Eddie S. Glaude Jr.’s Begin Again – An Odd Place to Learn about The Virtue of Trumpism

 Begin Again, Eddie Glaude, James Baldwin, Trump, Psychoanalysis of Racism, Psychology of Civil Rights

The Reluctant Wife asked that I read Eddie S. Glaude’s Begin Again because it is rich with psychoanalytic insight about Race and America without directly referencing psychoanalytic terms or concepts.  She thought it might be helpful to me as I struggle as an analyst to articulate how to understand Race in America.  As usual, she was right on the money.

Eddie Glaude is an African American professor at Princeton who has been puzzling, as many of us have been, over the rise of Trump.  He turned to James Baldwin’s path through the civil rights era and his navigation of those complicated waters as a guide to thinking about his own reaction to and experience of Trumpism.  Because this is a very personal narrative, it contains some of the perambulations and idiosyncrasies that writings of that sort, including this very blog, include.  Despite that, or maybe in part because of it, the book is a powerful reflection that gains momentum and power the deeper you get into it.

The original premise did not feel novel to me – The United States is founded on The Big Lie.  What is the big lie?  It is actually a whole bunch of lies, many of which are wrapped up in American Exceptionalism – that we are the land of the free and we are, first and foremost ethical, rule of law people where all creation is treated equally under the law.

Well, from the perspective of the white male, this may appear to be the case, but to maintain this lie requires a great deal of effort.  And, much later in the book, as he is describing James Baldwin’s series of exiles, it requires a kind of out of body experience.  In order to be the country we imagine ourselves to be, we have to overlook all kinds of things, like our treatment of African Americans and Indians over the last four or five hundred years. This parallels the psychological gymnastics we all need to engage in to maintain a sense of integrity despite our mistreatment of others (including by, sometimes, being too nice to them – putting women on a pedestal, for instance).  Closer to my home, psychologists might, for instance, need to interrogate their role in torturing detainees at Guantanamo Bay. 

Glaude makes the case that European Americans (white people) have been exiled from Europe and have continued to feel dislocated for our entire existence.  We have been fighting to show that we belong – perhaps.  We were, in the person of Hamilton, trying to create a monarchy, but this time to do it right.  Perhaps, and I will develop this later, we were trying to prove that we didn’t rely on Europe, but were independent – something that is an integral component of the Big Lie – that we are ready to move forward on our own.

Regardless of what is the case, we have dissociated ourselves from the messy, problematic aspects of our functioning from the very beginning.  The lie becomes that we knew what we were doing from the beginning, that we have always acted with integrity, and that we are continuing to do so today.

In the psychological world, the problem with self-analysis is that we can’t trust ourselves.  We necessarily tell the story in such a way that we are the heroes.  We did everything right.  And so we keep crashing ahead in our lives blindly assuming that we are doing things correctly, and that the world is messed up and not responding appropriately to our actions when it rejects us or tries to give us the message that we are not all that we have cracked ourselves up to be.

It takes a lot for us to go see someone else to help put ourselves right.  Trusting someone else to give us feedback about ourselves is a scary thing to do – are they really going to have our best interests in mind?  Can they accurately understand us?  In psychotherapy, we talk about this as the precontemplation stage of psychotherapy.  We aren’t even thinking about starting psychotherapy – why would we?  We are perfectly competent and able to manage things just fine, thank you very much.

The contemplation stage starts when cracks appear in that façade of self-righteous certainty.  We start to feel that maybe we aren’t so certain about the correct course of action to take.  Maybe we begin to realize that we are injuring people that we love.  We begin to question ourselves.  This is a critical moment that precipitates the contemplation stage.  Maybe we should do something differently.

Glaude doesn’t spend much time on this important developmental aspect of the civil rights movement.  The Brown vs. Board of Education decision (1954), the Civil Rights act (1964), and the Voting Rights Act (1965) were all responses to the realization that we had a flawed system.  Glaude references Baldwin as seeing that these were not going to be enough.  These were fix ups – in my therapy analogy, they were ways of staving off actually going into therapy and doing the work that we needed to do to undo the lie.  These were actions that allowed us to remain dissociated.

We have integrated our schools, we have made amends for past wrongs, and we have empowered the disempowered.  See, we are self-correcting!  We can be proud of ourselves for adhering to our values – for moving forward with integrity – as we have always done.  We fold the actions that we have taken in reaction to the big lie to actually reinforce that very same lie. 

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s non-violent movement was based on helping the white man see that he was violating his own principles in segregating blacks and then beating them and shooting fire hoses at them.  This movement was founded on the principle that the white man is, in fact, a moral person who wants to act in moral ways.  When we can illustrate his immorality, he will be appalled and work with us to fix that.

This led, in Baldwin and Glaude’s minds, to characterizing King and others in that generation as Uncle Toms.  White men are not, in essence, simply moral.  They are complex critters, as we all are.  They, no more than we, do not have to be perfect to be loved.  But neither they, nor we (as we imagine King), know that.  We are seeking a more perfect union.  And this perfection is likely to be the death of us all! 

Glaude’s position, following Baldwin, is that we need to leave the country to really see it.  When we are inside of it, even if we are feeling alienated, we cannot see the source of the alienation.  We need to enact our alienation by travelling elsewhere – we need to become exiles.  For Baldwin, this meant travelling to Paris, but also to Istanbul – to being in an entirely alien place where the language is unfamiliar and we can be isolated, from our own country and the country we are living in.

I think that what Glaude helped me see about Trump is that he has created the sense of isolation – the sense of being a foreigner in one’s own country.  We can’t believe that he was elected.  We can’t believe he is being nominated again after he made such a mess of things and led an insurrection.  He is a felon, for God’s sake, and sees himself as the anointed one.  What kind of country do I live in?

Glaude sees Trump as the second wave of defense against the reformation of our country that the Civil Rights movement promised.  When the Civil Rights movement collapsed, when Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. were assassinated, when the younger, more radical members of the movement were chased off or imprisoned by the FBI, when the faith in government was brought into question by Nixon’s actions, Glaude sees our choice to replace Carter with Reagan as the death knell to the possibility of having made the needed transition.

Electing Obama provided the possibility of moving in the direction of the transition, but instead it put into place our wish to return to the way things were, and Trumpism – the three nominations of the man, the first nomination of a convicted felon (something Glaude could not have foreseen when this book was published in 2020), clarify that a huge portion of our population endorses an abhorrent individual with abhorrent beliefs – but because of the popular support, they are not aberrant beliefs; they are widely held ones.

I have observed, by the way, in years of watching faculty votes on various issues that we generally act based on consensus.  Most of the time, when we vote on something, we all agree.  When we vote on something about which we are torn, this generally does not represent a true division among us, but the actual vote ends up being a measure of the aggregate individual ambivalence.  That is, if the vote is 6 to 4, we are, on average, leaning towards the measure with 60% of ourselves.  Of course, there is some variance – 4 of us were at least 51% opposed – but we are generally not divided.

The watch word currently is that our politics are very divided.  What this book is helping me see is that we are not as divided as we imagine.  We are torn.  Individually and collectively.  If Trump stands for the Big Lie, we are enticed by that lie – we want to believe it – and we recoil against it to varying degrees.

We want to believe that we have pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps (and don’t remember that MLK told us that it is cruel to expect someone without boots to do just that). We want to believe that we are rugged individualists – and we don’t want to acknowledge that we are also needy and want and need the nurturance and care of those (women and POC) who we say are dependent on us, to care for us.  Were we the essential workers?  Some of us, yes, but many of us were non-essential.  We want to get rid of the safety net, and are afraid to admit that without that net we will work ourselves to death out of fear that if we don’t have enough to last three lifetimes, no one will care for us.

Trump speaks to our insecurities in highly coded language.  We fear the outsider – the one who will come and take what we have away from us.  Of course, at the moment that I am writing this, Joe Biden is enacting that same fear.  He appears to no longer be as competent as he once was, and yet he believes that no one else can defeat Trump.  More to the point, he believes that he embodies the antithesis to Trump rather than being a participant in the Big Lie.  His position that he is the ONLY ONE that can beat Trump is a participation in this lie – though so was his handling of Anita Hill when she was testifying against Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court hearings.  It was painful to hear him try to articulate how a proper woman could possibly have heard the words “Long Dong Silver” by any other manner than to have Clarence Thomas utter them. 

Anita Hill was a woman in addition to being Black, part of what made her hard for Biden to manage.  James Baldwin was gay as well as Black.  Baldwin was arguing against identities, and I don’t mean to be pigeon holing him by articulating this identity, but clarifying that being this and that affords multiple perspectives from which to see things.  Glaude did not say this explicitly, and I am not familiar enough with Baldwin to know this, but the prejudice of blacks against homosexuality must have helped Baldwin see that Blacks participate in the big lie too – we all do.

In the book Don Quixote, the broken-down old man riding a broken-down nag with a dimwitted sidekick atop a donkey while simultaneously pining for a bartending prostitute imagines himself to be a young Knight Errant with a sprightly page by his side, fighting dragons on chivalrous behalf of his royal lady.  He is not defeated by the windmills he imagines to be the dragons, but by the knight of the mirrors.  Seeing himself as he actually is turns out to be more than he can bear.

Donald Trump’s mirror is not a funhouse distorting mirror, it is veridical picture of the aspects of ourselves that are (at least slightly uncomfortably) owned and acknowledged by half of us and but they are present (to some extent) but disowned by the other half who would distance themselves from Trump.  Glaude’s prescription – based on Baldwin – is that we should acknowledge that Trump is accurately portraying aspects of ourselves, and that when we come to own that vision as an aspect of ourselves we will have begun to be able to acknowledge the big lie and to have a more realistic self-appraisal. 

I think the question is, how close have we come to a tipping point?  I don’t think that we are ready to acknowledge the disavowed aspects of ourselves – those of us who are slightly on the Trump side of the divide disavow their attachment to the basic principles that Glaude and Baldwin would have us embrace – that we love all people because of their basic and shared humanity. 

Those of us who are never Trumpers – who feel alienated in our own country and are contemplating self-imposed exile if he is elected again - are defending against their disowned prejudice – but expressing it in their hatred and mistrust of Trump and his legions.

We are still in the contemplation stage.  We are not ready to acknowledge that we are imperfect – and loveable in spite of that imperfection.  We are not ready to love one another despite, or maybe even because of our differences.  We are not ready to remember what we have endured – the pain of being beaten, but also the pain of beating – and we are not yet ready to take to heart Baldwin’s message that the only value of that pain is to connect with the pain of the other so that we are not alone.

We are not yet ready to realize that, no matter how far away we get from this country, we carry it within ourselves.  That, at the end of the analysis, whether it is a psychoanalysis or a truth and reconciliation commission process, we are more like ourselves than not, but that we are more capable of accepting ourselves and others when we are able to acknowledge and bear our pain and use it is a conduit to be in contact with and care for others, while being open to being cared for ourselves.

In closing, I should acknowledge that when I talked through a version of this thesis with the Reluctant Wife, we switched roles.  She agreed with my belief (only after reading this book – I did not hold this before) that Trump is doing us a service by exposing our disavowed selves, but she does not imagine that we are ready to engage in the painful and difficult paradigm shift that this realization might precipitate. 

Realistically, I agree with her.  Nevertheless, I think that realizing that we need therapy – realizing that there is a significant problem – and realizing that WE need therapy – not that they need therapy – is a huge step.  I am, I suppose, a bit giddy at this realization, and, like the pageant queen’s promise to achieve world peace (or Trump’s platform plank plan to End Crime), I believe that, if I can see this, other’s can to.  A guy can dream… 

If that dream is to become a reality, we have to realize that the leadership that will lead to the solution is unlikely to come from a nationally acting leader – at least initially.  LBJ knew that the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were the right things to do (and the latter was certainly self serving), but he needed MLK to push him.  Could someone like Oprah push an agenda that would be palatable?  I’m not sure who is going to help the white man see himself – and help him realize that, despite the ugliness that is necessarily part of the picture, he is still lovable – more so for acknowledging the ways in which he is fallible, needy and aggressive.  Perhaps it will take a white man, one who is secure in his masculinity and aware of its limits as a means of engaging with and shaping the world.

After thinking about this overnight, I realized that while a leader or a group of leaders would be important, the important work has been done - curricula have been developed, books have been written.  Trumpers have tried to ban some of these books - sometimes successfully.  In my experience there is no more effective way to get someone curious about a book than to ban it.  I think that Trump's (or the 2025 project's - I'm not sure which) plan to do away with the Department of Education indicates just what a threat education is to repressing/suppressing/denying our history. 

Education is what is making our individual psyches cringe at a world that is and/or is not run by Trump.  Our ambivalence is fueled by what we are coming to know about ourselves - and would rather not, thank you very much.  Ultimately the changes that Glaude and Baldwin (and I) would hope for and aspire to will come not because a few leaders have convinced a few people, but because leaders have embedded leaders throughout the system, including in elementary school and junior high school and high school class rooms that espouse different approaches to the world - approaches that are more inclusive, less shaming, and more accepting of others, but also of ourselves.  These individuals go on to take government jobs, corporate jobs, and to move from the suburbs back to the city and to do so, we hope, with the intention of living with rather than displacing those who remained there (not always the case, I know, but someday we can hope that our children will be sitting in classrooms together connecting with each other, not because of a court mandate - which has not worked - but because we want them to).

The changes that are being talked about are both on a large political level, and, for them to succeed, they need to take place on the small individual level.  We need to wrestle with our racism, homophobia, and etc. on a global, but also on a very local level.  One of the revelations to me was that George Wallace, the racist governor of Alabama who was shot and paralyzed while running for president, had a personal transformation after he was shot.  He apologized for his racist past, ran for governor on a reform ticket, and was elected and placed qualified blacks in positions of leadership in his cabinet.  He was positively eulogized by leaders in the Civil Rights Movement.  This is an important part of Civil Rights story that should be more broadly known - we can reform ourselves!

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What is the threat that Neuropsychoanalysis poses?

 Neuropsychoanalysis, Mark Solms, Antonio Damasio, Threats to psychoanalysis, purity 

Neuropsychoanalysis is something that I am drawn to – I am a big fan of the Neurologists Mark Solms and Antonio Damasio; I think works like The Unconscious Id and The Hidden Spring enhance our understanding of the mind – and provide an empirical basis for some of Freud’s basic ideas, while extending and expanding them. 

But there are many who are unsettled by the assertions of Neuroscience.  They fear that neuropsychoanalysis will be a necessarily reductive undertaking, with the neuro part of the portmanteau overwhelming the psych(e) part of the neologism. 

This came to mind when I was listening to a podcasted reading of one of Freud’s Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; when Freud is describing the centrality of wish fulfillment in the interpretation of dreams.  Especially listening to his words being spoken in a slow and steady cadence and without a hint of defensiveness, I became aware that the roots of the concern about the relationship between biology and psychology run deep and are integral to Freud’s conception of the mind.

My own concerns – stirred by the objections of others – were soothed by a new appreciation of the model that Freud was working from – one that clarifies the ways in which he had to move from the topographic to the structural model of the mind and helped me also understand how the structural model (despite the criticism of authors like Phillip Adams) retains and even deepens the psychological complexity rather than mechanizing it.

I have not read the Introductory Lectures in decades.  Hearing them again, I realized that I did not get the intent of Freud’s telling a fairy tale – even though I very clearly remembered the fairy tale.  Just as Freud is about to explain how we arrive at the explanation of why and how wish fulfillment is at the base of “corrupted” dreams (dreams that don’t appear to be based in wish fulfillment), he breaks off to tell a delightful story.

A man and his wife are granted three wishes.  The wife, smelling sausages being cooked in the neighbor’s house, wishes she could have sausages, and they appear on a plate before them – and they have used one wish.  The husband, angry with the wife for using up one of the wishes, wishes that the sausages would hang from her nose – and of course they do.  Two wishes.  Of course, because they are hanging from her nose by magic, they can’t be severed, and because the man and his wife are actually a unit, they agree to use the third wish to remove the sausage from her nose.

Now when I read this the first time I was probably 20 years old and not very wise in the ways of the world.  I got stuck in an identification with the husband, and - I hate to admit this – didn’t see the necessity of removing the sausages from the wife’s nose.  In addition to this betraying something about the immaturity of my character, it led me to miss the point of the story.

Freud was explaining how the fulfillment of a wish for one person could bring unpleasure for the other, and then he clarified that we have multiple subcomponent parts that have separate and distinct agendas, but they are, ultimately, inextricably bound to each other: they are all part of the same mind.  The husband was meant to portray, essentially, part of the dreamer (his or her ego, let’s say), and the wife was another component (the id, let’s say).  Both of these parts are unconscious components of the person’s psyche.  And Freud acknowledges that his critics are going to have a field day with this.  Not only are the critics going to scoff at the idea of AN unconscious – he is now positing multiple unconscious elements!

As if this weren’t complicated enough, he then adds another metaphor.  Freud suggests that the creation of a dream involves a capitalist, who provides the wherewithal, and an entrepreneur, who pursues how to achieve the end that the capitalist has in mind.  He suggests that the feeling state forms the wish.  This is the latent content of the dream.  The entrepreneur constructs the dream to meet that wish – with the caveat that the construction likely needs to hide the actual intent of the wish fulfilling aspect from the censor.

Freud is saying that the entrepreneur, who is constructing the manifest content of the dream, can have all kinds of motives in his or her constructive process.  They may engage in a variety of problem-solving techniques, a warning, a reflection with “pros” and “cons”, but, he says, analysis always reveals that underneath these is a wish.  And the wish is generated in the immature part of the mind – the id.  This place that Solms and his colleagues have called the emotions.

The wish is the capitalist.  And the wish will out.  The entrepreneur, at least in this essay, is the day residue – the stuff that occurred in the day before sleeping.  This stuff from the day before becomes the building blocks that allow for the wish to be played out.  That said, the entrepreneur is also an active agent, the architect that arranges the building blocks, taking into account the building codes and the limitations of the site.

So, there is an emotional seat – a wish that is expressed by a feeling state – I want or need this.  The emotional seat is the core of the Latent Content of the dream.  But, the latent wish that I want fulfilled may be problematic for a number of reasons, and the entrepreneur/architect/dreamer must figure out how to construct a dream out of the available materials that will meet the needs of that underlying feeling state – that will, in a word, fulfill the wish – without tipping off to the censor that the wish has been granted, because the desire is disruptive.

Now Freud worked for a long time with only one drive – sexuality.  During the first world war, he was forced to add a second; he called it the death drive, but this morphed into an aggressive drive.  He was able to get pretty far with sex and aggression.  What the neuropsychoanalysts (and others) have added are a plethora of additional drives.

Using the work of Jaak Panksepp, Mark Solms has proposed that we have Seven Drives.  I think that this means that we have seven suspects for what may be driving the dream (and no one has said that only one can be in play – so I think we probably have seven factorial possibilities to consider).  So instead of a single capitalist, multiple capitalists are in play.

I think the emotional systems, in so far as they are universal in their functioning, would be the aspect of the “mechanism” of the mind that would be most concerning to those who object to neuropsychoanalysis.  They fear we would be reduce ourselves to these biological mechanisms that are driving our behavior (including our dream behavior – Freud generalized from dreaming to symptomatic and then to general behavior).  Even if we leave out the tremendous variation between people about the apparent strength of these drives and the manifold differential ways that they can be shaped by both biological and psychological genetics, the variety of possible combinations of drives bearing on any given behavior should give those with concern pause.  This is not a simple system.

The kicker, though, is that how we juggle those drives has everything to do with how we psychologically construct ourselves in the world.  Information comes in, managed psychologically.  I attend more to colors – you more to sounds; I listen for threat, you listen for warmth.  Our perceptions of the world are also determined by our biological and psychological genetics.  Once the perceptions have come in – once the day residue has occurred (in the case of dreams), the emotions drive the construction of those “facts” (and, of course, this happens on a moment to moment basis during the day – we may find ourselves “triggered” by this or that keyword or event, and we may experience (or not) the raw feeling erupt – or creep - through our defensively constructed exterior to assert itself).

This process of construction – while it takes place (when we are thinking as neuroscientists) in the brain, are determined by the psychological rules – the defenses, but increasingly analysts are recognizing, by the culturally formed aspects of our psyche – and we react based on an incredibly complicated and ever shifting algorithm.  Might we decode that algorithm someday?  Might we reduce ourselves to a program?

The aim of psychoanalysis has always been different than reduction (at least among its best practitioners).  The aim has been to recognize the patterns that are the result of the algorithm – to notice how they play out in various settings (including in the relationship with the analyst – the transference) – and to create a space where we can be curious about this and to interrogate it, while simultaneously practicing new ways of interacting – laying down new interactional patterns.

The neuropsychoanalytic contribution to the analytic process seems to be enhancing both the connection to the biological substrate, but also the psychological components.  I think it is also clarifying that the intermingling of the psychological and the biological is complex and, far from reducing us, it helps us appreciate our complexity, diversity, and the ways in which we are all derived from the same complex genus.

Freud’s wish at the beginning of this exercise, was to be able to describe human functioning as a result of neurology.  We might think of that as the wish of the housewife and neuropsychoanalysis is in the process of delivering this sausage on a plate.  Now we can either savor it – and incorporate it into the psychological structures that Freud was forced to elucidate when the neurology of his day was too primitive to describe the functioning of the mind, or we can wish it away – just have it hang from our noses – unintegrated, but also unremovable, when we will be forced to use our third wish to undo the mess (as we did with Freud’s wish to ignore any other empirical instrument than analysis to evaluate his hypotheses, letting that wish hang on our faces so long that we almost became irrelevant). 

Let’s learn from the past, embrace this new way of thinking and allow it to be another springboard to move our ideas forward.

  

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Amor Towles Table For Two: Is there room for reality?

 Amor Towles Table for Two Psychology Psychoanalysis Patriarchal Constraint

Amor Towles Table For Two: Is there room for reality?

Amore Towles is a clever and hardworking craftsman.  The short stories and the novella in this collection of works are as well-crafted as the studiolo he describes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Towles writes:

…The studiolo … is a rather unusual installation, even for the Met.  During the Italian Renaissance, it became quite popular for gentlemen of standing to have a private room in their home into which they could retreat.  In order to inspire creative meditation, these rooms were often decorated in a manner that celebrated the arts and sciences…. The Met’s studiolo is not much bigger that…[a] pantry…  its walls had been finished with an intricate design of inlaid woods that gave the appearance of cabinets filled with scientific devices, musical instruments, and books.  In the creation of this delightful illusion, the artist used over twenty species of trees and all the same tricks of perspective that were employed by the Renaissance painters.

The studiolo is used in this short story as the vehicle for helping the retired art dealer to change his nephew’s mind about the importance of sharing a piece of family art with the human community – a shift that will bring the art dealer a 25% commission.  Like many of the short stories here, and in general, this one hinges on the character of the art dealer, but also on the character of the nephew and the nephew’s family.  The art dealer, as a man of the world, is disdainful of the nephew’s character and that of his family.  They represent something that is out of his reach – human connection and even warmth, all while they are teetering on the edge of financial ruin, because they run their lives on principles that are “sweet”, but not serving them well.

Towles invites us to join with the crafty art dealer against the guileless family, all the while feeling that the crafty man is hollow, empty, and exudes a certain kind of out-of-date cool that we would admire if we weren’t, ourselves, feeling disdain for the erosion of the world around him and his own erosion at the center of that world.

The moral tension in this story is played out as a variation on a theme – in The Bootlegger – where the protagonist – in this case an Investment Banker (Towles profession before turning (back to) writing) – takes the moral high ground against a man who turns out to be engaged in a deeply moral – though illegal – activity. 

Spoiler alert: In each of these cases, the hollow shelled person ends up getting their comeuppance and all is put right in the world – but the heavy-handed morality that is dealt out – the sense of right and wrong – is so powerful that my guess about Towle’s former profession was that he was an attorney.

 Before leaving the short stories, I was surprised by the ending to one in particular.  It was a delightfully told story of a high-class man admiring a warm-hearted individual when they were stuck together when a snowstorm that shut down LaGuardia.  They got a room in town, started having drinks together, and because of the stranger’s warmth, there was quickly  a group of people surrounding them in the hotel bar having the best of times. 

By getting their cell phones mixed up, the high-class man started talking with the warm-hearted man’s wife in Chicago who was deeply concerned about her husband because he was an alcoholic who had been sober for a year, but clearly had just fallen off the wagon – hard.  It turns out that the warm-hearted/ husband/ alcoholic had recently started working in his father-in-law’s company and his wife was very concerned and instructed the high-class man in a very controlling way on how to control her out of control husband.

I was expecting, at the end of the story, that the high-class man (again the narrator) would tell us that it made sense with a wife that controlling her husband would lose control when he got a whiff of freedom, but the high-class man expressed envy of the warm-hearted/ husband/ alcoholic for having a wife who cared about him that much.

My objection is not that I’m right and Towles is wrong – it is that I think we are both right.  And I think that living within the strict guidelines that the wife (and the man’s alcoholism) dictate is difficult – and will have a good outcome because of her vigilance, but there will also be a cost.  In a word, the world is not as neat as the studiolo would suggest.  It is messy and complicated and there is much more ambiguity and confusion than the pat answer provides.

Which leads us to the Titular Novella.  A lovely compact piece, written in the style of Dashiell Hammet – a Noir crime thriller – but starring a woman as the mastermind who untangles the complicated actions of the sordid denizens of Hollywood in the late 1930s.  This piece is a page turner, not least because it includes Olivia DeHaviland as she prepares for her role in Gone with the Wind.

In my role as a psychologist, I have worked in forensic settings, in inpatient settings with hospitalized patients, and have seen many patients and supervised the work of many clinicians and consulted on cases in a wide variety of settings, but the most unusual individual that I have met was a friend of a friend.  The friend was in town for the weekend and I joined her when she called on her friend, an artist.  The artist and her husband ran the local art film house.  We went up to the apartment the artist shared with her husband.  It was actually two apartments that had been put together – and it had two kitchens – a regular kitchen and her poison kitchen where she was baking her current art.

She was a feminist who was interested in the history of women’s rights and she discovered that, when women could not divorce or if they could divorce, they would be forced to live without adequate support, their recourse was often the use of poison.  To publicize this sad state of affairs, she would bake arsenic cakes and publicly display them.  When asked if I wanted anything to eat or drink, I politely begged off.

The strong woman – Evelyn – at the center of the story Table for Two, is both self-possessed and unmoored.  Having called off a marriage (again, this is the 1930s) in New York, she travels back home to Chicago, but at the last minute decides to continue on the train to LA.  Along the way she meets an ex-cop who teaches her how to use a Mickey.  She uses this weapon twice to protect Olivia DeHavilland (and the second time, herself), and she supports both herself and DeHavilland becoming as free as they are able to be in a patriarchal society.

Evelyn/ Eve’s struggles are, I think, a version of Towles’ struggles.  On his website, Towle states that he was recognized for his writing ability when he was an undergraduate at Stanford, and pursued a Master’s in writing at Yale, but became an Investment Banker at his father’s insistence.  After he became “fabulously wealthy”, he returned to the writing craft. 

Towles writes of the wealthy and of Eve’s wish to visit monuments, but then points out, “True, the men who had built these monuments (or, rather caused them to be built) were gone….  For the world to have any sense of justice, a team of artisans had to come forward with their hammers and their paintbrushes and pumice stones in order to patiently unmake the palaces of the proud.”

Towles should have added pens to his list of tools that the artisans would wield.  What is interesting about him as an artist, I think, is that he would deconstruct the world that he has inherited, but he is very ambivalent about his role in doing that.  His identification is with the very world he would deconstruct – not just because he is a member of the monied class, but because he believes that the world should be an orderly place.  He states that he labors over his stories, writing detailed outlines of them so that they are as tight as a drum.  I imagine that, on some level, he is threatened by the possibility that someone would find his stories to anything less than extremely well crafted.  In a word, I wonder if he is afraid to be vulnerable.

I am not criticizing him for this.  In fact, I empathize with his position.  I blog anonymously for many reasons, but one of them, surely, is that I am uncomfortable with how others might critically appraise my criticism.  I, like Towles, am a member of the patriarchy.  If we are to unmake the palaces of the proud – if we are to create an inclusive world in which the contributions of all are recognized – and recognize that the efforts of all are necessary for us to create the monuments of which we can all be proud, we need to figure out how to unmake and remake ourselves. 

This is a complicated task.  It might be the work of our mature selves rather than our younger selves.  We may need to spend the better part of our lives reinventing ourselves – and support the next generation's efforts to do that as well.  What we venerate, what we hold dear, are the very things that we need to question.  And it is not so much the products that we need to remake, but the way we make the products, and that is a scary proposition, because it means leaving behind what we know will work and moving towards doing things in ways that are novel and uncomfortable.  We need to support each other as we do this – both by acknowledging that we are turning the ship – as I think Towles is doing – and by pointing out that there is a lot more turning to be done for Towles and for all of us.

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Hit Man: Is it a Good Film or a Bad Film?

 

Hit Man, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Morality, Justice, Personal Growth, Complications, Simple Solutions

One of my graduate school roommates asked me to weigh in on the question of whether Hit Man is a good film or not.  He liked the film.  A lot.  Our other roommate couldn’t stand it.  The one who liked it wants me to tip the scales. 

I think this is – if we leave aside the perils of siding with one friend over the other – a reasonable request.  All three of us were graduate students together, all three of us have become teachers – each in our discipline, and this film is about a teacher and his development into becoming a better teacher.

Shouldn’t this be a film that appeals to us?  Why is our third roommate so recalcitrant?

“Wait”, you say (or I did as I was watching it), “Hit Man is about a college professor?  How can that be?”

The secret to this film (spoiler alert) is that there are no hit men in the real world.  They only exist in Hollywood movies.  So, when, in real life, someone asks around for a hit man, somebody lets the police know that there is a potential murderous impulse out here, and the police set the would-be killer up – they use a sting or catfishing operation and an officer pretends to be the hit man and, when the unsuspecting murderous person clarifies that they really do want the “hit man” to kill someone else, the police arrest the person for intending to murder someone, and there is a trial.

Ah, good, we say.  The police have performed a service.  They have prevented a murder that otherwise might have happened. 

Let me come back to that later.

In the film, our friend the professor – Gary Johnson (Played by Glen Powell who also co-wrote the screenplay with Richard Linklater who, in turn, was the Author of another film that, like this one, was loosely based on the story of an actual human: Bernie), works for the cops part time and listens in while these sting operations are going on.  He is not a police officer, but is doing part time work sitting in a van monitoring the catfishing conversations.

In real life, Gary is dull as dishwater.  He bores his students.  He bored his ex-wife (with whom he is still friends – she didn’t leave him because she hated him, she left him because he was remote and unavailable – and therefore unloving - and she wants him to become more interesting - and interested).  Gary bores all the other members of the “hit man” team.  He is a sad sack. 

Actually, I kind of liked Gary the teacher at the beginning.  He was passionate about his field.  A little clunky in his delivery – but desperately trying to get his students to engage.  And they wouldn’t.  Instead they made fun of him.  The most cold-hearted line was, “This guy drives a Civic.”

And I resemble that remark.  OK, I never drove a Civic, but I do believe that cars are a means to get from here to there.  I think the life of the mind is what matters, and this is very uncool – especially with students who like hot cars and basketball games; these students cringe when they hear me talk about Plato and Freud while I am wondering just what it is that they came to college for…

And I resemble Gary in being more than a little bit dweeby.  His cats are named Ego and Id.  He lives in a nothing little place.  But he cares about ideas.  I would even hazard that all three of us ex-roommates are, at moments, more than a little like Gary. 

The roommate who is enthusiastic about the film is a poet.  He does public readings of his poetry with a Jazz band accompanying him.  He is hip – but some of his students must find him retro hip – and therefore dweeby?

As for the naysayer, the essayist and journalism teacher, is it possible he feels the resemblance too closely?  He is, I think, the coolest of the three of us. He is handsome, easygoing, and good at connecting with people – so he might be the one most vulnerable to a shadow side identification – his coolness just might betray his discomfort with his inner dweeb.

(The moral of the above two paragraphs, btw, is: don’t invite a psychoanalyst to a knife fight – he can cut in ways that leave no visible means of entry).

(Of course, the countervailing concern is that Philip Roth’s analyst wrote a thinly veiled description of him – and then Roth responded in kind.  The writer sliced the analyst to pieces – I may just have created my own soon to be demise).

The low production value of this film is, I think, intentional.  I think it is supposed to feel like a bad 1960s cop show.  Or maybe 70s, 80s or 90s.  Think Dragnet meets Hawaii 5-O or Magnum PI.  It is set in New Orleans – that sea of bad juju -   and the sets are mostly shotgun houses, strip malls, juke joints and a police station that looks like it is in an old house.  This is not the touristy side of New Orleans, but the grittier side.  We are immersed in a desultory sea of humanity.

Meanwhile, Gary’s ex-wife (now pregnant with her new husband) is encouraging him to become someone, anyone; to try on an identity and see if he can live his way into being a new person, and, by doing this, transcend his own desultory, drab existence and become someone who can love and be loved.

So, when the policeman who portrays the hitman is unexpectedly suspended from the force right before a sting, Gary is forced to impersonate a hit man because no one else is available, and it turns out he has a knack for it.  In the conversation with the sap, Gary adds in gruesome details about disposing of bodies and transitions from dweeb to ghoul convincingly enough to get the sap to say the words that get him arrested and, ultimately, thrown in the pokey.  And Gary is drafted into the position as a regular replacement while the regular is forced to take time off for having perpetrated acts of violence.

Not surprisingly, this subplot plays out like Wally Pipp taking the day off and having Lou Gehrig upstage him.  The cop being replaced, though, isn’t as gracious as Wally; he holds a grudge and shows up later to exact revenge.

Gary takes to this new opportunity with gusto.  He begins researching the potential saps and becomes the type of hit man he imagines the saps are looking for.  He impersonates a Russian Thug, a woman, but most centrally he not just impersonates but becomes “Ron” – the kind of cool, devil may care, aggressive man that would be the hero that a wounded bird would be looking for.

When “Ron” meets the wounded bird, she is named Madison (Adria Arjona) and she is being held hostage by a mean and vindictive husband.  Hiring a hit man is, as Glen Powell notes in an interview, a simple solution to a complex problem. 

Getting a woman out of a relationship with an abusive man is complicated and difficult.  Cities have built safe houses to protect these women.  I have worked in cities where I am not allowed, as a mental health professional, to know where these safe houses are because I am a man.  Sometimes when a woman leaves an abusive relationship, the man seeks her out and tries to win her back through intimidation and/or force.  Also, once out, the women, who are frequently deeply attached to the men in addition to wanting out, act on their ambivalence by returning. 

When “Ron” meets Madison, instead of closing the deal, he takes pity on her.  There is a sense that justice will not be served by sending the wounded bird to prison, and he talks her out of hiring him.  And, it just so happens that, as “Ron”, he is just the kind of badass that a wounded bird would be attracted to. 

The strength of this film is that it, like Bernie, tells the story of an average man - someone who is struggling to move ahead in a mediocre world without much heft, but someone who is essentially decent and quiet and weighs weighty problems as if they are theoretical, not the actual problems of living a life - who gets caught up in a web outside his control, and it is the story how he responds to reality intruding into his safe and protected version of life.

One of the holes in this story is that Madison evokes a different reaction from Gary than any of the others.  We see him in court, testifying about the murderous intent of the people he has entrapped.   He is judgmental about and contemptuous of the people who opt for the simple solutions to difficult problems; including the woman who wants to off her husband and offers to take a subtly different version of "Ron" – a kind of sleazy countrified hit man – on as a boy toy.  Of course, this woman is not as attractive as Madison…

The holes here are multiple.  Gary is a guy who is philosophical and, I think, interested in Justice.  He wants to do what is right.  And yet he doesn’t consider that (all of) the other folks might be overwhelmed by the circumstances they are facing and want an easy way out, one that will lead to huge complications (including their own jail time - a simple solution that introduces multiple complications into people's lives...). 

Hmm…  Am I proposing that the police should be a social service agency, helping those who are down and out rather than hustling them off to the pokey?  I think Gary should be contemplating this question, regardless of whether I believe it or not.  Or rather, he should be contemplating it in cases beyond the one involving the drop-dead gorgeous woman.

If I were to contemplate it for a moment, I would propose that the legal system is proposing a simple solution to a complex problem when they arrest the person who is mad enough to try to hire a person to solve the problem with murder.  The solution the legal system proposes is to jail the person who can’t figure out another way to solve the problem.

At the risk of overgeneralizing, isn’t this what the legal system does in general?  Isn’t this what dichotomous solutions do in general?  In the legal system, one person is at fault, the other is a victim.  Isn’t that solution usually (though not always) problematic?  Isn’t it more complicated than that that?

In the field of psychology, the hardline psychologists, in attempting to make psychology a “hard” science, demand that we only accept certain kinds of evidence of, for instance, the effectiveness of psychotherapy treatments.  The intent here is to eliminate the kind of bias that can creep in when we evaluate treatments using other means.  Guilty as charged.  But if we restrict ourselves to only one kind of evidence, or one way of “proving” something, another kind of bias creeps in – a bias that prevents us from using our whole selves to engage with each other and our functioning becomes mechanical – hardly a useful way to treat another human being.

OK, to return to the film, Hollywood demands that beauty allows for empathic connection and ugliness does not.  “Ron” falls for the pretty girl.  And he recognizes that her situation is more complicated, in part because she presents it as being so simple.  I get that.  Without dropping too many more spoilers, suffice it to say that some pretty predictable complications arise when Madison looks up “Ron”.  And also a pretty thin happy ending is eked out (I don’t think that is a spoiler – this movie has the kind of Magnum PI vibe that promises that we will feel good at the end of it).

The irony here is that Madison’s entry into “Ron’s” life significantly complicates Gary’s life as well.  The complications are, I believe, what end up making Gary a more interesting person – not his impersonations of others.  It is that he, as Gary, has to acknowledge his commitment to Madison and act on that commitment in ways that are, well, complicated.  They go against the basic principles that would protect dweeby Gary from ever causing anyone any harm – but would also keep him from causing others to be interested in him. 

Not so much because he engages in heinous actions (which he does), but because he become active.  The things that he is talking about in class are no longer esoteric academic exercises that he drily describes, they are lived and applied principles that he helps his students wrestle with using real life scenarios, and his female students wonder when he became hot.

Simple Gary was aesthetically admirable, but he was also a hermetically sealed character leading a nothing life.  Complicated Gary is reprehensible, but daring – and, more than that, passionate and passionately engaged in living. 

One of the complexities of the film (I am being generous here) is that Gary develops unevenly.  He is, in fact, attractive as well as dweebish in the beginning.  He is also compassionately engaged – with his students, and with animals as well as humans before his conversion.  Generously, then, Gary is portrayed as discovering his true self as he explores the character of “Ron” – his alter ego (or, to use the black board example he offers the class, his Jungian shadow self).

Frankly, though, the charismatic edges that shine through Gary’s pre-transition character seem more like the actors natural charisma bleeding through – and we could judge this as a failure on the director and actor’s part to help the actor fully channel a dweeb.  The dweebs that I see transition in therapy do that much more subtly, but every bit as tectonically as the film portrays.  The introduction of the heinous action on Gary’s part – something that was not part of the life of the person the film is based on – seems, then, gratuitous and part of the over inflation that the film engages in to make a point.

So, where do I land?  This is decent entertainment.  It helped me pass the time.  It was thought provoking.  How does a person become someone else?  Does imitation lead to internalization?  Can Gary become “Ron” by playing him?  Or is it in the action of truly becoming “Ron”, not playing him, that Gary is transformed?

Ultimately I have been asked a dichotomous question about a film that appears to be more complicated than it was at first glance.  Is this a good or a bad film?  YES!

  

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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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