Anton Kris on Learning and Unlearning - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Goes to a Seminar

Friday night Anton “Tony” Kris came to town to talk about psychoanalysis.  Dr. Kris is an interesting person for a number of reasons, not least of which is that his mother was Marilyn Monroe’s second analyst – who referred her to Ralph Greenson, her final, controversial analyst who became overly involved in Marilyn's life – and death.  But Tony was here to talk about something else – the learning and unlearning that is necessarily a part of becoming a psychoanalyst.

There is much to unlearn in becoming a psychoanalyst.  The analytic interaction is a weird one.  You, as a helping person, sit behind a couch and relatively silently listen as someone talks about what comes to mind.  You generally try to help them explore the depths of their feelings – despair, fear, pain – without trying to talk them out of them, or to tell them that things will be better – perfectly natural human responses that we have overlearned, especially if we are helping professionals.  Instead of reassuring our patients, we try to help them understand the roots of these dark, difficult feeling states, offering hypotheses about what has lead to them as a means of helping them becoming freer – less bound by the past, and also by the fear of having these states jump up unbidden when they talk or think about or run into something that threatens to expose them.

So, to become analysts, we have to unlearn responses that are so powerfully learned that they seem reflexive.  And, while Dr. Kris wanted us to appreciate this, he really wanted us to appreciate that we also have to unlearn what we have come to know – to inherit – from our psychoanalytic fathers and mothers.  We have to discard the foundations of our psychoanalytic knowledge because they are, in a word, wrong.  He gave seven examples of foundational assertions that Freud and his followers made that we have learned that we must discard.  These included: Specifics about the early growth and development of the human psyche and how that is tied to erogenous zones – the oral, anal and phallic; the idea that it is sex and/or food that we want, not attachment; ideas about women’s psychological functioning; etc. (Another thing that we may have to give up is the idea of gender being binary and immutable).

He maintained that this unlearning is very difficult for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that we have learned them from people we revere in the context of intense relationships.  Psychoanalytic training includes three parts:  Classroom work reading texts with teachers; clinical supervision with analysts; and a personal analysis of the analyst by a senior analyst that lasts for years.  Each of these sources get stamped on us – on our analytic identity – in ways that we understand and in ways that we don’t.  Each of these people – our teachers, supervisors and analysts – was formed, in turn, by their own teachers, supervisors, and analysts.  And they were wrong.  They were also right in some very important ways.  They helped us tremendously.  Our teachers helped us understand difficult texts and master concepts that guide the work we do; our supervisors helped us understand our patients and how to helpfully , if counterintuitively , intervene; and our analysts helped us not only with sorting out our own lives, but by modeling how to do an analysis – both well and poorly. 

Dr. Kris gave an example from his own experience of having visited upon one of his analysands a poor interpretation that came directly from his own first analyst.  With the help of a sensitive and careful supervisor, he was able not only to see that this had happened, but to discover a fruitful way of intervening.  And he proposed that this is the general model for unlearning – to observe, together with another person, the ways in which what we have done has not been useful.  Indeed, this is the model for analysis itself.

The upshot of all this was that we should be altering our curricula.  We should not be teaching what Freud wrote, and then teaching our current theory as edits upon that (which is what we do) because it is not true.  We believe that the mind, the psychoanalytic process; indeed being human, are fundamentally different than what Freud believed them to be.  So we should teach what we know now – all the while knowing that it will be superseded – knowing that it is wrong – knowing that it will have to be unlearned by those we are teaching.  And yet we teach this foundation – this new place on which we stand – as the starting point.  We also need to teach what Freud said – and what he believed.  We need to help our students learn to decode, to decipher, to unearth the roots of what we believe and to understand how earlier folks have gotten us to the point where we currently stand.

Tony made an interesting comment – that we don’t know enough about unlearning.  I think that, in his model, our learning is intimately tied to relationships.  Cognitive psychologists have long distinguished between episodic learning – what happened today – from semantic learning – the learning of facts and figures.  They believe that there are two separate systems for these two types of learning.  Perhaps because of the method of learning – psychoanalysts are home-schooled if you will – these types of learning overlap in ways that are powerful – we learn to function as our analytic parents did, something that helps us overcome the powerful identifications with our birth parents – but this has its own costs as well – we can become complacent in our execution and understanding of psychoanalysis.  We can quit trying to learn from other fields or from new voices within our own field.  (A few years after I wrote this, Mark Solms pointed out that the semantic learning - the learning of doing - is very hard to learn (think of dribbling or shooting a basketball) but also very hard to unlearn).

The work of an analyst, just like the work of a teacher, a parent or a change agent of any sort, is difficult because we have to confront the status quo – to acknowledge it and its benefits, but to propose an alternative that, we believe, will work better.  This requires that we have our feet firmly planted in the place that we want to help people to move to – even in a process as open ended and unsure of a destination as analysis itself.  We need to be open to ambiguity, to paradox, and to our own shortcomings and blind spots, while advocating for a method of exploration and some fundamental building blocks of that method.  We are, in the words of the philosophers, forever in a state of becoming.

The tool that we use to move the process forward is to offer a new alliance, a new relationship, that can serve as a way station towards achieving a new foundation, a new mode of operating, that will serve our clients better.  This involves a continuous chain of attachment to new figures at the cost of giving up some of the deeply held, but on some levels false attachments to older figures.  We are forever connecting in new relationships and mourning the loss of old connections if we are continuing to grown and change.  We are also preserving aspects of those old relationships, necessarily.  They are the bedrock on which the foundation is built.  Tony expressed concern that, when that bedrock is flawed by trauma - by unprocessable aspects of the relationship - he feared that we may not be able to give up that initial, flawed identification - that we may not be able to separate from original connections that were too damaged themselves.

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

 

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), if you are on a computer, hit the X button on the upper right of this screen and, on the subsequent screen, hover your cursor over the black line in the upper right area and choose the pop out box that says subscribe and then enter the information.  I'm sorry but I don't currently know how you can subscribe from a mobile device - hopefully you have a computer as well...

The Hunger Games- The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Goes to a Popular Movie

My son and stepdaughter have both read the first two of the three Hunger Games books.  Last night my stepdaughter who had already seen the movie was sick on a night the family had planned to go to the movies.  So my son and I went to see The Hunger Games.  I knew from the commercials and from what the kids had said that this would be a bloody and – if this distinction can be made – violent odyssey.  I anticipated that it would be grim and that I might find myself hating the ways in which I would be drawn into a post apocalyptic spectacle.  Instead I found it to be a delightful, if as bloody as advertised, coming of age movie that rang truer to my current personal experience than I would have expected.

The premise of the movie is that two children are chosen from each of twelve districts to represent those districts in an annual reality show akin to Survivor – except that here those who don't survive do, in fact, die, - frequently killed by the other "players" who are armed with weapons to murder each other.  The premise had been aired in  commercials that gave the impression that there was a sado-masochistic relationship between an all-powerful elite and a destitute and disabled set of underlings.  And yes, this movie does explore that, but it equips the underlings – not with masochistic tendencies (OK, some of them have those), but with skills and more importantly virtues that contrast with the morally vacuous standing – and just simple cunning – of the tyrants. 

This, then, is a story of good versus evil, but with a twist.  One of the good guys wants to “win”, not by surviving, but by retaining his integrity, by not letting the bad guys alter his essential approach to living.  His partner – and it is complicated but also necessary to have partners in a fight to the death – cannot retain her integrity if she or they are to survive.

On a much less life and death scale, I feel like I have been fighting the institutional hierarchy to wrest from them the necessary resources to have my program survive.  Simultaneously, and in ways that are apparently unrelated, the President has decreed that employees of the institution will no longer have birth control covered by our health insurance.  In both cases I feel firmly on the higher moral ground (and there is more than a little irony there) and thoroughly outgunned.  And the struggle to use what weapons I have available to me – including allying myself with entities that do not have my interests in mind, dovetails more neatly than I had imagined into the plot of the movie.

On the analytic front, I have been reading the works of Donald Winnicott.  He was a British Physician, originally trained as a pediatrician, who used his insights about kids and parents to help psychoanalysts learn how to set up the treatment space as a play space – an idea first introduced by Freud (since writing this I have learned that Freud's space was actually a little more like a battleground than a playground).  But Winnicott clarified in an essay about location of cultural space that the play space is a space that is intermediate between the external, outside space of action – the behaviorally determined space of reacting to a world that evokes behaviors – and the cerebrally determined internal space of the mind – a space that pulls us to withdraw into its infinitely compelling dreams, fantasies, and constructions. 

Winnicott’s position is that we need to find a space to play – a space to engage both behaviors and fantasies – to engage simultaneously with ourselves and with others – in order to integrate ourselves and to discover who it is that we are.  He proposes neither that the unexamined life is not worth living, nor its opposite, that the unlived life is not worth examining, but a dialectical fusion of these ideas – that the well lived life involves engaging both our private, internal, vulnerable selves and our external, active, powerful selves in a stimulating, fun, engaging middle ground where we play, feel, and touch each other while also remaining connected with those aspects of ourselves that can’t be seen touched or felt by others.

The intersection, then, of the movie with my world is just such an interstitial space.  It allows me to imagine my vulnerable self - the one that is beset by the administration - endowed with powers - to shoot an arrow, to run fast and hide, to retain my integrity, that will allow me not just to best the other lower level administrators that I am pitted against, but to expose the corruption of the higher administration.  My sense from the excitement of both my son and stepdaughter about this movie is that it is connecting with a similar space for them – it may mirror for them the struggles that they have against oppressive others like their parents or school authorities, or whoever it is that would tell them to march to the beat of an external drummer while they are feeling within themselves their own pulse and there own pace, which in turn is what the movie is portraying being enacted by the protagonists, each in his or her own way.

The Hunger Games’ Chief oppressor uses the games to maintain dominance and is very aware of the potential for the games to empower those he enslaves.  The victor from years past from our hero's district, now dissolute perhaps from guilt, who is an assigned mentor and who responds to the capacities of this year’s crop of a boy and a girl "tribute" from his district (the participants in the games) becomes transformed and genuinely supports them as he gains hope that they will actually win.  The two star crossed tributes – he who has the luxury to love wholeheartedly and thereby to retain his integrity, she who has greater obligations that necessitate compromise (compromise that, because of the politics of power, my son assures me will lead to unimaginably more awful consequences than any victory could ensure – but he has read the second book…); each of the principle characters is playing with the intersection of their internal world with the world that they encounter.  And each achieves a particular outcome with its own consequences.

My issues of supply have not yet been resolved.  I have lost some of my dignity, if not my integrity, already in what looks like it will become a prolonged battle.  We will see whether one can retain integrity and win the battle, despite what the Hunger Games proposes.  We will also see how the birth control issue gets resolved.  Our President, and his bishop, are attempting to enforce on us what the church has been unable to enforce on their own parishioners.  If those who are most educated and most devout are most likely to use contraception within the church, I think the bishop and my President – who I believe has lost credibility as a Jesuit by trying to impose health benefits that do not include birth control on faculty and staff who come from many faith traditions – will not win the war with this faculty.  But again, the Hunger Games, at least through two volumes, would suggest otherwise. 

I will ask my son and stepdaughter to get to work on the third volume while I continue tilting at the windmills of academe…

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

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), if you are on a computer, hit the X button on the upper right of this screen and, on the subsequent screen, hover your cursor over the black line in the upper right area and choose the pop out box that says subscribe and then enter the information.  I'm sorry but I don't currently know how you can subscribe from a mobile device - hopefully you have a computer as well...

American Pastoral - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reads a Pulltzer Prize Winning Classic

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Telephone Treatment - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Earns Continuing Education Credit

A couple of weeks ago I went to a Mandatory Continuing Education workshop.  Now, I didn’t have to go to this particular workshop – it is mandatory that I receive 20 hours of continuing education every two years, and three of those hours have to be in the area of ethics in order to maintain my license in psychology.  This workshop offered the needed ethical credit, and it was on an area that has been of great interest to me: Provision of psychological treatment via phone and the internet.

I have wandered into providing service via phone and email as many of my peers have done, a little bit at a time, reading as I go along, but also finding that the literature on treating at a distance is evolving, just as my practice is.  That said, I have always provided psychological services at a distance.  My very first training in the field was when I was in High School and I was a volunteer at a community mental health agency and I was trained on a suicide hotline.  I don’t think I fielded a crisis call during that stint, but I certainly fielded many during my next paraprofessional tour of duty in a halfway house for runaway teenagers when I was evaluating, after college and before graduate school, whether this really was the profession for me.

As a psychologist in training, then as a psychologist in practice, I fielded many calls – from clients asking about entering treatment to calls from established clients in crisis.  I have always felt comfortable using the phone.  It creates a particular kind of intimacy – a closeness and a safety – the safety of not being in another’s presence, that seemed to be actually quite psychoanalytic in nature.  If the couch is intended, in part, to relieve both analyst and analysand of being concerned with the other’s facial expression, if it is further intended to help the analysand construct the analyst as he or she will, doesn’t the phone do that to even greater levels?

So, when an analysand proposed meeting by phone during a period of travel, it seemed to make sense to me to try it and to see how it went.  And the answer, in so far as such things can be answered, seemed to be a mixed bag.  In some ways, there was that increased sense of intimacy – there was a sense of closeness.  On the other hand, I did not always know where we were meeting and sometimes that didn’t seem to be well thought out by the analysand and we needed to work on setting up appropriate places to meet.  More importantly, there was an interaction between what was talked about and whether we were talking in person or on the phone.  And it seemed like there were times when the analysand chose to set up the meeting by phone – for instance when there was particularly difficult material to discuss – as if being in the same room to talk about it would make it more difficult to address.  We were able to talk about this part of the process and to discover that it sometimes seemed to be the case that our difficult meetings were not consciously planned by phone but seemed instead to “work themselves out” in relation to unconscious motives.

I was fascinated by the interaction of the phone and motivations and talked with some of my peers who had been or were doing some of their own analyses by phone because they were commuting for training.  They resonated with the experience of my analysand and I and I briefly considered doing some research to investigate how the work of various analyst/analysand pairs was affected by including the phone as a means of doing the work.  I did not complete this project, but did some reading about the burgeoning field of telephone analysis and telephone psychotherapy more generally, so it was with some interest that I attended this workshop.

The workshop was led by the executive director of our state board of psychology and a member of the state psychological association who specializes in the use of technology in the practice of psychology (I consider both of them friends of mine).  After reviewing the evolution of phone, email, and other electronic communication use in psychological practice, the presenters noted that laws have not kept up with the spread of communication devices as a therapeutic modality.  They reviewed new laws that our state has put in place to protect the consumer of psychological practice – in particular, anyone treating someone who is currently in our state (whether they reside here or not) can only be treated by someone who is licensed in this state.   The intention of the law is to protect residents of the state from being harmed by someone practicing somewhere else and the citizen of our state having no recourse in case of malpractice.  The effect of this on the group was a little different, however.

The group, all practicing psychologists, began to fear that they would soon be breaking the law if they were to talk with their patients who were travelling in other states – or if the patient moved to another state and they continued to meet by phone.  As the person sitting next to me noted, the room began to be dominated by a powerful emotion: fear.  We all became psychologists for many reasons – but, I think especially when we were younger and more idealistic, foremost among those was the wish to help others.  From this perspective, a license to practice psychology was a means to do good.  It was like a driver’s license to a sixteen year old, an emblem of freedom – but in the case of the psychologist’s license, it is the freedom to provide useful and needed treatment.  Now, of course, it is and was also a means to a livelihood.  We anticipated that we would be able to charge for our services or be hired by an agency to provide them and this would become our livelihood.

In the group at the workshop (and I count myself in that group) it was the latter motivation that was dominant – and the resulting emotion – fear that our livelihood would be taken away – came to dominate our experience and our conversation.  We were consumed by the fear that we would do something wrong – illegal – and lost sight of the telephone and the internet as a means to more broadly do good works.  We were afraid that we would break the law – and also disdainful of the “counselors” that were called up on people’s smartphones who stood ready to provide counseling at rates that would be charged to a credit card by the minute.  While I share some skepticism about how useful that therapy “by the minute” might be, I must acknowledge that this may be a way of delivering service that is more in step with our current culture than I am comfortable admitting.  While it takes McTherapy to a whole new level, could it be that this is an entry point to the mental health field, a field that can be notoriously difficult for “consumers” to navigate?  Could reasonable referrals be made from such a means of being available?  While I am skeptical, I also wonder about the possibilities.  And more importantly, I am concerned that, once we have created a safe way of doing things, that we become closed to new and innovative means of addressing mental health needs.

When Freud shifted from applying mild electric currents to his patients’ numb arms and legs to asking them to tell him what came to their minds about their symptoms, this was a revolutionary shift in our approach to treating conversion disorders.  We now have very powerful treatments – and thus also the means of inflicting harm.  We need to protect our patients, but we also have an obligation to figure out ways of delivering the services that we offer to those who need them in ways that will work best for them.  It will be interesting to see how we move into this brave new world – and how we will balance our fears for our citizens and our fears for our livelihoods with our concerns for our citizens’ best interests and with using our license to work for those interests.    

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

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), if you are on a computer, hit the X button on the upper right of this screen and, on the subsequent screen, hover your cursor over the black line in the upper right area and choose the pop out box that says subscribe and then enter the information.  I'm sorry but I don't currently know how you can subscribe from a mobile device - hopefully you have a computer as well...

The Invention of Lying - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Goes to the Movies:

What would it be like to live in a world where everyone told you exactly what they thought?  The Invention of Lying, a sleepy little 2009 comedy by Ricky Gervais (He co-wrote, directed and starred in it) has this interesting premise and an uneven delivery.  I will focus more on the premise: that a world could exist where people never speak anything but the truth; and almost compulsively tell you what they actually think, and where they never lie for any reason.  This would, I believe, create a world that is profoundly different than ours.  The film highlights differences in this strange world, but does not follow all of them to what I believe to be their logical conclusions.   In part to make the story easier to tell, it is set in a world that looks very much like ours – indeed that shares much of our history and many of our commercial products (A sample commercial runs something like this: “Buy Coke.  It is just colored sugar water and it is bad for your health, but it tastes good and has little bubbles.  It hasn’t been improved, but we did put Polar Bears on the can so that your kids would be drawn to it.”  The counterpoint ad on a bus: “Pepsi: when there is no Coke.”)

The world that is portrayed in the film, then, is similar to ours but drab.  Because no one can lie, there is no fiction.  So the movies are all boring documentaries.  The protagonist is a documentary writer who is assigned to write about the 1300s, a particularly boring century.  Further, he is not good looking and everyone he runs into comments on this, including the woman whom he takes out on a first date.  She tells him about his having a nose that is particularly unattractive within the first minutes of meeting him and states that she will go out with him essentially out of mercy but that there is no chance of either a second date or of sex.

Psychologically, this set of premises creates a world that supports a depressive mindset.  By this I mean not that it is a depressing world, but that it is a world in which people know how others actually perceive them.  In our early work with people diagnosed with depression, clinicians took the approach that depression was distorting their perceptions and that they imagined that things were worse than they actually are.  Empirical studies, however, provide evidence that when we are depressed we are more likely to accurately perceive the world around us.  To turn this around: being psychologically “healthy” requires a bit of self delusion – believing that I am attractive, smart and witty, even if not quite true, helps me have the confidence to put myself out there – to pretend to be who it is that I am not quite but might more closely approach if I don’t actually know how far away from the ideal I currently am.

To carry these suppositions further, in this alternate world, we would not be able to dream (something that is not explored in the movie).  Or if we did, dreams would simply be a recapitulation of the events that occurred during the day.  And dreaming is just one example of the fluid functioning of the brain: we would not be able to imagine, and therefore, we would not be able to create.  Einstein used Gedankenversuch or Gedankenexperiments – “thought experiments” in English – to revision the world.  But these require seeing things not as they are, but as they might be.  And dreams do the same thing.  Our dreams, and perhaps especially our daydreams, help us imagine ourselves into a world that is similar to, but essentially different from the one we inhabit most of the time.  So, how ironic is it that the means to experiencing our dreams more directly – to decoding them – psychoanalysis – involves speaking as truthfully as we can about whatever it is that is on our minds. 

On some level, our unconscious minds are, in fact, trying to communicate a certain truth to us.  From Freud’s perspective, the model of the mind that best explains dreams is made up of primitive – meaning animalistic – components.  It is the part of our selves that is driven by sexual and aggressive drives or urges.  This immediate, direct sensory aspect of ourselves is covered over - hidden, defended against - by the civilized, and civilizing parts of our mind.  The parts of our mind that learn to deceive; to say, “No, that dress makes you look slender,” do so because the truth hurts – the unvarnished truth ruptures relationships and interferes with our achieving strategic goals.  So we work to quell it, to satiate it with substitutes – to substitute money for sex (from Freud’s perspective) or to substitute money for relationships (from Bowlby’s attachment perspective).   We come up with lies, substitutes, and with deceptions in order to fit into society.

The irony, then, is manifold.  The part of ourselves that is oriented to the “real” world, the part of ourselves that can plan and strategize and helps us wait until the most opportune moment to act, the part that Freud posited was based on what he called the reality principle and uses the rules of logic - ends up being a powerfully chaotic voice; one that rationalizes and helps us distort reality.  Our more primitive selves, ruled by what Freud called primary process, a process that is not based in logic but instead is based in the wish to have whatever it is that I want right now and the consequences be damned, can more accurately and immediately represent reality as it is rather than as we want it to be.  And this means that learning to listen to our unconscious selves does, in the sense of the movie, tune us into a more boring reality, one that is pretty simple and direct.    This, in turn, means that the tension between the two, the great engine that drives our neuroses, but that also fuels our creative and imaginative selves, reveals that the elements which underlie that tension are the forbidden, but therefore also possibly gratifying and ultimately tremendously desirable, but actually dull and concrete – everyday, animalistic, even mundane aspects of ourselves.  Our hungers, in their most concrete forms, are quite basic indeed: we want things like food and sleep, the regard of others and some sex, to be a little fat and happy (while perhaps appearing slim).  And yet, and here maybe is where the irony comes in again, our basic desires, in tension with our more savvy selves, drive us to creative and imaginative heights that are the stuff of genius.

Many artists fear analysis.  I think this is based on a fear that the post analytic state will be like the one depicted in The Invention of Lying – that they will become dull and ordinary as they directly reveal themselves to others.  It is as if the tensions between their unconscious and conscious selves will become resolved.  I think that the idea that such a resolution could be achieved is a pipe dream.  We go on deceiving ourselves even after the best and most complete of analyses.  We become more adept at decoding those deceptions, we become more comfortable with our internal tensions, and we better know how to integrate those tensions into our relationships with others.  It turns out, though, that once we invent lying – depicted primally in the story of Adam and Eve – not only can we not stop, we don’t want to.  We find that lying and all that it brings with it are complications we embrace.

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

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), if you are on a computer, hit the X button on the upper right of this screen and, on the subsequent screen, hover your cursor over the black line in the upper right area and choose the pop out box that says subscribe and then enter the information.  I'm sorry but I don't currently know how you can subscribe from a mobile device - hopefully you have a computer as well...

Amy Waldman's The Submission - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst is On The Same Page

The library in our town, imitating Seattle, chooses a book each year for us to read together – the event is called “On the Same Page”.  The stated intent is simply for us to read together as a community, though many times the book has had a diversity or multiculturally based theme, intending, I think, to help us better understand each other’s perspectives.  The novel this year, The Submission, by Amy Waldman, certainly appears, on its face, to be a multicultural primer.   It is the fictional account of a nominally Muslim architect winning the juried competition to design the memorial for 9/11 and the aftermath of that decision.

The story is told both in third person and in first person from the perspective of each of a half dozen of the major protagonists.  Mohammed Khan – or Mo as he prefers to be called, and Claire Burwell, the wealthy widow of one of the victims, are the central two of these characters, but Alyssa Spier, the ambitious journalist whose tactics spur the heated cultural divisions along, Debbie Dawson, the anti-Muslim divorcee, Sean Gallagher, the Catholic ne’er do well brother of a firefighter who died, and Asma Anwar, the illegal Bangladeshi immigrant whose husband also died in the towers, all take their turns at describing their experience of the events as they unfold, as do others. 

Each time a person’s perspective is taken up, it seems primarily intended to move the plot along.  Unfortunately, from a psychoanalytic perspective, this use of the device kills what I would hope for from a work of this kind – insight into the ways in which people differ.  Instead, the protagonists all sound more or less alike.  Their motives are similar – each is tinged with a certain amount of self-interest and self-promotion.  Each, in strikingly similar ways, struggles to know his or her central motivations and discovers them only as a result of engaging in the activity of the narrative.

The central narrative question of motive – what drove an American Muslim to submit a design for the competition, knowing that his being a Muslim would create divisiveness if his design were accepted - remains opaque.  Not, I believe, as the author might have us think because that is part of the Muslim mystery, nor as the author might have us think because none of us can know ourselves, but because each of the characters seems to be a similar projection of what I presume to be her central experience – the experience that we toss things out into the world to see what happens.  The converse of that – the reporter’s position – is that we will discover who we are (and who others are) by seeing the results of our actions.

While this may be a satisfying and perhaps even useful position for a journalist to take – it allows her to pillory others and to look for the self interest aspect of their motivation in whatever it is she is reporting – it is terribly disappointing in a novel, a place where we turn to understand the idiosyncratic functioning of individuals.  Unlike Kathryn Stockett, the white author of The Help (see my blog on this), who experienced the divide between blacks and whites in Alabama in the 1960s as being so sharp that she refused to allow access to the conscious experience of her black characters – only to her whites, this author, more like Zoe Ferraris, the author of Finding Nouf (again, see my blog), presumes to be able to articulate the internal experience of individuals from a vastly different culture.  While Waldman acknowledges the help of many individuals with Muslim surnames, I side with Stockett; that to know our own consciousness (let alone unconscious) is difficult enough, and to know another’s (something psychoanalysts strive to do) is presumptuous; increasingly so as those individuals differ from who it is that we, ourselves, are.

The submitted entry – the architectural memorial – is a garden.  It is a beautiful and ambiguous design.  It draws on many influences, not the least of which are Islamic, which, in turn, draw on pre-Islamic gardens that existed in the Middle East.  Under the pressure of taunts and heckling, Mo, the architect, strays from his intended strategy of emphasizing the breadth of influences and instead focuses on the Muslim ones, thus intensifying the polarizing quality of his proposal.  By becoming, owning, being who and what it is that he is, he increases the risk of being rejected by, vilified and distanced from those who differ from him.  Being ambiguous may allow him – and us - to hang onto some shred of what makes us distinct.

We are introduced to Mo as he is being frisked at LAX in the wake of 9/11.  He has been singled out because of his name and his looks.  This infuriates him.  He is further infuriated because his architectural talents are exploited by his firm and he is not promoted to partner.  He is also a man without a culture.  His parents emigrated from India and, though he respects them, he no longer belongs to their culture, indeed they no longer belong to their own cultural origins, nor does Mo’s adopted American culture, despite his wearing the trappings of it, completely fit him. 

Waldman seems, at least to my reading, to suspect that Mo’s sense of being disowned by his adopted culture would lead him to have an inherent hatred towards it, a hatred that could be expressed, perhaps unconsciously, in the building of a garden that would evoke the martyr’s garden that the terrorists were promised.  If we buy this premise, we must also buy that this would be one thread in a terribly complicated tapestry.  And Waldman, I worry, is ultimately not able to do that, or to help us do that.  I think she retains a reporter’s mistrust – a belief that others are harboring malignant motives – and that it is the malignant mistrust that is the real story.  Just as early analysts (and I, early in my development as a person and an analyst) took the position that the unconscious motives were the real – or even only valid and important motives.  Perhaps most damning for both is that there is a sense that the real motives are venal.  That the world cannot absorb evil – even something as evil as the attacks of 9/11 - and integrate it into its complexly evolving sense of itself in such a way that there is a greater holistic sense, rather than a more simplistic, and reductionistically easy but false answer to very a complex question – who are we. 

So my concern – despite over reaching into presuming to know Waldman’s thinking – is that this book does not help as much as it might appear to bridge the divide, but in fact might widen it, by creating the other – the Muslim in this case – not as he or she is, but as we imagine him or her to be.  Ultimately, if we are to live in a truly multicultural world, we should get to know our neighbors and be prepared to accept them with all of the complexity that being human, and being human in the context of being a member of another culture, includes.  This is no easy task, indeed it, like the analytic ideal of understanding another’s mind, may not be possible.

Post Script:  After writing the above, I went to hear Waldman talk.  She came to town because of the on the same page event and talked about how she wrote this, her first novel.  She experienced the sameness of the characters as emerging more organically.  As the threads of the story wove together she found that they emerged from herself and tangled themselves in ways that led them to have similarities that she attributed to the story, though I continue to wonder whether they are also partly woven on the same woof – her unconscious.

As I listened to her and reflected on my writing, I worried that I had been as reductionistic with her as I was accusing her of being with Islam and Islamic characters.  She was in New York on 9/11 and reported on the aftermath intensively for the next six weeks.  She was then relocated to a series of posts abroad, mostly in Islamic countries.  Her recovery from 9/11 was complicated by observing America through a Muslim lens – wondering what we were thinking as we tried to figure out with whom to go to war and as we painted all Muslims as extremist.

When I asked her to address the opaqueness of Mo’s character, she clearly had thought a lot about it, and was still puzzling it out herself.  Acknowledging that she drew from her own character to feel her way into his, she created a person who was close enough to be able to build a tentative bridge.  She focused on the rather naïve inspiration for Mo’s garden as something that he wanted to keep hidden.  This made me wonder, too late to follow up with her, if part of what she was saying was that her own naïve wish to be able to bridge the Islamic/Judeo-Christian divide was something that she wanted to keep hidden.  She also acknowledged that she and Mo share anger – at the US (and perhaps at sensationalistic journalism that drives us into weird places)– that is also part of the motivation that she wants to keep hidden.

I left the talk feeling that we still don’t know the Muslim mind from this book, but also feeling less judgmental about that.  The bridge that Waldman is attempting to build may not land solidly where Mo’s mind is, but that does not mean that it isn’t worth the effort.  I now think her primary effort was to heal something inside of her – something that was torn in many complicated and internally inconsistent ways by the events of 9/11.  To do this by wondering about those among us who are hyphenated differently keeps alive both the naïve hopes and the frustrating failures that are so much a part of belonging to this social experiment we call the United States, and that reconnects us with who we were before the attacks.


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

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), if you are on a computer, hit the X button on the upper right of this screen and, on the subsequent screen, hover your cursor over the black line in the upper right area and choose the pop out box that says subscribe and then enter the information.  I'm sorry but I don't currently know how you can subscribe from a mobile device - hopefully you have a computer as well...

Alan Rickman in Seminar - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Goes to a Convention and A Play

Sometimes the world falls into place in a way that defies explanation – synchronicity or kismet or fate or whatever it is that lines things up and makes them right acts to create a syzygy that can’t be ignored.  Tonight that happened.  The plenary address at the convention I am attending was by Judith Chused and was titled the “Psychoanalyst’s Narcissism” and the thesis was that the narcissism of the analyst (always abundantly on display at conventions of analysts) is not just off-putting and even destructive, but also can be – because it includes a desire to be helpful and a wish to avoid being vulnerable – one of the therapeutic elements that we bring to the table.  Of course this can cut both ways, but generally we think of narcissism as something to be vanquished rather than as something that is our ally.  So it was an interesting talk; provocative, but in a subtle way.  A talk that was applicable to me and to my work, novel, but not strangely new or different.  Perhaps like the best of new ideas, one that seems so sensible that we feel we must have thought it to be the case all along.

Then, we went to the Theater.  We stood in line to get half price tickets and chose to see “Seminar”, mostly because Alan Rickman stars in it and we like the way he plays wry, self-satisfied characters.  Well, this character was a bit over the top in that department.  Not just wry and self-satisfied, but a full blown narcissist who, at least initially, appears to be totally insensitive and destructive.  Cast as a teacher of a seminar of four young writers living in New York; instead of teaching them, he belittles, berates and attacks them – not their writing, but they, themselves as people.  He attacks them directly in the case of three characters, calling one dull, the second a whore, and the third a pussy; in the case of the fourth he even more insidiously attacks her by sleeping with her – something that she believes will help her writing career.  These attacks turn out to enact the very thing that Chused was describing, though I think in an idealized way that conveys some truth, but also in an exaggerated fashion that includes some dangerous elements of fiction and wish fulfillment.

Narcissism is essential to parenting, teaching, editing, and to therapy.  Narcissism is a complicated term that has been defined in a variety of ways.  For the moment, let’s think about the aspect that is central to parenting.  At birth, our children, little lumps of living breathing flesh, evoke tremendous feelings of love.  Part of that – a big part of it – is because this little lump is our creation – more than that, a part of us.  We love the child the way that we love our own bodies – the way that we love our own ideas  - they belong to us.  As the child grows and develops their own identity and becomes the person that they will be – a person who is influenced by our genes and our relationship – they also become a person more and more certain that they themselves own.  Indeed, many of the conflicts between parents and children revolve around this very issue – who is it that is in charge of my life?  To a lesser per cent perhaps than in parenting, we identify – more than that, psychologically “own”, the people with whom we work.

The positive aspects of “owning “ our patients includes wanting to protect them, wanting our work to be effective – it will reflect back on us if it is not - and not wanting to hurt our patients – indeed wanting to protect them more broadly, including from ourselves.  This is balanced by the danger of not recognizing that our children/patients/students/etc. are actually doing the work that will lead to the changes that they (and we) desire as a result of treatment.  Further, it is their actions (not ours) that are ultimately going to be the ones that carry them to a place – a place where they no longer need us in the way that is very gratifying to us that they do now.  We can get derailed from that process in a thousand ways; including by becoming caught up in and believing in our own power to manipulate, change, and to achieve through them what, at its worst, we have not been able to achieve ourselves. 

In the play, Alan Rickman’s character is a writer who, the seminar members discover, was drummed out of publishing when he was accused of plagiarism.  Rickman’s character himself later clarifies that he was accused of plagiarizing by a student he has slept with who feels rejected by him.  This led him to have to give up writing – and to move into editing.  He is now an editor who wields some power.  His challenge to the dull writer leads her to make up a first person account that is not her own, but of a person that she imagines.  The seminar leader notes the value of this writing and gets her a job interviewing people to ghost-write stories for them.  He lines up an interview with a Hollywood producer for the writer he has dubbed a whore – and this clearly is consistent with the career aspirations and abilities of the writer – and he saves the writer years of work discovering that this is his calling.  He also finds an appropriate slot for the person he is sleeping with. 

The fourth writer, the “pussy”, is the one whom he sees as having the ability to become a really good writer and with whom he most closely identifies.  He offers to edit this man’s writing and to mentor him through the process of publishing so that the man does not crash and burn the way that the seminar leader did.  The writer is skeptical and worries that Rickman's character does not actually have the chops to help him.  He shows up, unannounced, at the seminar leader’s apartment (discovering that the seminar leader is now sleeping with the other female member of the group).  While the seminar leader is tending to his private life, the writer reads something the Rickman character has written, becomes convinced that the leader is, indeed, a good writer and can help him and decides to work with him.

We leave this feel good play cheering for the narcissist whose apparently destructive intentions have had a positive impact on those who have been in his care.  This experience is part of the experience of the child/patient/student who successfully concludes a relationship with a truly caring other, one who is mildly distracted by their own agendas in the ways that all good enough parents/therapist/teachers are, but not so much that they harm the child/patient/student.  But it is not clear to me that this narcissist really was concerned about his students.   While sleeping with the first might be construed as consistent with an expressed desire on her part, sleeping with the second seems to me to make it clear that he is really much more interested in his own agenda with no regard for those of the others.  More to the point, the Rickman character is not willing to put his own writing out there.  He has not done what he will ask his protégé to do – publish the work and let other’s attack it or love it in whatever way they will. 

While we want to rewrite history to have our past demons become angels in disguise (or, perhaps, more to the point, we want to justify our demonic actions by pointing to the positive outcomes that occur in spite of our malevolent intentions), I think this sort of thinking clouds our narrative.  This editor/teacher is not benignly, but malignantly narcissistic – meaning that his own need for self satisfaction and acknowledgement will not be achieved through his own actions, including by having an impact on others that frees them to engage the world more fully as themselves, but he will achieve his satisfaction through claiming the actions of others as his own, while being able, simultaneously, to distance himself from them by ascribing the negative/disliked/disowned to them.

Chused’s position was that our narcissistic investment can, despite the dangers, be our ally as we work to help those who are dependent on us.  I think the play suggests that we can allow our narcissism more license than I believe is warranted.  In so far as narcissism is our ally, it is a dangerous one because its heady perfume can lead us into dangerous, indeed damaging waters – waters where we are tempted to justify ourselves out of all measure to what is actually taking place.  Generative narcissism requires; and this is almost oxymoronic, self-disavowal.  We must be prepared to give our investment in our dependents up in order that they may become whomsoever they will be, and take satisfaction, not in their accomplishments, but in our own – including the accomplishment of letting them go.

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

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), if you are on a computer, hit the X button on the upper right of this screen and, on the subsequent screen, hover your cursor over the black line in the upper right area and choose the pop out box that says subscribe and then enter the information.  I'm sorry but I don't currently know how you can subscribe from a mobile device - hopefully you have a computer as well...