Wrigley Field - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Goes on a Pilgrimage

Chicago, the city of my birth, was the destination of a Labor Day Weekend pilgrimage with my 13 year old son.  It was a post-modern traditional journey, invented in our blended family as a means of celebrating the bat-mitzvahs of his stepsisters - a journey with the same sex parent to the city of choice of the child reaching the age of adulthood in the jewish tradition; now applied regardless of the faith of the child.  Our eldest stepdaughter chose New York, which I lobbied for with him.  He originally wanted to go to Miami, mostly having to do with the sports teams, but he ultimately chose Chicago, and, while the Cubs, White Sox, Redwings, Bears and Bulls had something to do with that, it also had to do with a city that means something more to him.  What that is, I am not sure, but I was certainly relieved as it is a city that I know well - the city where my mother was born and grew up and a city where members of both my mother's and father's families still live.

We filled the weekend with two visits with family, trips to a skyscraper and four museums, and an afternoon at the ballpark.  In between we wandered through the city, on foot, by car, and on the El, marveling at its size, its engagement with its citizens and visitors alike, its stores, and its jazz festival.  But also we spent time in each other's company - with a quality that was different from the time that we spend when we travel with the rest of the family.  We were, once again, and in entirely new ways, the dyad that we have always been; father and son.

Having a child was a radically different experience for me - it was, in the words of Bernard Lonergan, a Jesuit I am reading to better understand the relationship between psychoanalysis and Ignatius' spiritual exercises, a horizon altering experience. Lonergan proposes that there are horizontal and vertical exercises of freedom, and a horizontal exercise is is one that occurs within an established horizon.  A vertical exercise is the means by which we move from one horizon to the next; and the unexpected and profound love for my child, an individual not yet formed, but also perfectly present, was a paradigm altering experience - it introduced entirely new horizons.

As the infant, pre-verbal son and I spent time together, I was enthralled by his development, by our shared experience.  Then, as I have referred to elsewhere in this blog, he began to speak, and the profound experience that we had shared collapsed - the words actually interfered with a level of communication that had, at least I believed, been taking place.  Instead of resonating with each other, we were talking about food, and the bathroom, and stuff - real concrete stuff, and our words were not adequate to address the spectrum of all that we had been sharing.

As the boy grew and developed, language provided more opportunities to communicate in new and more complex realms.  Sports is an example.  Playing video games, watching Sports Center, and reading the sports section quickly made him more knowledgeable than I about which modern players are playing for which teams in a host of sports (and who is good, who just mediocre), but also increased his knowledge about such things as strategy and gamesmanship so that, at times, he was embarrassed about what his Old Man didn't know.  On the other hand, I retain an edge in knowing about the classic moments and players in sport (see the blog about Steve Bartman and the Cubs), especially during the era of my youth and before.  I have a kind of reservoir of historical information that he is moderately interested in.  We are able to engage in conversation, but it involves ferrying material across a river that divides two similar nations who speak a different dialect of the same language.

Wrigley field, one of the Grand Dames, along with Fenway Park, of Major League Baseball, served as a wonderful place for these two congregations to come together.  The Cubs, who were so far out of contention that they were irrelevant, were playing the Giants - a team in contention, but one neither of us really care about one way or the other.  We didn't have a dog in the race.  But we were in Church together.

We arrived early.  My son, who has a collection of baseball hats, was interested in buying a hat at the ballpark.  We went to a stand and looked over the offerings.  His tastes run to the modern.  He likes the flat bills - a type of hat worn by rappers and a few baseball players.  I have trouble making sense of them - I think they neither look as good nor function as well as the traditional bill.  He also likes modern takes on traditional hats.  So he has an orange Cincinnati Reds hat, and he has a Tennessee Titans Football team baseball cap that has modern writing across the front rather than the more traditional team symbol.  In fact, most of his caps are caps that are trendy in one way or another.  I am strongly attached to the age old design of the Cubs' cap; one of the simple, traditional caps that is blue with a red C on the front and a red button on top - it is a symbol, like Wrigley field, of the way things used to be when we were more focused on building a country - primary colors and declarative symbols.

There were other caps on display.  There were pinstriped caps.  There were caps that festooned various things about the Cubs or about Wrigley in various fonts and colors across the front of the cap.  But most of the caps wore the traditional colors and symbol  - in either bill style.  He chose, after much deliberation, a flat bill traditional colored cap.  This choice was a sort of compromise - a mixture of the tradition that I lean towards but with the style that he likes, and that I have grudgingly grown accustomed to.  As we talked with the vendor, who told the story of an Alphonso Soriano home run ball that he had caught - and was till trying to get autographed - he mentioned where we could go to get a certificate for this being his first day at Wrigley (We had actually been here when he was two, but we agreed that pre-verbal trips to the ball park shouldn't count -especially because he was more interested in the El arriving at the station than a Sammy Sosa home run).

On our way to the seats, the scorecard vendor assured us, as I'm sure he had many others for years, that his Ouija board had predicted a no-hitter today...  though he wasn't sure whether that would be at Wrigley or at a little league game somewhere in North Dakota.  We picked up the certificate and headed to our seats, high above first base, but close enough, even though we were in the next to last row, that we were very much part of the game.  On the way, we passed hot dog stands offering Chicago style hot dogs, something I remembered eating on an earlier visit and found exquisite.  When we sat down, I offered to go get such a hot dog for each of us, but warned John that it would be laden with many things that he didn't like - but I thought it worth it because, in my estimation it was good local food and worth a try.  Somewhat to my surprise, he agreed, even though he is a picky eater who frequently refuses my attempts to get him to try to broaden his palate.

As I loaded the all beef hot dog on a poppy seed bun with tomatoes, onions, a weird colored pickle relish, mustard, ketchup (I didn't know this didn't belong), peppers and a pickle, I thought to myself, "He won't like this - all of the condiments, with the exception of the peppers and maybe the mustard, are things that he avoids."  Despite this, and manifold experiences of having my hopes dashed when I present new tastes, I believed that my own experience of this wonderful combination was something that I wanted to share with him.  When I returned to the seat, my son had been traumatized.  In my absence a huge spider had landed on him and then walked onto his program where he was able to throw it to the ground.  Despite being shaken, he tried the hot dog and, what do you know, he liked it!  He and I were both surprised.  And we settled in together to watch the game.

It was really fun to be in a park where there were no blaring advertisements to interfere with the conversation between innings - where T-shirt shooting, scantily clad women weren't encouraging us to beg and plead to have them send a T-shirt our way - but instead of being constantly "entertained", to listen to the organ as it provided a gentle, though, as the game demanded, a more strident soundtrack.  To notice the flags flying of players whose numbers had been retired - players whom I had seen play on this field in my youth (boy does that make me sound old).  To have my son point out to me the odd and predictable batting stance of a Giant player, and to have him talk about the pitching styles of the current pitchers for both teams.  To watch the game unfold.  To notice the traditions of the park together - including the polite applause that welcomed the Cubs to the dugout after a particularly difficult inning finally came to a close (as opposed to the booing that a crowd in another town would have visited on their hapless players), and to cringe, together, at the noise that the Giants fans made in this home of the Cubs.

In addition to the conversation, to sharing our memory of hearing broadcasters characterizing the size of a particular gate onto the field as being determined by the size of the elephant the circus would bring to Wrigley field, to my learning about the modern teams and his learning about the ancient ones, there was an unspoken experience.  A shared experience of being together.  One that we didn't comment on.  We talked about some of that after the game.  We discussed the fans around us.  We talked about the rhythm of the game.  About our experience of watching a game where neither had a dog in the race.  And we talked about how good it felt to be there.

And there was much we didn't talk about.  Of being father and son.  Of being on a trip together.  Of relying on each other.  Of being in touch with each other.  Of enjoying the time we had together.  Of feeling good about having a language that would serve to bridge a divide.  Of feeling united, connected, on a level for which there is no language.  Of sharing a perspective, and of appreciating the differences between our perspectives.  Of acknowledging that the choices of the other would not be our own, but that there is a logic to it, even if it is not our own.  And respecting that the other is who he is - that we share much, and part of what we share is respect for the other's experience, at least in our best moments.

The theme of shared and separate moments and experiences was played out throughout the weekend - as we searched for another dog as good as the first (couldn't find one), saw spiders all over the town, talked over what it was like to be with family members (sharing appreciation for the virtues of the people that we knew and the new ones that we met), looked at art, technology, and natural wonders, and shared the experience while also having our own experiences of them in the moment, and revisiting them in conversation after leaving them.  Agreeing that this was the best of our trips together; not, I believe, just because it was the most recent.  Nor because of the manifold virtues of Chicago.  But because we continue to become better able to share both the verbal and nonverbal parts of our experience.  To be in an experience together and on our own.  I hope that this post modern mode of communication - this pilgrimage to a zone of proximal development, a place where we can both expand our perspective horizontally, and perhaps even vertically, together - is one that we continue to share for a long, long time.

Of course, the wish for the experience to stretch is partially because of a complimentary awareness - that we are in very different places.  While John is on the verge of adulthood - including the chaotic swirls of adolescence - I can see, from my vantage point, not just retirement, but beyond.  When John asks me whether I would rather play third base or first, it is a theoretical question - I will never be called up by even the hapless Cubs - but he is still dreaming of what will be.  As my horizon moves vertically, I can see the edge of the world, while his horizons still stretch into countries that feel much warmer and beckon with promise.

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Hope Springs and The Dew Breaker - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Contemplates Atonement

In "Hope Springs", Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones, playing a Nebraskan couple - Kay and Arnold - ensnared in a routinized and deadened marriage, seek treatment from Steve Carell's character, a couple's therapist in Maine.  It is surprising that this cast would be assembled to attack, in what is intended to be a directly representative way, a subject as real, everyday and plain as a marriage gone bad.  I remember when I was trying to hang onto a marriage going bad, a friend told me that the difference between the couples that got divorced and those that didn't was that those that didn't, wanted to stay married; but they were no happier.  While I have been privileged to have access to good marriages, there is some truth to her statement - it is hard to sustain an intimate relationship with another across the better part of a lifetime - hard to see their foibles and to have your own exposed, to fail each other, to manage being roommates, lovers, perhaps co-parents, and to emerge unscathed.  Despite the two dimensional nature of the characters and the relationship, despite the unrealistically compressed nature of the treatment - something that seems necessary to keep our attention, and the emphasis on sex as a means of reconnecting, not to mention the Hollywood ending that feels tacked on, there is much that is true and real in this movie, just as there was in my friend's comment about marriage.

The Dew Breaker, a novel by Edwidge Danticat, seems at the other end of the spectrum.  This disorienting book that leaps from short story to short story in confusing and convoluted ways, has, at its heart, a relationship that, on its surface, could not be more different from the story of Kay and Arnold.  The way that the Dew Breaker, a brutal guard during the Haitian nightmare of rule under Baby Doc Duvalier, comes to marry - in so far as he does - the woman with whom he escapes Haiti for New York, is so incredible that it can't be revealed until the author has introduced us not just to the stories of trauma that are woven into the fabric of Haiti, but induced in us, the reader, a kind of dissociative experience as we try to piece together the book, giving up when parts of it just don't seem to coalesce, only to find that, if we try, we can put the pieces together in such a way that, rather than being a tightly tied ending, we discover all the loose ends, all the questions that linger in the air.

So, while Kay and Arnold are locked into a relationship that is functional on the surface, but seethes with unspoken feeling based on long enduring grudges, the protagonists of the Dew Breakers understand and support each other because they don't know or don't acknowledge the intimate ways they have harmed each other and are therefore loving and supportive in ways that seem much more genuine.  On the surface, the movie partners, who have raised two children, have similar values, and work together at living life (symbolized visually by Kay cooking Arnold a single brown egg and a strip of bacon each morning before he heads off to work), seem to be in a supportive, cooperative relationship, but Kay is more willing to acknowledge the void that exists within their relationship.  Despite their  deep and powerful attachment to each other, they are deeply and powerfully furious with each other.  Each has withheld from the other, each has felt deeply hurt by the other, and both fear making contact; they fear that being open to the other reopens them to being hurt, ignored, and rebuffed.

Kay expresses a willingness to engage and seeks out the therapist.  Arnold resists, almost cruelly and we, like another therapist, could make the mistake of believing that it is Arnold who is the impediment - the resistant one - and not realize that they are both hurt, they are both responsible for where they are - and that Kay is just as afraid, just as resistant.  We wonder why she is with him - why she puts up with his cruelty.  But this is not, at heart, a sado-masochistic relationship.  It is a loving relationship.  And so, ironically, is the relationship between Anne and a man so monstrous he can't be named - he is referred to only as the Dew Breaker, the fat man and, by his daughter, as Papa.

The fat man, the macoute, becomes monstrous as an adult.  He joins the regime that has displaced his father from his one acre plot and thereby driven his mother back to the arms of her true but poor love.  He goes to the city, joins the police, and uses his powers, from afar, to right things both for his father but also for other poor families back home.  In his new role as dictator in the prison, however, he becomes the most sadistic of men.  He takes real joy in observing terror - and in seeing the hope that springs when he offers his victims freedom right before he tortures or kills them.  But he feels enslaved by this, and by his awareness of his own precariousness in a system that is based on rule through fear.  He runs - escapes - after botching his work and being physically assaulted.  He runs into Anne's arms, and together they flee Haiti.

For her part, Anne feels great guilt for what she has done.  An epileptic, she had a seizure while she was to be watching her brother at the ocean and he drowned.  I believe that she blames herself for this and does not know how to seek redemption.  She is pleased that her husband is able to achieve some sort of redemption in their new life in New York - in fact she thinks that it is truly a miracle.  But in order to see this, she cannot look too closely at who he is or at how they are linked.  She must keep her vision fuzzy for if she knew, she might not be able to appreciate the resolution that he achieves.

And this is where the two stories diverge.  The atonement - the reconciliation - in Hope Springs occurs because the protagonists quit trying to fight each other off - quit trying to maintain the distance that has kept them feeling safe but cruelly isolated - and engage with each other - they become one - by acknowledging the grief that they share - the grief that they have visited on each other and the grief that they now are wallowing in.  But the Dew Breaker, the one who comes in the early dawn to maim, kill, and steal children, cannot atone - cannot gather together all that he has done - cannot acknowledge what he has done to Anne - nor even what he has done to his daughter.

In Hope Springs, as we unwind the ball of string that ties the protagonists together, we observe how simple it is for them to connect.  In the Dew Breaker, the opposite occurs; as the story unfolds we discover more and more connections between the protagonists,  but these connections are toxic.  They fear, and we the readers fear, that, if known, these connections would do what Kay and Arthur fear will happen if they speak what they are feeling, the connections would drive Anne and Papa apart.  Is there something about a level of trauma, is there a threshold of damage that can't be bridged?  Is the solution that Anne believes the dew breaker has achieved, the miracle of being transformed from working in a prison to being calm, to being patient, to driving forty miles to pick his daughter up to take her to a Christmas eve mass, the best that can be achieved?

Each story, in its own way, has a happy ending.  Hope Springs suggests a resolution - a coming together, a shared reconciliation.  Anne is proud of Poppa in the Dew Breaker, but it is from a distance.  She appreciates his transformation, and he, though tortured by his past and the belief that it will keep him from the afterlife, has raised a daughter and recreated a stable existence for himself.  As a clinician, I would not hesitate to recognize the differences between these two couples, to recognize that different treatments are called for, different outcomes likely; but somehow, as a reader, I am disturbed by what seems to be an inequity.  These people, through accidents of birth and circumstance, have different potential arcs available to them.

Anne and Papa live separate lives; Papa shares neither Anne's love of miracles nor her faith.  She adores him from a distance.  He dismisses her, but with affection, and she worries, as does he, about the fate of his soul.  Kay and Arnold also live separate lives, but the history that separates them is a shared history.  It can have a narrative thread that binds them - they were once in love and they still yearn for connection.  I suppose that both couples will settle into a playfully connected and disconnected latter third of their relationship.

Perhaps what is both disturbing and engaging is that both couples achieve a certain internal atonement - a certain kind of oneness - but the atonement of Kay and Arnold is based in a more realistically tinged view of each other.  The atonement of Anne and Papa is more saturated in fantasy.  Anne's view of Papa is as fantastic as her faith in the miracle that allows a woman to cry crystals.  Papa, who could so closely see the people that he tortured, is blind to both Anne and his daughter.  They are there, but his burden of guilt occludes them, and they are peripheral to his vision of his own damnation.  He cannot even see himself through his daughter's eyes; he destroys the artistic representation she has made of him.  While he may be loved by Anne - and by his daughter - it will ring hollow.  He is ultimately alone with the ghosts that haunt him, that he cannot shake, but that are also, on some level now fantasy figures too - memories of real actions - but memories none-the-less.  I think that Danticat, in the parallel stories she tells, suggests that revenge is not a solution, but also suggests that his guilt, his fantasy of himself as a monster, is its own kind of revenge.  Because he has concern, because he can connect, he can also feel guilt and can be cut off from those who would love and know him.  He cannot reconcile himself to living and is, perhaps, as dead in some ways as the people he has killed.  

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Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reads a Classic

While on vacation last week in Canada, I realized that I had left the book I intended to read in the car when we jumped onto the train.  I feared that in Francophile Montreal I would not be able to find a good book in English, but fortunately our Air B&B (a person's apartment that we rented on the internet instead of staying in a hotel room) was in the McGill University - the English speaking University - student ghetto and was over a small storefront English Language bookstore.  The store was tiny - maybe 20 feet deep with shelves on either side of a single aisle and struggling to survive as I learned through overhearing in the hour or so that I browsed through the books, struggling, even though the manager was also using the back small room as his apartment.  Which is a shame.  It was stocked with classics - in literature was the strong suit, but also in theology and history, science and even a smattering of psychology.  It is the kind of bookstore that I fantasized about running as a college student, and that we seem to have come close to eradicating in the US (though apparently in Canada, too) by a combination of chain bookstores and the availability of online bookstores and, now, books.

Well the choosing of books is a delicate matter - it isn't just one of your holiday games.  Reviews can be helpful, recommendations are good - though they can be freighted with obligation.  Choosing a book on line involves hunting for a particular tome, or following some kind of string of associations based on similar content.  It is only in a bookstore that one can truly browse.  Which, perhaps because it had been so long since I have had that luxury, felt like a naked excursion.  And reading a book on vacation is a bit different than at other times, or it feels that it should be.  Among the classics were big, difficult books that I should read because they are part of being well read - Gravity's Rainbow was an example of many in this category - there were books that should be read because of various professional paths I am currently on - the collected writings of Ignatius Loyola was an example of these - but I really wanted a book that I wanted to read - and the only trashyish novels in this rather high minded place were whodunits, and I'm not a big fan of that genre.  So I finally settled on Steppenwolf.  A book that was a must read among my peers in high school.  A book that I seemed to vaguely recall may have to do with the life of the Buddha (I was confusing it with another popular Hesse book, Siddhartha).  But also a slender volume that, because my friends had read it for pleasure and enlightenment, promised to be engaging but also meaty enough - and at this moment I was looking for spiritual food and the Buddha confusion was likely fueled by a wish for the kind of nourishment I hoped to find in a book that would be pleasant to read.

Originally published in 1929, the author's note from the 1961 edition further supported the notion that this might actually be the right book to read at this moment.  In it, he reflected on the popularity of the book.  He noted that it was written when he was fifty and that it represented the struggles of that particular developmental moment.  He then went on to note that his biggest problem was not with the detractors of the book, but with the supporters - especially the younger adherents.  And I began to wonder whether my friends - and I, had I read it as a late adolescent - were guilty of this sin of somehow subverting the intended message because we could not, from our own developmental vantage point, understand the book, and perhaps I might be able to appreciate that message now, as a fifty something year old reader.

So, the title character, the Steppenwolf or Harry, turns out to be a loner - an intellectual - a passionate but also highly constricted man who, in his fifties, takes a room in a boarding house in a town he lived in many years before.  He starts to see messages - weird invitations to enter into another world - a world where the sign says "FOR MADMEN ONLY!" - and he begins to stray into a world that is much more open, free, and sensuously driven than the world that he has inhabited and disdained throughout his life.  Harry is guided into this world by a beautiful and ambiguously gendered woman, Hermine, who both reminds him of an old male friend, but also seems to be a version of himself.  Harry is guided, then, on a journey of self discovery by someone who is very much like himself, though also somewhat other - this woman; but also by her lover, a black Saxophone player who, instead of being like Harry in talking about music, simply makes music - and the potions that help Harry enter an altered state to appreciate the world differently.

As a twenty year old, I would have heard this tale as one that is inviting me to throw off my inhibitions, to live spontaneously - perhaps I would, as my sophomore roommate did - give up language altogether and communicate only through barks - as if the sensual life - and I don't know that this is the right term, but please allow it to suffice - were the proper life to lead.  This level of simplicity would be a very possible, indeed a likely, response were the book read from that vantage point.  Life is simple - engage, respond - might be the bumper sticker version.  But, in fact, the tale is not about how to live as a twenty year old, but how, as someone in his or her fifties, to enter into a process of coming to know oneself, both who one is and has become, and the paths that were not taken.  It is a tale of self discovery that occurs after the self has been formed - after difficult choices have been made - after internal inconsistencies have become habitual and are no longer vividly portrayed, but instead hidden, assumed, covered up; and to discover them - to come to know oneself - brings with it the fear that the process might well lead to madness.  The message of the book - at least in so far as my fellow Steppenwolf feels it - is not that the Steppenwolf's life course could have been avoided, but that it is inevitable.  That even my barking friend must now, in his fifties, deconstruct the less verbal life that he chose.  That his simplicity introduced complications as well, and, in order to put his house in order, he, too must enter into a portal that proclaims "FOR MADMEN ONLY", because to know ourselves is to know the internal inconsistencies that are integral to supporting the facade that is essential both for our public functioning and, more importantly, for maintaining our delusionally consistent self narrative.

Even as I say this, though, I am remembering the author's note, where he states "I neither can nor intend to tell my readers how they ought to understand my tale."  And this, in turn, leads to a wonderful essay that Thomas Ogden, a psychoanalyst, wrote as an introduction to a book that he wrote about reading classic psychoanalytic papers.  Ogden's position is that readers who closely read other's work are actually writing it themselves.  They are taking whatever the author offers and remaking it, filtering it through their own experience.  While my identification with Steppenwolf leads me to feel kinship, it also leads to distortions.  From Ogden's position, I have rewritten it - or taken the ideas from it and made them my own.  As psychoanalysts, we are constantly doing this, including when we make interpretations in the consulting room.  Sometimes we lose track of this and believe that we know what is going on in the minds of our analysands, and to a certain extent this is true - frequently we accurately apprehend unconscious dynamics that are unknown or unseeable to the person who is freely associating, or writing a novel, as the case may be.  But our interpretations, and Ogden's clinical writings make this amply clear about his own practice, are infused with our own idiosyncratic mental content - we are rewriting the text that our patients give us.

I am aware of some distortions that my reading has introduced in the brief review that I have offered here.  I could go back and more closely tie what I have reviewed to the text- to clarify what is Hesse's thought and what my own.  Ogden does this in the articles he reviews, quoting them at length and closely parsing individual elements from the articles.  I do this as a requisite part of the process of editing these blogs for "publication".  But I also like to keep some of the boundaries blurry and, in the spirit of both Hesse and Ogden, would cathect - would own - Hesse's work and his intent, at least in this moment, as my own.  As I do that, I run the risk of cultivating Hesse's now silent wrath - of being like the twenty year old boys who distort his ideas and turn them into permission to live a different kind of life - but as I reread the author's note, I find that he is concerned not with the twenty year old starry eyed readers - perhaps a group of readers who would pick up the book in the twenty years after he wrote the note - but with a group of readers who misinterpret the Steppenwolf's, Harry's, Herman's suffering with despair.  From that perspective, my twenty year old friends are not appreciating the healing power of reflection - and are, as I imagine them, trying to avoid the kinds of wounds that Hesse portrays Steppenwolf as bearing.  And as I circle back, as I discover one way in which I have misunderstood Hesse, I am also finding ways in which I have actually gotten a clear vision of him and what his message is.  The bumper sticker version is that the wounds are a necessary part of healing - that redemption can only come as a result of having been in the dark.  But this is not just his message, it is my own.  He has become my Hermine.  And deliciously, even this name - her mine - transliterated into English - does it mean the same in German? - betrays an identification - the same identification that J.K. Rowling betrays when she names her alter ego Hermione (she and I are one).  Is Hesse punning in English?  Was Rowling?  At this moment it doesn't matter, because I am - and it is my Hermine that Hesse has become.  As my transferential figure, I bestow on him - and discover within him, and his character, Harry, the traits that I am struggling to understand.  And if, like he, I am able to discover this book as a redemptive one then I am able to make use of it in a way that is parallel to Hesse's stated intent.  Of course, if I do not, as he feared many of his most effusive readers had not, we end up in very different places.  And it is not surprising to me that he would be dismayed by this - for this, I think, is where, for Hesse, madness lies.

Wandering in a bookstore, browsing - wandering in another country - losing our way - becomes then a metaphor for being able to sort and sift through partly known, but also unknown elements - to choose the ones that resonate, and to follow a path that leads to, at the very least, a satisfying read, but perhaps more grandly, a moment of connection, with the author, with other readers - not a perfect connection, this is our own construction based on who we are at this moment - but it is also a shared construction - one that is influenced by the author - and that influence shapes the way that we experience subsequent connections.  By destroying parts of ourselves (portrayed in the book quite concretely) - finding out how the author actually does have a different point of view that we must take into account - leads to a rebirth not in the world that we have lived, or would have lived, but in the life that we lead from this moment forward.

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

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O Canada! - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Travels as a Typical Tourist in the First World

Wanting the kids to have a sense of another country and neither feeling competent yet in the third world nor flush enough to travel to Europe; we decided to visit our neighbors to the north.  After dropping our car in Toronto, we headed by train to Ottawa, a cute little city on the border between Ontario and Quebec that is situated on a defensible bluff overlooking the Ottawa river.  The capital was moved here from Quebec City in part to protect it from attack by the United States after we invaded the country in the war of 1812.  I have been struck by two things - the form of government, and the consequent depiction of it - and the intertwined historical roots of this country with ours - in ways that I, a casual historian at best, have been unaware.

The Parliament building in Ottawa sits on the bluff and is a vision of Romantic High Gothic English elegance.  With copper roofs, dominated by a twenty five story peace tower in front and a beautiful circular wooden library in back, it feels a bit like Hogwarts - and the meeting room of both the House of Commons and the Senate, the two bodies of the Parliament, are rich in wood and green or red leather, and feel very clubby.  Unlike our Chambers, arranged as auditoriums, each of these rooms have sets of desks on risers that face each other across a center aisle.  The presider - a presumably neutral party - sits at the head of the room, while the majority sits, faces, and debates with the minority across the aisle.  There are, of course, committee rooms where the legislators hammer out the details, but even these are configured differently, frequently with a table that legislators sit around rather than a dais that legislators sit behind while experts testify.

One of the moments that the differences in government become apparent then, is at 10 O'Clock at night.  That's when crowds assemble on the front lawn of the Parliament to watch a half hour light show, MosAika, that is projected on the walls of the Parliament building.  A mixture of history, cultural definition, and entertainment, this show, with accompanying music, is simultaneously humble, playful, and immensely impressive.  One of the central themes is that Canada is a country that is engaged in a conversation.  The gimmick is that Canadians can make brief YouTube-like videos to "participate" in the conversation  - and have them projected as part of the show.  Another theme is that Canada is a country that is committed to peace.  Finally, there is a theme of commitment to community and to heritage.  Throughout, the four seasons play a significant role, weaving themselves into each of the themes - not surprising in a country where everyone experiences a long, cold, dark winter.

The theme of conversation in a bilingual country is interesting.  Conversations around us moved from French to English and back to French.  Traveling mostly in well touristed areas, we were not randomly sampling, but people were willing to struggle across language barriers.  The British "took over" in the 1760s after a series of battles that they attempted to finance by waging taxes on the New England States - arguing that the war was protecting our interests.  We objected, and England ended up losing the larger prize.  More broadly it is apparent that Europe never really understood what was of value here or in the countries they colonized world wide (nor did we, in turn understand what was of value in Central and South America).  They came searching for gold and silver and, while they returned with some, it was the land as a cradle for nations that was the real prize.  Sometimes we, in psychology, can be guilty of this same sin.  We don't recognize the value of our patient's autonomy - the importance of the governmental structures they want to put in place - and instead we try to put in our own.

Back in the real world, however, the English gained control of a vast area that the French had explored and settled - including much of what would later be the US Midwest - dotted with French Names from Detroit though St. Louis and Des Moines all the way down to New Orleans.  So the English came, they governed, and they doled out the choicest morsels to themselves.  The French who had come here were largely poor, Roman Catholic and loyal to the crown - even if that crown was now English.  Benjamin Franklin was surprised when he came north to recruit the Canadians as allies who, despite having been recently defeated and occupied by the British, preferred to side with the Royalists than with our revolution.  But this did not mean that, across the centuries, as the English speakers doled out favors to their own, the French were sanguine about it.  Quebec became more and more adamant about seceding from the government and in 1995, by a slim majority of 50.6%, Quebecers decided to stay in the Union.  While the intent to leave the union has diminished, shopkeepers seemed pleased when we asked if they spoke English rather than our assuming that they did.  And it seems possible that this divided nation is able to dialogue about its differences and work towards solving some of the inequities that certainly remain.

Peace as a central theme felt genuine.  Unlike our country, with a sitting President who, though having won a Nobel Peace Prize, is presiding over a bloody war, the Canadian military seems more focused on maintaining adequate self defense and being prepared to serve in an auxiliary fashion in attempts to redress inequities abroad.  The TV commercials included prime time public service announcements about giving a broad berth to police and other emergency vehicles - characterized as people working to protect you - as well as appeals to contribute to aiding kids in third world countries.  Canadians have a much better international reputation - perhaps both because of their foreign policy but also because they have had to be guests in their own country; visiting provinces that are potentially hostile to them; learning to be polite to people that are both like and unlike themselves.  When traveling abroad, then, they may be more open to differences, more embracing of diversity, than we are.  Certainly the subways in the major cities are filled with as many diverse ethnic groups - including the dominant culture - as is the case in the US.

I think it must be different to be in a country where there is a large minority culture that is there by choice.  Many of the original French immigrants were poor.  Like in the US, many of them returned - 10,000 of the original 30,000 went home again.  But those who stayed were happy.  They were poor, as they had been at home, but they could forage for wood and hunt for game - neither of which were possible at home, and their happiness turned into progeny.  The French Canadians reproduced at a terrific rate and relatively densely populated the Eastern corridor along the Southern Great Lakes and the Saint Lawrence Seaway, with more English present the further west one travelled.  Perhaps our closest analogy would be to the Southerners who "lost the war of Northern aggression" but retained much of their cultural heritage.  Having the legacy of different languages might interfere with Canada's ability to deny the presence of two very different heritages - to keep them from building, like us, a myth of National Unity.

So the conclusion of MosAika, the national production at the national capital in a country that is currently dominated by the Conservative Party, was about the social responsibility of Canadians towards other Canadians - and about the government's role in making this happen.  A message with this tone, in our country, would be an abomination to the Republican party - the same party who, not long ago, had a president, Richard Nixon, who tried to implement a National Health Care system and failed.  Perhaps the long cold winters here help people to realize a sense of responsibility towards each other.

An acquaintance who moved to Canada characterized it as a country where everybody drives a Honda.  While I have seen more variety than that on the road, I think his point is well taken.  In contrast to our country, where every man acts for himself, and therefore some of us accumulate great wealth, in a country with a more socialist ethic, a reasonable level of autonomy and a government that is concerned with the well being of the people, there is neither great wealth nor is there as much abject poverty - of wealth, and perhaps spirit, a real accomplishment in a country where there can be so much darkness that Seasonal Affective Disorder must be a national issue.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, the metaphor of discussion/dialogue is a powerful one.  If the discussion includes those who have been excluded - if the marginalized - on the personal level, the unconscious and the repressed - are included in the dialogue, does it follow that there is a greater sense of connection with those around you - a greater sense of empathy, and a corresponding lessening of drive?  How do we square that with the increased self focus of the analytic period - with the intense experience of the self - a kind of analytic narcissism - that can be part of the analytic process and even part of the residual analytic effect?  Is the Canadian humility - one that is leavened with self confidence - a model of a positive analytic outcome?  Is the playfulness exhibited in MosAika - a projection onto the symbol of power of the country that at times pokes fun at the building itself - a self deprecating self concept that is elastic and able to withstand attack through flexible engagement - a model for individual psychological health?

Obviously I am drawn to the possibilities inherent in the analogy - perhaps under the sway of the charms of this country.  It is also very nice to be able to move between train and subway, using mass transportation to travel.  Sure, we have to wait at stations.  Yes, the kids complain about walking.  But we don't have to find parking.  We are using a little less gas, and I am able to read and write while taking a break to look out the window rather than being forced to drive.  The US is less expensive, perhaps less shabby, and certainly warmer.  Despite that, the reluctant wife and kids are ready to move here.  Me?  I'm not so sure I could survive the winter.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

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

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Eugenides' The Marriage Plot - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reads About First Love

First Love. Like a parental relationship, it can haunt the rest of our lives. There is nothing so sweet as loving and/or being loved - deeply appreciating and/or appreciating another perhaps for the first time, but certainly for the first time with someone who does not "have" to love you - a parent, a sibling - but someone who chooses to do so - not because you're their's but because they want you to be their own. Jeffrey Eugenides' Novel is about such a love - but with the advantage of hindsight - and, I think, as an attempt, and I hope a satisfying one, to put that first love to bed. It seemed helpful to me, as a reader, in any case.

The novel focuses on a triangle, but really a conga line, of lovers - all students at Brown in the late seventies and early 80s. Leonard is the brilliant but unstable bipolar child of absent parents who evokes sympathy and care from a string of women but ultimately from Madeleine. Maddy is a good girl from a solid home who is smart but not brilliant - a romantic who loves Austen, Eliot and James and others who write in the marriage plot genre - a genre that requires society to be structured in a rigid, traditional manner and for women to be in subservient, chattel based roles where their marriages will define them. Maddy dabbles in semiotics and through that rediscovers her favorite authors from a feminist perspective. Mitchell, the author's alter ego, a child of Greek immigrants from Detroit, deeply interested in religion and spirituality, is a person who has trouble hearing God's voice - and sparking Maddy's interest. He pines for her - she knows and enjoys him, but he is not wild and unpredictable the way that Leonard is.

The tale is told, alternately, in the three voices of each of the main characters in overlapping chronology, so that, Rashomon fashion, many events are told from two or three perspectives. More broadly, this book gets, pitch perfect, the stumbling, inchoate voices of the cohort that makes up the tail end of the boomer generation. The cohort that watched the 60s from the sidelines - as younger siblings - or saw the events on TV. The cohort that romanticized the idealism of free love, racial equality, and power to the people without living through the grit and grime of the lived reality of fighting for those ideals, including against the internal enemies. This cohort inherited, relatively unscathed, the haven of liberal arts colleges and Universities as a place to explore who they were in relation to each other without the mores and tropes of the 50s, and without some of the authority that the University wielded before the 60s but also without a clear new vision of how to navigate the new sexual and relational landscape. From Madeleine's perspective: "Madeleine...realized that her [older] sister's iconoclasm and liberationist commitments had just been part of a trend. Alwyn had done things she had done and voiced the political opinions she'd voiced because all her friends were acting and talking the same way. You were supposed to feel bad about missing the sixties, but Madeleine didn't. She felt as if she'd been spared a lot of nonsense, that her generation, while inheriting much that was good from that decade, had a healthy distance from it as well, saving them from the whiplash that resulted from being a Maoist one minute and a suburban mother, in Beverly, Massachusetts, the next."

So this coming of age novel is of a particular age - the post Aquarian age - when the Graduate's message - don't marry him - had been delivered - but the new marriage, the new society with its new norms was not yet developed. This group, this generation, would have to figure out its own marriage plot, its own way of engaging in the dance, and they would have to do that while the rules of the dance were evolving around them. This generation could fashion their own identity, but they would have to do that, seemingly, out of whole cloth.

The role of parents in this novel, then, is interesting, if for no other reason than that the children in this novel will become the helicopter parents of the present generation. The parents in this novel have provided and continue to provide a base - solid or shaky - but they are - even when present - peripheral players. They do not guide so much as turn a blind eye or, when they look, offer advice or attempts at control that are completely out of step with what the children need. Leonard's parents fail to provide him with adequate nourishment - his mother all but abandoning he and his sister after his father runs off with another woman to England. They show up for graduations and weddings but are not engaged. Madeleine's parents, much more involved, warn her to get a prenup, fly to her aid when she is stranded, and ultimately board all three of the protagonists (two at a time) when they are not capable of taking care of themselves. About Mitchell's parents we know very little. Traditional lines of initiation and passing on of wisdom have been severed, and the sense that there is wisdom to be had is in question.

Mitchell seeks wisdom in books and in mysticism. He reads Salinger's Franny and Zooey and takes up the Jesus prayer as Franny did. He goes to India to volunteer for Mother Theresa and to get the lay of the land. And throughout this, almost against his will, he is held in the orbit of Madeleine. She is his ideal. The basis for this is pretty slender: there is something about her handwriting - small and cramped - that reveals her inner life to be more complicated than her external, conventional demeanor would lead him to believe. He constructs her, then, not based on who she is but on who he needs her to be - she is his Beatrice, his imagined spiritual guide - not an actual, living breathing partner.

Madeleine, for her part, cannot imagine the interiority of Mitchell, and finds his exterior to be plain and therefore of little interest. Mitchell, himself, is searching for his own interior, imagining it in Madeleine, and, despite not finding it, is able to have the fortitude to resolve his relationship with Madeleine. My guess is that this is revisionist history. I think that Eugenides, an incredibly successful author - he won the Pulitzer Prize for Middlesex (a much more ambitious, sweeping book) may have returned later in life to the unrequited love - and achieved resolution. And, after having struggled with Madeleine throughout his life, I think he may finally have been able to own - not her - not the old marriage plot chattel ending - but the part of himself that he imagined she could provide him.

This novel then, as humble as it is when compared to the complex, ambitiousness that Middlesex provided, speaks to something very true and satisfying. It is about the ability of the post-60s generation to own themselves; to become that which they had hoped they could be, even though they were a lost generation, stripped of direction by the questioning that the 60s provided, deluded into romanticism but without a roadmap of how to get from here to there, Eugenides maintains (and perhaps proves?) that there is hope of integrating a cogent sense of one's self. Do we need to earn a Pulitzer to do it? God, I hope not.

I think that Eugenides has been able to come to a psychological resolve about this period of his life as a result of writing about it. Part of the telling of this tale that is off putting is that the characters have, what is to me, an unrealistic level of self awareness. They are cognizant of their intentions and of the likely impact of their actions that is well beyond their years. I believe this to be an anachronism borne of the author's having imagined these events - having let them ripen and become real in his belly over time. And as that happens, he knows the characters better than they could have known themselves - and he writes from the perspective of who they are beyond what they could reasonably have been conscious of being- he writes from the perspective of the integrated, whole person that they are working to become rather than the fragmented, developing person that they are at the moment that is being described. The maturation that has taken place is the processing, the coming of age, that ripening, of the author, and it is a maturation that each of us can engage in as we ruminate about the past.

Perhaps the most poignant example of this ripening, of this imagining, is the explicit sexual interactions between Leonard and Madeleine - wonderful, glorious, mania fired interactions that Mitchell (Eugenides) will never be able to compete with. Eugenides engages in this - what appears like a masochistic exercise - as part, I believe, of the process of knowing the enemy. Knowing that he cannot provide his lover what she wants and fears, at the time of the interaction nor now, in the present - he will never be the lover his competitor was, but also of knowing, perhaps through allowing himself to imagine it in all of its detail, that this is not what determines that he is not Madeleine's lover. What will allow Mitchell to become who he is is the process of hearing the voice within him - the spiritual voice he has been pursuing. This voice, imagined in the book as coming at the perfect moment in the relationship with Madeleine, but perhaps coming later in life, allows the marriage plot to have a new twist- one that Austen didn't have available - that the eligible young person might move towards becoming who they are not through a marital relationship alone - but along a variety of paths with a variety of people - the right people at the right moments - and not with a person who is forced to fit because of the urgency of the need of the lover.

My friend Dan, who spent the first year of his second marriage writing a book about the end of his first marriage, and my own experience, of dreaming about my first love and talking about that with my current lover, are both examples of being haunted by former loves. It has taken both Dan and I, and I believe Eugenides, considerable work to put these earlier lovers to bed. And, at least for me, she sleeps uneasily - she can re-emerge, particularly during moments when I am questioning myself and longing for something that I cannot provide at the moment.

This book was embarrassing to read. It aptly describes how awkward and clumsy I felt during the time he is describing. For all the erudition, for all the reading, for all the knowledge of love and self actualization that the world has produced, it remains for each age, and each member of each age, to grope through what is new - both to the individual but also to the species - how to navigate this particular coming of age. If we accomplish that in a lifetime, as Eugenides appears to have done, or even make significant progress on that process, I think we should count it a life well lived.

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...

Nat Johnson's Pym - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reads About Race

Last year there was no Pulitzer Prize for fiction awarded. This award, usually given annually, recognizes the best writing published during the year that captures some central aspect of the American experience. Over the years, the Pulitzer Prize has been awarded to exceptional books that have become part of our shared experience - To Kill a Mockingbird is an example of this category - and they have been awarded to authors who should have had a Pulitzer for their earlier work and the current book is good and somewhat related to the American experience - Ernest Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea falls in this category. But the committee could not come to a consensus about either. The New York Times asked authors to nominate books, and Maud Newton nominated Nat Johnson's Pym as a modern look at race with a Vonnegut-like wry humor.

As a fan of the Pulitzer, Vonnegut, and a person who is curious about race, especially about the subjectivity of cross racial experiences, I bit. Initially I was quite disappointed. This book is NOT about the subjectivity of cross racial experience. It is marginally about subjectivity at all - except in a very broad, very romanticized sense of subjectivity - which is to say, to my mind, not a very accurate articulation of subjectivity, though one that can be compelling. On reflection, Vonnegut's rather arch and wry renditions of consciousness can be quite glib and romantic and therefore were quite appealing to my adolescent and idealistic self, but might be less satisfying were I to chew on them today. Like Vonnegut, Johnson takes on a big topic and approaches it with humor and more than a little irreverence.

The original Pym is Edgar Allen Poe's sole novel. Written in serial form to make a buck when Poe was dying of advanced alcoholism and out of money, it is the story of a trip to Antarctica in the company of an African American that includes a stop at an island with people who are blacker than black on the way to arriving on the shores of Antarctica to be greeted by white yeti like creatures in a weird, unclear ending. Nat Johnson retells this tale from a modern perspective - apparently something that others have done. In Johnson's tale, Chris Jaynes, an African American Poe scholar is denied tenure at his small, white liberal arts college, purchases the memoirs of Dirk Peters, Poe's African American sidekick on his Antarctic adventure, and Jaynes assembles a crew of African Americans with a variety of interests to sail to Antarctica. There they improbably discover the yeti-like creatures and the two hundred year old Pym, preserved by the Yetis' alcoholic beverage which Pym drinks in copious quantities. The African Americans briefly enslave and then are enslaved by the Yetis - or snow monkeys as they refer to them in a reverse stereotypical manner.

The plot of the book is preposterous, and the characters amusing but two dimensional - the central and striking images are of ice caves on the one hand - carved out of the glaciers, they are austere but beautiful spaces with thin ice roofs that let in the 24 hour sun of summer - and a bio sphere constructed by a painter named Karvel, who is clearly a representation of Thomas Kinkade - the kitschy painter who created imaginary cottages and landscapes that people many American's homes. The biodome becomes a haven of sorts two of the escaped slaves.

The biodome is not just a device, but something that exists, as in the link, in the world, as well as in movies . Dependent on massive quantities of petrochemicals to maintain its temperature, Johnson's Biodome's exhaust is melting the ice caves; and it is the home of Karvel and his wife, and their entire enterprise is to make the internal landscape reflect one of Karvel's paintings exactly. Jaynes's sidekick, a bloated Little Debbie loving African American, is a huge fan of Karvel/Kinkade. And, if I understand the intent, he symbolizes the African American community's investment in acculturation. The American dream that is painted across the ceiling and included in the palm trees and blue tinted water running through streams in a dome in Antarctica is a picture of the delusional quality of the desired goal. It is not real, organic or true in its own right, much less as a vision to be aspired to by a people that were enslaved in order to bring it to fruition (Marvel/Kinkade's wife serves the slave function in the dome, as do, briefly, the two escaped African Americans).

From Johnson's perspective, then, the process of acculturation - from eating Little Debbie's, to enslaving others, to being enslaved - perhaps at one's job - is a false dream. The real dream that he ends his version of Pym with is sailing, as the racist Pym dies in his boat, to an island peopled not by the blackest blacks of Poe's work, but by brown people, people who are the color of most people on the planet.

As I reflected on this work, I was reminded of the two Jesuit visions of God - as a God of Affection or one of Disaffection. The God of Affection creates a world that is filled with elements that are in tension with each other, and he loves the whole creation - and is pulling for us to work to make it a little less messy. The God of Disaffection creates a perfect world - a Kinkadian world - that is corrupted by evil forces that should be vanquished. The latter God supports banishing those who are corrupted/corrupting and bonding with those who, like us, are good.

From a more analytic perspective, the person worshipping a God of Affection is interested in the entire range of her or his reactions to the world - good, bad, and indifferent. The person worshipping the God of disaffection banishes from consciousness thoughts that are unacceptable; bad thoughts that they shouldn't have. Oedipal thoughts, for instance, can be viewed as dangerous, incestuous thoughts that should be banished at all costs, or they can be treated as thoughts - and approached with curiosity about why they are emerging at this moment and what it is that they might signify. I think it is easier to worship a God of Affection, to entertain forbidden thoughts, when the intensity of those thoughts, significant though it may be, has not been realized in actions that overwhelm the ability to get psychological distance from them. Slavery - and having enslaved others - makes it very hard for us to dispassionately entertain thoughts about slavery, just as having been an incest survivor or perpetrator makes it hard for us to dispassionately entertain thoughts about incest.

This book, Pym, is disappointing then, not because it is not entertaining but because it, like the movie The Graduate, points to the problems of the generations before, but both works end on the cusp of whatever new thing it is that would be created. But neither presents a new template, and, without a new template, I fear that the new will end up taking on the mantle of the old very quickly. We will slide back into the sado masochistic relational patterns and the idealistic romantic vision of a perfect world and be totally unaware that the byproducts of our visions are toxic to the world's organic inhabitants.

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

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

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), 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...

Anne Sexton - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reads about Poetry and Psychotherapy

Dawn Skorczewski has written a marvelous book, An Accident of Hope, about Anne Sexton's poetry and her psychotherapy with Milton Orne in the late 1950's and early 1960's. Skorczewski listened to all of the extant tapes of the psychotherapy sessions Sexton had with Orne and chose to focus on the recorded sessions that have survived from the last nine months or so of Sexton's treatment. Dawn is a friend of mine, and I must admit that I was not looking forward to reading the book. I thought,"Oh, OK, I'll propose it to the analytic book club and, if they are interested, that will give me a chance to say that I have read it." Dawn is a vibrant person, a good writer and editor who has taught me a lot about writing - and teaching, but I'm not a big fan of poetry, it's just not my genre, and visiting a poet I did not know from around the time of my (and Dawn's) birth and thinking about the antiquated therapy she had undergone just didn't sound exciting.

Well, surprise, surprise. This is a lively and very current book. I was moved and frustrated by the treatment and enjoyed the poetry. Anne Sexton is a woman who had published no poetry before her therapy; she essentially started a poetry genre of self revelation that was a significant cultural step towards the Oprah openness we experience today; and she ultimately won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. She was also a woman who was seriously ill, was treated by Orne for seven years before being treated by another psychiatrist. The second psychiatrist had a sexual affair with her and Sexton subsequently committed suicide. Dawn elucidates how Anne's engagement in the treatment anticipated the developments that psychoanalytic theory was to discover over the next thirty or forty years. On the other hand, she is a bit critical of Orne who was from her perspective, slow on the uptake and didn't always appreciate what Sexton was laying out for him. This case, for Dawn, illustrated Freud's remark that "Every time I make a great discovery, I find that the artists have been there before me," though in this case the artist got there in the context of therapy as well as in her art.

From my perspective, the interplay of a modern feminist listening to and commenting on the therapeutic interaction between two people engaged in a dialogue that was very much of their moment in history- on the cusp of a feminist revolution - was fascinating. I also appreciated, as a guy with a bit of a poetic tin ear, Dawn's careful but evocative reading of the poetry, and her laying out the therapeutic and personal context of the poems, which brought them to life for me. Delightful. But I also found myself entering the dyad of Sexton and Orne from a very different perspective than Skorczewski. While I empathized with and appreciated Skorczewski's reading of Sexton's subjectivity, I found myself wondering about Orne's. More than Dawn reported herself feeling, I found myself identifying with Orne and feeling that, despite a familiarity with the modern literature that Dawn was citing as a corrective to Orne's technical failings and shortcomings; I might not have been able to make as good use of them as Dawn seemed to imply that I might, and I feared that I might fail in ways, and have failed with my patients, in ways that mirror Orne's failings. That is, I think that some - perhaps not all - of Orne's blind spots might have existed - and the dilemmas he faced might still exist, even though we have a much better understanding of what he was confronting than he did.

Skorczewski, I think rightly, takes Orne to task for two major blunders. Each comes to the fore in a specific period in this last part of the treatment and each is related to a particular part of Sexton's psychology. The first of these blunders, I will call it the error of paralysis, occurs when Orne is first becoming aware that he may leave town (ultimately he does) some nine months hence. Orne becomes particularly inept in his interactions with Sexton, and they talk together about a parallel period of time when Orne withdrew from her during the time when he was afraid to tell Sexton, a woman who had been desperately and at times erotically (in her fantasy life) close to him, that he was going to be marrying. On that occasion, he cut down the number of times that they met per week, quit holding Sexton's hand when she was having difficulty, and asked her to set a termination date, essentially wishing that she would get better so that his news would not upset her.

This time, Martin, a smart, driven man, drawn by his research and ambition to move to another city, refuses to acknowledge how important he has been to Anne - and she to him - and how difficult it is going to be to say goodbye. When she notes that it was he who encouraged her to write, and that the writing has often been directed at him and their work together, he demurs, and rather clumsily - if with apparent good intention - insists that it is she - not her poetry - that is of value. Imagining myself into Orne's experience, I wonder whether he is frightened by how important he has become to her. More than that, he fears, in this woman who has survived multiple traumas at the hands of family members, including her father, mother, and favorite aunt, that he is now becoming a perpetrator himself. By marrying - by leaving - by withdrawing from her, he will injure her, taking away the person she depends on to hold herself together. While we know, as observers, that talking about his leaving, processing the impending ending, is what is most desperately needed, he may fear that to discuss this is to reify it, to make it true and to instigate the very thing that he is desperately trying to stave off - Anne's descent into madness at the hands of a caregiver who withdraws. Because his paralysis creates the very withdrawal he is trying to stave off, an impasse in the treatment develops.

I think part of the problem is that there is a developmental lag for Orne. Sexton is healthier than she was earlier in the treatment (when he tried too quickly to force her to get well). Now that she is better, he still has in mind the danger of pushing her too quickly - and thus does not trust her to be able to tolerate more material now than she, in fact, can.  I think another part of the problem is that Sexton is a trauma survivor and the transference/countertransference interaction is sadomasochistic - and Orne, well intentioned, well meaning Orne, has trouble recognizing himself (and Sexton may too) as the instigator of potentially unmanageable distress. This leads him to become defensive - to demonstrate how the treatment has been useful - without casting himself as the hero - trying to avoid overinflating himself, but in the process frustrating Sexton because she can neither love nor hate him - and she wants desperately to do both, and to be able to do both.

I do think that trauma challenges our ability to love and hate the same person. We are called, especially through trauma with caregivers, to try to strain to hold together a positive and a negative view of them, and we end up splitting - seeing others as all good or all bad - rather than integrating them. This is partially, I think, because the psychological space in ourselves that we inhabit to hold our ambivalent feelings together gets pulled apart repeatedly, and we end up with scar tissue there - so we have real trouble standing on that spot and getting purchase, and it is easier to slide to one side or the other. Orne, I am imagining, feels uncomfortable being idealized and devalued and so he tries to make himself into nothing to Sexton, which he most definitely is not, and things crawl to a stop.

The second difficulty for Skorczewski is Orne's reaction to Sexton's narcissism. Skorczewski would have Orne embrace and support it - and she sees evidence of Sexton begging him to do this. She cites theories that Orne does not yet have access to that would help him be able to appreciate the importance of Sexton's narcissism to her maintenance of her self and to her functioning as an artist. I think, though, that Skorczewski loses track of Orne's role as a treater in this moment. Later in the book, Skorczewski is critical of the impact of Sexton's mother's narcissism on Sexton's functioning. Even though Orne overemphasizes Sexton's role as a mother, her maternal role is one that is important to her, and as a treater he may have felt an obligation to her children to try to help her be more considerate - less focused on herself and, without a theory that supports increasing the regard of the treater towards her as a way through the thicket of narcissism, Orne is indeed loathe to follow that route. To further complicate things, Orne's mother, a psychiatrist, originally treated Sexton and Skorczewski provides evidence that she - Orne's mother - is quite narcissistic. Poor Orne - he is treating a woman who has the issues that are unresolved in his relationship with his own mother. This complicates the task tremendously.

I offer the criticisms above not as a critique of the book, but to broaden the perspectives that the reader might take in regard to this unique, powerful therapeutic relationship that we are lucky to have access to via the tapes, but even more through Skorczewski's close and empathic reading of Sexton's experience. The tapes exist because Orne made them to help Sexton have access to the sessions - she would frequently forget material they had talked about and she was tasked with transcribing them as a means of better understanding and remembering them. Apparently Orne used this technique with at least some of his other patients. Unfortunately the tapes between the sessions where an impasse is apparent and later work that is more spontaneous and that demonstrates the real affection that each of these participants had for the other is missing - it would be really helpful to have a roadmap out of the morass of an impasse and back onto the highway of collaborative work.

I also must admit that there were moments when I questioned along with Skorczewski, Orne's treatment, especially when Sexton's husband is choking her and Orne does not intervene more directly. Further, Orne functions as a co-therapist during the time that Sexton is primarily seeing Duhl, her subsequent therapist, and Orne is aware of the sexual affair they have and the difficulties that it poses for Sexton.  Even if we didn't know then how disruptive this can be (see a post about Andrea Celenza's work on this); even if our ethical principles and laws did not yet condemn this behavior, it is hard to believe that Orne could not anticipate the difficulties this would cause Sexton and, again, more actively intervene.  There is a tragedy here - that someone who could be so helpful ultimately could not provide the kind of help that Sexton really did need.

Despite my misgivings, the book ends up being a very interesting entrance into history, but also, surprisingly, brings up issues about contemporary treatment that are well worth considering. While Orne did not hear Sexton as we can, others were hearing other patients so that we can now hear her, just as we can now hear one of Freud's failed treatments, his treatment of Dora, in ways that his work ultimately helps us achieve, but that were not yet available to him. That said, and despite the tragic conclusion to Sexton's treatment and life, it is also apparent that a less than optimal - perhaps good enough? - treatment helped this woman articulate her experience both in the consulting room and on the page in ways that enriched all of our lives.  Tragically, it did not save her life,

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