Gabrielle Zevin's The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Engages in the Guilty Pleasure of a Bad Book

When my little sister started her menses, she was humiliated that, on the way home from a trip to the drugstore, I was reading her tampon box.  She complained to Mom that I was embarrassing her, and Mom clarified that I was just reading print on page - it's what I do - and that it wouldn't have mattered if it was a tampon box, a cereal box, or the paper that was going to line the cat box, I was going to read it.  Not to humiliate her, but because I was then, am now and probably always will be an indiscriminate reader.  This book is, theoretically, about helping people read discriminately.

What reader hasn't fantasized about opening up a book store?  What could be better than to sit in store all day reading - interrupted only by people coming in to talk about books?  And what better place to do this than in some out of the way vacation spot?  Well, be careful what you wish for.  A.J. Fikry opens ups just such a spot in his wife's hometown.  But he is an outsider.  Not just because this is a small town and he looks foreign, but because he is a reader - someone whose nose is always stuck in a book, and he cares more about books than people - and he has particular tastes in books.  And he is in mourning - and he is mean when he is mourning.

The book deepens, in so far as it does, as Fikry begins to recommend books to people based on who those people are and what kind of book they would like.  I have had the experience, first for myself, of telling a bookstore employee what I was looking for (a wonderful fellow at the Little Professor Bookstore - one of the early chains - turned me onto Roger Zelazny, still my favorite fantasy author), and then for the reluctant son (recently a local bookstore helper in the young adult section was able to help latch his interest in sports books onto a futuristic series involving sports yet to be invented).  This service requires the ability to match our own sensibilities with those of another - to imagine not what our reaction to a book would be - but what their's would be.  It is a wonderful sort of match making - I think you would like this book.  And, when it works, there's almost something mystical about it.  We have gotten both the book and the other person.

Melanie Klein, a psychoanalytic theorist who was keenly attuned to the raw underbelly of human existence, claimed that there is nothing we can do that is more hostile than to give someone a gift.  And recommending that another read a book can certainly be a hostile gift.  They will, if they accept the gift, invest their time, the most precious commodity that they have, in something that you have foisted off on them.  Recently I recommended a book to the reluctant wife.  She likes to read, but she is discriminating.  I recommended Beautiful Ruins, a book that includes a weird mash up of fictional characters and Liz Taylor and Richard Burton - actors that she admires.  It also has a romantic/off beat feel to it and it feels allegorical.  It is incredibly well written.  Like Fikry, it is a quick read.  All these elements lead me to think she would like it, even though many of the books that she likes do not fit this formula.  I was right.  She enjoyed it.  I felt relief that I hadn't burdened her - but also some joy - pride maybe? - that I had picked right.

Booksellers have, it is clear from Fikry, from my own experience, and from an article read long ago, played an important role in helping us get to know what books to read.  And they are a disappearing breed.  A good reviewer can also help us determine what to read or see.  When I lived in New York a million years ago, Janet Maslin's reviews of films allowed me to know whether I would like the film.  Sometimes she would not like it, but could explain the virtues in such a way that I knew it would work for me - other times she would like it, but I knew from her tone that it would not be such a good fit.  This requires the reader to get to know the reviewer.

Fikry gets to know his customers - eventually - at least one or two of them - and he is able to put to work his talent for organizing, for categorizing, for putting a hierarchy to the books that he has read - books that he has read in part based on the recommendations of the publishing house reps who get to know what he is looking - oh, one of the reps becomes an important character in the story - but most importantly he uses his talent to leave a legacy - a poignant legacy as it turns out - to his daughter - a daughter who arrives on his doorstep in what is an intriguing and self consciously described plot twist - a daughter who reawakens his interest in others - and his descriptions of the short stories he recommends to her - pithy and tantalizing rather than descriptive - form the introduction to each chapter.  Fikry is able to marry two loves - short stories and his daughter - through the medium of written descriptions.

Reading the book, then, occurs quickly.  It is like eating candy.  It feels good in the moment, but the characters are two dimensional.  I feel somehow guilty about enjoying this book so much.  I have important reading to be doing.  I am not spending time with the reluctant wife but have my nose stuck, again, in a book, and I'm not going to be a better person for having read it.  But it draws me along.  I resonate with the bookseller.  I want to know what the twists will be.  I'm not surprised by the character who is not who he (or she) appears to be in a deep way, but am, rather amused and a little bemused that I have, indeed, been taken in a beat longer than I need to have been.  I should have seen that coming.  And the central mystery is not all that mysterious and the sadness at the ending is somehow not all that sad - I really haven't gotten to know this character on a deep and emotional level.

What I have done is indulge in a fantasy - a light daydream.  It has been pleasant.  And it has made me think about a few things - like why I blog.  Not just to get page views - which have suddenly soared in the wake of my using a different format that allows readers to sample what I have to offer - but also to leave a legacy - something that my own children may be interested in perusing some day.  Perhaps helping others know that psychoanalysis is not something cold and foreign and distant (though it certainly can be), but also something that is warm, immediate, available and very very human.  That I might serve as a match maker between people I don't know and ideas that, despite my reluctant embrace of them, I love.  There is something of Fikry in me - which is consistent with a central theme of the book.  And I could learn to be discriminating - maybe I am practicing that by writing and preserving my reactions to books, movies and life rather than simply letting it wash by...

Fikry's interest in the rep scuttles her interest in her fiancee.  Why?  He points out that the rep and the fiancee don't have the same interests.  His thesis is that love is essentially narcissistic - we love others who share our interests.  We love others who are like ourselves.  But we also love those who are different - he turns the police chief onto books - and the police chief, in turn, turns others who previously had no interest in reading onto books.  We love not just those who are like ourselves, but we share aspects of ourselves that are unlike others - and they come to embrace something that they otherwise would not have known.  And we want to go there.  We want to explore.  We want to expand.  This book is enjoyable because it is circumscribed.  It tells a small story about a small place and a small band of people.  They are introduced in and the plot is developed in a predictable and very pleasant way.  The author pretends (and she has the luxury of being able to do that because these are, after all, characters) that these people can be understood, can be circumscribed, that there is no mystery here.  And yet, of course, in all things human, there is.  Because the book doesn't address that internally I, as reader, am cast out by it to see what in my life it reflects.  I find the organic, the unknowable, in the margins, not in the center - where the author coyly and artificially tells us there is nothing much to see.  A discriminating reader like Fikry would have little use for this book.  I, a less discriminating one, find it a guilty pleasure - a little like watching a favorite sitcom.  Ironically, given Fikry's cry that we read so that we know we are not alone, I am with the author and presumably other readers, but the space we are inhibiting is, like the sitcom space, comfortable but limited.

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

Post script:  Recently the New York Times magazine  published a piece noting that the number of independent book stores is on the rise again - they were in serious trouble after the big box bookstores and then the online bookstores and books emerged.  This is good news for readers everywhere.  Indeed, the thesis of the article is that while the industries that got art out to us have taken a hit or been reconfigured, this may actually have been in a way that allows us to have more direct contact with artists - and maybe even for more artists to flourish.  See a review that touches on this phenomenon in another medium - music - here.

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Marilynne Robinson’s Lila – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reads About Loneliness

Lila is the third (or maybe fourth) book in the Gilead trilogy.  I’ve not read the others and found this to be a compelling if emotionally difficult read, but certainly not one that is dependent on having read the other books - it stand nicely on its own.  It is an emotionally difficult read because it is so bleak, especially at the beginning where the protagonist is stolen away as a baby from a home where she is not adequately fed, not kept clean, and where she is put outside when she is crying so that she doesn’t disrupt those who are inside.  The woman who steals her is a migrant worker who carries her from place to place with a loose band of people who lead a marginal existence until the dustbowl hits, and then things get really bad.  At some point, her caregiver, Doll, settles into a town for a year so that Lila can learn to read – something that she is drawn to, but doesn’t get much practice with until she steals a bible from a church – but that is getting to the end of the story, which is also the beginning.

This book could be read on many levels and, especially as an analyst, a book that is written from the perspective of having access to Lila’s thoughts raises interesting questions about our ability to know what goes on in the minds of others, especially those that have had such impoverished backgrounds when we who are writing and reading books like this most likely have not.  What Robinson does is to describe a mind that is filled with poorly understood memories that flow into each other in ways that would be confusing if they were being handled by a less masterful writer.  We are propelled through this woman’s experience – both her current experiences and the past, which passes in front of our eyes in a beautiful unfolding of her experience and the intermingling of the two becomes the story that we are forced to create almost on our own because the narration feels so ungrounded by time and place.  We are given hints, our appetite is whet, and then we learn more, but never all that we might have known.  We never, for instance, get a good picture of what this woman looks like.  And that feels consistent with the story being told essentially from her perspective.  She is a woman without mirrors, physical or psychological – a girl and then a woman being moved forward by forces very much beyond her control.

So, there are two questions about her inner world that spring to my mind.  One – despite the fluidity of her memories and the shifting of time that seems consistent with a mind that has never known clocks or calendars, but instead days and nights stretching into seasons, there is a central sense of self – a certainty about who she is – that seems to orient her – to keep her upright – she has a deep keel despite having slipped through pretty shallow water most of her life.  This is supported by the consistent relationship that she and Doll maintained – she felt loved and valued despite not having the same roof – and many times any roof – over her head.  The other is whether she could realistically have the kind of bookish interests that this character has – and here I think we must imagine that a woman very much like the author has been born into a local universe that does not contain books.  And I think if we believe that – and what else could be the case – then this may be a reflection of what could have happened.

I’m sorry for that jag.  You see there are questions about the Romantic vision – one first put forward perhaps by Rousseau – that the natural state of man is one of being at one with nature and that if we were raised by wolves we would be even more human than we can be when we are the products of our citified lives.  Mowgli of the Jungle Tales would be the quintessential example of this.  But could it be that if we were raised by wolves we would simply be primitive – our animalistic selves would predominate?  Doll is not a wolf – but there are a lot of wolves barking at the door – or lack thereof – in Lila’s early world and she knocks around a great deal – but she is, in this book, baptized – not just in the religious sense, but also in the sense of being washed clean, and this is a decidedly mixed experience for her – but I think it exposes her essential goodness – and maybe even her puritan or more to the point Calvinistic goodness.  And are we essentially good or evil?

You see, the beginning and end of this book is that Lila – a wild one if there ever was one – a person who was all but abandoned, was stolen, lived on the run, loves and is at one with nature, but is also a person who, as a woman, became a prostitute to survive when Doll left her, who became a domestic and who was on the way to returning to the wild – leaving St. Louis behind to get back to the nomadic migrant life in Iowa – fatefully stopped at a Calvinist church in a medium sized town in Iowa and fell in love with and married the minister – a man who had been widowed for forty years – a man who was probably thirty or more years older than she – a man who had been as bereft and alone as – well as Lila was once Doll disappeared from her life.

To write that thumbnail sketch of the plot above makes this book sound farfetched, and yet it is not.  Of course it is an intentional allegory.  Lila steals the Bible and retreats to the abandoned farmhouse where she is squatting and she writes out the lines from Ezekiel – a book of the bible that I was not the least familiar with – and the metaphor comes home to her – of a baby that is covered in blood and dirt and that is washed clean by the lord – the baby is Israel – the baby is Lila and the minister is cleansing her – and the baby is you and me – cut off from those around us and hungering to be connected – to be cleansed and brought back into the fold.  And the allegory when put out there by a plodder like myself – seems like an evangelical tract that you would run from, but in the hands of this author the allegory and the plot work – on the personal and the religious level without feeling preachy or forced.  We are happy to both suspend disbelief – or rather to believe – on many levels.  And partly this doesn't feel preachy because it becomes clear that faith is a very complicated thing.

The plot works because the minister is very sensitively portrayed – he gets Lila – her wildness and her skittishness – and, most profoundly, her loneliness.  And he gets that he can be with her without having to force his way in – she will, in her own sweet time, out.  And this relationship - to my ear like the relationship between analyst and patient – unfolds slowly and beautifully.  There is at the center of this story one of the most touching and sweet love stories I have read – and I can’t imagine a more romantic rendezvous than the afternoon of Lila’s baptism. 

But this is not a Romance Novel.  Lila’s baptism comes at a great and terrible cost.  She is separated from the people she has loved – first and foremost from Doll, but from all the unwashed whom she has known and loved.  As she is transformed to the 1%, she leaves behind the 99% that have sustained and loved her.  At one point, I found myself thinking that this is, among all the other things that it is, a reflection on the guilt of privilege – on what it means to be one of the select – whether that is religious or economic or, on the level of the changes that a therapeutic relationship with a lover have wrought, of psychological health – to realize that there is a loneliness of privilege as well as one of poverty. 

This is also not a Romance Novel because of the disparity in the ages between the lead characters.  Lila must face what life will be without the person that she has connected with and we watch as she teeters between preparing to return to her former life and figuring out how to imagine living within the confines of her current one.  It is the minister that makes her citified life bearable.  She has lived in cities before – real cities – but never connected with anyone.  Here she is connected.  Will that connection take?  It seems to be taking, more and more, as the novel progresses, but we don’t actually learn her fate in this novel – perhaps in the others we do – but in this one that question is left hanging nicely in the air.

Robinson has imagined herself into a life and invites us to do the same.  She is also opening up a big part of her experience and of ours – what it means to be alone.  What it means, in the midst of that loneliness to sense the presence of others – whether a maternal figure – a paternal/romantic one – or the presence of God – and to be skittish in the presence of that other.  To fear that who we are cannot be accepted by that other – to fear that being accepted will lead us to lose what we already have.  On this most essential level, the novel works.  It articulates a kind of essential loneliness – one that Sullivan calls prototaxic – the loneliness of awe – of having no words to articulate the experience – but it also articulates the process of learning those words – so that this story could be the story of each of us developing – coming to find the words – to find the story – that best articulates our experience – even if that will cost us dearly it will also allow us to connect with that which is available.  Can we hope for more?

     

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Research and Treatment Outcome: The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Continues to Report from the Convention

Psychoanalysis has a long and uneasy relationship with traditional empirical research.  Freud was quite concerned that researchers would not appreciate that the unconscious cannot be observed directly and he privileged the analytic hour as the one and only position from which we can learn about the unconscious and, indeed, the functioning of the human mind.  Taking this position hamstrung psychoanalysis.  It interfered with it joining the mainstream of scientific development that revolutionized so many fields during the twentieth century.  I suppose it is a testament to the psychoanalytic situation and to Freud’s genius that he developed something from it that still has some relevance now, more than one hundred years later.  But we are woefully behind our peers who work from other disciplines, many of which were founded within an empirical tradition, of using research techniques to both a).  Understand how well our patients “objectively” benefit from our work together and b). Understand what is taking place between ourselves and our patients.

This year, a German researcher, Marianne Leuzinger-bohleber, presented the results of research that she has done with others over the course of the past decade or so.  She is working in a country where insurance is still paying for psychoanalysis – and where the insurance companies are, like those here, asking whether longer term more intensive treatment is worth it.  Some interesting results that mollified the insurance companies – who are concerned not just with their own expenditures on treatment but on the productivity of the workforce – including noting that those with treatment had fewer sick days after the treatment than the population as a whole – and that this discrepancy increased across time – so that they had many fewer sick days six years out of treatment than they did when ending treatment and that they were bucking the trend of the comparison population which had an increasing number of sick days as time passed.  They also noted that, when compared with medications and with shorter term treatments, psychoanalysis led to fewer relapses and, as with the result above, increasing measures of health across time.

I should note that in another session, the folks who study infant's attachment to their parents were discussing their speculations about treatment.  They have shown that poor attachment style in infants is related to difficulties as an adult.  They have also shown that poor attachment styles of parents predict difficulties in the attachment of kids.  Finally they have shown that attachment styles of adults improve as a result of therapy.  The step that is left to demonstrate – the study hasn’t been done, but it will be - is that therapy can interrupt the pattern of poor attachment – so that those who were poorly attached who go through a treatment that improves their attachment style will parent children who are less likely to be poorly attached.  Wouldn’t that both make sense and be neat?

So the question gets asked, what is it that causes these changes?  Why does psychoanalysis foster improved functioning?  Psychoanalysts have long written about this subject.  They have posited many factors.  The early analysts suggested that interpretation – particularly what were called mutative interpretations – were what caused the changes.  In essence, they proposed that increased insight caused the changes that we see in treatment.  More recent analysts have argued that what changes is the quality of the relating that the analysand does, and that this is the result of engaging in a deeply satisfying relationship with the analyst.  (This, by the way, has been a tough sell to the old school psychoanalysts who see a relationship cure as temporary and only lasting as long as the therapeutic relationship – but the relational group has demonstrated that something about the relationship with the therapist sticks).  Yet a third group has proposed that the process of freely associating frees the mind up and the patient can approach difficulties with more creative enthusiasm and solve problems with greater ingenuity and verve.

Leuzinger-bohleber and her group did an interesting thing – they measured all three of these qualities before and after treatment, plotted them in a three dimensional space – and looked at how they changed from before treatment to the conclusion of treatment.  The graph, which had empty spheres for the before data points and solid for those after, looked like two clouds – one dense and compact, centered around poor insight, poor relationships, and little creativity at the beginning of treatment and a much bigger, but also more divergent cloud up, to the right and in back of the beginning of treatment that were the bubbles post treatment.  Some people improved on one dimension, some on two, and some on all three.  A few did not improve, but the majority did (enough for the insurance guys to be impressed), but the intriguing thing is that improvements look different in different people.  Overall there is a shift in the cloud, but on an individual level, some people had much more insight, though their relationships didn’t change much; others were much more creative, but not necessarily significantly more insightful – a myriad of configurations that described the arcs of particular treatments. 

One size does not fit all.  What patients walk away with differs.  When we measure symptoms, there is a reduction – but this may be occurring for different reasons with different people.  One of us may feel less stuck because we finally get how it is that we have ended up at this particular point in our lives.  We may not change things much, but we may derive comfort from knowing – coming to peace as it were – with who we are and how we got here.  Others may figure out a way out of a complicated and convoluted trap – moving away from situations that previously baffled them – and these situations may be external, internal, or some combination.  Yet others may feel more connected with others – perhaps as a result of coming to trust a particular person they may be more willing to risk trusting others in the world.  For most of the people in the study, there was at least some of each of these elements – but there may have been a strong suit among the three – though many seemed to move significantly positively on all three dimensions.

So then the question becomes, what happens that these changes are coming about.  Traditionally the theorizing and the research have focused on what the therapist does, what the patient’s characteristics are, or on the quality of the relationship between the therapist and the patient.  In the discussion within this group, an idea emerged that we may have overly focused on the activity of the therapist.  We, as analysts, are constantly thinking about our technique.  Another group in the discussion presented data that suggested that even when an analysis is going poorly, the analyst may still be doing “good” technique as we measure if formally.  What might matter most – and what might be most mysterious and difficult to assess and to effect is what is going on in the patient.  What is the patient doing in the treatment?  Wouldn’t this be the best predictor of a good outcome?  And what does analysis allow?  It allows space for the patient to work – a place for the patient, in the presence of a reasonable other, to explore.  Perhaps our emphasis on what we are doing is partly a means of helping us stay within bounds – to help prevent us from interfering with a healing process that the patient “knows” how to engage in.

This series of thoughts, which draws on the conversation in the research group but also begins to move away from it, mirrors parts of the conversation with the attachment folks.  The attachment folks were commenting on how much care it took to provide a solid attachment foundation.  They were noting that it was kind of miraculous that the human species is doing as well as it is.  In fact, they noted, if positive attachments in infants to their caregivers were necessary to the survival of the species, we would be extinct.  So how do we pull ourselves up by our bootstraps?  Despite not having gotten all that we need, we are frequently able to provide for other’s needs.  Or, more precisely, others are able to make use of our well-intentioned but not perfect efforts to do what they need to do – to get better.  Yes, the better able to be attuned, to be present, to sense what is just outside of awareness and to offer that at a moment when it can expand awareness we are able to do and be the more we can help this process along, but we might want to focus some of our efforts on the healing desires and abilities of the people with whom we work – to think, as Jonathan Lear alluded to in his plenary address, which I have written about in another blog, not just about what is wrong with our patients and their situation, but to help recognize what might be right, and what might help them make it righter.

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

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A Delicate Balance and Jonathan Lear – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst goes to the Annual Psychoanalytic Convention

The American Psychoanalytic Association holds its annual convention every year in New York City.  This is an opportunity to hear and talk with the finest analysts in America, and many others from Europe, Asia, South America and Africa.  It is also a chance to spend some time with the reluctant wife in the Big Apple.  This year we took a bit of a busman’s holiday and saw Edward Albee’s play “A Delicate Balance” with Glenn Close, John Lithgow, Lindsay Duncan, Bob Balaban, Clare Higgins, and Martha Plimpton, a tight play about three days in the life of a family that is balanced on the edge of madness with the mother, played by Glenn Close, characterizing herself as the fulcrum.  It is a play that was first performed in 1966 – a moment that was itself a fulcrum.  On the one side was a way of doing things the way they had been done – well, not for all that long, but seemingly forever.  It was a kind of Golden Age of the ruling class of the United States.  We had won the war, we were doing things our way and things were going swimmingly – especially economically.  But, as this play and many other works of art, the anti-war movement, and the coming wave of the summer of love and a culture of youth that didn’t trust anyone over 30 was about to expose, there was foment underneath the calm surface.

The Playbill proposed that this play took place “now”, but it so apparently did not.  Set in a neighborhood not unlike the one I live in, the meals were prepared by an unseen “them” – presumably the help who, in those days but certainly not in mine, likely lived on the third floor and did the cooking and cleaning.  Also the brutality of the interactions between the players – brutal as it was – was quite tame by today’s standards.  There was a lot thicker veneer of civilization than in more contemporary plays about dysfunctional families – plays like August: Osage County.  And this, I think, put a greater pressure on the actors to portray the madness boiling just below the surface – the outrageousness of their experience had to be hinted at rather than being paraded across the stage in all its glory – and, not to disparage the great actors that were on the stage, I felt that they failed to create the kind of tragic tension that a play of this sort calls for.

John Lithgow, in particular, played a man who has a hard time saying no.  He likes to have people near him, but he doesn’t really want to be intimately engaged with them.  Perhaps because he fears that they will exploit him, or perhaps because he doesn’t like them, he just likes them to be at arm’s distance.  Well, when you are living in a house with a demanding, prima donna wife and her sister, a mean drunk (who functions as the Greek chorus in this play) and your daughter is about to come home in preparation for leaving husband number four, but before she gets there the neighbors, your best friends in the world, bland people, actually,  decide to come stay with you because they are frightened in their home – for no particular reason – there is a lot of reason to be uncomfortable.  But Mr. Lithgow remains remarkably serene through all of this – as if his ability to ward off the presence of others were so thick that he could take it all in stride – until he can’t, and then he seems to be bemused before becoming distracted and somewhat anxious.  But when the head gaskets blow – there isn’t enough grit – there isn’t enough discomfort under the bland exterior – to make that explosion believable.  We just aren’t as horrified as he is – or should be – at what flies to the surface.

And maybe this is a play, then, about our current state.  We are so assaulted by the stuff of life – whether it is the vaginal crème commercial for post-menopausal women we watched together as a family tonight, or the crude humor – with absolutely no innuendo – that the reluctant step-daughter takes in as her constant fare these days from stand-up comics on comedy central, or the horror of terrorism in its current iteration that we need to confront and deal with and don’t because we are, after all, comfortable.  We have built a huge insulating wall around ourselves that allows us to handle the assaults around us and to focus on what sporting exploit has occurred this week – to marvel at the latest sports score (reluctant son) or newest fashion or nail polish exploit (the other reluctant stepdaughter’s current obsession) and just to stay focused on the details of our lives while the world churns around us.

Jonathan Lear – a philosopher and psychoanalyst – gave the plenary address at the convention.  He proposed that Freud’s theory of mind is strongly and deeply rooted in the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle.  He noted that Plutarch described a Greek who offered a “talking cure”, had some success with it, and then closed up shop to become an orator.  Lear proposed that what Freud came up with – the impossible command to freely associate – was at the center of finally exposing the tensions that the Greeks first sensed.  But then he took a bit of a left turn.  He proposed that we analysts have spent too much time focusing on the bile that lies underneath the surface; that we should instead be using our craft to help our patients live lives of engagement – enjoying their relationships with family members and their engagement in the tasks of living.

Lear went on to propose a distinction between moral functioning and ethical functioning – moral functioning, he proposed, involves invoking rules of law.  Ethical functioning, by contrast, is something that emerges spontaneously out of connected living.  It is based on a sense of empathy with others and having a sense of shared goals and interests and working together to achieve them.  In A Delicate Balance, each of the characters seemed focused on their own needs.  Despite her protest that she was the selfless one who put her husband’s wishes into action, Glenn Close’s character was as self- interested as the others – pretending to be a loving wife and mother, but actually furious at the ways tending to other’s needs interfered with her ability to meet her own needs and, on another level, how everyone else’s self-indulgence sucked up oxygen that would, in a perfect world, fuel her flame so that it would shine all the brighter.

Lithgow’s character, then, contains our hope – the hope that he, who is comfortable, can tolerate  - can connect with others.  Close’s character hints that he can’t.  That he doesn’t welcome his daughter home or talk to the daughter's husbands before she divorces them.  She ridicules him, but she ridicules everyone and we have the hope that he can be more.  And here the analysts have another comment.  A discussion group with the attachment specialists indicates that at the Anna Freud Institute in London, the analysts are required, before they can start classes, to spend a year observing infants.  Why?  Partially to have a better sense of where we come from – but partially because observing infants requires us to confront raw emotions – pain, frustration, and also joy – and, because we are sympathetic humans, to experience those feelings ourselves.  This, the theory goes, better prepares us to be analysts – to be comfortable being present to the powerful feelings of our patients and the powerful feelings that are stirred in ourselves by them.

Well, John Lithgow’s character has never spent time with infants.  He is not connected with others, but pretends to be – and, I think – though I didn’t feel it from the stage – he deeply wants to be connected – to be comfortable not just at a distance, but actually while in contact with others, but he can’t tolerate it.  The best he can do is to be comfortable from a distance and, in the climax moment, he realizes and articulates this – and, realizing his limitations, he perhaps for the first time, feels deeply and powerfully – but what he feels so powerfully is not his capacities, but his limitations - and we should be feeling them with him.  That’s what we go to the theater for.  But this moment was not delivered, at least in my gut – which felt apart from, rather than within – observing rather than experiencing – seeing a shallow character – but just the shallow character, not the depth of the deeply caring man beneath it – a character careening from thought to thought – but not one exploring the taught line between what we believe ourselves to be and who we also are – the experience that the tool of free association allows us, at its best, to explore – and so it felt, not like theater, but like television – something to watch and be entertained by, but not something that deeply moves us.  While his character has never observed infants – or cared for them – we count on Lithgow to have done that.  And for this play, for this part, on this night, he did not access that part of himself – or more precisely, that part of me.

Morally, then, this play delivered.  I was present – in a very privileged way – to the work of six actors – stars – people that I have seen on the big screen and the small.  And they delivered.  They were working.  They brought a play to life.  I got my money’s worth.  But there was an ethical failure.  These people did not deliver on what I really wanted – a sense of connection – not with them as stars – as people to see, to have seen, to be able to brag about seeing – but people who connected with me not as a star but as a person – people who made me feel in my gut what I know to be there – and count on them to help me access – something about my true self – including its limitations, and the terrible pain that I don’t connect with others in the ways that I would like to.  This awful, horrible realization – one that I am all too comfortable not feeling so much of the time – is what I would have had us teeter towards – it is what would have brought us together, not as star and admirer, but as fellow humans sharing what it is like to be human. 

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Night at the Museum III - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Bids Robin Williams Farewell

Night at the Museum has been a fun, if not very demanding, franchise.  Starring Ben Stiller, our neurotic hero, and special effects that take us on crazy tours of museums in the US and Europe, the third and final film boasts a fine ensemble cast and two final performances by stars - a very brief one from Mickey Rooney and a poignant one by Robin Williams.  The film seems to follow the "Save the Cat" Hollywood formula that I have just discovered - which is based on a book about how to write screenplays.  In case I am not the last on the planet to discover it and you, too, have been in the dark about it, briefly it is a formula in which the hero, mood and tone of the movie are established in the first 10 minutes (including when the hero "Saves a cat", getting the audience clearly behind him - perhaps as Stiller does by confronting his son who is refusing to go to college, but also by recognizing his son's need for independence), the hero then faces some life changing event (in this case the ancient Egyptian tablet that brings the museum to life is deteriorating), then, at 25 minutes or so in, the hero leaves the old world for a new one, a second plot is introduced that is a mirror image of the first, and the fun and games commence.   Here, the hero travels to London, sneaks into the British Museum, and searches for the exhibit that contains the answers to how to fix the tablet, with the mirror plot being the search that his small companions take through the heating ducts within the museum where they have been sucked by the power of the air recirculating system.

At or about the midpoint of the movie, according to the "Save the Cat" rubric, the bad guys close in, and the hero must face them - in this case with the help of Sir Lancelot, who - though not actually an exhibit in the real British Museum - helps Stiller fight off a nine headed Chinese serpent - also not an exhibit in the real museum, and adds a bit of mayhem, becoming, himself a threat for a period of time - which leads to the crescendo - which should usually occurs at about 75 minutes into a 110 minute film.  Called the "dark night of the soul", which seems a bit melodramatic for this bit of fluff, all seems lost until a solution emerges (which I won't give away in case you haven't seen the movie).  By 85 minutes the crisis is resolved, the secondary plot merges with the primary plot and the last 25 minutes involve dispatching enemies in hierarchical order.  All neat and tidy, except that it is about mortality - and the limits of our ability to exert influence on the ways that things go, especially in other's lives.

In order to say farewell to Robin Williams, I will have to give away some of the particulars.  Williams portrays Teddy Roosevelt in this film as in the other two (actually I can't vouch for the second as I don't think I've seen it).  He is a wax figure who comes to life at night due to the magic of the tablet.  In this film, he and other favorites from the Natural History Museum in New York accompany Stiller to London to solve the problem.  The solution to the problem means that those who are from New York must, at the end of the movie, return to a sleep from which they will never awaken.  Stiller has to reinstall them in the museum and say good bye to them.  Knowing as we do that Williams will shortly die, this is a particularly poignant moment in the movie - one in which Williams, who has been incredibly restrained, for him, throughout the film, tells one last joke on parting from Sacajawea, his love interest, noting that despite their saying it could never work out because he was made from wax and she from polycarbonate, their love has triumphed.  The line was delivered with what, perhaps with the wisdom of hindsight, seems to be great wistfulness and sadness.

Google, in its year end greeting, noted that the searches for Mrs. Doubtfire were the ones that exploded in the wake of Williams' death.  This movie (one that seems as I review it in my head to also have followed the "Save the Cat" format - apparently most do),  captured Williams' humanity - his wish to connect with people - that his humor seemed to simultaneously fuel and prevent.  We were drawn to his manic humor because it was amazing - he could hold us spellbound with his ability to turn something as simple as a scarf into a shawl, a rickshaw, a violin and whatever else might occur to him in the space of 2 or 3 minutes, creating or accessing a wealth of characters as he did so.  This let us in, but also kept us apart as we viewed him, as we do all entertainers to some extent or another, as an object.  But the fluidity of his thought; his ability to jump from here to wherever at the drop of a word or expression lent new meaning to the term free association - his comfort with his unconscious and the power of that unconscious - and his seeming effortless conscious control of the material so that he could channel it within bounds was awe inspiring - and therefore distance creating.

There was also a sense of naïveté that his characters expressed - the radio DJ in Good Morning Vietnam comes to mind.  In that film, his character believed, on some level, that the US was doing good to and for Vietnam - and that because he had befriended particular Vietnamese, that he was doing them good.  There was visible shock that registered when that friendship, legitimate though it was, turned out to be much more complex - and built on foundational levels that he did not in that moment have access to - and it would take much time to achieve appreciation.  This was certainly a message about America's role as a superpower and our blundering belief in our ability to do good in cultures and places where we have no knowledge, something explored by Graham Greene in The Quiet American as well - but it was also as if Williams, and here I am blurring the actor with his characters, was still Mork, come from another planet, and somewhat confused about how it is that things work here.

So this film, with a subdued seeming Williams playing a wax character - one that feels somewhat removed, observant, but not active - could I say depressed? - seems to be offering, we can imagine, a weird fun-house mirror picture of the person; someone who was struggling with his current TV show - one that felt heavy handed rather than funny - as if the Midas touch of being able to see the absurdity of things was becoming a burden - something to throw in people's faces rather than something to laugh at with them - as if he stood on the other side of a barrier rather than on the same side of that barrier with us.

I never knew Robin Williams, and for that reason I can't ethically offer a diagnosis of him, and I don't intend to be doing that in this blog.  Instead I mean to be wondering - and I do think that we need to wonder about something like suicide, which we are programmed by millions of years of evolution, and the joy of life - to avoid - we need to wonder what causes someone - especially someone as full of wit, conviction about the importance of family, and a naked desire to connect with others - to choose to end his life.  Why do we, who share those attributes, though to a lesser extent, consider suicide ourselves?  Why are we depressed when there is so much wonderful stuff that life has to offer?

I think there is a sense of isolation - a sense of being made of an essentially different substance, that may have been part of Williams' depressive experience.  I also think there may have been some anger - some significant frustration that all of his talent, all of his ability did not give him something that he desperately desired.  I assume that to be a kind of love - a kind of connection - that he felt to be out of his grasp.  I also think that the onset of a progressive illness - one that would rob him of his ability to be as physically fluid and ultimately as cognitively fluid as he was used to - may have angered him.  I don't know any of this - it is a guess.  But I do wonder about the role that anger played in his suicide.

In a small instance of life imitating art, I could not convince the reluctant son to join us for the film.  Despite it being the case that he has enjoyed the first two installments, he has decided that he does not like going to movies, so we were not able to have the family outing experience that I had hoped for.  It was frustrating.  Certainly less so than if he decided that he didn't feel that he needed to go to college.  Perhaps we need models like the character that Ben Stiller was playing to help us think about managing our wish to control our lives and the lives of those around us.

Perhaps also we need to question the Hollywood formula of overcoming adversity with a specific formula.  I have often compared movies to dreams, and think that the Save the Cat formula, present in so many movies, while bankable, constrains our dreaming capacity.  In fact, we need to learn how to manage limitations - and dreams, and movies, can, if we let them, help us with that.  But we have to trust that our audience wants catharsis - that they want to see that their heroes have limitations and live within them.  While this movie let's Williams character go with grace into the night (or day - it is daylight that robs him of his living quality), the end of his actual life does not feel so graceful.  He played characters who gave voice to important positions that were not popular, and they always seemed to be able to triumph on the moral level if not always being able to best the powers that be, though sometimes they were able to do both.  Perhaps it was too much to ask that he do this in his life as well as on screen.  


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All The Light We Cannot See - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reads a Novel about WWII

This is a book about stuff.  It begins in the Paris Museum of Natural History, where the blind daughter of the locksmith, Marie-Laure, hangs out while her father works.  His job is to protect with keys and locks the stuff - and there is lots of it around.  There are mollusk shells, and gems, and dinosaur bones and stuff, stuff, stuff from all over the world.  And one of the things in the museum is rumored to be incredibly powerful - and therefore incredibly valuable, especially as the Nazis approach Paris.  It is a diamond - called the Sea of Flames - that is cursed.  The owner will live forever, but those the owner loves will endure endless misfortunes.

This is a book about media.  It begins in a coal mining town in Germany where a technical wizard named Werner lives in an orphanage run by a French Nun with his sister after his father was buried alive in the mines.  He is able to make a radio out of bits of wire he finds in the trash and it brings into his life music, the propaganda of the third Reich, and lovely stories broadcast in French that describe to children how the natural world is constructed and address some of the precocious questions this very bright boy asks.

The book alternates from chapter to chapter between these two children, growing up worlds apart, but also lets us know that their fates are linked - they will meet, briefly, in St. Malo, a storybook city in seaside Normandy the girl runs to with her father when they flee Paris entrusted with the Sea of Flames, to hide it from the Nazis.  A city that will be destroyed by the allies as they work to retake France.  And a city that Werner will be directed to after he uses his radio skills to perfect triangulation as a means of finding and destroying radio operators in the field because Marie-Laure's uncle, the St. Malo resident to whom she fled with her father - and the very person who broadcast the lovely stories that Werner tuned into, is now broadcasting intelligence to the allies.

For a period of time the book bounces not just between the two children, but also adds in chapters about the Fuehrer's gemologist - the man pursuing the Sea of Flames.  Initially he is in pursuit of it to add it to the collection that will be housed in Berlin of the great things of the world - though this is the kind of thing (in High School I read a book about the Spear of Destiny that Hitler tried to acquire) that Hitler would have wanted to personally own.  This man, dying of cancer, becomes obsessed with the idea the that the gem will cure him, and he does not care about the cost: we are briefly introduced to his family, who would be cursed were he to achieve his goal.  His pursuit becomes indicative, then, of not just the pursuit of Hitler, but of the German people who sell their souls to the devil in order to dig themselves out of a very deep pit that the First World War has left them in - the same pit that has imprisoned Marie-Laure's uncle in his home - fearing to leave it because of the ghosts who have haunted him since his own horror in the trenches.

So, this is a nicely told story - one that weaves together various elements to create the seemingly inevitable - perhaps only so in retrospect - denouement where all three characters come together at the same place and same moment in time, as the rage of war rains down around them.  This meeting was more suspenseful than it sounds here - and felt chancier - more daring - and certainly more dangerous than I am able to give it credit for because I would like to focus on something that feels less central to the thrust of the narrative, but that this story may represent more viscerally, and that is our transition from the material world as our grounding and resonant point to the world of ephemera - one that is largely driven by electronic representations of others rather than material ones.

In Freud's view of the development of the infant, he was confronted with a dilemma.  Why does the child become invested in the world around him?  As infants, our needs are met by caregivers.  We don't have to do anything and they materialize.  What leads us to give up this cocoon like world in which others adore us and we adore being alive and cared for (he called this primary narcissism)?  His answer was a simple one, that the child, driven, somewhat tautologically, by drives, invests in the things that gratify his drives.  These things, from Freud's perspective, happen to be people, but later writers, most notably Margaret Mahler and then Daniel Stern in The Interpersonal World of the Infant proposed that it was not by accident that we get invested in people, but by design - and that our development is intrinsically caught up in connecting with and investing in our relationships.

But we shouldn't throw the old man out.  We don't just invest in people, we also invest in things - in stuff.  We will work for stuff - certainly for money - but to be able to acquire things.  And when we meet a kid, he or she will frequently show us some of his or her stuff as a means of introducing him or herself.  Maybe, through some kind of convoluted pathway, they have invested in the stuff because their dependence on others has been disappointing, but the stuff is always available, but maybe it is also because the stuff has been given to them by the others and they feel some kind of connection to the others through being connected to the stuff - and maybe just because the stuff is neat and they like to play with it and therefore it is a representation of their passions and what they have invested their passions in - and maybe for all of these reasons and more - kids will hand people their stuff as a way of introducing themselves.

The world of stuff, then, is a complex, interesting, psychologically charged world.  Marie-Laure lives deeply in this world - she is drawn primarily to the mollusks and loves to feel their shapes - but more than just the dead mollusks which she organizes by shape and size, she ends up being drawn to the living mollusks - the snails which, as an adult, become her life work.  She manages to invest in both the shells, but also the inhabitants of them.  She uses the stuff as a means towards connecting more and more closely with the world around her.  A world that is viscerally but not visually available.

Werner lives in a different world.  One that is peopled by disembodied voices.  He leaves his sister behind to go off to camp because of his radiological gift.  There the propaganda becomes no longer disembodied; it is shouted by his fellow campers and brutally enacted.  He sees the impact of the propaganda on his friend - a bird lover and quiet soul who doesn't belong in a camp to train future soldiers and pays dearly for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Werner, who understands and, I think, loves both his friend and his sister ultimately fails them both through the very human sin of being concerned about his own hide.  And the vehicle to safety - the stuff that will protect him - is the electronic world of radio - a world that can carry lovely voices opening up the world, but also propaganda that warps many of the minds of those who hear it.

So Marie-Laure, it seems to me, is living in the world of my parents.  They were children of the depression, but also children of an era in which stuff got infused with meaning.  Gifts were given, and the giver was remembered each time the gift was used - whenever an event occurred - like it started to get dark - and the "lamp that Uncle Wes and Aunt Nancy gave us for our wedding" was used, or simply in the act of putting on the sweater that Mom had given me that Christmas and I could feel the warmth not just of the wool, but of her choosing this particular object for me so that it reflected who I was - so that it fit and was of value and use to me.

Werner, on the other hand, seems to reflect the world of my children and my students.  They snap-chat the latest experience to each other, knowing that it will be swallowed up and disappear in a heartbeat, and the triumph of knowing what is going on now seems to trump the fact that the picture will be gone never to be seen again.  Books, which hold an almost sacrilegiously sacred place in my psyche, seem to have almost no pull for my students - the idea of building a professional library is anathema to them.  And why, it seems to me they seem to wonder, am I assigning books for them to read - especially books by people who wrote 50 or 100 years ago, when they can access summaries of the work at the flick of a finger from anywhere at anytime?

It is as if my students don't need to know, when they are sitting with a patient, something deep and timeless about the human condition - something that is unpredictable that they need to know at that moment, but something that they can glean from these books, that they may put into their own internal system that is searched, not by subject or author but by feeling and intuition - by an associative network that is richer and deeper than anything Google will ever create.  But I think that I have gotten derailed by a rant - for I, too, am drawn in by TV - to watch the ephemeral - and I have lost much of my earlier attachment to stuff - especially as there is more stuff seemingly than there ever was - and more distractions in terms of demands on time - much of it from electronic sources - and these sources, when they are embodied - whether as the cell phones themselves or laptops or even TVs seem outmoded only moments after they impress with the new and brilliant ways that they present information.  It seems to be the information - the knowledge - and the connection with the people who are snap-chatting, with the wisdom of the people on Instagram and Vine and Twitter and Pinterest who are concisely and wittily summing up what is important, what is of interest, this kind of knowledge, is what is important.

So this book, read on this level, becomes a morality play about the ways in which things - like the Sea of Flames - protect us but endanger those around us.  Marie-Laure, who ironically doesn't even know what she possesses, survives the war, but loses the people that she loves, indeed she loses the entire city that surrounds her while her home, and she within it, miraculously survives and is protected by someone whom she grows to love.  We could expand the metaphor and suggest that the Sea of Flames engulfed all of France in the war - drawing the Germans to her wealth.  France survives, but does so by enduring endless misfortunes.

Werner, on the other hand, is drawn not by things, but by things as a means of connecting with others and, through the machinations of the Third Reich, of using that connection as a means of killing others - sometimes, perversely and unintentionally.  The dead in no way deserve the death that he has inflicted.  He is haunted by his misdeeds, and does what he can to undo them - to do right by those he encounters now and to provide what he can to those whom he has left behind.

The after story of this novel nicely allows both Werner and Marie-Laure's stories to move forward in time, through a period not torn by war, and to come to somewhat peaceful conclusions.  The fate of the stuff - the fate of the Sea of Flames - is left up in the air.  Marie Laure has tried to leave it behind, but it haunts her 'til the end, and we don't learn its ultimate fate.  Werner's connections with those he loves are traced - they were not erased by his pursuits nor by the propaganda that his machines transmitted.  Quite the contrary, he seems to have remained connected, in his heart, to the people that he has left behind - and to the person, Marie-Laure, he has just met.

The author's final vignette explicitly includes the modern world of electronic connections.  Marie-Laure's grandson is playing a video-game - something she cannot see, but can sense his investment in - and she can sense his return to being engaged with her once he has been killed in the game.  He is also connected to stuff - anticipating his twelfth birthday, he is looking forward to being able to drive the moped.  And he is connected, deeply connected, to Marie-Laure.  Perhaps the author is trying to overcome his (and/or my) reservations about our entering this brave new world.  A world that is populated by electronic strands that knit us together - with each other, but perhaps also with those who have died - or perhaps we have all died a bit as we have connected through the ether to people who aren't really people but just opponents against whom we test our ability to quickly press a button or our knowledge of trivia or whatever we are doing at the moment with whoever is out there.  Perhaps we use these media to draw ourselves into the world - as Freud postulated we invest in things in order to emerge from our primary narcissistic state - but we certainly also use them to return to a narcissistic world; a world where we are inert - infantile - and entertained by the images flickering in front of us.  Even if we have moved from a world that was only filled with stuff to one that is also peopled by various ghosts, we still face the same tension - the same dilemma of how to invest ourselves in moving forward when there are so many siren calls that promise forward movement while actually delivering solipsistic emptiness - as destructive if misused as any world war that was driven, at least in part, by the wish for stuff.      


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Birdman (or the unexpected virtue of ignorance) - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reflects on Narcissism at the Movies

Michael Keaton, the washed up actor who played Batman years ago, plays Riggan Thompson, the washed up actor who starred in three Birdman movies when younger and who is now making a comeback attempt on Broadway with a play that he wrote (adapted from a Raymond Carver short story), is directing and starring in.  The movie doesn't just imitate art in having an actor play himself - in a role that may earn the washed up actor an Oscar nomination - but it competes with Broadway as "legitimate" theater - taking us behind the scenes as Birdman goes through the paces of putting itself together as a play - giving us the illusion that it is shot in one long scene - that it has the form of a play instead of a movie - it appears seamless, without cut scenes and multiple takes - while noting that the play, unlike the movie, is an unfinished mess that morphs and changes as it limps towards an opening that could be glorious or gloriously ignominious; upsetting the New York prejudice that film stars aren't actors or confirming it beyond a shadow of a doubt.

One of the many nice things that is captured, then, is the manic quality of living on the edge between despair and elation; powered by the twin engines of the wish to show off and the fear of being exposed, that seems to be at the heart of the narcissistic striving that we all, to some extent, engage in.  The artist - and in so far as this movie is art, the actors, the director, and the crew are all engaged in an artistic process - living, at least according to this film, on that edge, and as they portray living on that edge (we would have to see the documentary to know if they are), we fear the edge can't be held and that the movie and the play within it will careen off into something self indulgent and distracting or something simply bad (and there are a few moments where it does this) - that it will collapse and not be art, but schlock.  But it maintains that if it doesn't live on the edge between greatness and self indulgence - which it does - then it can't be art.

In psychoanalysis, when you present the work that you are doing with a patient to an audience of analysts, there is nothing more denigrating than for another analyst to say than the work that you are doing is not analysis, just as there could be nothing more devastating than for the critic to predict that she will say (as she promises to in one of the penultimate scenes) that the play is not art.  Because she threatens to pan the play out of pride - for New York - for Broadway - for the art of serious acting; something that the star-making power of Hollywood corrupts absolutely - at least in her mind; it is not a true criticism of the actor or his art.  So he is, in some weird sense, protected from her criticism, but he does not experience this in the movie.  What he expresses is anger at her - and fear that her review will ruin him - he says financially, but we know that it is more that he will feel himself to be false and small - and, like the character he plays in the play within the movie, that he will not exist anymore without the play's success, which he believes depends on her to determine.

The irony of the critic's criticism is that no one knows the corrosiveness of becoming the star more than he; he battles with his Birdman persona - the part of himself that is not the role but the Birdman himself - the one who has superpowers - on a daily basis.  Indeed, in the wake of the critic's devastating news, he goes on a bender that is followed by a full fledged immersion in the experience of being Birdman - he and we are convinced that he is the superhero.  This star turn distracts him from the task at hand - which is not to be Birdman, but to portray someone who, it turns out, is quite vulnerable; not protected by the magic shield of being the star or the superhero.  To translate that back into the world of the psychoanalyst - it can be difficult for the analyst who can create analytic magic and perform a true analysis to know that he is not the magician - to know that the magic is occurring in the mind of the analysand - just as the magic of the movie/theater is actually occurring in the mind of the viewer who is watching the film/play, not in the hands of the actor who is calling that experience up.

So, the perfect foil for Riggan is Mike - played with incredible manic zeal by Ed Norton.  Mike is Broadway.  He lives for the stage.  Riggan's superpowers - he can apparently levitate and perform telekinesis - only occur when no one is looking.  When people come into the room, it no longer looks like he is directing things to fly into the walls, but that he is throwing them.  Mike is the exact opposite - has no power off stage, out of sight of others.  He needs to be in front of an audience to express his superpowers - which are considerable - his performance is stunning.  Concretely, though, he hasn't been able to get it up with his girlfriend, who also plays his lover in the play within the movie, for months - but does so for the first time when they are on stage and he proposes having sex with her - and attempts it in front of a full house - emerging from beneath the covers with a very apparent erection, as Riggan bursts in finding him in bed, in the play, with Riggan's ex - which leads directly to Riggan's suicide and the end of the play.

We witness the suicide scene three times - once after the erection, again the next night after Riggan gets locked out of the theater with only his underwear on, has to run through Times Square to enter the theater from the lobby and do the scene as he walks down the aisle - and on opening night, when he knows that the Times critic is going to crucify him.  Each iteration becomes more real as we see the convergence of the player and the role.

We learn more about Riggan in part by seeing the interactions between he and Sam, his daughter, played by Emma Stone.  Sam's mother divorced Riggan over one of his many infidelities - yet she remains connected to him and cares about him.  She also cares that Sam connects with her father in ways that Sam never has.  So Sam is working as Riggan's assistant on the play.  And she has a scene with Riggan where she points out the double edged nature of fame.  She begins with a task that she learned in rehab - she shows him a roll of toilet paper with pen marks for each thousand years and the last sheet contains all of human history.  So what Riggan does, she maintains, will be of little consequence.  On the other hand, she points out, he is so antediluvian that he does not have a twitter account nor even a Facebook account; he is too outmoded to be a star.  So, even though on the grand scale Riggan can't do anything that will matter, he is also incapable on the scale that she, and he, know and measure.  (Of course Riggan's underwear clad romp through Times Square will be you-tubed and trend and be reported in the news, showing that there is some play left in the old boy).  Later in the film, almost to underscore that he is not the guy - that Mike is the guy - she takes up with Mike after Mike's girlfriend dumps him, in part over the sex on stage incident (fear not for the girlfriend, she takes up with Riggan's girlfriend, the fourth actor in the play within the movie - everybody sleeps with everybody in this film...) and now we have another iteration of Mike being in bed with someone that Riggan would have love him.   The tragic element is that Riggan can't quite see that the love he so desperately desires will come more easily if he actually sees and appreciates the person his daughter is becoming, as Mike does, rather than to focus on making himself the person she will desire.

The play is a tragedy, but would Hollywood tolerate that in a movie about itself and its ambitions?  Can the analyst accept his own limitations?  In one of the taped analyses that I review as part of my research, the analyst is older.  He is confronting his own mortality.  And this leads him to focus on his superpowers instead of the experience of the patient.  Weirdly, despite knowing that the analyst was not doing analysis, we rated his work quite highly.  Why?  I think there are many reasons - perhaps including our own wishes to avoid identifying with the aging analyst - but I think the dominant reason is that he was practiced enough to engage, technically, in the analysis.  He was following the rules.  But the music wasn't happening.  I fear that this film disappoints because it does not confront the malignant nature of this kind of narcissism - this self love that occludes making real connections.  Or maybe it succeeds in showing us how we live in a culture - whether that is the culture of Hollywood or the microculture - in my case the psychoanalytic subculture - that promises us superpowers if we dedicate ourselves to the terrible master that each of our particular cultures can become.

Hollywood has long told us - since at least Citizen Kane - that the star is immortal - and that the tragic wound - the remembered happy world that our ambition and the ambitions that others have for us has dragged us from - makes us appealing characters.  Orson Welles, though, had the courage to face the idea that all of his talent - all of his charisma - all of his magic does not allow him to change the fundamental parameters - and that these very gifts are also despotic and demanding tyrants who will, sometimes even despite our best efforts, destroy our efforts to be human as we are lured into being superhuman.  What this film articulates, perhaps better even than Kane, is the way in which the adoration of the other - whether an individual, a critic, or an audience - is so necessary to maintain self cohesion.  That the essence of narcissism, even in its most difficult forms, is not the armor that it provides, but the vulnerability to annihilation, an annihilation that none of us - actor, analyst or Indian chief, can avoid.  This movie's answer to the dilemma is to keep working on the armor.  I think it is more difficult, more humbling, but also more likely to bear fruit to deal with the universe as it is - and to live with rather than deny the resulting vulnerability to annihilation that we do, in fact, inevitably face.

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