Frank Lloyd Wright- The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Learns about the Architecture of Relationships

My mother, in her eighties, is more productive than I am in late mid-life.  I am reminded of a friend of mine’s comment on meeting my grandmother, my mother's mother, who was in her eighties at the time – he said that he hoped that he could be that clear minded when he was her age.  Then he corrected himself.  He said that he wished he were that clear minded now! 

In the last three years my mother has co-written, produced and directed four plays, each of which has been presented in a one night stand at her local theater.  The previous three were offered late on weeknights and travelling to her city two hours away and then back after a performance during the school year was daunting and we never managed it.  This year, however, the production was a Sunday matinee, so the reluctant wife and I were gladly able to make the trip.

Mom has been working with a theater group – they have sort of become an informal company – during this time.  They have worked on themes of plays that have struck their fancy.  This time, the local arts center that houses their productions was going to be hosting a display about a housing development that a Frank Lloyd Wright enthusiast built in the town in the 1960s.  This is an architecturally distinct neighborhood in a community that is, as a whole, divided between Olde New England style – with early 1800s buildings and buildings built to look them (including gas stations with cupolas required by the town zoning) and modern suburban split levels.  So the Frank Lloyd Wright inspired subdivision is a group of 20 or so homes that form a visually and even spiritually unique sub-community.  The houses don’t have clear boundaries between the plots, one is circular and one is a tower and each of the rest are in their own way unique yet vaguely reminiscent of the others because they have casement windows, parts that are underground, no gutters and downspouts, and that Frank Lloyd Wright look.  The theater group decided to celebrate this community by creating a work that described who it was that Frank Lloyd Wright was.  As they pulled together material to create the play, they read biographical material about Wright, but much of it was focused on the women in his life, and the play emerged as a description of the home makers who made the houses that Frank Lloyd Wright lived within.

The play, then, included six characters – the four central women in Wright’s adult life – his first wife, Catherine “Kitty”( Tobin) Wright, second, Maude “Mimi” (Noel) Wright and third wife,  Olga Ivanovna “Olgivanna” (Lazovich Milanoff) Lloyd Wright and also the woman he lived with, Mamah Bothwick Cheney, who was killed by their live-in cook, along with her children, while he was separated from wife #1 – a newspaper reporter, and the voice of Wright himself, which came from backstage.  It was staged as a series of monologues – each of the four women spoke twice – they went through in order – and the newspaper man interacted with them while Wright offered editorial comments – or pontificated.  The style at first felt like it might be stilted or preachy or too didactic, but as the play settled in, it clearly became a play and the sense of anticipation – of wondering what happened, what would happen, and why it all happened, emerged, but more importantly, the sense of a dramatic unfolding took place.  We were in the presence of people whose lives mattered - people about whose lives we cared.

It is interesting to note that Wright was born about 13 years after Freud and lived 20 years or so longer than Freud.  While he lived in the US, they were born into similar worlds, and worlds where the roles of women were quite similar.  Wright’s first wife was every bit the traditional wife, and played the traditional role that Freud’s wife did.  Though she was educated – she was a social worker as well as a socialite – she came across as terribly traditional in her gender identification.  She was portrayed in the play as saying something like “Frank built the house that I lived in, he made the furniture, and I found it no surprise that he designed the clothing that I wore.”  There was a sense that Wright, who was frequently absent, treated his first wife as an object to be housed, furnished and clothed.

Of course Freud’s interests and Wright’s could not have been more different.  Freud was interested in people – in their minds, in their products – their works of art and where they came from, and in their psychological health.  Frank was interested in buildings – in architecture, which he took to be the highest form of art.  And he was not particularly interested in the creature comforts of the people who lived in his works of art – his homes are notoriously cold and drafty – those single pane casement windows conduct the heat and the cold directly into the house – and Taliesin, the home where his second lover died and his third and fourth wife lived, was primitive, with only fireplaces to keep out the cold of the Wisconsin winters. 

Wright connected with the second, doomed woman, when she and her husband were clients of his.  She and Wright, who had been having numerous brief affairs, became proponents of free love, and she relied on the writings of a woman who was a spokesperson for the free love movement to support her decision to leave her husband and Wright's to leave his wife and children so that they could live together – they could not marry as neither spouse would grant them a divorce.  At least as portrayed in the play, this woman was a more suitable match for Wright, but was still quite traditional, while he was breaking architectural boundaries and creating a novel visual style.  She felt, at least on stage, as a slight move forward from wife #1, though Wright viewed her as more of an intellectual equal.  And Wright seemed less than invested in her (and her children) as individual people with particular minds than he might have been – even more than he was interpersonally somewhat distant from his own children.

This was an interesting period in which to have come of age.  In an earlier time, or at the same time in Europe perhaps, he and woman #2 might have simply had an affair.  But they made a bold and public break at a time when divorce was still relatively novel and had a morally repugnant tone, and they began to build lives together quite publicly – talking with the media about the decisions that they made – publicizing their otherwise “private” lives.  This took a macabre turn when the cook – who was I think from the Caribbean – set the house on fire and took an axe to the family members as they fled, killing Mamah and two of her children (Wright was away at the time).  What the cook’s motives were have never been clarified, though some have wondered whether he was driven by moral qualms over the living arrangements – whether true or not there was certainly plenty of room for a late Victorian public to feel that some justice had been served by the deaths, justifying their own sense of satisfaction at an event that otherwise would have appalled them.

Frank then got caught in a snare.  Wife #2 sought him out by writing long, long letters to him in the wake of the deaths at Taliesin, and he became enamored of her – or perhaps more accurately, he became enamored of how enamored she appeared to be of him.  He was dazed by her enough that he overlooked such things as her dependence on morphine – at least long enough to marry her.  Once married, he reasonably quickly became aware of what a burden she was.  The character, by the way, was one that was clearly quite fun for the actress portraying her to play.  She enjoyed that this histrionic woman turned every little interaction into drama, and it was an actress’s dream to have a part in which nothing could be too over the top – what a chance to act without abandon! 

The intriguing thing about the arc of this trio of women, though, is that it seemed to prepare Frank for the final relationship of his life.  The final woman to waltz into his life, wife #4, Olgivanna, was a dancer from Montenegro who had the mettle to match the distant and brilliant Wright.  I am not certain of this, but the plot of the play, which borrows heavily from novels tracing Wright’s wives, including one titled “The Women”, suggest that Wright needed to learn that a woman could be a match – that love could occur between two people with similar passions and with similar strengths.

Again, like Freud, Wright was the leader of a group of people who learned their craft at his feet.  He was an acknowledged genius within his lifetime and exercised his genius with impunity, treating lesser mortals with a certain amount of disdain.  Freud was able to stick with his wife – apparently quite faithfully (though he had a very close relationship with her sister who seemed more his intellectual equal and some have wondered whether they may have had an affair).  Freud was deeply invested in his children (maybe too deeply – analyzing his daughter Anna and helping her become the heir apparent in the family business).  He was deeply invested in his work with women patients and became a clueless and sometimes problematic icon in the development of a women’s movement toward equal footing with men.

At a time when, even in the privileged classes, women did not have anywhere near the same opportunities as men for such things as getting a good education, to expect equal relations between individuals so differently prepared to become adults required a tremendous amount of romantic (meaning fictional) support to work. Olgivanna was an accomplished artist in her own right and she was able to manage the farm that was their home, to keep Frank’s students in line, and to command the respect of those around her, including, I believe, Frank himself.

 My grandmother, the one whom my friend noted was such a powerhouse, was raised by her father, who trundled her across lumber towns in the Pacific northwest and she watched as her father engineered and built one lumbermill after another.  As an adult, engineer friends marveled at her ability to understand mechanical principles, yet she claimed never to have been taught about fractions and decimals and therefore claimed to be mystified by them.  She ended up being a college graduate, but she was an art history major – something for which she had great passion – but her apparent native mathematical and engineering talents could never have been tapped in the educational system available to her.

She, in turn, became the mother to my mother, whose training was pushed towards the humanities in part because of prejudice and what kinds of opportunities existed for women, though largely out of interest and aptitude.  She became a theater director, which meant someone who taught theater, and then her career was secondary to that of my father, who was seen as the de facto bread winner.  Perhaps because of that, her current productivity is particularly impressive.  Perhaps the arc of her life has mirrored in some ways the arc of the lives of the privileged through the first half of the last century and has led to a certain ownership of her gifts and talents that is continuing to reap rewards later in her life.

What would Freud – or Wright – have made of this?  I think that Wright came up against women of greater and greater strength as his life developed – OK the strength of wife number two was largely in her ability to be wacky, but that is a certain kind of strength, one that women have relied on when all else has been denied them for a very long time, and it may have taught Wright that you really want to have the strength of women working with you, not against you.  So find someone who can measure up, and he seems to have, at least at the end (Perhaps Mamah did as well – their relationship never had a chance to mature).  Freud, too, befriended and championed powerful women, including his daughter, throughout his life.  But it is also the case that women have taken what Freud had to offer, including his misreadings of women, and made them right – refusing to be cowed by a genius who had his blind spots.

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The Conscious Id – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst reads Mark Solms

Many psychoanalysts talk lovingly of the first time they read Freud.  They say things like, "He really helped me understand myself," or "For the first time I felt like someone understood psychology;” for me, not so much.  I found Freud to be a difficult and dense read.  His models of the mind were too simplistic in text books and too complicated for me to understand when I read Freud himself.  And, while some of his cases were lovely, many times his explanations were tough to follow.  But the clinicians who loved Freud really seemed to understand people and to be helpful to them.  And, over time, I learned a language - not necessarily Freud’s language, but a dialect related to the language he coined - one that helped me better understand the people that I was working with and how to be helpful to them.  And I kept banging away at Freud, giving the old man another chance, trying to understand what he was saying.  I read a lot of Freud in my psychoanalytic training proper, but I can't say that I got it all of the time - or even much of the time.  I am teaching Freud now, and I'm beginning to get him, but it ain't easy.  So, imagine my surprise when I read a paper and said - "Oh, of course.  So that's how the mind works."  It's not a paper by Freud, but one by a South African neuropsychologist named Mark Solms.  I recommend it - here is the link, but I think it would have been largely impenetrable to me, so I offer the following as an interpretation - and therefore recognize that it will overly condense, simplify or distort the paper - so please, feel free to check the facts.  I am also aware, now having written it, that this may be as dense and impenetrable as the paper, and for that I apologize ahead of time.

Now there are two funny things about Solms’ paper.  First of all, Solms claims to be turning Freud on his head, but I experience him as straightening Freud out.  The second is that this paper is a really dry, really technical paper (OK, it has some cool color pictures of the brain, but you know what I mean), and yet it seems, at least to me, to be incredibly applicable to day to day life - to be burning into my thoughts these days as I try to puzzle this or that problem of human living.  I feel like one of those psychoanalysts I have envied who found Freud speaking to them; ironic that I am getting that experience out of this very dry paper.  It is also ironic that I find this lively because Solms is, I think, completing some of Freud's work, or at least intending to update it based on our current neuropsychological understanding.  Freud was originally a neurologist, he abandoned neurology for a particular psychology that he invented because his neurological descriptions were not up to the task of explaining the phenomena he ran into, so he translated his neurological understanding into a more psychologically based one - though he never gave up hope that his model of the mind could become a neurologically supported one.

So how does Solms claim to turn Freud on his head?   Well, first of all, he claims that the id - Freud's cauldron of drives, uncivilized wishes, and forgotten/repressed material - is not unconscious at all, but intimately related to consciousness and, indeed, central to our primary conscious experience. He also states that we are pretty much constantly at least capable of being aware of the stuff that Freud claimed was deeply unconscious (though I think he means by this the immediate derivatives of drives - feelings – not necessarily the contents (memories) and functions (defenses) of the unconscious) though he does not clarify this, which confuses the paper.  In any case, Solms locates the id deep within the brain - in the brainstem and the structures near it like the ventricular system - in the systems that are responsible for waking and sleep and for our feeling states.  In fact, Solms claims that the function of the mind is not primarily to think - to be cognitive - but instead to feel.  Why did we choose this course of action?  We chose it because it felt right.  We leaned in one direction, and checked out how it felt.  If we felt uncomfortable, we may have asked for more information.  Getting it, we may have leaned further, or leaned in the other direction and, when it felt like we were in a comfortable place (or we felt like there was no time left) we acted.  And the cognitive parts of the brain, the stuff that Solms equates with Freud's ego, provide the needed information.  It informs our feelings (and restrains them – so we don’t act too impulsively), but also justifies them, creating a plausible rational narrative for our affectively based actions and, Solms believes, the ego is thus subservient to feelings on both ends - the feelings search the ego for what they need to have a better feeling for something and, once the decision has been made, using the ego to provide support for the feeling based decisions.  So Solms feels that he has turned Freud on his head.

Now, I’m going to quibble with Solms' idea that he has turned Freud on his head with a technical point about Freud’s model in this paragraph. Solms seems to assume that because something is unconscious, it must be part of Freud’s id.  Solms seems to have forgotten that, for Freud, most of the mind, including most of the ego, is unconscious.  Our conscious selves are really small – not just small but largely inconsequential or irrelevant in most of our psychological functioning.  The real bang, for Freud, is in the unconscious.  And I think that Solms is elevating a very small part of that unconscious, but one that Freud put deep inside the most unconscious part of his model the id, the drives – the part of ourselves that wants this now and wants it anyway, into something that we have conscious access to rather than being unconscious.  I think he means by this something like what happens when I walk by an unlocked car and see something in it that I could use – a CD that I want but don’t have – I have an impulse to open the door, grab the CD and keep on going.  This is part of what seems so right about this article.  Solms is maintaining that a lot of what Freud sees as having been defended against is just kind of continually running across the front page.  So I think that Solms may be confusing consciousness with the ego. I think he is extending the range of consciousness more than upending the ego and id.

The major thesis of the first part of the paper is that there are two self-representations in the brain.  One – which is located in the cerebral cortex – is the one that locates us in space.  It is the part of ourselves that feels where we are and that directs us to move in space.  This is connected with the sensations that come to us from the outside world.  This is the self that Solms equates with Freud’s ego.  I think there is some sense to that.  He then contrasts this with another sense of self, the sense of self that arises from within – the feeling states – the urges that drive us and that give texture and continuity to our lives.  This is the stuff he locates in the brainstem and other “lower” brain centers.  These brain centers he claims are actually in charge of our consciousness because they do such things as determine our wake sleep cycles, and they operate to do that even when there is no cerebral cortex.  OK, they determine wake and sleep, but I think he makes a bit of leap when he states that they therefore are the site of the primary consciousness and the “higher” ego consciousness is subservient to it.  This could be the case, but does not follow necessarily.

So, Solms maintains, the cerebral cortex, or ego, is called in to access procedures for handling particular situations – it is what he believes is the aptly named working memory that is our conscious functioning – and it figures out what, procedurally, to do at a given moment.  We access relevant chunks of information and manipulate them in order to come up with a procedure and the intention of this is to come up with a procedure that is a routine so that we can just do that routine and NOT have to consciously work at a problem.  OK, I am dealing with x situation – I need the x solution box and need to plug in the subroutine that will solve it.  I don’t need to figure out how to do this.  The point of our minds is to avoid being conscious as much as possible so that we can function efficiently and, I suppose, have RAM (or working memory) open to be used for novel situations which require actual problem solving.  This is largely a restatement of what Freud has said, but also what cognitive psychologists have been saying about why so much of our processing is unconscious.  Solms is taking the position that his “new” part of this is that it involves the ego as an unconscious piece, but I think Freud actually beat him to the punch on that in The Ego and the Id.

What I think is remarkable about the distinction that Solms makes between “higher” ego functions and “lower” ego functions is something that is actually implicit in one of Freud’s models of the mind that Solms recreates in one of his color illustrations.  This model is from Chapter 7 of the interpretation of dreams and is a model that Freud used to describe how dreams function.  I think of it (perhaps wrongly, I have not yet heard others call it this) as a kaleidoscopic model of the mind.  Freud creates this model to explain two features of dreams – that dreams are visual and that they are never in the location that we would expect them to be.  And what Freud comes up with, I think, is brilliant.  It is a model where we look at an image that is on top of another image that is on top of another image so that we can simultaneously see multiple things that are coming to bear on a particular issue and so that we can also obscure some things that are occurring because they can be covered by other images.  What is it that we are observing?  We are observing the things that have occurred during the past day – and the things that have been associatively called up by them – how those things have been fit into our memories – our reworking of what has occurred at previous moments in our personal history and how those are related to what has happened more recently.

While Solms does not apply his model to dreams, this is one of many places that I think it could well prove quite fruitful.  For instance; what if the function of dreams is partly a consolidation of memories – not just as they occurred but as an active integration of them into the existing components of our perspective on the world?  Here we have been applying, from our data banks, the material that we use to make decisions and move forward in the world.  Then, at night, we replay our experience – Freud calls it regression because we reverse the direction of the movement of materials, and move them backwards – from the memory out to the sensory system where we watch them being played back, but on unfamiliar ground – the ground of the old memories that are called up by what we have observed and engaged in during the day.  This might help us both build more efficient means of staying unconscious – help us fine tune our procedures; but it also might help us realize when those procedures have failed us – and these might be the dreams we remember or the moments in dreams when we awake and need to think of a new way of handling things – our processes are not capable of handling the situations – or we realize the negative consequences of handling situations in the ways that we have – they feel bad to us – and our brainstem says to us, in effect, there is something dangerous going on that we need to react to.

Solms does talk about psychopathology.  In this model, psychopathology – neurosis – happens when the automatic processes of the ego are put in place prematurely – before there has been a chance to adequately test them.  This largely happens because we are anxious about a situation and act before we have enough information.  Once the solution gets put in place however, because it is unconscious and because it works at some level, it becomes automatic.  Dreams and psychoanalysis become ways to rework these compromise or failed but nominally functional solutions.

So you may have lost track of why I think this paper is so exciting.  Let me try to review with some bullet points:

• Solms clarifies that the drives, if not directly conscious, are much closer to consciousness than Freud maintains.  The ego, instead of being a driver, is actually a largely unconscious consultant to the lower parts of the brain that are both driving us, and central to our conscious experience.
•  This means that our minds are primarily feeling organs rather than thinking ones.  Thought is an afterthought, as it were.  This “feels” to me more consistent with my experience than that thought is primary.
• This models preserves and enhances something specifically psychoanalytic – that there are multiple layers to our experience and that these can be understood singularly, but also in terms of how they interact.  It essentially explains that there are multiple systems functioning simultaneously that can be accessed and understood as separate entities and as integrated systems.
•  It is complementary to theories of how dreams work – that this may be the basis for new thinking about the adaptive function of dreaming – and why it is neuropsychologically so important to our functioning.  That dreaming might be similar to the cleaning out a fountain pen that occurs by drawing ink in from a reservoir after having had it run out onto the page.

But I think the primary reason that I am so excited about this paper is that, as much as psychoanalysis has evolved in the past 100 years – we have self-psychological models, object relations models, intersubjective models, new and better models of psychological development – we still rely on Freud’s models of the mind – his metapsychological models.  This paper revisits them from a neuropsychological perspective, finds them more serviceable than I think we would have expected, and updates them in ways that make them even more relevant, including in ways that may help us better understand how the relational models work within the individual.  As Kurt Lewin noted, there is nothing more practical than a good theory.  Freud’s theory has been very practical.  Tweaking it in ways that make it more closely mirror reality can only make it even more useful.

I also posted on a talk about psychoanalytic education that Mark Solms gave in 2019 and another at the 2020 convention.  Please also see a complementary post about Antonio Damasio's book, The Strange Order of Things.  I have also written about Solms (2022) book The Hidden Spring.

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

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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.

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

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