Free Solo: The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Wonders What It Would Mean to Live Life Without a Net

Climbing, Oscar Winning, documentary, psychoanalysis.

When we saw the trailer for this documentary film about an individual, Alex Honnold, who decides to climb El Capitan without ropes – an even bigger and more imposing rock face than Half Dome, also in Yosemite National Park, and which Honnold has previously climbed without a rope – I expected a film about a daredevil – a swashbuckler who was interested in cheating death in a variety of ways – by climbing – but maybe by drinking or doing drugs – and I certainly think that I would have expected that he would have been a womanizer.  But this film is about a person and an undertaking that has daredevil qualities that are inherent in what is being done, but there is an odd aesthetic that is at the core of this film, this person and this quest that is much quieter, but certainly every bit as tension filled and vertigo inducing as the swashbuckling film I anticipated.

There are a number of themes that overlap and interweave in this film.  The first is the role of the filming of the undertaking.  Free soloing is the art of making difficult climbs – life threatening climbs – without any aids or ropes.  It is man or woman against the mountain.  Or more properly – against the rock face.  Not just getting to the top of the mountain, but doing it on the most inhospitable face.  Filming what is essentially a solo undertaking makes it public in a way that violates part of the freedom inherent in the name.  It also yokes the filmmaker to the climber – if the climber should fall to his death, is that partially the fault of the person who films him?  What role does the filmmaking play in the climb itself - including the potential to fatally distract the climber?

The second yoke that keeps this from being a free solo is the relationship between Alex and his girlfriend, Sanni McCandless, a woman he met when on a book tour describing his climbing and she, who had no interest in climbing at the time, on a lark, gave him her phone number when she got his autograph, and we are not told about the ensuing courtship, though we get to see them developing a relationship in the shadow of his attempt to engage in a solitary and dangerous activity that might rob her of him – and she has some thoughts about that.

The third yoke is the tie between this kid – it is hard to think of Alex as a grown man – partly because of his relatively slight stature, but mostly because of his gee-shucks approach to the world - and the mountain on one hand, and the need to keep body and soul together on the other.  He is living in a marginal world where his only home is his van and his only food is stuff he cooks on the burner in the van – and a real shower is a huge luxury.  Because of his accomplishments, he now has a reasonable income, but he is still incredibly uninterested in earthly goods that are unrelated to climbing.

But the center of the film is the technical, emotional, and physical challenge of making a 3,000 foot vertical climb with thousands of moves – each of which could prove fatal if not done correctly – and some of the moves are simply incredibly technically challenging under the best of circumstances.  How does one prepare for and undertake such an endeavor?

These elements, interestingly, overshadow the final climb – so that by the time it takes place, as thrilling and crazy as it is, it is no longer what it might have been – something overwhelming and poorly understood – instead it is, for the viewer as for the climber – the thing that has been pointed to since the beginning of the film and it seems somehow, oddly, destined to be occurring – and it is only through the cut-aways to one of the cameramen who can’t watch, who is afraid of what it is that Alex is doing and unwilling to watch him fall to his death – that we, oddly, become aware of the gravity (as it were) of what is occurring on the screen before us.

I did a little rock climbing in high school – mostly as part of a counseling experience that would ultimately lead me into the therapeutic profession.  This was the infancy of what would one day become ROPES courses that all kinds of people would engage in to learn team building skills and to learn to rely on their buddies.  We did that – holding the rope for each other while we engaged in scrambling up the sides of buildings and walls of rock cut by creeks in the middle of mostly pancake flat Columbus Ohio.  We learned to use carabineers and to belay down, which was great fun.  But we also learned something of the power of concentration – as we paid attention to each foot and hand hold and tested them before trusting our weight to them – not wanting to fall even if the rope would ultimately hold us.

Alex didn’t want to fall either, but he did.  He fell before this project began and his girlfriend was responsible for the rope that was to hold him, but she didn’t pay attention to how much had been played out and his fall led to compromising two of his vertebrae.  It was almost the end of the relationship, but she convinced him that he would not be better off for not having her.  He fell multiple times attempting the most difficult part of the climb up El Capitan while trying each of the two moves to get across a particularly tricky spot – he was in harness and practicing.  On another practice climb, near the bottom in a part of the climb that he found very challenging because of a lack of purchase on what he described as a glass-like wall, he fell, and, though Sanni had the rope, he sprained his ankle.

The ankle sprain occurred about a month before the end of the climbing season.  The camera crew was prepared to film the climb.  They followed him to the local gym where he climbed the rock wall with his boot on.  Other climbers told him it would be a six month recovery arc.  He thought he could climb again in a month.  When he started out to do free solo El Capitan a month after the injury – on a climb that, because of the time of year – had to start at four in the morning and he sported a headlamp to climb in the dark – he seemed as foolhardy as I imagined him to be.  What a relief when he – spoiler alert – aborted and decided to come back and do it the following year.

That winter, he and his girlfriend bought a condo together in Las Vegas and their relationship developed on screen.  He had been coy with her about when he would attempt the solo climb in the fall – and they began to play back and forth about how much he was allowed to know how much he meant to her as he prepared to attempt it again the next summer.  But it was also important that she knew that his primary interest was in the climb.  During the interlude, he also did some psychological testing on an fMRI scan to ascertain what was going on with him.  Looking at images that would cause distress and therefore brain activity in the amygdala to others, his amygdala was non-reactive.  He was essentially not anxious about things others would be anxious or aroused by.

I think there are two diametrically opposed but perhaps related constructs that might help with this.  One is the idea of Obsessive Compulsive functioning.  In this approach to the world, an anxious person defends against their anxiety by organizing their world so that the likelihood of something bad happening is greatly minimized.  This can be a very effective means of isolating anxiety, and if that is what has happened in this case, Alex has so effectively managed to distance himself from his fear reaction that he has interfered with it pre-emptively.  He no longer fears because of the disciplined way that he has managed fear.  Another component of that is that he has exposed himself over and over to the feared stimulus to the point where he is inured to it.

The explanation that requires less mental gymnastics is one that comes from the literature on thrill seeking.  Individuals who qualify as thrill seekers seem to have a lower base rate of arousal and need to engage in thrilling activity to, on some level, feel alive – to feel the adrenaline rush of knowing that this life really matters.  These individuals have been studied clinically as having more difficulty connecting with others – primarily in terms of being antisocial or sociopathic – though Alex’s mother refers to Alex’s father as having been on the Asperger’s spectrum – and this might be another expression of this fundamental lack of arousal.

What is interesting is that the other climbers and the film crew (who are all climbers) talk about not knowing Alex and what drives him – they don’t seem to have a sense of him as a person.  He is personable – charming even – both in his public interactions, for instance with students at his high school, but also in his interactions with his girlfriend – where he is, as I have said, coy.  He also talks with climbers from the generation before him and clearly venerates them – but his conversations are generally technical and when he is goofing around and responding to them about his girlfriend, again he is coy.  That said, there are cameras on for all of these interactions and, just as they, by their very presence, alter the climb, so they alter the person they are observing.

After the sprained ankle, we are treated to the preparation for the climb.  How many times does Alex climb El Capitan with ropes?  We don’t know.  He talks with another climber who prepped for a different free solo climb by doing the route he would solo forty or fifty times.  I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Alex made the El Capitan climb at least that many times – and that he practiced the difficult bits many more times than that.  By the time of the solo climb, I think he knew essentially every step that he would take – each handhold – and how he would navigate the whole thing.  It reminded me of Scott Hamilton’s commentary on a beautiful Olympic skating routine when asked what was going on in the skater’s mind at that moment and he replied that skater was thinking outside blade, inside blade, crouch, lift, turn, etc. – focusing on the elements of the routine – and not, as we the audience were, on the beauty of what was occurring.   In the final climb when Alex seemingly effortlessly handles on of the technically challenging bits we know the five or six step routine that we see him doing, he grins for the camera – clearly having enjoyed pulling that off – but he is also headed forward into the next challenge at the same moment.

Whether because of nature – an amygdala that is under-responsive so that Alex has to manufacture extreme ways of exciting himself – or because of nurture – anxiety that he manages by over-preparing to do what he does, this film is a record of single mindedness.  It portrays the discipline and isolation that is necessary for the arduous but ultimately gratifying work of free soloing.  

What does Alex do when he is done?  He looks oddly fresh – as if he has just been for a brisk walk in the park rather than having completed a grueling and harrowing four hour test that has taken him to the limits of what man can accomplish.  He celebrates with the crew at the top of the mountain and then calls his girlfriend – and, as we listen in on the conversation, he is clearly pleased with what he has accomplished and pleased that she gets what it is that he has accomplished – and then he goes back to his van and spends the afternoon working out – preparing for the next climb.

While it is possible for me to admire this singlemindedness, it is impossible for me to imagine engaging in any activity with this kind of relentless focus.  My mind reels at the paradoxical loss of freedom to achieve a free solo.

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Medea – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Watches A Feminist Tragedy ripe for yet another moment in history….

Last night, there was a showing of Lars von Trier’s 1988 Danish made-for-television adaptation of Medea, with Larry Jost, one of our local Philosophy professors, discussing it and the play with a group of psychoanalytically interested folks.  Not having read Medea or seen it performed before, it was very helpful to get some background and, he being an old school professor, gave us handouts that included dialogue from Euripides’ play, which brought to life how Euripides originally gave form to Medea’s fury. 

The version that we saw was, as the discussant characterized it, stark and highly stylized.  Watching it was among the slowest – but also reasonably satisfying – 80 minutes of my life.  As the reluctant wife suggested, it was like watching grass grow – interesting grass – but still.  The getaway scene at the end has got to be slowest getaway scene ever recorded on film or video.

The plot starts before the film – so it was helpful to have Jost, if after the fact, play the role of the chorus and the Gods, filling us in on the back story.  Medea helped Jason and the Argonauts steal the Golden Fleece from her country.  Jason, a Greek, wooed her and they married, not just on paper but in action, becoming true partners as they figured out how to loot her father’s prize possession.  Medea was, as the film characterized her, a practitioner of the dark arts.  To slow her father and his army down when he was chasing after her and Jason, she murdered her brother, dismembered him, and scattered the parts because she knew that her father would stop the chase long enough to gather the pieces and give him a proper death rite.

Jost spared us a film version in which this is graphically and brutally depicted in the opening scenes.  In our version, there is just the title art, which depicts two children hung in a tree, foretelling the central drama of this tragedy.  Then we meet Medea  (Kirsten Oleson) on a bleak, desolate and wind and water tossed shore, being greeted by an Athenian who is sailing into town and will be leaving the next day.  He promises her safe passage, no matter what.  Jost let us know that this is one of the plot devices that Aristotle objected to – he felt that it was too convenient for Medea to have an escape plan provided for what is about to transpire.

We next learn that Jason (Udo Kier), who is an ambitious man, has decided to throw Medea over, abandoning her and her two children, to marry Glauce (Ludmilla Glinska), the daughter of Creon (Henning Jensen), who is the king of Corinth.  This would put Jason in line to the next king.  Indeed, at least in this version, immediately after the marriage it sounded like he would be taking on some or perhaps all of the executive duties of the kingdom.  There’s just one problem – Creon doesn’t want Jason’s ex (or other) wife and children hanging around – presumably as a threat to claiming the inheritance of the crown that Glauce’s children will one day own.  Again, Jost informs us that Medea is loved by the community and has been accepted by them.  But Creon tells Jason that his love for his own child trumps Jason’s love for his children, and he banishes Medea effective today – the wedding day.  When Creon delivers this message, Medea begs for an additional day to get her things in order, which he grants.

Medea accomplishes a lot in her day.  She collects some berries, makes a poisonous mash, which she attaches to her own wedding crown.  She confronts Jason – who argues that in his position as king – even after her banishment – he will be able to better care for Medea and the children than if he weren’t in this position of power (we are left in the film to imagine how pleased Medea is with his generosity – Euripides makes it clear by giving her the words to express it just how furious she is about this gambit).  She seduces Jason (whose new wife won’t join him in the marital bed until Medea is gone), and convinces him to have their two boys take the crown to Glauce as a gift – and in order to ask her to ask Creon to allow Medea and the boys to stay.

Jason and the boys head off on this errand.  Glauce is pleased with the gift – but pricks her finger on the poisoned barbs and dies – as does Creon when he finds her.  Jason finally gets it (boys can be pretty thick) and heads out towards Medea – fearing what she may next have in mind.  And this is where things get interesting in this particular film version.  In the original play, Medea murders her sons – I think off stage – with a sword.  This is enough to get the Athenians riled up.  In the “historical” myth, Medea leaves, and the Corinthians murder her children.  But Euripides solution is so much more economical and horrifying.  She could have murdered Jason.  But instead she uses the boys – whom she knows he loves as only a parent can – against him.  If she had murdered him, that would not have wreaked revenge.  Destroying the things that he loves – not just his new bride and her father – throwing his ambitions into chaos – but his offspring – and making him live with knowing that he has been, through her, the instrument of their destruction – is horrifyingly sadistic.

There is, of course, a small hitch.  They are her children, too.  In the version we watched, they are not murdered off screen with a sword, but, as the title art suggests, they are hung.  The twist is that the eldest of the two boys gets what is going on and offers to help his mother complete this horrifyingly impossible task.  When his younger brother runs away from the tree, he chases after him and delivers him to the mother, who hangs this youngest son, holding him and loving him as she watches him strangle to death – as if she were putting him to sleep for the night.  The eldest son then offers her a noose that he has tied for her to use to hang him, which she again does while holding him in her arms.

Wow.  What a deeply, intimately, horrifying moment.  As one of the audience members in our conversation pointed out, the movie director did not give us more information about the boy, so anything that we say about the child’s motives would be projection.  Unfortunately that shut the conversation down because I think that is a critical addition that this director has made and he is inviting us to project into this (and much else in this tremendously pared down version of the play) what we are experiencing (As kind of footnote to that comment – it is just possible that a modern depiction of this tragedy doesn’t require Medea (or the boy) to articulate all that she is feeling – we may be better equipped than the Greeks to imagine what it feels like to have power in play in our relationships – and the variety of responses that we generate may help us realize where we are as we struggle with it).

I think the boy, like his mother, has been discarded by his father and knows that.  He knows his connection to his father has been irrevocably severed by his father, but, like his mother, he knows that this is a surface and that, underneath that surface, his father is also irrevocably connected to him – even more than his father is connected to his mother.  The only way for the father to know how deeply he is connected, though, is for the father to be the victim of the severing rather than the perpetrator of it.  It is only in this way that his father will come to know what he has actually done – and this is the only way that the boy – as well as his mother – can wreak the revenge that they both want – to remind the father of what they both (and each) mean to him.

How’s that for projection?  Well, I think it is too much.  It is worthy of Melanie Klein when she is ridiculously insinuating what the infant is fantasizing.  But it also seems to me to have a bit of the ring of truth.  So where does it belong?  I think this is something like what the Director intends – and I think it is something like what Medea must be thinking on the son’s behalf.  She is expressing, I think, not only her rage – the rage of the jilted wife – but also the rage of the jilted son – and she is acting on her own behalf, but also on his.  The son’s death becomes the vehicle of his own (real, imagined, future and/or present) rage.

A modern version of the Medea play is Tony Morrison’s Beloved.  In this novel, which I read so long ago that I cannot bring it to life here (and I am too mired in the middle of the semester to re-read it), a runaway slave kills her children – who are also the children of her master – as revenge against the master.  This drives her crazy – and Morrison writes – as I remember it – from within that craziness.   The killing of her children – as one of the discussion members last night pointed out - allows the mother to re-own herself.  She thrusts off the yoke of having born a man’s children that he does with as he will – negating her ability to own even this – the product of her body.  The only action she is left with is a destructive one – one that destroys not just the child but a part of herself.  Unfortunately, when we re-own ourselves in this way, we realize ourselves anew – and all that we are capable of.

Would that this were just fiction.  Would that this were just a tragedy on the stage.  One modern version of it has been characterized as “Parental Alienation Syndrome”.  The name is unfortunate because it medicalizes something that is much more human and tragic than it sounds.  Parental Alienation occurs in divorces when one of the parents uses a child or children to wreak revenge on the other parent – by, for instance, getting the child to accuse the other parent of sexual molestation.  This can result in a Medean equivalency, where the accused parent is jailed and prevented from having contact with the child. 

Of course, we are watching, in 2018, this film in a larger context.  The midterm elections are looming and we do not know whether the misogynistic unholy alliance of the current administration with congressional representatives of the desire to keep women and other marginalized people under control will be upheld.  As if to prove that the more things change, the more they stay the same, Medea’s children would never be Greek citizens because she in an immigrant.  The urge to have power over others – and the terribly destructive reactions that may feel like (or be) all that is left as the available alternatives to disempowerment continue to reverberate today.  Sometimes those who are drawn to power don’t realize that sharing it might enhance rather than diminish that very power, and that not sharing it - keeping others from ownership - might have tragic consequences; having nothing, one means of reclaiming yourself is destroy what has been taken from you.

At the end of this film, Medea meets the man from Athens at his boat, which is sitting on dry land.  While Jason is chasing around, finding out about the havoc she has wreaked – she waits serenely for the tide to come in – for it to lift her and her boat and carry her off to a new place and, in at least one version of the myth, a new life as the wife of the captain of the boat (where more mischief will, of course, occur).  While she is re-owning herself, Jason is driven mad by the discovery of his sons’ deaths.

Postscript:  While I have labeled this a feminist tragedy - and I think it is - it is important to note that it was written by a man at a time when women had no voice.  It is what a man imagines it must be like to be scorned.  This movie version is also written by a man - as an homage, in fact, to another man's interpretation of the tragedy.  I am reminded of the feminist who objected to Caitlin Jenner's feeling comfortable determining what it means to be a woman - from a perspective that was originally that of a man.  Succinctly she said, "I am tired of men determining what it means to be a woman.

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Episodes – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Realizes that Sometimes it takes a Brit to help us see ourselves....

The Reluctant Wife has been binge watching a series called Episodes.   Originally available on Showtime, it is now a completed series of five seasons that is available on Netflix.  The premise of the show is that two British comedy writers married to each other, Sean (Stephen Mangan) and Beverly (Tamsin Greig), have a successful show in England and the rights to it and their talent are bought up by a Hollywood network to air the series in the US and Matt LeBlanc (Played by Matt LeBlanc) is plunked into that series by the producers and agents and studio heads and powers that be, ruining the show, their marriage, and rudely awakening them to what Hollywood and fame can do to undermine their integrity while simultaneously casting a spell on them so that they become starstruck, transfixed and mired in a world that they hate but can’t seem to pull away from.

Watching this series has felt like eating candy – it tastes good, but it doesn’t fill me up – in fact, I feel a little sick – OK, rotten to the core – after watching it.  I feel as sucked into the series and Sean and Beverly feel sucked into Hollywood.  And that reminds me, oddly, of the feeling of having been sucked into watching the Rocky Horror Picture Show when I was teenager.  Just as I am currently identifying with the good, clean Sean and Beverly from England, I identified then with Brad and Janet – virginal kids from the Midwest who stumble into an alien universe.  Hollywood as the alien universe is filled with beautiful people who are so enamored with themselves and so pampered that they don’t even know where the sheets are kept.  Rocky Horror’s alternate universe included a seemingly seamier assortment of sexually obsessed transsexuals, transvestites and, of course, Meatloaf.  In both cases, I am both repulsed and fascinated.  I want nothing to do with these alternate universes – and I want to live – or wallow – in them and their lurid qualities.

The actors who play Sean and Beverly don’t fit on the screen with any of the others.  Beverly has lines around her eyes – delightful, expressive lines that help make her real and alive – but no other woman character has any lines – their faces are all stretched tight by genes, botox, surgery or some combination.  Sean is just plain goofy looking.  At one point, he is compared to Wallace and Gromit, the British claymation characters, and it is an apt description.  It is not hard to see how this dweeby couple would be star struck.  It is also not hard to see how they would experience themselves as simultaneously superior to these characters whose antics betray levels of shallowness that compete with the Himalayas.  Every time LeBlanc or his pals do something low – they top it with something even more astoundingly low.

So what is the fascination?  With Rocky Horror, it’s clear.  Sex – as messy and dirty and confusing as it is – especially when we start bending genders – is still sex.  We are built to be drawn to it.  Brad and Janet’s prim personas soon drop away and they, like we, revel in what the “creatures of the night” have to offer.  How is it that Matt LeBlanc – the least interesting of the pretty banal group of white kids that hung out in New York together in Friends those many years ago – holds any fascination at all?  I fear that it may have to do with a crazy identification with him.  I think that he is a bit like us.

“Hold on,” you may say, “are you saying that you feel like one of the beautiful people – one the vacuous beautiful people?  You aren’t that pretty, pal.”  True.  And I don’t play basketball well either, but I still dream of being Michael Jordan.  But it’s more than identification based on wishing to be like.  I think we are, in odd ways, quite close to the essence of the Matt LeBlanc that Matt LeBlanc plays in this dramedy.

I am fond of pointing out to anyone who will listen, that we are the most privileged people to have ever walked the earth.  Queen Victoria – Alexander the Great – Louis the XVth – have very little on us.  For one thing, we have indoor plumbing and none of them – with the possible exception of the Queen in her dotage – did.  We can also fly.  In fact, we can get from city to city faster than any of them could, whether by land, sea or air, and in much greater comfort.  And when we get there, we can find accommodations that they could not have imagined – and we don’t have to carry bring along a whole retinue - we can stick a few things in an overnight bag and go.  We live in homes that are warmer – and cooler – than any of them did.  We are living (perhaps not sustainably, but still…) better than anyone in history has ever lived.

So, while Matt LeBlanc, like Queen Victoria, has no idea where his sheets are kept – we (who wash and put away our own sheets, thank you very much), like Matt and the Queen, command more luxury than our grandparents could have imagined.  And what are we doing with that?  How are we using it to serve the greater good?  Do we appreciate it?  Do we wake up in awe each morning that our homes are reasonably clean, dry and temperate?  That we eat fresh food that comes from halfway around the world?  Nah, we complain that the oranges we bought last week are going moldy or that our internet connection is lousy or that we ran into too many red lights on the way into work this morning.

When we see through Sean and Beverly’s eyes what Matt and his ilk are up to, we are, I think, gazing at a fun-house mirror version of ourselves.  We see a pampered group of people who are so concerned about getting their own cut of whatever pie is being cut up that they don’t actually taste the pie – they don't have a clue just how damn good it is.

OK, but it is not just a mirror.  We are, as Hannah Gadsby points out, looking at the people who are responsible for our stories – for the narratives that we carry around inside of us and that will give order and meaning to the lives we lead.  And these people – perhaps oddly reflecting us – are as distracted by things like texts and pettiness as we are.  As a neighbor recently pointed out to me when I was complaining about the political state of affairs while walking the dog – we are living in Rome, not Athens.  We are not the beacon shining bright to gather others in – we are self-absorbed idiots in search of even greater creature comforts - and a good fight at the Coliseum.

As I was writing this piece in my head, I thought to myself – if people have read other posts, they will wonder what has happened to the irrepressible optimist who wrote at least some of them.  The more psychologically minded might wonder if that fellow is depressed.  Well, all is not currently jolly around here – locally, regionally, or nationally – but I think this show and its craving for me (I don’t desire IT - IT wants me to watch and admire it) – evokes an awareness of the finitude of narrative – of the limits of the story about the human condition to lift ourselves above the human condition.  It does not quite have that power.  We are always – in fact, we are always more deeply – human.  We are drawn to sex and creature comforts – and to believing that whatever we are interested in at this very moment is the most interesting thing ever.

Thank goodness Beverly and Sean are lurking around the corner – noticing what we are doing, calling us on it, and writing about it (and the writing on this show is very good).  Perhaps, in addition to being sucked in and drowning in the saccharine sweetness of it all, we can also laugh at ourselves a bit – step back – and take a moment to appreciate that this is a pretty wonderful world that we live in – the one that’s just outside our own craniums.

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Blogging about Blogging II: The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Articulates His Blogging Envy and Concerns about Net Neutrality

I have been blogging for about six years and wrote about the process of blogging four years ago.  This is an extended postscript to that, but it is informed by having written a post in a very different environment and also by some interest in the disappearance of net neutrality.   First things first.  With some nudging, I wrote a heavily edited piece for the American Psychoanalytic Association’s blog, one that is on the Psychology Today blog site and with my real life name as the byline.  My initial version of the post – they asked me to write about dreaming after refusing my first offering to explain what psychoanalysis is (here) – was considered way too wordy and was not catchy enough.   

The intention of the feedback about my first attempt at a dream post (here) was to make the post more attractive to the average blog user.  The feedback from the editors (isn’t a blog supposed to a reasonably immediate and spontaneous reaction to the world?) was not scathing - they wanted me to retitle the piece – to call it 7 Reasons you should interpret your dreams – or something like that - and to create more white space on the page – and for God’s sake (they said) use less words. The intent was to make the material more visually appealing, especially for people accessing the blog from their phones, which is the way that people increasingly read blog posts these days.

In addition to offering suggestions about what I should do, they moved my words around in ways that sometimes didn't make sense to me – the coherence of the piece was lost.  So I rearranged my now fewer words to get some coherence and tried to reinsert ideas that I thought were important to the overarching idea of the piece, and I used their proposed outline of 7 reasons.  The resulting piece, I thought, was fine, but a bit fluffy, at least when I sent it off (you can judge for yourself - I included it at the end of this post).

 

The central concern I had when I reread the fluffier dream post on an official blog site with my name attached was that it gives the impression that learning to interpret your own dreams is pretty easy.  In the post, I reported that we (a co-teacher and I) had good luck getting students to interpret dreams in a class.  When I have talked with others who have tried to accomplish dream interpretation with a class, they want to know how we did it because they have not had a similar experience.  I don’t know if the process we used will work in other settings, or, if we repeat it, with another class – but it is a process that includes readings about dream interpretation and practicing by interpreting other people’s dreams and interpreting literature as a dream of the author before starting in on interpreting, with the help of classmates and teachers, one’s own dreams.

   

The point is that writing a post that is light, fluffy and engaging can mislead people who will then be frustrated when they wake up in the morning and are puzzled by dream symbols that they don’t feel they have the skills to interpret (because they don’t in fact have those skills).  It might make for good reading and also, though, disappointment if people want to execute the process.  But, because this might be exactly what people want to hear, according to my editor, they will be drawn into reading the piece and, after all, isn’t that the point?

I was recently told that Psychology Today decided to feature the edited dream post on their website – they chose to put it out there for their 1.7 million follower’s on Facebook.  This will, based on past results, likely result in somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 page views of the post.  Wow.  To put that into context, I have been blogging for six years as the Reluctant P.  I have a total of 130,000 page views of over 200 posts.  My most popular post has about 3,500 views that have been garnered over the course of five years.  So, 10,000 views in the first month of a post? Wow.

As evidenced by the last paragraph, part of blogging is the feedback loop that comes from the statistics that are gathered.  In a recent Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, Jerry Seinfeld talked about not understanding how novelists and other writers work.  As a stand-up comedian, he gets immediate feedback about the quality of his jokes – people laugh or they don’t.  If someone writes a bestseller – why?  What is it about the piece that led the people at Psychology Today to nominate my post to be headlined on their website?  I don’t know.  What leads people to read this Reluctant P. post but not that one?  I don’t always know.  Sometimes I am able to discover what people have searched for and that helps (and sometimes there is little other material out there about a topic), but which posts are the ones that readers get excited enough to browse for other posts at the end of their reading?  I don’t know.  All I have is the gross numbers.

I also don’t know why the Psychology Today editors chose to highlight the piece on Facebook.  Is part of the reason the post was selected was that it was short?  Was it because it was suggesting that a hard thing is easy, and that it was therefore sexy?  Should my posts follow this pattern?  I am not willing to mislead people in exchange for more readers – which leads me to wonder why I was willing to do that when I actually put my name to it.

But I think another reason is that it was on a very different platform – whether it was featured on the Facebook page or not, it likely would have garnered more views than a similar post on the Reluctant P. site, which is stand alone.  More insidiously, the Reluctant Psychologist site has been losing readers.  People are not coming to the site at the rate they were.  My paranoid self wonders if the timing of this is related to the ending of the net neutrality laws.  Has Google changed their algorithm to include in the rankings of sites that those that have advertising (which mine has not had to this point) would be rated below those that have ads?  This is my hypothesis.

 

The data that I have to this point is limited.  One of the things that I can access is where searches are coming from.  In the history of my site, the ratio of hits from the US has been 50 to 1 over the next country – Canada – and 100 to one over the country after that – England.  But in the past month, there have only been four times as many hits from the US as from Canada.  I think this is a little fishy.  But it is not proof.  I also don’t know whether the decrease in hits might have to do with factors other than including ads – the ads that Google would supply to me would, I think, probably not raise great revenues for them – then again, every dollar, or penny in the case of clicks, is a penny in the Google bank.

So, I have been thinking about an experiment (at the risk of repulsing my readers and – perhaps more to the point having them get bored with what I write and clicking to sites that would advertise on mine – thus losing them forever).   In this experiment, I will add ads to my site, and see what happens to traffic.  After they’ve been around for a while, I will get rid of them (apparently it will cost me ten bucks to do that) and we’ll see if things change after that.  If the traffic goes up then down, I’ll bring them back on board, to prove the relationship. 

Even if the ads bring in readers, should I keep the ads?  Psychology Today wants short posts – people can’t attend to longer material is the implication.  Am I contributing to this by including flashing doohickeys that will distract the reader from reading my post – and send them careening off to another corner of the internet?  Isn’t the point of psychoanalysis to engender deeper rather than more surface engagement with material that is, or should be, enthralling?  At what point does this medium, one that helps me connect with people about something I care deeply about (despite my ambivalence) actually interfere with the intended communication?  

The insidious concern is that we are driving ourselves to distraction.  By building a world that is filled with more and more shiny objects there is more opportunity to engage with that world (I am, btw, all in favor of that), but engaging deeply - and learning how to follow a train of thought without being distracted into another area - is the real gift of analysis.  I believe that when people are freely associating they are able to follow a thought to its roots, to not be distracted, in the case of neurosis, by defensive functions and, in the case of being an engaged reader or thinking, not being distracted by stray thoughts that are not central to the thesis.  Great works of art and of thought involve immense effort as people work to articulate what is at the heart of a given complex matter.  For us to truly follow them there requires more than skimming a wikipedia article about the topic - it involves immersing ourselves in it - of being quietly connected to a living, breathing person, idea or experience and resonating with it.  I fear that we are building a culture that is, from stem to stern, opposed to this lofty but difficult to achieve goal.

  

By the way, I’m under no delusions – adding a few ads will not give me the power of Psychology Today – they have a stable of people writing – and managing their content and web presence.  They know what their readers want (that said, I have taken some satisfaction in the rejected post – the one on what psychoanalysis is – having been my “best seller” of the last few months).  I have added below the content of the material that ended up in the Psychology Today post – if you are curious to compare…  

[Post script:  I am somewhat relieved that when I tried to add ads to this blog I was rejected.  The robot that makes decisions did not include reasons for the rejection, though did encourage me to resubmit when I had fixed the problems.  When I wrote to Google about this as a quandary, they responded that they could not individually respond to emails...  So, I am stuck with my paranoid ruminations - I can't perform my experiment.  But at least I preserve the uncluttered reading space.]

7 Reasons You Should be Interpreting Your Dreams

How to get to know your unconscious self

As we age the things that we desire from life become more complicated. Sometimes we want things that don’t feel right to us.   For example, we may want our boss’s job.  If she knew that, it could get us into trouble. So we hide that desire from both our boss and from ourselves.

Instead of talking or thinking about taking that job, we might dream about beating someone at a game.  The person that we beat would resemble the boss in some important way, but also NOT resemble the boss in some other important way.  Our unconscious recognizes the symbolized person as being equal to the boss, feels satisfied by the dream, and lets us continue to sleep because our secret wish is being gratified. 

Dreaming is a very complicated activity. According to Sigmund Freud, the goal of a dream is to satisfy those desires that we can’t even voice, much less work towards satisfying, when awake. This means that we need to decode our dreams in order for them to reveal our unconscious wishes. This is not always easy! 

Dreams Are Not Just Random

In a class I teach on dream interpretation students are asked to bring in their own dreams to analyze. Every time a student presents their dream something similar happens.  As dreamers begin to analyze their dreams they describe the process as “unnerving”.  They thought they were bringing meaningless dreams to class, but the dreams end up having important and relevant information about what is currently going on in their life and about their wishes and desires.  Each student discovers that their dreams are not just random, but have important meanings.

For instance, a student had dreamt about being on a luxury liner that she was swimming on and off of.  As she began associating and had supportive ideas from her classmates, she began to think about this as representing her family: a vehicle that had carried her to this point, but one that she was increasingly “swimming away from” as she began to direct her own life.

Dreams can be unsettling

When a dream is interpreted, it can reveal something that is very disturbing. For example, we may discover that we are in a relationship with someone who reminds us in very important ways of a parent and wonder whether we have married our mother or father. There may be an uncomfortable moment that this person is too close or too familiar – that there is something incestuous about the relationship. Thus, dreams can reveal uncanny, extraordinary and unexpected aspects of ourselves.

Here are 7 reasons why it is important to interpret your dreams:

1.           Take advantage of your dreams. You dream every night. When you wake up and think about a dream, you have an opportunity to access a product of your unconscious.

2.           Dreams are familiar territory.  They are formed, in part, by what has gone on the day before. 

3.           Dreams are not just reiterations of what happened during the day. They also include our actively working on problems that were “insoluble” in the light of day. Some important scientific discoveries occurred as the result of a dream.

4.           Remembering and interpreting your dreams can open up the weird and offbeat parts of yourself that are kept under wraps.

5.           Although we may be unaware of the unconscious, it is revealed in our dreams.  If we understand how the dream is constructed, we can understand something about the part of our minds that we can’t see. 

6.           Dreams are meaningful.  Each of us makes up our own sets of symbols and we use these symbols to hide the meaning of our dreams. So the boat in the dream of the student does not mean that all boats symbolize a family. This is her own idiosyncratic use of the symbol.

7.           The meaning in dreams is hidden because the truths of dreams can be strange and unsettling. Dreams are intended to keep us asleep.  To do this they grant the wishes of the parts of ourselves that want something – and would wake us up to get it.  For example, a child who is hungry will dream of eating something wonderful and this will satisfy them enough that they can stay asleep.

To get started interpreting your own dreams try these:

•            Keep a dream journal by your bed and write down the dream as you wake up.

•            Try to think about the dream soon after having it. The longer you wait the harder it is to remember. 

•            Consider telling the dream to someone who knows you well. It need not be a therapist; a close friend or lover can often see things that are out of your awareness. 

•            Think about your dream as a work of fiction or a poem and try to interpret it as you would a work of art. 

Sweet dreams!

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Amadeus – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Realizes What Can Be Done For the Love of God

The Reluctant Wife and I decided to watch Amadeus again because I am teaching Abnormal Psychology this semester and the scenes at the beginning and end of the movie where Salieri is being taken into and then through the madhouse are supposed to be the most accurate depictions of an insane asylum in the 1700s on film.  I wasn’t able to find the clip that I wanted as I browsed Youtube, but became intrigued by the story (again) and proposed it as a Friday night view, and the wife agreed, so we watched the Director’s Cut courtesy of Amazon.

Boy was this a surprise.  It is still a great film almost 35 years later.  But I have always watched it before with my eyes focused on Mozart.  Isn’t the film named after him?  Wasn’t he the great musician – perhaps the greatest of all time?  I, like Salieri (played by F. Murray Abraham, who deservedly won the Oscar for Best Actor for the role), wanted to know who the person was behind the music – and I wanted to know the music better.  But this viewing clarified that this not a story about Mozart – the title – Amadeus – taken from his middle name – means “Love God”.  It is an imperative.  And it is this imperative that Salieri – and to a lesser extent Mozart – fail at.

This film is about envy.  It is not about jealousy, envy’s uptown cousin, which involves a higher level of psychological functioning and includes the idea that I could have something like what you have.  This is about the wish to have the thing that you have – and the accompanying belief that if you have it, I cannot.  Salieri is deeply, toxically, malignantly envious of Mozart’s musical gifts and the movie revolves around his confession to having killed Mozart – the greatest musician of his age, and, as I hope to demonstrate, the person who was portrayed as trying to bring modernity to a world that was mired in ancient mores.

Is the film historically accurate?  Even a cursory Google search reveals that it is not.  The intention of the author, as was the case with Tom Stoppard and Shakespeare in Love is not to historically accurately depict a person, but to use someone that has left a legacy to depict an emotion – here, while the Mozart character (Played by Tom Hulce (Also nominated for Best Actor for his role – which he played maniacally well, but the subtleties demanded of the Salieri role made it more deserving)) argues that he is interested in portraying love on the stage (which is what Stoppard did with Shakespeare), Peter Shaffer is using Mozart as a foil to portray envy – and what it does to the soul of a person – what it does to Salieri.

Salieri, as a teenager in Italy, makes a pact with God – that if God will deliver him from his tyrannical and rich father who has no appreciation of the arts, he will devote his life to serving God by writing divine music.  He swears that he will not be swayed from this by any temptations – he will foreswear sex, becoming celibate – and he will donate his services to the poor – spending some of his time teaching music to those who couldn’t otherwise afford it (though his love of sweets is something that he can’t give up – and that moral failing emerges time and time again through the film, underscoring one aspect of the hypocrisy of Salieri’s pact).  When his father dies, shortly after having made the pact, he undertakes to hold up his end of the bargain.  What a noble man he becomes!  Or at least, what a noble man he believes himself to be! – And all in the service of a God who will grant him what he wishes.

The problem with the kind of pact that Salieri makes is that the other entity that has been entered into the contract is frequently unaware that they have signed on for something.  God never said, “OK, I accept,” and it is often the case that we promise someone – perhaps someone we love from afar, that we will dedicate ourselves to them.  Then, having accomplished what we promised we would do, we can be surprised when they don’t hold up their end of the bargain by rewarding us with what we stated would be the result of the “agreement”.  This involves an underlying fantasy that we are communicating on a higher plane – and that we belong on that plane.  Here, this is obvious with Salieri believing that his prayer – a prayer that directs God rather than one that humbly asks God to direct him – has the weight of a commandment.  He thinks so highly of himself that he can direct God.  So, when his father dies shortly after he has made the deal, he takes his father’s death as a sign that God, who can do these kinds of things, has killed his father: just as you or I might take another’s caring glance as indication of that person’s interest in us and implicit approval of the secret pact we have made with them.

So Salieri sets about becoming a musician, and he becomes the court composer to the Holy Roman Emperor whose sister is none other than Marie Antoinette.  When Mozart shows up in Salieri’s Vienna, Salieri quickly realizes that Mozart, and not he, is the one who has been singled out by God to produce divine music.  This infuriates Salieri because Mozart, who is bawdy and crude, who drinks too much and cackles when he laughs, is not nearly the man that Salieri is, or believes himself to be – and he has clearly not dedicated himself to God as Salieri has done.  But he is a man who knows his gifts, and he exploits them to get his way – bullying those around him and getting himself deeper and deeper into debt to support a lifestyle that a teaching position might support, but that Salieri, because of his envy of Mozart and his power at court, prevents him from securing, all the while pretending to be Mozart's friend.

Salieri, if he had done an honest inventory of his own skills, would have seen that he was a good, perhaps even a gifted politician.  Perhaps not the best politician ever, but a person who was competent to navigate the court of the Holy Roman Emperor, something that Mozart was not prepared to do.  In a parallel and very different universe, one in which Salieri’s pact with God, based on a more powerful faith in his own capacity to be the instrument that God would choose him to be, would have supported Mozart, God’s chosen musical vessel, and protected Mozart from evil forces that would have distracted him from using his gifts for, in this world’s vernacular, the Greater Glory of God.  In this corrupt world - the one we all live in - the opposite occurs.  Salieri becomes one of the distractions and, in this rendition, is the lethal rendition.

But Salieri is not a generous soul but rather a selfish one – one who experiences envy of those who have something that he does not and if he can’t have what they do, he must sully them – Salieri cheapens Mozart’s relationship with his wife, undercuts Mozart’s career by shutting down Operas early in their runs (though the historical record suggests they ran longer than the movie depicts them to have done), and he ultimately works him, literally, to death.  He is able to kill him, not with his hands, which in his confession he clarifies would have been difficult to do, but because Salieri, more than anyone else, understands both that Mozart is the genius of the age – and something very psychoanalytic – that his music is not the product of God or of a divine muse – but of the complex and twisted psychology – the machinations of Mozart’s soul, as it were.  By listening closely to Mozart’s music, and especially his Operas, Salieri sees and feels Mozart’s innermost turmoil and he is able to play on it, as masterfully as Mozart himself can play the piano or the violin – to work Mozart to death – killing the person who has what he cannot.  He effectively says, if I can't have it, no one can.

Mozart argues before the Emperor that he must be able to express what he feels.  This democratic or individual or subjective voice is as threatening to the Emperor as IgnatiusLoyola’s mystic connection with God and ability to help others achieve thatconnection directly was to the Pope, and as threatening as the colonies’declaration of independence was to King George.  The emergence from the dark ages, the renaissance, was both a rebirth of enlightened thinking, but it also allowed for the emergence of the individual hero – the person who can articulate him or herself.  Freud’s engagement with the unconscious ofhis patients is the next step in this progression – as every man and every woman can now own themselves in ways that they have not before – they become their own instrument, tuning their unconscious to support their conscious intent rather than having it hobble them and keep them enslaved to the mastery of their parent’s/society’s imposition on them of standards they can’t live up to.

Mozart’s God is his own father, which Salieri can see – and perhaps envy.  Didn’t he wish for a father who would have cared for the arts as Mozart’s did?  Wouldn’t Salieri have enjoyed being shown off as a prodigy at all the courts in Europe?  And so isn’t Salieri’s appreciation of the tyranny that this father had over Mozart – his ability to terrorize him and draw from him his best and most tortured work – not just ironic but a sign of Salieri’s deep and abiding humanity?  Wouldn't Salieri, unlike Mozart, have loved such a God - such a father?  But don't they both fail to love and obey - aren't they both disobedient - as Adam and Eve are in the garden?  Isn't there a price to be paid for such disobedience?

The play is set up as a confession.  Salieri is confessing the murder of Mozart to a young and inept priest- a priest who is nowhere near able to hear and understand his confession – one who cannot effectively confront Salieri's flights of logic or point out his consistent perversion of a relationship with God to his own ends.  Salieri plays on this – equating the priest’s ineptitude at solace with his own ineptitude at music.  They are both competent, but neither is divine.  And Salieri’s gift – as he puts it – is to be the champion of mediocrities; indeed, the patron saint of mediocrities.  And isn’t this the terrible identification that we feel with him – and with the madmen that he absolves of their sin of mediocrity - as we identify with the terrible feeling that we, too, are not able to reach the rarified air that a genius like Mozart does?  As enlightened as we may be, whether by talent or practice, whether through analysis or LSD, we still fall short of our goals.  Aren't we but mediocrities? 

But the tragedy goes deeper - even our heroes – in this case Mozart – if not worked to death in the play – dies, as he did in real life, of something as silly as eating rare pork – something that is not tragic but comical – we lose a great musical mind to bad cooking.  In a world that is driven by art - by striving to be more than mediocre - isn't it tragic that both of these men are killed by their own demons and not by chance.  Aren't we elevated by being in the presence of men who strive and fail - and fail because of their striving - because of their deeply felt need to address a consuming hunger - whether to assuage the father, as Mozart does - or to punish God the father - as Salieri does.  For the tragedy would be that we live in accidental rather than a tragic world - where our passions don't matter - where things occur not because we will them to - often against our better judgement.  Wouldn't the real tragedy be that we might be living in world without tragedy, without art, with the lives that history rather than art, has given us. What a  tragedy this is work of art is – what an opera.  Salieri's mediocrity helps us live amongst the Gods.  We can have gratitude for his envy and the ways that we, as post modernists who believe that unlimited vistas are opened for us, cannot, in fact, realize them - so that we, too, feel this thing called envy.

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What is Porn? A Psychoanalytic Reaction.

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.

-          Justice Potter Stuart

Printed or visual material containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity, intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings.

-          Online Dictionary

I will tread today where Supreme Court Justices have dared not go in a delayed response to thinking about the movie “Y Tu Mama,Tambien?”  This movie includes very frank depictions of sexual interactions and one of the reasons that I didn’t see it in theaters when it was released is that the titillating aspect of the movie was played up in the trailers – and perhaps out of some sense of taking the moral high road, I did not see it.  Now, having said that, my moral high road is an interesting one because porn is something that I have seen and used in various forms since I was first introduced to Playboy magazine by my peers when I was 10 or 11 years old.  OK, maybe Playboy isn’t generally classified as porn, though my definition (below) may allow it to be included, but throughout my adolescence and adulthood I have seen hard-core porn in various forms and have found it arousing and enthralling.  The sex in “Y Tu Mama, Tambien?” is neither – it is poignant at its best and downright comic much of the time. 

I think that the reason the frankly depicted sexual scenes in “Y Tu Mama, Tambien?” is not porn is because the intent of pornography is to provide the viewer with visually and/or auditory (and probably in the not too distant future tactile) stimuli that fuel sexual fantasies.  We watch it not to see the interactions between the people depicted, but to imagine ourselves engaging in the actions being depicted or to imagine ourselves engaging in actions with the individuals depicted.  To this end, the depiction of what is occurring should be seamless – it should not interrupt our engagement with our own experience of pleasure.  The purpose of porn, then, is to stimulate us – to physically and sexually arouse us when we are actually (generally) by ourselves (though porn is also viewed in various group settings – from stag parties to its use by couples to stimulate their desire).

A movie that contains frank depictions of sex within the context of psychologically meaningful relationships will depict sex in a very different way.  Instead of being seamless – meaning somewhat repetitive and long lived with relatively little to distract the viewer (this does not mean that there aren’t changes that occur in porn – but those changes occur in a prescribed and choreographed manner), organic sexual interactions include bumps and disruptions – and what allows the interaction to remain being a sexual interaction, one that requires a certain consistency of focus, is that the participants, not the viewers, stay focused on their experience of being pleasured by and pleasuring the other – and that the one who is giving pleasure can sense when the other who is receiving it is no longer needing whatever type of pleasure is being offered and can shift to offering – or asking for – a different kind of interaction.  Porn cannot sense the needs of the observer so to protect the fantasy space of the viewer, it is oddly static.

This means that porn becomes an object for the viewer.  It is something that stimulates the viewer and is manipulated and controlled by the viewer – especially in the age of internet porn.  The danger is that the viewer will generalize from the level of control that they have over porn to exerting that control in actual interactions and treating living beings as pornographic objects; that they will experience others as being there simply to pleasure them.  That said, most run of the mill porn depicts some sort of reciprocal relationship between the participants – and pleasing another is a form of pleasure that is depicted to a greater or lesser degree.  Some of the arousal comes from imagining providing pleasure.  I don’t mean to reduce this too far, for even here the providing of pleasure that is imagined is imagined towards an object – one who is responding onscreen or in photographs or in writing, but not to the viewer.

Ironically, then, porn can be used to preserve relationships – for instance, out of a sense of connection and loyalty to a partner who is unavailable for whatever reason.  That said, its lure can pull the user away from being connected to that partner, even when the partner returns and is interested in engaging in a mutually pleasurable interaction – the porn user may want to slip off to a place that feels more gratifying.  Using porn, rather than being used by it, is a very slippery slope.  Whether its power to overwhelm the desire for human connection that is intimately tied up with human desire is realized partially depends on the strength of the individual’s interest and ability to connect with others.  Worse, of course, it can contribute to broader objectification that would support the imposition of our sexuality on unwilling individuals.

 

Could some sort of virtual porn – a version of Woody Allen’s Orgasmatron from his movie Sleeper – provide an interaction-like state that would mimic sexual interactions in such a way that participation would not be pornographic?  This leads us into the world of Artificial Intelligence and what it means to be in connection with another person, whether through conversation, cuddling, or sexual intercourse.  In “normal” sex, are we bridging a human gap that can be, at least partially, bridged by the sexual interaction or is that something that is actually a fantasy – and we are only given the illusion of being in contact with the other?  Is imagined contact as good as (or even better than) real contact with another person?  As I think about the arguments for why that isn’t the case (building a shared history of trust and contact, carrying the sexual interaction into other spheres such as parenting or discussing a good book) it becomes possible to imagine that this might take place with an AI partner (see the movie Her, for instance).  I am also aware that I am introducing false dichotomies – just because we can never view the world exactly as another person does doesn’t mean that our efforts to understand another’s perspective doesn’t bring us closer to that perspective than we otherwise would have been.

Going back, for a moment, to watching the depiction of sex between people depicted in movies as people rather than as objects, in Y Tu Mama Tambien?, for instance, and seeing the disruptions in the relationship - this may mirror the process of realizing that, as much as we identify with the individuals being depicted in the film, they are also different from us.  We make trial identifications - and get a sense of our overlap with those characters - but also of how we differ from them.  And in doing this we re-own ourselves - just as in love, we expand by connecting with our lover, but then return to ourselves, richer for having been in connection. 

But if we imagine AI, as was done in Her, we do that from the perspective of a creature that is totally responsive to us and to our needs.  Isn’t this a form of porn?  Isn’t part of the inconvenient truth of being an adult and living with other adults that we don’t just want to meet the needs of a lover, we are sometimes forced to do that by circumstances or by the other’s needs even though we don’t want to?  Isn’t that part of the force of attachment that we (somewhat) willingly do things for our children that we wouldn’t do for anyone else?  And isn’t part of the mystery of the human interaction that we never, actually, know the other person – that they are always slightly beyond our reach – capable of surprising and, yes, frustrating us? 

From this perspective, perversions involve directing our drives towards objects that don’t allow for reciprocal and mutually gratifying (and frustrating) interactions – they are directed towards objects that we believe we have control over.  So, yes, using pornography would be a perversion.  But on the scale of perversions – where incest and rape involve turning unwilling humans into sexual objects in ways that harm the other – it is a minor one (and this is leaving aside questions about whether the porn industry, in the act of delivering porn, harms people – a big set of issues - I know).  One of the dangers in porn is that it can contribute to objectifying others in our actual interactions with them. 

From a psychoanalytic perspective, porn operates to reduce the anxiety that is present for all of us in interacting with others.  For some of us, to interact with another individual that is free to act in whatever way they do is not something that we feel able to do.  This can be the result of trauma – our attempts to connect with others may have led to ridicule or worse.  For whatever reasons, we sacrifice the real pleasure of connecting with other living breathing humans for engaging with others in the context of controlling them – or seeming to.  This interaction, in which we are one up on the other individual, seems safe to us.  We are remote – untouched – but willing to take this in exchange for the safety it affords.  Providing a safe place to become vulnerable again is the intent of treatment – psychoanalytic and otherwise.  In the meantime, pornography and other means of objectification can protect us.

This way of looking at pornography – and objectification in general – that it is a function of fear and self-protection – may help us change the way that we approach others who are objectifying in whatever way.  They do this not primarily out of an intent to harm (though that is certainly the consequence), but out of a perceived need to protect themselves.  This can be really hard to wrap one’s head around.

When I was in psychoanalytic training, I was the only male trainee with a large group of women.  When one of the male patients we were discussing as part of the training was describing some sort of stereotypically problematic masculine behavior, the others in the group would look at me as if I were to blame.  It became my task, over and over, to work with the group to look at the dynamics that lay behind that behavior – to think about why this person who we also knew to be a good person – was behaving like a cad.  The point here is that even psychoanalysts in training don’t think  about what is driving cad-like behavior all of the time - when a person of whatever interest becomes objectified we the observers - whether we are a horny male (or a female who is being hit on by that horny male) - get locked into a reciprocal position of thinking, this girl is just a piece of meat (or that guy is just a jerk).  To break out of that mold is hard to do.  But I think that, in so far as we able to do that – as well as to work to confront those behaviors and make it clear that they are unacceptable, the more likely we are to make headway on reducing the objectification that takes place.

   

Recently, I was having a conversation with a friend who is a devout Catholic and whose professional life has been devoted to the formation of Catholic priests (this was before this week’s publicity regarding the harboring of more pedophilic priests in Pennsylvania).  We agreed that the shortage of priests could be quickly addressed by dropping the vow of chastity – if married men could serve, they likely gladly would.  We wondered together about a world in which sexuality was valued as a sacrament rather than a sin: where the potentials of sexual interaction were protected because they allow for our greatest expression of our humanity – but therefore can also be the theater for all that is problematic in being human and so should be doubly protected.  Of course, we would have to protect human interactions more broadly and treat them all with sanctity.  How would our world be differently ordered if this were the case?  What would it mean to protect a sacrament rather than to prevent a sin?  What would the place of porn be in that world?

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