To allow the breath to fill our consciousness.  The goal of analysis is to follow our thoughts.  To learn to articulate experiences - including those that have been inchoate - wordless.  Yoga puts nothing where words would be while analysis puts words where nothing has been.  These are very different but hopefully complementary processes.  I assume that they come together in the experience of clarity - clarity of thought and clarity of being.  Both processes, I think, contribute to this goal.

There is more to read about this - I have not done much reading.  I will continue to practice with the other teachers at the studio.  But I will miss Joe.  Unlike in the psychoanalytic relationship with the "teacher", Joe knows relatively little about me as a unique individual.  But there is a sense of connection that has been gained as the result of allowing his words to guide the exploration of my body and thoughts.  Of course, others have been in the room with us as well.  I assume that others feel the connection.  I know that the reluctant wife feels it, too.  It is a shared experience that each of us experiences uniquely.  When I was at a Hozier concert, I couldn't quite figure out who Hozier reminded me of - his stage presence evoked someone.  And it was Joe.

Today was a typical class.  Joe lead us through a series of poses, helping us position ourselves within each pose, helping me to concentrate on what needed to be attended to at each moment.  I wished that I could record it, but also am aware that each class is unique.  I have puzzled over this, and then remembered that, in addition to our taking our cues from Joe, he takes cues from us.  I see him adjusting the posture of one student and hear him instructing all of us in that shift.  Just as a group interpretation can have some meaning (see a note on that here), so our functioning as a group is related to our individual functioning.  We become a weird collective organism (again the Hozier concert comes to mind).  Recording and sticking with one routine would leave something vital out of the practice.

And today was the final class with Joe.  I rediscovered, for the umpteenth time, something that I learned in my own analysis - that life is better lived when we get to live it than when we have to.  Since it was Joe's last class, I wanted to savor it - I wanted to have the class stretch (as it were - unintended pun).  And, unlike the typical Saturday morning class that I wanted to race to the end of, I wanted to soak it in.  And so it went, ironically, much more quickly than usual.  Rather than feeling relieved when the final floor stretches arrived - relieved and exhausted - I felt more invigorated and energized than I have in a long time.  I will try to hang onto this feeling of engagement as I work with the other instructors, while also remembering, as best I am able, the instructions of my master teacher.

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Life After Life - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reflects on Kate Atkinson's Novel About Reincarnation

A Palimpsest is a document that has been written on a surface - usually vellum - that has been previously written on - and erased.   Occasionally scholars discover that what has been erased is more interesting than the most recent thing written on the page.  In her book Life After Life, Kate Atkinson lets us look, with her protagonist Ursula, at a life - a life that Ursula lives over and over until she gets it right.  We get to see the things that Ursula "knows" and that lead her to head off various bad things that occur (frequently death, often her own but sometimes others) in her next life ant the life after that.

Ursula is born into upper middle class paradise; Fox Corners, a home in suburban London, in 1910.  Her entry into life is precarious.  She is born with an umbilical cord around her neck in the middle of a snowstorm and sometimes things happen so that she survives, and sometimes not.  From this precarious start, she grows up with a boorish older brother - in every iteration he is boorish - and a lovely older sister, an Irish housekeeper and, eventually, younger brothers.  Her father disappears to fight the First World War and her mother raises her as an independent woman, creating a joyful and safe bubble for the family to live in.

Ursula is bothered by the intimations she has of former lives, but they are annoyances rather than something that sets her apart as a different sort of person.  She has deja vu experiences that are more potent than most.  And she has memories. usually vague, of previous lives that powerfully determine her behaviors - perhaps because, in some lives, she states that her primary job is to be a witness.  And witness she does.  She sees the horror of the Second World War - particularly the experience of living, time after time, in London, and in one life in Berlin - during the horrific bombing that took place - in London, at night - in Berlin, around the clock.

This story, then, is an interesting twist on the psychoanalytic paradigm.  In psychoanalysis, the analysand visits parts of their lives, and then revisits them. And frequently each visit reveals differences.  Sometimes the differences are subtle and sometimes they are profound. The different perspectives might be an important part of the "curative" quality of analysis.  We are able, from increasingly mature and sophisticated perspectives, to view what happened to us - and to what we did in return.  We are able to be more accepting of our own culpability - and to come to terms with what we have done to ourselves and others.  We are also able to come to terms with the complexity of others' motives - and we come to have a richer appreciation of them and what was occurring - or may have been occurring - at the time.

It is a truism of analysis that with trauma, the memories tend to be more crystallized.  There is a sense that this - this particular thing - happened, and the different angles are hard won - if they are achieved at all.  One of the things that is remarkable about Nelson Mandela is that he was able to survive brutal treatment - and to acknowledge his own brutal treatment of others - and to create a position from which to engage with others that was overly determined neither by the trauma nor by his aggression.

So the analytic question is: How do I learn to better live with this life that I have lived - how do I use that as a platform, not to keep doing things as I have done them - not to keep banging my head against the wall - but to acquire, slowly and gently because giving up my way of making sense of the world leaves me vulnerable to disorientation and worse; new ways of seeing things and understanding them.  Kate Atkinson's question dovetails with it: if I could live this life over, how would I do things differently?

Her answer, and here there is a spoiler alert, is that the changes would, in their final iteration, be small rather than large.  Much would remain.  Major changes, changes that would prevent horror - the holocaust, the bombings of London and Berlin - require violence that prevents viewing the results - Ursula must die in order to achieve these ends, and she can never know what the result will be.

So, Ursula chooses a world that is very much like the world that we live in - it is our world.  Indeed, many of the iterations that seem wildly different end up with specific elements that seem to have a different place and different meaning, but are the same. So, in many of these stories, Ursula chooses to go to the same shorthand and typing school.  Sometimes she is more aware of the lechery of the owner and lead teacher, sometimes things happen differently within the school, but the school, something that she goes to at different points in her life and with different support and for different reasons, keeps showing up.  As do some horrific images.  They keep being there, even though they are seen from the perspective of very different life experiences.  And they keep being horrific.

What Ursula chooses - Ursula who is named a bear - like Ursa Major - the constellation that points to true north - what she works iteratively and consistently towards is the preservation of a life and a relationship.  She cares, deeply and powerfully, about two other people and about their relationship with each other.  Enough that, given the power to literally create different universes, she focuses on supporting a particular relationship.

This is not like the movie Groundhog Day.  She doesn't live life over until she gets everything right.  There is still a great deal that is very very wrong.  And she, and people around her, somewhat annoyingly, defend against the horror of what they have seen and smelled and floated in by having a stiff upper lip - by using a distinctly British sense of humor - at times this reads more like the screen play to a Hugh Grant movie than a serious exploration of horrendous trauma; but the humor - the need to defend against the horror - is very real and a very real part of surviving and, in so far as we can, transcending it.  It both transcends and preserves it.  And within what is a horrible assault, we choose, Kate Atkinson proposes, to find some goodness - and to do every thing that we can to protect and preserve it.

An interesting twist on this is that, in addition to Ursula having the gift to relive, it seems that her mother does.  And one of her mother's choices is to live a life with Ursula in it.  She,in turn, chooses to keep two particular others in this world - to believe that the world will be a better place - that things are as they should be - because these people will be here and will be together.

The opportunity that our life affords us, I think Atkinson is maintaining, or at least she is as I understand her, is the chance, amidst all that goes wrong, to do something good and noble.  Not necessarily something heroic or history altering, but something small but profound - to recognize goodness and to help it spread.  This is a very different idea than, for instance, waging a war on drugs or terrorism or whatever we may be at war with at a given moment.  It is the lesson that gets learned being raised in an idyllic corner of the world - and nearly all of the corners of the world contain idyllic elements - the lesson that building a better world is important.

In the palimpsest of our lives - the one we discover analytically rather than through reincarnation - part of the task is to discover interactional elements that are desired, useful and growth promoting.  Our lives - and our analyses - are filled with difficult moments.  People misunderstand, sometimes violently.  But the positive moments also exist in all of our lives - and hopefully in the interactions with our analysts - those moments that serve as the cornerstone to recognize the beauty that living with others can bring.

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

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Alice Munro's Dear Life - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reads one of a Nobel Prize Winner's Books

Alice Munro's Dear Life, purportedly her last book, is the first of her works that I have read.  The prose is as stark and spare as the Canadian landscapes that have shaped the stories she tells.  The first 10 chapters are short stories, her preferred genre, and the last four are memoirs - in short story format.  Entering each story is bewildering.  It is not clear who the main characters are going to be and the stories themselves are told in a casual manner, as if being related to someone who already knows all the backstory necessary to understand the story.  The back story is revealed, but seemingly almost by accident as the arc of a person's life, or a very significant portion of it, is sketched in but a few pages and by referencing relatively few key events that shape that story.

On the surface, there could be nothing less psychoanalytic than these stories.  The richness, the detail, the nuance of the lives of the patients that I see in analysis is lost.  And yet these people are not reduced - they are not boiled down versions of people, but rich complex individuals whose essence we can guess at through knowing certain key, pivotal moments and, indeed, there are key pivotal moments in the lives of our patients and their analyses.  In her stories, the peripheral characters we know only peripherally - we wonder about what drives them to do the sometimes crazy things that they do.  The central characters - or more frequently character - once we figure out who he or she is - we get to know in deep and penetrating ways.  And we know them, as we do the characters about whom Elizabeth Strout writes, not from the outside in (even though the story is told from the point of view of the plot), but from the inside out - we don't laugh at their shortcomings, but accept them, as we would our own.

So the question that comes to mind, for this analyst, is where does this ability to read others and to portray them starkly, pimples and all, but sympathetically, come from?  How does the ability to appreciate another person in all their complexity without forming dismissive judgments about them, something that we as analysts aspire to, come from in the life of a writer?  This text, with its combinations of stories and autobiographical material becomes a rich mine to address the question - I only hope I do it some justice in the space I have allotted myself, though I fear that I will reduce Ms. Munro in the process.

To start with one of her stories - a man returns from the war - many of the stories revolve around the aftermath of World War II.  He stays on the train beyond the stop where his ticket took him and jumps off the train when it slows down.  He goes to a run down farm house and starts working for and with the woman who lives there.  They bring the farm back to life.  We learn that the woman's mother had a degenerative disease that made her unavailable - psychologically but also sexually - to the woman's father.  The father took in his nude adolescent daughter's body when she stepped out of the bath.  He then killed himself walking on the railroad tracks, apparently out of guilt.  The woman tells the man this story for the first time when she is in the city with the man so that she can be diagnosed with breast cancer.  He leaves her immediately after she tells him.

Now you might think, as I did, that this is a story about the woman.  But it is not.  It is the story of the man.  It turns out that he had a beau in that city that he never returned to.  But he was never able to be intimate with her.  Similarly, he never attempted to be intimate with the woman that he met up with.  The reason for this is explained in the part of the story that takes place after he leaves the woman he lived with.  In this second part of the story, he runs into, quite by chance, someone from his former life in the town he never returned to.  It is a tragic and sad story - somehow not surprising, but I don't want to ruin it for you.  What happens next to the man?  We don't know.  After the chance encounter, he takes off for parts unknown - unable to shake the experiences of his early life.

As we read these stories, we begin to wonder about the woman who wrote them.  We wonder about who she is and how she grew up and how she can be - in addition to empathic and truthful - detached from the people about whom she writes.  How can they be so stark - so unswervingly themselves?  It does not surprise us that she, from a small town, was somewhat precocious.  Her abilities marked her as special.  But it also doesn't surprise us that these abilities were swept up in her mother's sense of her self as someone special - someone who was different from the farmers and laborers that she and her husband came from and were.  Her mother stood out, in Alice's mind, from her other family members and from her father as pretending - though I think there probably was some truth to her sense of being cut from a different cloth - to being different from the plain folks around her.  This gave her a sense of "putting on airs", and alienated her from those around her.  It also kept her from seeing Alice for who she was - Alice was her special child - not the person that Alice was, in fact, becoming.

Alice's father was very different.  He was very comfortable in his own skin, and therefore was liked by those around him.  He connected with people on a genuine human level and Alice admired this.  He also connected with Alice.  When she had fears that kept her awake night after night - fears of strangling her sister - her father, mostly through patient listening, heard her fears.  His response, which Alice sees as being every bit as good as  psychiatric treatment would have been, was to acknowledge, matter of factly, that those were reasonable fears - the kind of fears that people have.  And they became the kind of fears that Alice would write about, with the kind of acknowledgement that her father had given her own fears.

When Alice's mother died, Alice lived on the other side of the continent.  She did not have much money, and she did not travel home for the funeral.  She feels deeply guilty about this, but also, I think, somewhat self righteous.  She did not want to acknowledge the passing of someone who never really understood who it was that she was.  So it is a kind of guilt for which there is no absolution - she just might do it again, even though today she would certainly have the means to get there.  She loved her mother, yes, but she also hated her - hated her for never really getting her.  And knowing both of these feelings - the feelings of empathy for who her mother was - where she came from - how she struggled to become what she could, the painful ways in which she tried to be better than others but was, in fact, an embarrassment, and her ultimate failure to be connected to her daughter - an unforgivable sin; this is a complicated and very human stew.

Alice Munro is a talented writer.  She is also a good story teller.  But more than that, I think she is a person who has looked deeply into her own life and has pulled no punches in telling it like it is - she has had to become her own mother (and has been helped in this by her father); to reflect on her life, on her desires and her failings and to come to accept them.  And this has led her to be able to dispassionately observe the experiences of others.  To realize that life happens to us, not as her mother would imagine because we are special and at the center of the universe, but quite the opposite, because we are cast into a particular place at a particular time and the meeting of that place with the stuff of ourselves is what makes us; good, bad and indifferent.

Alice quotes the poetry of a woman who lived in the house that she grew up in - a house that was on the margin between the town and the country - and a house that had a wonderful view of the world as if perched on the edge of something spectacular.  This poetry is very much like the long lost poetry she herself wrote when she lived in that house as an adolescent.  She never met the woman who wrote the poetry she quotes.  The woman had lived in the house in the 1890s and 1900s while Alice lived there in the 1930s and 40s.  But there is a sense that they both experienced similar things and expressed similar things about their experiences.  She, like her father, humbly accepts that she is in a particular place at a particular time, observing it, and assumes that others, given similar circumstances, would do the same.  This allows her, ironically, to achieve more notoriety that her mother would have dreamed possible to claim.

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 Big Lebowski - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Revisits a Cult Classic

  Movie night is becoming a political phenomenon in the home of the Reluctant Psychoanalyst.  The children, all teenagers, are watching increasingly complex, adult-themed material, though much of it is quite immaturely conceived and executed.  The (sometimes) Reluctant Parents are excited by the increasing ability of the teens to watch "mature" movies so that we can share some of our favorite films with them, while we are simultaneously appalled at the unbridled carnality they seem, at times, to prefer.  So it seemed like the time to try the Big Lebowski, the Coen brothers film, on them.  Once cool and somewhat hip, at least to our generation; what would it evoke in them?

Before I get to that - a little background.  The Big Lebowski is one of those movies that, when we were dating, the future Reluctant Wife could not believe that I had not seen.  I have endured this before.  Patients could not believe I had not seen Gone with the Wind; students could not believe I had not seen the Godfather series.  And each time I have watched a "must see", I have appreciated being able, finally, to share in something that helped me feel more a part of the greater culture.  In this case, a subculture.  But I have to admit that, as much as I liked The Big Lebowski, I didn't really get it.  Besides being at moments surreal, it was also confusing.  The various strands of the movie did not fit neatly together for me, and instead it felt funny but dissatisfying - almost empty or hollow.

So, when we decided to screen it with the kids, I decided to offer some "helpful" narrative.  In particular, I pointed out the opening narrator as a character that would show up later in the film, as well as trying to point out important people who appeared and trying to help the kids (and myself) keep the various strands straight by tracking the relationships among the various characters.  Of course, this is dicey territory.  A little commentary goes a long way and I tried to keep the comments to a minimum; but actually a conversation broke out during, but more importantly after the film.

Jeff Bridges plays Jeff Lebowski, or, as he prefers,The Dude.  The Dude is an LA slacker with no apparent means of financial support and relatively few other social supports (he has two friends with whom he bowls and his landlord whose art dance escapades he watches - perhaps in lieu of rent), or psychologically supports (except for the consistent use of marijuana).  He is just a dude, but refers to himself solely as The Dude.  But he becomes the focus of the movie, which the narrator, known only as the Stranger, deems interesting, because he shares a name with Jeffrey Lebowski - the Big Lebowski, whose wife bunny owes money to a porn movie director (whom she used to - or maybe still does - work for) who, in turn, sends thugs to mess up the wrong Lebowski, the Dude, and in addition to dunking his head in a toilet, they pee on his rug.  When the Dude asks them to look around to see if he is a millionaire, they take in his hovel and acknowledge their mistake - and this could have been the end of the whole thing.

The Dude is not one to make a mountain out of a molehill, but he is upset by having thugs break into his home.  As he talks about it with his buddies at the bowling alley; his buddy Walter (played by John Goodman), is not just incensed, but urges the Dude to action.  Their third friend, Donny (Steve Buschemi) is clueless, annoying, and bullied by Walter, but an integral part of the threesome.  His presence, I think, helps us realize the virtues of The Dude.  The Dude is not annoying, nor is he as passive as he appears.  He engages in a series of escapades, fueled by Walter's unrelenting aggression and groundless desire to be potent (something that is oddly mirrored by the Big Lebowski when we get to know what lies behind his bluster).  The Stranger comments that he likes The Dude's style, and joins him at the bowling alley bar for a drink of Sasparilla.  The Stranger also ties the movie up - so far as it gets tied up - by reappearing at the bar at the end of the movie and offering a narrative summary.

And it was about the Stranger that my post movie conversation began with the older Reluctant Stepdaughter.  We discussed the movie as we drove the Enthusiastic Boyfriend home and it continued as we drove back.  We began as she attacked the Stranger as unnecessary and the ending as dissatisfying because the narrator acted as if things were tied up when they were not.  I, as much to engage in the conversation as because I believed it, took the position that the Stranger was essential.  Together we puzzled over this and concluded that one reason the Stranger is essential is that the movie could, without the Stranger, who introduces it as a Western and who is dressed in Western regalia, be misperceived as an Eastern Philosophy/Zen/Taoist movie.

The Dude - who famously, at the end of the movie, abides - is, the Stranger would have us believe, not Eastern in his essence, but Western - and not just Western philosophy, but Wild Western - rugged Reagan individualism Western.  And, as the reluctant Stepdaughter pointed out, he is the only character in the movie with integrity - with centeredness.  He takes what comes very matter of factly.  He observes it and thinks about it - he addresses it and mulls it over.  He presents it to his friends, who encourage him to act - and he acts with them.  But he is not concerned by all that goes on.  He - in the stoic tradition - is relatively unmoved by all that happens.  He seeks justice - what he believes to be fair compensation for what has befallen him - but he does not desire more than to be able to keep ambling on - living life as it occurs to him.  And this is, perhaps, the essence of our heroes from Western Films - Shane or the characters that Clint Eastwood portrays; Bruce Carradine in Kung Fu, to mix the Western with the Eastern.

So this becomes, we decided, a movie not about plot but about character.  It is the story of everyman - or an idealized everyman.  Someone who is able to take what life casts his way - not as the Big Lebowski would have us believe; achieving as the result of setting a goal and shooting for it - but instead doing something much more human and real, taking what is in front of him and making the best of it while retaining a sense of integrity.  On an entirely different level - to think of the Dude as being a character that includes not just Jeff Lebowski, but Walter and Donnie as well - to think about the human task being one of listening to, but retaining mastery over our inner desire to run full on into the teeth of whatever is out there (a la Walter), while also keeping ourselves from running away from what ever threat may present itself (a la Donny).  And the Dude does this.

The most important moment in the movie, I think, is when the Dude unravels the mystery of what happened to the million dollar ransom and the reason that we was hired to be the drop man for it.  OK, I realize I haven't given you any context for this.  I'll let the movie do that, if you choose to watch it, but you should know that this viewer, at least, even on a second viewing, didn't get it.  The Dude did.  It turns out that he can actually be pretty smart when he gets all the needed information and when he has been knocked around enough that he becomes actively engaged in not just following the next piece of bait set out for him but interested in understanding the whole picture.

In psychoanalysis, our patients are pretty smart to begin with, but they get smarter as things move along.  They begin to see patterns and they also begin to lose inhibitions.  So rather than deferring to others, they start becoming more assertive.  This is a good thing.  One common observation, especially of low fee analyses - the kind of analysis that many in training provide as they start to practice as analysts - is that as patients engage in their analyses they start to earn more money - sometimes significantly more money - and they can afford higher fees.  This is a good thing in many cases.  But sometimes it is given too much weight - in this analyst's opinion.  Not the income, per se, but the association of uninhibited or assertive, but even aggressive action with being "well analyzed" or psychologically healthy.

The goal of psychoanalysis is to freely associate (it is what the analysand is told to do - but also must learn to do in the process of treatment).  When that is achieved, and when that occurs not just in the analytic hour - meaning that the person's thought is no longer constrained by neurotic conflicts - the person can think more clearly, as The Dude does when he solves the problem.  But the Dude does not go on to solve the problem of world peace, he plays in the semifinals of the bowling tournament.  The cowboy rides off into the sunset - in search of other adventures, perhaps not enriched by all that has happened except in so far as he has the satisfaction of knowing that he has and can survive whatever he has been confronted by.  While in the analytic world, this may lead to riches - the analysand is less conflicted and thus better able to solve problems and to appropriately value his or her contribution to the solution, that is a byproduct, in my opinion, rather than the end result.  The analytic community might benefit from observing that neither The Big Lebowsky nor Walter are the true heroes of this story, the Dude, who abides, is.

Another way of saying this, then, may be that the goal of the Dude (and analysis) is neither Western nor Eastern, but an interesting amalgam - a shifting of the lens so that both are in sight but neither is the goal.  If Walter is a cartoon version of the western ideal- Donnie, who ends up as ashes, might be a cartoon version of the eastern one.  Our task is to use foundations that are human, incompatible with each other, and ultimately incompatible with, though informative to a third direction - one that is, or can be, our own.  As we move beyond being the puppet of our desires, as we move from doing what we have to what we want to do, we move into the range of being The Dude.

The Reluctant Stepdaughter and I benefited from our conversation about the film.  We agreed that we both understood the movie and liked it better for having talked about it.  It was still, at least for me, somewhat disappointing because the plot did not neatly resolve, though it was better resolved than I thought (the Reluctant Stepdaughter brilliantly tied many plot elements together) and I think we got it, in part as a result of doing it, that this was not the point.  At the very beginning of the film, the Dude is in a convenience store.  He samples a half gallon of milk before writing a 69 cent check for it.  He is willing to pay for something, but he wants to make sure he won't get gypped.  We got our money's worth from the movie as a result of having talked about it.

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Shakespeare in Love - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Ponders Our Attachment to Will Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon

The reluctant son is once again reading Romeo and Juliet.  He read it in sixth grade and really liked it.  I, woefully inadequate parent that I am, delighted by his interest, shared a related drama of mine, Shakespeare in Love.  Oops.  I remembered the explicit sex scenes too late, and what was to have been a nice father son shared adventure turned into a developmentally inappropriate moment to be muddled through.  Muddle through it we did, and now that the reluctant son is in High School, has been bombarded by sex on broadcast and other TV, and is reading Romeo and Juliet again, I thought it worth repeating the experiment.  And the results were much better this time around.

But I was watching the film with another context in mind as well.  I have just finished reading (actually re-reading) and posting about the hypothesis that the plays of Shakespeare are not written by the man from Stratford, a tradesman and sometime actor Will Shakspeare, but instead by Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, a nobleman whose life and perspective eerily parallels the plays of Shakespeare, but whose identity would have had to be kept secret, hidden behind the witty nom de plume "Shake - Spear", because it would be unseemly and politically unwise to have the words of the poet tied to a peer of the realm.

I remembered that Shakespeare in Love, Tom Stoppard and Marc Norman's imagined, anachronistic, delightful movie was written from the perspective that Shakespeare was from Stratford and I watched it to better understand our attachment to that hypothesis - one that is apparently endemic among scholars.  A fellow analyst, who read the blog on de Vere, Rick Waugaman, kindly sent me a preprint of his book review about to appear in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and in the article he cites a study noting that 82% of academics believe the Stratfordian hypothesis.  Why is there such allegiance to it when so many good thinkers; Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Sigmund Freud among them, have long questioned it?   Why are we so attached to it when emerging scholarship is tying it to new figures, particularly de Vere?

Shakespeare in Love features Joseph Fiennes as a young Shakespeare, in love with Viola de Lessups (played by Gwyneth Paltrow), a beautiful woman in love with poetry and the theater, whose rich father has bought her a noble but penniless husband, Lord Wessex (played by Colin Firth) who will make her offspring royal.  Actually, in very Shakespearean manner, Shakespeare confides his love for Viola to her as she pretends to be Richard Kent, a pretense that she has taken on to play the part of Romeo in Shakespeare's Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter, which is to contain much comedy and a bit with a dog.

The power of this film, though, resides in the development of Shakespeare's play.  He lives and writes about what he is living, and the drama of his life becomes the text of the play.  He is not the Great Playwright, Shakespeare, but Will, who drinks and plays the owner of one playhouse off against the other, promising them both the same play and hustling to stay one step ahead of their wish to get words from him.  He is in awe of Christopher Marlowe, gratefully accepts advice from him, and is mortified when he fears that he has, though impersonation, caused his death.  We identify with his quick wit and with his joie de vivre.  We feel, as commoners, the constraint and unfairness that divides him from the woman that he loves - as Romeo is divided - not from Ethel, thank God (and Christopher Marlowe, who suggests the name change), but from Juliet, by the war between their families and his own part in it.

At some point, and I don't have the reference, a writer proposed that one reason the Stratfordian hypothesis has retained its strength is that it was used by the British to support the position that public schooling should be offered to all.  Shakespeare, a commoner from Stratford, after all, had written the greatest plays in history.  Who among us could not be the next Shakespeare?  And I think this is a very powerful argument.  An argument that allows us to identify with Shakespeare.  To imagine ourselves Shakespeare, to share in his glory, indeed to be Shakespeare...  For who among us is not?

Every night we dream complicated dreams with characters who are familiar but unknown.  They engage in activity that can seem chaotic but, especially if we listen to our dreams, if we analyze them, they are not just sensible, but useful, and sometimes delightful, even brilliant narratives emerge.  We are complex people filled with ingenuity, humor, deep and powerful feelings, and ideas that are unique.  Nelson Mandela, whose passing this week is a great loss, rightly pointed out that we fear (but I would add hope to achieve) our potential.  And Shakespeare did it.  He articulated the complicated thing that it is to be human.  He did this within characters - in their soliloquies, and between them - in the drama that plays out when our lives are on the line, but also in the comedy that ensues when we play with each other.  He tapped into what it is to be human and makes that come alive in us - our own sense of humanity - when we participate in his plays by watching them.

So, the greatest moment, the moment of most tension in the movie is when Romeo and Juliet has finally been written and has just been performed.  It has had its world premiere. The play has come to life as the result of a series of accidents, false starts, changes in character that are truly Shakespearean in their madcap happenstance - and the stuttering announcer has pronounced the last words in flawless English - and the birth of this great tragedy is received - with silence.  A silence that stretches to the point of breaking. And then a single clap brings forth applause and then rapturous sounds of joy.  We, with Shakespeare, with the entire troupe of actors, have wondered: Did they get it?  We knew they would, but feared they wouldn't... And, they did.  We have put it out there and they have received it.  We have communicated - one to another.  We to them.  And it is grand and glorious.

And we don't want to give up our ownership of that moment.  We don't want to believe that we couldn't have written, we couldn't have performed that play.  We believe that we could have.  We who come from boroughs and from hamlets and from common origins.  We don't want to hear that some well born, privileged man wrote this.  The idea that de Vere, a nobleman, crafted these plays goes against our democratic zeal, our sense of a meritocracy where our value will be recognized and rewarded regardless of rank. While we acknowledge the Stratford fellow's debt to a public school classical education, we want that to be all that we need.  In fact, to realize our ambitions, to let the world know the wonders that lie within us, we need to know many languages that will excite others - we need to know how to communicate emotionally, but also cognitively.  To weave a spell (as Stoppard and Norman, our everymen, have done in this movie), the tapestry must be as close to flawless as possible.  A failed detail may wake the dreamer from his or her sleep.  To have the privilege of expressing ourselves well - clearly and coherently - we need to have been afforded many prerequisite privileges.

The de Vere scholars make the case that the references in Shakespeare could have been accessed, in that age, only by those from the most privileged classes.  The knowledge of the law could not have been included but by a legal scholar.  The understanding of the nautical scenes comes from a sailor, and the idiosyncratic knowledge of Venice comes from the pen of a man who has sailed her streets.

Our romantic connection to Shakespeare of Stratford comes, I believe, from an anachronistic attachment to what we believe to be everyman - the everyman of a post industrial society.  But I think this identification may be misguided.  In fact, I think that it takes a great deal of privilege to produce Shakespeare's works- the privilege of education, travel, and, if it is de Vere, the privilege of being privy to the world of nobility and having multiple well schooled secretaries to read and perhaps co-write your work.  And I think we have built a society that affords similar privilege to many more people than had it in Shakespeare's day.  In fact, I think that the 'everyman' of today - the many privileged citizens of our industrialized and post-industrial nations, have privileges, Shakespeare, whoever he was - even if he was de Vere, could not have imagined.

It is ironic then that the myth of Shakespeare of Stratford has been used to support the importance of education.  Ironic because I fear that our clinging to it now may cause us to argue that everyman can do it; just provide him or her a tablet and an internet connection.  When in fact we need to communicate, many of us in many ways, with someone who is a potential Shakespeare.  To provide him or her not just information, but to teach him or her how to think, how to understand and articulate systems, and how to be in touch with his or her emotional world - we need to help him or her interpret, not just be moved by, the plays of Shakespeare.  And it is expensive to provide the kind of education that helps people to explore, engage, and then articulate what they discover.

The modern world seems allied against the expense of education - and it asks educators to justify the expense.  I'm not saying we shouldn't do that - we should.  But the value of education is much greater than the income of the educated. I am reminded of a Reader's Digest joke from many years ago.  The immigrant father, working in his small store, welcomes his son home from college where his son has learned accounting.  The son says, "Dad, you've got to come up with an accounting system to keep track of your profits and losses."  The father reaches under the counter and pulls out a cigar box.  He says "Son, what's in this cigar box is everything that I arrived with in this country.  Look around you.  Everything else is profit."

Our modern world with all of its wonders is all profit - the profit of learning and teaching each other and going out to explore more.  We need to keep doing that.  Including trying to figure out who Shakespeare really was, because knowing that, as Rick Waugaman maintains, will enrich our reading of our greatest author.  It may even help us clarify the value of providing the expensive education that we need in order to maintain our ascent as a civilization.  And we need to keep teaching our children, even if that sometimes leads us to blunder, because, sometimes, as in the case of the reluctant son and me, we get to witness the birth of a new world together.

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Jack Black's Bernie- The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Fears He's Slumming, But He Ain't

In a weird case of art imitating life, the reluctant family gathered for movie night and, much to this analyst's concern, the consensus was to watch a Jack Black (and Shirley MacLaine and Matthew McConaughy) film, Bernie.  Oh, boy, I thought, two hours of watching a buffoon clown around.  I pulled out some papers that I needed to grade and settled in for what I thought would be torture.  Of course, as you must realize by now, I was pleasantly surprised - and not just that the movie was good but that it spoke directly to the dilemma that we had been discussing in a psychoanalytic class earlier in the day.

In class, we have been reading Jane Hall's book Deepening the Treatment.  This book is intended to help therapists help their clients talk more fully about their psychological lives - to engage with their own material, with the goal of working towards deepening the psychotherapy treatment, one where patient and therapist meet once or twice a week, into an analysis, where the meetings are more frequent and the patient frequently lies on a couch to more deeply immerse themselves in their inner world.

Traditionally, psychoanalysts have worked with patients who are reasonably psychologically healthy.  Part of the rationale for that was that such deep immersion could be disruptive to those who, for instance, didn't trust that the out-of-sight analyst had their best interests in mind.  However, in the 1950s, psychoanalysts started working with what they termed wider scope patients.  Psychoanalysis can and actually should stir powerful emotions in all patients; however, as those patients who are less emotionally stable engage more deeply with their inner lives, a great deal of upsetting material gets stirred both in themselves and in their analysts.

The Class debated the role of setting limits in such a treatment. On the one hand, it felt potentially harmful to, in the context of a caring relationship, set limits. It was feared that our patients might experience us as being too much like the harsh and critical others who may have contributed to their difficulties in the first place. On the other hand, it felt dangerous not to end sessions on time and not to encourage patients to talk about their experience rather than to act on them. I didn't frame it exactly this way, but Glenn Gabbard has talked about the analytic process involving both love; actively listening carefully to our patients, and hate; the act of charging fees and starting and stopping the session on time. Bernie, it turns out, is about the very question of whether love alone can overcome hate.

Bernie is a delightful individual who truly enjoys being with and, indeed, serving others. He works as an assistant funeral director in Carthage, Texas and makes certain that the services that the funeral home offers are as lovely as they can be.  He is the choirmaster in the local Methodist Church and is an exemplary church member. He starts a local theater group and stars in their musical productions. Bernie is a 39-year-old man who is likely gay and living in the middle of the Bible Belt so, if he is gay, he certainly does not feel comfortable expressing that publicly and, in Jack Black's wonderful characterization, he may be quite conflicted about his own sexuality and may even feel ashamed of being gay.  In fact, it is reasonable to conjecture that he needs to repress his sexuality and deny that he has sexual feelings. Instead of seeking the love he desires (perhaps), Bernie dotes on the widows that he serves through the funeral home. They are generally quite appreciative of his concern.

Bernie attempts to dote on the widow of the richest man in town - Marjorie Nugent (played by Shirley MacLaine), who turns out to be the meanest as well as the richest person in town. She initially rejects his concern, but then something about his demeanor warms her to him. Initially, his presence in her life appears to transform her. She, at least in his presence, smiles. They go on trips together, which she pays for, but which they both clearly enjoy. These are not trips around the corner, but to the corners of the globe. Further, Bernie learns to fly her airplane and enjoys recreational flying. They also end up eating out together a lot, usually in the best restaurants in town, when Bernie isn't cooking her delicious meals in her home.

At this point we might begin to wonder if Bernie is really a Golddigger. He has demonstrated both charm, but also some ability to convince people to buy shinier caskets than they initially want to buy. Is he really wolf in sheep's clothing, that is, to use a diagnostic term, a sociopath? Or, is he someone who is very insecure and trying hard to get people to love him? This is further complicated by the fact that this is not just a story, but an artistic enactment of an actual set of events. The real-life Bernie is currently living in the Texas State penitentiary.

Marjorie becomes more and more possessive of Bernie. She also begins to become abusive towards him - yelling at him and then locking him into her property when he threatens to leave. His response is to work harder and harder to be the lovely person who will meet all of her needs and thus keep her from going ballistic. He sands the calluses on the bottoms of her feet. He makes sure that her medication is ready for her on a regular basis. And he gives up more and more of his own life, having to drop out of many of his beloved activities.

Not surprisingly he becomes angrier and angrier. His sexuality may or may not be bottled up, but his anger clearly is. We see it play across Jack Black's face for an instant and then disappear to be replaced by a loving, though slightly bitter, smile. We empathize with his sense of feeling imprisoned; trapped; caught in the snare of a mean bitter woman. And we are not surprised when he picks up a 22 caliber rifle that Marjorie has taunted him for being unable to use to kill an armadillo, and shoots her in the back. Nor are we surprised that he feels tremendously guilty about having done this thing.  We're not surprised for two reasons. First, because of our empathic understanding of the character that is being portrayed. Second, because there is a Greek chorus of townspeople who in, in this mocumentary style movie, have been commenting on their perceptions of what took place between them. We have seen the murder coming from miles away and we are sympathetic to the circumstances that bring it about.

The local DA, Danny Buck (Matthew McConaughey), is not so sympathetic. He firmly believes that Bernie is a coldhearted murderer, and/or he is hot to be reelected and wants to get into the headlines of the local paper. In any case, it is his intent to prosecute Bernie for premeditated murder. He quickly realizes that he can't win the case in this town where Bernie is widely loved and Marjorie reviled.  So he moves the trial venue to a town 50 miles away where the inhabitants are significantly less well-off, know neither Bernie nor Marjory, and will much more quickly see Bernie as interested solely in financial gain.

The townspeople, who are memorably referred to as having "more tattoos than teeth", not surprisingly quickly judge Bernie guilty of first-degree murder. But we, the jury that has been assembled by the director, Art Linklater, are not convinced. We see a very different Bernie, one who was highly conflicted. He has learned to sit on powerful emotions, but they come pouring out of him, against his will. This seems not heinous, but human.

It is also a cautionary tale to analysts, therapists, nurses, indeed helping professionals of every stripe, and perhaps those who would love in any context - that selfless love is not truly possible.  If the other, whom we love selflessly, does not have our interests in mind, and we don't either, it will end badly.  As a corollary, if we don't access and use our emotions, including unpleasant ones that we may have been trained by society or believe by the nature of our role in a relationship (caregiver, lover, parent) not to acknowledge, this, too, will end badly.

Bernie, classified as a dark comedy is, then, actually a tragedy.  He is imprisoned, not because of pre-meditation but because of failure to meditate, or, more precisely, because of a failure to repress.  Or, psychoanalytically, because he is afraid of acknowledging aspects of himself - aspects that we believe would have been helpful to him.  That his anger was not something that could not co-exist with his love, but that it is something that may even have been essential to it, especially when he loved a complicated person.  Figuring out how to express that anger while still loving?  Aye, there's a rub.  Books have been written about that...




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

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Edward de Vere as Shakespeare: The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Rereads The Life of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, the Man who was Shakespeare by Mark Anderson

A few years ago I read a wonderful book, Will in the World: How Shakespeare became Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt, and I was astounded by it.  The author used William Shakespeare's plays to demonstrate that Will Shakespeare of Stratford - on - Avon could have penned the works that we see as belonging to the Shakespearean Canon.  It has been a while, so please forgive errors in detail, but Greenblatt's essential process was to imagine the life of Shakespeare from the very few known fragments of the actor William Shakespeare's life and then to construct him from the plays he wrote - thus demonstrating that what he is purported to produce could, in fact, have been produced by him.  I found the writing in the book compelling on many levels.  It was just plain a good read.  The author is a good story teller.  He was able to tell the stories of the plays of Shakespeare, put them together in chronological order and to construct the story of a man, Shakespeare, that fit the plays.  Masterful.  It was also particularly compelling to me because it felt like it was psychoanalytically based psychohistory.  The plays were essentially being read as dreams and the dreamer's life was being constructed from them in a plausible way.  I was sold.

But the reluctant wife was not so convinced.  Despite my fervor, she recommended that I read a very different book, "Shakespeare" by another name: The Life of Edward de Vere: Earl of Oxford, the Man Who was Shakespeare by Mark Anderson.  This book, unlike the first, was thick and slow and filled with footnotes - almost half the pages are footnotes.  It is written in the style of Historians, who can, when they are very good writers, write page-turners, but this did not quite measure up to the works of David McCullough as a piece of literature.  But it had an interesting premise:  That Edward de Vere, an English lord and, as a youth playboy who vied for the hand of Elizabeth, was supported by her to write plays - which he likely wrote with various secretaries who were very much men of letters - in first draft as light fare for the court, then as propaganda for her government and, in their final versions, as masterpieces of literature.  Anderson's position is that de Vere could not take credit for his work because, as a lord, he could not engage in a lowly profession like playwright (even though he was being paid a hefty sum annually by Queen Elizabeth for no apparent reason, which Anderson interprets to mean he was being paid to write - to be the Queen's chief propagandist and artist).

I am writing this blog for two separate but related reasons.  First, I want to relate the experience of re-reading and second to report one little fruit of that effort.  Tom Ogden, a psychoanalyst who does a lot of reading and writing, talks about two kinds of reading in his book Creative Readings.  One he calls transitive reading - this is an active reading, one where we are interacting with the author and the text as we read the text - actively re-writing the text as we make our way through it and make it our own.  The second kind of reading he calls intransitive - and this involves becoming lost in the text, and we take on the author's perspective and see the world through his or her eyes.  Both kinds of reading are important (as are both kinds of listening in clinical settings).

My first reading of the Anderson book was transitive.  Violently so.  I was still enamored of the vision of the untutored kid from Stratford becoming the Bard.  I also missed the free flowing language (partially because it was unhampered by being tied to historical facts) and intertwining of the stories of the plays with the creature who was imagined almost exclusively from those stories.  So I was reading the book critically.  I was questioning the data.  I was arguing.  By the end of it, I had grudging respect for the author, for his scholarship and the effort that he made to tie Edward de Vere to Shakespeare, and was willing to grant the reluctant wife that her position might have some validity - that his argument felt, ultimately, stronger than the argument from Will of the World.  But I wasn't convinced.  Partly because I do not know the wider arguments and concerns, but more importantly, I think, because my contentious engagement with the book led me to be uncertain of what it was that the author had actually said.  And I don't think I realized that until my current rereading of the book.

This time through, I have taken a more intransitive position.  I am less concerned with the veracity of Anderson's thesis and more interested in finding out more about this de Vere character, but also about Shakespeare.  What do his plays mean?  And this reading lead to a very different set of experiences.  I found out delightful things about both de Vere and Shakespeare that I had missed the first time.  Some of this supports the thesis.  The facts of de Vere's life, the bare bones of it, resonate so deeply and powerfully with Hamlet that - whether de Vere was the author or not, each helps understand the other better.  Hamlet comes to life in the story of a royal born child whose father died early, who was raised by a powerful and benevolent figure who also took his inheritance from him, and the struggles that he engaged in throughout his life to regain what he felt to be rightfully his.  As I write this, it is apparent the tale of Hamlet has particulars - and Anderson works to connect those to de Vere's life in various more oblique ways - that are not present in the life that de Vere leads.  Yet it is quite compelling that the psychological structures that Hamlet exemplifies could well have grown within a parallel but distinctly different biography - de Vere did not have an Uncle marry his mother whom he kills after having players play out the death of his father on stage, but the symbolism of those acts grow out of the wishes of a man who feels stifled by the person he believes stole his true inheritance.

The experience of reading intransitively lead to several gems.  One was that Shakespeare, whether de Vere or not, is a compelling author because, according to both authors, so I think they agree on this regardless of whether he is a player from Stratford or a noble to the manor born, he is writing autobiographically.  I think that he is able to sympathetically portray even heinous characters in part because they represent a part of himself - or some aspect that he could imagine having.  I think he shares this gift with Elizabeth Strout who writes about troubled characters in compassionate ways - we connect with them - we know them intransitively - even though they are portrayed from the outside - where we could encounter them transitively - as if we know them - and could dismiss them as being, for instance, evil or banal or lazy or whatever.  Instead, they are human: good, bad and indifferent.  Conflicted.  Complicated.  Too virtuous to stand and too evil to imagine.

And one play, not delved into, but mentioned, really stood out for me as being one that I came to understand better by putting a story around it.  MacBeth, the tale of the Dane whose wife would have him king, the man who - pushed by a woman - kills and kills and kills some more.  Anderson ties this to Elizabeth and de Vere - and specifically to Elizabeth's appointing a council of Lords to try Mary, Queen of Scots, her cousin, for treason.  Mary, the Catholic cousin, fell into a trap.  She was discovered to be communicating with a Catholic who was supposedly planning Elizabeth's assassination so that Mary could assume the throne of England.  De Vere and other royals were convened to hear the evidence and come to a foregone conclusion - one that Elizabeth then enacted and repudiated.

Anderson maintains that Shakespeare, and therefore by implication de Vere, fervently believed in the divine succession of royalty.  De Vere was, in Anderson's mind, deeply troubled by putting a royal to death.  Lady MacBeth's cries to eradicate that damn spot seem somehow more poignant when they come from the lips of a person who has actually committed the deed.  Shakespeare is imagining lady MacBeth as Elizabeth, the Queen who ordered the botched execution - where her cousin was first struck in the arm and then had her head severed - the head that was then held up only to fall out of the executioners hands because it had a wig on it that did not hold.  Something about the physicality of this ending - something about the bloody butchery - combined with the upsetting of the divine order - killing someone who, like Elizabeth herself, sat on the throne at God's command - and so, by killing her made it clear that she herself could also be killed - that God's orders could be circumvented by human design, something about the concreteness of it makes it chilling.  Lady Macbeth's guilt - the spot that won't go away - is not just her feeling responsible for an innocent death, but the sense that the blood, once shed, could go on being shed indefinitely.  De Vere's shared sense of guilt - and horror that he could overturn something he needed to believe upheld his own position, all of this creates a work of art that is not simply a means of telling a story - but of channeling very real, personal and immediate feelings into a vessel - a holder, not just for the author - not just for his queen, but for all of us - to know some very real aspect of what it means to be human - to act, and to feel the consequences of our actions.  To know that we can do and have done great and terrible things.  Art - and, I believe, analysis - allow us to know this viscerally, immediately, and irrevocably.


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