What is Psychoanalysis?

I blog as the Reluctant Psychoanalyst, but I have never defined directly what it is that I mean by Psychoanalysis.  Here is a description of what I believe psychoanalysis to be – and why I think it is an important perspective (even if I reluctantly identify with it) for us to be aware of when we think of all things human:

Though psychoanalysis as a discipline and a field is largely the invention of one man, Sigmund Freud, it has been practiced, altered and thought about by a myriad of individuals.  In fact, Freud first learned of a new technique of treatment from his friend Joseph Breuer, who called it “the talking cure”.  Breuer was reporting his work with a patient, Bertha Pappenheimer (they called her Anna O), who, when she first started to recall the things that had preceded being symptomatic, had called it “chimney sweeping”.  Most people, when they think about psychoanalysis, think about it as a psychotherapeutic technique – one where the psychoanalyst sits behind a couch that the patient is reclining on; this has been the staple of New Yorker cartoons for decades.  Psychoanalysis is also, though, a theory of how the mind works that is derived from listening – yes, frequently from behind those couches – to how it is that people think – what they say when they are encouraged to say whatever comes into their mind – the primary and explicit direction that Freud offered to his patients.  This theory of mind is used not only to understand and help individuals who are confronting difficult lives, but also in understanding the worlds of art, literature, politics and business.

So, psychoanalysis is, first and perhaps foremost, a way of listening.  What Freud was encouraging was the process that he called free association.  “Just say what comes to mind” might sound easy, but it turns out that freely associating is much harder than it appears.  On our way from thought A to thought B we frequently get sidelined by thought Q or Z.  We feint and dodge rather than moving smoothly through our thoughts.  One way of thinking of the goal of psychoanalytic psychotherapy is to help us think more freely – to be less encumbered by the defense mechanisms – the feints and dodges that Freud and others discovered and described as they listened to people engaging, as best they could, in free association.  Psychoanalysts have spent a great deal of time working on how best to help people learn to think and talk more directly and clearly – frequently by helping them discover and evaluate what it is that they fear – what they feint and dodge to avoid – and once that has been identified, helping them decide whether that feinting and dodging continues to serve them well – or whether they can more directly face uncomfortable or even terrifying thoughts and learn to move through and address them rather than to skirt and avoid them.  An important part of this process is providing a safe place – a relationship that is reliable – in order to do the work required to face these difficult thoughts.

So, by listening and hearing how people’s minds work, psychoanalysis also becomes a theory of the mind.  The theory emerged from seeing that we are not driven solely by “rational” or “conscious” thoughts, but that many of our most important decisions and actions – things like whom we choose to marry, what profession we choose to pursue, and how we respond to people that we interact with in the course of a working day – are driven by unconscious wishes and desires – and by our efforts to avoid being aware of those wishes and desires – the feints and dodges of the analytic hour end up being the stuff of lived life – the stuff that is part and parcel of our everyday functioning and interactions.  The idea is that the unconscious is not just a place where we store stuff that we aren’t remembering at the moment and, in some cases, can’t directly remember even when we try, but that it is where the action is – where we weigh what to do, it is where the deals are brokered that lead us to do this rather than that – choosing a course of action, for instance, where we don’t get all of our needs met, but we also think that we won’t take some of the hits that we would expect if we were to do something else that would more fully satisfy us.  We believe or state that we are acting rationally – or doing this because of that, but in fact, there is a much more complex process going on and most of our important decisions involve a great deal of compromise, much of that unseen – having taking place under the radar; unconsciously.

The psychoanalytic mind is, then, a very rich place where a lot of things are happening simultaneously.  On the most basic level, we are breathing and regulating our heartbeat – usually outside of our conscious awareness, but not always.  We are reacting emotionally to situations and we may be struggling to manage multiple competing emotions aroused simultaneously.  We are considering what courses of action are open to us and imagining what the consequences of doing this versus that will be.  And we are engaged in activity – we are talking – and perhaps walking and chewing bubble gum – all at the same time.  Psychoanalysis has been parodied as a process that reveals what we are “really” thinking – as if there were some simple thought that was responsible at any given moment for what was going in a tremendously complex system.  I have come to think of psychoanalysis not as reducing us to what is “really” going on, but expanding our ability to think about what is “also” going on – psychoanalysis is, then, a means of exploring the multiple parallel processes that occur within our minds all the time and that are intrinsic to being human.

When psychoanalytic thought has been the axiomatic system for scientists studying development – Daniel Stern is an example of such a scientist in his book the Psychological Birth of the Human Infant; or brain structures -   Mark Solms and others have done extensive research in this area – we are able to put together information into a working system that ends up describing how we as people actually work.  Instead of having a bit of information about this or that part of our functioning, we have an overarching theoretical system that helps us relate the various results of basic scientific work together into a working model – one that helps us better understand why we as individuals – and as a culture and even, at times, as a species – do the things that we do.

Our research, both the basic research of people like Stern and Solms, but also the continuing work of analysts listening to their patients, informs how psychoanalysts can better hear and engage with our patients so that those patients can, in turn, have more access to more of their minds – and so that we can help them function more and more effectively – spending less time feinting and more time working cohesively toward desired goals – more and more freely associating.  Metaphorically, as we begin to organize our minds to work more like a symphony – we are more likely to conduct the symphony – to orchestrate glorious work that is more frequently harmonious and when it is discordant for that to be an important component of who we are at that moment – not something to run or hide from- to recognize that there is discord and that this is part of the process of being complex people – instead of feeling that we are the victim of a mind that is intentionally and consistently working against itself.  (Paul Wachtel, a psychologist/psychoanalyst, noted in the 1980s that part of reason psychoanalysis works in this way is because of the behavioral treatment principle of exposure therapy.  The more time we spend with thoughts that are anxiety provoking, the less anxiety provoking they are - we get used to them - and they have less power to derail us.)

The psychoanalytic perspective, then, is important because, in so far as it accurately represents the ways that the mind works – the architecture of the mind, as it were – it facilitates our getting a better handle on this very complex thing; the most complex closed system in the known universe.  Something this complex needs a road map – a more or less accurate description of the terrain – for us to make headway on an individual level – improving people’s psychological functioning as much as possible – and on a scientific level – articulating how the mind as a whole works in a way that fits with our lived experience.  A perspective that attempts to do all of this is going to draw on other disciplines and it is also going to be internally inconsistent as we try to determine which elements are most important – and it is going to evolve as we learn more about the human condition.  Psychoanalytic theory does all of these things – which makes it a complicated perspective to study, but, in so far as it is accurate to depict ourselves as actively working outside of our awareness to engage with the world, it is a critical perspective to help us understand human functioning – in the consulting room and in the world at large.

The writing that I do in this blog is, then, applied psychoanalysis.  It is the mind of one person - me - reaching out through that of another - usually through a product of that mind - a book, a movie, a work of art - and reporting some of the impact of the other on this person - to you, the reader.  In my reporting, I include the ways that I wonder about how the work is indicative of the functioning of the other person's mind - and I invite you to wonder about that with me.  Ultimately, I suppose that I am maintaining through the writing that I do here that the deeply human process of communicating is enriched by a psychoanalytic way of listening - by trying to hear the reverberations of the creator's mind in the creation and, from that, in my own unconscious mind.  I am then hoping that what this causes for me resonates with something within you.  Of course, the mechanism for doing this is consciousness.  I don't have the ability to directly tap into my unconscious - it's called an unconscious for a reason - but I have worked to be more attuned to the ways in which the unconscious influences my own and other's conscious functioning.  I hope that you, in turn, find this process useful in your own thinking about the material addressed here.     

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Y Tu Mama Tambien - Sex and Sorrow

  

When my only biological child was born, I was glad he was a boy.  I was scared to death about navigating adolescence with a daughter – in part because adolescent boys (not to mention creepy older guys) just seemed so dangerous.  Having been gifted with two adolescent stepdaughters, their self-awareness is a bonus – and the lack of it on the part of most of the reluctant son’s friends (he seems to be an exception – or maybe just hiding it from me well) should have given me more pause about having a son – and this movie would have clued me in had I seen it when it first came out in 2001.  I didn’t see it then because the trailers made it seem raunchy, which it is, but what the trailers didn’t capture was that the raunchiness is one the more realistic integrations of sexuality and, in one moment, sensuality into a film that I have seen.  Somehow these Mexican filmmakers have allowed their adolescent males’ sex lives to be part of their lives – and this has led the film not to be tawdry but rather deeply human.

It is not just sex that is realistically portrayed, but a country that has a small elite ruling and moneyed class, a small middle class and a very large indigent population – and it notices – off to the side - many of the class tensions that are inherent in that structure – a structure that in my worst moments it feels like our current government is hurtling us towards (shortly before we saw this film the new tax code was passed that seems like a handout to the rich and a guarantee that avenues for the other classes – including good education and health care - to rise will have to be even further closed off to pay for the largesse). 

The film begins with two buddies having very different but similarly hurried, though very affectionate sex with their respective girlfriends before those girlfriends go off together to spend the summer in Italy.  The boys reassure themselves that they will have a great time getting laid a lot while they are away while also reassuring themselves that their girlfriends will be faithful.  They then fall into a summer lassitude where they are largely hanging out with each other.  Tenoch's (Diego Luna) father is a the Secretary of Economics in the doomed PRI party that has held power for 71 years but that will fall in the next election.  Because of his father’s position, Tenoch lives in a lavish mansion with servants who don’t just wait on him but care for and about him – he is a little prince.  His father is on the board of the local country club, so he has access to it on Mondays and he and Julio (Gael García Bernal), his buddy, who lives with his mother who is a corporate secretary, have the run of the place – and it is there that they have sex – masturbating – each on his own diving board and offering images to each other that will help them orgasm.

The image that does the trick is that of an older woman – the wife of one of Tenoch’s cousins, Luisa (Maribel Verdú), whom they had tried to talk up at a wedding they both attended – a wedding where, Tenoch pointed out, the body guards outnumbered the guests.  Luisa gets a tearful phone call from her husband who confesses to having been unfaithful to her over the phone.  She then calls the boys up and lets them know that she is interested in the road trip that they have offered to the secret hidden beach called “The Mouth of Heaven” that they have boasted they know of – though in fact they have made the name and the idea up.  But, hey, you can’t pass up an opportunity like this, so they borrow a beat up car and the three go off on a road trip together to an imaginary destination.  What could go wrong with that plan?

The car trip affords them the opportunity to get to know each other – meanwhile we, the moviegoers, are introduced to the country they drive through.  And I think I failed to mention a fourth character – the omniscient narrator’s voice that tells us what is happening – with the individuals – with the country – and he points out the fates of incidental people and animals at various points – his voice is unhurried and matter of fact while foretelling various deeply concerning and even outrageous futures.  So what do we learn inside the car from this troika?  Luisa, who is married to someone with intellectual pretenses – a published author – is pleased to be mistaken by the boys as a member of the intelligentsia when she is, in fact, a dental hygienist.  She confesses that her marriage is largely empty – that she was drawn to her husband by their shared experience of being abandoned as children and we learn, over time that he has abandoned her on multiple occasions – she has been aware of previous affairs – he has just never confessed before.  We also learn that the boys belong to a society that they have created themselves in which they have pledged undying devotion to each other and imagine themselves, as the members of this secret society, as great faithful and undying friends.  And we learn everyone’s sexual histories – with the boys transparently trying to embellish their sexual prowess, which we strongly suspect is nothing but a series of hollow boasts.

On the second day out, the car breaks down and the three are stranded in a marginal hotel with a pool filled with leaves.  Tenoch goes to Luisa’s room to borrow some shampoo and she seduces him – not because of any particular attachment to him, we learn later, but because he was first through the door.  This has a tremendous impact on Julio, who is reminded of the first great betrayal of his life when he discovered his mother in the arms of his godfather.  He pays Tenoch back by confessing that he has slept with Tenoch’s girlfriend – and now Tenoch is stricken with the self-same sense of emptiness and loneliness.  The next day, to make everything right – Luisa has sex with Julio.  Of course this complicates things even further – but it also does create a certain détente – and more importantly a shared sense of emptiness and betrayal – they have all now been betrayed by someone they deeply trusted.  It also lets us know – and Luisa as well – that both boys are inexpert lovers who are too excited about the idea having sex with another person to be present to that person – and so excited that it is over almost before it begins.

Through the miracle of randomness – and as can only happen on an epoch voyage – the troupe finds its way – quite by chance – to a hidden beach that is every bit as glorious as one that they would have conjured out of thin air.  They set up camp and go swimming – and they discover a fishing family who gives them shelter at a nearby waterfront cantina and hotel.  They have a night of heavy drinking where they address all that is problematic between them – offer carnal toasts – and end up in the motel room together where the only truly sensual moment of the movie occurs.  As Luisa is pleasuring both boys – the boys kiss each other tenderly and deeply.  We cut away to the next morning where they wake up in each other’s arms and then recoil from each other.

Luisa, who has broken up with her husband over the phone, decides to stay in the fishing village and the boys have an uneventful ride home.  They drift apart and, two years later, they have lunch together – and Tenoch explains that, unknown to both of them but not to her, Luisa had cancer when they went to the beach – she knew that and knew that it was untreatable and she died two months after their trip.  The boys decide to get together again, but, the narrator tells us, they never do.

I don’t think this bare bones account of the plot can convey the depth of pleasurable melancholy that this film gave me.  I think there may be a word – triste – in French – or maybe a word in another language that conveys a pleasurable sorrow – something that feels bad – but at the same time lets you know that you can only experience this kind of sorrow if you are truly alive and care and are connected to the world and that it has disappointed you not by being something other than what you’d hoped for but by being exactly what you’d hoped for.  This trip – this coming of age moment – this shared journey – one that is deeply embarrassing to both Tenoch and Julio, because it reveals the depth of their love for each other including its erotic elements – something that was apparent to us – and to Luisa – long before that tender, sensual moment – has been expressed.  This is a rare and precious moment –one that comes all too infrequently to any of us.  And it is too much for them to bear – to know that they are, in fact, deeply in love – erotically in love – and that they are unable to handle that – on the surface because they are very straight adolescent boys, but also because as erotically attached to the world as they are the intensity of that attachment is too powerful for them to directly experience – it is too much for them to bear.  They don’t have a place to put these feelings – a category to describe it – a container for it – any more than Tenoch can bear to know the life of the servant who cares for him – to know the village that she comes from and that they drive through without looking at it.  The boys are no longer snapping towels at each other in the locker room but directly expressing all that was being playfully denied in those actions that also expressed a much more limited version of this fuller, richer and therefor intolerable experience.

Luisa’s sadness – something that she is able to communicate to each of the boys by having them betray teach other so that they can all experience it viscerally together – the sadness of losing a husband and losing her life – and deeply loving her life – and wanting to live it fully but knowing that it is limited – this all becomes shared among all three of them.  She can bear this feeling on her own no better than the boys can bear openly acknowledging their love – or their sense of being betrayed by the other.  The sadness is shared among them – she can experience it with and in them – though it is never openly acknowledged.  They are snapping a very different kind of towel together and we don’t know it – the full extent of it – until the narrator fills us in.  But we do know it – under the surface –not quite consciously – because the narrator has been telling us all along of the tragic endings that are all around – how can they not be here in the central story that we are watching?  This is not the beery bacchanal that the trailer suggests, and that this movie appears to be offering on the surface – it is not about two randy adolescents having their way with a young cougar, though it appears to be that at times to them and to us – it is three people sharing something profoundly and deeply connecting – their love of life – their love of each other – and a fragile moment that will tie the three of them together only for that moment - a moment that is both the most profound moment of connection they may ever experience – and the most profound experience of isolation they will ever know.  How privileged we are to be able to share in moments like this.  What a gift this film turned out to be.

It is a gift that I turned away from twenty years ago because I was embarrassed by what looked like an adolescent fantasy film.  Little did I know how potent adolescent fantasies can turn out to be – and how adolescent sexuality – filled with its bravado and its anxiety and its rush to nothingness – may signify something very central to the human experience more generally.  By marginalizing the sexual – by turning away from it – as we do time and again – I protected myself, as the boys were able to do early in the film – from the experience of the intensity of sorrow.   

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The Serpent King – Jeff Zentner’s Coming of Age Novel for Adolescents (and the rest of us)

When I was an adolescent, I primarily read fantasy and science fiction.  The reluctant son’s reading has skewed more towards sports stories – some fiction and some about real life events, but mostly, as my reading was, fantasy focused – the kid who is in some way an outsider becomes the winning quarterback or pitcher or whatever just as, in science fiction, the kid at the edge of the universe ends up saving it.  I suppose that the Harry Potter series, which I read before I began blogging, is also adolescent literature – though Rowling maintains that she was always writing with an adult reader in mind.  Young Adult lit was, in part, a category that was developed on the New York Times bestseller lists because they got tired of Harry Potter books dominating the fiction list, but I think it exists because there are people like this author, Jeff Zentner, who write for the audience – and the sales support this as a viable genre.  Hey, anything that gets kids to read is a good thing, right?

Zentner’s goal seems to be loftier than that, though.  He wants us to know that Southerners are people, too, even those who handle snakes.  The novel’s protagonist, Dillard Early, is the grandson of Dillard Early, the serpent king, whose son, Dillard Early, was the snake handling preacher, and this Dillard Early – Junior, even though he is the third, because, in a southern tradition, when his grandfather died his father became senior is the hero of the story.  His grandfather died of grief over the loss of his daughter who was bitten by a copperhead.  As a means of expressing his anger, he started killing copperheads, not knowing which one had killed his daughter.  He wore their skins and became a sad and vacant person who, consumed by his grief, ultimately killed himself by drinking poison while lying atop his daughter’s grave.  His son, emboldened by Mark 16:18, which states that those who believe shall survive being bitten by snakes and drinking poison, started a church where the believers passed around snakes, occasionally being bitten by them and, if they believed, surviving the bites, just as the believers survived drinking the poison.  The grandson had a crisis of faith and chose, while singing for the church, not to handle the snakes just before his father was sent to jail for having kiddie porn on the computer. 

Wow – what fertile psychoanalytic soil that is!  I could easily spend the rest of this post detailing the ways in which the Serpent King’s attachment to his daughter and failure to connect with his son set in motion a multigenerational tragedy that would make Oedipus blush at being such a piker – but that would be pure speculation because the book lets this backstory remain just that – and we focus instead on the current life of Dill Early, Jr., a kid who, as a senior in high school, visits his weird Dad in prison, lives with his Mom in meager housing, is, not surprisingly, heckled by the kids at school, and works to help pay off the family debts at the local grocery store in the small town of Forrestville Tennessee.  He is saved from misery by two friends – Travis, who reads the Bloodfall series of fantasy books (I checked – they don’t really exist anymore than the small town of Forrestville supposedly named for Nathan Bedford Forrest (apparently a real confederate general, and one of the founders of the KKK)) and Lydia, a super cool girl with a relatively well-off and super supportive Dentist dad, a devoted on-line following, but not a friend beyond Dill and Travis at their hick high school – where none of the three of them are appreciated by anyone who is not in their circle.

Perhaps the most refreshing thing about this book was that the dialogue – the banter between the friends – was a wormhole that transported me back to being an adolescent hanging with my friends.  I found myself pining for the easy jocularity with close friends where there was little fear of alienating them because our shared affection was so transparent.   The healing power of this kind of comradery cannot, I think, be underestimated, and Dill is, as he comes of age, healed in this book.  But healed from what?  And prepared for what? 

I am concerned that the author takes liberties with understanding others as if we were all the same when they may in fact be fundamentally different in ways that may be dangerous to his readers and to their contact with “others” to assume is not the case.  It is clear from the biographical material in the book that there are many links between Dill and the author.  They are both musicians, and it is Dill’s musical ability – his ability to channel his father’s charismatic intensity into the songs that he writes and performs – that is one of his tickets out of Forrestville.  So I think that Zentner is in solid literary ground when he writes a first person account based on an identification with the hero of the book.  The question that I have is whether he came from similar fundamentalist roots?

A quick survey of various interviews and statements online suggests that while religion of some form was important to Zentner, he based the part of Dill on the musicians that he knew who hailed from places where snake handling occurs.  He did research on evangelicals and their religions and how they worked – so he had a sense of what the back story would be – and I certainly appreciated learning about how the religion worked and the sense in what seems to be a senseless religious expression – he has a compassionate curiosity about the phenomena that I think he lends to Dill – who is somewhat (and reasonably) appalled at what his father does and is doing.  I think this brings us as readers along with him into a place where we can walk with a guy we would otherwise look past.  But the question is whether we are still looking past him – and seeing a weird reflection of ourselves in foreign territory.

When Kathryn Stockett wrote The Help, she wrote the white characters in the first person, but she intentionally wrote about the black characters only in the third person.  To inhabit the mind of the “other” involves a great deal of presumption.  I think that someone who has been raised within a fundamentalist church and has been abused in the ways that Dill has may not have some of the facile ability that Zentner imagines Dill to have in distancing himself from his father and seeing him as an oddity.  I don’t know about that, but I suspect, for instance, that the views that he has been raised with are more likely to be seen as truths than as oddities.  For instance, I have a friend, one of the brightest guys I know and one of the first people I felt the kind of rapport that bloomed in adolescence that I describe above – I met him when we were about 10 and in a gifted kids class a million years ago – and he still maintains – despite his having achieved a Ph.D., that creationism is a reasonable description of the world that we live in – in fact the only plausible one.  This is one area where our easy rapport simply slides away and we have to agree to disagree.  It is not worth our friendship, to either one of us, to go to the mat over this.  We go to the mat over many things – but this has a different feel to it.

I think that what Zentner is doing here is both deeply entertaining – I cried through much of the book – as many of his other readers did – I was fully taken by this very well told story and empathized deeply with the characters in my own particular way – and educational – I think he wants us to learn that the South, for all its mystery and all of the prejudice that we have about it – is a place that is deserving of our engagement.  And I applaud both of these goals.  But if we achieve them on shifting and false grounds, we are going to be severely disappointed on both sides – as Southerners (if you will) and Northerners when we actually convene around a table and discover that despite our similarities, we also have deep and powerfully divisive differences that are not as easily reconciled as this book would suggest. Lydia is, I think, Zentner’s more convincing “Southern” voice, because I think she more nearly mirrors who it is that Zentner is.  But Dill’s voice – as lovely as it is – does not feel as authentic.

What am I proposing?  I hope that this book would be made into a movie someday.  I would also hope that, should that happen, Zentner would work with a screen writer and a director to think about the character of Dill and to consider how we might a love a person – as Lydia and Travis do – in part by realizing that they are not living, in some ways, in the world that we are.  Zentner is, I think, indulging, as Dill, in a fantasy about being loved by Lydia that he also recognizes is an unrealizable fantasy.  We know throughout the book that Lydia’s horizons are different than Dill’s.  This is beautifully portrayed – and the work that the two of them do to find a narrative path for Dill that will help him work towards who he will become is beautifully described.  But the tragic divergence of their paths is also evident.  And this is not just because she is into fashion and he is into music – it is because her place is a place like New York City and NYU – the school that she is accepted into – and his is Murfreesboro, Tennessee and Middle Tennessee State University – the school that he is able to head towards.  Their paths from there will diverge – they will stay in touch, but they are not soul mates.  This does not mean that their souls are of different value – just that they are different.  To not acknowledge the fundamentally different tenor of these two people could lead to one or the other being co-opted and becoming a wholly owned subsidiary – something that would leave the world a lesser place.

That last bit may seem a bit opaque.  I think what I am stating is something like what Jordan Peele points towards in Get Out – that disavowing fundamental differences between people leads to reducing us to a common denominator that is, in fact, not common, but imaginary.  Indeed, no lesser a light than Freud did this in the case of Dora where he assumed that men and women – and he and Dora – were the same underneath.  Maybe so, but it is so far underneath, and there are so many layers of difference between here and there that the “essential” aspect of the other is something that they themselves don’t recognize.  That is, would the real Dill – as if there could be such a person – recognize himself as well as we – a presumably empathic and receptive audience – recognize the Dill that Zentner describes?  He, unlike we, might, instead of crying, be appalled that anyone could think that he would, for instance, feel anything but profound and very deep loyalty towards his father and mother – and that this would be the essential conflict – a conflict within himself – not between himself and his parents – as he wrestles with coming of age by finding a path that will allow him to be true to who he is – as a son and a grandson – and as the person who wants to write a different kind of gospel music – the gospel of the love he feels towards someone who is as alien to him as the person he loves most and wants to be most deeply in harmony with – Lydia.   

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

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The Shape of Water – The Ethics of Love

Monsters are primitive creatures and when we go to movies about them we are going to be confronted by primitive material.  Well, there is plenty of sex, violence and black and white thinking in this movie for it to qualify as a primitive movie but, despite that, or maybe because of it, it is a delightful love story – one that is surprisingly warm – at least for the older members of the crowd who went to the movies together.  In talking about it afterwards it was surprising that the reluctant wife and I, along with her parents, were fully supportive of the interspecies coupling that was depicted, while the two reluctant (and old enough to go to a movie like this) stepdaughters found that aspect of the film to be not just off putting but morally reprehensible.  They, who are generally on the side of all things liberal and progressive, became quite dismissive of the idea that humans should pair with anything but other humans.

We enter the film on an underwater ocean dive where we come across a doorway that leads to a hallway that leads to an apartment where the furniture is hovering, held up by the water but not buoyant enough to float out of the rooms and, in the final room, we discover a woman sleeping, suspended above her couch, peaceful in her watery space.  We have entered a dream world where one can live underwater and the light that shines in on us is murky – it has filtered down through layers of water and reflects in odd and unworldly ways – things are dreamy and unclear – not sharp and definitively depicted.

The story told in this film is of a top secret research lab in Baltimore operating at the height of the Cold War, and a brutal agent – a man who is as all-American as apple pie – who has discovered and brought back from South America a hominid creature that is capable of breathing both in air and in water – and the agent believes that the creature might be useful in our space project – an answer to the Russian dogs.  But he treats the creature – he calls him the asset – like a dog – or worse – using chains to restrain him and attacking him sadistically with a cattle prod.  Little does he know that the physician on the team who is charged with keeping the asset alive and doing research on him is a Soviet Spy.

The woman we spied sleeping in the water is a janitor at the facility – Eliza Esposito played by Sally Hawkins.  She was an orphan – raised in an orphanage where her vocal cords were apparently cut.  Mute, she signs to the closeted gay artist who lives next door and also her to her African American co-worker who interprets her signs to their supervisor and the other workers at the research lab. 

The tension in this film between ideologues who want to control the world to meet their own ends – the brutal agent and the general he reports to, but also the spy apparatus supervisors that the Russian spy reports to – and the people who are invested in caring for and about each other and the creatures that live in the world with them – Eliza is at the head of this troop, and she enlists the aid of her next door neighbor, her fellow janitor, and the Russian spy to free the trapped and endangered creature.  When the humanists outwit the ideologues, the ideologues don’t get it – people who are concerned couldn’t be involved in the drama they have created- it must have taken a crack team to have accomplished what they have done – and the crack team must be intent, as they are, on domination – on control – on winning the war.

When we meet Eliza her world is pretty circumscribed and her existence is largely grim.  She commutes to a job where she works the midnight shift cleaning up after others.  Her moments of joy include masturbating in the tub while she cooks the three minute eggs that she will eat for lunch and watching old musicals on her neighbor’s TV and mimicking the dance and tap routines.  We can easily look past her, the way we do when we pass people who are doing janitorial work, her features are plain and she is slight and seems to want us to look elsewhere, but in the moments when she is doing a little soft shoe – and she is smiling – we see that there is much more there.

The other person – or, as the girls point out – creature who notices her is the asset.  We get fleeting glimpses of him at first – and she is curious about him (as are we).  She draws him out by offering him her lunch eggs – and by playing music to him and dancing for him.  They become attached to each other even as he engages in mortal combat with the agent.  Eliza both wants to protect him from the agent – but she also comes to want him for herself and, it turns out, he comes to want her as well.  They learn to communicate through signing – it is pretty rudimentary, but, the old folks maintained, this demonstrates that the creature is capable of communicating and thus of relating – indeed, we framed the relationship as one between consenting adults.  To avoid spoiling the whole thing (haven’t I spoiled enough already?), suffice it to say that Eliza and the creature take care of each other’s needs across a spectrum of physical, sexual, and emotional levels.  And the creature – who at first seemed scary and ugly - turns out to be beautiful, as does Eliza.

So this film could be seen – as the reluctant father in law proposed – as a morality play.  The bad guys are the government agents who are interested in exerting control in a world that feels filled with threats.  The good guys are the caring ones who see the others not as threats, but as fellow creatures – Eliza’s inability to speak is mirrored by the creature’s – but they share a desire to communicate, not control.  Viewed from this angle, it would be possible to see the film as criticizing the powers that be – the Trumps of the world that would keep us safe from nuclear threat by strangling those who threaten us – and I think this is a viable reading of the movie.  But I also think it can be read as a conflict within ourselves, between that part of us that would keep us safe by controlling the world around us – and that part that would endanger us by becoming attached to those we care about.  These two parts of ourselves on some levels would appear to be allied – aren’t they both interested in our well-being?  But they can be surreptitiously at war – we can try to control those we love rather than appreciate them – we can try to subdue others – and our own passions – rather than listen to and express them.  Del Toro – the co-author and director of this film – is encouraging us to embrace that which is different and scary and dangerous – to embrace the monsters we discover and to find within them something human – something sentient – something warm and loving.

I think the girls in the family’s repugnance at the interspecies love reflects the resistance Del Toro ran into in creating this film.  He originally pitched a remake of the Creature of the Black Lagoon to be told, this time, from the perspective of the creature – with a happy ending where he makes off with the girl.  The studios didn’t buy it.  I think that, as advanced as the girls are on many fronts, there are limits to our capacity to embrace things that are different.  Freud’s attitude towards our sexuality was amazingly liberal given his background – he believed us all to be essentially bisexual – and he believed that our primary mature attraction was driven by our early navigation of the (sublimated) sexual relationships within the family.  Psychoanalysts, especially American psychoanalysts, jumped on this to label homosexuality as a “pathological” resolution of those familial sexual relationships.  Gays and Lesbians had to fight like mad to get analysts to get it that mature object attractions towards either sex can be healthy.  When the transgender folks wanted to tread the same path, though, some gay and lesbian analysts were not so sure that having something as primary as one’s gender being alien could be anything but pathological.  As we move into a world that is increasingly accepting of connecting with others (and our own) otherness, we are going to have our abilities to connect sorely tested.  We are going to find limits where what and who we love (including parts of ourselves) is very hard for us to embrace.

The girls pointed out that not everything is OK.  Having sex with children is not OK, for instance.  Within my profession, it is clear that having sex with clients is not OK.  There is something monstrous about both of these things.  The irony is, I think, that it is the agent and the Russians who are more likely to engage in these activities – the ones who want to exert control.  Indeed, it is the agent who wants to impose himself sexually on Eliza – to make her cry out (while he doesn’t want to hear anything from his wife when he has sex with her - it is as if he wants the other to be other than who they are when they are with him). 

The creature, who is worshipped as a God in his native habitat, has healing powers.  He heals both an unintended wound that he inflicts on the balding neighbor – but he also causes the neighbor’s hair to regrow – something about which the neighbor is greatly excited.  The ways in which he cures Eliza are, then, telling.  She becomes vocal in her dreams – and we expect her to become vocal in her life – she seems to be approaching it and I, at least, expected it to happen.  But the healing that he offers is very different.  Again, you will have to see the movie, or if you have seen it to remember it, and to think about the ways in which he offers her healing that allows her not to live more fully in her world, but in his.  He bridges a divide – not just seeing in her something that is like him, but offering her something that allows her to be in his world, something that allows them, then, to be more fully in each other’s.

This crossing of boundaries is dicey stuff – as the girls point out.  It is the stuff of morals and ethics – as the father-in-law proposes.  What Del Toro offers as the result of this particular boundary crossing between this creature and this woman is a kind of reassurance that our monstrous selves, when loved by others (and perhaps by ourselves) can produce a profound kind of healing.  We should think about that.       

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Paterson- Was Kylo Ren Really a Bus Driver?

The Indy Movie Paterson showed up in our mailbox the day after watching Star Wars – The Last Jedi and imagine our surprise to see Kylo Ren, Jedi drop-out, master of the Dark Side and would be master of the Universe driving a bus and writing poetry in Paterson, New Jersey.  This quirky little film was on our watch list because it had been well reviewed and we had not had a chance to see it.  How refreshing to see an actor,Adam Driver, who can portray both ends of a very broad spectrum of ethical functioning.  I had actually been concerned by what I considered to be his semitic features in his role as Darth Vader’s heir apparent.  So it was with some relief that a quick Google search clarified that he was raised a choir boy and that his stepfather is a pastor.  According to Wikipedia, he was a bit of a terror as a kid, and he sold Fuller brushes after high school before joining the Marines and then ultimately ending up at Julliard to hone his acting chops.

In Paterson, he plays a local kid named for the town – Paterson – who now lives in a very plain house with his ditzy wife and walks to work each morning as a bus driver.  We are invited into his daily routine, waking with him each morning of the week as he awakens, without an alarm, and nuzzles his wife, who usually tells him about a dream in which he figures prominently.  We follow him through his day where he eaves drops on his rider’s conversations, has a beer after work at the local bar while walking the dog, and, in between, writes poems – poems about love and poems about driving a bus.  He writes his poems in a journal that he carries with him or keeps locked in his basement office – it is what his girlfriend calls his “secret notebook”. 

The film is filled with whimsical convergences to which we give meaning – his wife dreams that they might have twins – and the rest of the film is filled with his chance encounters with twins.  We are invited to wonder about twins and what they might mean – but we are given few clues.  Perhaps the encounter at the end of the film with a Japanese Poet is an encounter with Paterson’s twin?  Similarly, he encounters a gang of hoodlums who point out the value of his dog – and warn him about the potential of a dog napping – but he doesn’t seem to pay it any mind, other than to note, as he is loosely putting the dog’s leash around the pipe outside the bar that night that the dog should watch out for dognappers   - and we are left to wonder, vaguely, if he would welcome them.

The central convergence is between this man’s name and the city in which he lives – a city that has many famous son’s – the two most prominent being Abbott of Abbott and Costello fame – and William Carlos Williams – of poetry fame.  Is Paterson fated to be a poet?  Or is he called to it?  What is the nature of a poet?  Is a poet an observer?  Someone who is caught in the forces that move around him and describes them in pithy and dramatic ways so that others can experience them with him?  Is this what Shakespeare did?  Is this what my poet friend Phil does?

Meanwhile, the action in the film is almost all about the people around Paterson – he is a nearly inert observer – pained by but reluctantly supportive of his wife’s ambition to buy a guitar to become a country singer and more openly pleased when her cupcakes sell well at the local farmer’s market in what she is sure will be her other path to fame and fortune.  When the action centers on Paterson, his bus breaks down on a routine run, he is nearly derailed by it – efficiently evacuating his passengers, but flummoxed by the complications of calling in the incident to the central office. 

This movie is, then, a poem.  Austere, beautiful, each day a stanza, it tells in the arc of a week story of the life of a poet – and the meeting with the Japanese poet at the end of the movie helps to underscore that being a poet is who this man is.  However other poets may live, this man, a bus driver, lives in the way that he does and produces the poetry that he does as a result of living the poet’s life.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, this man’s emotional life is very near the surface.  He, like the actor who plays him, is an ex-marine (I assume it is Adam Driver’s marine portrait that graces his nightstand and lets us know that), and he uses his military skills when he needs to – when there is danger that calls them out.  He is also remarkably observant of his wife – and we observe her too – both her physical and ditzy beauty, but we also wryly realize with him that her dreams, while painful to his sensibilities, are an expression of hers – and that his love for her – as her love for him – is pure – it takes her into account, it does not discount her.

From this perspective, I think the film is suggesting that the life of a poet – or rather living as a poet writes – is a desired state – an aesthetic state – possible even in a place like Paterson where the natural beauty has been hemmed in by industrial necessity – the old factories crowd near the picturesque waterfalls that almost certainly once provided the power to run the mills whose presence leave it viewable only from a small park with a chain link fence that separates the viewer from what is to be seen.  And yet the beauty can be seen – not just dispassionately; Paterson’s waters run deep.  The poet loves his town, he loves his wife, and he loves his poetry.

I realize that in this writing I have left out the central dramatic moment.  I think it actually makes sense to do that.  It is a moment where the plausibility of the story is most highly tested.  It is the moment, I have written elsewhere, where the movie as dream is being stretched almost to the point of breaking – the storyteller’s need to clarify the importance of writing poetry – and of sharing it with the world – of sharing our perspective so that others can appreciate it, and, I think, so that we know that we aren’t alone – this is so important to tell and yet it is not part and parcel of the peaceful narrative that a moment of violence creeps in – and yet the movie is able to survive the moment – we are able to remain asleep and to come to grips with what needs to be known – that this writing is not just a pastime – it is not just part of who this man is – it is who he is.  He is not, essentially, a bus driver, or even a lover, though both of those are essential to his primary identity – the identity of being a poet.

Now this is, of course, through another lens, a fiction.  None of us can be reduced in this way.  But from the perspective of this movie – which is, I think, a highly aesthetic one – and the perspective of a dreamer – it is a way of characterizing the essential nature of a person.  Paterson’s power is to distill the universe into a series of poems – to describe the world as he experiences it, just as Kylo Ren’s power is the desire to rule the universe with an iron fist and to make it into what he would have it be.  The psychoanalyst’s power – to help a person gain perspective on a particular moment – to put it in place – to help him or her understand how this thought and this action have a particular context – that is much more like the power of the poet and the artist than it is like Kylo Ren’s.

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Star Wars – The Last Jedi

The central problem this film tries to solve is also the central problem with the film.  Our Hero, Luke Skywalker, the young, brash and impetuous fighter for all that is right and good, has grown old and bitter and withdrawn from the galaxy.  When Ray, the next generation force gifted woman hungry for training tracks him down and shows up on his doorstep – the final scene in the last film – Luke has no interest in her and no interest in training her in the first scene in this film - and his refusal is hardly believable.  What happened?  Well, the movie explains the steps that led to this point, but the more central question is, what has happened to Luke the character and Mark Hamill the actor?  The answer within the movie is provided by Ray; Luke has closed himself off to the force.  As for Mark Hamill, playing an old curmudgeon seems to no longer allow the force to be with him either.  The flatness of a forceless central character felt to me, as I watched the film, to be a central flaw of the film.  After a few days of letting the film baste, and also having a dream this morning that was, I think, stirred by the film, I am willing to think of this flaw as a way into what may be the central compelling aspect of the film. 

One part of the issue is the question of the force itself.  Like the manifold gadgets that the characters use in each film that are not explained but just part of the background, the force is a religion that is a creation of Lucas and we receive hints about aspects of it, but we are never catechized.  The Jedi are, apparently, the high priests of this religion – and they have been all but driven out of the universe – we are, as the title suggests, down to just one.  And this religion, like the religions of old, allows the practitioner to perform miracles – though Luke pooh-poohs the lifting of rocks as a central aspect of the religion, it certainly comes in handy in other films and in the resolution of this one.  This religion is, like all religions, powerful.  And a little power gives the illusion of great, vast, even infinite power.  And this can be heady stuff.  One would think it would be the stuff of the dark side, and I’m sure it is, but it is also the stuff of the other dark side, if you will, those who stand by, as Luke is doing, and do nothing, because as powerful as the force is, it can't seem to make the world behave the way that we want it to.  Because when a little power doesn’t turn out to be absolute, it can be disillusioning and we can take our ball and go home if we don’t get to be the winner – the one with absolute power and absolute knowledge.

One of the things that drew me to the field of psychology generally was the power that I experienced in the hands of the practitioners who treated me when I was an adolescent.  They were able to intervene helpfully in my personal and in my family life.  When it came time, however, to become a therapist myself – when I went off to graduate school – I was aware of leaving out power as a motivating factor for going into this field.  That is, I think, telling.  We don’t want to acknowledge how important power is to us – and when we deny that (which I was doing publicly – but very aware of privately) we can get into all kinds of problems.

The Jedi are, in the Star Wars movies, fighting against the dark side of the force – the side of the force where the naked desire for power leads to corruption and the creation of an evil empire run by those who are enslaved by the dark side and all that it promises.  This is a very American viewpoint – we view ourselves as liberators – as protectors of what is good in the world.  We are the underdog (even when we were, for a brief while, the sole superpower).  The forces of evil always outweigh the forces of the good.  Or, the force of power is never strong enough.  We always need more.  That is demonstrated in spades by the bad guys – Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader in the early films – Ben Solo/Kylo Ren in the Last Jedi, but also, I think, by Luke Skywalker, the best of the good guys.

No one has more power than Luke Skywalker.  But, and this is a significant and fun moment in The Last Jedi, this does not mean that he is impervious to making errors.  In fact, he is told by Yoda – the true and original font of all things Jedi, that it is an essential part of being a Jedi to make mistakes – and to learn from them.  This lightness of being that Yoda personifies – this sense that we do, in fact, have a great deal of power, but that the universe, despite our power, is bigger and stronger and more complicated than our power can master or than our genius can comprehend – and Yoda's ability to be OK with that – is a very difficult to state to achieve.  It is easier to feel powerless – to feel that others have what we don’t have and to envy that and to try to acquire it.

As an aside, I think that one of the issues in the last US presidential election was that Hillary was running as an outsider – as the first woman candidate.  She wasn’t running as a Senator, a Secretary of State, and a First Lady – as among the most powerful people in the country save the president.  Her denial of her power – her denial of the power that the democratic party has wielded to create a more inclusive country – “No, we haven’t achieved all that we might, but we have, especially in the eyes of others, come a long way, baby” – made her, I think, vulnerable to the fear based position that Trump took – a position that led those with the most power in the country, and many with the least – to feel that they were the disempowered outside group – they saw this despite her not having said it.  Had Hillary’s debate position been something like, “We have made great strides and I am the frontrunner because I speak to the concerns of most of the people – I am not trying to convince the people who would vote for you to vote for me – I am trying to convince those of us who have been in power to assert the importance of wielding that power for the good things that we have done and will continue to do” perhaps there would have been a different outcome.  Who knows?  Of course, I think Obama did say that on her behalf, but, apparently not enough people bought it.

Closer to home, I haven’t written a blog post in over a month.  I have achieved a number of external goals that I have set for blogging – number of posts, number of hits – but I have found some internal goals more elusive – articulating a cohesive vision of what psychoanalysis is and how it helps to open up works of art and the process of living to being more cogent.  I feel good about some posts – less so about others.  It’s also true that I have also been simply swamped by the end of semester grading and holiday planning, but I think there is a part of me that is empathizing with Luke’s experience – if I can’t make it all make sense, maybe I should just take my ball and go home.  I also think that is a stage of life issue.  But I can’t imagine, living it, that it would be much fun to portray it.  It is embarrassing to withdraw from something that you have been deeply invested in.  The hubris that it takes to undertake something big – like becoming a Jedi or a psychoanalyst, and the sense of pride about having achieved it can be overshadowed by how limited the achievement is: not only does the world not bend to your will, but you are bound and determined to NOT have it do that, but to use your power to help others articulate themselves in ways that will empower them and ultimately be for everyone’s good.  As noble as that sounds, it was frustrating when both the reluctant son and the reluctant stepdaughter backed out of a day of skiing during this down time – both for legitimate reasons, but both thwarting my vision of a “family day” that would be good for all us – but is essentially something that I am most heartily invested in.  Almost as frustrating as having Ben Solo, your nephew, appear to be toying with the Dark Side.

So, as I wrote about The Force Awakens, one measure of the power of the universal themes articulated in the films of this series is that they translate into the lived experience of our lives.  We are just ordinary mortals – like Anakin, Luke and then Ray – who are living on the periphery of the universe at the beginning of our lives.  Like them, we discover that we have special talents and abilities.  We hope that they will be recognized and shaped, that we will be mentored to become what we feel ourselves destined to be.  Yoda was concerned about Luke, and this applies to Anakin and now Ray, that he was not taken into training early enough to prevent his becoming vulnerable to the dark side.  Presumably Ben Solo, Han and Leia’s son, was trained early enough, and by Luke.  But – and here it is, I think, ambiguous, Ben’s deep engagement with the dark side, but also Luke’s discomfort with it – Ray demonstrates a curiosity about it – as a place where she can learn more about her own heritage, but I think it is also a place that is filled with a big chunk of all of our heritage and Luke’s disavowal of that – his wish that the world could only be lightness and good, or that all of his pupils would embrace the light side at the least, indicates that he has not accepted the universe on its terms.  I suppose it is hard for me to fault him for that when I have failed to do that my own self.

       

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Battle of the Sexes - Biopics (and psychoanalysis) bring life to ghosts

Emma Stone and Steve Carrell

Where were you in 1973 when Billie Jean King played Bobby Riggs at the Astrodome?  I was where many other Americans were, watching it on TV.  Visually it was odd.  The Astrodome was huge and the tennis court was small.  This was not a tennis venue.  Even 13 year old me could tell that.  And what I remember most – but what was not depicted in the movie – was that Bobby Riggs (what thirteen year old had heard of Bobby Riggs) intentionally dumped his first serve into the net to express his disdain for Billie Jean King.  I hated him for that.  Billie Jean King was cool – I liked watching her play on TV.  Plus, you should always respect your opponent.  And when it became apparent to me early on that Billie Jean was going to win, I kind of thought Bobby deserved to lose – but perhaps more importantly I thought that he wasn’t in BJK’s class (and she did take him apart).  It felt like a foregone conclusion that she would win.

The movie Battle of the Sexes manages to make that foregone conclusion – I did watch it on TV and knew who was going to win – not seem so foregone at all.  Billie Jean King is played by Emma Stone.  Emma Stone brings to life a person who is confident, but not brash, intense while still being human – in a word, she captures some very important aspects of BJK.  That said, she is not BJK any more than Will Smith was Ali.  The subjects of biopics – even very good ones – I Walked the Line, Ray, Julia and me, and we also watched Jackie this weekend – are always, not just to my eye but certainly to my eye – more beautiful than the very beautiful actors who portray them.  Don’t get me wrong – Joaquin Phoenix is much prettier than Johnny Cash could ever hope to be.  Johnny Cash is not, to my eye, an attractive man, but he is beautiful because of – I don’t know what – his inner beauty?  My attachment to the way he sits behind that pock marked face and practically dares you not to love him, sometimes in spite of himself can’t be topped by the appreciation of a prettier boy trying to do the same thing.  If you want to see how beauty is not skin deep, watch a biopic and then remember the person being depicted.

Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs

In the best biopics, as Emma Stone does here and as Smith did with Ali, the actor who portrays someone we know well captures essential qualities of the person but doesn’t do an impression: they don’t mimic their subject.  They become the character.  I think, then, the irony is that no one can play us better than we play ourselves.  One of the reasons that we want to see a biopic like this is that we want to be in touch with the person who is being depicted.  We get instead a ghost of the person that we know – a representation.  And, at least in the case of this movie, but I think more generally, we get to know that person in a whole new way.  We get to know them intimately.  This is, I suppose, the way that we get to know our parents in the process of going through a psychoanalysis.  We remember aspects of important early figures, and in so far as, even if they aren’t like those figures, we imagine others – in particular our analyst (though I think this happens all the time with, for instance, our spouses) reminds us of aspects of them, and the task is to actually discover them (both our parents and/or other early caregivers and our analyst and/or spouse) in other ways that they in fact were or are is a tremendous achievement.  OK, that was a psychoanalytically determined and dense sentence.  Let me take a paragraph to unpack it (if you understood it as written, just skip the next paragraph).

Just as Billie Jean King – someone that I “knew” from watching her on T.V. – is both someone that I am (weirdly but I hope not creepily) attached to and that I remember, but is now a ghost – someone from my past that I might compare to current tennis players, so my mother, who is someone I am genuinely and deeply attached to and is someone that I “knew” from a particular perspective – as her son – actually as her eldest son who had the particular attributes that I have – I have internalized a version of her – or more precisely a version of her in relationship to me – and this is a ghost that I carry with me and compare to people in my current life.  I may use the feel of that relationship to anticipate the rhythm of those current relationships in my life, occluding in the process both my memory of my mother and my ability to perceive the other in their own right (I make assumptions about my spouse and my analyst based on what has gone before and what I have learned to anticipate in intimate relationships).  In a word, I project – or imagine – that they fit that template more completely than they actually do because there are feelings – for instance of attachment – that tap into the template, the ghost, that I have of my mother.  I transfer onto my spouse feelings that I have had towards my mother and my analyst and the technical term for that is transference.

So the Billie Jean King that I didn’t know – the one who left the women’s tennis circuit and started her own because Jack Kramer, who ran both the men’s and women’s tennis circuits and was the real bad guy in this movie, wanted to pay a small fraction of the prize money to women that he was paying to men even though the women were putting the same numbers of fans into seats is like the person my mother was when she was off at work – someone I didn’t know.  But she is also like, when I see her in this new movie, the person my spouse or analyst actually is – someone with whom I have a much more complicated relationship and about whom I know a great deal more than I knew about my mother as a child.  This Billie Jean King, for instance, is married to a man that I took an immediate dislike to onscreen because he just looked too perfect – like the quarterback for the football team who models on the side – but he turns out to be a prince of a guy.  She is married to a man who understands that tennis is her first love and he is a sideshow – and somehow he is OK with that: really OK with that.  He is still able to love BJK despite her inability to know and connect with him in the way that he wants to with her.  So when BJK has an affair with a woman, rather than being threatened by that, this man connects with and supports her lover.  Wow.  But I diverted myself.

The BJK that I didn’t know, the one who was real and not just bouncing around on the court destroying women players (and one man), was struggling to discover her sexuality.  She was struggling to discover what it meant to be a woman – and a woman jock.  How do you engage in both of those identities simultaneously?  Jack Kramer maintained it couldn’t be done.  He firmly believed that she would fold in the match with Riggs because she was a woman and couldn’t bring her “A” game when it really mattered.  She would defer.

There is interesting data to support that.  Girls tend to be competitive with guys in the classroom until about junior high school.  Then they start deferring to the guys.  The reasons for this are complex and socially based.  Single sex education – as in the seven sisters colleges and some Catholic school traditions – makes sense for women in a way that it doesn’t for men, where that tends to be exclusionary for a privileged group rather than providing a base for a group that needs it.  What BJK did was to found a women’s league – one that had ironic corporate sponsorship from Virginia Slims – the cigarette brand – and it was a league where the players sold tickets and greeted fans as they arrived at the venues. 

Meanwhile, Bobby Riggs is played wonderfully by Steve Carell (and the biopic issues of attachment to him don’t play in – I was angry at a guy I saw once in the tiny corner of a small screen taking in a very big space).  He was leading a childlike existence, doing nothing for his rich father in law’s company, playing delightfully with his son, and making outrageous bets on himself in acts of tennis wackiness, though probably on lots of other things as well, all of which his very rich wife did not approve of.  Riggs turns out, then, to be a clown.  He is not so much a chauvinist as clueless – and both pitiable and oddly loveable.  But he is a good tennis player.  The chapter that was unknown to me was that, before he beat BJK, he beat Margaret Court, her nemesis and the person who had passed her to be number one in the world.  The outcome of the match between Riggs and King was hardly a foregone conclusion.

What the picture portrays in microcosm is the symbolic nature of the event for the nation in the context of the life of an individual and her battles with figures in the establishment.  The tennis match, as silly as it was, marked a shift in the consciousness of the country.  Rosie the Riveter, who had picked up her rivet gun to build the tanks that won the second world war, had put that down to welcome back the GIs who drove them and walked beside them and she had (here I am painting with a very broad brush) raised her boys and girls at home on her own.  Her daughters were intrigued by the possibilities of wielding that riveting gun.  The strident, first generation or wave of feminism was here.  This game foreshadowed for my 13 year old self what would become a lifelong adjustment process in the way that I would come to see women, an adjustment process that has been occurring within me and around me ever since and which continues to shift and change both for me but also for society.  It was interesting to go back to a formative moment, one that, at the time, I did not know was formative, and to get a better sense of the complex narrative that was at the heart of it.  I discovered that it was not simply a weird sideshow but something that drew as large an audience as it did because of what it actually was.  This bears an eerie resemblance to the revisiting of our childhoods that we do as part of the analytic process.  We revisit with our adult selves a time in life when we had a very narrow vision of what was occurring and we discover that a lot more was going on both around us and within ourselves than we could have known at the time.  

       

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