Gregory Boyle's Tattoos on the Heart – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reflects on the Work of a Jesuit

At the Jesuit University where I work, we have been assigning a first year reading for 8 or ten years and I have been of two minds about the choices.  I wish that we were assigning classics; things that the students would refer to throughout their experience at the University – like the Republic.  Instead, the group that makes the assignments has been requiring current books – mostly of the inspirational bent.  I think they want to influence the students to engage in “living a life for others”, part of our mission statement.  The books “Three Cups of Tea” and “A Pearl in the Storm” have been assigned, for instance.  Last year the book was about the HeLA Cells, cancerous cervical cells that are used in almost all cancer research; cells that were “donated” by a poor African American woman who didn’t know they were being taken from her.  It is a rich, complicated and interesting book that I reviewed previously, and the students rose to the occasion.  At least in my group, they seemed to really get it and to discuss various complex threads that were central themes in the book.

The book this year is a book by Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart.  It has the virtue of being by a Jesuit.  But it really has no plot and the narrative arc is implicit rather than explicit.  It is essentially a collection of homilies that this Jesuit priest has told over the years.  These homilies have been told primarily to the “homeboys” – gang members – in the south central LA community where Father Boyle worked first as a Parish Pastor and then, after he had decided that this was his calling (not to work in the Student Services Division at the nearby, but light years away Jesuit University of Santa Clara, where he was originally intended to work) he started something called “Homeboy Industries”, a collection of agencies that provide many services, but mostly jobs, for ex-gang members so that they can get out of the gang/poverty cycle and move on with their lives.  So these are stories of kids who have moved on, but also of many who tried and failed – he has buried more than 150 “homeys” who have been killed by other homeys.  He tells these stories to homeys because they experience themselves as the subject of interest of someone like him – someone who it educated and not trapped in their community – and this makes them subjects of interest to themselves.  He tells these stories to us because he hopes that it will allow us to see gang members as human beings – very much like ourselves, with similar desires and ambitions.

Boyle relates that there have been three “waves” of addressing the gang problem.  The first was to wage war on the gangs.  This led to a proliferation of gangs as gang members were given additional, reality based reasons to band together against an outside force.  The second wave was to broker truces between gangs.  This was the early work that Father Greg – or “G” in gang parlance – engaged in.  It took him a while, but he and others realized that this was also perpetuating gangs – as Boyles puts it, it was like oxygen to the gangs.  In my mind, it legitimized them and their “turf” and led to institutionalizing gangs as the de facto organizations in the barrio, parish or neighborhood.  The third wave is not to engage with gangs at all, but to engage with individuals.  The idea is that by meeting individual’s needs directly gangs become unnecessary to them.

One of the chapters in this book is a chapter about outcomes.  Boyle has to demonstrate to those who fund his work that he is accomplishing what he has set out to do. This has been a real issue in both psychoanalysis and, more recently, in higher education.  Both are expensive, time intensive enterprises.  Are they worth it?  In some sense, Boyle’s book, the stories that he tells, is the outcome of his work; both the content of those stories – this homey got a job/that homey went to college, but also the impact of the stories on the reader.  He tosses off one statistic – the number of gang murders per year is half now of what it was when gang violence was at its worse when he started this program – but he does not claim credit for that.  What he does claim credit for – not directly, but through the stories, is the positive impact of being a father figure – a stable reliable father figure – to thousands of kids exemplified by stories about a few dozen of them.  And these kids have been able to have profound moments of emotional and spiritual insight as a direct result of the relationships that he forges with them.  And these lead to monumental life changes in some of them.  They also lead to changes in us.  We see the individuals he is talking about as people – soft vulnerable decent people living inside of scared selves and bodies that are tattooed and muscled to scare away scary others – and we feel more human – more connected with people we would not otherwise imagine connecting with - as we move with G through the barrios and witness what he has seen.

This afternoon, a group of us met with a new faculty employee.  She is a local celebrity – the ex-mayor of our city – who has been hired to help us in our community outreach.  We asked her what she envisions doing here, and she said that she would like to be able to be involved with projects that have demonstrable impacts on the well-being of members of the community; something that actually enhances their quality of living through improving their health, economic standing, or their vitality.  I realized that we do this – with our students.  We offer them an education that opens doors to jobs that provide them with a good standard of living.  Many of our students become do-gooders, but they are frequently able to do good from the position of being a reasonably well paid professional.  They work with the poor and underprivileged – they teach them, or treat them or minister to them in whatever way that they do – and they have the credentials to be compensated for this work.

Many of the students in my department are working in the community.  They log 72,000 hours of community service annually.  We know that the work that they are doing, in general, has good outcomes.  Most of the people they work with have better mental and emotional functioning as a direct result of the work that they do.  Many of the people that they work with are poor and/or marginalized in various ways.  Does the work that they do lead to measurable improvement in the functioning of the community?  Is our city, is this world, a better place for the work that they do?

My city will never be without poor, marginalized, emotionally despondent and spiritually bereft individuals.  My adolescent self cringes at the idea that I just wrote that sentence.  But my more mature self realizes that the human condition will, I think, always generate misery.  Ouch, now I’ve written another one - but I fear it to be true and thus feel compelled to write it.  The outcomes that we are looking to achieve, then, are not absolute or perfect – they are determined by the hand that is dealt.  Boyles does not believe that he can end poverty in South Central LA, nor even that he can end gang violence.  What he believes is that he can address both and that will have a positive impact on the lives of some of those he touches.

I think I feel guilty about teaching (and treating) students (and patients) who can most benefit from what I have to offer – those students (and patients) who are NOT marginalized, but are competent – but not yet as fully competent as they will be after their education/treatment.

 

As part of my own training, I worked in a State Hospital and made a vow to myself that I would include work of that sort, one day a week, in whatever my professional world ended up being.  I have not kept that promise.  Greg Boyle did.  It is some small consolation that my students do that on my behalf.

But, at the end of the day, does this rising tide raise all ships?  Are we creating paths for the homeys to get out of the barrio?  Is our educational and health care system one that improves the lives of all or just of a few?  How do we empower those who are marginalized?  And how would we measure it if we were empowering people – what outcomes would we track through the complicated pathways along which our interventions are being delivered?  Boyle has concrete answers.  He can see the impact of the work that he does.  And he can feel the need for it – which leads him to plead his case – effectively - by helping us feel the need for it.      



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Lucy – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Gets Dragged to a Popular Movie

This year the reluctant family has joined me at the shore for the typical psychoanalyst’s August vacation.  Unfortunately, Hurricane Bertha has joined us as well and, despite being far out at sea, she has dumped a lot of rain and cloudy weather on us.  We have done jigsaw puzzles and gone to the local aquarium (where we learned the 80% of the world’s population lives within 40 miles of an ocean – we, in the other 20%, must drive to be near but not in one – who wants to get wet when it’s raining?), so it was time to get out of the house for a movie.  Seeing as it is summer and the offerings are limited – further, we are at the beach and our favorite theaters are hours away – our choices were limited.  The reluctant wife and I voted for the Phillip Seymour Hoffman vehicle, but we were outvoted by the reluctant children, who were more interested in Lucy – something that I was mildly drawn to by the trailers that featured the question “What would we do if we could use 100% of our brains?”

I should have known I was in trouble during the trailers.  After each come on for a shoot ‘em up, each one with less apparent plot than the one before, I whispered to the reluctant wife, “Just find your center.”  The eldest reluctant stepdaughter didn’t understand what I was saying or why I was saying it, but the reluctant son, I think, did – of course he finds zombie movies appalling while she feasts on them.

Now don’t get me wrong – I’m no longer squeamish in the way that I was immediately after the birth of the reluctant son.  Then, each movie death was not simply an act, but the death of a human being, the child of someone.  I’m still a softie.  My kids all can tell when I’m going to tear up while we’re watching a movie or, worse, a particularly moving commercial, but I have become somewhat hardened to the experience of watching violence, death and mayhem on film again and recognize in a film like The Avengers that this is all just for fun.  This movie, though, begins with a defenseless woman (played by Scarlet Johansson) being swirled into a drug gang crazy world by her lout of a boyfriend whom she has been with for a week.  And after the first scene there had been more deaths, some of them quite brutal, than minutes – and perhaps that was still the case at the end of the whole movie – we were trying to figure that out but could not produce an accurate body count of the extended car chase scene down multiple streets the wrong way creating mayhem and who knows how much murder and maiming.

Ironically, the woman’s capturer’s brutality injures her in ways that empower her and, in what the reluctant wife notes is a fantasy for all women, she lures a would be rapist into being thoroughly thrashed (and killed, along with his henchmen – at this point in the movie the body count was way beyond the minutes).  (I wonder if it is also partly Johansson’s fantasy about what she would do to the Marvel group that has not given her a well-deserved starring vehicle in that franchise because they are too afraid that a woman can’t successfully headline.)  In any case, Johansson’s character proceeds to grow in intellectual and physical power and is, incidentally, able to seek vengeance on the drug lord who gets her into this mess in the final scene.

So, why bother writing about this movie?  In part, it makes sense to give it some thought because the come on teaser is one that is broader than a shoot-‘em-up.  This is billed as a movie about what would happen if we could use more than 10% of our brains (a statement that has lots of legs, but no real basis in anything like modern neuroscience).  What is the intellectual framework that undergirds a shoot-‘em-up?  What does the director think is the reason that we are drawn to this? 

We are delivered a truism by the character played by Morgan Freeman, that "when the environment is supportive, we seek immortality through connection and passing on what we know to those we love, but that when the environment is hostile, the organism seeks personal immortality."  Hmm…  So, because the drug lords are seeking to attack Lucy, she becomes more focused on her own survival than on being connected with those around her.  Lucy’s only ally is a French cop who is mystified by how he can help her as she demonstrates her superhuman powers and she explains that she has him along as a reminder – so that she doesn’t forget her own humanity as she becomes increasingly smart and, in the language of the movie, computer-like.  From this perspective, having more access to our minds makes us more machinelike and less human – as if intelligence did not include empathy and connection but was only “cerebral”….  Again, hmm…  (For a very different view of the relation between human and machine logic, see my review of Hozier).  One problem with this film is that it is filled with so much drivel that it is hard to stay focused on the central message – which seems to be that the hero in an action film is so threatened that she must become, at least in Lucy’s case, essentially invincible and focused on solving the problem of individual immortality so much that she is in danger of losing track of the best interests of the community and therefore my fail to pass along what is known so that the tribe may survive.

Well, Lucy somehow manages to do both (whew!) (the dead in the cars are just collateral damage and she checks to make sure that one of her victims is terminal before mercifully killing him).  She leaves a flashdrive with all the information that we need to know (it’s a REALLY BIG flashdrive) when she poofs into post physical existence and is, as she says, everywhere.  Maybe she is able to manage it all because she is a woman.  I suppose boys get bullied more than girls (there must be data on this somewhere) and this may account for their sense of vulnerability and thus flocking to theaters to see the vulnerable hero overcome all odds to beat the corrupt enemy, but it really is women – especially as adults – who have to fight long odds and are, I think, constantly reminded of how vulnerable they are to more powerful men who can do bad things to them.  So it makes a lot of sense to have a female character be the hero in a shoot ‘em up.  Further, it makes sense that she refuses to consider that she is able to do all kinds of magical things because of drugs so that anyone else should be able to do this as well – but perhaps she just doesn’t trust men to handle the job, any job, with integrity.  They will just use the drugs to get people high.  What a waste.  Better to kill someone every minute until you get it all figured out and then hand on the wisdom.

This movie has wonderful visual effects.  Imagine what Stanley Kubrick would have done in 2001 if he had our toys?  Imagine what the Beatles would have done?  Perhaps there is a danger of moving more and more to the surface as we marry our intelligence to the visual.  Freud maintained that it is our initial thinking – our primary process, animal thinking, that is visual.  Our secondary process thinking – the rational part of ourselves – is, for him, narratively based – it is the thinking of Shakespeare where the words are the play, and the staging is just an excuse – a way to illuminate the words.  In our modern shoot ‘em ups, the words are an excuse to get to the next dazzling effect, and this effect has to be more expansive and, frankly, grosser than anything we have seen recently or we will, like the reluctant stepdaughter who found seeing the legs of dead people and then the bloody hands of the murder unimpressive, say that we could have done better with a bottle of ketchup.  Ouch…

So, the day after the movie, what should happen but that I should be kicked out of the ocean by a lifeguard?  Kicked out of the ocean?  Who gets kicked out of the ocean?  Well, it turns out that Bertha is creating rip tides in addition to dumping water.  I wanted some of Lucy’s superpowers to defeat the lifeguards.  They were kicking me, a body surfer, out, while allowing the surfboarders to remain.  It turns out the surfboarders had a flotation device with them - the surfboard.  If I fetched a boogie board, that would not suffice.  Aargh.  What is an analyst to do?  Stay out of the water so that he can pass information on to his students and his patients?  Preservation of the individual for the betterment of society – it’s the right thing to do.  I know, I know.  But I would much rather be personally immortal and not have to worry about small natural events like hurricanes… I would much rather take a drug that would lead to immortality, invincibility and enlightenment that trudge along towards small gains.  Kind of like the folks in the sixties who thought that LSD would be a shortcut to enlightenment.  We can wish - but the lifeguards apparently stand ready to provide an unwanted dose of reality.

   
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How Would Freud have written his Biography? The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reads Adam Phillips’ Becoming Freud – The Making of a Psychoanalyst

Adam Phillips’ slender biography of Freud published this year (2014) and titled “Becoming Freud” is one that I was quite intrigued to read.  It is brief, written by an analyst who is also the editor of the new Penguin Standard Edition of Freud – someone who is editing the new translations without speaking German!  Does he get Freud?  Well, he spends the first chapter clarifying that, from Freud’s perspective, there is no such thing as an accurate biography.  From Freud’s (via Phillips) perspective, the biography is more about the biographer than about the object of the biography, just as this blog is more about me than about Adam Phillips’ work, and just as what you think or say about this blog is more about you than me, Phillips, or Freud.  From Freud’s perspective, it is the subjective experience of the person that matters.  And this is, I believe, at the heart of what it is that Freud had to say and certainly Phillips takes this stance as well.

So Phillips' approach to Freud is not to flat footedly analyze him by attributing actions to hypothesized unconscious motivations as others have sometimes done; instead  he takes a swirling, free associational stab at describing Freud’s history – what is known and so much that is unknown and, in a weird approach for a psychoanalyst, he analyzes not Freud the person so much as Freud the socio- psychoanalytic individual who emerges at a particular point in history – the history of European thought – he sees Freud as a left over Romantic as the world is becoming modern (ironically largely at his prodding) – and he emerges at a particular point in the history of European Judaism – Freud may be a Godless Jew, but he is deeply determined, Phillips believes, by his cultural origins.

It is important to realize that this is one of a series of books about famous Jews, and it is central to Phillips’ thesis that Freud, as a Jew in Anti-Semitic Vienna and as an immigrant from Moravia was a man standing on the margins.  This prepared him to hear the voices within himself and his patients that were being silenced by the dominant majority.   Freud’s unconscious then, in Phillips’ reading, is the unconscious of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents; Freud’s commentary on the ways in which civilization needs must squelch the voice of the individual for the common good – and how this, in turn, leads the individual to want to articulate something nameless and forbidden – the urge to assert him or herself, and these forces must be repressed for the good of the order – so they go underground – they become the unconscious.

This process occurs for (or to) every member of society.  But for those who are privileged, they don’t quite see what they are giving up because they are given so much in return.  And, as the executors of the next social order, they do to others what was done to them (we call it “identification with the aggressor”), and they do it with impunity because it is, after all, how they have come to profit in the ways that they have.  As a Jew, Freud both is (25% of University students in Vienna when Freud was in college were Jewish) and is not (only 9% of the population of Vienna was Jewish) a member of a privileged class.  One of the dangers of a meritocracy, which Vienna briefly was, is that the minority may move into positions of power, and when this happens, those who held power are not pleased, and they may retaliate – hopefully not usually as brutally as the Nazis did, but it is a risk.  But Phillips’ position is a different one – it is that Freud actually craved being taken over by another – having a mentor who would show him the ropes – assimilate him – and, to his credit, he strongly resisted this despite being drawn to it in a series of relationships with attractive and powerful mentors.  Freud worked to maintain his “splendid isolation” throughout his professional career – guarding against the possibility that what he had to say would be poisoned, not just by the intent of the other, but by his wish to have his work validated – to be loved by a maternal, personally erosive other who would incorporate him.

So this is an interesting biography from two perspectives.  The facts of Freud’s life are not talked about until page 38 – it takes that long to tell us that those facts, while relevant, cannot adequately describe Freud’s world analytically because he is not there in an analytic relationship to talk about it – and then that Phillips says all but nothing about the last half of Freud’s development as a systematizer of the psychoanalytic movement.  He all but says that he wishes Freud would have died after teaching us about dreams and slips of the tongue, after telling us about the unconscious – while his thinking was young and free and he was describing humans in revolt – because, and this he doesn’t state, the part that he leaves out is the description of the mind as a structure – with the familiar super ego, ego, and id – and this mind of Freud’s – his last invention – is one that, I think, Phillips would say (or I am saying for him) is the mind of the politician who created a movement – a movement that, like all political movements, ends up repressing those who would belong and discarding those who don’t toe the line.  Freud became the very thing that his revolutionary idea was rebelling against – at least if I am reading Phillips accurately.  And more than that, despite his fear of being incorporated, he may have been – perhaps without knowing it – as he came to identify with the aggressor/oppressor and describe a mind – this structured mind – that is the mind of the slave; of the person who has bought into what civilization has to offer and has sold his soul to wallow in its comforts.

Last night, I wandered into a Barnes and Noble and there, in the vestibule, were stacks of books with “90 second” synopses of various fields.  I picked up the one on psychology, and there was Freud, summarized in a page, and he was referred to as the guy who gave us the superego, ego and id.  That was basically it.  This later mind, this mind that is a description not of human potential – not of what we could become – but the mind of who we are – the mind of those of us who have figured out how to repress/suppress and distance ourselves from our dreams – not those of us who have figured out how to live in dialogue with them; those of us who are living to find – and in some sense to live out – our dreams.  Freud is, then, being presented (at least in my view of Phillips’ position) as the ultimate squelcher rather than as a symbol of freedom…

I have taken some liberties in the last paragraph, indeed throughout this essay, but it is, at least until you read it, my essay and so I will play with taking Phillips’ ideas to the extreme.  But lest you think that I am some kind of revolutionary who gets the way that Freud, and then the world, turned the revolutionary Freud into the repressor, please know that I have written a textbook chapter that commits the same sin as the book in Barnes and Noble’s (OK, I used more words to do it than the 90 second version) and it is Phillips’ book that is creating, for me, this dichotomy – the dichotomy between Freud the revolutionary and Freud the systematizer.  And the dichotomy between my adolescent, fancy filled self who would take an idea and run with it and my old, tired self, who takes and passes on things that I have heard or read but never quite understood and teach them as if I had – as if I had created them (which Freud – through Phillips – maintains we must for something to be truly our own, and therefore transferable).  I so frequently do not create them; instead of authoring them so that I know them so thoroughly – or so poorly - that I can put them out there in all their shabby glory, I simply mouth the words.  So, at least in this moment, at the risk of doing violence to Phillips, I am maintaining that Freud took a left turn.  That he veered off the track of exposing The Man – and instead, while describing him – invited us to make use of Him and his ways – to become The Man.

So, this biography, unlike the standard biographies that have dispensed with Freud’s early life by page 38, in part because there is so little there to talk about, and then goes on to talk about the rest of Freud’s life for 500 pages, this biography takes longer to get to those facts and then spends time swirling those facts around, putting them into the sociopolitical/philosophical context, and spinning Freud – the consummate repressed middle class achiever who articulated the language of sex and aggression that ushered in an era culminating in Oprah openness and the idolization of the subjective – out of the threads of what we know about his family, but also what Phillips vividly imagines, allowing his fantasies, tempered by his close reading of Freud’s texts and his knowledge of the available facts, to create a tapestry that is rich and dense.

This perspective has had a profound impact on what it means – to my mind – to work analytically.  It has reminded me that we are revolutionaries.  When I read on the psychoanalytic listserve debates about whether psychoanalysts should be politically active with members of the psychoanalytic community remembering, back in the day, how liberal – even revolutionary – analysts have been, and when I think about how stuffy and constricted psychoanalytic politics can be, I am intrigued by the tension between these two positions.  We are frequently simultaneously potential agents of change, and very conservative operators, teaching people how to operate the mechanism they have been handed more efficiently – helping them become mentally healthy rather than truly, terrifyingly alive.  Are we afraid of the radical charge that we have given to ourselves (And are we mirroring Freud in doing this)?  Do we turn away from the essence of what we could be out of fear or even horror (As he may have)?  And do we cling to a notion of what we could be – do we remain closeted rebels – and work to undue the workings of the institutions that we build to spread the word (As he did, creating enmity among like-minded folks)?  Do we really believe that it is wise to help our patients give voice to the parts of themselves that hate the oppressive others – including their analysts – and to assert themselves?  Do we sometimes boil that down to simply helping them assert themselves in socially sanctioned ways?

As a gentile – born an Episcopalian and to all kinds of privilege – I find that Phillips’ Freud speaks particularly clearly to me – or to the adolescent version of myself which I still, in many ways think of as the core person that I am.  And I know that I have pursued analytic training for many reasons, not the least of which is to achieve the status of guru – of knower – as well as to obtain knowledge – and comfort.  Ironically, there is a wish to touch the live wire, to engage with the forbidden, not necessarily to be shocked, but to be safe from shock; not to be ostracized, but to recover from the ostracism of having been on the outside, of having been made fun of.  I want to know, as did Freud, perhaps as do we all, what makes the universe go – how it is that things work and what our place is in that.  And Freud’s answer, at least his early one, according to Phillips, is that neither the world inside of ourselves nor the one around us is a neat and orderly one.  We can give order to it, but it is a shifting, changing, moving world that will stay forever and always one step ahead of us.  We can get on and enjoy the ride, or get off, pretending that we have it figured out.  Phillips thinks that Freud got off, and he is disappointed in him for doing so - because the wonderful thing about being the outsider who becomes empowered is that you have the ability to notice that the emperor is wearing no clothes (or so many that he no longer knows what fun it is to skinny dip).

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The Goldfinch – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reads Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize Winning Novel

Editorial Note - 9/10/2019  I am expecting people to start accessing this post soon as the movie, made from the book, is coming out this weekend.  I have seen the film, and have posted on it here.  While I was waiting for the film to come out, I had some concerns about whether an 800 page book could be made into a film, especially because the writing style is based in the "flashbulb memory" function that is part and parcel of traumatic memory, as described below.  As a result of seeing the ads for the film I also reread the post and a couple head's up before you read it:  I assume, in the post (though not on all posts in this site) that you have read the book.  I hope that seeing the movie will suffice to orient you to the post.  If you have neither read the book nor seen the film, this may help prepare you for the film - though I think you may get a little lost in the read.  In any case, enjoy!


I hate this book!  It is disorienting.  I had to read the first bit three times and still couldn’t quite make sense of it.  There are places where just the simple math doesn’t add up.  There are sentences that were terrible.  Steven King reviewed this novel and he said that what you look for in an 800 page novel is that the wheels don’t fall off.  He feels that they don’t.  I think they wobble.  A lot.

I love this book!  The characters in this book are incredibly three dimensional, gritty and realistic – that is when they aren’t made of fairy dust and everything sweet and unbelievable.  The narrator is incredibly easy to identify with – a character who wanders through a crazy life, observing it, taking it in, and, for the most part, remaining largely unaware of the activity he is engaging in and his role in shaping the world that he will inhabit.  Even when he fires a gun, it feels like an accident rather than an intentional activity.

I think the things I hate about this book are, for the most part, intentional.  If not intentional, they are at least consistent with the central concern of the book, which is how trauma alters us.  How it takes who we are – the external and internal context of our lives - and splinters us so that we preserve, but also protect ourselves from the feelings of loss that we both want to know and not know, because knowing hurts too deeply.  I suspect that the book won the Pulitzer in part because it portrays a post 9/11 America – one that is splintered and confused – and this portrayal is primarily in the psychological functioning of the central characters, but we also see, almost as an added bonus, the decadent American world that they are walking through.

The central image is the Goldfinch, a pivotal and enigmatic painting that lands in the lap of the protagonist.  It is a simple painting.  A goldfinch is chained, by a delicately wrought bracelet, to its perch.  It was painted by a Dutch Master who died young, and, fittingly, violently, in a gunpowder factory explosion.  Fittingly because, in the book, the painting comes into the hands of the boy as the result of a violent explosion.  The boy then becomes as chained to the painting as the goldfinch is to his perch.  But the boy is attached to more than the painting; he is attached to his mother and then to his father, to his friend Boris – one of the too real characters – to another survivor of the blast and the man who cares for both survivors whom he meets as the result of the blast.  But also, and most directly, he is attached to the actions that he takes, despite his sense that they emerge largely on their own.

The painting itself is also, in the way that it is painted, a representation of the book (or vice versa).  It is a masterpiece.  The painting is a piece of trompe l’oeil painted in 1654 by Carel Fabritius.  It is both tantalizing in its realistic depiction of the bird, and has modern strokes that look like impressionist dollops of paint.  In other words, it is, despite the simplicity of the subject and the sparseness of the execution, an incredibly complex, dense and engaging work of art.

The other works of art in this book are produced by Hobie, the accidental caregiver who takes in Theo, the main character.  Hobie is an adorable bear of a man who has learned a great deal about the restoration of the finest pieces of furniture.  For his own amusement, he cobbles together bits of cast off furniture and creates Frankensteinian monsters that are beautiful in their own way – again, I think, like this book, which Stephen King notes, borrows heavily from prior masters, especially Charles Dickens.  And the painting and the furniture, not just in their content, but in their execution resemble the inner world of the traumatized Theo.  He hangs onto the adoration of his mother, to the style of his father (which he imitates without quite knowing that he is doing it), to his connections to other trauma survivors – Boris who has been through hell with his own Dad – and Pippa, the other survivor of the explosion, but also to Hobie, the caregiver.

The violent explosion that sets this book in motion is, from the perspective of Theo, entirely and totally random.  Oh, sure, there were specific things that lead him to be in the museum on a school day, but that the explosion happened at that moment is random and all that flows from it feels strangely, oddly, accidental, including the very basics of his existence; that he is alive.

A relatively recent article that I read about the psychoanalytic treatment of combat trauma suggests that part of the reason that PTSD is not more frequent than it is among warriors is that they are frequently able to connect with each other – and that this connection with another survivor helps them to feel less fragmented – less cut off from the world.  They are able to begin healing the wound before it becomes unbridgeable.  Theo is drawn to Pippa but she is evanescent – out of reach, intermittently present and therefor more disturbing than comforting – creating a desire for connection rather than an actual one.  The relationship with Boris is more complex – he is present and helps Theo navigate the ongoing traumatic situations that they face, but he is also hardened to the world by his own lonely history of trauma and this makes him an interesting mirror – a fun house mirror that is distorting – but also makes him essentially inaccessible to Theo.

So Theo is on his own.  He turns to various others but it is Hobie that provides the anchor and the fulcrum that he uses to move forward with his life.  And Theo does this not as a passive recipient of care, but as an active provider of care, offering organization and income to Hobie.  In fact, the generosity of his actions blinds he, and us, to the greater danger that he poses to Hobie.  We avoid recognizing what a cad he is, as does he, because his motives are pure – his wishes simple – at least apparently.

Theo is, like each of us, and like America itself, blind to how complex his motivation is and to the manifold unintended consequences that must, inevitably, arise from his actions.  When they come, in the particularly virulent form that they do, he is blindsided and dumbfounded, taken aback by just how out of kilter things are, at least some aspects of which we have been painfully aware for a very long time.  Despite our awareness and discomfort, we are still surprised (or at least I am) by the savagery that his actions unleash.  We are surprised by the actions in the world and the actions within the character that he becomes, without being conscious of it, very actively engaged in directly observable aggressive behavior.  And it disorients him further.  This is not who he is, he says to himself, as if it were someone else who were doing all that he is so apparently doing.

The book begins near the end of the story, when Theo is in the process of reeling from the trauma that he has brought on himself – though it feels like it is visited on him by powers outside of himself.  The rest of the book is told in flashback, and it would seem that we would get that we are, then, working forward to this inevitable moment with which we began.  It seems that we should know where all of this leads.  But even with the advantage of knowing the future, we can’t predict it, and hurtle towards it blissfully unaware – sort of like a teenager who will inevitably be told “I told you so,” but not get it because, though he was told, it didn’t make any sense.

The disorientation in this book is, mercifully not Kafkaesque.  The author is not engaged (hopefully), as Kafka was, in a vision that became the holocaust.  After all, it is told not from the perspective of the oppressed but from the perspective of the disoriented, traumatized person of privilege, who is traumatized not just by the intensity of the experience, but by the sense of disorientation that comes from discovering that the privilege of the position is not impervious to the environment but dependent on it.  The book is disorienting in the ways that we can feel after watching too much television – as if the turning of the day into night, the events that have been going on around us, aren’t really real, but are imaginary.  And this dream – and how can trauma that simply falls out of the sky feel like anything but a dream – feels ephemeral and unreal as do our resulting actions.  But those actions are real and have real consequences.

Suffice it to say that this book, despite its length, mirrors life and does not wrap itself neatly in a bow.  Instead the world continues to move forward.  Despite that, I did not feel, as I frequently do, a wish for the story to continue.  Not just because 800 pages had worn me out, but because there was something quite satisfying in all that had been stirred and the time that had been spent looking at the resulting swirls.  I felt like a customer in Hobie’s store – one who had used a mirror to inspect the underside of his furniture, who had seen in the width of the grain that this was modern lumber, not ancient, a person who knew this was not an original piece of work – it is not one that should command a price because of its age and the contact that I would have with an original master through owning some of her work, but knowing instead that it was a contemporary monstrosity – one that is cobbled together out of the bits and pieces of the modern world.  And that, despite its monstrous quality, despite the tacky and sleazy corners, the overall perspective is pleasing and that I will buy this work of art – not as a forgery or a derivative product – but as something that has virtue in its own right – despite its flaws.

Will the world continue to embrace us despite our flaws?  Can we avoid hurtling towards inevitable moments of unintended violence that we barely acknowledge?  Can we free ourselves from the beautifully wrought ball and chain of inherited violence?  We are probably no more free, and perhaps less so, than Theo.  We are no more self-aware, perhaps less so, and our experience is splintered by the traumas we have survived, small and large, some of us more so than others.  Despite this, we have the capacity to make amends.  We have the capacity to struggle to integrate what seems so desperately disparate.  Perhaps, like Theo, we will survive to live and appreciate a new day and the irony of it all.


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On Transference and Introversion - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Rereads Freud and Finds Him Haunting His Dreams

I am part of a summer reading group at my local psychoanalytic institute and we are looking at some of Freud's papers during a time of year when there is a little more time to think about and reflect on them.  I was not prepared to have those readings intrude into, or to guide my thinking, in quite the way they did.  Lots of things have changed since Freud wrote, including the ways that we conduct analyses.  Also the papers we were reading, at least to my way of thinking, were papers that were a bit dry and theoretical.  I wasn't expecting them to come to life.  So forgive me if this blog imitates life and is a bit dry in terms of introducing some terms before I let you know how this material came to life.  I found it worth reading "dusty" papers because they led me to think differently about how I connect with people in my life, including my patients, and hopefully that will help me improve the usefulness of the connections that I offer.

In 1915, Freud wrote a series of papers on how to conduct an analysis.  Psychoanalysis was about 30 years old - which sounds ancient but, when you are inventing a discipline, or even learning one as complicated as Psychoanalysis, 30 years is but the blink of an eye.  The technique papers, as they came to be called, are somewhat sketchy.  There are very clear directives, but they read more like notes than like a textbook on how to do something.  Indeed, an analytic scholar has maintained just this year that they are really more like musings - notes to self - less about how to do psychoanalysis than what NOT to do.  Sort of a collection of reminders, many of which grow out of mistakes made and lessons learned.

In the midst of these papers, and considered part of them, is a short paper titled "On Transference Love."  Now transference is a very basic psychoanalytic concept - and one so basic that it has slid into psychology proper.  We know it there from stereotyping - the application of a set of expectations to a group of people without regard for their individual differences.  Freud's transference is a much more intimate kind of thing, though he used the idea which was originally translated as a psychological "stereotype plate", and in the most recent translation has also been called a "cliche" to describe the ways in which we use our earliest relationships - with our parents, siblings, caregivers, teachers, etc. - as templates to understand and anticipate how to interact with other individuals, individuals who remind us in various ways of these people, throughout our lives.

Now this is not something pathological in and of itself.  It is something that we all engage in - in no small part because it is much more efficient than learning how to interact with each individual we encounter from scratch.  Indeed, much of our culture is built up around creating cliches - whether in terms of table manners or traffic laws - that make the behaviors of others predictable.  Transference becomes pathological, and psychoanalysis is called for, when we become attached to a particular way of interacting that we continue to engage in despite it not having a useful outcome for us.  We get stuck in a pattern - and here Freud made one of his sweeping generalizations and simplifications that makes a great deal of sense, though it necessarily leaves out variations and subtleties of diversity (it is applying a stereotype plate); we get stuck in a pattern of demanding from others what they cannot give us.

Why would we demand from others something that they cannot give us?  Part of Freud's genius is that even though he could, for some of the things that he observed clinically, only come up with somewhat lame explanations that felt like a stretch, he didn't allow the limits of his theories to interfere with what he observed - and he observed the phenomenon of transference, reported it, and tried to explain it.  I think today we would explain problematic transference as a vestige of the attachment that an infant feels to an inadequate, but desperately needed caregiver.  The way of being attached - one that to the outside observer looks puzzling because it doesn't result in achieving what the person apparently wants - becomes a repeated pattern because, while it doesn't achieve what others would label a useful connection - it achieves the kind of connection that the person has come to experience as being life-giving and sustaining.  It was the best thing they could get at the time - and it allowed them to survive what was a harrowing, lonely, scary experience, and therefore it has come to be highly valued and, indeed, sought after, even if, or more precisely because, it eventuates in a rough, even painful (but familiar), connection and this kind of connection is vastly preferable to being abandoned.

The idea of attachment wouldn't be articulated until 40 or 50 years after Freud's paper.  What Freud used to understand this, then, was more descriptive than explanatory.  He borrowed Jung's term introversion to describe the ways in which people can rely on their internal experiences, blocking out contact with reality (so we can think of the extroversive style, from this vantage point, as a reality connected style), in order to hang onto this internal reality.  Now introversion and extraversion turn out to be very complicated styles, but also perhaps the most reliable and consistent axes along which our personalities, as measured by modern personality scales, move.  Indeed, one of the consistent findings in psychotherapy outcome research is that patients, after treatment, are more extroverted than they were before treatment.  This is a good thing, as the first and biggest factor of the extroversion scales is happiness.  But I think it is also getting at something that Freud and Jung were able to see 100 years ago.  We can get pathologically connected to stuff - to a way of dealing with the world - and we can stamp the world to conform to this system over and over.  Part of becoming healthier is becoming more open to the world as it is - this doesn't mean there isn't room for considerable introspection - God knows I may be reluctant, but I am still an analyst - but that there is also room - as there was for Freud - to be informed by the world - to notice it and to let it change who it is that we are - in a word, to be extraverted - even if we also reflect on that and try to make sense of it - indeed, if we don't, what good has it done to be informed?

So how did this rather abstract set of notions intrude into my dreams?  I awoke last night, or early this morning, from a dream that I found quite disturbing.  I don't remember the beginning of the dream well, but a group of four of us, friends from my college days, were hanging out together.  We became frustrated with one member of the group, and we decided to teach him a lesson.  We knocked him out - quite violently (one of the other members of the group did this, though, as author of the dream, it was certainly me who was doing this powerfully violent act), stripped him of his clothes, which we donated to a charity auction that was taking place in the large house/hotel that we were in, and we stashed him somewhere - perhaps under a bed.  I feared that we had killed him.  I wanted to get out of the building before he woke up and fingered us - or before he was discovered dead and we were implicated.  But things got in the way of getting out of the building and I saw him later in the dream at a distance - he saw me as well - but rather than fingering me, or confronting me, he noticed me- almost gave me a high sign - and then he slunk off.  Now the odd part of the dream - or the part that woke me up (apparently I was OK with the violence or had removed myself enough from perpetrating it to disown it) is that I felt guilty about what I had done - even though he, apparently, wasn't upset enough to bring it to the attention of the authorities or to confront me about it.

I puzzled about the dream, fell back asleep, woke up, still puzzled but realizing more and more clearly that part of who the character symbolized for me is someone in my current life with whom I am quite angry.  The interesting part, though, is that the part that was problematic was that I was feeling guilty about my actions.  This helped me see that beating him up, knocking him out, and stealing his clothes was NOT what I was feeling guilty about.  What I was feeling guilty about was that those actions had not caused him to change.  He was still, in some weird way, connected to me - he wasn't going to confront me or to go to the authorities.  He was going to acknowledge me - as if we were going to go on being friends.  As I was thinking about this, and thinking about the person in my real life with whom I am furious enough to dream about this, I thought about something that someone had said when I was complaining about the situation and other people had stated they had similar concerns.  This person said that I should not welcome this support because it was pity, and therefore was not helpful.  I was puzzled by this, but now think I have a clearer understanding of what they meant.

Empathy, or social support, is a terribly important component of healthy psychological functioning.  Without some support, we are vulnerable to all sorts of psychological ills.  Pity is, I think, related to empathy, but is also incredibly different.  Pity is what we feel (according to Aristotle and Nietzsche) towards tragic heroes.  And tragic heroes have a flaw - a flaw that can't be changed.  Empathy is what we feel towards someone who is confronted by difficulties, and we imagine ourselves in their shoes and imagine their predicament, and what it must feel like to be confronted with what they are facing.  Pity is when our empathy leads us to believe that what they are facing can't be overcome.  We are connected to them, but we give up on them.  We feel badly for them and we conclude that they can't get out of this situation; that they are doomed.

The dream awoke me because I was communicating to myself that I had given up on this person.  I believe he is doomed.  I believe that his introversion - his tie to his internalized frustrating but terribly important way of doing things - is more powerful than even the most violent means of shaking him out of it will lead him to be able to shift.  This is something that I work very hard to avoid doing - indeed it is a fault that has been pointed out to me - I do not bring the hammer down when that needs to happen and say that this person is not able to do what is required of them.  And I think my inhibition is counterproductive in life and in a clinical setting.  It leads me to stay connected with people in ways that are not useful to them or to me.

So what would true empathy, rather than pity, look like?  It would look like this.  Dear friend: I believe that you are engaging in behaviors that are not bringing you the outcomes that you desire.  I also believe that you are powerfully attached to doing that.  There is nothing that I can do to help you, other than to try to minimize the damage - including to me as well as to you - by distancing myself from you or, when I can't do that, defending myself when I am in your range, as long as you continue to be attached to doing this.  When you are ready to make shifts, I believe that you can do that, but I do not believe it is in my power to make you make those shifts, nor is it the case that I can wish them away by pretending they are not as damaging as they in fact are.

As I write this, I become aware of two things.  First of all, even in a clinical situation, I don't know that it is wise to say all of that - and it is certainly not wise to say it in the other situation(s) I am thinking of.  And the second thing is that the dream is representing many situations, not just one, some of them are clinical situations, some of them are "real life" situations.  It is not just the first person that I thought of in the dream who is being represented by this friend, but a slew of people with whom I am currently interacting, some of them quite closely and intensely and others of them more peripherally.  As was the case for Freud, I don't know what it is that shaped the actions that they are engaging in (for Freud it was because he didn't get attachment, for me it is because I don't have direct access - through the transference, which I am actually experiencing with my friends - but through the working through of the transference - talking about it - trying to understand how it arose in the first place and what has activated it currently - that occurs in treatment when treatment is going well, but that rarely occurs in friendships gone awry).  But I do know, and sometimes try not to know, that something has gone terribly awry for them (and for me) in past relationships, and we are stuck in a cliche - in a stereotyped way of not working things out.

This rush of ideas interferes with my intent to clarify the important distinction between empathy and pity.  Empathy supports forward movement.  Pity does not.  Empathy indicates that there is a way through.  Pity indicates that there is not.  Sometimes there isn't a way through, though.  Pity underscores that but also promotes it because, by the very act of pitying, we are continuing to emotionally engage with the other.  Disengagement rather than pity at these moments may, paradoxically, be a much more powerful way to evoke the possibility of change.  Disengagement says, in effect, I am unwilling to continue to play the games by these rules.  You profit from this game, but it is in a perverted manner - you are using me not to solve a problem - not to joyfully connect with someone else - but to stay stuck in the introverted solution that you have come to trust.  That solution harms me, and actually harms yourself because it prevents your engaging with the world in ways that would allow you to grow.  Despite your need for me, I am going to pull back because that will get your attention- because I know, even if you don't, that you need me and need this relationship and, if you truly value yourself and me, you will come back to it with an interest in playing by a different set of rules.

Brave words when they are shouted into the internet cloud.  More difficult to live by in relationships where we are bound together by the twists and tangles of blood, paycheck, or the obligation of a treater to his (in my case) patients.   Despite that, I think the distinction between empathy and pity and being sensitive to when we have moved into responding to others with pity, or to ourselves with self- pity, can be useful because this is an indication that we are no longer engaging from a position of compassion, and it is likely that, unless we radically and uncomfortably change things, we are, indeed, going to be stuck, and pity is going to be all that we have for others and for ourselves.

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Blue Jasmine - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reverts to Type

Woody Allen is the poster boy of psychoanalysis - famous for featuring it in his films and in his life - sometimes twice a day with two different analysts...  After one of his very public peccadilloes twenty five years ago - let's just say it was when he married his stepdaughter - I was working at a psychoanalytically oriented hospital and thought to myself - if there was ever proof that psychoanalysis does not work, Woody Allen is it.  But one of my trusted supervisors had a different view - that his behavior demonstrated how pernicious - how difficult to change - character pathology is.  Currently I suppose that there is something to both of these thoughts.  There are certainly limits to the ability of psychoanalysis to create change, particularly in people who are attached to their pathology - and Woody Allen's latest movie, Blue Jasmine, demonstrates the complexity, and insidious nature, of character pathology.

OK, so it is a cliche for an analyst, reluctant or not, to write about Woody Allen's movie; but wait, it gets worse!  I watched it at the psychoanalytic institute with a bunch of analytic types and then we discussed it afterwards.  How cliche is that?  The discussants had done their homework.  One area they talked about was the apparent relationship between Blue Jasmine and the play "Streetcar Named Desire".  Another was in reviewing interviews with Mr. Allen, but also archival interviews with Tennessee Williams.

Blue Jasmine mirrors Tennessee Williams' play Streetcar Named Desire.  The dramas are set in different parts of the country, in different decades, and have very different plots.  To my way of thinking, what unites them is that the central character in both is challenged by her need to be dependent - or more particularly to ward off the awareness of just how vulnerable her wish (and need) to depend on another makes her - especially in the context of an intimate relationship.  The character - or character pathology - of the lead has changed, however.  Blanche Dubois, the lead in Streetcar, can be understood as having an hysterical character.  Her chief motivation is to be loved - and she is willing to overlook many faults - to repress her awareness of them - in order to hang onto her high regard of others - and to let them have, in turn, a high opinion of her.

Hysteria was the most frequent diagnosis that Freud made.  He learned about hysteria from the French.  He traveled to France and observed Charcot treating hysterics using hypnosis and took this treatment home to Vienna where he found no shortage of patients with hysterical character styles.  The famous Anna O. who, as Bertha Pappenheimer, went on to found the social work movement in Germany and who was credited by Freud with discovering the psychoanalytic cure - chimney sweeping she called it - of saying whatever came to mind in relation to hysterical symptoms - using this technique, with her Doctor Joseph Breuer, to break through the repressive barrier - discovering the unwanted thoughts that had been discarded, and dealing with them in the light of day, finding another way to cope with them, and moving on.  Freud saw Hysteria everywhere, including, as he engaged in self analysis and the analysis of others, in himself and other men - something the establishment couldn't bear - Hysteria, etymologically based on the Greek word for Uterus is, by definition (they maintained), a female disorder.

In fact, I believe it to be a means of coping with the world that was much more prevalent in times when authority figures were relied on in ways that they aren't currently.  I remember watching that transition as my grandmother sat transfixed day after day by the Watergate hearings.  Pundits at the time claimed that it was the end of an age of innocence, and it was.  Nixon, a man grandmother had voted for three times - a man she trusted to have integrity - was not trustworthy, and his band of henchmen were too graphic and three dimensional in all of their shiftiness for us - individually or collectively - to repress.  We learned that authority was not to be trusted.  But of course authority has to be trusted for the system to work, so there continue to be hysterics among us and hysterical streaks within each of us, but as a dominant style, it became more difficult to maintain.

So what did we replace the hysteric style with?  I am indebted to a fellow analyst for pointing out that Woody Allen's answer, in the character of Jasmine, played by Cate Blanchett in a performance that won her an Oscar, is that we have become narcissistic - or, in Jasmine's case, brittle narcissists - believing that we do not need others because we are self reliant and, unlike the hysteric who represses information that would interfere with our being able to be cared for by the other, we divide ourselves not between what is known and what is unknown, but between what is known when things are OK and what is known when things are not OK.  This way of not knowing is what we call a vertical split (between parts of the self that can be consciously in control - between the part that intermittently is in charge and feels independent and the part that intermittently is in charge and knows that we depend, despite what we tell ourselves, on others) rather than a horizontal split( a repressive split between what the trustworthy things are that are known about the other and the parts of the other - and ourselves - that is not trustworthy - parts that remain consistently unknown or unconscious).

But before we get to splitting, let's talk about narcissism.  First of all, narcissism is a normal part of our development.  It is, quite literally, self esteem.  It is self love, which is an important, perhaps even crucial part of a "healthy" personality.  The character (and dramatists are enviable because they create characters rather than the messy self-contradictory things called people), the character of Jasmine is a person who has loved herself.  She has been wealthy and stylish.  Her husband (played by Alec Baldwin) was suave without being smarmy.  While he was wheeling and dealing, she was entertaining his business associates and their wives.  She was also managing the charitable endeavors, the "noblesse oblige", that this couple of tremendous privilege engaged in as an integral part of the rounding out of their lives.

We meet her after all the trappings of wealth have been stripped away and get to know her former life only in flashback.  We see her in a raw state - one where her own self-involvement - her need to not just survive but thrive - is paramount, and these needs outweigh the agendas of those around her, including her adoptive sister on whom she is imposing - and whom she was party to swindling in her former existence, demonstrating that this is not just a means of functioning in the present, but a style that she has relied on forever, part of her character.  She does not just have self esteem, but self love that eclipses her ability to resonate with the needs of those around her.  She overlooks the shadiness of her husband's business dealings until he betrays her - not just her family - at which point, when things are not OK, she "recovers" her memory of his shenanigans and seeks terrible retribution - publicly exposing his private matters.

It quickly became clear to me that the movie was a condensed and highly symbolized version of Woody Allen's experience.  Jasmine (who changed her name from the drab given name that her parents chose for her) becomes a glamorous, competent person, but is also aware of the ways in which it is a sham - she is playing a role rather than being a person - and this is the vertical split - I both am and am not the person that I am pretending to be.  I remember an ancient interview where Woody Allen was asked about being married to a movie star - to Mia Farrow - and how did that feel to a nebbish kid from Brooklyn.  He responded that, as a world class director, of course he was married to a movie star.  And that statement rung to me as both true and not true.  He is a world class movie director.  But he is also a nebbish kid from Brooklyn and, at least in my memory, he did not say that he was a director AND a kid from Brooklyn, but that he was JUST a world class director.

This kind of split is evident in Jasmine.  She tries, in the wake of her dislocation, to play herself again, and is initially successful, catching the eye of a man who would remake her into who she was before - perhaps even more legitimately, but she can't - or doesn't - do this honestly and straightforwardly.  Instead she pretends to be someone she isn't - even though the man she discovers is attracted to the person she is - and when she is caught at being who she is not, she is abandoned by him, and she begins to totter on the edge of madness.

What I found compelling about the interviews - those with Allen and Tennessee Williams, is the contrast between Williams comfort with himself and his characters as projected aspects of himself (see a discussion of this in a post about The Glass Menagerie) - he states, in effect, that he is writing about parts of himself that he knows - parts that he isn't proud of, but that are very human, and he would never place himself above his characters while Allen, who denies any relationship between himself and his characters (and any relationship between his movie and Streetcar), creates distance which seems disingenuous at best.

Woody Allen depended on Bernie Madoff - a wheeler dealer like the Alec Baldwin character who disappointed him and absconded with a fortune.  Woody Allen depends on his audience, and they can turn on him, especially when he engages in behaviors that they find reprehensible (marrying his daughter), though he denies the reprehensibility (she is adopted).  And he denies a connection between his life and the movie, where the adopted daughters are, not surprisingly, all but unrelated to each other.

Both Williams and Allen, I believe, write incredibly presciently about female characters.  I think this is partly because those characters are, indeed, projected and, in Allen's case, apparently disowned aspects of themselves.  They are writing about their own psyches, or the feminine aspects of them, and allowing them to infuse the characters that are also based on people that they have interacted with.  This suggests that the chief characters they create may mirror the dominant characteristics of their own personality styles and that the character's means of managing what they don't want to know - in Williams/Blanche's case through repression - in Allen's/Jasmine's case through splitting, may mirror the functioning of the author's (even if, or, weirdly, particularly if, one of them denies it).  And Allen's denial through splitting - if that's what it is - may make the treatment of that aspect of the character structure particularly resistant to a treatment that relies on insight to achieve cure.  Interestingly, then, if this is true and Allen were to read it, he would both agree with it and deny it - the latter part would not be something that we, and perhaps not even he and his analysts, would be able to access.

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

Post script: Rereading this after Bruce Jenner's transformation into Caitlyn this year, I am struck by the frustrated response of a feminist writer in the New York Times who railed that she was tired of men defining what it means to be a woman.

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Richard Russo's Straight Man – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reads About Academic Life While Living It

Richard Russo published Straight Man in 1997 and I must have read it for the first time not too long after that.  The story, told in the first person, of the interim Chair of the English Department in a small State University in Pennsylvania, led me to think, the first time I read it, of Phil, a friend of mine who teaches in an English Department in a small State University in Pennsylvania, but in a vague and abstract way.  The hero of this story, Henry Devereaux, Jr., sees the world as a joke and is constantly treating the people in his life as straight men (and women) who are merely setting up the punch lines that he delivers.  My friend Phil, while being fun loving, is also very serious – and takes himself more seriously than Henry Devereaux does.

I chose to re-read Straight Man in part because more than one person recommended it.  I remember enjoying it, but not much else about it.  There was a bit about a duck, but I couldn’t even remember the details of that.  The reason people were recommending it, I think, is that I am the chair of a department in a small private school.  The issues, they thought, would be similar.  And they were right.  Hank faces the same craziness that I am experiencing as a middle manager.  He is at a state school, so he is at the mercy of the legislature; I am at a private one, and so am at the mercy of the board, but we are both frequently waiting on funding.  This time I identified closely with the hero, and the story hung together better (though I have never had the temerity to threaten to kill a duck a day until the budget is approved – I will have to remember that tactic next year when the administration is sitting on it – again…).

But what does this book have to offer people who are not chairs – or even middle managers at whatever organization they may be in?  From a psychoanalytic perspective, Hank’s approach to life is very interesting.  He consistently occupies the “joking” state of mind.  He gives us as much access as he is able to the rest of his experience, but it is frankly – and he would be the first to say this – pretty limited – especially at the most critical moments (such as when he lifts a goose aloft and threatens to kill a duck a day while the news cameras are rolling).  Why does he do these crazy things?  It seems like a mystery to him, and to most of those around him – except his wife, who is actually bored by the predictability of his antics, and his boss’s secretary, who also gets him.

What do they get?  I think they are able to see something that Hank can’t possibly recognize from within the protected zone of his joking attitude towards the world – that his jokes betray not a disdain or disinterest in the world; quite the contrary, they display an almost painful reverence for it.  As his daughter remembers, when she went head over heels while learning to ride her bike, it was her father who cried all the way home, even after the pain, for her, had subsided.  This pain is too difficult to live with on a daily basis, so he distances himself from it with humor.  It is only when what he has been able to convince himself is a distant and unworthy world is threatened that he becomes directly aware of how desperately attached to that world he really is.  The humor, most of the time, keeps him safe.

This is the beauty of defense mechanisms.  They protect us from something threatening – an awareness of threat.  The intriguing thing is that this threat is frequently internal and mushy rather than external and physically dangerous.  Hank is afraid of the power of his attachments to make him vulnerable to being sad at a loss or anxious about an impending one.  He grew up in a family with two distant academic parents who saw him largely as an inconvenience.  He desperately wanted to connect with them – and failing that, to connect with a dog, something they were resolutely opposed to obtaining for him.  He fought and clawed and scrambled to get that dog only to have the dog his father finally obtained for him die the day he arrived.  He had to learn to protect himself, and humor became his go to protection.

My friends who have pointed me to this book have presciently pointed to a part of my experience I did not expect to discover from it – the power of the attachment that I feel to the place that I work.  In the midst of reading the book – swirling through my reading of the book – I felt the integrity of my University was threatened by the crazy actions of an administrator.  I am highly, consciously, ambivalent about the institution.  I like what it stands for.  I like what we do in our best moments.  I am appalled by our internal inconsistencies and the ways in which we don’t accomplish what we say we intend to.  I feel and resonate with Hank’s sarcastic relationships with students, fellow faculty and, above all, the administration.  I find almost everything about the University disappointing at one time or another.

At one point, Hank is describing the student ghetto and states that his Ivy League schooled buddies assure him that the slum-like conditions are to be found universally on or near all college campuses.  For an Ivory Tower place, academia can be quite gritty.  And Henry has seen the academic stars up close – his father was one – brilliant, but remote and self absorbed.  We want the academy to be Utopian, but it fails us – not least because it is tilted towards the intellectual life so much that the emotional life can be constricted and only seems to leak out in sophomoric humor and immature and highly objectified sexuality.

Many things on college campuses have changed since the writing of this book.  It would no longer be possible for a chair not to use email.  There are no phone booths on campus and being out of touch for periods of time in the midst of crisis the way this guy is seems very last century.  Hopefully there is less of a casual, wink wink say no more attitude towards sex between faculty and students – I hope that most schools, and faculty, have gotten how significant power imbalances rule out mutual consent and that, when these relationships inevitably emerge, they indicate a problem that should be attended to.  But, despite the different technologies and mores that have emerged in a relatively short period of time – the sense of the University – and I have it on good report that this is true of the Ivies as well – the sense of the University as less than we imagined is, I think, very current – perhaps even timeless.

So, it comes as some surprise then – when we have been complaining of the lack of resources, of the banal qualities of our students – that they are now millennials and that means that they can’t write or appreciate the written word – when we pooh pooh the administration; that, when there is a threat to this institution to which we are ambivalently (dare I say reluctantly) attached, we rally to defend it.  We lose sleep over how to ward off the threat – and think about how to make it better.  We may  use – or overuse – humor to protect ourselves.  In fact, unlike this character, who is, after all, a character – we inhabit multiple states of mind and, even if we have a home base, we move around,  organizing our internal world through a humorous lens one day, a blazing lens of fury the next, then an Eeyore/depressive one, and then maybe a somewhat aloof and better than it all one.  We put these selves on like costumes – and like costumes they distract others and ourselves from what we look like naked, but also serve as conduits for our naked feelings – allowing us to express them in ways that authenticate them.  So, when I am truly appalled by what an administrator is doing, my righteous indignation is both deeply genuine and a sham – an act.  It is a means of dressing up, of expressing, something that is not directly knowable, but only through acting it out can we know who it is that we are.

Russo maintains that the reason “… we have spouses and children and parents and colleagues and friends, is because someone has to know us better than we know ourselves.  We need them to tell us.  We need them to say, ‘I know you Al.  You’re the kind of man who.’”  They see us in our many costumes, and they observe what is constant, what is at the core, what makes us who we are.  Russo has constructed, in Henry Devereaux, Jr., a person who clings to a particular costume – that of the jester – to have a clear sense of himself.  It takes a great deal of courage to put the costume down – or perhaps more aptly – to try on various costumes – to become what it is that is evoked by a situation – with the faith we can use a particular costume to express what is needed at this moment, and to be able to shed it, to move to a different position, to understand ourselves at this moment from that moment where we have a very different vantage point.  Russo’s protagonist resists doing this.  He clings to the jester’s cap.  Or maintains that he does.  In the epilogue, though, he acknowledges things – like the depth of his love for his wife – directly.  He puts on the clothing of the lover – and it seems to fit OK.  He doesn’t feel too awkward or vulnerable, but rather – finally – more at home in that role, in the role of pater familias, and in a few other roles (including NOT being chair – but remaining comfortably in the role of faculty member).   And, from this perspective, this is a coming of age novel – even if the age of the one coming along is 50, and even if he may have to come of age again next year, and perhaps the year after that, too.

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


Post script:   It's two years later and the administration has found yet another way to appall me and the rest of the faculty....  The more things change....  You can see a diatribe about the state of higher education at higher education.

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...