Inside Out 2: A Sequel that Makes Developmental Sense

 Inside Out 2, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Emotions, Character, Inner World, Art and Science

Inside out was a surprisingly psychologically sophisticated film.  I saw it with the younger Reluctant Daughter - we both loved it - and I loved having an evening with her.  She is now grown and on her own, living far away, and, after asking permission from her, I decided to go to the theater with the Reluctant Wife and our older Reluctant daughter to see Inside Out 2.  After watching it, I commented to the Reluctant Wife and Daughter that Inside Out 2 was a disruptive film.  Both of them had enjoyed it, as did I, but unlike our last venture to the theater together (we went to see Appropriate on stage in New York which generated intrafamilial controversy), this seemed to be just a lighthearted excursion into the world of adolescence.  What could be disruptive?  I responded that I was disappointed that Pixar seems to be more on top of some aspects of development than I am, and this is concerning to me.

I will forego framing the plot of Inside Out 2, though I anticipate that my descriptions of the psychology of the film will necessarily contain spoilers.  Briefly, the film articulates the experiences of a week in the life of Riley, the preteen in Inside Out, as she navigates a week in her life between eighth grade and high school, culminating in a weekend at hockey camp where she is attempting to make the high school team as a freshman.  I am not intending this post for people who are thinking about going to the film, but, as is often the case, for people who have seen it. 

I must admit that seeing the film in the theater was not pleasant.  After sitting through a half hour onslaught of commercials for Disney Parks and films, seeing the Disney castle appear to announce the beginning of this film released both relief and a wish to defile the Castle in some permanent way – to clarify that it is not, in fact, a place of conviviality and connection, but a series of isolated towers that seem designed to imprison rather than free those who have been captivated by it…

Which is an interesting introduction to the film.  This is a coming of age film – or, more focally, a surviving early adolescence film.  But the twist is that the emancipation that this film envisions is not from an external oppressor (Disney, in this case, or perhaps her parents locking Riley in an isolated tower), but rather she is being freed from the clutches of being controlled by her own emotions.  I may be a slow learner, but I did not achieve what is portrayed in this film until long after adolescence (OK, truth be told, I am still trying to negotiate the transition being portrayed, and maybe that has something to do with my not being up to the same developmental speed as Pixar).

The genius of the Inside Out (now apparent) franchise is that inner world is run by basic emotions that compete for access to the control system.  In the original film, five emotions are in competition: Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust, and Fear.  Emotions are depicted as being in competition for access to the consciousness not just of Riley, but of all of the other characters in the movie.  In other words, this is the basic state of being human.  This mechanistic depiction of human functioning is actually quite consistent with current psychoneuroanalytic concepts of the functioning of the mind.  In this second film, the original five emotions have been joined by Anxiety, Envy, Embarrassment and Ennui.

Having new emotions appear – especially with the onset of puberty – is brilliant.  It is not just that the world feels MORE intrusive, abrasive and difficult to manage – it is not just a matter of degree – the world has a different quality.  It feels different.  We are attuned to aspects of the world that didn’t matter much before because we have new antennae – new feelers that are capable of picking up new vibrations in the world.

Of course, within the Inside Out world it would have been nice to have been aware of these additional feelings that come on board later, as the parents and other adults could have been equipped with them in the first movie as they are in this current edition, but we will give some artistic license to realize that it is not just Riley that is developing, but the Pixar people.

That said, it makes sense to compare the Pixar feeling states with the feeling networks that are the current scientifically accepted core neurological states.  Jaak Panksepp’s research has led us to think of seven feeling states:

1.          Fear.  This feeling does not come into play when we feel safe.  When it gets activated, we freeze or flee from an external threat.

2.          Rage.  Frustration occurs when things get in the way of accomplishing a goal.  If the person who is getting the way of accomplishing a goal is someone that we love, things get complicated (see panic below).

3.          Lust.  Freud thought that all pleasure was sexual.  We have learned that there are many pleasures and we can think of this as an acquisitive drive.  I want x.

4.          Seeking. We might think of this as curiosity.  I am longing to come in contact with what is unknown to me.

5.          Panic/Grief.  This emotional state is based on our need to cared for.  When we are in danger of losing loved ones, we freak out.

6.          Care/Concern.  Not only do we need to be cared for, we need to care for others.  Our hearts ache when those we care for are in danger. 

7.          Playfulness.  This emotion is an important part of our being pack animals and learning how to interact with other members of the pack.

8.          Disgust.  (I said there would be seven, but disgust is sometimes included as an eighth – and since Pixar has this as a character, let’s just add it in).

The Pixar feeling state that is most glaringly missing from this group is Joy.  Playfulness, in my mind, may be the closest feeling state to the character Joy in the Inside Out movies.  But in the model of the mind that Mark Solms proposes – one that is based both in current neuropsychological thinking and in Freudian theory – joy is, weirdly, the absence of feeling.  A state we could call the nirvana state, when all systems are go and there is no feeling that is tugging at conscious saying, “you need to take care of this!”

The interesting thing about both the Pixar list and the Panksepp/Solms list is that they are both woefully incomplete.  One of the fun internet games is, “What additional emotion would you have included that Pixar did not in Inside Out 2?”  After we watched the movie, the Reluctant Daughter posed this to us – I answered guilt and The Reluctant Wife answered shame.  Thinking about it now, I am surprised that Pixar didn’t include love.  Where would Disney, or any other studio, be without love?  Isn’t love what makes the world go round?

Panksepp and Solms propose that the manifold feeling states that we experience are essentially complex combinations of the basic emotions.  Sternberg’s triangular theory of love is an example of this kind of thinking.  Sternberg proposes that we can describe different kinds of love (erotic love, parental love, companionate love) based on the relative strengths of three components – two of them emotional and one cognitive.  He suggests that the levels of passionate attraction (lust), levels of  intimacy (Panic/Grief and/or Care/Concern) and levels of commitment (the cognitive component) can distinguish between different types of what we call love.

Solms also suggests that some emotional states are the result not of concordant but of conflicting feelings.  So guilt is the result of a conflict between rage and attachment. 

Because the emotions in the Pixar world are not pure, but characters being voiced by complex people, we see the feeling states develop across the course of the movie.  Joy moves in the first movie to acknowledge the need for sadness, and in the second movie to acknowledge the importance of anxiety.  But it is not just joy that develops, anger also does, becoming more thoughtful – more strategic.  All of this is occurring in the context of the development of Riley’s character.

The central plot in the internal world of Inside Out 2 revolves around the development of the character structure.  The original emotions have helped Riley develop a seemingly solid, desirable character in her childhood – the sense that she is a good person.  This has helped her in the outside world.  Anxiety demonstrates that this is too brittle a character to carry her through adolescence – where relationships demand much more cunning and ennui.  The original emotions are banished from the control room and set off on a quest to recover the “good girl” character and are in a race to return that character to the determining position in the control room before the new, complex character that is constructed of various “not so good” strands becomes solidified.

Ultimately, the solution to traversing the vast distances in Riley’s mind in the short time afforded to the banished feeling states necessitates their unleashing the suppressed memories that they have so carefully hidden from Riley’s consciousness.  This tidal wave of undesirable memories and experiences floods the area that connects to the character structure and the replacement of the twisted character with the original pristine character fails and a new hybrid character structure, one that is kaleidoscopic rather than static, emerges. 

This highpoint in the movie made me wonder how many of the writers are engaged in Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy.  This therapy is based on an assumption that the mind is not unitary, but made up of dissociated elements – the treatment has appropriated the language of Multiple Personality Disorder (now call Dissociative Identity Disorder in an effort to hide it from the public) to refer to aspects of the self as “alters” – short for alternative personalities. 

And don’t we all have alters?  Aren’t we a different person when we talk on the phone with our Dad than when we talk with our Mom?  Or our children? Or our sibling? Or our boss?  And yet, aren't we the same person from one day to the next?  Isn’t it sort of a miracle that we have relatively constant sense of ourselves at all?

Inside Out 2 nicely takes this potentially disorienting and shattering characterization of our character as kaleidoscopic and turns it into a lovely visual representation of a talisman of ourselves that can shine different colors and forms depending on the needs of a given situation.  At a sleepover, we can be less mature, while with cunning friends we can feign indifference to material that we care deeply about, all in the interests of maintaining the integrity of the whole self.

Perhaps the central miracle illustrated in this film, then, is the relationship between Riley and her emotions.  In a weird moment, Joy is called back to the control panel.  If I overlay Solms' concept of Joy as the absence of feeling - or perhaps the drive of the core self to achieve a state of homeostasis where we are using our self to maximum capacity - Riley bypasses the wily anxiety and turns to Joy as the character who should be in control of her actions.  Isn't this something that we all aspire to?  Isn't this something like the depiction of a peak experience - of self actualization?  I both enjoyed and was just a little bit envious of Riley's ability to call forth Joy.  Oh, that I may be able to do that more often in my own life!

To return to the brilliance of this work, the development of a complex self involves not just the integration of various memories into a complex whole, but the development of new means of sensing the world and reacting to it.  The research of Panksepp – and Solms – has largely focused on the adult emotional system and, at least as I have studied it, I have not been asking the question of how does this system developed.  Inside Out 2 nicely corrects that oversight.

A complete theory of mind, as Freud pointed out 100 years ago, requires an understanding of how that mind develops.  What are the critical elements of that development?  How does it come online?  And so, when we focus on various components of that mind – cognition, emotion, character structure – how do those components develop both as individual components, and in relationship with each other.

I am not ready quite yet to cite Peter Docter and the rest of the Pixar team as my go to neurological consultants, but I appreciate their guidance as I work to create a working model of the minds that I work with both in the abstract and in the concrete world of the consulting room and engaging in the relationships with others that, in their best moments, bring me joy and allow me to connect the appropriate color of my character with the color that they are able to radiate at that particular moment.  I am also appreciative of the development of my children that allows me to enjoy favorite and share favorite experiences and current versions of those experiences with each of them.

 

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Poor Things: How the Lessons on Screen Translate to the Classroom

 Poor Things, Emma Stone, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Teaching

Poor things was highly recommended by a friend who is interested in odd, offbeat ways of depicting the human condition – and if there is a little bit of the macabre mixed in, he is all about that.  So, I was braced as we entered the theater to watch it, especially as the trailers were generally for horror films and films that were more focused on violence than I am generally comfortable with.

When the film began, we entered a world that was both familiar and strange.  It was Englandish, and located somewhere in the post-industrial revolution/ pre-automobile age but with enough odd colors and weird vehicles to let us know that what we were seeing was surreal.  We watched a woman plummet off a bridge – it was a suicide, surely, but so beautiful and serene that it was hard to imagine the violence that must follow the fall.

If we were buffered from the visceral in the opening scene, we were not in the second, where a gruesome surgery – or perhaps post mortem – was being conducted in an old timey operating theater with groaty students watching on and commenting negatively on the surgeon’s work – a surgeon who had clearly survived multiple injuries of some sort to his face, leaving him scarred.  The one student who regarded the surgeon with reverence was invited to join the surgeon in part of his work that was taking place in his home.

One of the advantages of setting this piece, which could have been set in any century, in the late 19^th, was that there is a clear caste system in place – and there are servants in the home, observing what is going on and normalizing the odd and bizarre things that are occurring.  Another helpful thing was to watch this film a second time – that friend I referred to above is reluctantly teaching a class on Freud with me and we assigned it in the class.

As is often the case, when I have assigned something in class that we have already seen, I ask the reluctant wife to watch it the second time with me.  This time, when I asked, she was willing.  But her experience was very different than mine.  She saw the film much as she had the first time.  I did not.  I cry at Coke commercials – I am sentimental and easily thrown off my game.  She is clear eyed and “objective” about many things.  I saw this the first time with anxiety for all that might befall the naïve girl at the center of the drama.  She saw it like I did the second time both times – that the naïve girl at the center of it all was, from her first moment on screen, self-possessed and capable of handling anything that was thrown her way. 

So, we are introduced to a physically awkward girl (who is in the body of the beautiful woman who jumped from the bridge; this version of her is Bella Baxter played by Emma Stone) who is the surgeon’s ward.  She has little language, spasmodic body movements and she engages in apparently uncontrollable fits of rage when she doesn't get her way; breaking plates with no interference from the surgeon, whom she calls God (Short for Godfrey  Baxter, played by Willem Dafoe).

The surgeon also has a home operating room where we are exposed to the blood and gore of the operating theater again – and to our heroine’s apparent comfort in being in this space and observing and childishly imitating some of the surgical procedures, mangling corpses in the process of doing that.  The student who has followed the surgeon into this space (Max McCandless, played by Ramy Youssef) is assigned the task of observing and recording the girl’s (child’s? woman’s?) progress in such things as learning language.

The student, like the audience, is curious about the state of affairs that brings the girl to be in the state that she is in.  The surgeon/professor has no interest in bringing him up to date – merely assuring the student that his observations are part of doing cutting edge research and moving science forward – just as the surgeon’s father did before him.

It becomes clearer that the girl is some kind of monster that the surgeon has locked into his home, much like the various animals that he has stitched together – a chicken with a pig’s head, for instance.  He is preventing this girl from seeing and interacting with the world.  When she becomes completely unhinged in her efforts to know more, he sedates her and, as the assistant carries her to bed, the assistant sees her naked breast.  We see that this stimulates him – and perhaps it stimulates us, but we recoil at this thought.  The student (and we) can’t be attracted to this monster – to this woman child – that, in itself, would be monstrous.  She is barely sentient.  To desire her would be perverse – it would be somewhere between pedophilia and bestiality.  He can’t desire her…

But, of course, he does desire her.  He confesses as much to the surgeon after first checking to see if the surgeon has his eye on her.  The surgeon reassures the student that the surgeon’s father’s experiments, in addition to leaving him with visible scars, left him with a rare kind of impotence that needs extraordinary power to overcome. The surgeon goes on to clarify that while it is physically impossible for him to have sex with his child/creation, the moral impossibility is not the issue.  We live, inside this house, in a post-moral world, then.

At about this time, the girl discovers sexual pleasure -fittingly enough, as it were, with a fruit (could it be an apple?) at the dining room table.  She immediately wants to share her discovery of this pleasure with the house staff, and they are appalled, and then with the student.  The student resists her attempts to pleasure him or be pleasured by him, and asserts his Victorian morals insisting that such behavior could occur only if they were wed.  He has brought his morality into the house.

Not long after this, the student and the surgeon decide that the student should wed the girl.  To move this forward, they hire a dashing but shifty lawyer (Duncan Wedderburn, played by Mark Ruffalo) to draw up the marriage contract.  The lawyer, enticed by the interest of these men, discovers the girl and takes her off to have the adventures that these conspiring men have locked her away from (though God does give his assent).  

Wedderburn's immorality is selfishly oriented – he will do what feels good to him, even though he, as a lawyer, knows the rules that others must abide by and informs them of that, even as he chooses to personally ignore them.  What he finds puzzling about Bella is that she functions without awareness of the rules - she works solely on impulse.  Even when he explains the rules to her - she has no meta concept of rules, so she follows the particular rules - says the words he says she must say, but violates the spirit in which the rules were given, apparently unknowingly.

So, this will be a coming of age film.  And the twist here is that this woman is her own mother.  She is the woman who fell from the bridge – what we didn’t know is that the falling woman was pregnant.  She wasn’t quite dead yet when discovered by the surgeon.  He removed her brain and, in a Frankenstein like manner – or in an homage to the movie Get Out – he took the infant’s brain and implanted it in the mother.  We have moved from a Wes Anderson surrealistic film to the horror genre.

When Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, she was pointing out the horrors of the modern world.  We were gaining power over life and death, but we didn’t really know what came along with that power.  In Get Out, Jordan Peele was asking us to think about the ways in which white people have colonized blacks and used them to achieve a certain kind of immortality.

Poor things seems to be asking us to consider what it means to discover ourselves living in a world where we can allow ourselves to become, physically/surgically, whomever we desire, though there are consequences associated with that.  Godfrey, as a result of his father’s experiments, cannot digest food without assistance (in addition to being impotent).  The girl is growing into her adult body at a rate that is highly accelerated over the normal developmental arc, so she is naïve in the ways of people – she is too trusting (we might think of The Invention of Lying where people trust each other because no one realizes they can lie).

The girl’s sexual appetite, unfettered by social inhibition, is tremendous – and her ability to feel the loss associated with a sense of attachment is limited.  She is thus able to sample the fruits of this highly evolved society without having to kowtow to the norms that have led to its construction.  She is, in a word, as free as a modern woman is promised to be – as free as Duncan Wedderburn pretends to be.  She can sample and critique what she experiences without deference, guilt or second thought.

Then she runs into some philosopher’s when Wetterburn has tried to sequester her on a cruise ship.  The philosopher exposes her to the poor – and she feels guilt at her privilege.  When Wedderburn wins big at the roulette tables, she hands the riches to the cabin boy to take them to the poor – and we know that they will never get there.  She and Wedderburn somehow make it to Paris after they are thrown off the boat for being unable to pay there way – she becomes a prostitute – which breaks Wedderburn’s heart because he has, against his better angels, fallen in love with her.  She learns a great deal as a prostitute, and earns some money to boot.  She returns to England to marry Max – the surgeon’s assistant – after she learns that God is dying.  Max has apparently been on his own journey and he is now ready to acknowledge that she is her own person.  Bella makes a brief detour at the altar to see for herself what mother’s relationship with her father was like (in my first viewing, I was confused by this, not understanding that she was exploring, not being highjacked).  She discovers that it was awful enough to make her mother want to commit suicide, serves her father his just deserts and begins studying to become a surgeon, just like God.

Throughout the movie, Bella is discovering things for herself and using her own language to describe those things.  Sex becomes “furious jumping” in her lexicon because she has discovered it and described it rather than having learned about the concept from someone else with all of the freight that goes with that.  So, while on the first pass I thought this film was about the freedom to surgically define ourselves, it seems to be a thought experiment that is as old as John Locke and one that Freud tried his hand at: what would the primitive, the unschooled, make of the world if they were not confined by morality?  More importantly, how would they act in the world?

Freud’s vision, in Civilization and Its Discontents, is that civilization – the moral strictures of society – impinge on us and create a malaise (another translation of discontent).  We are first and foremost sexual and aggressive creatures, and we have to inhibit these drives in order to live with each other – creating an essential unhappiness.  Poor Things explores this question in novel ways.  It seems to be asking, “What if we could keep the joie de vivre that the infant and young child has – our delight with the world – and express it as an adult?  What would it look like to engage the world with childlike wonder through an adult’s eyes?”

Of course, this movie is asking another question as well.  What if the individual who is gifted with this is a woman and not a man?  And, further, what if this woman is more like the Reluctant Wife than like the Reluctant Psychoanalyst?  If we have a clear eyed, self-confident girl growing up at lightning speed to become a self-possessed woman, what would that world look like?  The world that she inhabits at the end of this film is an Edenic garden, filled with monstrous creatures who seem quite content – even including her father who has quite literally been put out to pasture.  This Eden is not the closed space her father envisioned for her, but a launching pad, so that she can become a physician and learn to engage in the healing arts.

This movie raises all kinds of other intriguing questions – but one that my reluctant co-teacher and I were quite satisfied by was that a group of undergraduate students, having spent a semester reading Freud, could wrestle with those questions and address them in pertinent fashion in an hour and a half conversation.  Some of them were still uncomfortable with the premises presented and felt a bit squeamish about what was being presented – but they could see the virtues of the questions being asked, which felt like a giant leap forward from where they were at the beginning of the semester.  Those who had been more adventurous from the get go used Freud to expand on the film – but also used the film to interrogate Freud.

So one of the central questions being asked, both in the film and in the class, is about the centrality of the role of sex – or furiously jumping – in the life of the individual.  We remembered a scene near the end of the film, when Bella is in the home of her biological father who thinks of her, because of her body, as being his wife, and he, frustrated with her recalcitrance towards him, is clarifying that he will have a surgeon perform a clitorectomy on her.  She considers this threat as if it were a proposal, and she acknowledges that her sexual desire, which she equates with curiosity, is somewhat of a burden to her, but then she decides that, on balance, it is better to be drawn into the world than to shrink from it.  This seemed like a good note on which to end the class.

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Total Eclipse of the Sun: Freud’s On Transience Elucidates Achieving a Lifelong Goal

Solar Eclipse, Totality, On Transience. Psychology, Psychoanalysis of Everyday Life, 

Total Eclipse of the Sun: Freud’s On Transience Elucidates Achieving a Lifelong Goal

I “saw” my first partial eclipse when I was child of 8 or 10 in Florida.  My Mother made pinholes in sheets of paper and we used those to cast shadows and see the progression of the moon as it passed in front of the sun.  I was fascinated by both the celestial happenings, but also by the pinhole camera that we fashioned.

At about this time, I also began reading accounts of total eclipses at historically meaningful moments.  The one of those that stands out in my mind is reading that there was an eclipse during Joan of Arc’s burning at the stake.  A recent perusal of various online biographies turned up no evidence of such a momentous occasion, demonstrating my ability to manufacture memories – perhaps blending them together into an artful mélange of what should have been.  But the idea that the sun could be totally blotted out and that this would induce awe moved me to look up, when I was a ten year old boy, the date of the next eclipse in the US – and it was unimaginably in the future – from the 1960s to the 2000s seemed to be a traverse to the land of Sci Fi and never-never getting there.

In any case, I was excited about the possibility of observing not just a partial eclipse – not just seeing an eclipse through its shadow representation, but with seeing the thing itself.  In 2017, when we had the opportunity to see totality near here – within a three- or four-hour drive – I opted out, in part because I was teaching class and didn’t want to maroon my students and partly because I knew there would be one even closer in 2024.  So, in 2017, I went outside with my students – having taken a pin and lots of sheets of paper – and introduced my students to the wonders of pinhole cameras and partial eclipses. 

One of my students held up the sheet of paper to look at the sun through the pinhole and I had to shout “DO NOT LOOK DIRECTLY AT THE SUN”.  

I vaguely remembered from my days in Florida that the shadows of leaves acted as a type of pinhole camera and it turned out to be true – there were halfmoon suns all over the sidewalk.  God had invented the pinhole camera long before we did – and it was fascinating to discover that the shape of the sun determined the shadows all of the time – they are always round!

This time, we were not to be denied.  Because the reluctant wife has been commuting to DC a lot, she has lots of Hilton points, so we booked a room at the Embassy Suites in Huber Heights, Ohio, a suburb of Dayton, that would have 2 minutes and 33 seconds of totality on April 8.  We did a quick Google Maps survey of the town and found that there was a good-sized municipal park a 20-minute walk from the hotel.  We checked it out the night before, and it looked perfectly suitable – a big square field in the middle of a town of brick ranch houses where many active duty and retired air force service people and their families live.  We decided not to drive over for fear that the tiny parking lot would be full of fellow gawkers.

I told my friend from Dayton that we were going to Huber Heights and he complained that there were no real heights associated with the town – it was essentially flat.  Yes, that part of Ohio was scraped flat by the glaciers from the last ice age, but those same glaciers also pushed far enough south that they closed an Oxbow in the Ohio River that had travelled north to Dayton and then back south, joining the current Ohio River bed West of Cincinnati.  Huber Heights, on the north side of Dayton, is actually a bit higher than Dayton, and we were on the crest of that gentle, but very long hill leading down to the old Ohio Riverbed.

We arrived early the next day – we were initially the only people in the park, and we were able to get a prime spot under a crabapple tree that was just beginning to bud.  Parking would not have been no problem, but the walk had been pleasant.  A perfect early spring day, the temperature was great, there were wispy thin clouds high in a mostly clear, blazingly blue day.  I had been looking for the moon, both the night before and when we got there, and while it must have been near the sun, the sun’s brilliance must have been blotting it out of sight.

This time, we were equipped with glasses.  Yes, I made a pinhole in some papers that I had brought to work on, but we had the ability to look directly at the sun which, through the glasses, was really quite dim – a very tame subtle orange ball.  I had thought maybe I would be able to see the moon through the glasses, but I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face.  It was only when looking directly at the sun that anything registered through the glasses.

Convinced that totality would mean total darkness, when the moon started to move in front of the sun, we pulled our hat brims low and covered the areas around the glasses so that our eyes would acclimate to the dark and we would be able, we assumed, to see the Milky Way when totality struck.  This meant that we very slowly tracked the moon’s progress across the sun, but we didn’t see the subtle changes in light – some described the light as becoming grey and shimmery just before totality, though we did feel the change in temperature.  It went from cool to just the edge of cold.  But perhaps most importantly we were able to have a lazy day, talking idly, petting the dog, while sitting outside.  That has not happened in a very long time, if ever.

As totality approached, we prepared for our 2 and ½ minutes in the dark.  We noticed in our peripheral vision that it was getting a bit darker, and then the last of the sun’s rays blinked out and we were free to look, without glasses, at the sun and at the world around us.  

Much to my surprise, it was an eerie twilight, not the blackness I had expected.  In the south east, it looked like the sky looks just before sunrise while to the west and north (we were not dead center in the middle of the dark area, but a bit to the east of it), it was a kind of hazy blue sky.  There were two stars, which a couple near us identified as Venus and Mars, but we later learned were Venus and Jupiter.  The star of the show, though, was, of course, the Moon eclipsing the Sun.

The sun was blotted out, but still very much present.  Radiating from around the moon was light – reminiscent of the rays that children color going out from the sun, but moving and shifting and changing as we looked at them.  

The Moon was the blackest object I had ever seen – so black that it looked, not flat, like the moon usually does, but threateningly, pregnantly spherical – it looked like the Death Star.  Around the edges of it were a few of Bailey’s Beads – something we had been told to look for.  The beads are created by sun rays striking craters at the edge of the moon and reflecting golden light that glows brilliantly against the black. 

One of the loveliest things about this odd moment is that it was just that – a moment.  There was a lot to take in and very little time to do that.  One hundred and fifty-three seconds.  Part of what was odd about this moment was that there was a clear awareness that we are a planet – a ball suspended in a space so vast that it is incomprehensible.  Two other celestial objects are lined up – by chance – in such a way that we can know that we are one of them – a round object floating in space, held onto them by the gravitational pull that holds us in orbit around each other, while each of the objects, despite that connection, are very much alone.

Afterwards I read that one of the Bailey’s beads looking things may actually have been an eruption on the surface of the sun – some of the sun stuff shooting out into space – and the estimated size of that eruption was about equivalent to the size of the earth – but it appeared to us as just a tiny glowing dot on the side of the sun.

In the moment of seeing it, of course, I was unaware of what I was seeing – I didn’t have a way to measure the vast distances and the huge size of the sun, but I sensed it, and sensed our smallness in comparison.  It was both a humbling and a thrilling moment.  We were in touch with the galaxy (even if we couldn’t see it) in a whole new way.  We belonged to the objects that we were observing; we were not the stable place from which celestial activity was observed.

This week, on the pencast that I listen to (a podcast about fountain pens – put that in your nerd pipe and smoke it), Brian Goulet reported that there are more trees on the earth – over a trillion – than there are stars in the sky – 8 or 9 billion.  While it is reassuring that we have such a huge reservoir of green stuff, especially in the time of climate change, that actually seemed to underscore the sense of - I’m not sure what – our insignificance in the grand scheme of things?  But that insignificance, in the tradition of Freud’s On Transience, where he argues that the glory of a poem or statue is not that it will last forever, but that it exists at this moment, that insignificance has its own glory.  We are here, now, and that is what matters.

On the drive home, the reluctant wife commented that it is rare when an event lives up to expectations.  We had both just witnessed an event that far exceeded our expectations.  A very plain suburban park, with maybe 5 or 10 couples and families dotted around it, had been transformed into something uncanny – a place that was both known and familiar and oddly and totally strange.  Magic.

We began looking for the next full eclipse.  It will be in August of 2026 and will be visible from Spain, Iceland and Greenland.  Would it be worth the trip across the ocean to spend a moment in space?  How could you question that?

 

 

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Tom Lake – Ann Patchett’s Imagined Oral Memoir

 Tom Lake, Ann Patchett, Fiction, Memoir, Truth, Psychology, Psychoanalysis

My Aunt Julie and I have an ongoing debate – one that is resolved by each of us pursuing our own path while respecting the other’s.  She claims that nonfiction books are the way to learn about the world, and she doesn’t like fiction because it is just made up.  I think that that fiction tells us a lot about how human beings function.  I find pleasure in reading because I am learning something about humans – about characters and how they are imagined by people who are close examiners of others – and of themselves.

In a sort of compromise with my Aunt, I have considered writing a memoir – which would be nonfiction in so far as such things can be, dimmed by time and reconstructed by the forces that shape our memories into approximations of what actually occurred.  But I would intersperse it with the paths not taken – the person I might have become had various alternate routes been taken through my life.  Somehow these alternate versions and I would be having a conversation about the various routes taken, and one of the questions would be, what is it that is essential in a character and what is shaped by the events that a person encounters.

Ann Patchett’s latest novel, an easy read, approaches this question in a more linear manner.  She tells the story of a critical moment in her life, a moment when she was a dating a man who would become a movie star, to her now grown daughters, who are sequestered with her on the family cherry farm in Northern Michigan during the pandemic with their father - not the movie star.  

The central premise of the book, that her children are interested enough to hear her tell the story of her early life over the course of weeks, even to hang on to her words, is hard to believe.  When I asked the reluctant son about his thoughts on the manner, he acknowledged that the fact that the story involves a celebrity – one of his favorite stories of my youth involves my running into Brooke Shields at the gym when I was living in a small town and she was there shooting a movie – but he acknowledged that it is a brief story and anything longer would have been as uninteresting as the rest of my stories.  So, chalk one up for the Aunt Julie on that score…

The other problem with the story is that the narrator supposes that the spot that was chosen for the family cemetery, a spot on top a hill, would have been the place that the farmhouse should have been as it is the loveliest spot on the land – but the original family reserved it for the cemetery so the dead could enjoy the beauty in perpetuity.

A nice thought, but a spot on top of a hill in Northern Michigan would not have been a place to put a house when a farmhouse was being built five generations ago.  First, there would be no water on top of hill.  Carrying water up the hill, or even pumping it up there, would have been an unnecessary luxury.  Second, there would have been no protection from the wind in winter – and conserving heat was much more important than the views.

So, once my gripes were out of the way, I was drawn in by the story and also by the quality of the writing.  It really is a lovely piece about the connections – and disconnections – between a mother and her daughters.  There is enough gritty reality – the mother felt, but has never told the children this – consumed by them when they were little.  The eldest daughter, as a rebellious adolescent, aware that her mother had dated a movie star, was convinced that she was his child and became obsessed with him and his way of life which was so different from the simplicity of their life on the farm.

And what child isn’t convinced that they would not have sprung from their quotidian parents?  Why are so many fictional protagonists orphans?  And don’t we all imagine that we are highborn?  Since this is a truth that is buried in fiction, I will chalk this one up for the Reluctant Psychoanalyst in his debate with his Aunt Julie… (impartial judge that I am).

The characters that come to life in this book – unlike in many memoirs – are the players around the narrator – though there ends up being more than a bit about the narrator herself, we do get to know her.  And this is a lovely mirroring of the plot.  The narrator realizes her limits, something that is very hard for us to do, and chooses a path through life that suits her, even though she is offered a path that she might have desired not because of who she is, but because of what she would have been led to believe that she, like everyone around her, must desire.  But I am getting a bit ahead of myself.

The narrator is careful to bring to life her three daughters, and to distinguish between them, giving them each to us as a precious, cared for, and unique individual who cares for the others, for her mother and for her father, and who has unique experiences of having her life interrupted to hang out on the family farm during the pandemic doing the labor that is needed (picking the sweet cherries) to keep it afloat when the seasonal workers are not migrating with the crops because of the pandemic.

She also brings to life – slowly and carefully – the characters she knew back when.  As she tells the story of the summer at Tom Lake to her daughters – with asides to us about the parts that her daughters don’t need to know about.  These individuals have convened to put on a play – several of them, actually, at Tom Lake, a vacation spot in Northern Michigan.  Yes, in the vicinity of the farm she would someday call home, but it is not at all clear, for a very long time, how that connection will be made.

But the play she is called to be the lead in is Our Town by Thornton Wilder.  A play that was produced at my High School when I was a student there – though I did not see it then nor have I seen it since.  The central premise of the play seems to be that life in a small town is not just good, but unbelievably good; so good that those who experience it don't appreciate just how wonderful it is. It is a play about life and death in a small town.  It is central to the repertory of the American Theater, and the mother/oral memoirist is playing Emily – the lead in the play.

She had played the role before, and her Uncle, a movie producer, saw her in it, took her to Hollywood, and she acted in a movie he produced.  While that movie is awaiting release, she auditioned to play the part in a revival of Our Town on Broadway, wasn’t taken, but when there was need for her in a Summer Stock production in Northern Michigan, she was available and was flown in.

 There she becomes a part of troope of players including the future film star, the director of the show, and the understudy for the role of Emily; the part she plays.  The movie star’s nobler and more stable older brother rounds out this group, and the group together spontaneously make a pilgrimage to her future home, and they all, each in their own way, fall in love with it.  

As the two stories unfold – the romantic and professional entanglements at Tom Lake and the development of the family connections through the telling of the story of Tom Lake and the ways that each of the children, and the mother, experience the story – a deeper story is being told.  It is the story of finding a path in life that allows one to become the person they were intended to be.  The children are convinced that their mother should have become a movie star – not been just a one hit wonder.  They are asking “What if?”. 

We, too, are asking “What if?”  Their father, mostly off stage, is aware of the story, which we are not, and we are impressed with his willingness to have her tell it.  He appears not to be threatened by what is to come.  The children and their mother settle on the word trustworthy to describe him.  I think reliable is, perhaps, a more apt description.  He turns out to be a rock.  The mother, who might have floated along in life, reconnects with him, and that allows things to settle into place.  She withholds part of the story from her husband and children, but tells it to us so that we can see that she is not quite as stable, this life was not quite as inevitable, as she wants them to believe.  This is not a criticism of the mother’s character, but an acknowledgement in what is, I think, a powerful reversal of the usual experience of a memoir.

To recap:

This fictional memoir is, I think, more realistic than many because:

1.    1.  It does not assume that the end is inevitable – especially as the mother/narrator acknowledges that she was more star struck and more adrift than she would be comfortable with her family knowing.  We are let in on an aspect of the human condition that might actually be hidden by the kind of memoir that is presented to the “public”: in this case her family.  Instead, we are given an opportunity to see into a part of the memoirist’s mind that perhaps even she would not let herself see.  When the author is creating an alter ego she can have a different relationship with her than she might have if she were the memoirist herself.

2.   2.    It does not assume that the end is inevitable – there is lots of room for chance here – and for other outcomes.  Her children are lovely – each of them – as well as brutal and limited.  And other children, with other partners, in other corners of the world, would also have been lovely, and brutal and limited.  She ends up in this spot largely by chance.  That is the way of the world.

3.    3.   The memoirist does not strain to justify herself.  She acknowledges her limitations – and, in doing this, she is able to choose a path that suits her, not one that she has to make suit her.  She is a character actress who can play one leading role well.  She was not cut out to be a leading lady – and the role of being a leading man is not all that it may be cut out to be – it may require a certain instability of character to convincingly take on a rainbow of roles.  The movie star literally turned himself upside down before every performance in order to prepare for his roles.

Of course, on the other hand, this memoir falls short of reality because:

1.    1.   It is a crafted novel.  The parts fit together all too smoothly.  The central character’s lack of regrets and certainty of place – especially being on a farm that is marginally able to financially survive from year to year while being simultaneously threatened by climate change – is unrealistically serene.  It is written to help us, the reader, feel good about the path that we have chosen.  We are all but made to identify with the memoirist.  We woulda, coulda, shoulda – and instead we landed in paradise.  When Freud said that he cured people of neurosis so that they could experience ordinary unhappiness, he did not envision a cherry farm in the middle of summer in Michigan with three grown children hanging on their mother’s every word…

2.    2.   The loose threads in this story are few.  Despite the numbers of characters that are included in the story, we feel settled about the vast majority of them by the end of the story, and have relatively little empathy for those who have been discarded along the way.  There is a neatness here that I don’t think is realistic.  The sense of closure, while it brought tears to my eyes, is inconsistent with the observation of the memoirist that her greatest moments of joy lose their sparkle over the years.  Of course this book will fade, but it is tied up with a bow and at the moment of its completion there is an unrealistic sense of all things being right in a world that is grittier and more complicated than that – including as it is being described here.

3.     3.  Finally, any book, whether fiction or non-fiction, about a life, is constrained by the particular path that life follows.  We cannot live those multiple lives that I would like to construct in my memoir…  We cannot know what the road untravelled actually looks like.

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Succession: Why am I obsessed with a show that has no likeable characters?

 Succession, Logan, Kendall, Shiv, Roman Roy, Family Psychology, Psychoanalysis

Succession has been an obsession for the past few weeks.  Four seasons of intense drama – 38 or so episodes in all – each episode an hour or more filled with, as everyone I have talked with about it says; a cast of characters not one of whom is likeable, and yet, like the proverbial car wreck, we can’t turn away from looking at it.  What is the draw?

We watched the penultimate episode last night and I awoke a tad early this morning, as I often do after watching an episode, from a dream about the episode.  I cannot capture the dream itself, but could capture the feeling of it and I was finally able to articulate, as I lay waiting for it to be time to get out of bed, some of the draw to a show that has been this toxic for me.

The penultimate episode centers around the long delayed funeral for Logan Roy (Brian Cox), the media mogul, king maker, billionaire toxic patriarch of the clan of misfits that would fill his shoes.  In this episode, we finally get the backstory on this man at the center of the drama, and various rage storms, that have filled our screen for many weeks.  The four eulogies, one from his brother, Ewan Roy (James Cromwell), an aborted one from his youngest son, Roman Roy (Kieran Culkin), a stolid one from the oldest son of his second marriage, Kendall Roy (Jeremy Strong), and childhood memories from Siobhan “Shiv” Roy (Sarah Snook), the middle child of this group and his only daughter, paint an interesting picture against the background that we have come to know.  (Logan also has an only child - his eldest son from his first marriage, Connor Roy (Alan Ruck), a kind of laughable, delusional son whose wholly apparent ineptitude allows the other children, whose ineptitude is more subtle, to shine in comparison, especially in their own minds.)  It also allows the family members to parade across the screen one final time before the series ending showdown where the successor will be named…

Logan Roy built his empire from scratch (or close to it – Ewan clarifies that after they made the terrifying crossing of the Atlantic in the 2^nd World War, in the hold of a ship that lost its power and where the 5 year old Ewan and the 2 and ½ year old Logan, alone on the ship without parents, were told not to make a sound lest the UBoats would blast a hole in the hull; they arrived in the States to stay with an unspecified relative who had some unspecified amount of money), and Logan’s fondest wish (and seemingly greatest fear) was to leave the empire that he had created to his children – while he simultaneously did everything in his power to undermine them, seemingly to ensure that they were unable to take the reins when his rule came to an end, or, perhaps in his conscious mind, to avoid their stealing the kingdom from him before his time was up.

In this reversal of King Lear, Logan hangs onto power too long, and he sees everyone, especially those who most love and care for him, as threats – and because he treats them as competitors who would take away what he has, they become every bit as threatening as he fears they might be, but because he is prepared for that, he can thwart them at every turn and no one is able to trust anyone.  Unfortunately for them, his suspicions and criticisms and brutal attacks have crippled them so that they are not effective threats to him – nor, then, can they be legitimate candidates to run the company in his absence, but none of them can see that, except, ironically, Roman – the initially most unaware character who, across the course of the series, actually grows into an admirable human being. 

In one scene in the second or third season, Logan, who supposedly does not know how to swim, is swimming in Connor’s pool – ironically in New Mexico, one of the driest states in the nation – and we see his back – and it is covered in the scars from what must have been brutal beatings – probably when he was a child.  This hint at childhood trauma, and the ways that he is enacting that trauma on his children including, at one point, hitting Roman hard enough to dislodge a tooth, we can imagine that he is justifying his treatment of them by saying something to himself like, “beatings made me stronger – they need to regularly be beaten in order to have the strength to head this company.”

Logan Roy is, then, like Stalin, or any other despotic ruler of an empire, someone who is paranoid that those around him are as ruthless as he.  And his paranoia, his projection of his own internal world onto those around him, poisons them; turning them into crippled, angry broken versions of himself.  But where he was focused on proving to the world that he is a powerful person who needs to be recognized and dealt with, his children become focused on getting him to recognize that they are a force to be dealt with by him; but since he has all the power, they fail, time after time.

The humane thing to do would be to leave them by the road.  To let them know that they are inadequate, to provide for them, but to leave them, but he is not able to do that.  He is forever stirring them up, appointing a new favorite, drawing attention to what this new one has to offer, apparently because, if he doesn’t keep them interested, who will be interested in him?  Who or what does he legitimately have to offer the world that will result in the world loving him?  Logan Roy is a deeply cynical man who sees through everyone's efforts to curry favor with him - what is it that he is looking for?

And why am I drawn to watch this super slow-motion series of car wrecks?  Why can’t I look away when looking at it makes my own dreams toxic, disturbing my sleep at a time when I am too busy to devote one or even two hours a day to something that is not just disruptive, but unpleasant?  What must this be mirroring in my own life that makes this so enthralling?

I think I am drawn in by a nearly universal thread about fathers and their children that I didn’t get until the Eulogies.  Logan Roy is a despicable man.  He doesn’t like to receive gifts.  He is not motivated by acquiring the tremendous wealth that he has generated, though his children are addicted to the trappings of wealth and he despises them for that.  "You don't know the price of milk," berates them during one of the really crazy and dehumanizing episodes where every member of the family and the executive board is demeaned.  Logan wants power, and no amount of power is enough for him.  He is the personification of the toxic, narcissistic psychopath who is so vilified in our society.  He is the toxic patriarchy writ large, with the ex-wives and mistresses to prove it.

This extended portrayal of the family and the business allows us to see – often in broad daylight – the malicious cruelty that emerges out of his personal cauldron of hate and bile.  Because of the harm and the damage this causes to the psyches of those around him, the psychopath is rightly feared and avoided.  And yet, the psychopaths in our society do not just fill our prisons, but they often turn up, as Logan does, as leaders of our corporations and other entities.  I would also propose that though we have called them a class of people, segregating them, as it were, from ourselves, they are also, to some degree, perhaps, present in each of us.  Haven't we had a moment where we have taken pleasure in causing another pain?  

Those who fit the category of psychopath of become leaders in part due to their single-minded pursuit of goals and objectives.  Famously unhindered by guilt, their path is not impeded by the social concerns that would prevent others from rising.  But this does not explain their charismatic pull – their ability to suck us into caring about them despite ample evidence of their lack of caring for us.  What they care about is the attention that we focus on them – and it is important that we be clear that we are talking, then, about the narcissistic psychopath.

As one such psychopath clarified, it is not that the psychopath does not know the rules, it is that they are not bound by them except as it serves them to observe them.  Rather than simply doing things because they are the right thing to do, as most of us do – we have internalized the rules and the threat of punishment is essentially unnecessary to sustain our inhibitions (though getting a speeding ticket now and then does curb my speeding for a while) - they are consciously choosing to follow the rules or the laws because it is strategic to do so – not because they have to.  If it is advantageous to them not to follow the law and when the risk of doing that is calculated to be low, they will do what is expedient.

So why are we drawn to such people?  First, and most importantly, because they are alive.  Their drives – their desires – their feelings – are present to them.  They don’t defend against them, they manage them, or fail to manage them (Logan’s rages are volcanic), and they are real.  When we are confronted by them, we don’t just deal with them.  We need to think about them, plot against them, and weigh whether confronting them is worth it to us.  Do we really want to invest that much in this interaction?  Are we up for going toe to toe at the drop of a hat?

A friend of mine who was bipolar talked about his experience when he was manic.  He felt so alive, so aware, so awake.  And he particularly felt sexually alive and awake.  And women would respond to this.  They would frequently have sex with him after spending very little time with him.  It was a combination of his losing his inhibitions, feeling more powerfully sexual, and of being able to concentrate all of the energy he was feeling on a single person at this moment that, at least as he reported it, led to a very different sex life than he experienced when not under the influence of mania.  I am suggesting that narcissistic psychopaths have access to similar life juices on a pretty regular basis.

But, while this accounts for our attraction in the flesh – and perhaps to our enthrallment with them as objects of interest, Succession got under my skin for more personal reasons – reasons that I wasn’t aware of until this episode.  In this episode, where the loss of the father was expressed and felt by each of these damaged and largely unaware children, I think it came to me that all fathers have a kind of low level narcissistic psychopathy on a relatively normal basis.  Freud focused his interest in the Oedipal situation on the child’s experience and acted as if it were the child's attraction to the father and the mother that is driver of the whole drama.  I don’t buy that.  So I will tell a slightly different fable:

Fathers, in our industrial society, traditionally left the home to do work “on the children’s behalf”.  They were expected to be selfless providers.  But, of course, they resented this.  Instead of respect at work, they had to compete with others on a consistent basis.  And then, when they got home, they frequently found that their spouse was more interested in the children and what was going on domestically than they were with what was going on in the world of the father.  Now they had to compete with the children for what should have been coming to them.

Heinz Kohut clarified for us that our narcissistic needs are not somehow met and then they disappear was we become capable of working from our full tank of self-esteem and self-confidence.  In fact, he said, we continue to need validation to maintain a sense of competence and worth.  Some of this, under the best of circumstances, gets accorded to us at work – sometimes more than at home, so we often spend more and more time at work, justifying it as somehow being for the good of the family while using it as the replenishment of our tank.

Of course, in a post-industrial world, the need to be validated by the world is compounded as two spouses are returning home to a place that should be a refuge, but is frequently chaotic and where, instead of a caring presence, additional demands are placed on each of them.  We are in the middle of figuring out this shift and, to this point, we have blamed the patriarchy for the ills that are so manifest in Logan, but we will see if, as things evolve, our challenges continue to be gendered or if we find new ways to manage them as the workplace becomes feminized and men influence the domestic sphere.

In any case, I think that the plaintive cries of Logan’s children – Roman’s inability to deliver the speech that he had been practicing with ease all morning when he was confronted with the actuality of his father’s death; Kendall’s putting together what needed to be said – pretending to be the grown-up in the room in the face of the loss of the true adult; and Shiv’s vulnerability as she recalled being a child playing outside their father’s office and his rage at being interrupted by the sounds of their play, somehow brought home to me that part of what drew me to the show is that this is a version – a distorted, larger than life, twisted version – of the family that I grew up in.

We did not have multiple marriages in my family.  We did not have inestimable wealth – quite the contrary.  But we did have a complicated inter-generational family where, I think, there was a tremendous desire to be loved on the part of each of the members – and, at moments, a tragic inability for any of us to see the needs of the others for validation and loving because of the momentary strength of our own needs.  And then, when this is a more or less constant state, it is only in the moment of loss – only when the contact that is so desperately sought is no longer possible - that a new kind of reckoning has the possibility of occurring.

Would that it had been possible for each of these characters to see themselves as a result of the “gift” of the loss of the mirror through which each was seeing a distorted vision of him or herself.  As I have mentioned before, Roman, once freed from this mirror, is able to observe himself and to know that he is incapable of performing the functions of the leader, something that has been painfully obvious to us from the very start of the series.  Roman is a glib, endearing fellow who appeared to be tremendously shallow and petty and his failure to be able to have a mature sexual relationship with a woman predicted his likely business impotence as well.  As the series progressed and it became apparent that he was the most emotionally available of the three children – that his shallowness may have been a cover for evolving emotional depth – it was also clear that sensitivity is not an asset in this family – quite the contrary, it leaves you open to ridicule and, indeed, destruction. 

Shiv is finally able to see, as painful as it is, that Kendall is also not able to fill that role.  It is less clear whether she can see that she is not fit for the role – she has, at moments, seemed so capable to us – and the illusion has been that it is only her gender that has blinded her father to her abilities.  If it is the case that she has been able to protect herself from the toxic burn of the family, performing this role will destroy the parts of her that she has tried to maintain by staying outside the family business to this point, but even a little reflection on the quality of her relationship with her husband Tom reveals that she has been, at least in my mind, deeply polluted by the stench of the family.

Which leaves us with Kendall.  The early money was on him.  But he has always seemed small while his father was large.  And with his father’s disappearance, one might imagine that he would grow into the role, but instead he continues to desperately aspire to it.  His failure to see himself in the absence of the distorting mirror – his inability to recognize that he is not the person that wanted his father to imagine him to be is not a tragic moment.  It is a sad and small moment.  Instead of realizing who and what he could have been – whatever that might be – he will likely always harbor resentment that his legacy was stolen from him.

When I was in college, after a summer working for my father, I wrote him a note explaining that though I understood his wish that I would take over his business at some point in my life, I did not believe that this would be a good fit for me and it would not be good for us if I were to set my sights on that goal.  This was deeply hurtful to him.  I did not know how deeply for years.  He only referenced it once.  And figuring out how to see each other outside of the narrow parameters that we had used proved to be a difficult, indeed a lifelong task.  I believe that, on some level, I regretted not having followed in his footsteps – it would have been a simpler life.  I could have been the mirror he wanted and needed me to be.  But, ironically, if we had worked together for thirty years, we never would have gotten to know each other in the ways that we did by my choosing not to follow his path.  Though I fear Kendell will never know that freedom, I think I was drawn to possibility that there would be some reconciliation - some way out of the mess that only got deeper and deeper the deeper we got into it.

 

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