Blue Jasmine - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reverts to Type

Woody Allen is the poster boy of psychoanalysis - famous for featuring it in his films and in his life - sometimes twice a day with two different analysts...  After one of his very public peccadilloes twenty five years ago - let's just say it was when he married his stepdaughter - I was working at a psychoanalytically oriented hospital and thought to myself - if there was ever proof that psychoanalysis does not work, Woody Allen is it.  But one of my trusted supervisors had a different view - that his behavior demonstrated how pernicious - how difficult to change - character pathology is.  Currently I suppose that there is something to both of these thoughts.  There are certainly limits to the ability of psychoanalysis to create change, particularly in people who are attached to their pathology - and Woody Allen's latest movie, Blue Jasmine, demonstrates the complexity, and insidious nature, of character pathology.

OK, so it is a cliche for an analyst, reluctant or not, to write about Woody Allen's movie; but wait, it gets worse!  I watched it at the psychoanalytic institute with a bunch of analytic types and then we discussed it afterwards.  How cliche is that?  The discussants had done their homework.  One area they talked about was the apparent relationship between Blue Jasmine and the play "Streetcar Named Desire".  Another was in reviewing interviews with Mr. Allen, but also archival interviews with Tennessee Williams.

Blue Jasmine mirrors Tennessee Williams' play Streetcar Named Desire.  The dramas are set in different parts of the country, in different decades, and have very different plots.  To my way of thinking, what unites them is that the central character in both is challenged by her need to be dependent - or more particularly to ward off the awareness of just how vulnerable her wish (and need) to depend on another makes her - especially in the context of an intimate relationship.  The character - or character pathology - of the lead has changed, however.  Blanche Dubois, the lead in Streetcar, can be understood as having an hysterical character.  Her chief motivation is to be loved - and she is willing to overlook many faults - to repress her awareness of them - in order to hang onto her high regard of others - and to let them have, in turn, a high opinion of her.

Hysteria was the most frequent diagnosis that Freud made.  He learned about hysteria from the French.  He traveled to France and observed Charcot treating hysterics using hypnosis and took this treatment home to Vienna where he found no shortage of patients with hysterical character styles.  The famous Anna O. who, as Bertha Pappenheimer, went on to found the social work movement in Germany and who was credited by Freud with discovering the psychoanalytic cure - chimney sweeping she called it - of saying whatever came to mind in relation to hysterical symptoms - using this technique, with her Doctor Joseph Breuer, to break through the repressive barrier - discovering the unwanted thoughts that had been discarded, and dealing with them in the light of day, finding another way to cope with them, and moving on.  Freud saw Hysteria everywhere, including, as he engaged in self analysis and the analysis of others, in himself and other men - something the establishment couldn't bear - Hysteria, etymologically based on the Greek word for Uterus is, by definition (they maintained), a female disorder.

In fact, I believe it to be a means of coping with the world that was much more prevalent in times when authority figures were relied on in ways that they aren't currently.  I remember watching that transition as my grandmother sat transfixed day after day by the Watergate hearings.  Pundits at the time claimed that it was the end of an age of innocence, and it was.  Nixon, a man grandmother had voted for three times - a man she trusted to have integrity - was not trustworthy, and his band of henchmen were too graphic and three dimensional in all of their shiftiness for us - individually or collectively - to repress.  We learned that authority was not to be trusted.  But of course authority has to be trusted for the system to work, so there continue to be hysterics among us and hysterical streaks within each of us, but as a dominant style, it became more difficult to maintain.

So what did we replace the hysteric style with?  I am indebted to a fellow analyst for pointing out that Woody Allen's answer, in the character of Jasmine, played by Cate Blanchett in a performance that won her an Oscar, is that we have become narcissistic - or, in Jasmine's case, brittle narcissists - believing that we do not need others because we are self reliant and, unlike the hysteric who represses information that would interfere with our being able to be cared for by the other, we divide ourselves not between what is known and what is unknown, but between what is known when things are OK and what is known when things are not OK.  This way of not knowing is what we call a vertical split (between parts of the self that can be consciously in control - between the part that intermittently is in charge and feels independent and the part that intermittently is in charge and knows that we depend, despite what we tell ourselves, on others) rather than a horizontal split( a repressive split between what the trustworthy things are that are known about the other and the parts of the other - and ourselves - that is not trustworthy - parts that remain consistently unknown or unconscious).

But before we get to splitting, let's talk about narcissism.  First of all, narcissism is a normal part of our development.  It is, quite literally, self esteem.  It is self love, which is an important, perhaps even crucial part of a "healthy" personality.  The character (and dramatists are enviable because they create characters rather than the messy self-contradictory things called people), the character of Jasmine is a person who has loved herself.  She has been wealthy and stylish.  Her husband (played by Alec Baldwin) was suave without being smarmy.  While he was wheeling and dealing, she was entertaining his business associates and their wives.  She was also managing the charitable endeavors, the "noblesse oblige", that this couple of tremendous privilege engaged in as an integral part of the rounding out of their lives.

We meet her after all the trappings of wealth have been stripped away and get to know her former life only in flashback.  We see her in a raw state - one where her own self-involvement - her need to not just survive but thrive - is paramount, and these needs outweigh the agendas of those around her, including her adoptive sister on whom she is imposing - and whom she was party to swindling in her former existence, demonstrating that this is not just a means of functioning in the present, but a style that she has relied on forever, part of her character.  She does not just have self esteem, but self love that eclipses her ability to resonate with the needs of those around her.  She overlooks the shadiness of her husband's business dealings until he betrays her - not just her family - at which point, when things are not OK, she "recovers" her memory of his shenanigans and seeks terrible retribution - publicly exposing his private matters.

It quickly became clear to me that the movie was a condensed and highly symbolized version of Woody Allen's experience.  Jasmine (who changed her name from the drab given name that her parents chose for her) becomes a glamorous, competent person, but is also aware of the ways in which it is a sham - she is playing a role rather than being a person - and this is the vertical split - I both am and am not the person that I am pretending to be.  I remember an ancient interview where Woody Allen was asked about being married to a movie star - to Mia Farrow - and how did that feel to a nebbish kid from Brooklyn.  He responded that, as a world class director, of course he was married to a movie star.  And that statement rung to me as both true and not true.  He is a world class movie director.  But he is also a nebbish kid from Brooklyn and, at least in my memory, he did not say that he was a director AND a kid from Brooklyn, but that he was JUST a world class director.

This kind of split is evident in Jasmine.  She tries, in the wake of her dislocation, to play herself again, and is initially successful, catching the eye of a man who would remake her into who she was before - perhaps even more legitimately, but she can't - or doesn't - do this honestly and straightforwardly.  Instead she pretends to be someone she isn't - even though the man she discovers is attracted to the person she is - and when she is caught at being who she is not, she is abandoned by him, and she begins to totter on the edge of madness.

What I found compelling about the interviews - those with Allen and Tennessee Williams, is the contrast between Williams comfort with himself and his characters as projected aspects of himself (see a discussion of this in a post about The Glass Menagerie) - he states, in effect, that he is writing about parts of himself that he knows - parts that he isn't proud of, but that are very human, and he would never place himself above his characters while Allen, who denies any relationship between himself and his characters (and any relationship between his movie and Streetcar), creates distance which seems disingenuous at best.

Woody Allen depended on Bernie Madoff - a wheeler dealer like the Alec Baldwin character who disappointed him and absconded with a fortune.  Woody Allen depends on his audience, and they can turn on him, especially when he engages in behaviors that they find reprehensible (marrying his daughter), though he denies the reprehensibility (she is adopted).  And he denies a connection between his life and the movie, where the adopted daughters are, not surprisingly, all but unrelated to each other.

Both Williams and Allen, I believe, write incredibly presciently about female characters.  I think this is partly because those characters are, indeed, projected and, in Allen's case, apparently disowned aspects of themselves.  They are writing about their own psyches, or the feminine aspects of them, and allowing them to infuse the characters that are also based on people that they have interacted with.  This suggests that the chief characters they create may mirror the dominant characteristics of their own personality styles and that the character's means of managing what they don't want to know - in Williams/Blanche's case through repression - in Allen's/Jasmine's case through splitting, may mirror the functioning of the author's (even if, or, weirdly, particularly if, one of them denies it).  And Allen's denial through splitting - if that's what it is - may make the treatment of that aspect of the character structure particularly resistant to a treatment that relies on insight to achieve cure.  Interestingly, then, if this is true and Allen were to read it, he would both agree with it and deny it - the latter part would not be something that we, and perhaps not even he and his analysts, would be able to access.

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Post script: Rereading this after Bruce Jenner's transformation into Caitlyn this year, I am struck by the frustrated response of a feminist writer in the New York Times who railed that she was tired of men defining what it means to be a woman.

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Richard Russo's Straight Man – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reads About Academic Life While Living It

Richard Russo published Straight Man in 1997 and I must have read it for the first time not too long after that.  The story, told in the first person, of the interim Chair of the English Department in a small State University in Pennsylvania, led me to think, the first time I read it, of Phil, a friend of mine who teaches in an English Department in a small State University in Pennsylvania, but in a vague and abstract way.  The hero of this story, Henry Devereaux, Jr., sees the world as a joke and is constantly treating the people in his life as straight men (and women) who are merely setting up the punch lines that he delivers.  My friend Phil, while being fun loving, is also very serious – and takes himself more seriously than Henry Devereaux does.

I chose to re-read Straight Man in part because more than one person recommended it.  I remember enjoying it, but not much else about it.  There was a bit about a duck, but I couldn’t even remember the details of that.  The reason people were recommending it, I think, is that I am the chair of a department in a small private school.  The issues, they thought, would be similar.  And they were right.  Hank faces the same craziness that I am experiencing as a middle manager.  He is at a state school, so he is at the mercy of the legislature; I am at a private one, and so am at the mercy of the board, but we are both frequently waiting on funding.  This time I identified closely with the hero, and the story hung together better (though I have never had the temerity to threaten to kill a duck a day until the budget is approved – I will have to remember that tactic next year when the administration is sitting on it – again…).

But what does this book have to offer people who are not chairs – or even middle managers at whatever organization they may be in?  From a psychoanalytic perspective, Hank’s approach to life is very interesting.  He consistently occupies the “joking” state of mind.  He gives us as much access as he is able to the rest of his experience, but it is frankly – and he would be the first to say this – pretty limited – especially at the most critical moments (such as when he lifts a goose aloft and threatens to kill a duck a day while the news cameras are rolling).  Why does he do these crazy things?  It seems like a mystery to him, and to most of those around him – except his wife, who is actually bored by the predictability of his antics, and his boss’s secretary, who also gets him.

What do they get?  I think they are able to see something that Hank can’t possibly recognize from within the protected zone of his joking attitude towards the world – that his jokes betray not a disdain or disinterest in the world; quite the contrary, they display an almost painful reverence for it.  As his daughter remembers, when she went head over heels while learning to ride her bike, it was her father who cried all the way home, even after the pain, for her, had subsided.  This pain is too difficult to live with on a daily basis, so he distances himself from it with humor.  It is only when what he has been able to convince himself is a distant and unworthy world is threatened that he becomes directly aware of how desperately attached to that world he really is.  The humor, most of the time, keeps him safe.

This is the beauty of defense mechanisms.  They protect us from something threatening – an awareness of threat.  The intriguing thing is that this threat is frequently internal and mushy rather than external and physically dangerous.  Hank is afraid of the power of his attachments to make him vulnerable to being sad at a loss or anxious about an impending one.  He grew up in a family with two distant academic parents who saw him largely as an inconvenience.  He desperately wanted to connect with them – and failing that, to connect with a dog, something they were resolutely opposed to obtaining for him.  He fought and clawed and scrambled to get that dog only to have the dog his father finally obtained for him die the day he arrived.  He had to learn to protect himself, and humor became his go to protection.

My friends who have pointed me to this book have presciently pointed to a part of my experience I did not expect to discover from it – the power of the attachment that I feel to the place that I work.  In the midst of reading the book – swirling through my reading of the book – I felt the integrity of my University was threatened by the crazy actions of an administrator.  I am highly, consciously, ambivalent about the institution.  I like what it stands for.  I like what we do in our best moments.  I am appalled by our internal inconsistencies and the ways in which we don’t accomplish what we say we intend to.  I feel and resonate with Hank’s sarcastic relationships with students, fellow faculty and, above all, the administration.  I find almost everything about the University disappointing at one time or another.

At one point, Hank is describing the student ghetto and states that his Ivy League schooled buddies assure him that the slum-like conditions are to be found universally on or near all college campuses.  For an Ivory Tower place, academia can be quite gritty.  And Henry has seen the academic stars up close – his father was one – brilliant, but remote and self absorbed.  We want the academy to be Utopian, but it fails us – not least because it is tilted towards the intellectual life so much that the emotional life can be constricted and only seems to leak out in sophomoric humor and immature and highly objectified sexuality.

Many things on college campuses have changed since the writing of this book.  It would no longer be possible for a chair not to use email.  There are no phone booths on campus and being out of touch for periods of time in the midst of crisis the way this guy is seems very last century.  Hopefully there is less of a casual, wink wink say no more attitude towards sex between faculty and students – I hope that most schools, and faculty, have gotten how significant power imbalances rule out mutual consent and that, when these relationships inevitably emerge, they indicate a problem that should be attended to.  But, despite the different technologies and mores that have emerged in a relatively short period of time – the sense of the University – and I have it on good report that this is true of the Ivies as well – the sense of the University as less than we imagined is, I think, very current – perhaps even timeless.

So, it comes as some surprise then – when we have been complaining of the lack of resources, of the banal qualities of our students – that they are now millennials and that means that they can’t write or appreciate the written word – when we pooh pooh the administration; that, when there is a threat to this institution to which we are ambivalently (dare I say reluctantly) attached, we rally to defend it.  We lose sleep over how to ward off the threat – and think about how to make it better.  We may  use – or overuse – humor to protect ourselves.  In fact, unlike this character, who is, after all, a character – we inhabit multiple states of mind and, even if we have a home base, we move around,  organizing our internal world through a humorous lens one day, a blazing lens of fury the next, then an Eeyore/depressive one, and then maybe a somewhat aloof and better than it all one.  We put these selves on like costumes – and like costumes they distract others and ourselves from what we look like naked, but also serve as conduits for our naked feelings – allowing us to express them in ways that authenticate them.  So, when I am truly appalled by what an administrator is doing, my righteous indignation is both deeply genuine and a sham – an act.  It is a means of dressing up, of expressing, something that is not directly knowable, but only through acting it out can we know who it is that we are.

Russo maintains that the reason “… we have spouses and children and parents and colleagues and friends, is because someone has to know us better than we know ourselves.  We need them to tell us.  We need them to say, ‘I know you Al.  You’re the kind of man who.’”  They see us in our many costumes, and they observe what is constant, what is at the core, what makes us who we are.  Russo has constructed, in Henry Devereaux, Jr., a person who clings to a particular costume – that of the jester – to have a clear sense of himself.  It takes a great deal of courage to put the costume down – or perhaps more aptly – to try on various costumes – to become what it is that is evoked by a situation – with the faith we can use a particular costume to express what is needed at this moment, and to be able to shed it, to move to a different position, to understand ourselves at this moment from that moment where we have a very different vantage point.  Russo’s protagonist resists doing this.  He clings to the jester’s cap.  Or maintains that he does.  In the epilogue, though, he acknowledges things – like the depth of his love for his wife – directly.  He puts on the clothing of the lover – and it seems to fit OK.  He doesn’t feel too awkward or vulnerable, but rather – finally – more at home in that role, in the role of pater familias, and in a few other roles (including NOT being chair – but remaining comfortably in the role of faculty member).   And, from this perspective, this is a coming of age novel – even if the age of the one coming along is 50, and even if he may have to come of age again next year, and perhaps the year after that, too.

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Post script:   It's two years later and the administration has found yet another way to appall me and the rest of the faculty....  The more things change....  You can see a diatribe about the state of higher education at higher education.

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Sex and Coming of Age - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst watches the Birdcage, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and Dirty Dancing

Coming of age is a complicated matter.  My kids are in the middle of adolescence and trying to figure out how to come of age, and we have turned to movies as a means of talking about some of the issues that emerge at this point in life.  The Birdcage, a Hollywood film starring Robin Williams and Nathan Lane is modeled after the film La Cage aux Folles, a French Film.  When the two films first came out, I favored the French Film - it felt real and genuine while the Hollywood film felt arch and too carefully planned.  Well, arch, apparently, wears better than genuineness.  La Cage aux Folles now seems dowdy and dated, while the Birdcage is quite crisp.  And what struck me on this viewing, and the reason to group it with the other films, is that it clarifies that the sexually outre couple, Williams and Lane, is the moral equal of the repressed and repressive senator (Gene Hackman) and his wife (Diane Wiest).  These two couples are brought together by their children who want to become engaged and are afraid of the mixing of the cultures - something that occurs with what I find to be truly hilarious results.

The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas is a musical that documents the real life demise of an establishment that was a Texas institution.  In the film Dolly Parton plays the Madame who runs the ranch, Burt Reynolds is the none too bright sheriff who both sleeps with Dolly and protects her, her girls and the town, and Dom DeLuise plays the TV reporter who exposes the secret and shuts down the ranch.  As an aside, watching DeLuise literally stuff himself into the suit of the character, but more importantly stuff his outsized persona into the relatively contained role of a Texas loudmouth from New Jersey is good clean fun.  And the movie portrays a visit to the whorehouse as being nothing more than good clean fun as well.  Indeed, all of the patrons are treated to a soap and water washing before any extracurriculars take place, and the married patrons' wives seem to think that it is nice that their husbands give them a little time off from the chore of sex.

In both of these movies,  the repressive forces - the Senator in the Birdcage and the DeLuise character in Best Little Whorehouse - have self interest as a complicating factor in their morality and thus are mildly corrupt in their approach, while the sexually liberated have to be duplicitous to escape legal difficulties or social censure, but ultimately are able to act with integrity because they are genuine and authentic people.  Come, be like us, they seem to be saying, or, barring that, admire us - don't ridicule us.  We are living the truly moral, truly caring existence and this lifestyle, far from threatening, is a good and wholesome one.

We can see why the Gay world would want to put this message out there - but it is a little less clear how the institution of prostitution is supporting the second movie.  Actually I think both movies are promoting a much more universal psychological transition that we have to make.  We are told, by and large - sometimes directly, sometimes subtly, that our infantile, pre-adolescent and adolescent sexuality is something to be controlled.  Perhaps if we are liberated parents we tell our kids to masturbate as a means of managing their sexual urges.  Perhaps if we are less so, we tell them to take cold showers.  But we also urge them toward sexuality.  If we didn't, how would the species propagate?  How would we have any fun?  How would we get our children out of our basements?

The not so subtle message in these movies is that you can engage in the "dirty" activity of sex, that you can move beyond seeing sexuality as something that is gross and disgusting to experiencing it as an important part of a life - an integral part of a life - that it can be part of your moral functioning, part of your moral character.  The Burt Reynolds character finally grows up enough to have a mature relationship with the Dolly Parton character - he recognizes his sexuality as an important part of a loving relationship.  You do not have to be a bad person to have sex.

This is perhaps most poignantly and directly portrayed in the movie Dirty Dancing.  Here, the protagonist, Baby, the younger daughter of a traditional New York Jewish family with a physician father, discovers her sexuality at the dawn of the sexual revolution in the 1960s while on a family vacation at a schmaltzy resort in the Catskills.  This is a more nuanced film than the other two.  Here, too, the sexually awakened are the morally superior, though they are painted by the establishment as danger incarnate and dismissed as immoral.  The nuances come through by pointing out that sex is not all rosy, but in fact some of the sexually active are wolves - though these are the Yale and Harvard pre-meds, not the working class kids who run the resort.

Would that it were as easy as these films portray it to be to make the transition to adulthood.  Baby acts on her principles, sticks to them (while becoming sexually active), risks the most important relationship in her life, the relationship with her father - loses him for a while, but ultimately regains both the relationship and a new level of respect.  This is what is supposed to happen as we mature.  Engaging in a forbidden, disowned and morally reprehensible, but necessary activity like sex certainly complicates this process.

We are currently struggling on college campuses to reconcile this process with the ways in which it can be abused.  One in four (or five, depending on the study and the ways that we define it) women on college campuses have been raped.  For many of them, this has been traumatic.  Title IX, most famous for effecting college athletics, is the Federal Law that is being used to oversee colleges' responses to sexual violations.  It will be important, as we move forward, to recognize that, for women to be able to say no, and for that to be respected, they first have to be able to say yes, if they choose to.  They have to be able to own their own sexuality and to engage in it if they choose.  When they can do that, no does not mean yes - no does not mean, I want to but society won't allow me to say that so I have to say no and you have to "seduce" me.  Quite the contrary.  I am a sexual being.  I want to have sex.  I want to choose with whom I will have it and when.  So when I say yes I mean it, and when I say no I mean it.  And "seduction" no longer becomes a veil behind which men can hide their selfish intent.

When we get to the point of being able to honestly engage in conversations about sexuality.  When we can own our sexuality as comfortably as is represented in the Birdcage and Best Little Whorehouse, then we can, as men and women, live sexual, but more importantly, moral lives with integrity.  Fortunately we can do that, even in difficult times, like the times depicted in Dirty Dancing, the times that occur in all families as the children mature and engage in sexual activity on their own terms.  This is a complex process, however.  It's not just that it is not as simple as the guys from Harvard are bad guys and the hoods are good guys.  In fact, we are all powerful mixtures of both (though, don't get me wrong, there are guys out there who are more consistently bad than not - and they should be identified and stayed away from/separated from the herd/trained in becoming good, depending on the type of relationship and on the power that the people are interacting with them have).  But we have different motives that are most surgent at different moments.  But I do agree with these films' shared premise that, when sexuality is acknowledged - even celebrated, we are much more likely to lead lives of integrity.

All of the above being said, we should let the Reluctant Wife have the last word on this subject.  As we were discussing the Best Little Whorehouse, we debated the role of television in bringing about the demise of the whorehouse.  Her position:  it couldn't survive as depicted because it was a place where women owned their sexuality and men can't handle that.  OK, maybe she shouldn't have the last word.  Men should learn to not just tolerate women's sexuality, but to enjoy it - to celebrate it - as something that enhances the lives of all.      

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Gender and Sexual Object - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Goes to a Convention

There was a panel discussion today at the psychoanalytic convention I was attending about gender and sexuality. I arrived late from another session and missed the bulk of the formal presentation, which, I gathered from context, was a historical review by the people who had lived it, of the shift in US psychoanalysis from a repressive attitude towards gays and lesbians to a current position that ranges from embracing gays and lesbians, to tolerance, including by "allowing" openly gay and lesbian individuals to become analysts and training analysts (analysts who are cleared to train other analysts), to discomfort, but with much more openness towards the psychological health of individuals with disparate object attractions than has traditionally been the case.

I have blogged elsewhere about sex and sexuality. What stuck me today was a question that a woman asked who had been in a previous session with me. That previous session had focused on research in psychoanalysis and she had talked about her own research work. She was pleasant, clear and articulate and my "gay-dar" had not registered anything at all. Frankly, despite her being an attractive enough person her "sexualness", meaning her being a sexual being (God, that sounds stilted) didn't register. What had registered was that this was a comfortably professional and competent woman.

 In the Q and A with the panel in the GLBT session, she described her experience as a group therapist in a clinic. In a therapy group one day, an offensive joke about lesbians was told. The group was appalled at the joke and appropriately confronted the joke teller. What was pivotal for her (and for me) was a comment by one of the members. "Well, thank goodness there are no lesbians in the group," the member said.

 An interesting thing happened at that moment. Perhaps partly because it still hadn't registered for me that this woman was a lesbian, I thought, "Well of course there are. All the woman in the group (I do not know the gender composition of the group, so this may have meant that just the therapist or the therapist and all of the other women) are lesbians - and straight."  But the actual identificatory track, if I am honest, was more personal. I immediately switched the genders and thought, "If an offensive joke about a gay man were told, my gay self would be offended. And so would the gay selves of all the other men in the group (it happened that she had stated that her co-therapist is an openly gay man)."

By the way, I don't mean to be telling my reluctant wife news. And this will not come to her as news. There are men to whom I am attracted, just as there are women (it was kind of odd that I wasn't attracted to this woman telling the story - maybe it was that there were no flickers of attraction that were coming from her?  Or maybe she was more practiced than most in desexualizing relationships?  Or maybe most of my day to day interactions are much less sexually charged than my bold assertions above be attracted to anything that moves would suggest?). The question that the woman posed to the group was, "should I have come out in that moment?" And this turns out to be a complicated question, especially in a group that is talking about how important it has been for analysts to come out over the course of the last 50 years.

 In that moment, when the group member stated that they were thankful there were no lesbians in the group, the storyteller was passing as a heterosexual, something it became apparent many psychoanalysts had been doing during the early years of the AIDS crisis - they came out when they died. It turns out that this therapist's motivation to come out to the group was not based, to the best that she could tell, in her desire to move the group process along. It was based primarily in a wish on her part to be known as a lesbian by the group. She fought her desire to come out - she bore the burden of being unknown to the group through the end of that session and then she and her co- therapist discussed whether disclosing her sexuality would be in the best interests of the group at that moment.

 I don't know what they decided, and it doesn't really matter. The point, she and I agreed in a brief conversation after the session, is that what matters is what is in the best interests of the group or, in psychoanalysis proper, the individual we are treating. As psychoanalysts, we need to bear our patients' misperception of us, at least at times. We need to pass.  We need to allow the transference to develop.  Sometimes my patients perceive me as Jewish. At some point they will discover that I am not, and I need to make my best guess effort to try to understand why they need to see me as Jewish at this particular moment before too quickly disabusing them of a useful fiction. Are they Jewish themselves and need me to be safe? Are they anti semitic and need to hate me? I can't, of course know this for certain, but I can be curious about it. And we can discover that together. The dilemma, though, is that passing violates a basic principle of psychotherapy - good psychotherapy requires that the therapist be genuine - deceit is a corrosive element in any relationship. So how can my lesbian peer avoid deceit while she bears being perceived as straight? How can I avoid deceit while bearing being perceived as Jewish?

 First of all, I should not pretend to be gay if I am straight or Jewish if I was raised Protestant. I cannot be something that I am not, and I shouldn't try. That said, and this should cause you to question my integrity, I think we should consider our ability to channel, not simply to bear, being the person we are perceived to be. This should not be a deception. In so far as I am able to be in touch with my gay self; to be offended as a gay man by a slur against gays, in so far as I am able to be my Jewish self; to be safe or to be despised in whatever way I am; in so far as I can, I should identify with the projections of my patients, to try them on for size - never losing track of the fact that I am, at least also, straight; that I am, in very essential ways, in addition to being Jewish in whatever ways that I am, Protestant and a member of the dominant culture, so that my passing, my channeling, is just that; passing, and I pass as a means towards more fully engaging with my patients, with their experience of my essential otherness or similarity or whatever it is they may be exploring.

 If this is the analytic ideal, and I believe it is, this may help us better understand the homophobia that has been such a central element in American psychoanalysis. But American psychoanalysis is not just homophobic, it has been a bastion of narrowly and conservatively defined normalcy and mental health. Psychoanalysis begs us to get in touch with all of our contradictory selves, especially those that are most threatening to us. And it demands of analysts that they do the same thing, and this is, indeed, very demanding. We must bear not just the projection, but the realization that, in some derivative way, it is accurate because we are human and we lust, we hate, we love, and we do everything else that makes living so delicious and so complicated. But I think we also want to deny that reality, so we created the myth of the well- analysed person - someone who had somehow weirdly transcended being human. We thought that we, and our patients, could achieve this state, and may therefore have engaged in denial of aspects of ourselves, and of them, that were ironically essential to their achieving true psychological health.  (For another perspective on why psychoanalysts have been late to the gender and sexuality conversation please see a more recent post here).

I am aware as I say this that my perception of psychoanalysis as homophobic - or as being closed to childhood sexual abuse as a contributor to psychopathology - is based largely on my experience from outside the profession: from what I have read about it, or heard about it before becoming more closely involved.  Charles Soccarides wrote powerful tracts denouncing homosexuality as essentially pathological.  Indeed, version of the Diagnostic Manual (DSM-III) that was in place when I started to practice characterized homosexuality as a diagnosable disorder.  But my experience of practitioners of psychoanalysis is that they are, by and large, an open group - curious about the human condition and engaged in trying to understand that as best they are able.  And I have experienced the shock of practitioners at the characterization of the analytic position being that childhood sexual abuse didn't exist because they have been hearing about it and treating the effects of it for decades.  We need to be careful about characterizing psychoanalysts as a group as we do about characterizing any other group, I suppose.

 After the conference, I had a little time to kill before boarding my plane. I didn't have enough time to go to a museum, so I decided to go to the New York Public Library, to the reading rooms, to soak in a bit of the atmosphere. I was carrying my briefcase and my overnight bag and I went through an inspection line on the way out the door (I have no idea why the NY Public Library doesn't have a mechanical theft detection mechanism). I had a number of my own books in my briefcase, but I saw the guard size me up and decide I wasn't a likely thief - he let me leave without even a cursory inspection. And he was right. I didn't have any stolen books in my bag. This doesn't mean I don't want to (in the probably all too mortal words of Abby Hoffman), "Steal this book." I have stolen. I still feel the urge. Perhaps more than most, I am conscious of it. I feel needy and entitled. I am, at heart, a thief. But it is currently unlikely that I will act on that - and maybe the guard could see in the cut of my coat that the risk of being caught, and my moral repugnance at my desire to steal, and whatever other factors conspire to keep my inner thief in jail were at work and my bag was clean.


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Noah - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Sees a Movie that is a Modern Midrash

There is a story about a psychologist who proposed an idea to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The president is accompanied everywhere – or was at this time – by a military attaché who carried the code that was needed to start a nuclear war in a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist. The psychologist proposed that the attaché have the code surgically implanted near his heart and that he carry an axe in the briefcase. If the President decided to wage nuclear warfare, he would have to look the attaché in the face and say, “In order that millions of innocent people die, I first have to kill you to get access to the code.” The Joint Chiefs of Staff were horrified. They said if this system were set up, there would never be a nuclear war.

Noah, The new film starring Russell Crowe and Directed and co-written by Darren Oronofsky, proposes a kind of inverse problem. How do you take the noblest man – a good and gentle father, someone who is so good that he is a vegetarian and won’t even pick flowers because that would prevent their becoming seeds - and use him as a tool in the destruction of all life on the planet? The answer is presented in this film in the form of a Midrash. A midrash is an ancient Judaic tradition of filling out Biblical stories, particularly in the Torah – the first five books of the Bible, by Rabbis who put flesh on the bare bones stories as told – they describe the context in which the stories took place – sometimes based on textual interpretation, sometimes from historical information – and they can bring the characters to life – giving them psychological motives and enriching the stories – frequently to make a moral point or as a means of interpretation.

Raised a protestant, the idea of a Midrash was novel to me. I suppose that the kid’s versions of Bible stories – they used to be in Doctor’s offices when I was growing up – were a kind of Midrash, but they didn’t elaborate much. Mostly they presented visual images – in this case of Noah’s ark, with a prow and windows with pairs of happy animals sticking their heads out. And the story seemed mostly to be about the animals. In this movie, the animals are at best bit parts – it is the human drama that takes center stage, and the questions of justice – of good and evil, of the nature of man, and of the purpose of creation - take center stage. The questions are addressed in ways that I found to be gripping – it is a good movie – but also profound.

This film gives us access to an enigmatic character – indeed makes it clear to us that he is an enigmatic character – and it opens up his psychology in novel and interesting ways. The first of these is the mode of communication between the Archaic God and Noah. How does Noah know God? Bill Cosby, a million years ago, engaged in his own Midrash, a wonderful dialogue between God and Noah. God tells Noah, “Build me an ark 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide and 30 cubits high”, and Noah says, “Right,” pauses for a beat and says, “What’s a cubit?”

In this movie, God communicates with Noah much more ambiguously, through dreams. These dreams presage the ending of the earth, but they do so, as dreams are want to do, through visual images. Noah sees the mountain of his grandfather, and sees a deluge and people dying. He deduces that he needs to take his family with him to see his grandfather and to take whatever next steps God would have for him.

I have occasionally had patients who are convinced that they have dreams that have divine origin. I make it clear to them that I cannot interpret that type of dream. I am not an oracle reader. I can help them with more common every day dreams, dreams that are produced by their unconscious minds – dreams that are a reaction to events in their lives and that are serving a function – one of integration, problem solving, and wish fulfillment. I explain that understanding these aspects of their dreams will help them learn to communicate better with their unconscious minds and that the wisdom of their unconscious minds will be useful to them in navigating their lives.

Noah’s dreams are of divine origin, but they also seem to be constructed in the much the way that our more garden variety dreams are constructed. They contain the hopes and fears of Noah the person that we are getting to know in this movie. Noah is first introduced to us as a little boy. He is about to receive the blessing of his father when Tubal-Cain discovers them at a site where he wants to mine and kills his father in front of Noah’s eyes. Noah runs away. We next encounter Noah as a grown man with three sons – children he cares for and nurtures – guiding and teaching them as they try to scratch out a living together on barren ground. But when they are threatened by outsiders, Noah brutally defends his children, killing men with as much certainty as he displays in teaching his children not to pick the flowers. This good and gentle man is also living in a harsh and unforgiving world, one in which it is sometimes necessary to kill or be killed. He loves with abandon, but engages in violence as necessary – and perhaps with vengeance as a motive. His dream, then, contains both the fear and the wish that this world – this harsh and violent world that he dearly loves – be destroyed – not by fire, but cleansed - cleansed of the dirty and destructive creatures that are ruining God's creation - by water.

Noah’s Grandfather, Methuselah (played by Anthony Hopkins), helps induce a second dream, with tea, and gives Noah a seed from the Garden of Eden. These two tools help him create the ark. They also lead to a confrontation with Tubal-Cain, who is now the king of the hordes of evil people that God, and Noah, would eradicate. Noah’s family – in a departure from the Biblical text – consists only of his three sons and a barren girl that he has rescued on the way to Methuselah’s mountain. And Noah goes out into Tubal-Cain’s hordes to find wives for his sons. But he is confronted by nightmarish scenes of people who are trading their daughters for food and, sickened, he returns to the ark convinced that God wants him to save the animals, but destroy humanity. He concludes that his sons should be the last living people. This is neither the plan of his children, nor his wife. They want to live and to promote generations to follow. They are more aware of the love between them – and with him - that redeems their own wickedness.

Noah, as he engages in a terrible exercise that will result in the murder of many, becomes closed to the loving part of himself. He becomes essentially evil. And, I think, he projects his evilness, not only onto those, like Tubal-Cain, who deserve that, but also onto those he loves. As he does this, he removes himself from them and they react to that in various ways – his wife turns to Methuselah as an ally against his plan, and his son Ham, who tries to find a woman to take with him as his wife, becomes furious with Noah. Ham recognizes the evil in him, noting that Noah has caused the death of the woman Ham has found – a woman that Ham declares to be innocent. Noah becomes increasingly at odds with his family as he clings to his interpretation of what God wants him to do.

 God, as is frequently the case, does not communicate with Noah as Bill Cosby’s God would.  Instead, Noah is confronted with the unplanned births of grandchildren – the result of Methuselah’s intervention – and, not surprisingly, cannot bring himself to murder them in cold blood. Despite our knowing the end of this story – we exist, at least in the context of the story, because Noah did not end all of human life, I found myself caught up in the question of how Noah would handle this moment. Psychologically, he must heal the rifts that have come to be inside himself – he must move forward in a world where his offspring – he will be the father of all of humanity – are capable of murder – the murder that separated him from his father and from his birthright. He will be responsible for a world that will wreak greater technological damage on creation than Tubal-Cain’s hordes could possibly have imagined. And he will be the father of a world that exists in the wake of the murders that he has been party to – the people who climbed on board the ark but whom he let drown rather than bringing them into the ship because they had room.

Noah, this man who believes so strongly in justice and who works so hard to return order to the world will allow evil to return, because he feels attachment to humans.  At the moment when human life could have ceased; when we were hanging on by the thinnest of threads and, when someone who was informed about the inevitability of man’s destructive ways with creation could stop it – when, unlike Adam who did not know the consequences of eating the fruit, Noah did – he chose, and God backed him up with a covenant symbolized by the rainbow, to continue this thing called human life. We, in our own small way, play Noah when we have children; when we consume goods, when we drive our cars, eat meat, do all those things that we feel mildly guilty about, we participate, with Noah, in the conflicted enterprise of living; of affirming the value of humanity despite the dirty, horrible mess that our living causes. This movie writes large a latent story that could be read in the Bible, but one that we might too quickly skip over – the heart of a conflict that we can feel between how we would have the world be, and how it is – and the reason that we “settle” for living in the world as it is turns out to be quite simple – we love the people in that world, flawed though they are. Noah, as every President to date has done, decided that human life needs to be preserved. Though we may hate our enemies and want to destroy them, we can find a way, at least Noah did, to recognize that their evilness is something that lives within ourselves, and that we can muddle forward - there is no way that we, or a world with humans in it, will be pure, and, despite that, it is better with us in it, with or being able to love each other in spite of ourselves.


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Her - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Watches a Movie about the Therapeutic Relationship and So Much More

The movie Her is not nearly as creepy as you might imagine; at least not on the surface. You may have heard that a guy, Theodore Twombly, played by Joaquin Phoenix, falls in love with his computer – actually his operating system (O/S), Samantha, voiced by Scarlett Johansson. As the reluctant wife points out, 20 years ago this would have been science fiction. Now, it seems like what we should be preparing for. The O/S is a version of IBM’s Watson, a computer that can intuit – that can guess – what would work best in a situation of uncertainty. But it is more human than Watson, and engages with Theodore in ways that are both surprising, but also quite believable. We work with computers most of our days – I spend more time at my computer than I do with humans – and I am a psychoanalyst! The story of Theo’s falling in love with his O/S and she with him is less about a basement dwelling guy who can’t connect with people than the story of a guy, coming off of a divorce, finding a compassionate ear who takes really good care of him and also finding an entity who is becoming someone – but who is virtual – and she wants to know what it is like to be human.

Now, about the title of the blog, it is really hard to view this movie and not see it as a representation of the therapeutic relationship, at least if you are an analyst. OK, this O/S therapist (though she might have also been the secretary in the days of Mad Men), is more consistently available – when you can’t sleep, she is right there, but the set up almost cries out for it. Theo is asked to answer several questions by the company thatt sets up the personal O/S that will evolve for him before they turn her on. They want to know what gender he wants the O/S to be, and they want to know what his relationship with his mother was like. As Theo is reflecting on the second question, after acknowledging that his mother would appear to be interested in him, but take everything that he said and turn it into something that was of interest to her, the machine cuts him off, and he is introduced to Samantha – who chooses her own name by reading a book of baby names in the time between his asking her what her name is and her seemingly immediate response. In psychoanalytic terms, we expect – and see played out – a transferential replay of Theo’s relationship with his mother, and get evidence that this is part of what happened between Theo and his wife, whom he is in the midst of divorcing.

While I could write about the arcs of those relationships and the ways in which the relationship with Samantha is a healing one, much as a relationship with a therapist/psychoanalyst can be – including because both the O/S and the therapist are ultimately unavailable, and thus the ways that this movie is, indeed, a comedy, as advertised, my experience of it was actually much more disturbing, much more creepy. After we got home from the movie, I had a long dream. In it, I was on vacation, alone. There were lots of other people in the dream, but they were all going about their own business and I mine. Towards the end of the dream, there was an earthquake and I tried to organize the people who were around me to get away from the walls of the buildings that were crumbling around us. I was the only one who was successfully able to do this. Everyone else died. I was alone and frightened. I yelled, hoping to find someone still surviving – it felt like anywhere on the planet. I noticed some movement, but it was just my reflection in a mirror that was hanging, crooked, on a wall a long way off. I looked like a monkey crying out, jumping up and down. I woke up terrified. And while the dream is about many other things as well, it was partly stimulated by the movie.

 Theo becomes caught up with his computer. He is around many many other people, but he is isolated. His job – he works at handwrittenletters.com – is to write love letters for people that he doesn’t know, apparently because they are too busy to do so. So he writes to wives from their husbands, and to kids at school from their parents – picking up on subtle clues from photographs that they send to create relationships between them that he quite beautifully articulates. I, too, do this. I imagine the lives of my clients. I picture the people in their lives – I picture their dreams, and I use my intuition to connect with them. And Samantha does this with Theo. She sees, through the lens of the camera that he carries in his chest pocket what he sees. She joins in his conversations, first with him, then with him and others, and then on her own, and as she does this she becomes more and more human. She models her humanity, in part, on her experience of his humanity. Theo is the mirror that Samantha uses to build herself, and then she becomes a mirror in which Theo can see himself – he can see how he is treating her as he has treated others in his life. He creates her – in some ways more, but in other ways just as we create each other in our relationships.

Samantha and Theo become mirror images of each other, as he, to some extent, was a mirror image of his mother. And as they do this, Theo experiences himself as opening up – going on vacation with Samantha to a remote cabin where it is just the two of them and he can more fully be himself – but this does become a pretty creepy context in which to become yourself. He is literally masturbating as a means of having sex with Samantha, but he is also symbolically masturbating as he becomes the “master of his own domain” by living with a projection of who it is that the other should be.

 Now part of the happy ending of the movie is that Samantha does not simply remain a projection, but she in fact becomes an autonomous other – and this allows Theo to reclaim himself, and to reconnect with humans. But the scary/creepy component is how drawn we (and here I mean me, as exemplified in my dream) are to an isolated, self-absorbed/reflective existence, one where we are as happy to sit in front of a TV or computer screen as to interact with real people. This withdrawal into virtual relationships is very inviting, seductive, and ultimately – my dream suggests, though the movie reassures us that it is not the case, deathly isolating. I think this movie is trying to reassure us, on the surface, that our basic humanity will save us from the onslaught of isolating factors that are increasingly assaulting us. Just as Facebook reassures us that we are in more and more contact with our friends. I think my unconscious questions that assertion.

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

In another post, on Hozier, I am less convinced that machines can become "human".

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Autism and Being Human - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Looks from Afar

The New York Times Sunday Magazine last weekend included a moving article about the relationships between a group of people and an autistic child, now adult, who is functioning much better than any would have imagined; while the New Yorker published the interview with the father of the Sandy Hook killer, who also bore an autism spectrum diagnosis, but whose outcome, as his father said, could not have been worse. Before we go any further, a word of caution: I know next to nothing about autism. One of the reasons to become a psychoanalyst, however reluctantly, was to gain knowledge about the human condition. I hope I have gained some measure of that. I have not treated, nor have I known well anyone with an autism diagnosis. I know, academically and in the vernacular, what it means. It has become the diagnosis du jour – like multiple personality in the 80s and 90s, and Attention Deficit Disorder and the 90s and 00s, it has become all the rage.

 As the New York Times article points out, 1 in 54 males is currently being diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder (boys are six times more likely to be diagnosed than girls). I remember in 1990, working in a tertiary care facility and having someone referred to us for a diagnosis – the parents had found no description that was accurate – and one of my fellow clinicians met with the boy and tested him and discovered this arcane syndrome – Asperger’s – fit. It was a syndrome none of us had heard of. And now it is widely known to the lay public. My, how times have changed. And it is a mystery to me. I first heard of it being treated by the Lovaas group at UCLA. There they treated these kids who would not make contact by offering powerful behavior interventions – feeding them cheerios when they engaged in prosocial behaviors and withholding food otherwise. They were the group that had the most success with this very difficult to engage – walled or sealed off kids – who lived in a world of their own. I had a friend in graduate school who worked with that group and one thing that she related to me – as a kind of secret – was that, in addition to the “positive” reinforcement of the cheerios, the group was also taught how to hit (punish) the kids for doing undesired behaviors – they were taught how to hit them in ways that would not bruise so that no one would know that they were hurting as well as feeding them. I don’t, of course, know if this is true or not, but I remember recoiling at the idea that children were being treated so inhumanely.

The current book on autism, at least most broadly, takes it to be a mysterious syndrome with uncertain, but likely biological causes. Autism generally is associated with poor intellectual functioning, and Asperger’s was the exceptional case where it was seen in kids with normal intelligence. But the new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, DSM-V, proposes Autism Spectrum Disorders, and has done away with Asperger’s as a category. And the treatments continue to be largely behaviorally based treatments – often parents hire our undergraduate students to closely monitor the functioning of their children and to reinforce desired behaviors – presumably a treatment based on some variation of the Lovaas technique – hopefully without the surreptitious hitting. I have a friend who is a child analyst who has had success connecting with autism through analysis.  Researchers have also made the case that analytically based interventions can help people with autism.

 The New York Times article, Animating Owen, written by Ron Suskind, the father of the boy who has had such a remarkable developmental arc, relates the importance of Disney movies in the boy’s recovery. The boy has an older brother and initially developed normally and then, like a third of kids who are diagnosed with autism, his development went south. He lost the ability to speak and went from a verbal and engaged kid to one who was severely withdrawn. The father’s pain at losing his child was perhaps most poignantly portrayed when he described not being able to bring himself to watch the videos of the happy child his son had been before things went so terribly wrong. So Disney movies became the key to getting back out and on track. It was a painful and very difficult track; the child obsessively played Disney movies over and over, sometimes rewinding and playing a particular scene, or even snippet of dialogue again and again.

At first the repetitive movie watching just seemed an annoying autistic obsessive symptom, but then his Mom noticed that he was saying something that sounded somewhat like the words to one of the songs in the Little Mermaid, and the family watched that scene together. Then slowly and with difficulty, he was able to play one of the parts while a family member played another part, and an interaction began to take place. This play acting led, slowly, to being able to talk in the voices of the characters, at first mimicking them precisely, but eventually talking with his own words. Ultimately it led to the ability to reflect on the play acting and eventually to being able to talk about how the movies were constructed. And some of the observations about the movies attributed to the child were remarkable; particularly that it is the sidekicks who do all the work and have all the most interesting emotions. The heroes just kind of bumble along (see my similar observations about Star Trek). And the kid’s observation that he is a sidekick. And that this is a strength, not a weakness.

The Andrew Solomon article about Peter Lanza, the father of the Sandy Hook killer Adam, was also quite poignant. The newspaper articles that I read suggested that the Sandy Hook groups were opposed to the article, saying that it was time to move on with healing and that it would open up a wound. As a distant observer, I found the story to be very human; filled with guilt, regret, and remorse and telling a story that acknowledged the heartbreak for all. At the center is the story of a mother choosing between what will make the day livable (OK, don’t eat your vegetables) and what is in the long term best interests of the child (don’t come out of your room until you’ve done your homework).

Solomon clarifies that the murders cannot be explained – but what the picture that he paints of the estranged father and the mother who is struggling with an increasingly demanding son evokes is sympathy – as does the story of the students and teachers who were killed. What binds these stories together is the difficulty of reaching kids who are as walled off from the world as these two. It is expensive, both in money – Suskind estimates that it cost his family $90,000 per year in schooling, psychotherapy, etc. to support his son and the autism organizations estimate $60,000 per year are necessary to provide adequate care, but the costs are also in emotional engagement. Owen and Disney were the center of the family functioning for the better part of 20 years. Raising a special needs child is tremendously taxing on a marital relationship. I can’t help but imagine that the challenge of raising Adam Lanza was one of the factors in the dissolution of his parents’ marriage. And our children demand of us that we work to create a space for them to become more fully human.

That last sentence in the last paragraph has gotten me in trouble with the reluctant wife. She does not see degrees of humanity, but expects that we are all, categorically, human. And she has the Declaration of Independence, among other documents, on her side. But I believe that we, as parents, provide love, education, medical and psychological care, nutrition and exercise not just to promote our children’s “normal” development, but actually to help them join a tremendous web that is our shared human culture. We are trying to provide the best possible platform for them to fully exploit what is available to them. This challenge, as difficult as it is, is hugely more problematic when the child is missing something that we take for granted – something like an interest in human relationships – something as debilitating as an inability to form words.

Suskind suggests that we can reach these kids – particularly through finding out why it is that they have chosen to get wrapped up in the things they have, to discover what these things mean to them. This requires an incredibly close and demanding attention – a sensitivity to the potential for an inner life in someone who can actively work to ward off the intrusions of those outside of themselves. The other thing that he suggests is that these kids, unlike us (though I think I share at least some of this with them) work from the outside in to construct themselves – using the blacks and whites of rules, the cartoon versions of how people function – to create a version of themselves, rather than working from the inside out – trusting our intuitions and feelings and senses to “know” how to move forward in the world. I think I would propose that most of us work in a dialectical movement back and forth between inside out and outside in, while some of us may be more comfortable – and in some cases more confined – to one end or the other of this range of functioning. My thesis is not that we should not focus on the behaviors of autistic kids. We should do whatever will help them engage more fully in the world. My thesis, and I think that of Suskind, is that we should also focus on their inner worlds. To trust that they exist and that they are working to be – or from the position of the reluctant wife – that they are human, and that we should work on figuring out how to be in contact with that humanity within them. Of course, this raises the specter of false hope. I think this would be a terrible thing - but I think the specter of no hope is even worse - even more difficult to labor with.

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

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