Da 5 Bloods: Brutal History Comes to Life in the Present

Da 5 Bloods, Movie, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, PTSD, Spike Lee, Chadwick Boseman

 

Da 5 Bloods is a deeply disturbing movie.  

It is the beginning of summer.  I have not taught in a few weeks.  My clinical work is going well.  I have been sleeping well.  But not the night after watching this film.  It took forever to get to sleep and then I woke twice, each time for an hour.  I know that I had been dreaming, but I was unable to recall the dreams that, I presume, woke me – and I think this meant that they were too difficult to dredge up – they contained, I believe, ghosts of the film that I had blocked from conscious awareness but that were haunting me.

 

Da 5 Bloods is a buddy film.  Four of the five “Bloods” get back together – they reform the gang – and have a reunion in Vietnam – the place where they met and fought together.  The opening video – in true Spike Lee style – integrates real life footage (which he does throughout) of Muhammed Ali talking about why he is not going to Vietnam to fight against people of yellow skin who have done him no harm at the behest of the white man who has done the black and brown skinned men and women in the United States great harm.  This statement returns to mind when, in a flashback, the North Korean radio propagandist points out to the black men in the trenches that though they make up 13% of the people back home, they make up 35% of the people fighting in Vietnam.

 

The opening scene is of the reunion of the four in the hotel in Ho Chi Minh City.  Paul (Deloy Lindo) is the one we are worried about from the get go.  First of all, he is wearing a MAGA hat and defending voting for Trump – a weird thing in a Spike Lee film – but he is also just a bit too boisterous, a bit too paranoid about the people buying them a drink in the bar, a bit over the top about everything.  We aren’t the only ones worried about him – his son David (Jonathan Majors) shows up unannounced to watch over him during this trip.  The war has destabilized him and he is returning to the scene of the crime.  We sense that there will be lots of triggers for him.

 

The ostensible reason for the reunion is to recover the body of the KIA leader of the bloods, Stormin' Norman, played in the flashbacks by the actor who played the Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman).   The hidden reason is that this will also allow them to recover war booty – CIA gold that was to be delivered to allies.  Da 5 Bloods were sent to retrieve the booty when the plane carrying was shot down, but they were fired upon, losing Norman, and they buried both him and the gold before beating a hasty retreat.  Their agent for converting the gold into cash is the war time girlfriend of one of the bloods, Otis (Clarke Peters),  Tien (Lê Y Lan) who brings in a French agent as a go-between.  Otis discovers that, unbeknownst to him, he is a father.  

 

The 4+1 Bloods hire a guide to get them to the edge of the bush and then to pick them up a few days later.  To skip spoilers you may want to go to the next paragraph.  As they travel to the site, the events that led to the death of their leader and the burying of the gold are told in flashback.  We learn that the leader taught the men Black History – and we get a very contemporary lesson about Black Lives Mattering.  As they recover the body of the leader, they also find the gold.  This creates the kind of divisions that large amounts of money create, and they run into the Viet Cong whom the French Intermediary has tipped off, and they have to fight for their money and do not emerge from the jungle unscathed – the firefights and the fear of mines are, I assume, a big part of what fueled my lack of sleep, along with the archival footage and photographs of war atrocities that were sprinkled throughout.

 

The relationship between Paul and his son David and Paul’s personal arc are at the center of this film.  One of the features of the Vietnam War was that our soldiers were not paired up based on geographic commonality, as has been general practice in wars.  This particular group of Da 5 Bloods clearly forged close bonds in the war, but after the war they went their separate ways because they didn't come from the same community – and therefore returned to disparate parts of the country without any of their war buddies to support them and with a country that was hostile to the war and taking out that hostility on the veterans.  Alone and besieged, Paul found love.  He married a woman whom he loved and they had a child.  This should be where the narrator says, “And they lived happily ever after.”  That did not happen.

 

I believe that one of the semi-universal experiences of men when their first child is born is that they are displaced in the hearts of the woman they have been loving.  This woman becomes enamored of an interloper – their infant child.  Fortunately for the child, the father feels love - boundless love - for the child, too.  But I think that Freud’s vaunted Oedipal triangle – which he tells from the perspective of the male child wanting to murder the father and marry the mother, glosses over the parental involvement in this triangle – and especially the father’s envy and (usually fortunately quite unconscious) murderous rage towards the child.  (There’s a lot more going on in this little triangle, but let’s just stop there for now…). 

 

Paul’s love for his son was complicated by not just losing his wife’s love, but her life.  She died in childbirth.  And the open hostility that Paul bears towards his son is difficult to witness.  Especially because his son is, despite the hostility, basically a good kid.  We see Paul’s love – and his son’s desire for that love, but we also see Paul’s paranoia crush his expression of his love – and we see Paul abandon his son after accusing his son of being disloyal and after having humiliated his son in front of a potential love interest.  We see Paul as the worst kind of monster - the unchained Oedipal father.

And then we see Paul taking off through the jungle on his own, and we are privy to his thoughts.  We hear him working out, in his feverish way, what has brought him to this moment.  We finally are able to go back to the heart of the firefight and to see the intense guilt that Paul has borne – his sense that he is responsible for too much for any one person to bear.  And we transition, from hating this dangerous and trigger happy guy to feeling for and with him – partly as a result of seeing that his paranoid suspicions have been borne out – but mostly as a result of seeing how dangerous it is for him to love, and what a relief it is for to be finally freed from his obligations (and the symbol of his backpack hanging out of his reach is a brilliant poetic statement of this).

 

This film, as an historic piece, is, I think, intended to help us share in the outrage of the ways that the ghosts of our forebearers have created a mess of things for us.  There are ghosts galore in this movie.  If the goal of psychoanalysis is, as the analyst Hans Loewald has maintained, to make ghosts into ancestors, this movie makes some progress towards that goal by humanizing this group of GIs who are haunted by those ghosts.  The Vietnamese do not fare so well – but I think they are casualties of friendly fire.  We need to resonate with heroes – and in this case, those heroes are the African American men who served in a war that was not of their own making, one that still rages within them.  We can, through empathizing with the crazy among us, see their sanity.  And when we do that, we can begin to spread that empathy – to understand (and this is very difficult to do) how the ravages of slavery and then almost two centuries of post slavery oppression continue to play a part in complicating their lives.  If we can do that – if we can practice the kind of radical empathy that this film encourages us to engage in – if we can see Paul (as we were able to see the Joker) not as biologically paranoid – or raging – or defective person – but as a human being, we might begin to make a step towards the kind of reparations that matter.  Doing that is not going to be easy - we need to allow his ghosts to haunt us - we will have many sleepless nights.  But we might begin to welcome our brethren into the society and the country that they have helped build and defend because they are what we are, citizens and humans, with all of the complicating factors that go along with both of those designations.  Black Lives Matter.

 

Btw, Spike Lee complained in an interview that if NetFlix had given him the money that was given to Scorcese to make the Irishman, he, too, could have made the old men in the movie young in the flashbacks with CGI.  This film is much stronger for the contrast of the old men being themselves as young soldiers.  Their age and Norman’s youth – and his leadership and shaping of them – sends a message that I think may register unconsciously – we are never too old to learn.  We are also never, no matter how old we get, not the people that we were when we had formative experiences.  Just as the censors ended up helping Casablanca become a great film, I think the lack of CGI money helps deepen the impact of this film and to create it as a much more powerful moral statement.  Stagecraft often trumps effects, and here I think that is nicely done. 

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

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

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text.

COVID Craziness at the University Continues – With No End in Sight

 

One advantage of an executive team for making decisions is that the group is small and therefore nimble.  They can come to a consensus and act.  Even if they don’t agree they can get things done.  Decision making in a large group is painful.  It is slow and cumbersome and problematic.

 

The executive team at our University has made a lot of decisions recently.  They have decided we will be having in person classes, at least at the beginning of the year.  They have also decided, because of budgetary uncertainty, to cut our salaries and to institute across the board savings.  They have also offered buy outs to help reduce the number of faculty and staff to create additional savings.

 

The faculty and staff assemblies are (I think rightly) concerned that though the executive team thinks that have collaborated with us in the spirit of “shared governance” that is intended to be a hallmark of the university, we have not experienced it as this at all – it feels like we have been told that we will have to make do with less or leave. 

 

The response of the faculty assembly has been to revisit the changes that have been rolled out.  We have a more equitable plan for changing the salaries.  We want to be reassured that if enrollment returns our salaries will as well.

 

I get this desire, but I think our efforts are misplaced.  We should, I believe, be looking at what is coming up, not at what has already been decided.  We can revisit that stuff later.  If the imposition of salary changes has been unequitable, then the reinstatement of salaries can be crafted to create a more equitable relationship between those who make the least at the institution and those who make the most and we can work on that.

 

I think it is our job to remind the executive committee why we are here.  We are a public trust.  As a Jesuit Catholic institution, we also have particular obligations to particular constituent groups.  We serve the general and a particular public, and we have a central mission that is invaluable.  In a time of uncertainty, we need to look to our core values and to preserving those as we move forward.

 

The central part of our mission statement is that the University exists to teach.  That’s what we are here for.

 

One of my, but I believe, our central beliefs is that synchronous, in person teaching is the best pedagogical tool that we have.  Conversation as a means of communicating – even though, and perhaps partly because, it is such a difficult way to communicate – is central to the best learning. 

 

Conversations are hard because the ideas we cherish are being questioned and we have to hold onto the idea while also hearing the concerns that others have with those ideas.  This is a tremendously complicated psychological and cognitive task – but it is one that is critical to the learning enterprise. 

 

Conversation becomes more difficult when we are remote.  We can and will assign asynchronous tasks as we always have – papers, long and short and with varying foci will be part of the pedagogy.  So will we assign homework with problems to solve and ideas to react to.  But discussion – the verbal communication between two or more people is at the heart of our pedagogy.

 

Discussions are necessary because we need to see people thinking – to hear the thoughts being formed – and to see how they are shaped in the cauldron of conversation in order to a) not follow our own thoughts into a rabbit hole of logical sense divorced from consensual reality and b) to hear from others so that we can learn from their experience and perspectives.

 

So: we should move towards having in person classes because those are the best kinds of classes to provide the kind of teaching that we value most highly.  And we should do this in the context of protecting the safety of the students, staff, and faculty to the best of our ability.  If we are to open in the fall we should do so as safely as possible.

 

This means that: masks should be available to all students, faculty and staff.  It would make sense for the University to provide both cloth masks for those who don’t have them but also plenty of disposable masks for individuals who forget them.  We should work on signage and other means of getting out the message that “No Masks, No Class”.  We should make it clear that wearing a mask is cool and considerate of others.  Taiwan, with a population of 20 million people, has under 500 cases of COVID and fewer than 10 deaths at this writing, AND THEY ARE NOT USING SOCIAL DISTANCING.  They are using masks.  Everyone is wearing them.  This virus is transmitted through droplets born on breath, coughs and sneezes.  If we are going to breathe the same air, let’s make sure it has been filtered at the source.  Everyone must wear masks.  It has to become basic to our culture as an extension of our valuing consideration of the other.

 

Because social distancing is required where we are, we are being told to prepare to teach to sections of class that are in the room while other parts of the class are joining remotely or not in the classroom.  We need tools to be able to teach in this way.  The classrooms need to be fitted with adequate cameras that will broadcast good quality images and with very good microphones.  Our laptop cams and mics are not up to the task.  We need the tools to be able to use the white board on Zoom as a true whiteboard.  Our laptops have pads that are TERRIBLE for drawing on the Zoom white board.  We need, at minimum, mice that will work well, but ideally some form of tablet that can be connected to the zoom whiteboard.

 

It also means that we should be regularly testing students, faculty, and staff and demanding quarantine for those who test positive – even, or perhaps especially, when they are not symptomatic.

 

Oh, and by the way, we should also meet in person because this is important to the economic health of the University.  But economic health, while an important consideration, is not primary.  What is primary, and needs to be kept primary, is that we have a culture of learning.  And this culture, which is dependent on direct contact in ways that we can’t appreciate until it is taken away (including extracurricular contact between students as well as contacts between students and faculty and students and staff) should be protected in the concrete world as long as we can safely do that, and when we can’t, we should make the best virtual analogue of that so that we can deliver the best possible education we are able.

 

And we should bear in mind that the reason that the economic well-being of the University is important is that it is necessary to support the culture that supports the students doing the necessary and important work that they are doing.  Economic well-being is necessary to our survival, but not the reason for our existence.  The reason for our existence is the culture that we have created that at its best can lead to improving the lives of our students.

 

As a corollary of that, we should continue to do the best we can to work together – executive team, faculty, and staff, to craft the best possible experience that we can for our students – including one that is safe for them, for their families, and for those who serve them. 

 

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

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text.

For other posts on COVID:

I:       Apocalypse Now  my first posting on COVID-19.

II:      Midnight in Paris  is a jumping off point for more thinking about COVID.  (Also in Movies).

III:    Hans Selye and the Stress Response Syndrome.  COVID becomes more normal... for now.

IV:    Letter on the occasion of a Town Hall Meeting

V:      COVID craziness at the University continues with no end in sight.

VI:    Get back in that classroom  Paranoid ruminations.

VII:   Why Shutting Classes Makes Fiscal Sense A weak argument

VIII: Catholic Social Teaching Marshaled to support Rationalization...

IX:    What will school look like?

X:     Denial is not just a river in Egypt...

XI:    Back in the Classroom

XII:  Labor Day is for WORK!

XIII: Ennui

XIV. Where, Oh Where have my in-person students gone?  Split zoom classes in the age of COVID.

XV.  The First Complete COVID Semester is Done.

XVI.      More of the Same: The Second COVID Semester begins.

XVII.     Surviving the First Year of COVID: Will education be the same?

XVIII.    I miss my mask?

IXX.      Bo Burnham's Inside Commentary on the commenter.

XX.       The Olympics Mark the Oddness of the Time In Between.

XXI.      It's baaaack...  Joy and Horror and Maybe a Little Bit of Hope

XXII.     The Great Resignation Hits Home

XXIII.    The Great Resignation (cont.): A Family Reunion

XXIV.    COVID in the Classroom: The Great Dis-integrator

XXV.     First COVID, Now No Snow Days?

XXVI.   Not with a Bang but a Whimper: COVID is over... or is it?

XXVII.  Post COVID (we can hope) reflections on morale and morals...

XXVIII. How will we move on from our Empire of Pain? (Also in books)

XXIX.    A New Year's reminiscence.

Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School

 

This Memoir disguised as a novel – more than a Roman a Clef – a memoir that uses the novel form to clarify that it is subjective history, but one that retains history, and slightly shifts it – is weird to read as someone who has lived in and among many of the people in the book and has shared a culture – the culture of the Foundation – the Menninger Clinic – that is at the heart of this book.  And as much as I initially read this book with prurient interest – and as much as it tells truths about the people and places that author and I have in common, the center of the book is about language.

 

This book is divided into chapters that are sandwiched in between updates about the internal world of a minor character in the main story – a boy, Darren, who is the antithesis of the hero Adam.  Darren’s family are Topeka natives, unlike Adam’s family – and the families of the rest of the Foundation kids.  The distinction is a little like a college town where the townies are indigenous and the students and faculty belong to a different group.  But Darren belongs to neither group.  He has difficulties – with language and thought – that Adam indicates could be helped by the Foundation – by his father in particular – if Darren’s parents had the means or the insurance, but they don’t.  So Darren’s story is both integral and marginal to the story as a whole.

 

The main story is about Adam (clearly a version of Ben), his family, and about his coming of age.  It is a subtly brutal story – brutal in an odd way that is the mirror of the brutality in the novel by Ben’s student, Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re BrieflyGorgeous, in that the instrument of the brutality in this story is the hero himself.  Or rather both of them.  Darren is also brutal in the moment that hangs in the air throughout the story, but we understand the sources of Darren’s brutality – he, like Ocean’s alter ego, is abused by society and he reacts to that (which Ocean’s hero does not – Ocean’s hero is somehow able to understand and metabolize the brutality that is visited upon him).  Neither Darren nor Adam can contain their anger – both harm those around them, including women whom they admire and denigrate.

 

The main story is told through different lenses.  Four of the chapters are told from the perspective of Adam, though they are written in the third person.  Two of the chapters are told from the perspective of Jonathan, Adam’s father.  Interestingly, these are told in the first person.  And they are startling on target.  I happen to know Ben’s father.  The reluctant first wife and I saw him in marital therapy when I was working at the “Foundation”.  But it is not knowing him as a therapist and a person that this rings true, but from my identification with Jonathan as the father of Adam – and my fathering of my own son – who could not be more different in some ways than Adam.  This raises a question.  Is Ben more comfortable inhabiting the mind of his father than his own mind?  Does he now identify with his father more than he does with the person – or this version of the person – that he once was?  Or does he need to find some distance from himself in order to be able to identify with himself and to help us identify with him?

 

Finally, two chapters are told from the perspective of Adam’s mother.  Adam’s mother speaks for herself to Adam – or Ben.  He, Adam, goes home as an adult to get background information and Adam’s mother tells him what he wants to know, knowing that what she tells him will go in his book.  Adam’s mother – a version of Harriet Goldhor Lerner, the author who was famous for writing the Dance of Anger and then a series of additional self-help books with Dance in the title, is no stranger to the effects of having a public life.  In the novel, she talks about handling the calls of men who were angry about her book, and the sneers of men in the grocery store who were mad about the ways her books empowered their wives – or ex-wives.  Ben, through Adam, gives Harriet, in the character of Jane, the ability to tell her own story – and to clarify that she is continuing to knowingly live a very public life.

 

Language is at the heart of this book.  Ben is an accomplished poet and this is his third novel.  He has written for the New Yorker and, though he couldn’t have known this would happen when he was writing the book, this book was the runner-up for the Pullitzer Prize.  He knows how to put words down on paper.  Adam, his alter ego, becomes (spoiler alert) the National Champion in Extemporaneous Speaking.  He wields words as a debater, as an extemporaneous speaker, and in his mind as the sharpest of weapons.  He brutally demonstrates, near the end of the book, how Amber, the attractive, popular girl whom he chooses to date over his debate partner – is of no real long term interest because of the paucity of her language.  But, unlike Ocean, this is not done with charity, but with malice.  It is almost shockingly hostile – more so because his victim doesn’t know – perhaps until she reads this novel – how summarily she has been dismissed.

 

But language, for both Adam and Darren, is at best a treacherous means to an end.  Darren is all but mute because the thoughts that he has can’t be represented in language – they are too weird – he is too weird – to talk to others in anything like consensual English.  Adam is deathly afraid that his words will leave him.  He fears that he will get on stage and be unable to be articulate.  Back to that spoiler alert – I could find no record of Ben Lerner having won a National Extemporaneous speech contest, though there was a record of a boy from Topeka winning it twice – in the era when the mentor that Adam has would have won it.  Did Ben invent a different ending for himself?  One in which, unlike in real life, when his mother withheld valium from him at Nationals, she actually gave it to him and this helped him manage his fears so that he, as Adam, won?  Is Ben angry enough at Harriet over this to expose her in this book in the ways that he does?

 

But I think language unites Adam and Darren on a much deeper level.  I think that language fails both of them.  The book opens with Adam talking to Amber on a rowboat while they are on a lake at night.  Unbeknownst to Adam, Amber slips overboard and swims off while he prattles on, telling the moon and the dragonflies the deep and important ideas that he wants to convey.  This is followed by an eery, uncanny wander through a stranger’s home, thinking it is Amber’s.  Adam is lost.  His words, as much as he has control over them, do not convey what he is feeling.  They do not connect him to others, but they divide him from them.  Adam, like Ocean’s Little Dog, and his own Mother and Father, has insights onto other’s psyches.  But unlike Little Dog, Adam uses those insights to feel disdain towards those he has come to know – just as Darren does.  Adam hates where Little Dog loves.  Adam has learned from the townies how to use his elbows rather than his fists to land blows that are more powerful – that do more damage – and that are surprising because they come from closer in.

 

Ben ends this book rather abruptly and, I think, cutely.  It is heralded as a book that is about the divide that language has created in the country in the age of Trump and his cronies.  The MAGA days.  And Ben has framed this book so that it can be understood in this way.  That we have left behind reason – that the spread of point counterpoint in a debate gave way, in the Reagan – Carter debate, to taking the moral high ground – Reagan winning by saying, “There you go again…” as Carter would use a fact to demonstrate what he meant.  And, of course, the irony is delicious.  Who is the more moral ex-President? 

 

But I think this book is much more personal than universal.  Not just because I have had a little access to some of the principle characters and to the culture that is being examined here; the culture of the “Foundation”.  The culture of a community of people deeply and at times dangerously involved in each other’s lives and the lives of their patients.  A culture of people perceived as having a magic elixir that could impart to the chosen healing – something that has always been associated, in our culture, with miracles.  But I think it is also the case that these miracles are never quite enough – especially for those from whom they feel withheld.  I suppose that Darren ends up being an odd fun house mirror for Adam.  Like Darren, Adam felt shut out from something deep and mysterious – something like love.  Something like the communication that language promised.  What he saw around him felt to him, I think, tawdry and disappointing.  Cheap, like the mass produced tins that his mother was led to believe were unique works of art.  He longed for Duccio’s Madonna and Child – a personal devotional that is scarred by the heat of candles that are a measure of the love that the viewer feels for the Mother and Infant that are depicted there.

 

This, then, is a book about the anger that white men feel.  An anger that is surprising to those who, from the outside, say, “What have you got to be angry about?”  As if power were a reasonable substitute for love.  As if being in charge were the same thing as being loved.  And as if our language, with all of its fine gradations, would allow us to articulate this need in such a way that it could be met without our having to become vulnerable.  We fear, from the inside of our safe space, that vulnerability and, so, may end up being locked in a tower or, as our President is this week, cowering in a bunker…

  For the accompanying post on Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, link here.

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

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text.

 

 

 

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous – Ocean Vuong and the Ephemeral Quality of a Visceral Life

 This is a book – something the author calls a novel.  But it is also poetry, a memoir, and a letter to a mother who cannot read – indeed, a mother who cannot speak English.  It is a work of art – and a tour de force by a kid who has been beaten and bullied – who is the product of a war he never knew but that lives on in him none the less.  And it is the product of a relationship with Ben Lerner – a poet, novelist, memoirist and teacher, supporter and promoter of a stunningly honest style of writing that transcends memory to become a statement – of oneself as the product of one’s history, but also of oneself as one sees himself, and as he is seen through the eyes of another – in this case, the mother to whom he is telling things that we would never tell our mothers -  but that he must tell her – and cannot, because she does not have the words to understand them.  Yet, I think it is important that he see himself through her eyes – her eyes that have seen so much that they can stand to see him in his most raw and vulnerable state, but also to see beyond what he has been through – to see who he has become, and to realize with him that they, despite the flimsy foundation they have been afforded, have built a table – a place where they can eat – together – and know each other – on a deep and visceral level because they have lived within each other’s skin.

 

So, this book is not something that I can write cogently – or certainly not encyclopedically - about.  It is, I think, intentionally confusing as it skips between times and places, lingering in one when you think you have returned to the other.  It becomes taken with itself (or Vuong becomes taken with himself - his virtuosity with language is a slap down to all those who have slapped him down in the past he is narrating) and the beauty of the language interferes with the story – or is it the other way around – this brutal story interferes with the beauty of the poetry? 

 

I guess I ought to define my terms if we are going to have a solid place from which to appreciate this work.  Poetry is, for the sake of this post, the language of dreams.  It is the language of symbols that mean multiple things – it is the visual turned into the linguistic – it is a song that can be sung many times because it will reveal new meanings each time it is sung.  It is a narrative that is held together by the survival of the author, something that we are only sure will happen because we continue to hear his voice in our ear – indeed, he needs to reassure himself on a regular basis that he is there, that he hasn’t been destroyed in this moment or that, that his heart is still beating and that his words are still potent.

 

Ocean Vuong – whose given name was Beach, but this was pronounced by his Vietnamese mother Bitch, so he changed it to Ocean; in the novel his alter ego's given name is Leader of Vietnam, but we never hear the Vietnamese pronunciation of that because he goes by the name his grandmother gave him – Little Dog.  This is the name that is given to the runt of the litter, so that the runt is not stolen by roaming evil spirits.  “To love something, then, is to name it after something so worthless it will be left untouched- and alive.  A name, thin as air, can be a shield.  A Little Dog shield.”

 

So I worry for Little Dog.  This is a big book - even though it is short.  As big and certainly more beautiful than the pink Schwinn Little Dog learned to ride only inside after it got the paint scratched off it by bullies who said it was a sissy color.  How was his mother to know that pink was a sissy color?  Is pink a sissy color in Vietnam?  Is my own Reluctant Son lucky that his mother and father could send him to a Hippie school where he would not be bullied because pink was his favorite color?   Was the reluctant son unlucky because he was bullied not for the pink colors of his gloves and scarf, but because he was a good kid who was loving and kind and could, therefore, be used by others?

 

Ocean has opened his heart to us in this book.  And we see how he has been brutally treated by everyone who has loved him.  He is able to see the love through the brutality.  Indeed, he is able to separate himself from those who brutalize him and to see their pain while experiencing his own.  And he can feel superior to those who have more power over him – and this gives him a special power – his own super power.  It allows him to connect with those who are themselves brutalized – to find a safe space within the blows that they rain down on him – and to love them – and, I think just as importantly, to feel loved by them.

 

So I find myself thinking about Ben Lerner – the author who is pioneering this form of novelized memoir, though he is far from inventing it.  But Ben taught Ocean.  And Ocean – whom I have come to be fond of here – exposes all of his complicated identities in this book.  He lets us know that he is gay and Vietnamese and the grandson of an unknown G.I. who had sex with his grandmother when she was a comfort woman.  More intimately, he lets us know just how hungry he is for love – so hungry that he will endure a great deal. 

 

Were I his therapist, I think I would trust myself to help him appreciate this, and therefore to be curious with him about he could protect himself in his loving.  But I fear that others, hearing this naked exposure, might not be so careful.  I have to trust that Ben, and the readers of this volume will learn from it what it means to be, as he says, briefly gorgeous – and to appreciate his beauty without exploiting him.  But I think more importantly, I have to trust that this man’s resiliency is such that he will not be destroyed in the way that I imagine him to be by exposing himself so openly.

 

Since writing this far in this post, I have finished The Topeka School, and I think now, more clearly, that the more powerful of these two writers – Ben and Ocean – is certainly Ben.  He has resources that Ocean does not.  But it is clear to me that he is not as strong a person as Ocean.  Ben’s power is brittle and there largely by dint of social class but also by virtue of, as is case for Ocean, command of the language.  But language, for Ben, is a tool – it is a weapon.  It is used to keep him safe.  For Ocean, language is a means of connecting – this book is a letter to his mother – a mother who will never read it.  So we, his readers, become his mother.

 

Both authors talk quite intimately about their mothers – as intimately, in many ways, as they talk about themselves.  I am not able to be anything close to an objective observer because Ben’s mother is someone I know, not closely, but I have worked with her and been a part of her world.  Ocean’s mother could not be more foreign to me.  She beats her child.  She is impoverished.  Her schooling ended in the second grade when her village was destroyed by the US Army.  She doesn’t speak English – except to say “Sorry” to her customers as she cares for them, and she does understand enough of what they say to empathize with their losses.  But I don’t feel sorry for her in the way that I feel for Ben’s mother.  Ben’s exposure of his mother has an edge of malice.  Despite all the complications of the relationship between Ocean/Little Dog and his mother, there is a deep sense of caring for her – of understanding her and the world she lives in.  And a need to have her understand him.  Ben needs his mother to understand him, but he doesn’t seem to know that.  Ocean/Little Dog does know that he needs his mother's understanding, and he helps us to realize that the strength of knowing the other is not to have power over them, but to realize who it is that you are in relation to the other – and to realize who it is that they are and just how important it is that they are to you.  Ben and his alter Ego Adam can inhabit his father - write in his voice, but must hear from his mother.  Ocean/Little Dog can write to his mother - can create her in the ways that he needs her to be.  I think this allows him to more fully realize himself.

 

   My post on Ben Lerner's The Topeka School can be accessed here.

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

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Letter on the Occasion of a Town Hall Meeting at a Jesuit University in the Midst of Three Health Crises

First, I want to thank the executive team for meeting in a town hall format with the faculty and staff.  I was particularly appreciative of the opening prayer and its call for us to think about life over property, especially at a time like this; not an easy thing to do.  I also appreciate that we are all concerned about property – meaning compensation and the continued financial well-being of the campus.  Certainly the questions were focused on them and therefore channeled the conversation in that direction.  But I was struck at the contrast between the prayer’s calling us to reflect on the marginalized and on living in a stratified culture long after the need for that has disappeared while, in the meeting proper, we focused on preserving the source of our collective livelihood. 

 

A Jesuit education accomplishes many goals – some of which are internally contradictory.  We are educating men and women for and with others while we simultaneously elevate them to being able to be employed in ways that will let them join the upper middle class (or maintain their privileged position in that class).  I fear that those we would elevate are often saddled with debt that will prevent them from crawling out from a lower class and instead will plunge them deeper into it.

 

As a society, we have moved, in my lifetime, from seeing higher education as a bare bones means of helping society train their future leaders and investing in training those leaders because that is good for society, to charging students (generally by putting them deeply in debt) because of the benefits that they as individuals will reap from that education.  And providing cushy seats for them while they do it.  In the process, we have moved from a society that supports service for others to one that supports entitlement of the individual because they have “suffered” (in luxury) and thus deserve the disproportionate income they will one day achieve.

 

One writer, the gifted novelist Marilynne Robinson, has posited that this is ultimately based on a shared experience of scarcity, which she finds remarkable in the richest nation the world has ever produced.  Her thesis, and I agree with it, is that we are prey to anxieties about survival and therefore lose track of what it means to embrace the all too brief life that we have been given on this earth.  I think this was on ample display in this town hall – and I think we all shared in the creation of a general experience of that anxiety.

 

This COVID-19 thing is a bump in the road.  We don’t know how big it is – but it will be something that we will address.  While we are addressing it, other issues emerge.  Certainly the second health crisis – the crisis of racial and class inequality and its consequent health (including mental health) sequelae has exploded into our collective consciousness.  But so has the third issue of the health of the planet.  The wisdom of creating climate change and the other consequences of continuing to be a fossil fuel dependent and blindly hurtling forward let’s consolidate wealth for the wealthy society we are is becoming clearer (I’m a deeply invested player in this game, btw – please don’t hear me as being above any of this).

 

But the silver lining to all of this – if we don’t spend every single freaking second of our time trying to fix it - is that it gives us an opportunity to pause.  To realize the brevity of our existence.  To evaluate our values.  What do we care about?  As a University, as individuals, as spiritual and religious people, and as a society as a whole, we care about many internally contradictory things.  And this moment is pregnant with all of those contradictions and difficulties.

 

So, as we are attending to the things that we are worrying about and trying to fix them, please also let’s spend some time remembering that we are being given a big, ugly, difficult and unwanted gift.  Melanie Klein, a notoriously cranky but prescient psychoanalyst once observed that there is nothing more aggressive that we can do than give someone a gift.  The Universe (God?) has given us a gift.  A complex difficult, multilayered gift.  And we are in a relatively privileged position from which to engage with it – or should be.  If we can lift our heads up from all of the dross – we may be able to recognize that we are being confronted with the kinds of issues that can shape our souls and our futures. We should be thinking not just about how to balance the budget (and build in a surplus at these times?  If this isn’t a time to tap into our rainy day fund, I would hate to see the storm that will empower us to do that…), but to balance ourselves.  To figure out how to surf on the waves that this storm has produced, using the board that we have been waxing throughout our lives as a means of conveying not just ourselves, but each other through these treacherous tides.

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

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text.

For other posts on COVID:

I:       Apocalypse Now  my first posting on COVID-19.

II:      Midnight in Paris  is a jumping off point for more thinking about COVID.  (Also in Movies).

III:    Hans Selye and the Stress Response Syndrome.  COVID becomes more normal... for now.

IV:    Letter on the occasion of a Town Hall Meeting

V:      COVID craziness at the University continues with no end in sight.

VI:    Get back in that classroom  Paranoid ruminations.

VII:   Why Shutting Classes Makes Fiscal Sense A weak argument

VIII: Catholic Social Teaching Marshaled to support Rationalization...

IX:    What will school look like?

X:     Denial is not just a river in Egypt...

XI:    Back in the Classroom

XII:  Labor Day is for WORK!

XIII: Ennui

XIV. Where, Oh Where have my in-person students gone?  Split zoom classes in the age of COVID.

XV.  The First Complete COVID Semester is Done.

XVI.      More of the Same: The Second COVID Semester begins.

XVII.     Surviving the First Year of COVID: Will education be the same?

XVIII.    I miss my mask?

IXX.      Bo Burnham's Inside Commentary on the commenter.

XX.       The Olympics Mark the Oddness of the Time In Between.

XXI.      It's baaaack...  Joy and Horror and Maybe a Little Bit of Hope

XXII.     The Great Resignation Hits Home

XXIII.    The Great Resignation (cont.): A Family Reunion

XXIV.    COVID in the Classroom: The Great Dis-integrator

XXV.     First COVID, Now No Snow Days?

XXVI.   Not with a Bang but a Whimper: COVID is over... or is it?

XXVII.  Post COVID (we can hope) reflections on morale and morals...

XXVIII. How will we move on from our Empire of Pain? (Also in books)

XXIX.    A New Year's reminiscence.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche’s Americanah: Does a foreigner’s eye better reflect ourselves?

 Americanah; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; psychology; psychoanalysis; 

Americanah is a masterfully written novel about a Nigerian immigrant woman. It is both a roman a clef (a novel that is a disguise of actual events – in this and many cases the actual events of the author’s life – Asymmetry is a recent example where the author tells of her love affair with Philip Roth but changes the names) and a bildungsroman (a coming of age novel told by the narrator in retrospect, after having come of age – To Kill a Mockingbird is a classic example).  And, I think, its vision is on a par with the great novels (Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex) and historical works (Alex De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America) that expose something essential about the American character – in this case about race.

 

The Novel interweaves three stories.  The first is the story of the moment the heroine, Ifemelu – decides, after having come to the United States and establishing herself here, to leave the country and return to Nigeria.  This is the story that the novel begins with and is “home base” throughout it.  It is the story of a pivotal moment – the coming of age moment and the owning or re-owning or defining of the self-moment.  Much of this first story – after we learn that Ifemelu has entered into rarified American air, becoming a scholar and financially successful blogger about race, takes place in the confines of a hot, decrepit space where is she getting her hair braided by other West African immigrants who have not been as successful as she, and she is listening to the stories of their lives while she tries to make sense of the story of her own and prepares to return home.

 

The second story is the story of Ifemelu's history that leads up to the present, transitional moment.  Ifemelu’s childhood in Nigeria takes time to articulate – we are being introduced to a foreign culture – and then, much later, we follow her arrival in the United States and her slow, difficult and incomplete acculturation to two foreign cultures – White American culture, and the culture of the African Americans – those who were taken generations ago as West African slaves and who now reside in this their country not as equal citizens, but as a marginalized minority – even when they are tenured professors at Ivy League Universities. 

 

One the criticisms of the Netflix film adaptation of the novel Unorthodox is that the acculturation of the heroine to modern day Germany occurs in the course of less than a week – a pace that feels impossibly rushed compared to the real world necessities of making such a transition.  Americanah is almost 600 pages long, and so is able to devote considerable time – on the page and in the life of the heroine – to the transitions that she makes and fails (or refuses or can't) make.  We’ll have to see whether the HBO series from the book can keep us as enthralled as the text does while immersing us in two cultures that are so foreign to each other.

 

The third story is what unfolds after Ifemelu’s decision to return home.  Though this story dominates the last hundred pages of the novel, it seems to flit past too quickly.  Ifemelu doesn’t seem to quite get her feet under her, or perhaps I didn’t as a reader, before an ending that seemed like too simple an answer to the questions raised in the book.  Of course, the answers will also come from the life that is led after the book is over, so perhaps I am feeling a bit like the analyst whose patient has left and who will not be exposed to “the rest of the story.”

 

Woven into these three dominant stories are multiple sub stories – especially the story of Obinze, Ifemelu’s college boyfriend who takes his own emigrant/return home arc – a journey that, because it lands him in England, allows for some comparing and contrasting of “foreign” Anglophone cultures.  Obinze, who is known as “Zed” in college – presumably for the Zee in his name – is a rock steady and loyal character in a book full of people who are neither.  He, like Ifemelu, is clear in his understanding of the world.  This does not mean that he is naïve.  Quite the contrary, he is worldly wise and understands that people are complex and internally inconsistent critters.  So, when Ifemelu’s beautiful Aunt Uju’s boyfriend, who is a married general in the military, is killed, Zed and his family of academics rally to protect Ifemelu and Uju from the general’s wife’s wrath, now that wife is no longer restrained by her husband from taking her wrath out on her competitor.

 

The foreign perspective is essential to the insights that Ifemelu brings to her blogging about race, and to her (and our dawning) understanding of American Culture as the book unfolds.  As Ifemelu’s African American boyfriend’s jealous sister says about her, “You know why Ifemelu can write that blog, by the way?... Because she’s African.  She’s writing from the outside.  She doesn’t really feel all the stuff she’s writing about.  It’s quaint and curious to her.  So she can write it and get all these accolades and get invited to give talks.  If she were African American, she’d just be labeled angry and shunned.”  But I think that, at its core, a person from a country where one’s blackness does not cause prejudice can experience the shock of this in a way that neither European Americans nor African Americans can experience.  We are oddly bound together by the normalcy of our racism.  By the way that it has wound its way into our personal and cultural norms so that we cannot take it on as an object; it is a deeply felt, very subjective part of our very beings.

 

So Ifemelu inhabits, in America, the space that the analyst inhabits in the intrapsychic world of the analysand.  The analyst enters this world as a transference object – as a foreign object that gets painted with the familiar.  Just as Ifemelu gets painted by both black and white Americans as black, something that she is both aware of, but also not used to as a stimulus that arouses this particular kind of reaction from others, so the analyst, who is male or female, more frequently white, but occasionally darker skinned, but more importantly caring at moments and negligent in others, is able to experience the reaction of the analysand as the analysand welcomes the analyst to become part of their interpersonal and intrapsychic world as a member in the way that all other members are welcomed.  The analyst is able to observe the odd tribal traditions that are part and parcel of that treatment, because of the analysts essentially foreign nature.  The analyst can say, as Ifemelu does, isn’t is strange that you are treating me in this way - and to be curious about that – rather than to take it as the usual way of doing things and to react in the usual way evoking the usual kind of dance.

 

Because Ifemelu is African she can feel racism all the more acutely.  Growing up in a culture without blatant but hidden racism, it assaults her when she is the target of it in the United States.  Another way of saying what I said in the paragraph above is that part of why analysis is so much easier with two is that the “foreigner”, the analyst, can feel the power – the weight – of oppression that is so much part and parcel of the experience of the “native”, that the person who has borne it for so long, ironically can no longer feel it as an outside force because that weight has become a natural feeling extension of their being.   The analyst, the therapist, and, I would add, the lover can experience the native experience as foreign and can question it. This helps the natives with the first of two problems – to recognize the size and scope of the problem – rather than seeing it as just the way things are.  The problem is, to give up something, no matter how problematic, that has worked for us in whatever ways it has – even though it has also worked against us, is terribly difficult - whether on the couch or in a culture.

 

To be clear, Ifemelu primarily addresses her observations of our culture to African Americans (she shortens this to AB for American Blacks and distinguishes them from NAB – Non-American Blacks), but she is also implicitly addressing a white audience that is blind to their racism – she is speaking to the vast liberal white American that Get-Out was trying to wake.  Ifemela works with an upper middle class white couple, nannying for their children while dating the mother’s rich cousin.  She is concerned for the woman she works for who doesn’t see how she is being treated and, I think, she is concerned for the rich cousin who is adrift in his wealth.  It is not just the oppressed, but the oppressors who are blind to their condition and to the costs of them of the condition they are (unconsciously) wrapped up in.

 

Meanwhile, Ifemela does not just articulate her own immigrant experience, but she stays in touch with her Auntie Uju, with whom she can be more candid than she can be with her parents who are tied to the mores of Nigeria.  She is able to watch and narrate Uju’s struggles as a physician coming to a foreign country, which is very different – and demeaning in its own way – from Ifemelu’s entrance as a college student.  She is also able to trace Uju’s son Dike’s growth and acculturation as an immigrant mother’s son in this foreign country.

 

At this point, I should remind us that the novel is a different form of writing than the memoir.  This novel, which is certainly also part memoir, is told from the third person, and we are given particularly close access to Ifemela’s internal experience and it is told primarily from her perspective.  But the third person, as opposed to the first person, allows the author to take some distance – to be a bit of a foreigner even to her own experience and therefore to have a critical relationship to it.  And we can join the author in the criticism of the main character, which interferes less, I think, with our identification with the heroine than if we were reacting to her as she was talking in her own voice.  We become, as it were, allied with the narrator in our criticism, and we feel the way we feel when we are criticizing ourselves, which is, of course, what the author is doing.  We see and criticize, but also forgive.

 

And we are willing to forgive in part because we are held in such capable hands.  We are shuttling back and forth between the three stories (and many subplots) which means that we are moving backwards and forwards in time.  This is momentarily disorienting – but only momentarily.  The narratives are woven together so that they form the kind of integration, the kind of clarity that occurs when a person tells their own story in the way that it occurs to them (here I am referring to the process of free association in psychoanalysis but also of a parent telling the story of their life to a child) but, because we can’t ask questions to help orient us, Adichie has made the connections for us.  I have quoted before Stephen King’s concern about the wheels falling off in long books like The Goldfinch.  Suffice it to say, there is no such fear here.

 

Ifemelu remains solidly grounded throughout this book, which is a bit of a puzzle.  Almost everyone else in the book is off balance.  Partly they are off balance because of Ifemelu.  She does not play games.  Her observations bubble out of her like an out of control burp.  She can’t keep from accosting people with what she thinks about them and the situation they are in together.  Blogging becomes a natural outlet for her.  Her posts are short, pithy, and filled with wit.  By the time she makes her decision to return home, she seems to have found the reins to these thoughts – and she seems to be more and more to be on top of her game in articulating them.  She becomes more and more self-sufficient while staying connected with a world that she cares deeply about, feeling for it, but remaining open to the contradictions that are central to it.

 

I spoke earlier about being disappointed by the ending of the book.  If you don’t want a spoiler, skip to the next paragraph.  Ifemelu ends up finding, or rediscovering, her soul mate in Zed at the end of this book.  On one level, this is disappointing because it follows the tried and true girls meets boy, girl loses boy, girl finds boy arc.  However much this may reflect reality – and however much Zed may, in real life or in the mind of the novelist (not the memoirist), reflect what would or did happen in the lived life of Ifemelu, I am less distressed by this ending as I realize it is also a symbolic dream ending, if you will.  That is, Zed is not just a flesh and blood character, but he is also a representation of who it is that Ifemelu actually is.  Discovering him – returning to Nigeria to find him – becomes less about a lovesick girl’s dream of reuniting with a lost lover and more about a person coming of age by discovering and connecting with her true nature.  Her mirror self has – as she herself has – strayed from who it is that that they were – but these mirror selves are both tuned to the vagaries of development – they get that living is complicated – and they are able to reunite – to square themselves with the insults of having been foreigners both abroad and then, inevitably, when they have returned home.  To discover home is not a passive act – it is the activity of creating the home space that we deserve.  Whether we are doing that within the walls of our own home – or within the walls of the country that we want to own as our own, we have to not take it as it is, ultimately, but make it into what we want it to be.

 

I am grateful for the recommendation of this book to a French Analyst who mentioned it in a podcast about Covid.  I was struck by the parallels between this book and the Frenchman De Toqueville’s Democracy in America, as I mentioned before, but I did not remember that book well, having read it 40 years ago.  So I pulled it down from the shelves and leafed through it.  I found the yellowed translation to be quite accessible and modern.  But the most surprising piece was that De Toqueville devoted fully half of the first book (he ultimately wrote two volumes) to the issue of race.  His position was that, as much as we had been able to create a country that had the potential to balance equality of opportunity with personal freedom, we had failed to do this with the African American and the Native American populations.  He concluded that the oppressed (the African Americans, who were largely enslaved in the 1840s) had it worse than the marginalized (the Native Americans who were pushed off their land and out of the consciousness of the majority).  But his position was that we, as a nation, had the reckoning with these two populations as our major unfinished business.  Almost two hundred years later, another foreigner, Adichie, helps us see that this is still the case.

 

 

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

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

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text.

 

  

Dead to Me Season 2: Guilt is the Culprit

 

If you, like me, have been feeling that Dead to Me Season 2 is a guilty pleasure, rest assured that it is also a primer in guilt.  The first few episodes seem to be filler – getting us back into the swing of things, reminding us of who the characters are, and cementing the relationship between Jen (Christina Applegate who is also the executive producer of the show) and Judy (Linda Cardellini) and Jen’s two boys and establishing this modern family unit as the central group.  Added to this is the surprise appearance of the murdered Steve Woods’ near identical twin Ben (both played by James Marsden).   This last entrance helps clarify that we are watching a Soap Opera – especially as Ben is the “good” twin and Steve was the “evil” twin.  That this is a Soap Opera is underlined by the number of main characters who sleep together and the way that seemingly minor characters either become main characters or show up to or three segments later to underscore an important plot element.

 

In my comments on the first season, I noted the absence of back stories.  These finally start to come thick and fast in the end of the second season, and the underlying psychoanalytic logic of the series starts to emerge.  Remember that Judy met Jen, whose husband she had murdered with her car, in a grief group.  Judy lied about her grief, claiming that her husband had died of a heart attach when, in fact her fiancée, the “evil” twin Steve, had dumped her after insisting that she not go to the police about the accident.  Judy feels terrible guilt about what she has done to Judy, but her guilty relationship brings more grief to Jen than redemption, at least at first, as Steve’s dogged pursuit of Judy leads him to confront Jen and she reactively kills him at the end of the first season – a crime that also goes unreported and provides the drive for the second season that Jen's husband's death provided for the first season.

 

It should come as no surprise then (though I have to admit that I didn’t see this coming) that there are layers of guilt for Jen and Judy that precede the current imbroglio they create for themselves.  Both harbor tremendous guilt that stems from their relationships with their mothers – and one way of thinking about this guilt is that it is unresolved grief. 

 

Judy’s grief and guilt is, not surprisingly given how much difficulty she has in getting her life on track, much deeper and more difficult than Jen’s.  It parallels Jen’s in that both feel guilt over the anger they feel towards a parent who disappointed them before they, each in their own way, lost that parent.  Both secretly blame their parent for failing them, while simultaneously being doggedly loyal to them, and, to a certain extent, less in Judy’s case, idealizing them.

 

The conflict they feel about their guilt – the sense that they must keep their anger hidden (at least intermittently unconscious and/or out of their “public” narrative) binds them tightly to their parents as Freud described in his 1917 book, Mourning and Melancholia.  In a very dense sentence he says, “Just as mourning impels the ego to give up the object by declaring the object to be dead and offering the ego the inducement of continuing to live, so does each single struggle of ambivalence [in melancholia] loosen the fixation of the libido to the object by disparaging it, denigrating it and even as it were killing it.”

 

What Freud is saying is that mourning or grieving is a process where we give up our ties to the objects (people who now live in our minds), but that melancholia, depression, or “pathology” involves hanging onto the object by “as it were” killing it – which only loosens but doesn’t sever the tie to the object.  We stay stuck to the object, banging away at it while also hanging onto it - not letting it go.  

 

The dilemma is that we can’t live without connection – both to people in our current world – Jen and Judy cling to each other (often against Jen’s better judgement) even though they have done terrible things to each other because they need a friend in a very cruel and unforgiving world.  But they are clinging rather than simply connecting in part because they, ironically, haven’t let go of the objects that still haunt them.  They haven’t in the words of the psychoanalyst Hans Loewald, allowed ghosts to become ancestors.  It is the guilt that they feel that is forever blunting their ability to see the world, including the people in the world who would do them harm, in unrealistic ways.  They keep hoping that this time the other will actually be the one that they can count on, and blind themselves to the ways in which they are not.

 

So, Judy relies on Ben who tells her not to come clean – but she feels badly about Jen and so connects with her.  Only in the context of that relationship can she see the problems with Ben’s exerting harmful control over her.  Jen cannot come clean about her murder of Ben to the authorities because she fears that she will, in being arrested and incarcerated, abandon her children (who have already lost their father) as her mother abandoned her.  She avoids identifying with her mother.  She doesn’t come clean to Judy because she feels guilty about having harmed someone that Judy loved, no matter how ambivalently.  Again, she doesn’t want to be seen by Judy the way that she views her mother.  She feels tied to her mother and feels that others will react to her as she has reacted to her mother.

 

Surprisingly, it is Judy, in this second season, that comes to terms with her guilt.  She recognizes that her feelings towards her mother are not something to be ashamed of, but reasonable reactions to her.  She is able to see her as she really is.   This is surprising because Judy is the one who is always seeing the good in people – even the evil twin – perhaps because she has had to wall herself off from her mother to keep herself from her mother’s evilness – this has left her with a wall within herself that protects her from seeing the bad in others.  Perhaps it is because she has come to see that Jen – despite being a good and well intentioned person – is also bad.  Not just a little bad, but murdering bad, and is still good, that she can see the ways in which her mother’s badness is not, in fact, balanced by good.

 

This would (whether it is the intent of the writers or not) parallel the psychoanalytic therapeutic process where the patient’s realization of the analyst’s flaws – the deidealization of the analyst – facilitates a more balanced views of others – just because they have good qualities does not make the perfect, but also, paradoxically, this realization also helps analysand's mourn relationships with people who have been less than perfect – it helps them realize that those who have been harmful are not necessarily evil – or, in Judy’s case, to finally see that those whose primary intent to harm are not essentially good – at least not currently and in relationship to her – but that doesn’t mean that she is bad.  She can still be good and recognize that they are bad.

 

So, at the heart of this soap opera is a very deep and compelling truth.  How will this play out in season three?  Will Jen get hit with this kind of realization as well?  Or will she end up in the slammer?  In addition to articulating psychological truth, the writers of this saga are interested in more seasons, so stay tuned, there is certainly more guilt laden binge watching to come!

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