The Crucible – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Goes Back to High School

            The Reluctant Son is taking an interdisciplinary course in High School – his US History Course is coordinated with his American Literature Course so that while he is studying the pre-Revolutionary period in History he is reading the Scarlet Letter and the Crucible (which will also be relevant for the post Second War period) in Lit. There are two sections of Lit and two of History, and they dosey doe during second and third bell. In order to facilitate the students meeting with both teachers at once, and to allow all of the students to interact, the teachers are hosting a weekend film series, inviting parents to participate in order to facilitate family discussion of the material and yesterday was the first of those.  As the title of this blog suggests, they showed the Crucible with Daniel Day Lewis starring as John Proctor, Winona Ryder as Abigail Williams and Joan Allen as Elizabeth Proctor, a 1996 production that I don’t remember coming out (it was not a box office hit), but one that is an excellent film. 

               Either the other parents didn’t get the memo, or their kids strongly encouraged them to stay home, but the reluctant ex-wife and I were the only parents there.  The film was shown in the High School auditorium, the kids watched from the balcony, and we watched from the main floor with one of the teachers, thus not embarrassing the Reluctant Son too much (he left the auditorium with the other kids after the post movie discussion and we discreetly hooked back up with him at our cars – he only acknowledged us with the slightest of nods in the auditorium).   The sound in the auditorium was not good, and we sat far enough away from the group during the discussion afterwards to avoid embarrassing our boy, but the students all had their backs to us, so we did not get all of the film or the discussion, and so I apologize ahead of time if I missed an important detail from either.

               This play, written as a commentary on McCarthyism and Puritanism by one of our great playwrights, was appropriately discussed primarily from the vantage point of the cultural and historical significance that it has.  From this vantage point it is, as told, the story of hysterical contagion – of a group of girls caught being naughty – dancing in the woods and dabbling in a slave’s spiritualist practices something that the Puritans perceived to be witchcraft and a sin – and the ways in which they transform their naughtiness, which puts them at risk of censure – into pointing their fingers at the rest of the community – using the community’s beliefs and rigidity against them in ways that create a tragedy – the tragic fulcrum being the rigid laws and mores of the community.  The high school group discussed the girls’ strategy or tactic of first implicating the most marginalized in the community – the beggar and the slave – before moving onto respected members of the community and eventually crossing a line when they accuse a pillar of the community – the minister’s wife – that finally strains and breaks their credibility.  This was compared to McCarthy’s first fingering writers and actors and the intelligentsia –people who are marginalized in the governmental system and the social system more generally - and it was only when McCarthy tried to take on military figures that  his indecent tactics were seen for what they really were.

               The group also discussed the potential corruption of a system that married the church and the state so that a legal trial, which physically took place in the church with the authority of the religious government behind it, was able to produce “evidence” that was based in belief systems rather than in consensually observable phenomena, producing a tyranny in which a well-meaning judge (Paul Scofield) was corrupted without knowing it, and one in which that judge fell more and more into the trap of having to stick with his method after it should have been apparent that things were terribly awry because, in part, to change in midcourse would be to acknowledge the fatal errors that he had made to that point.  This, in turn, became a discussion of the foundational importance of separating church and state in the US constitution. 

               The movie was also discussed as a movie.  The literature teacher also teaches film and encouraged the students to consider the director’s choices in framing particular shots and choosing to bring some characters to the fore at certain moments and how this helped move the story along and underlined important themes.  They discussed how shooting from below made some characters and moments larger – how shooting the dining room table to emphasize the distance between John and Elizabeth when they were eating represented the psychological distance between them at that point in the movie.  There was also a very interesting discussion of the use of music and how it influenced the viewer’s experience of the film.

The conversation went in other directions, all directly relevant to the course and the task at hand and, in so far as I could hear it, an informed, intelligent and lively discussion of an important work of art and two periods in history that interweave in interesting ways.  And a discussion that was diametrically opposed to how I would have approached interpreting the movie.  From the perspective of this psychoanalyst, the story is about the tension between three people – John and Elizabeth Proctor and the orphaned girl – Abigail Williams – whom they hire to help them around the house and on the farm.  John, a rigid and upright man, has an illicit affair with Abigail – he characterizes it as engaging in the sin of lechery – during a time when his wife, due to illness, is sexually unavailable to him.  He characterizes this affair as a bestial failing, though it is clear that Abigail became attached to the qualities he displays as a doting father and husband and fell in love with him – in addition to being powerfully sexually attracted to him.  She also became aware of her power as a sexual creature - as the person who caused him to fall from the perch that he had established for himself as an upright and perfectly righteous man - to sin - to become human.  Perhaps she became cynical – especially when he spurned her after his wife discovered them and fired her and he disavowed their love – and she may have decided that the entire society was corrupt and deserved whatever came to it.  Though it also seemed that she felt she could continue to use her power to make him love her and to bring them back together - believing, in effect, that they were star crossed lovers.  In any case, she began to act from a position of power, if corrupt power, calling herself high and mighty and throwing the town into turmoil, and murdering 18 or so members of it along the way.

This, then, from the perspective of the individuals involved is a tragedy; one that is based on John’s pride, his adultery and the rigidity of the moral code of the Puritans.  But it becomes clear in an achingly beautiful scene between him and his wife, when she owns her own part in it, that there is room for multiple tragic heroes here.  Elizabeth Proctor is as upright a woman as there is.  She would, for instance, never tell a lie, and John relies on this to stem the craziness.  Her loyalty to him overrides her aversion to lying, but this is but a road bump on the way to her true revelation.  While Elizabeth did withhold her love for seven months, about which she feels guilty, her true crime – or sin in this context – is a somewhat ironic one.  She, believing herself to be too plain to be loved, never engaged with John in ways that would have allowed his love to sustain them across the inevitable dry spells that enter into relationships.  This sin is ironic because it is a lack of pride – not an overabundance of it – that, from Elizabeth’s position, sets the whole tragedy in motion; and pride, as we know, is a sin that the puritans were vigilantly guarding against.

In this poignant scene, after Elizabeth has been asked by the judge to help John confess to cavorting with the devil in order to avoid being hung, John asks her to forgive him.  She clarifies to him that neither she nor anyone else can deliver absolution – the judge that he must satisfy is the one that lives within himself.  But in the very next scene it is clear that this psychoanalytic solution – the one that involves the relationship between John Proctor and himself – is not an adequate one.  In fact, what others think of him is important to him and simply being OK with God and Elizabeth is not enough.  John wants to retain his good name.

So, the literary, the historical and the psychoanalytic each bring something important to the understanding of this play.  In the ultimate moment, when John Proctor and the two women of integrity (as the reluctant ex-wife pointed out) are being executed (no spoiler alert necessary for that; I already told you it was a tragedy), the three say the Lord’s Prayer together to the assembled townspeople, including the request to “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”  In the context of the moment, those who are being hung poignantly forgive those hanging them, but we also see the integration of the perspectives that are socially derived (the literary and historical) and those that are psychologically derived (especially in the sense of the psyche as the soul).  The martyrs, for – in addition to being tragic heroes they are, indeed, martyrs (and this is another layer of the social/psychological dichotomy) – are forgiving those who have wrongly condemned them – and they, as tragic heroes, are asking for the forgiveness of the ultimate objective/subjective judge, God.   

One of the revolutionary and powerful tools that Freud afforded us was using the subjective perspective as the defining perspective from which to understand the ways in which the events in an individual’s life unfold.  As powerful as this perspective is it is not the only perspective that matters.  Certainly Freud’s case of Dora proved this, but so does a high school history and literature class. 

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Silver Linings Playbook and a Poetry Slam – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reflects on Female Sexuality as a Powerful Healing Force

   The Reluctant Wife recommended that we watch Silver Linings Playbook on date night and I somewhat reluctantly agreed.  Her description of an award winning film that depicted the trials and tribulations of a guy who is bipolar, out of the hospital AMA and falling in love with someone who helps him get better frankly sounded like going to work.  And I was concerned about how accurate the portrayal of mental illness would be and how much time I would spend evaluating that and so on and so forth.  Well…  This is a delightful little film.  And one that I think says something very interesting – not so much about mental illness, but about the function that sex can serve in relationships between men and women. 

     The film is set in Philadelphia and Bradley Cooper plays Pat Solatano, Jr., the character who is hospitalized after he discovers his wife Nikki having a tryst in their shower with a history teacher from the high school where she works.   Pat beats her lover so severely that they are both hospitalized, the teacher for injuries and Pat for a mental disorder by the judge.  Pat comes by his violent streak honestly – his Dad (played by Robert De Niro) is no longer allowed to go to Eagles games because he was in too many fights in the stands.  Released from the hospital into the care of his mother (Jacki Weaver) and father, Pat meets his buddy’s sister-in-law Tiffany (played by Jennifer Lawrence the star of the the hunger games movies), who is recently widowed, at a dinner party thrown by his buddy and his buddy’s wife, who is still in contact with Pat’s wife Nikki– who, in turn, has a restraining order against Pat, which he resents and bridles against as he is still madly in love with his wife despite her affair.

     The party is where things get interesting.  Tiffany is a slightly gothy, completely wacky woman who apparently sleeps with anything that walks.  She leaves the dinner early, Pat walks her home, she invites him to have sex, and you’d think Pat, who hasn’t had sex in a long while, would bed her in heartbeat, but his devotion to Nikki prevents it.  Tiffany promises to deliver a letter to Nikki for Pat if Pat will practice dancing and enter a dance contest with her.  OK, now the spoilers begin.  Tiffany, as wacky as she is, is in league with Pat’s Mom.  Pat’s Mom let’s her know when Pat is going out jogging so that she can stalk him, which she does as she tries to get him to commit to practicing for the dance contest and competing.  Pat’s Mom, who sprung Pat from the hospital prematurely, is trying to fix Pat up with Tiffany because she believes Tiffany is better for him than Nikki was or ever could be.  Neither Pat nor we know about his mother’s machinations.  When he finally commits to the dance routine in exchange for Tiffany sending his letters to Nikki (and returning letters from Nikki to him), he becomes quite fond of Tiffany and fends off one of the many men that she has bedded and keeps on strings since her husband’s death.

     Tiffany’s explanation for her apparently indiscriminate interest in sex is tied up with her husband’s death.  He died when they had been having a slow spell in their sexual relationship; he had driven to Victoria’s Secret to get something to spice up their relationship and on the way home, he had a flat tire and, while changing it, was hit by a car.  What she doesn’t say is that to deny sex to a man is to kill him, but it isn’t hard to connect the dots.  She became set on a path of preventing the deaths of men (and women) in her life – and also assuaging her guilt for killing her husband – by having sex with all of them.  Of course, this introduced interesting complications, including getting fired when she slept with everyone in her office, but I think one of the complications is that she attracted men (and women) who really did need her to keep them from falling apart.  And Pat stands out because he is able to use his ex-wife - a woman he is NOT sleeping with – to organize himself – to keep himself from falling apart (though just barely – and Tiffany helps – a lot – and it is, I think, important that her help, too, does not involve having sex with him).

     What truth is there to this?  Will a man fall apart without sex?  Men talk about exploding when they don’t have sex (Blue balls is the myth that men pass around about what will happen if they become aroused and don’t orgasm – as if they didn’t get erections 4 or 5 times every night when they dream; and very rarely do they wake up the next morning with missing or damaged parts).  And sexual intercourse was privileged by none other than Freud himself, who credited masturbation as causing mental illness and intercourse as the route to mental health.  The irony is that while Freud was doing this, at least initially, he was denying the importance of the relationship between people as a curative factor – or certainly giving relationally based cures a snide dismissal (he was also likely having sex infrequently - we don't have good data about his masturbatory habits).  In any case, Kohut is the analyst who talks about individuals becoming shattered because they don’t have an internal sense of integrity, and he ties this to the need to have another person to, quite literally, hold them together – something that, across time, in normal development (and presumably in treatment), we internalize, so that we are able to hold ourselves together because we have an internal version of the people who have held us together.  For Kohut, unlike for Freud, this isn’t explicitly tied to sex; but Tiffany makes that connection.  She senses the vulnerabilities of the men (and women) that she approaches, and serves as an organizing entity through her sexuality – though she seems to be equal parts stabilizing and chaos inducing.

     Lawrence’s portrayal of Tiffany, for which she earned an Oscar, shimmers.  She steals every scene that she is in.  We cannot take our eyes off her (OK, maybe it’s just me as a man, that can’t, but I think there is more to it than that).  Tiffany hovers between offering this tremendous salve – this healing binding force which will cure what ails you – and being desperately hungry for something herself – something that only the other, only this one, can provide.  As in all good romantic comedies, the tension between Tiffany and Pat builds, but her apparent nonchalance – she is the one who has all the goodies – precariously balances against the need to have Pat love her, a need she tries to hide from him, but one that we can see all too clearly – a need for him to transfer his allegiance from Nikki – who surely does not deserve it – to her.  She not only deserves, but needs someone who can love her as firmly and resolutely as Pat loves Nikki – not someone who needs the salve of a temporary fix that comes from a sexual encounter that momentarily helps them believe that they are worthy, but someone who can use her presence to anchor themselves and, because they are capable of doing that, they can serve as the kind of anchor that she needs – someone who can be deeply, intimately and constantly connected to her and help her rebuild the sense of herself that she had – or hoped to achieve – in the relationship with her husband.

     Last night we went to a spoken word event.  This is poetry, sometimes set to music, frequently written by African Americans and, at least in our local rendition, is frequently written to heal the wounds that the poets have, but they are wounds that, at least in the experience of the authors talking, are not just their own, but shared by the community.  I happened to have gone to an African American funeral earlier in the day – one of the brothers of one of my co-workers died – and to a wedding reception for two women who had celebrated the twentieth anniversary of their original, illegal wedding by getting married with the imprimatur of the state.  At each of these events the congregants were together, supporting each other, helping each other to bear – to be – constant to each other.  Trying to help each other rise above the difficulties of being able to be constant because of the ways that trauma – death, exclusion by society, the inconstancy of a fragmented culture’s caretaking – had deeply and powerfully impacted individuals.  The hope – a hope that was exemplified by both Nikki and Pat – in each of the three gatherings – was that, in spite of the odds against it – this group, these individuals could be constant for each other – could provide what is needed to help keep themselves and each other stitched together, whole and filled with integrity.

All four then; the movie, the funeral, the wedding and the poetry slam, were dreams.  Dreams that point towards an integrity not yet achieved.  The movie – as dreams that are of things that are not yet quite possible in the mind of the dreamer – lurches towards its conclusion.  The plot is far-fetched and threatens to fall apart.  Our credulity is strained.  Things don’t fit together seamlessly and threaten to spin out of control.  And the conclusion is not quite the fairy tale ending – which is much more satisfying than a pure fairy tale ending would be (that said, there is an unrealistic amount of cotton candy at the very end– it is, after all, a Hollywood product…).

     William Raspberry, an African American Columnist, wrote in a column twenty years ago that he felt little hope for the African American Community because he did not see that African Americans were able to help themselves.  I think that a culture whose shared roots lie in inhumane trauma – trauma that is institutionalized as well as woven into the transgenerational transmission of trauma through the family and individual relationships - will be incredibly hard pressed to achieve the healing that the spoken word performers were seeking through their work.  It will be long, slow work – the work of generations.  But it is incredibly important work – and as we lurch towards achieving the goals of that work, I think that it is no accident that soul and R&B music – with its references to sexual healing and love – including especially decidedly physical expressions of love – is an expression of a powerful balm that those who have been traumatized can be drawn towards (see an essay on Hozier, an Irish r&B performer, here).  And while the ending of Silver Linings (it is a RomCom) suggests that this is an achievable end; Tiffany’s unbalanced lurching towards that goal – Pat’s belief that enough exercise will win Nikki back - the importance of Pat’s parents being willing to endure the tension of working without a net, all of these clearly characterize just how chancy and risky it is to try to bootstrap our way to happiness. 

     But honestly, what other option do we have?  Won’t we necessarily be inconstant in our efforts to provide each other with the foundation that we need to move forward?  Won’t this be incredibly destabilizing – how can we learn to trust when we keep getting disappointed by those we rely on most closely and intimately?  But won’t we, in the process, learn the value of constancy?  Won’t we become that which we are lurching towards – not the Kardashian’s, who use money and things to prop themselves up, but people whose love for each other creates a base that they can use to spread that love to others – not just through sex – but through caring for our children and for each other – being able to love more broadly than just sexually because we have a foundation – a base to work from – a base in our relationships with our parents and other caregivers where the sexual is peripheral – not central – that allows us to build ourselves into adults who are comfortably sexual – in whatever way that may be, including being asexual – and we can work from this adult, loving base to spread the love that will develop us and those around us further?  Perhaps not in this or the next generation; but we will only achieve our destination if we keep working towards it.   


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Civilization and Its Discontents – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reads Other People’s Freud

Freud wrote for multiple audiences.  While psychoanalysis was always his subject (once he discovered it) and always his home, his interests ranged far and wide, and his wish to make psychoanalysis an intellectual force in the world at large led him to apply it to everything from biography and history to religious studies and philosophy.  He also wrote about psychoanalysis for both lay and professional audiences, and was developing psychoanalysis itself for well over forty years.  Over that period of time, his understanding of the human mind changed considerably – not surprising given that he was making most of that understanding up as he went along.  Not that others weren’t contributing.  They were.  But Freud was a bit of a control freak, psychoanalysis was his baby, and he exercised control – for good, but frequently for ill – over the psychoanalytic canon throughout his long career.

I have not read much of what most people have read of Freud.  It simply isn’t part of the core readings that we do as psychoanalysts.  Every few years, a philosopher at my University teaches Freud.  He assigns readings.  I generally guest lecture.  I teach the Freud I know, and I really should sit in on his whole class because much of what he is teaching is material I don’t know.  I haven’t done that yet – but this summer a group of us read a number of Freud’s writings, about half of them readings that most analysts have read – the essays that are called the technique papers.  Then we delved into a series of readings culminating in Civilization and its Discontents; the readings folks who aren’t analysts are more likely to have read.  In fact, I may have read some of them when I was a senior in college – not quite sure, at this point, just what we read, but it was by Freud and may have been this paper or one of the others in the group.

Wow.  Not only is this a paper that is written for a different audience, it seems to be written by a different Freud than the one that I have struggled with, but, I thought, come to love.  This is a guy who is taking his ideas and pushing them to what seem to me to be extremes.  He is struggling in this paper, as he does many other places, with what the basic drives are.  For him, these are essentially unknowable.  They are biological in nature and they operate deep within the unconscious depths of our psyche and are knowable only in derivative form.  He originally postulated the sexual drive as the basic drive, and here he is adding a second – a death drive (which makes little to no sense) or maybe it is an aggressive drive (more sensible).  But his vision of the ideal life is one which these drives are given full expression.  So he states that the best life is one in which we are able to kill those we disagree with and have sex with those we desire.  Ouch.  From this perspective, then, civilization gets in the way of our actualizing our potential.

Well, this is an interesting view of the human condition.  And one, oddly, that is very much at variance with my own (and, I think, with the way Freud constructed his own life).  It is one that I think is overly determined by two things – one is an overreliance on theory – and the other is an expression of the repressed parts of Freud himself.  Freud was first and foremost a biologist and, as a biologist on campus recently told me, biology only makes sense in the context of evolution.  And, from Freud’s perspective, sex and aggression are the two essential drives that led to our survival as a species.  From this perspective then, we are built to express these drives and civilization, which provides great benefit to us as a species (we have not just survived, but thrived), does so at the cost of the individual meeting the needs that they are built to achieve.

The second factor is that Freud was a very ambitious man, and one who was, I think, pretty sexually frustrated.  He was a control freak, and he exercised this by being a dictatorial leader of the developing psychoanalytic organization.  I think this felt to him like, in part, sublimation of frustrated sexuality.  And perhaps it felt, in part, like an expression of aggression (and perhaps, when things weren’t going so well, like an expression of a death wish).

The first time that I went to a meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association twenty five years ago, I remember going to a paper presentation (and the paper later became a book), in which an analyst (Joe Lichtenberg) was presenting the “radical” idea that there may be five or seven basic drives.  I put radical in quotation marks because each of the systems he was talking about were well researched systems that I had been teaching in introductory psychology and that had been in introductory psychology textbooks for years.  That said, it felt, even to me on my first visit to this organization, like a breath of fresh air.  It felt like psychoanalysis could link up with the rest of the world and evolve.

So, if we consider that perhaps we were selected not so much because we could reproduce and fight, which we share with all other mammals, many of whom are bigger and stronger than we are but whom we have dominated, domesticated or eradicated; and instead perhaps we were selected precisely because we can communicate with each other.  And this may not be an accident, but something that is built into us, just as sex and aggression are.  And to realize our potential we need not just be sexually and aggressively active, but cooperatively engaged, perhaps even linguistically engaged with others.  This creates whole new arenas for us to express ourselves.  It makes us more successful than other organisms, so that we can dominate them and build schools and houses where we are warm and comfortable while we are sexual, aggressive, and convivial.  Psychoanalytically, though, this creates a whole host of additional problems.  From the analytic perspective we are now innately conflicted, rather than in a conflictual relationship with the world.

Freud’s position in The Ego and The Id, and in other places, is that the ego – our control mechanism – is not something we are born with but something that emerges as we learn to control our urges – our drives – in relation to the external demands.  If you demand to eat right now there will be a negative consequence (Mom will yell at you; a sabertooth tiger will eat you), so you have to come up with strategies to mollify the drives.  More recently, Daniel Stern has pointed out that it looks like, from birth, we are built to manage our internal states.  Rather than being something that is learned (Oh, we do get better at it across time, so in that sense it is learned), but rather than something that we have to create out of necessity, it is something that we have on board from the get go.  And this means, I think, that we are  conflicted from the beginning.

My son tells me that we, dolphins and the bonobo chimps are the only mammals that have sex for fun.  Maybe there is something to Freud’s idea that our sexual urge is part of what leads us to desire connection with each other, and maybe the constancy of that desire is one of the things that is at the root of our desire to build a society – to be regularly in contact – sexually and otherwise.  There was an article this week in the New York Times magazine about a forthcoming book on Gary Hart – the man who, presumptively, would have been president if he hadn’t gotten caught having an affair (on board the boat “Monkey Business” wearing a Monkey Business T shirt).  The article pointed out that many of our most pro-social presidents before (and since) have had powerful libidos that they exercised in office with multiple women.  The press used to look the other way, but in the post-Watergate era where exposure of the moral fiber of our leaders was highly valued, infidelity became fair game.

Isn’t it intriguing, then, that Freud, for all the ways in which he may have been blind to other aspects of human nature, may have been on to something, in a roundabout fashion.  Sexuality – the urge to procreate – may lend some juice to our prosocial wishes (I admit that I am overreaching at this moment to make a point).  It was certainly difficult for Freud to navigate in a world which was so much more repressed than ours.  Even 100 years after he pointed out the important place that sexuality serves in our development – whether expressed or not – we are still prudishly and narrowly evaluating the people that we entrust with great responsibility. 

Would Freud have questioned that?  It is intriguing that he broke with Jung because Jung did not see sex as the primary drive, but broadened it into a prosocial drive, as I am doing.  Freud was also uncomfortable with Jung’s sexual behavior.  Freud himself was likely both frustrated by and faithful to his wife.  He had great regard for his wife’s sister,  felt more intellectually understood by her, and they did once sign into a room together while travelling, though I (perhaps prudishly) believe they were trying to save a Mark rather than to have a tryst, but who knows?  I think Freud’s public and professional positions about sex – he very comfortably, sometimes even brutally interpreted the sexual desires of his patients - were at odds with his private views - he prudishly denied his daughter Anna’s sexual interests even when she was an adult.

I don’t know if Freud would trust an adulterous politician, but I do think that a part of him – the part that strove to be the best at a deeply humane undertaking, even if that meant being brutally engaged with people that he deeply loved – would have understood and even resonated with that politician.  And I believe that his essential idea – that great things (and he was a great admirer of civilization – Rome was his Mecca) can be borne of conflicting desires – holds true despite our understanding of the human mind being more nuanced, complex and, I hope, complete than his was.  My guess is that long after we have discarded many of his basic premises (and ours), we will still highly regard the observations that he used to arrive at his conclusions.  He may have been wrong about what we were conflicted about, about how the conflict contributed to the development of the mind, and that the actualized person would just kill and have sex, but he got it that we are fundamentally and perhaps ineradicably conflicted.  In fact, that may be at the basis of what has made us so evolutionarily successful.   


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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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