Is President Trump a Terrorist? A call for nuclear disarmament.

The following brief post is a letter to the editor.  I sent it to my local paper, but to date they haven't published it.

September 11, 2001 was a very scary day.  On that day, we learned that men armed with primitive weapons can use our most advanced technology against us in terribly destructive ways.  We also learned (again) how much easier it is to destroy something than to build it. 

The election of Donald Trump as president of the United States and his appointment of Stephen Bannon to the National Security council has made it clear that we are also politically vulnerable.  We have put our most sophisticated weapons into the hands of a person who has only been vetted by an individual who lost the popular vote.  What will actually happen as a result of this appointment is, at this moment, unclear.  But what could happen is frighteningly apparent to some.  Our foreign policy could be directed in such a way that we would enter waters that could result in the use of nuclear weapons in what would be seen as a defensive or pre-emptive strike but would, in fact, be naked aggression on our part.

The irony, of course, is that Trump has railed against an intelligence community that supported the position that there were weapons of mass destruction at Saddam Hussein’s disposal.  Those of us who watched the Bush administration present evidence to the UN of weapons of mass destruction knew that the evidence was flimsy.  The fault for the actions that led from the intelligence, such as it was, was not in the intelligence community, but in the political community.  We were ready for war and we convinced ourselves that we were engaging in a pre-emptive strike against a hostile enemy.

What if it were to become apparent to us, the People of the United States of America, that it would be wrong under any conditions and at any time, to use nuclear weapons?  What if, further, we were to take the position that being a military aggressor is something that we have historically done only based on the perception that our actions were actually and deeply self-protective, but that we were sometimes wrong about this?  Would it follow that we would build a military that was truly capable of being only defensive?  What would be the consequences of these two actions? 

Strategically, it would be stupid to unilaterally and immediately announce a position that we would, under no conditions, use nuclear weapons.  But what if we were to announce this as a goal and work vigilantly towards it?  What if we were to work vigilantly towards a goal of disarming ourselves – and all other nations?  What if we were to use our Aircraft carriers as ambassadors of peace (as we do) using them (solely) as mobile disaster relief centers?  What if we made it clear to all that the best way to assure our own safety was to assure everyone’s safety?

OK, I know that almost everyone who reads this will dismiss it as granola head garbage.  The reluctant wife told me that if we actually did this, six months later I, myself, would be railing against it.  There would be a LOT of details to work out.  My guess is that our friends the Quakers and Pope Francis could help us think this through, but we should also turn to tough  minded people like Dwight Eisenhower who did not trust the military-industrial complex.  We need to figure out how to protect us, the people of world, from harming ourselves.

After writing this, I sent this as an email to the reluctant mother.  She let me know of an organization, the Simons Foundation, that is working towards nuclear disarmament.  Full disclosure: it was actually founded by a distant relative of mine.  If you are concerned, as I am, you might want to check out the link to their site.  I am also far from the first to wonder about Trump and his terroristic leanings.  See this post of concern from a christian perspective.

Post Script: Having written about Trump as a terrorist, I am beginning to wonder about the advantages of having a terrorist as president during an era of terrorism.  I think that one of the luxuries of being a terrorist is that you don't have a state to defend.  You can attack without fear of reprisal - or with certainty of being welcomed into a post death hall of fame.  I think that Trump's lack of attachment to his ideas - to people (Stephen Bannon is, at least as of this writing (4/18/17) on the outside looking in) - and I think to the United States in some very real sense (Trump's own business strategies - make a buck wherever a buck can be made - belie his pretending to be invested in the American worker or in a vision of making America Great), allow him to be nimble in ways that his predecessor certainly wasn't.

There was an article in the Sunday New York Times  where the authors of House of Cards, Veep, Madam Secretary, and Scandal to discuss writing "reality" politics show in the age of Trump.  This is challenging.  Many years ago, I quickly tired of watching the show "Thirty Something".  As I told my friends, "Why watch what I am living?"  The authors have all, each in their own way, made politics absurd.  So it becomes challenging when the real politics are more absurd than what they can cook up.  Their conclusion?  The most improbable and therefore best plot line would be for Trump to become a great president.  (Will Frank Underwood become a popular president who is actually good for the country?  You heard it here first....)

Trump the disrupter, by being a terrorist at the helm of the most powerful first world country in the would could, improbably, rewrite what it means to be a diplomat.  Of course he will be doing this without a diplomatic corps - without a team - he is a one man band who does not want to be constrained by conducting the other players.  I don't think the model is sustainable, but it might wake the world up to, among other things, just how crazy it is that we have nuclear weapons lying around ready to be used by the likes of  Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump.

Post Post Script:  I wrote the above before Kim Jong-un and Trump faced off.  The opportunity there is that Trump, unlike most past President's, does not seem greatly attached to the welfare of people in general, but rather to this in his immediate family - and he pledges loyalty to those he calls his base - though his actions don't seem to have that base's interest in mind.  In any case, I don't think that Trump feels much connection with the people, for instance, of South Korea or Japan.  This is both an asset and a liability in negotiating with another terrorist - a dictator.  Trump (as I have constructed him in this paragraph), like the other dictator, is not hamstrung by concern about damage that might be wreaked by, for instance, a nuclear face off.  He might even be less hamstrung by it, for a change - so the possibility of blackmail diminishes.  Of course, the danger is that the other negotiator might feel that his power is being unacknowledged and might do more than simply fire missiles - he might cause real damage to show his intent.  This way true madness lies....

Post Post Post Script (8/15/2019):  I think I keep returning to this post and adding to it as a way to prevent my blog from being clogged by thoughts about Donald - the way everything else seems to b these days.  I think the seminal idea for it is a good one, though, and I would like to return to it and state it more clearly.  Donald Trump was never a politician.  In fact he despised them.  By being elected, he inherited a political machine - a party - with all the power that goes with that, but without a sense of responsibility - and with disdain for the idea of government and governing.  He has used the power of the office and the power of de facto party chief to cow the party into doing his bidding - because congressman are more concerned with keeping their jobs than with doing the jobs they were hired to do.  Now to a certain extent this is defensible.  If they don't toe the line, Trump will support someone who will either a) serve as a complete henchman in undermining the system or b) not get elected in the general election after winning the primary, undermining the power of the party.  So one could provide a rationale that waiting him out - and being there to resurrect the party when he falls apart, is in everyone's best interest.  But the central issue is that we have someone in the white house whose avowed mission is to destroy the process of governing.  This is an inside job revolution that we are watching unfold before our very eyes and we appear to be powerless to stop it.  It, like 9/11, is, when viewed with enough emotional distance (very hard to find in the era of Trump), brilliant.  We have had a bloodless coup and the head of our country is a potentate who has seized power without firing a shot.  

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

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

  

A Man Called Ove – Cartoons capture something very real about being human.

This book is a cartoon.  It is a very good cartoon, but a cartoon nonetheless.  It is not literally a cartoon - it is a novel.  It tells an emotionally evocative tale about a loveable 58 year old Swedish curmudgeon, filling in his back story at the same time that it moves him forward into a brave new world that he has no interest in entering.  After the death of his wife and the loss of his job – the two things that gave meaning to his life, he would just as soon end his life.  Ove is not given to thinking deeply (and he hardly talks at all – he is taciturn) – but he longs to reunite with his wife and the plot follows him as he botches one suicide attempt after another after another – something that seems highly improbable given this man’s extreme competence in the world of things.

I found myself envying Ove as I was reading about him.  He is a character – and I have often wished that I were a character – life would be much easier if that were the case.  Characters (and here I guess I really mean curmudgeonly characters) don’t have to think about other's feelings – they don’t have to weigh and sift and measure – they are action prone, judgmental and decisive.  I remember one of the stated goals of a very early treatment that I was in – group therapy in high school – was to reduce manipulative behavior.  A curmudgeon wouldn’t need this type of treatment – he just says what he thinks and acts in order to get what he wants.  They might need to learn a little bit of social manipulation – and social nicety.  Charm school might be more important than group therapy for Ove.

I was envious, though, on another level.  Ove ends up becoming a kind of unwitting Pied Piper, drafting various people in his wake, including the local newspaper reporter.  He is both a minor hero and a minor celebrity – neither of which he has any interest in being.  I, on the other hand, would love to have little children light up around me, found a gang, and be written up in the paper for being a hero.  I am able to live vicariously through the parts of Ove’s life that he would just as soon do without.  Ove and I seem to be made of very different stuff.

I cared about Ove in another way.  As we learn his back story, Ove has pluck.  He lost his mother at a very early age and then his father died before he finished school.  Ove took over his father’s job at the railroad, and learned how to fix the dilapidated house his parents left him by working evenings in construction where the workers, after telling him what a dummy he was, would teach him how to do carpentry, wiring and plumbing.  Meanwhile he built his muscles and became more and more taciturn, especially after he was swindled out of insurance money and the white shirts prevented him from fighting the fire that consumed his house after he saved the grandchild next door.  The white shirts wanted to condemn his property to build a suburb and the fire was convenient for them.

Despite all the hardship, Ove maintained a desire to live – indeed to live right.  His father taught him basic morals and, despite the corruption around him, Ove stayed true to them.  Ove’s courtship of his wife is a truly lovely thing.  He becomes a puppy dog following a beautiful and well-read woman who had a father much like him – she could appreciate his silence and devotion and he became a willing and appreciative audience for her.  She directed the relationship – and him.  His relationship with her gave his life meaning, but more importantly joy.  And he made the mechanical aspects of her life easy in return.  She, for her part, loved him, but was puzzled by him and his taciturn ways.

Ove’s primary male relationship is with the neighbor- another curmudgeon who, instead of driving a Saab, drives a Volvo, and then goes and buys a BMW.  Well, there can be no reasoning with a man like that.  Or so we think at first.  The relationship – its ups downs – gets fleshed out in the back story that is told in chapters that alternate with what is currently occurring.  As is gets fleshed out, it becomes somewhat more real – but these characters never become three dimensional.  I think what Backman, the author of the book, is attempting to do is to have the characters come alive inside the person reading the book.  We are intended to feel what Ove can’t or won’t feel.  We do Ove’s emotional work for him – as his wife likely did when he was alive – imagining his inner states even when he can’t quite do that himself.

This occurs in my treatment of men with some regularity.  I experience them as closed – unavailable.  I may have trouble following what they are saying in sessions – and may find myself getting sleepy as I listen to them.  Then, if the treatment goes well, I begin to wake up.  I find things of interest in their inner worlds.  They begin to relate emotionally lively material.  The task of the treatment – and perhaps the task that Ove accomplishes in this book – is to be able to own the feelings that are warded off – for the patient to begin to feel the excitement that I am feeling – for them to begin to care about themselves as a person – to believe that they have a subjectivity – an inner life – that is of interest to them – and potentially to others.  They may also become interested in the inner lives of those around them.  This awakening is more than just a return to a former way of functioning, it is frequently a discovery of a whole new way of being. 

Ove gets dragged kicking and screaming into a new world by his neighbors – and primarily by the neighbor across the street – a woman from Iran named Parvenah.  She cajoles and demands and goes toe to toe with him  Meanwhile, he also connects up with a stray cat, a couple of stray boys – including one who is bent (presumably a British euphemism for gay – having this book translated by a Brit gives it an odd foreign feel – it should feel foreign – it is about Sweden – but it shouldn’t feel British) and the aforementioned newspaper reporter.  They stand with Ove as he fights various forms of despotism in the form of various men in white shirts, a bit of bad luck, and truckers who are covered in tattoos.

This cartoon is well constructed.  I found myself laughing and crying and rooting Ove on – all the while feeling manipulated myself.  Backman wanted me to feel these things.  He was putting them in me.  He was almost as cold and calculating as Stephen Spielberg was when he created E.T.  And yet I was willing to have him do this – and actually think that this was an organic experience.  Because, as I alluded to earlier, I don’t think that people like Ove actually can tolerate the feelings that are stirred in them.  They end up stirring feelings in the people around them – because, and this is a weird truism from I know not where – feelings need to be felt in order to be real.  And if our feelings aren’t real, then we aren’t either.  So we act on the world in such a way that it (actually the people in it) feel our feelings if we ourselves are unable to stand that.  And when we do that, we come to life.

If we are lucky, we find someone like Parvenah who isn’t cowed by our feelings and doesn’t walk around on eggshells around us, but metabolizes our feelings and then returns them to us in a form that we can tolerate.  As we hear about our own feelings from this other. we begin feeling the feelings are not quite as nasty as we imagine them (and as she experiences them) and this allows us to imagine that we might not be quite as toxic as we have presumed ourselves to be – and as others may have experienced us as being. 

As a therapist, what I like about working with people like Ove is that they don’t realize that they are sending these feelings out into the world – and would be both astonished and embarrassed if they realized that they were.  Their intent is to be autonomous.  The suicide attempts demonstrate this – as carefully scripted as he could make each one, with plastic laid about to prevent a mess and instructions for what to with everything left behind make them seem like they are to have as little impact on others as possible.  But the intent of them – to reunite Ove with his beloved wife – betrays the underlying wish to impact – and connect with – the world.  The autonomy of these guys looks like it is how they are made – but they, in fact, are made of the same stuff that we all are – and, in spite of themselves, they actually want desperately to be connected.  When Ove figures out how to connect with Parvenah’s kids, not just by being pestered by them, but by actually sharing interests with them, we see the beginnings of the feeling states that will make life rich for Ove and we are very pleased for him.

And this is what transforms guys like this.  And it is just fine that he is presented as a cartoon.  In fact, that is in some ways useful.  Were he painted more particularly, we might diagnose him as having an obsessional style – or being Aspergery, or as a schizoid type.  Or we might even call him bipolar with angry affect.  The point is that he is all and none of those things.  What he needs, regardless of how we “diagnose” him, is to connect with the world around him.  As malformed as he has been by fortune and DNA, the treatment he needs is organic - to heal the internal rifts that have been formed so that he can be comfortable with himself - and with others.  Fortunately, he finds a group of people who like him and who he can take a liking to.  He becomes humanized by those around him.  He could also go into a therapist’s office – and you’d be surprised how many guys do.  They realize they aren’t happy and they’d like to know how to get there.  Frequently, at least in my experience, they do become happy not because they are cured of Asperger’s, or schizoid personality, or obsessive personality disorder – they are still very much themselves – but they become able to use themselves to better connect with those around them, as Ove does.

This cartoon, like Charlie Brown, or your favorite cartoon, tells us something very important – and very endearing – about ourselves and the people in our world.  It also translates well to the screen.  The reluctant wife and I watched the Swedish version with subtitles last night.  The movie is quite faithful to the book, though many details don’t make it in.  And the actor (Rolf Lassgård) brings a pathos to the part that is lovely.  I was unprepared for how the violence in the book, which seems muted as I read it, became quite shocking in the film – especially given that this is a nice quiet little story about a Swedish man and his wife living in a quiet middle class suburb.

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

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

  

Arrival: Contact with aliens is a good thing

The movie Arrival is one that I have wanted to see for some time.  OK, its just seemed like forever.  The family has not been as excited about seeing it, and the reluctant wife took pity on me on Friday and went with me to see it (she liked it - a lot).  The most enthusiastic encouragement came from a colleague who suggested that it was a "new kind of movie."  Somewhat skeptical, I was also intrigued.  It was in the water that it was about contact with aliens - and the aliens turned out to be benign - and that it required a woman to figure this out - and to embrace them.  This led me to believe that it was a Kumbaya movie which, while I felt it might be timely to our installation of Trump as an isolationist president, and that it might serve as a hopeful alternative view of how to react to aliens - be they Mexican, Muslim or extraterrestrial, might be too simplistic to be a persuasive alternative vision.  

My advance intel was fine as far as it went, and, thankfully, it spared me from the disorienting/orienting plot twist that I will try to spare you as well.  This film stands as a powerful rebuke to the notion of isolationism, but it is far from a simple feel good film.  The engagement that it endorses is complex and will lead to deep and powerful shifts in the functioning of the protagonists, and to the viewers, if they take the underlying messages to heart.  It is a complex film - more complex than it appears at first.  I left the theater feeling disappointed by the movie - that it hadn't lived up to my colleague‘s hype.  As I have chewed on it, though, I think it has more heft and many more layers to it, though it was a plenty satisfying movie to begin with. 

This movie, as you will know from the trailers, is about a linguist.  And she is called upon – the trailers make her seem more passive than the movie portrays her – she steps forward – to engage in a novel process – to learn the language of and to teach our language to – extraterrestrials.  This seems like it should be pretty straightforward.  When I was a kid and lived in West Palm Beach, Cubans who had escaped Castro came to our school and I was tasked with teaching one of them English.  I didn’t go to some class (English maybe?) and instead hung out with him in the courtyard and pointed at things and tried to get him to learn the English names of them and to elicit from him their Spanish names.  What I didn’t know at the time was that his parents had told him NOT to learn English as they were Cuban and Spanish was their language.  Even if he had been willing, it would have been tough.  The extraterrestrials seemed willing enough – and competent enough to bring 12 ships to earth and have them perched at various places and to engage with the people at each of these 12 places who then would intermittently connect with each other as they tried to figure out what this contact was all about.

I’m not sure, but it seems to me that the aliens, like the Cuban refugees, might have been playing dumb.  They were competent enough to bring 12 huge ships to earth from someplace quite distant and to have them hover in pre-selected places.  The cover story is that they have to find shared referents and need a chalkboard to do this, but how hard can it be to share data?  As one aside pointed out - the Fibonacci sequence is seen as being universal.  Let's start with numbers - or pictures of stuff just outside the ship.  

I think that, in so far as they were playing dumb, they might have been doing this to buy time - because their wish is for us to really learn their language, not some pidgin version of it, and it requires immersion in their language in order for the communication between earthlings to take place - communication that is essential to our working together.  And we need to actively do this work - it is not something that can be done for us.  So, the movie makers created a great deal of suspense around the efforts of the terrestrial central pair, the linguist Louise Banks (Amy Renner) and the physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) who work diligently to teach and learn the foreign language to the central alien pair whom they nickname Abbott and Costello.  Part of the apparent problem is that they don’t know what shared referents they have.  In fact, as it turns out, this foreign language is not just a new set of words, but requires – or enforces – a new way of thinking in order to become fluent in it.

I have often thought of psychoanalytic training as learning a language.  Psychologists generally, and psychoanalysts in particular, share a vocabulary – a jargon.  That jargon is something that we try to avoid using in describing our patients in, for instance, test reports.  I teach my students to write in Plain English.  That is all well and good, but it means that we are in the position of translating not just jargon (which we need to do anyway, since people use the jargon in confusing and idiosyncratically defined ways) but a way of thinking into plain English.  Because, you see, psychologists, but especially psychoanalysts think differently about the human condition than run of the mill mortals do.

As Louise and Ian learn the language, as they immerse themselves in it, it begins to alter them.  Ian asks Louise if she has started to dream in the alien language.  Louise hesitates to acknowledge that she has done that, but as she does, we see that she has a waking dream – an hallucination – where Ian looks like the aliens and sounds like them.  She has gone native; or, more precisely, alien. As the movie progresses, it becomes clear that the aliens have brought many "gifts", but the primary one is their language.  Interestingly, then, the consensual translation at multiple sites of this is "weapon".  Language, in so far as it structures our thinking, is integral to who it is that we are.  Learning a new language has the potential to destroy us - to invade us - to create an alternate version of us - we know that we have been caught in the cross hairs of the weapon when we begin to dream in the new language - we have become someone different from who it is that we once were.

The structure of the alien language in the film is different because it bears a very different relationship to time – using this language leads us to see our way into how it is that things in the future will come to pass.  The movie takes a literal interpretation of this.  But I think it is worth thinking about this as a metaphor.  I think all language allows us to see our way into the future because it allows us to articulate what it is that we are imagining and it facilitates that imagistic process as well.

Psychoanalysts view time differently than others do.  They see the past as present and assume that what was done then is informing and shaping what is done now so that what we do now is necessarily shaping what will come.  Altering the ways in which we function by default – the thoughts and behaviors that are a product of reacting to what he have done and what has been done to us – occurs over time and through effort to create new ways of being with another person – that person, the analyst, then becomes a new touchstone – a new cornerstone on which to construct a way of functioning and a new way to create the future.

Psychoanalysts and their patients create new languages.  They have names for concepts – and for things that have occurred – that are idiosyncratic to the pair. This works its way into the functioning of the analytic pair – they dream and think about each other as they learn this new language that is dominated by the patient’s native tongue, but is certainly influenced by the language and person of the analyst.  As they learn this new language, new ways of thinking about the future open up.  What had been a relatively static expectation of the future becomes fluid and filled with options that weren’t previously imaginable.

Outside of analysis, we worry about the minds of millennials.  They are being programmed by the devices that they are using.  The static baseball cards of my childhood have been replaced by MLB games in which the batting average of every player on every team is available and referenced every time that you, playing a pitcher whose stats you also know, face them.  This will, as the movie points out, irrevocably reprogram the mind – not just with content, but with how that content is accessed – externally in terms of the devices, but internally – how do we have a mind that can hold that much data?  We need new ways to think.  A classroom is suddenly a very dull place to gather data.  But isn’t it a great place to integrate it?  Well, maybe, but it requires a different way of interacting –not with a device, nor even just with a human, but with a whole group of them.  This can be scary for those who are used to using devices to communicate.  So we have to teach old skills in new worlds.

The film is filled with tension precisely because the future is unknown.  Somehow seeing one’s way into the future does not mean that the future is inevitable.  In fact, in a climactic moment, it is essential that something in the future occur in a particular way in order that something in the present can happen in a way that we certainly want it to.  And the decision to live one’s life in a way that will allow what has occurred to occur is still an open one.  The tension between a future focused language and a world which is not determined is not worked out in detail in the film other than through the realization that people may – or may not – choose to follow through on the paths that are open to them - and knowing a particular path that is open to us - not as a fantasied future in which everything is perfect, but as an actual, lived experience with all of the heartache that every such experience includes, means choosing to live with the good, but also the bad and the ugly. 

What determines what will happen, then?  Ultimately it is the character of the people who are making the decisions.  And the film’s greatest commentary on current events – and our President who would be an isolationist – is not that the aliens need us all to work together so they give each of us a piece of the puzzle – though that is surely applicable – but that our stereotypes and prejudices are played on.  We think we know who the bad guys are and why – and when we actually meet them, they turn out to be very different than what we believed would be the case based on their portrayal by the media.  Actually living life, actually engaging with others, leads us not to reduce them to a stereotype, but to appreciate just how complex and rich they are.  (Could it be that Donald Trump is more than just a flagrant narcissist?)

The reluctant wife recently read a book about the Supreme Court – The Nine - and one of the central theses of the book is that there is a correlation between the justices who have become more liberal during their time on the bench and the amount of travel, especially international travel, that they do.  It seems that actually having contact with people from other cultures leads us to have more faith in humanity.  When we don’t have that contact, we fear strangers.  We let our prejudices, and our frequently unearned faith in the tribe, trump our need to connect and be interdependent.

This movie is ultimately a film that teaches us to embrace rather than fear life: to live fully despite or maybe even because of the fact that we will die.  Its final message is that living life – being alive – not some weird final destination – is what we are here for.  If there is an aim, it is to support others having a chance at this incredible thing.  And this message – this very Buddhist or alien message – is one that frequently comes to us from a source like science fiction – a source that is disorienting – where things are – as this film portrays – literally upside down but, despite that, the film has the gravity to make the case that we should engage in life, one moment at a time, appreciating it for what it is, while preparing for what is to come.

The reluctant son was born in 1999.  This is no accident.  In the seventies, I read a book, The Limits to Growth, that predicted the world would end in 2000.  We would be suffocated by smog or run out of coal and gas or we would be inundated by Uranium poisoning - all of their models led to the prediction of doom and gloom.  This movie would, I think, have encouraged me to go ahead and have a kid, even if the future was dark.  I doubt that it would have convinced me.  But I appreciate the film makers making the effort.  Simultaneously, the film supports the idea that we have to work to make the world a place that our children will want to live in.  There is both a commitment to creating the best world possible and an acknowledgement of the limits of that world - even with clear sight, we cannot avoid what may - and in the case of death - must - befall us.


Post Script:  It is now some time later and the DVD has come out.  It, apparently like the first release of the film, does not include 8 minutes of footage that are critical to some of the observations I have made above - particularly about the openness of the future.  The film as first released and currently available on the DVD that we saw makes it look like the future is inevitable - and the alien language simply articulates what will necessarily occur.  I like the longer version better - it is much more subtle and, I think, true to life.  When we see how the gears mesh - when we recognize how our lives have been determined by the forces that have guided them, we have some degree of freedom to rethink our future path.  This freedom is likely quite limited - we are more like ourselves than not, even after engaging in something as arduous as an analysis - but we have a skosh more freedom.  The movie is suggesting that, even knowing what we are walking into it, we can still embrace it.  This is a powerfully optimistic message.

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

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

  

Salmon Akhtar – Dionne Powell – and Donald Trump’s Inauguration

Yesterday, while Donald Trump was being inaugurated, the reluctant wife and daughter prepared to march on Washington while I sat in New York listening to analysts talk about the nature of the human mind.  Salmon Akhtar delivered a Plenary Address – a speech in which an accomplished analyst is given free rein to talk about what that analyst believes is important.  Salmon chose to speak about curiosity.  Later, Dionne Powell, who will be visiting our institute in the spring, led a panel of speakers who were reflecting on the forces that led to the election and that represent the exposure of underlying racism (and sexism) that have been hidden by our apparent forward movements in civil rights (and women’s rights).  Meanwhile, Trump assumed the presidency.

As I reflected on this day after a night’s sleep, it was a set of remarks that Dr. Akhtar made – not central to his thesis – that seemed to organize swirling sets of thoughts.  Dr. Akhtar noted that we are not powerful creatures – we don’t have fur so we can’t regulate our temperature – we don’t have claws and teeth so we aren’t at the top of the food chain based on our native tools, but we have achieved our claim to the top by by virtue of our wits and our tools.  But, he maintained, despite our having attained power in a variety of ways, we have a central and ineradicable experience of being vulnerable.  We compensate for our vulnerability – and ultimately gain our power not just by our wits, he didn’t say this, but I believe – and think he would agree – by being social creatures.  But our dominant American myth is that of the rugged individualist – the autonomous person – the autonomous man – who vanquishes nature (and hostile others) through sheer strength of (his) wit and will.

The content of Dr. Akhtar’s talk was about a very different mythological and lived world.  He talked about how his mother, when he was a child in India, responded to his curiosity about the lid of the tea pot bouncing by telling a story about a Scottish man, John Watt, who was also curious about this, and how John Watt figured out that it was the steam that was coming off of the heated water that led the lid to dance – and he figured out that by focusing the steam on a wheel he could make it go around – and thus created the railroad trains that carried them to Mumbai.  She went on to say that she was sure that Akhtar’s curiosity would lead him to discover great things – and that he would be invited to give a Plenary Address someday! 

Dr. Akhtar comes from a very prominent Indian family.  For generations, the members of his family have been extremely productive poets, philosophers and teachers.  He traced this intergenerational productivity, indirectly, to the family's support of curiosity – and support of sharing the ways that satisfying the curiosity with the world that is generative and constructive – indeed, it that will lead to being rewarded with fame.  And this has led to a very productive career, where the books that he has published, when stacked together, are almost as tall as he is.  His wits – responding to curiosity – allow him to assert – not aggressively but generatively – many useful and organizing ways of thinking about the world.  He has also mentored many others, including them in his generativity.

At the other end of the spectrum is the developmental message that the panel reported is delivered to African American males who are brought up in supportive families in our culture.  They are taught to avoid asserting themselves because of the danger of doing this.  The curiosity of young African American males is stunted by anxiety about the ways in which their assertion will be seen as aggression and lead to their death.  Dorothy Holmes also spoke about this in her own plenary address a year or two ago. 

Many of our kids do not get this message, especially those who are economically disadvantaged and those who are members of marginalized groups.  In fact, many of them have the experience of overwhelming trauma within their homes and within their peer groups from early on.  This morning I am in a panel of psychoanalysts talking about working with kids who have been traumatized and who are acting that out aggressively.  Interestingly, here, also, the need to open up curiosity – to think about what it is that the opponent is thinking – becomes a means of helping fragile individuals who resort to violence in order to protect how fragile they are feeling – becomes a strategy for helping a person manage their anxiety about their vulnerability.  And this, paradoxically, permits them to be curious about others in ways that leads to their becoming more comfortably attached to others.  This attachment – rather than autonomy – is ultimately what helps them “heal” from their “diagnosis” of Oppositional Defiant Disorder (or whatever diagnosis or sentence they receive). 

 As these thoughts were swirling last night, I passed a couple of street banners here in New York in support of Trump.  Next to them were posters encouraging avoiding being pissed on by Trump (If my grandmother had lived to hear golden showers and the President mentioned in the same sentence she would surely have died at that instant).  The idea condensed in the poster is that Trump, far from being the savior of the disenfranchised, is actually intending to use the power of government not for the good of the populace, but for his own ends – and he will therefore be using the population to meet his needs.  Ironically, of course, I think this is what his campaign was promising to interrupt – a government that is oppressing rather than supporting people.  The poster might be suggesting that Trump’s demonstrating and encouraging aggression against groups that are seen as threatening in various ways betrays his true intent.

 

More broadly, those who, from the position of others, appear to be privileged do not themselves experience that sense of privilege.  We have a more fundamental, primal experience of being alone – and of having, from that perspective, to protect ourselves.  If we are going to move away from feeling alone, we are going to move towards people who look and feel like us – the other, from this perspective, feels threatening the more they differ from us.  Akhtar is encouraging us to remain open to remain curious.  This is really hard for us to do when we are anxious.  We inhibit our curiosity and restrict our vision.  This leads us to avoid exploring and instead to begin asserting – telling ourselves that we know what we know – that we are certain rather than curious.

Ironically then, in the US in 2014, for the first time in decades, children became less poor relative to women (who, in turn, are poorer than men) than they had been the year before.  We reversed a trend that had been occurring for decades.  Reversing this will lead to greater security among children, which will allow them, in turn to be more curious – to be more open to possibility rather than to foreclose on possibility and assert certainty.  However, as the tide of people now swelling around the Waldorf and headed towards Trump Tower in a jovial and festive mood wearing pink knitted hats and objecting to the impending loss of social supports that have allowed this trend to turn around would attest, we cannot maintain these gains without a government that shares this as a value.  Out of anxiety about others taking from us what is rightfully ours, leaving us impoverished and vulnerable, we have elected a chief executive who has no interest in supporting the kind of support that would reduce all of our anxiety.  Instead he promises the illusion of greater individual strength – as if that were possible without social support – and a congress and senate that are similarly minded.

Ironically, it is, as far as I can tell, highly privileged people who are marching.  These are the people who, in the short run, are most likely to benefit from the policies that Trump is likely to put into place.  These people are marching against their own immediate best short term interest because they know that in the long term this is not in the best interests of the country.  The majority of those who voted for Trump are those who are LEAST likely to gain from what his administration is likely to put in place (or disrupt), though, they believe that, in the long run what he will be doing will be in their best interests.  What a weird world we live in...

So, rather than staying with the joyful and disruptive crowds outside (there is gridlock as a swelling, large and very cordial crowd is not contained to any parade route – if there ever was one – and spill over into various streets and avenues, having a good time and stopping traffic - and when the taxis honk their horns in protest, the marchers raise a chorus of hoots and yelps as if the horns were joining them in support rather than frustration), I have come back inside to attend a panel on disillusion.  In this panel, a similar conclusion to that from this morning is being reached: Disillusion is inevitable, but this can be a source of creativity – Akhtar’s curiosity re-emerges when we are able to recognize that illusion is part and parcel of living.  The primal illusion is that mother and I are one – and that is all that matters – there is nothing outside of this bound world.  But to stay in that world is impossible.  How do we use curiosity to help us move beyond the circumscribed bounds of this relationship so that we gain more as we experience new and exciting things – rather than feeling overwhelmed by the losses associated with losing our deeply felt (or hoped for) sense of safety in the presence of others?

I frequently find the annual conference to reignite my interest in psychoanalysis – something that I can lose faith in and contact with as I do so many other things during my day – and as my clinical and academic engagement waxes and wanes.  But this year, I am more impressed with the ways in which psychoanalytic thinking is an integral and important way of understanding not just my patients, not just the books and movies that I read, but the way that the world – on a social, political, economic, biological and relational level.  It seems, somehow, essential to me, despite my reluctance, as a person, not just as a psychoanalyst.  I know the world is moving in many ways away from a psychoanalytic perspective – I think it always has.  But the truths that are at the heart of psychoanalytic thinking continue to be at the center of the way that world in both the consulting room but also the world much more broadly.  We need to partner with other perspectives, but we also need to keep alive this powerfully useful and accurate perspective.  

One of the final speakers at the panel on illusions noted that the New York Times credited Trump with seeing the simultaneous implosion of faith in the illusions that the church, universities, the press, the government, psychoanalysis as field and society as a whole has created for us to live by (such things as All Men (and now Women) are created with equal opportunities) not as a threat but as an opportunity.  My dinner companions and I agree that the Times is giving Trump too much credit, but I do think this is functionally what we are seeing happen.  How will we weather this?  What will we create to guide us into a strange new world?  I don't know, but I was buoyed by the enthusiasm and the infectious happiness of the crowd today.  There were many slogans in evidence, but the repeated tried and true one, "Love Trumps Hate" seemed to resonate with this old child of the hippie days.  Could it be that we could forge our youthful dreams into a mature illusion that will sustain us?  We can look forward with curiosity...

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

For other posts looking at Race in America see: James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree, and applied to a Rock Musical, Dorothy Holmes presents to the 2016 Psychoanalytic Convention, 2017 Convention Aktar, Powell and Trump, hearing Ta-Nehisi Coates talk, Black Lives Matter,  John Lewis' March, Get Out, Green Book and Blackkklansman, Americanah, The Help, Selma, August Wilson's Fences, Hamilton! on screen, Da 5 Bloods, The Black Panther, and Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me.

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

ORLAN - Art, Beauty and Psychological Health

If we are not art, what are we?  If our lives are not artistic expressions, what are they?  ORLAN, a French performance artist, lives this out quite concretely, using her body as a canvas or pile of clay and performing her art by, among other things, filming herself during surgeries that have transformed her face and body, and reading out loud while these surgeries are performed.  The intent of the surgeries is to graft or apply parts of great works of art onto parts of her face – so, for instance, she has crafted her forehead to look like the forehead of the Mona Lisa.  The intent is not to become beautiful, but to embody these works of art and, I think, by doing this to embody - to concretely represent - what it means for her to be human - to articulate who it is that she is.

Danielle Knafo brought this literal body of work to the attention of the psychoanalytic community at a discussion group this afternoon.  She started the discussion by noting that, some years ago, ORLAN spent the night at Dr. Knafo's home as part of a project where Dr. K. was interviewing ORLAN – and Dr. K. was concerned that her son, who was three at the time, would be startled by ORLAN’s appearance in the morning when he awoke to find her in his home.  In addition to hair that is yellow on one side and black on the other, and big bold round glasses that make her look like an owl, ORLAN has implanted silicone under her skin to give her the appearance of having horns.  When Dr. Knafo found ORLAN with her son the next morning, they were playing together, and her son was clearly enjoying himself with ORLAN as he would with any adult with whom he was playfully engaged.

Dr. Knafo’s anxiety speaks to a fear that we have of the monstrous.  This was also spoken to by the discussant of the group, Dr. Ted Jacobs, a highly respected analyst, who posed two questions: “Is this art?” and, “Is she pathological?”  Though I think these are wonderful questions - they were also somewhat ironic.  Dr. Knafo had carefully related ORLAN’s artistic intent – ORLAN wants to escape the binary.  She wants to transcend being masculine or feminine (She describes herself as a transgender person who is changing from female to female), modern European or pre-Columbian American (Her current work is to transform her image, through computer enhancement, into various culturally defined images of beauty), and ultimately living or dead (she wants to have her body be preserved and put on permanent display in a museum when she dies).  Both questions posed to the group are binary – art or not, pathological or healthy – and both therefore would reduce her to being one or the other – they would give us, the viewer of her – a handle with which to designate her – a box into which to put her – and I think this undermines the effort (at least as I understand it at the moment) of her (and perhaps our own) art - an effort to transcend ourselves while fulling becoming ourselves.

I was reminded during the talk of something that I once heard about.  I don’t know if it is fact or fiction, but I do know that it caught my fancy so I will relate it.  Apparently in Japan there are people who use head to toe tattoos to become living works of art – the Birdman – a very colorful NBA player is very much on his way to doing this.  The problem is that introducing that much ink into the skin is toxic and these individuals die young.  Rather than having their art die with them, many of them have their skins removed and hung (in my memory it is like being hung on a hanger) in a museum where others can appreciate the artwork.

From Dr. Knafo’s careful description of ORLAN’s childhood, it is clear that there are ties between her life experiences and her artistic expression.  For instance, ORLAN experienced her mother as being largely unavailable, and thus that she herself was largely invisible, except when ORLAN became ill.  It is not hard to draw a line between feeling invisible as a child, becoming a performance artist and having people observe her surgeries.  But the question, to me, is whether this reduces ORLAN to simply repeating a childhood experience and enacting a continuing longing to be seen – which is clearly happening, or whether this gives us a window into the particular way that her artistic expression of something that is both incredibly particular and concrete -but also general – even universal – about the human condition, finds an avenue for expression.

I used to scoff at the notion that my becoming an analyst was determined by events in my childhood and the relationship between my parents and me was related to choosing a profession.  For what it’s worth, I still scoff at the idea that this determined my course.  I might have become a number of other things, and my early childhood experiences and relationships with my parents and siblings and friends would have put their stamp on the profession that I choose (come to think of it, I have chosen a number of vocations – clinician, teacher, researcher, middle manager, parent and spouse), and I have discovered through analysis proper and my own continuing analysis just how potent that stamp has been on each of my pursuits – that who I am has been shaped by those I am in contact with as I have lived out my life in manifold ways – but all of this is far from a linear relationship.

In so far as ORLAN has threads that connect her childhood experiences of feeling invisible and then becoming visible when ill with her using medical procedures to articulate herself, the connections are not as linear and simple as they appear to us with our 30,000 foot view.  As Dr. Knafo relates it, the idea of filming her surgeries first occurred when ORLAN was unable to perform at a scheduled time due to an ectopic pregnancy.  In the ambulance, on the way to the hospital, it occurred to her to film what was occurring as an alternative to the performance that she had planned.  This, in turn, led her to the notion of highly staged, aesthetically determined surgeries that also, necessarily included much blood and guts.  Even the still pictures that we observed were hard to stomach.  What is compressed into these images?  What is occurring inside of ORLAN and what is occurring inside of the viewer?

We spent some time speculating about whether the next step in her career, these staged surgeries, was partly a means of mourning the child that was lost.  I think there are likely tendrils there.  In fact, a seemingly simple question turns out to have very complex answers.  ORLAN herself articulates very different aspects of her experience at different times, in different interviews, and under different conditions.  At times she denies that she feels pain (and she was given local anesthetics when she underwent these surgeries).  At other times, she acknowledges that the manifold surgeries have been assaultive on her body.  She did not begin this process until she was 43 years old – a time when the body does not bounce back like it once did.  Some of the post-operative images were of a person who had been attacked – something that is not unusual after facial plastic surgery.  Fortunately, we don’t remember trauma in its original form.  And it seems that ORLAN was using a variety of strategies to avoid the experience of pain in the moment (in addition to the medications, the ritual aspects of preparing for the surgery and planning and executing elaborate readings may have helped her enter dissociative states where she could be less psychologically present to the procedures than she otherwise might have been).  And her experience in the moment – and in memory – is, like all of our experiences, multilayered.

Our experiences as viewers are also multilayered.  There is, at least for me, horror, fascination, identification, rejection, and curiosity, plus much more.  I turned away from some of the images.  I have not included those in this post, but you can easily find them on the web.  But some of her images – especially those in which she morphed her image into other culture’s definition of beauty – were strikingly beautiful, or at least awe inspiring.  In these images she is clearly herself and clearly someone or something completely other.

Dr. Knafo pointed out that ORLAN anticipated, with her art, what we are approaching – a world in which our biology is no longer our destiny (something that Freud maintained).  We can alter our bodies – changing the gender from this to that – and we live increasingly non-bodied lives as we build, tend and cultivate virtual identities and relationships.  In the virtual world, we can construct ourselves with many fewer apparent constraints.  Even in the corporeal world, bodily decoration (tattoos) and augmentation are becoming the norm.  ORLAN herself (like Eric Ericson) created her name as means of more fully articulating herself and is in the process of doing this again, this time with a product naming consulting firm.  The ability to transform ourselves in these ways was viewed with some trepidation, I think, by most of those in attendance.  It seemed they thought this was a kind of manic flight from the reality of limitations that are part and parcel of being human.  My own experience was very much a minority one – that our internal lives are much bigger, grander and far more complex than our hum drum external world would indicate.  ORLAN, to my way of thinking, is, as it were, living the dream – becoming, first physically and then increasingly in a virtual way – a representation of what it means to be complexly, complicatedly human -  and therefore beautiful – including in our ugliness.  Ultimately, psychoanalysis is a means of transforming ourselves.  As psychoanalysts, we privilege the verbal, cognitively mediated transformation over physiological transformation, but I think that we are both, ORLAN (who has been engaged in at least two analyses) and the analysts, engaged in transformative work.

You see, Dr. Jacobs asked the question about art because he did not see beauty in what ORLAN was doing.  I think that Aristotle might have disagreed with him.  In the Poetics – a meditation on tragedy – Aristotle proposes that the theater allows us to confront, in part because we have the support of the rest of the audience all around us, those traumas, the deepest feelings of pity and fear, that we can’t otherwise tolerate, and, through confronting them, to experience an emotional catharsis.  Now I think therapists have found catharsis to be overrated, but ORLAN seems to think – or perhaps to enact – the potential for confronting various emotional experiences – the most central of which, Dr. Knafo pointed out, for ORLAN, is the idea that, at some point, and completely out of her control, a biological switch will be turned and she will die.  If there is a more universal fear than this, I don’t think Freud found it.  And if there is a more universal dichotomy – the living and the dead – I don’t think we’ve discovered it.  And yet we, tragically, can’t transcend it and so we, as one of the group pointed out, like Prometheus, are condemned to having a piece taken out of us each day.  At least ORLAN determines which of those pieces will go and under what circumstances.  And that can weave a sort of magical – one might say artistic - if sometimes ugly – spell.

So the opening question has new overtones for me: what does it mean to be healthy?  I think that if we define health as coming to grips with our mortal limitations and deciding to live our lives within the confines of those limitations, ORLAN is quite pathological.  But I also think that this definition of pathology doesn't acknowledge that our existence is monstrous - that the burden of being mortal - the burden of having flesh - is huge.  I think, then, that if we define life as a challenge - one in which we need to figure out how to channel our frustration at the limitations that we are confronted with into living the best life we are capable of living - ORLAN could be seen as the pinnacle of mental health.  Dr. Knafo's clinical experience, and that of her son, are that ORLAN is a reasonably psychologically healthy person - though she is a bit of a control freak.  My own and the group's recoiling at the images that ORLAN creates suggests that ORLAN struggles to channel her chafing at the limitations (some of the intensity of her emotional experience sloshes over onto the viewer - bruising him or her), but I think, on balance, she is able to destabilize herself (and us) in productive ways - at least I found the discussion she prompted in us to have been an afternoon very well spent.


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

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

St. Ignatius and the Jesuits - Psychoanalysis peaks at Religion

This a This is a re-posting.  Originally posted August 2, 2011, I am reposting because I was not aware at the time how to title posts so that they could be easily searched.

In addition to being a psychoanalyst, I am a faculty member at a Jesuit Catholic University.  There are 28 Jesuit Universities in the United States (the most Universities of any Catholic order), and many more high schools than that.  There are additional Jesuit Universities and High Schools scattered around the world.  The Jesuits were founded by St. Ignatius Loyola in the 16^th Century.  Loyola was a young courtesan and minor royal in Basque Spain who was injured by a cannonball when he was leading a foolhardy defense of a castle.  During his convalescence he discovered that he was not drawn to read the tales of Chivalry that he thought he would have preferred, and instead found himself reading about the life of Christ and the lives of the Saints.  This inspired him both to reconsider his life as a young knight, and to become an academic - in part so that he could learn more about Christianity.  After training at the University of Paris, and in company with ten others, he founded an order of activist priests who ended up creating an international confederation of High Schools, Colleges and Universities.

The Jesuits in the United States have a problem.  They are not attracting members at the rate they once were.  Fifty years ago, virtually all of the faculty and administrators at my University were Jesuit priests.  Today, there are about 12 Jesuits at a University that employs roughly 500 teachers.  Our President has publicly mused that he is likely to be the last Jesuit President.  In the last 10 years, 10 of the 28 Jesuit Colleges and Universities have hired lay presidents (who are all white, male, and Catholic).  So I spent the week at a retreat for faculty, administrators and board members of Jesuit schools.  The retreat is a kick-off to an 18 month process that is meant to mirror the formation of Ignatian priests so that we can, in effect, maintain the Jesuit or Ignatian character on our campuses.

Formation for Jesuits involves becoming a priest.  That is not on my to-do list.  But the group leading this effort wants to both inform; that is, to teach us about Ignatius, and to form us; that is to help us become emotionally resonant with a Jesuit position with regard to issues that emerge in an academic setting. 

From the information presented this week, I came to be able to articulate things that I have felt about the Jesuits but have not had a knowledge base that has allowed me to know why I have felt them.  Ignatius, it turns out, is not unlike Freud:  He was a revolutionary thinker who emerged at a propitious moment in history and built an organization that promulgated his ideas.  Ignatius was roughly contemporary with Luther and, like Luther, he proposed that the individual person could be in direct contact with God.  This “protestant” idea did not lead to a schism for Loyola and the Jesuits because he worked very hard to remain connected with the church, but his ideas were consonant with those who split away.  And, raised in the Episcopal Church, I think I resonated with both the “protestant” views of my Jesuit peers, but also with their organizational loyalty – the Episcopal Church has been called Catholicism without the Pope.

The “protestant” position of the Jesuits is important as a cornerstone for Colleges and Universities.  From Ignatius’ position, knowledge is something that is acquired by direct engagement with the world, not through indoctrination at the foot of an authority.  This position was essential to and a product of the zeitgeist of the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance; Freud’s discovery of the unconscious – deposing the authority of consciousness, like Ignatius's and Luther's deposing the authority of the pope, was both a product of and essential to the transition to modernism.

                 













Ignatius reminded me of Freud, though, not primarily because they were both transitional thinkers, but because Ignatius created a method of listening that is eerily reminiscent – or presages - Freud’s listening method.  Ignatius created the Spiritual Exercises.  They were based on the conversion process that he went through in the wake of his injury.  These exercises are engaged in by a spiritual director and a retreatant who has a particular problem that he or she wants to address – the Jesuits have always used the exercises as a means of helping a novitiate determine whether he was truly called to be a Jesuit.  They are intended, in their original form, to be undertaken over the course of a month, give or take.  The part that seems to me to be centrally parallel is that the spiritual director is to help the retreatant engage as directly as possible with God – indeed, where possible, the director is to try to facilitate without interfering with the conversation that emerges between the retreatant and God.  The listening perspective for the spiritual director is supposed to be one that is attentive, reverent, and devoted, which feels very much, to me, like the evenly hovering attention of the analyst.  What does not feel strictly analytic is that the retreatant is asked to imagine particular scenes from the life of Christ rather than to simply follow his or her own associations.

The analytic process can be thought of in many ways, but one of my orienting thoughts is that one of the analyst’s central tasks is to facilitate a conversation between the analysand and his or her unconscious.  Ideally this conversation becomes an ongoing, dynamic conversation where the unconscious, instead of being always unknown and even hostile to a person’s conscious personal intent, becomes an ally, using different but very powerful processes and data to work on the very problems the conscious mind is struggling with and to propose an array of solutions that can be implemented in ways that become more and more consistent with the consciously experienced self.

Ignatius used the Spiritual Exercises as a means to facilitate a dialogue between the retreatant and God – an entity that, like the unconscious, is not directly knowable by most of us most of the time.  In my own analysis (and in my current life), I have been confronted over and over with evidence that I do, indeed, have an unconscious that attempts to communicate with me; sometimes by engaging in outrageous or embarrassing behavior, but more frequently through dreams that symbolically – through the use of images and narrative - represent problems that I am wrestling with.  Dreams do not necessarily offer solutions, but might offer a representation of the problem in ways that clarified aspects of that problem that I was uncomfortable representing to myself consciously.  For instance, if I am struggling to help a patient articulate a particular thought, a dream might help me realize that this has to do, in part, with the ways in which that feels like an expression of affection that feels, on some level, sexual, and therefore forbidden.  Recognizing this, I can reflect on the amount of sexual oomph behind the idea and determine whether pursuing it is likely to be more useful or more distracting to the analysand.  

From the perspective of dreams as informing our consciousness, when the spiritual director in the spiritual exercises proposes that the retreatant imagine an episode from Jesus’ life as clearly and vividly as possible – imagining the sights, sounds, feelings and smells - the director is encouraging a guided dreamlike experience.  It is then up to the retreatant to discern (this is another Jesuit technique that I may discuss in a later post) how God would have the retreatant engage with the current problem.  As a central component of the formation process, I will be going through the spiritual exercises – probably in about a year.  I don’t yet know whether I will still be blogging at that point, but should I be, I intend to report on the experience of parallels between going through the exercises and going through analysis, not just the theoretical parallels that I have reported on here.

Postscript:  I did both continue with this process and continue blogging.  Part of the formation experience included a trip to Nicaragua to appreciate a very different world view.  I blogged in anticipation of going here, and then wrote about my experiences while there here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.   I returned from Nicaragua and, a week later, did a condensed version of the spiritual exercises, which I blogged about here, here, here, here, and here.  I am now aware, in putting together this compendium, that I did not write about the final, concluding retreat, nor a kind of summary blog of the experience of being a participant in the ICP.   

It is also the case that, through the rest of the ICP experience, my views on Ignatius changed.  I came to see him less as a protestant who didn't leave the church and more as a mystic - a person who truly believed that direct access to God was possible.  In addition to being a mystic, he contributed to the reformation of the church in many important ways.   In terms of education, he reintroduced Plato and Aristotle as important thinkers.  The church had marginalized them as being pre-Christian and thus necessarily unenlightened.  Ignatius disagreed with this position, pointing out that the world has always been God's creation and that we have always been able to learn about God by learning about the world.

As to the process of discernment that is at the heart of the spiritual exercises referred to in the post, the very simple version is that Ignatius taught us to notice how we feel about things that we engage in - as he noticed that he felt energized after reading the lives of the Saints and depleted after reading the exploits of the Knights.  This process is, of course, more complex than that, but this is the foundation on which it rests.  The intent, from Ignatius' position, is to discern what it is that God has in mind for us - to read His will through our experience.  The psychoanalytic version of this is to live a life where our unconscious needs - the entire range of them - can be met by the life that we lead - a life that we become deeply invested in leading.  Or, as Confucius is reported to have said, at 70 I follow my heart's desire without breaking moral principles. 

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

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