Glen Gabbard on Psychotherapeutic Action

 

Glen Gabbard; Therapeutic Action; Witnessing; Therapeutic Match; Seeing and not seeing.

Glen Gabbard (virtually) Came to Town the Other Night and Clarified that Psychotherapeutic Action is not what you think it is…

If David Letterman were a psychoanalyst, he would have Glen Gabbard as his first guest on the show “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction.”  Dr. Gabbard has written over 300 psychoanalytic articles – many of the co-authored with other leading analysts - and multiple books, including Psychodynamic Psychiatry in Clinical Practice, which is a standard text in both psychoanalytic institutes and psychiatric residencies.  He also edited the most recent edition of the Textbook of Psychoanalysis.

I have known Glen for about thirty years, since I was a trainee at the Menninger Clinic when he was its director.  I never had him as a teacher when I was there, though he was a consultant on a patient that our treatment team was working with.  I came to understand what he does so well a few years later when he came to present to my state’s psychological association on borderline and narcissistic personality disorders.  As I was walking out of the presentation, I overheard one psychologist say to another, “I could have given that presentation.”  I thought to myself, “I don’t think so.”

Dr. Gabbard’s gift (in my mind) is to take incredibly complex material and make it comprehensible.  In the psychiatric text, he very neatly explained the differences between Kohut’s version of narcissism and Kernberg’s, a difference that was the subject of heated debate in psychoanalysis for decades.  He clarified that these two men were working with very different populations and using the same name to describe the psychological functioning of these two groups.  When understood in this way, it is no longer a question of who is right, but which theory is applicable to which particular patient.  Elegant.  In the state psychological meeting, he presented complicated concepts so clearly that others thought what he was doing was easy.

I was looking forward to Dr. Gabbard’s presentation on Psychotherapeutic Action, which is the question of what it is about psychotherapy that helps our patients.  Recently, due to the COVID pandemic, we have not had the usual national meetings that allow me to connect – even if across the room – with people like Glen whose work I admire and, in his case, with someone that I know.  It was also good to welcome him to our group – even if, because when he agreed to come, it was on the stipulation that it would be virtual because the world was not yet back to our new sense of normal.  I was not prepared; however, for this paragon of analytic doctrine to rock my world.

Oh, he started out just fine.  He noted that when he was a trainee, he presented a case to Charles Brenner who was, at the time, the paragon of psychoanalytic thinking.  He noted in his case presentation, that though there were still a few symptoms, he was prepared to terminate with the patient.  Dr. Brenner chastised him, stating that a treatment is only complete when there are no remaining symptoms.  Dr. Gabbard was publicly chastened and apologetic, but on the ride home from the presentation he thought, “That’s crazy.  When is anyone symptom free?”

Indeed, I remember a colleague at Menninger talking about her own analysis and the fact that she was still smoking (cigarettes) at the end of it.  The newest version of the DSM had just come out that included nicotine dependence as a disorder – and she stated that if nicotine dependence had been a disorder when she was in analysis, surely her analyst would have cured her of that as well. 

I repeat that little story to clarify that psychoanalysis, within psychoanalytic circles, has always been idealized in ways that are not reality based, but those idealizations have had a powerful impact on us – or at least on me.  For instance, the oft repeated ideal that the well analyzed person never unintentionally alienates another person was very attractive to me.  I hate alienating others, but do it quite frequently and, apparently, unintentionally.  The idea was, when I was well analyzed, I would have access to all those unconscious desires to harm others and could therefore avoid acting on them.  Well… apparently, I am not well analyzed enough to have reached that level.

So, I don’t mind (and have often found helpful) a little de-idealization of analysis.  But what Glen did was different.  After tracing the “relational shift” in analysis – the transition in analytic thinking from the 1940s into the 1980s – and indeed even into today – that allows us to realize and consider the ways in which we influence each other, he talked about the influence of thinking about relationships in general and the psychotherapeutic relationship in particular as central to human functioning on therapeutic action.

Unlike the old ego psychologists like Dr. Brenner, who saw symptom reduction as the task of analysis, Gabbard says that we have come to realize that focusing on symptoms is not helpful; in fact, it can cause our patients to cling to them ever more tightly.  We need to work on helping our patients live within their own skins; to be comfortable making fuller use of themselves.  When we are thinking about improved functioning rather than symptom reduction, we focus on understanding what leads the patient to get better.  This way of thinking about therapeutic action leads us to be more inclusive than simply looking at what we as analysts/therapists do.  Instead, we are thinking from the perspective of patients do to become healthier.  In support of his position, I would add: when we look at the empirical literature, patient variables account for much more of the outcome in therapy than therapist (or orientation of therapist) variables do.  So, Gabbard’s position is that we need to understand therapeutic action from the position of the patient.

He then proposed three conditions that lead to patient improvement.  The first is the match between the therapist and the patient.  The second is the process of witnessing (or being witnessed, if we focus on the patient).  The third he called “Seeing and not seeing”.

Patient/therapist match is indicative of psychotherapy being a more personal than a technical undertaking.  The patient’s transition to living within his or her own skin – with being able to tolerate and articulate the feelings that have been warded off and therefore relegated to unavailability rather than being available to help guide his or her behavior – happens within the context of a human relationship – a relationship with another human being, not a relationship with a "therapist". 

As therapists, we can adjust ourselves, within limits, to “match” the needs of our patients.  I work particularly well with emotionally remote men.  I think they find my relative ease with emotional expression reassuring.  Emotionally remote women, on the other hand, in my experience, do not respond so well to the same emotional expression.  I think, though don’t really know (because they don’t typically stick around long enough for me to find out), that these women experience me as being unpredictable and therefore threatening.  That said, there have been surprising fits (and misfits) over the years - and I can stretch to work with clients that might not initially feel that I would be a good match for them.

As witnesses, we need to listen.  Gabbard minimized the role of interpretation in change, even though this was seen to be the “mutative” element in early analytic theory about therapeutic action.  He believes patients come to talk, to be heard, and that our interpretations are primarily useful in so far as they help the patient feel understood.   Indeed, Gabbard sided with Winnicott who believed that what our patients need is, essentially, a private experience - a sense of being in contact with themselves.  They want (and need) to be alone – somewhat paradoxically - in the presence of the analyst.  Our job, then, is to create a space in which the patient can feel free to be and express themselves; not for the therapist, but for themselves.

This part of the talk brought to mind for me a description of an evening that Ralph Waldo Emerson spent in the company of Henry David Thoreau.  As I remember it, Emerson arrived and Thoreau invited him into his cabin where they sat in front of the fire for two or three hours.  Neither said a word.  At the end of the evening, they thanked each other for having spent a magnificent time together.  Of course, this happened in the context of a friendship that was based on talking as a means of getting to know one another, but it also indicated an ability to be present to the other without needing to be in the other’s business – and that the presence of the other allowed one to more fully occupy oneself.  The maxim of the witnessing perspective, then, would be: In the context of a relationship, I can more fully get to know myself.

Finally came the unsettling aspect of the evening.  If the idea of witnessing had a bit of a Zen koan feel to it, the idea of Seeing and Not Seeing certainly felt like we were being implored to clap with one hand.  Dr. Gabbard cited research that suggests that much of what we communicate is non-verbal.  Despite the fact that the analytic posture (lying mostly motionless on a couch with the analyst largely out of sight) intentionally minimizes non-verbal communication, Gabbard insisted that most of our communication occurs outside of our awareness.  We don’t understand what we hear and, no matter how well analyzed we are, we don’t really know what we are saying.

This poses a quandary for the analyst – and even more so for the person trying to teach someone how to do psychoanalytic work.  How do we help someone know what they don’t know?  Of course, this is the central dilemma in the psychoanalytic process.  We are trying to help our patients access the parts of themselves that are unknown.

In the discussion after the talk, I let Glen know that, though I had appreciated his talk, I found it disturbing.  As a person who is responsible for shepherding our candidates through the curriculum that teaches them how to do psychoanalysis, a central component of which is to teach them how to follow the “red thread” that binds the analytic hour together, to have him (of all people – I might have added – the avatar of psychoanalytic orthodoxy) tell the psychoanalytic candidates, but also the psychoanalysts and faculty that, when we listen to and follow what our analysands are saying, we are missing the majority of what they are trying to communicate – and likely the most important aspects of what they are trying to communicate, well… that is unsettling to say the least.

Then, that night, I had a dream.  I was wandering about and came across a seam in the landscape – a ripple in a cliff – and I noticed that it went deeply into the side of the hill and, as I started to follow it into the hill, each time I thought I came to the end of it, another alley would open up and I could follow that deeper into the hill.  I was really excited as I was pulled inexorably forward, discovering new depths, until I realized that I did not know how I would find my way out, and I awoke with both a feeling of terror but also a sense of guilt that I did not have more faith in my ability to navigate things in reverse.

The next day, Dr. Gabbard worked with one of our analytic candidates to better understand a case she presented to a group of us.  Glen practiced what he preached.  Generally, our speakers do when they engage in the consultation/workshop the day after a lecture.  But this usually means that they are pointing out the parts of their theory that are being demonstrated in this particular case. 

Glen was doing something different.  He was showing us how to match ourselves to, in this case, not a patient, but someone consulting with him.  He was witnessing what he saw going on, and he was working to be aware both of what he saw and what he didn’t see.  When the person consulting finished presenting a segment of clinical material, he did not opine about what was going on, but asked her what she thought was going on.  He asked her what the material evoked in her – what she felt on hearing the history.  He did wonder if she felt some of the things that he felt, but this was presented in the form of a question, apparently out of curiosity, rather than as a corrective – he was not saying you should feel what I feel, but wondered with her why he would be feeling something she did not, if she did not, in fact, feel it.

I was reminded of his presentation to our state psychological association.  His approach to consulting seemed so simple that I felt I could easily do that.  I know from practice that what he was doing was, in fact, anything but simple.  In fact, I think it is terrifying.  I think it is like following a series of openings deeper and deeper into a cave, not knowing if one has left behind a red thread that will allow one to find one’s way back out.

Towards the end of the consultation, I let the group know that I had had a dream the night before.  Glen reassured me that there was no better place than in a group of analysts to tell one's dream, so I did.  The group immediately grasped the excitement, but also the terror as a response to the talk the night before.  My experience was that Glen was asking us to join the patient in the terrible quest of not knowing – of being present to another without trying to control, mold, or shape them; without knowing where they would go or how they would get there.

I think that, at least in my own analysis, this became a faith-based enterprise.  I eventually became convinced that my thoughts, random though they appeared at first, would coalesce and, when they did, they would make sense.  And more often than not, they did.  And, frequently when they didn’t, my analyst would help me tie them together.

I think Glen would support our gaining as much knowledge as we can so that we are as well equipped as possible to manage the terror that is part and parcel of being immersed in the relatively unstructured mind of another person – especially as we try to be as open as possible to the functioning of our own minds.  But I think he trusts that we will do this.  Our techniques, following red threads, etc., and our concepts, imagining the organizational structure underlying the association we are listening to, are maps that help orient us to the terrain we are inhabiting.  They help us manage the terror.

But I think that he would not have us use those maps to protect us from the terror and the joy the emerges from the immediacy of the human interaction that the analytic space affords.  We should be alive to the moment that we are having with this individual and we should be prepared to be surprised by what will emerge in that moment within them and within ourselves.  When we are able to inhabit that space more fully and, in so far as our past experience and theoretical knowledge helps us, hover in that space and not flee from it, this will support our being well matched with our patients, witnessing their experience, and it will help us see both what is apparent and what is harder to sense – those aspects of the interaction that lie just outside of our awareness.  

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Tár: What Does Power Look Like from the Inside?

 Tár, Lydia Tar Movie, Cate Blanchett, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Narcissism, Cancel Culture, 

Tár – a film about fictional tyrannical maestro Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) opened just a week or two ago to widespread acclaim, two full page ads in the New York Times Sunday paper, and to fanfare from multiple perspectives claiming it as a possible Oscar contender for best picture and a lock for Best Actress nod.  We were somewhat surprised to find that it was only playing on one screen in our town – at one of the art houses.  We were not surprised when, at first, we couldn’t secure tickets ahead of time – it must be sold out, we thought.  But when we did get tickets and got there, there were only about eight other people in the theater for a 6:00 Saturday showing…

This is a hard movie to watch.  Lydia Tár is a hard character, in every sense.  We observe her very closely.  And she is elusive.  Who is she and what does she want? 

I have commented before that I find film a frustrating medium for understanding the psyche of the protagonist.  Novels seem to be a much better vehicle to experience the consciousness of another.  But this film, with its inability to puncture Tár’s consciousness, mirrors our experience of being with characters like Lydia Tár. 

What is she thinking?  We don’t know.  What is she doing?  Often, we don’t know.

The film is replete with horror film imagery.  Tár goes jogging in foreign cities through graffiti covered underpasses.  She hears a woman screaming in the distance in a park on one run.  Should she intervene?  Will she be at risk if she does?  The scene does not resolve.  We are left with a feeling of being haunted by what might have happened.

Tár shares a luxury apartment with her lover and their child.  Her lover is the first violinist in the Berlin Philharmonic, which she conducts, and the space, while elegant, is also cold.  The architecture is brutalist and the lighting is dim. 

Tár has kept her old apartment in a warm old building and she uses this as a working space to practice, compose, and to meet with the next person she wants to seduce.  The tenant across the hall interrupts her at her work and is the target of her wrath, but when the neighbor needs help caring for her emaciated and filth covered mother who has fallen to the floor, Tár, a germophobe, pitches in and then washes herself off.  When her potential paramour comes in, she does not mention her recent experience.  She does not confide in others, especially about things that have shaken her.  She is always in control.

We observe Tár attack a student at Julliard who states that he will never conduct Bach because of Bach’s morality in birthing 19 or 20 children presumably by different wives and Tár takes him apart in front of his peers, teaching him by mocking him and degrading him.

What the hell is she doing?

Is she justifying her own behavior?  Does she know that she will be cancelled if she is known?  Or is she explaining that art is above and a bit beyond quotidian morality?

And we are conscious of the actress, who is not only acting, but playing Bach and demonstrating the language of the music on the piano and the line between the actress and the part begins to fade.  Is this Lydia or Cate?  Blanchett or Tár?

There is a moment when her crazy world has spun completely out of control and Lydia plays a videotape of her mentor, Leonard Bernstein.  He is explaining to kids on his much beloved show for children what they have just heard: feelings.  Not sharps and flats, not notes, but feelings.  Music articulates feelings in a way that language can’t capture.

Lydia’s world, I think this moment implies, is dominated by powerful feelings and the means that she has available to express them is through music.  Of course, Lydia is being played by a superior actress at the height of her powers who portrays feelings with her face, her body, her voice, her diction – someone who is capable of portraying – and does, in this film – seemingly the entire gambit of human emotional experience – and we observe that from the outside. 

She does not let us in. 

She cannot, according to Bernstein.  There are no words.

Oh, she is articulate.  The movie opens with her engaging in dialogue with Alec Baldwin (playing himself) on his podcast and she eruditely explains the musicology of the Brazilian Rain Forest native’s musical prowess.  She then matches wits onstage with Adam Gopnik (also playing himself) explaining the role and the history of the conductor to an audience summoned by the New Yorker.  She is in command of herself.

She is exquisitely attuned to various mentors and heroes and knows the lore of classical music like nobody’s business, and she is absolutely tone deaf to the impact of her flirtation with a new lover in front of her current lover and the entire orchestra, including one of her allies whom she completely undermines.

She also somehow doesn’t get that her assistant disdains her, and she expects that she will continue to be able to use her after passing the assistant over for a position that the assistant’s servitude has been led to believe would be hers – and somehow can’t see that alienating her assistant (even further) will lead to catastrophic consequences.  Even if she doesn’t know that her assistant is in touch with the last jilted lover whom Tár blackballed, the assistant has the goods on Tár.  Yes, it will be suicide for the assistant to use those goods, but Tár’s revenge would be professionally homicidal if she does not use what she’s got.  Shouldn't she bring down the monster?  Don't we want her to?

We cannot have access to Tár because, I think, she does not have access to herself.  She is a highly talented person entirely at the mercy of the powerful feelings that she cannot name and feels compelled to serve through their expression in the music – but even more so in her life.  She conducts her life as she conducts the orchestra – believing that she can bend it to express what she intends it to, not realizing that, just because she wants an outcome, she cannot necessarily will it into existence.  But this is hard for her to believe; after all, she has always been able to do make the piano play her tune, the orchestra to articulate her feelings, and her lovers to, well, sing.

This film then, asks a very difficult question.  Should we celebrate or cancel this person?  Is her music, both what she records and what she writes, an expression of something deeply, powerfully human or, perhaps even something divine and therefore worthy of reverence and celebration?  And shouldn't she be celebrated?  Shouldn't we recognize that the chaos that follows her around is just part of the deal with the devil that allows her to articulate what we are all feeling but cannot quite express in any medium as clearly as we can in music?

Or is she calculating, shrewd, and, as her lover posits, merely transactional in all of her relationships except the relationship with their daughter?  Does she deserve not our reverence, but our disdain – the attitude that her assistant has towards her?  Should we pull her out like a bad weed and throw her away?

Is Lydia’s sensitivity to sound – to the slightest hum or vibration – a sign of an artistic temperament that is attuned to how things should be, a sign not just of her sensitivity, but of her superior intelligence, or is it an indication of a wish to control her life, to bend things around her to meet her needs regardless of the consequences?

The ambiguity of the film – the way that it haunts at least this viewer – suggests that the answer is neither simple nor known.  Indeed, it may not be articulable.  Like music, it must be experienced.

Indeed, the dreams that she has; brief, vivid, scary enough to wake her and to all but preclude thinking about; do they indicate that she, too, is haunted?  That she is trying to keep her badness out of her own awareness?  After all, aren't we getting access to all that she is?

Perhaps Blanchett – and Todd Field, the writer director who had her in mind for the part – know that the mind of the artist can’t be known; they know (or don’t know) their own minds well enough to know that they are inscrutable and maybe they believe that if they train the camera closely enough on Blanchett/ Tár, perhaps we can come to know just how unknowable she is to those around her, but also, inevitably, to herself.

Why did I do it?  I don’t know.  It wasn’t me that did it.  It just happened. Or, perhaps, I felt it was the right thing to do.  I don't know why.

Perhaps our sensing her power to bend the world to her will is part of why we pull away in horror.  Yes, we would like to be confident enough to believe that we are invincible, too.  We have even felt that we are invincible on occasion.  But we have never had quite enough success at what we do to believe that we really are capable of anything we set our minds to.  We are painfully aware of our limits – but perhaps Tár is not.  Or she is striving to ignore those limits.  Perhaps she has spent enough time with the gods to believe that she is one of them.  Her aging process, though, is betraying that she is mortal, and her increasingly unsheathed attacks on the world are attempts to deny that her omnipotence is illusory.

Are we envious of her?  I suppose so, up to a point.  But at that point we become appalled.  We cannot get inside of Tár’s skin because she, ultimately, doesn’t live there.  She is merely a passenger on her passions.  She is as driven as the hyper-tuned, hyper-fast car she drives.  And we, looking from the outside, feel like her lover, the passenger in the car that is driven faster and faster and we feel, even when she doesn’t, the spin that indicates that she is no longer – and perhaps never was – in control. 

We feel something like the nausea that Tár experiences in the massage parlor when she is allowed to choose amongst the masseurs arrayed as her orchestra was and she makes eye contact with the one in the last cello chair location.  Oh my god, she must think, what have I done?  And she throws up.  But we have been nauseous for a while.

This is a great film.  I think that it explores something about narcissism, a topic that movies have long been very good at exploring, in novel and interesting ways.  I think it is important for us to look at something truly frightening about the human condition – are we not driving ourselves over the brink in regards to the ecosystem while we feel powerless to stop moving forward?  But isn’t this what we most want to overlook?  Don’t we want to avoid feeling that we have spun out of control?  Don’t we prefer to hang on with all that we’ve got?  Don’t we want to be Tár – and don’t we want, at all costs, not to see her as being like us?  Don’t we want to cancel her so that we can deny that part of ourselves that is Tár-like?

Perhaps it should have come as no surprise that we were nearly alone in the theater.  Critics can tell us to go, and I think this movie is well worth seeing, but it is a horror film, and our friends may not recommend it to us for a date night outing – it is far from light entertainment…     

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

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Hacks: Aren't We All?

  Hacks, HBO, Deborah Vance, Psychoanalysis. Psychology, 

Hacks is a series with two season on HBO Max that stars Jean Smart as the successful but now running-on-autopilot comedienne Deborah Vance, whose long Vegas run has made her wealthy but also irrelevant to all but her aging midwestern fans, and Hannah Einbinder as the young, sassy writer Ava Daniels who gets assigned by their mutual agent to work with Vance, though Vance has no interest in creating new material or having a writer - has always written her own material. 

The thing that sets this series apart is that the two principals are both totally and entirely unlikable.  Vance is vain and magisterial, and Ava is self-indulgent and childish.  What they have in common – and what Deborah appears to admire in Ava – is that they are both intensely focused on getting ahead at any cost and therefore are total jerks to the people around them.  This series is a tough watch through the first few episodes.  We hung in there, partly because the reluctant daughter recommended it, but also partly because we sensed that the characters would become more likable, but it wasn't easy...

What seems to distinguish Deborah and Ava is that Vance is successful and Ava hasn’t, apparently, done much of anything and is at the end of her rope, can’t get work anywhere else, and is therefore desperate, though still proud enough to quit when Vance demeans her.  Very quickly, in the first season, they both become aligned when Vance’s primo gig gets pulled out from under her because she is no longer the draw she once was and, though she could retire on her wealth and her continued ability to sell her line of products on QVC, she will have lost her audience and we discover that Deborah desperately desires to the connection she feels with a devoted audience as much as Ava desperately desires to so something, anything.  Vance is a performer and feels like she is herself when she if performing.  Ava is trying to find herself.

I am a big fan of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, but it has always felt too clean and simple.  Hacks does not feel clean.  It feels gritty and, in a Vegas sort of way, real.  That is, as real as the lives of entertainers who both mock and define what our culture is and should be while doing that from within ersatz replicas of great architectural wonders of the world for people who are in town for conventions and/or to figure out how to get rid of excess wealth through the promise of gaining more wealth can be.

It sounds like I must have hated this show – and a part of me did.  But it was the part of me that I would rather disown.  The part of me that identifies with these characters – and particularly with Vance.  Oh, I have been nowhere near as successful as she has been.  But I, like her, am much closer to the end of my career than I am to the beginning of it.  And I, like her, am beginning to feel less and less relevant.  And I, like her (it turns out) despite having had a reasonable successful career, did not – at least in my own mind, achieve my full potential.

We discover Deborah’s potential when she assigns Ava to review and digitize her collection of jokes, sketches, videotapes, and records of her career.  This scut work has a purpose, of course.  It is not articulated clearly in the series, but if Ava is going to write for Vance she needs to know what works and what does not – she needs to know who this woman is.  But the apparent reason is that Deborah needs this stuff catalogued and it appears that she is treating her employee like clerical staff rather than as a junior colleague.  It feels like she is trying to demean Ava.  

I have been given scut work to educate - and demean  - me, too.  My former, younger self identifies with Ava - the one who wants to belong (and I think Vance both identifies and feels some affection for the part of her younger self that she sees in Ava, though it takes a while for Ava, and the audience, to see and appreciate this.  The scut work feels like part of a hazing process).

In my own life, Ava's and Vance's going through old clips parallels my reviewing my career to make a case for promotion at work.  This is a review I should have done years ago.  But the first time I was up for a promotion was such an embarrassing experience that I haven’t wanted to put myself in the sights of those who would judge me again.  So, I have been, like Ava, reviewing records from years ago and dredging up what I did when.

What Ava discovers is that Vance was in line to the be the first woman to have a late-night talk show (something that still hasn’t actually happened out here in real life), but her life melted down when her husband, who had been her business manager and biggest supporter, had an affair with her sister.  We suddenly have an explanation for Vance’s bitterness and mistrust of anyone who is close to her - anyone that she doesn’t have on her payroll and therefore imagine having complete control over.  And we begin to feel something like empathy for this very prickly character (or at least I do – I, after all, haven’t wanted to put my vulnerabilities out there again for many years).

It is hardest, though, to feel empathy for Deborah Vance in terms of her relationship with her grown daughter, Deborah “DJ” Vance (Kaitlin Olson).  DJ is a loser.  She just isn’t good at anything.  And this appears to be, at least in part, because Deborah (her mother) keeps running her life, so she has very little true autonomy and instead she engages in faux moments of running her life – making truly terrible jewelry that is way too clunky and big – as a failed means of supporting herself, for instance.  Over time, we come to see that this has much deeper roots – Deborah took DJ on the road with her after the divorce from DJ’s father and, though this was intended to be an expression of her maternal caring, Deborah was too wrapped up in her own career and achieving success to be tuned into her daughter.

Of course, I hope that my devotion to my career has not interfered too much with my parenting, but it certainly played a role in marital distress and a failed marriage, as well as a great deal of personal angst and many sleepless nights that left me feeling less than at my best.  So, given a chance to review my career, was it worth it?  Would I do it all over again?

Deborah is proud of her career and married to continuing to do what she does indefinitely.  That said, we can see that in Vegas she is just mailing it in.  We also see, through Ava’s eyes, that she is not relevant to a younger, hipper crowd.  And then the hammer comes down – she is booted by the owner of the casino that has hosted her for many years in an arrangement that has been mutually very enriching.  Angry and embittered, Vance sets out to reinvent herself – with Ava as her devalued muse and co-author.  In spite of ourselves, we come to admire the pluck and verve of these two women who are very hard to like, but somehow easy to identify with.

Just as in Seinfeld, part of what is attractive about this pair, and the rest of the planets in the solar system that revolves around Vance, is that they are part of a community despite their apparent lack of redeeming value.  Perhaps as in Seinfeld, part of the attraction is that, despite Woody Allen’s protestations to the contrary, we actually are looking for a club that could tolerate having us as a member.  And that we could belong not because of the ways that we have made ourselves look good – not because of our shiny resume, as it were – but that we could belong warts and all.  Even though we have a face that only a mother could love, we wish that the world would turn out to be a supportive maternal figure.

So I think that we enjoy this pair and their entourage not because we like them, but because we are like them.  Their flaws are our flaws and, through identifying with them, they become likable (and perhaps teach us something about being able to like ourselves as we learn to like them).  

In the second season, as they are on the road and Vance is trying out her new material on audiences that want to be sympathetic, she keeps falling flat and, while she gets a few laughs, she doesn’t connect with the audience.  Ava has convinced her to be more straightforward and real about the facts of her life.  Vance didn’t actually burn down her house when she found out about her husband’s infidelity – her husband did that and framed her so that he not only torched the house but also her career.  But putting this into her act makes her come across as self-pitying, self-mocking or, worse, she turns, in a few performances, to mocking her audience.

The magic happens when she is able to turn her keen judgement back on herself.  She doesn’t just tell what happened, but recognizes the humor in the ways that her efforts were self-destructive.  She amuses herself – and her audience – by being amused with herself.  She learns to simultaneously take herself very seriously – honestly articulating her experience instead of pretending that things were not so bad – and also to take herself way less seriously – to recognize that, despite the cards being stacked against her, she made her situation even worse by being headstrong and self- important.  And that becomes funny.  She unites with her audience in good-humoredly poking fun at herself, and she and the audience laugh together at the result (not all that differently than what Mrs. Maisel does from the get go).

Perhaps if I can just learn to take myself a little less seriously – while also recognizing just how powerfully attached to the important things in my life I really am – I, too, can connect more genuinely with those around me.  Maybe I, like Deborah and Ava, can become more likeable, while remaining deeply (but hopefully more adorably) flawed.

 

Post script:  In the discussion among the writers after the last show of the second season they hint at doing a third season.  I hope this doesn’t happen.  The second season wraps things up.  Let’s leave it at that.  

 

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The Movie Elvis: Cementing a legacy in place.

 

Elvis the Movie, Colonel Tom Parker, Psychology, Psychoanalysis of film, Tom Hanks, Austin Butle

 

In addition to being a reluctant psychoanalyst, I am a reluctant fan of Elvis Presley.  When I took the reluctant wife to Graceland last Spring, I worried about how few people were coming to see his home, automobiles and airplanes.  I wondered whether his fan base was dying off.  The reluctant wife assured me that those fans are introducing their children and grandchildren to Elvis and he will continue to be a cultural force and his home will be a mecca for a segment of the population for a long time to come.  Wait until the summer, she and the tour guides said; Graceland will be crawling with people again.

The movie Elvis will contribute to maintaining Elvis as a hero to his fans and their children.  It is, at this moment, the second highest grossing music Biopic, so far being exceeded only by Bohemian Rhapsody.  But, it will also maintain the Elvis hagiography in part because it gives an acceptable narrative to the fans that will let them maintain Elvis as a good guy who was done wrong.  This is tricky.  He could have been portrayed as the goat.  He could have been painted as the appropriator of African American music; the guy who would profit from the creativity of others.  And that narrative is very much alive in this film.

But the creators of this film were prepared for this.  The primary defense against the charge is sleight of hand.  They present Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks) as the villain.  As an aside, I think the casting here is problematic.  I think that actors bring themselves to a part – and Hanks is just too much of an average good guy.  He doesn’t have an evil bone in his body.  Ok, I know, as an analyst, we all do, but Tom just doesn’t.  Or he’s not willing to lend his evilness to the parts he plays.  Instead he plays the part as an irascible but likable, if a little oily, uncle.  Fortunately for the Elvis legacy, the part is written for someone to play it as a psychopath.  So this creates a matador’s cape for our rage to be directed against.

The second feint is to is to have Elvis (Austin Butler) come by his blackness honestly.  He is shown being raised among the blacks when his father is jailed, and he is transported by his experience of both types of African American music- the Sunday Morning Church and Revival singing and the Saturday night Rhythm and Blues.  Additionally, he has conversations with Black musicians who give him their blessing to use their music – they know the game is rigged and they’d like their friend to profit from it, and he demurs when others say he is the greatest rock and roller and points towards Fats Domino as the true Rock and Roller.

Despite my mistrust of having Colonel Tom Parker as the villain, I do think that telling the story from his vantage point was wise.  Elvis is many things to many people, and anchoring the story in a particular set of eyes is a smart move.  He is, I think, chimeric.  As depicted here, Colonel Tom views Elvis as a Freak in a side show that fascinates people, and they will be happy to part with their money (money is snow in the Colonel's metaphor with the Colonel as the snow man) to have access to Elvis.  Elvis is a freak who captures something that the world desires.  And what is that?  

Elvis himself believed that he was as popular as he was because his singing conveyed the emotional experiences that we all feel, and his articulating these feelings allowed us to feel themt more deeply, and to feel that we shared those feelings with others, in a transcendental way.  He imagined his true competition to be not another pretty boy, but Roy Orbison, because Orbison, too, was able to articulate the emotional experience that his audience wanted to feel.  This movie emphasizes the complex feelings that are involved in asserting oneself against an oppressive external culture. 

Of course, asserting oneself against the oppressive external culture is central to the experience of the African American community – and Elvis is depicted as joining them in that – and learning from them how to be true to himself and to the feelings that he feels pouring up and out of him.  But he is also dependent on the oppressive culture – and, in particular, on the Colonel.  One of the characteristics of psychopaths is that they are capable of being quite empathically attuned, particularly to their victims.  They are often charming, not in a gee shucks boyish kind of way that Tom Hanks can be, but in a tuned in, you are the only person in the world for me kind of way.

The Colonel is depicted as being quite tuned into Elvis – and he is particularly attuned to his fears.  But he manipulates those from a distance.  Did the Colonel hire someone to leave death threats for Elvis in the Las Vegas International Hotel?  He never copped to it in the film, but it is clear that he used Elvis'  fears about his security to keep Elvis from travelling abroad and he did this not for Elvis’ benefit, but to protect himself from the goons who would have collected on his gambling debts if he could not produce Elvis at the casinos and with that all the snow that came with him.

So Elvis, despite being the single best selling solo vocalist of all time (according the post film credits), was childlike in his dependency on his mother and then, when she died, he transferred that dependency to the Colonel.  Despite his Taking Care of Business mantra and his moniker as the king, through the Colonel’s eyes, he was a needy little boy who needed the Colonel's guidance.  When, at the end of the film, the Colonel blames the fans for Elvis’ death, saying that Elvis died trying to meet the needs of those he truly loved – his fans – we are almost convinced.  But I think the tragedy at the heart of this movie is that the Colonel was able to manipulate Elvis out of the Colonel’s awareness of his own insecurity and lack of certainty about his ability to keep himself afloat in a world that was hostile to him and this allowed him to understand and manipulate Elvis who was also essentially immature and uncertain why he had been gifted in the various ways that he was.

So I guess I am left, at the end of this film, having been entertained and, perhaps, enlightened a bit by the Colonel’s perspective, but also feeling that Elvis continues to be enigmatic to me.  As I put forward in the post about Graceland, I continue to believe that Elvis embodies a certain version of what it means to be white.  I am concerned that this film will help Elvis’ fans continue to believe that they, too, are supportive of African Americans while simultaneously continuing to support exploitative policies and vote for individuals who signal their intent to maintain racist social structures.  I think one way that Elvis embodies a modern version of whiteness is that he is ultimately powerless, too – and if he is, how then can I not be powerless?

Elvis takes a stand against the Colonel, choosing to have rock and roll producers direct his Christmas special and in that special, Elvis, apparently, pens and sings his own protest song, objecting to the violence that kills Martin Luther King, Jr. in his own town of Memphis when he is living in LA, and then later kills Bobby Kennedy.  This song – and his hit “In the Ghetto” – seem to put him in the pantheon not just of performers, but of Rock and Roll crusaders.

I guess I am, ultimately, not enamored of this film.  It seems to appeal too powerfully to our wish to stay culturally asleep and cut off from our responsibility to really change things.  Elvis tries to rehabilitate his image as a true rebel at two points in the film – in the first, he plays a concert at the baseball stadium in Memphis as a Rock and Roller and his penance is to go into the military rather than being sent to jail  (not included in the film are the ways that Colonel works on his behalf while he is in the military to keep his image alive on the radio).  The second time he asserts himself is with the Christmas special, and the Colonel turns that opportunity into an endless gig in Vegas where he most clearly lives out the Colonel’s vision of him as a freak show attraction – loving the adoration of his fans more than the love of his family.

I think this is an interesting aspect of the story, but I think there are many parts of it that were not included.  That said, I think that is true of every post that I have ever written.  I take a particular vantage point – as an analyst working as a cis white male, etc.  But more importantly it is a perspective that I espouse at this particular moment.  Will I still be disappointed by this film (in the same way) if I watch it again in five years?  Probably not.  And how different would this film have been if it were told through the eyes of Priscilla Presley?  Or Elvis' band members?  Or his Dad?  Or from the omniscient third person perspective? Or through the eyes of the black musicians who were his peers and whose music he was able to turn into snow?

Perhaps most importantly, I wonder what Elvis' own version of his life would look like and I wonder if we would find it enthralling?  Would we have found his insecurity and uncertainty about the validity of what he had to offer endearingly humble or would we have found him to be a fun house mirror reflection of the Colonel – both men were robbed of their childhood and spent their adult lives searching for something (maternal and social love and acceptance) that should have come from some other source than the adoration of fans, snow, or the contents of a hypodermic needle.

In closing I would like to talk about something uncanny.  I found Austin Butler’s portrayal of Elvis to be a little bit weird.  It seemed less like he was channeling Elvis than a young (and better looking) John Travolta.  I don’t know what to make of that, just an odd observation from me, at this moment…

 

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A Midsummer Night's Dream - Love, Sex, and Fairies

 Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Folger Theater, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Sex, Love

 

We were in Washington, DC, on a work/mini-vacation trip, and we went to see one of the less visited museums – the museum of buildings.  It is in the judicial district and a very large brick structure.  When it was built, it was the largest brick building in the world.  It was built as a pension building for civil war veterans and it has an incredible open atrium – five stories tall – in the middle of it.  It is a particularly fitting building to be the museum of buildings because the columns that support the brick walls surrounding the atrium are in all three classical styles – with Ionic columns holding up Doric columns, and massive Corinthian columns dominating the space – as if to teach us about the development of classic architecture.  On the day we visited, this space was filled with – a pop-up stage.

Apparently, the Folger Shakespeare Library is closed for renovations, and their stage is, too, so they are using various other stages around town to mount their productions.  The last time we saw Midsummer Night’s Dream, it was on an outdoor stage in Door County, Wisconsin, and the stage at the Museum of Buildings (we were able to get tickets to come back to see the performance of Midsummer Night’s Dream) felt – because of the space above us – almost like we were outside again.  And, of course, even if it is a bit past the solstice, it doesn’t hurt to see this play in the middle of summer.

The play is, as this Playbill pointed out, a comedy; not because the two (or three, depending on how you count it) couples are able to successfully get together at the end of it, but because the ragtag players who are in it are able to mount a successful production at the end of it.  The dream is, as it were, the creation of a play – the mounting of it – and successfully inviting the audience to engage in it, to feel it, to experience it, as they would a dream.  And so, the measure of success of the play is the measure of the experience of the audience member – the ability of the audience member to experience the play as a dream, as their own dream.

This production was quite conscious and public about their intention to engage the audience – to ensnare them or collaborate with them in the dream production.  They encouraged audience participation at the beginning of it, made frequent allusions to pop music, encouraged clapping along to much of the singing and dancing that they did.  They more successfully captured the Reluctant Wife, because she is more familiar with the pop vernacular, but I think they missed the mark with deeply enthralling each of us – ironically because of the strength of the individual actors.

The play involves three largely unrelated sets of people who are functioning in parallel but apparently without any actual overlap – much the way that our dream life functions in parallel to our lived life with overlap that is only apparent on inspection or, dare I say it, analysis…  The first characters we are introduced to are the Members of the Court of Athens.  Hippolyta is the Queen of the Amazons and she is betrothed to Theseus, the Duke of Athens.  Was Theseus a Duke?  Did the Amazons have a Queen?  Does it matter when they are played by African Americans as contemporary African Americans?  Hermia, a young girl who is in love with Lysander, has been promised by her father, Egeus a member of the Athenian court, to Demetrius, who is desperately in love with her.  Meanwhile Demetrius is spurning Helena who is in love with him.  Just so there is some balance somewhere, Lysander, at least initially, is in love with Hermia.

Meanwhile, Theseus has commissioned Peter Quince to produce a play on the day of his wedding.  Quince has an inept band of players, led by Bottom, to do this.  Meanwhile, in a shadow world, The King and Queen of the Fairies are fighting with each other and Titania, the Queen, uses an assistant Fairy, Puck, to transform Bottom into an Ass and then, in a reversal of Shakespeare’s writing, casts a spell so that Oberon, the King, foolishly falls in love with the Ass, which will allow the Queen, she hopes, the ability to take from the King the changeling – a young human that the fairies have stolen.

In my own reading of this comedy, unlike in tragedy, which focuses on the character and travails of a hero, here we are confronted with a group of people.  All of them are flawed in obvious and ordinary ways.  And the loves that they experience here are fickle and complicated.  Unlike the single minded lovers of tragedy – and here we could take Romeo and Juliet – lovers who may be star crossed by virtue of the social boundaries they dare not cross, but who are true and constant with each other.  Ironically – certainly intentionally, Shakespeare does take the star-crossed lovers and makes fun of them.  The play that the troupe performs on the triple wedding day at the end of the play is a vastly shortened caricatured and funny version of Romeo and Juliet.  It is absurd and awful, it is poorly acted, and it allows the couples who are getting married – who are entering into a sacred covenant, making sacred vows, laugh.  And we laugh, too, exiting the theater with a light-hearted step.

What does that say about us?  Are we fickle, too?  Of course we are.  What are we to do, then, with Romeo and Juliet?  Weren’t we deeply moved by that?  Where do we stand on the comic and fickle to tragic and serious continuum?

I, for one, was raised to be serious.  Love – and the necessary compliment – marriage – was serious business.  When I fell in love, it was to be forever.  And it was to be a deep and lasting opening up of an intimate relationship across a shared lifetime.  And I took it upon myself to mold my character to be worthy of such an undertaking.  (I know this sounds pretentious and crazy, but it is true…)

At the same time, I was driven to be interested in a variety of people – to be drawn to them, to flirt with them and, especially as I grew older, to explore being close to not just one, but a series of people.  Ultimately, when I married the first time, that marriage did not last.  Was my wife fickle? Was I fickle?  Did the fairies interfere in our loving relationship?  Did we not understand each other enough – though we were older and, as my brother-in-law who performed the marriage ceremony pointed out to us when he opted not to offer pre-marital counseling – we were both psychologists.   Shouldn’t we have known what we were getting into?

I was struck, in thinking about the structure of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, that the book Hamnet, which portrays a version of Shakespeare as married in Stratford and a man about town in London, captures something of the tension between Shakespeare’s vision of love in Romeo and Juliet (a deep and abiding love for a wife in Stratford), and the temptations, perhaps especially as imagined by that wife, of a man who spent much of his life away from her (The man about town in London).

Love is both serious business and light-hearted play.  Peter Fonagy, a psychoanalyst in London who is very interested in how we develop from children into adults, proposed that one of the reasons sexual intimacy is so delightful is that our sexual selves have not been supported and nurtured throughout our lives – they have mostly been ignored.  This means that they are relatively immature – meaning that we can more easily engage in spontaneous play from our sexual selves than perhaps from any other part of ourselves.  I believe this can also get us into trouble.  We can play – and be drawn into a relationship – and not realize – not have the wherewithal to realize that we are in over our heads and that the other person is, perhaps, not the right person for us.  Shakespeare nicely sends this idea up by having Egeus not understand that his daughter Hermia’s love for Lysander is true and constant, though he also has the fairies demonstrate that Lysander could become directed to love someone else.  Fortunately for Lysander, and the play, Hermia hangs onto her attachment – she knows what love is – and she wins Lysander back.

If Shakespeare did, as Harold Bloom proposed, invent The Human, he did so in all of the splendid variety that we as a group – but also that we as individuals are.  Not only are the characters different from each other, they are different from themselves based on the vagaries of fairies and of chance, and we are able to be made a fool of by love – even falling in love with an ass…  Even if I did not resonate with the beat of this performance – even if the strength of individual performances was so great that the play did not coalesce into a deep and strong dream, but felt rather like one of those dreams that barely holds together and barely keeps us asleep, there is something about the structure of this play and its tension with the other plays in the oeuvre that, like the columns in the building where it was performed, can teach us something about the structure of the human experience – its variety and constancy – and all the while we just think that we are being entertained. 

 

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COVID Chronicles XXVIII: Monuments and monumental failures; How will we move on from our Empire of Pain?

 COVID; Empire of Pain; Patrick Radden Keefe; Psychoanalysis; Psychology; Denial

COVID Chronicles XXVIII: How will we move on from our Empire of Pain? 

As a sort of prelude to vacation, the reluctant wife and I spent a week in Washington DC.  She is working at the job she commutes to there and I was teleworking in a reversal of our usual roles.  I was seeing my patients virtually and working on various projects in our hotel room between sight seeing jaunts.  It was the week of the final (for now) January sixth hearings, and I had been cognizant of them as I wandered across town.

I flew in on Friday so that the reluctant wife, who had been there all week, could stay the weekend and we could have that time together in the city where neither of us had to work before she returned to work on Monday.  On that Friday, after her work, we went out to dinner and then went for a walk around the tidal basin.  We walked past the Vietnam War Memorial – that slash in the ground that depicts the dark underbelly of the wars that are celebrated for what they have accomplished with the gleaming marble structures that are reflected in it – Washington’s victory over the British and Lincoln’s war to unite the country.  This monument, like many others in the town, is inscribed with the names of those who were killed in war.

We went from there to the Lincoln Memorial.  I was as stirred by it, and the words of the Gettysburg Address and Lincoln’s second inaugural address, as I was by being able to stand on the spot from which Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I have a dream” speech.  So, it was fitting to be able to walk, for the first time, from there to the Martin Luther King Memorial.  And there King is standing, looking across the tidal basin at the Jefferson Memorial as if to say, “Here I am, working on the next step of the process that you began (and Lincoln, the man behind me, continued to work on).”

MKL on Vietnam

A collection of King’s actual words are cut into stone behind him.  One of his turns of phrase I read, initially, as a poor grammatical construction.  In fact, as the reluctant wife pointed out, it was an intentional reworking of our usual manner of speaking.  Instead of urging us to be a moral example “to the world”, he urged us to be a moral example “of the world”; urging us to demonstrate not our exceptionalism, but our ordinary human capacity to do the right thing.

We walked quickly through the FDR memorial, one that is sprawling and a bit of a jumble – part of it intentional as it is depicting the disorder of the world war, and it, like the Lincoln and King Memorials, was liberally sprinkled with the words of the one remembered (e.g. “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”).  We were walking through it to get back in time - to get to the Jefferson Memorial, another memorial that I have not visited before.

The White House and Jefferson

What was most striking about the Jefferson Memorial, besides Jefferson’s words, which clarified that King was, indeed, working to create the kind of country that Jefferson was envisioning, even if Jefferson himself could not live up to those aspirations, was its location.  It was apparent as we approached it that the sight lines put it directly in the center of the view from the living quarters of the White House.  How would it be to be President and wake up in the morning and see, just to the left of the Washington Monument, Jefferson’s dome?  It would, for most people, be a bit humbling to think of the legacy that one would be called to uphold.

But in wandering the streets of the capitol this week, what is impressive is that it is not just the monuments, not just the museums, but the buildings themselves that are big piles of stone and steel and concrete and on these buildings there are numerous inscriptions – statements about the values that would define our culture. They are etched in that stone or rock or concrete.  These values have to do with what we are called to be.  They are aspirational statements.  Especially as a psychoanalyst, I am aware of how difficult it is to achieve those aspirations.  We need to build a version of ourselves that manages and re-channels our immature but powerful impulses into possibilities imagined by our visionaries and made real, in so far as they are, by the lives and deaths of the many others who are memorialized.  Of course, we fail at this – in small and in big ways (Jefferson and King both failed in their own ways), but having the aspirations can allow us, at crucial moments, to be guided by them; if we construct ourselves to be open to that.

So, it was with interest that we watched the January Sixth hearings – where Liz Cheney and the rest of the panel reminded us, as they have from the beginning, of the oaths of office that our executives took when they were sworn in.  She was clarifying that we should etch into our hearts what has been written in stone throughout this town.  And she was clarifying that an individual inhabited the highest office in the land, and, rather than using the monuments as a calling to become a better version of himself, used the power of his position to deceive people into supporting his attempts to subvert the system that we have relied on.  He attempted a coup d’état.  This is, of course, difficult to prove.  Perhaps he believed that he had won an election that was being stolen from him.  So, the committee focused on his inaction when the Capitol was under attack. 

We are a flawed nation.  We have failed in so many ways.  Half of the Washington Monument and all of the White House were built by slaves.  The brutality of the slave system and its visible legacy is comparable only to the near extinction of our indigenous people and the theft of their lands.  More recently, we have frequently failed to live up to King’s admonition to be a moral example “of the world”, with the Vietnam war being one of many examples of that and our torturing of captives a more recent example.  Presidents have deceived us, occasionally for their own purposes, but on a consistent basis to enforce actions – including torture – that we find abhorrent.  But failing to intervene in an attack on the Capitol?

Would that this was simply an aberrant leader who was indulging his own wildly narcissistic fantasy that was shared by a few loyal nuts, but I think it is symptomatic of a much deeper malaise.  We have forgotten how far we have come in a very few hundred years and what discipline is required to have done that.  We seem to have forgotten that it is ideas that have propelled us forward.  Ideas that have been argued and discussed and tried out – some of them used, most of them discarded.  But when we have come to a conclusion, we have acted – decisively and with common cause and purpose.

This summer, COVID has surged again, but we seem to be largely blithely oblivious to it.  My students who have been sickened by it do not report that it has been a mild disruption, but a significant one – one that lays them up for a week or more and has lingering after effects.  Do we know what the long-term effects are?  Not yet.  And they may prove to be nominal. But we could have nipped this in the bud through collective action.  Once we knew that this was spread through the air, universal masking would have been an effective deterrent to the creation of variants, which now have open season to spread and evolve into the best, most effective versions of themselves, to figure out what is the best way to use our bodies to keep themselves alive, regardless of the cost to us.

Of course, this may turn out to simply another chronic issue that we need to manage, and there may be little annual cost to it.  Like the flu, it may help us cull the herd, taking out the weak and the elderly.  That last sentence was intended to clarify that we, along with our ideals, have also espoused such things as Social Darwinism, and this would be the latest, medical, iteration of that.  It felt to me to be a callous statement.  We have been given a precious gift: life, but more than that, we have been given the gift and the responsibility to exert influence and, indeed, dominion over creation.  Have we used that responsibility well?  Are we prepared to make sacrifices – hopefully not the kinds that those who have fought in wars have done, but much more reasonable ones – to wear masks, to change energy policies, to build a world that is sustainable? 

After the week in Washington, we travelled far south and east – to the Virgin Islands.  I successfully snorkeled for the first time and discovered a world that was fantastical – the world of tropical fish, swimming in a paradise that was previously unknown to me – except in the movie Nemo and on nature shows.  My appreciation (and criticism) of My Octopus Teacher would now have a completely different feel.   

While on vacation, I read a book by Patrick Badden Keefe that the reluctant son recommended, Empire of Pain, about the Sackler family.  The three generations of the Sacklers, who fueled the Oxycontin debacle, underscored my pessimism about our current condition.  Their first fortune was made from the pushing of Milltown and then Valium in the 1960s.  In addition to the crippling addiction these medications brought on people, the marketing also cemented into the public consciousness the idea that psychological problems are caused by “chemical imbalances”.  Then, from the 1990s to the early 2020s they used the playbook from the 60s to influence the FDA and sell physicians on prescribing medications with essentially no scientific evidence to back up the claims they were making.

The psychoanalytically intriguing thing about this is that I think the family was as convinced that they were providing a useful analgesic to the public as Donald Trump was that he had won the election.  That is to say: I think that both Trump and Sacklers knew that what they wanted to believe was not true and they simultaneously did not know that.  Neither Trump nor the Sacklers allowed themselves to believe what was apparent to rational people around them because to believe that would threaten the cornerstone that their self-worth was built on.  To protect that cornerstone, they engaged in massive denial of obvious and clear facts, and became isolated in their fantasy world with devastating consequences.  This, by the way, was not caused by a "Chemical Imbalance".  The fault lies in the character structure of individuals whose addiction to greed and self aggrandizement appears to be as powerful as the pull of Oxycontin to mask physical and, as in the case of  Trump and the Sacklers, psychological pain.

Keefe offered two central metaphors to describe the current and future state of the Sackler family, who have avoided taking any responsibility, have not been significantly financially impacted, and have not been found guilty of crimes that led to almost a million deaths and a 2 trillion-dollar impact on the economy.  The Sacklers used their money for many things – but what seemed important to them was being perceived to be philanthropists by, for instance, bringing the Temple of Dendur from Egypt to the Metropolitan Museum and to install it in the Sackler wing.  That temple includes graffiti from an early traveler.  It also does NOT include graffiti from a later traveler – graffiti that was apparent in early photographs, but that has since washed off.  The removal of the Sackler name from the wing and from many other institutions around the world was offered as a penalty – their fame will be fleeting and they will not achieve the immortality they craved - for the failure of the family to appreciate that they lived in a community.

The other metaphor was the Hearst Mansion, as it is represented in the movie Citizen Kane.  Richard Sackler, the scion who was personally responsible for the aggressive and deceptive selling of Oxycontin, was pictured as living alone in his father’s mansion in Connecticut, perhaps as isolated as Kane/Hearst at the end of their shared life…  This was clearly Keefe offering us solace for the massive failure of justice that he chronicled.

This, in turn, caused me to reflect on the ways in which we discovered who the essential workers are during COVID.  Those who were remanded to do the most dangerous work were not those who were most highly compensated, but those who are least compensated.  And yet the work they do is of the greatest value when push comes to shove.  We literally cannot live without the grocery store clerk, and the trucker who delivers the groceries, and the workers who harvest and package and prepare the food.

I think, in fact, that we are all essential.  We do need a system that protects those workers, and all of us, so the government is something that we need.  But we need it to recognize what its role is.  And in a democracy that means we ourselves need to recognize its role and to support it as it does its own (and therefore our own) essential functions.

We all need to inscribe on our hearts both our own value, but also the realization that this value is realized in the context of a community that we depend on to support us.  We need to value and care not just for ourselves, but for each other, even if only out of self-interest.  So, it is with some relief that the Senate has decided that the value of the planet is as important as the income of big oil companies and their stockholders (including me).  That the fish living in the ocean are as essential as the plutocrats who ply the surface of those fish’s home in their yachts is something that I am coming to believe.

Will we value our own lives and mask up to get over the surge that will surely happen when school starts though?  I doubt it.

 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), please try using the service at the top of the page.  I have had difficulty with these and am looking for something better, but these are what I have at this moment. 

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.