MOOCS and SMOCs and moldy Socks – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Learns about Teaching and Learning

What a nice break from this cold, cold winter to head south to San Antonio, Texas for a conference that Chairs of Psychology Departments throw to keep each other posted on what is going on in the field.  And one of the things that is going on is the change in the teaching that we are doing.  We are teaching more and more in online classrooms.  This was, at first, not as big a threat to teaching as we normally do it as we feared – in part because the limits on class size have been about the same as for teaching in the classroom, so the biggest expense in delivering material continues to be the faculty members.  OK, we don’t have to heat the classroom and turn on the lights, but the parameters were about the same.  Then along came Massive Open Online Classrooms – or MOOCs.  These involve master teachers being filmed doing what they do best – teaching – and then posting their classes online for all to participate free of charge.  The hitch has been that there is no college credit granted because there is no way to monitor if the particular person who signed up for the course is in the chair – or taking the exam – so it could be anyone.  So lots of people sign up, but by the end of the class, very few are participating; still no real threat.  But at the conference, in addition to the Riverwalk, I saw the future of a certain kind of teaching and it is scary.

James Pennebaker, a very smart social psychologist who is simultaneously a bit of a geek – he reminds me of a classic engineer type – and very funny, has teamed up with Sam Gosling, another social psychologist, who is a little looser – not quite zany, but with a touch of maybe an Australian accent he nicely complements Pennebaker’s drier, Midwestern style.  They are working on a new concept, Synchronous Massive Online Classes (SMOCs).  The idea here is that students take these classes at the same time, like a traditional class.  They log on with their computers and their “presence” is recorded as they use a unique password.  The classes are streamed live and currently 1,000 to 1,500 students take the class simultaneously all over campus, but the intent is to have students taking the class simultaneously all over the world.  Students are registered in an actual class and receive a grade, and, the data suggests, they learn better – not just in the course, but in subsequent courses.  How is this possible?

At first Pennebaker and Gosling teamed up to co-teach a class in a typical classroom with 100 or so students and a number of cameras and streamed the class on campus.  But then they decided that it made more sense, since most of the students were using laptops to participate, to create something more like a TV show, and they did that in the TV studio, producing a show modelled on The Daly Show, with regular features like interviewing the expert and Psychology in the News along with lots of demonstrations that are eye catching and entertaining.  You can see a promo for their class by clicking here. They don’t have a text book for the class, but instead have a medley of materials – from YouTube videos to current articles in psychology journals to current news media links online that students are encouraged to access.  As engaging as this style is (some students are picked at random to be in-studio participants for each class, and the out of class materials are varied and pitched to appeal to the students), it is not the format of the class itself that seems to have the impact on learning.  Instead, this seems most tied to the testing of the students.

Instead of having a traditional midterm or two with a final at the end, students are tested at the beginning of each class over the material that was presented for the previous class and the online materials that supported it.  They are given immediate feedback about how they did and they are retested later in the semester on items that they fail.  The items are mixed and matched so that no two students have the same items and Pennebaker and Gosling are convinced that cheating is all but impossible the way the system is currently constructed.  This continuous testing, they maintain, teaches the students how to learn and they have some pretty impressive data to support it.

At the beginning of the class, they compare first generation students (students whose parents did not go to college) with those whose parents attended college and they find something pretty typical.  The first generation students do not do as well.  By the end of the class, the difference between the two groups is negligible.  What happens in between?  Well, when students don’t do well on the first three or four exams, they email the instructors and say, “Why am I not doing so well?”  The instructors refer them to a video that demonstrates how to move from memorizing material (which is the dominant study strategy of people who do not do so well) to a more conceptually based approach to studying the material, so that the students are prepared to take tests that include items that are more applied and that require conceptual thinking.  Students are then able to practice this multiple times across the course of the semester until they get good at it – as opposed to the traditional testing approach where they only get a couple of shots at being examined, never try a new approach, and simply go on to the next class trying to study harder – to memorize more – without learning how to study smarter.

Because they have so many students, Pennebaker and Gosling have tons of data.  They can show a very clear cut relationship between the number of times that students click on the recommended links and the grades they receive.  They can show the improvement in the scores of the first generation students across the course of the semester.  And they can get together with the registrar and look at the performance of students who look like the students who take their class in subsequent classes and show that their students perform better in these later classes than those who look like them but did not take their class.  The students in Pennebaker and Gosling’s class have learned how to study – have learned how to take tests – and may even have learned something about how to think – something that we claim is at the heart of what we are trying to teach.   They may have learned not just the content of a course, but something about the process of thinking itself.

Now, is this course the be all and end all?  Of course not.  Students still need to learn how to speak, how to form their own ideas and how to write.  All of this requires, at least at this point, more individualized attention.  Is this a course that anyone can put together?  No.  It requires the massive resources of an institution like the University of Texas.  But with those resources, this course can be offered to all – so that I can take this course when I am registered at the University of Oklahoma, or the University of Tubingen in Lithuania.  That distal University pays Texas a chunk of what they charge in tuition, but that frees up their faculty to teach the smaller classes that need more one on one attention. 

What is the down side?  One of the fears expressed at the meeting is that Pennebaker and Gosling’s vision of what the field of psychology is about could become the dominant US vision and there would not be an appreciable difference in experience of students at very different institutions.  This would be a paradoxical outcome of the web – which generally has led to much more individualized viewing patterns – there will never again be a must see Thursday where half of the population (is that possible – did half of the US population used to watch Friends on Thursday nights – look it up) is watching one thing.  Pennebaker and Gosling maintained that this would be functionally what is going on now where there is a dominant textbook – Myers – which is dictating what students learn in intro psych.  While I agree that there is a dominant text, I think that I, as a psychoanalyst, interpret that text differently than my brethren and sisters who are not.  I think that the physiological psychologists interpret parts of it very differently as well.  That said, there are certainly efficiencies in bringing in an analyst to talk about Freud to the masses, and there are problems that only my few random students get this radically different experience.  But what if Pennebaker and Gosling think that psychoanalysis is hooey (the dominant view of psychologists teaching in Universities today)? 

I think, though, the real difference in this class is an exciting one.  As much as there is an emphasis on the delivery differences, the truly impressive difference is that the focus is actually not primarily on what is being taught – though this requires a great deal of attention – but the focus is actually on what is being learned – what is happening in the minds of the students.  And this is a true revolution in teaching – and the scale of the class, ironically, allows this to take place – or at least promotes it.  It is a big enough class that it makes sense to make up particular questions every week based on what happened the previous week.  It is a big enough class that these two professors can devote the bulk of their time to preparing for it – along with an army of Teaching Assistants – not to mention students in the TV lab who do the filming and producing of the class itself.  I think my concern is real – how is it that we as a culture that values individuality as much as we do keep erasing individual differences in the ways that we do (this was pointed out recently by a Norwegian novelist)?  Why does the McDonald’s in Santa Fe taste just like the one in Portland, Maine?  And are we going to all believe that the field of psychology is defined by the particular perspective of two professors in Texas?  Isn’t it ironic that our field in particular – one that explores the similarities, but even more the differences between individuals – could become yet another brand name?  Yet another way to help the masses homogenize…


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Amok Time – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Watches a Star Trek episode and remembers Leonard Nimoy

I first learned of Star Trek when I was in about third grade and it was must see TV, at least for those who were allowed to stay up late enough to see it.  As I was not, but as I had the coolest desk chair, one that had tacks that held the “leather” (I think it was probably a vinyl imitation) to the arms and this was, apparently, somehow like the control chair on the USS Enterprise, we would gather at my house where, despite having the chair, I didn’t get to be Kirk and sit in it because I hadn’t seen the show and didn’t, therefore, know how to play the role.  Instead I was one of the characters at the periphery of the room being ordered around by the commander.

Yesterday Leondard Nimoy died at age 83 years of age.  When I was older and could watch Star Trek in reruns, Nimoy’s character, Spock, was the emotional center of the show.  His half-human half-Vulcan character was the most authentic in the program.  Captain Kirk, played by William Shatner, channeled anger.  He was always ready to stride headlong into whatever trouble lay ahead.  Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy, played by DeForest Kelley, just seemed to be a sap.  He was long on emotion – long on “caring” (I suppose he was in a caring profession), but short on common sense.  He seemed always to be paralyzed by fear.  The other characters also seemed each to have their role – or emotion – to play.  But Spock – human alloyed with Vulcan, a purely logical species – was forever torn between his preferred role, that of being logical, and his duplicitously human, feeling self.

I think that the internal conflict between thinking and feeling, and Nimoy’s sensitive portrayal of it, was what made him a more three dimensional character – a more truly human character than the others.  Tonight we watched an episode of Star Trek for the first time in a very long time.  The episode, perhaps chosen because of Nimoy’s death, highlights Spock’s character, putting him in the uncharacteristic position of being the most emotive of the crew because of a mysterious condition that leads him to need to mate or die.  The intensity of this desire causes him to run amok – to throw food against walls and to engage in insubordination, overriding the captain’s order – behavior that is clearly out of character for him.  Long story short, the Enterprise, following first Spock’s orders against Kirk’s wishes, then Kirk’s wishes against Starfleet Command's orders,  makes its way to Vulcan where Spock can engage in rutting behavior with the woman to whom he was betrothed when but a boy.

Well, things have changed since Spock's childhood, and his beloved has taken up with another Vulcan and she, quite logically, Spock realizes when he comes to his senses, wants to have Spock’s lands and monies but not to be saddled with a partner who is never there and whom she doesn’t know.  So she utilizes the ancient tradition of the Vulcans to choose a champion.  She had intended to choose her paramour, but as Kirk and Bones are to witness the fight, she decides to choose Kirk instead. He can’t take Spock’s belongings even if he wins – and if he dies she doesn’t lose her paramour.  Again, from Spock’s perspective, this is a supremely logical strategy.   Spock, in his maddened state, fights Kirk to the death, apparently killing him, which releases him from the rut.  Returning to the ship, he discovers that Bones, of all people, has come up with a subterfuge – he injected Kirk not with oxygen to even the playing field as he claimed to have done, but with a neurotoxin that imitates death, but from which he can be revived once safely back on the ship.  And Kirk, despite my memory of him as driven primarily by rage, is quite affable and even courtly in his interactions with the Vulcan priestess.  Perhaps Spock’s loss of rationality requires a compensatory growth of reason on the part of the others (or maybe my memory of the limits of the other’s roles is exaggerated).

From a psychoanalytic perspective, it is intriguing to see, in this hyper-rational society, the portrayal both of an intermittent hormonally driven  and quite shameful drive to reproduce – as if Spock’s characterization of his Vulcan heritage as exclusively rational must be an exaggeration for any biological species – and this is further acknowledged in the religious ritual that cloaks the mating rite – one that is, in the words of the priestess, handed down from the earliest days of the civilization.  This ritual, complete with a jade gong and other religious trappings, emphasizes that the irrational – the assumption of a governing principle beyond the scope of reason that apparently must be incorporated into even the most rational society – just as pi – and other irrational numbers – emerge from the most rational mathematical systems.  There is mess in the most orderly corners of the universe.

Last week, in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, there was a feature article about Airbnb – a web based company that facilitates people renting their homes – or space in them – to travelers at a fraction of the cost of a hotel.  We stayed in Airbnbs on our family trip through Canada and on the pilgrimage that I took with the reluctantson to Chicago, both chronicled earlier in blogs.  On both trips, we mostly stayed in the homes of people who were involved in a relationship with someone else, but had not yet moved in together, or so it seemed to us.  In Montreal, though, we stayed in an apartment that was managed by an entrepreneur who realized that it was more profitable to rent his properties by the day than by the month.  The focus in the article was on Airbnb’s efforts to penetrate Japan, a country with a looming Olympics that could be a bonanza for the company and those who would stand to profit from having foreigners stay in their homes, but the Japanese are reluctance to play.

Airbnb and the article rely on the work of a Dutch social psychologist, Geert Hofstede, to describe the relevant dimensions that seem to distinguish between countries like the US and Australia, where Airbnb has taken off and Japan, where it has not.  Hofstede, when working for IBM, developed a series of metrics to determine what distinguishes different cultures – whether in the home, the workplace or a political entity like a town, state or country.  The relevant dimensions include collectivism vs. individualism, restraint vs. indulgence, acceptance vs. rejection of hierarchical structures, and embracing vs. avoiding uncertainty.  The US and Australia are, as a whole individualistic and indulgent, while Japan is collectivist and restrained, but the article proposes that the differentiating factors for openness to Airbnb appears to be the dimension of avoiding uncertainty, which the Japanese do, apparently, with a passion.

I think, actually, that the different personality dimensions are not as independent as they might seem.  I think that the characteristics of being restrained and avoiding uncertainty go along with the acceptance of hierarchical structures in what we would clinically call the obsessive personality style, a style that is related to an introverted style and also to a style that has been termed the highly sensitive style – and each of these related styles of engaging with the world are styles that many, many in our US culture endorse, even though the US culture as a whole celebrates and differentially reinforces the opposite traits.  Spock and his hyperrationality become the poster child for these individuals – people who are more comfortable thinking than feeling – people who tend to want a world that is neat and orderly, not one that is messy – people who answer to authority - and people who tend to stay within a very small comfort zone – not being interested in traveling outside of it, and many of these people are also afraid of experiencing uncertainty.

  

Traveling and meeting new people is inherently filled with uncertainty.  Will they be friendly or not?  How do I connect respectfully with people whose culture is so different from mine?  Wouldn’t it just be easier to stay home?  And isn't it ironic that people with these “stay at home” traits are also likely to be quite intellectually curious about the world?  I have an Uncle and Aunt who are both curious and concerned.  They have traveled to over a hundred countries, and most of the time they have carried their own food to maintain their safety.  Spock, who epitomizes the stay at home type, is the second officer on the USS Enterprise whose five year mission is to “Boldly go where no man has gone before.”  He demonstrates the value of this style that is undervalued in our society, while simultaneously encouraging those of us with this style to embrace something that is scary but, with him as a model, somehow more manageable.          

In the Amok episode, Spock, after acknowledging the logic of his betrothed’s betrayal, notes, with his usual measured tone that “You may find that having is not as desirable as wanting.  It is not logical, but you may find it to be true.”  Over and over again, Spock, the quintessential rationalist, finds that the logical is not always true.  He models equanimity in the face of irrational quandaries and therefore most closely models the heart of the mission of Star Trek and the hopeful children of the “Greatest Generation”; a generation who would both question their parents, but also embody their hopes as they tried to remake the world to fit their vision of it.  Leonard Nimoy, in his portrayal of Spock, clarified that there could be a rational center to that ideal – and that, when the limits of reason were reached, we could still bravely move forward, even if that is into someone else’s living room, or inviting them into our own.



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Interstellar - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Explores Our Fears in Outer Space

Interstellar, 10th Anniversary, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, tenth anniversary see bottom

The reluctant wife and I decided that it really would be worth seeing Interstellar on the big screen, but its first run was done, so we saw this film at the cheap theater.  Housed in the very back of the biggest mall in our area - a mall that has been a spectacular failure - getting to the movie was, in itself, a post apocalyptic adventure.  One cut rate department store is open - and three decidedly home grown stores in the mall proper, clustered near the front door, and then a very long walk - through empty dimly lit mall corridors, with little heating, through the intersection of the four gargantuan wings, past an abandoned food court, and down another long corridor to a dead end where you buy the ticket from the popcorn maker (and there is no ticket taker), all to arrive at a small screen, largely empty theater where the movie that maintains that our way of life has been precipitously imperiled because almost all food crops have succumbed to some terrible blights - corn is the only remaining food source, and it is only a matter of time before corn fails as well - is believable, and, especially in the bowels of this huge empty space, it is believable that our hubris, our belief that bigger is better, might be a deeply problematic thought.

Despite our preparation and willingness to believe, our credibility was strained by a movie that imitated life - it seemed too big and sprawly to support itself.  It labored under seemingly unnecessary subplots that made apparently tangential points.  Though the ideas played with in these tangents were interesting, and some of the visuals they afforded were the most stunning in the movie, it began to feel like a marathon not because it was long, which it was, but because there was just too much freight to bear.  But the movie opens up when you get closer to the center of it, and the tangents, along with the gripping, powerful action sequences that were riveting, begin to make some sense, despite the fact that they now seem self indulgent, because it takes work, at least for me, to see the center amidst what had distracted us from a deeply searching exploration of the variety of ways that we can cope with inter generational loss and love.

The primary story at the center of this movie is a love story between a father and a daughter.  The love that is portrayed is strong enough to bend time and space.  It is powerful enough to save the human race.  A parallel but less apparent relationship is the one between a father who believes the race is doomed and sends his daughter on a mission that will allow her to live out her own life - even though he believes they can never see each other again and that she will end her life in deep space.

OK, so what happens?  In the post apocalyptic world, our hero, a former NASA flyboy (played by Matthew McConaghey), is now tending corn because technology or biotechnology and mono-cropping - it really isn't clear to me - has led to viruses that have killed all but a few food crops. The crop failures have led to global economic ruin, and turned people against technological solutions to problems.  So the government can no longer publicly work on anything but agriculture - presumably in a low tech manner.  Flyboy is back on the family - in this case the family in-law - farm.  His wife has died and his beloved daughter, who is math/science brilliant (and played by Mackenzie Foy as a child and Jessica Chastain as an adult), is not going to get the education she needs because of the collapse of the educational system, especially around training scientists.  This dead end existence is interrupted by a ghostly/poltergeist phenomenon that, even though Flyboy the engineer pooh poohs ESP as a non-scientific entity - reveals the coordinates to NASA's top secret ongoing project intended to relocate the people of earth, or at least a big chunk of them, to a planet in a galaxy far, far away.

This is where we meet the second father/daughter pair.  The scientist (played by Michael Caine), is working to solve the problem of how to power the mammoth ship they are building.  He sends his daughter (played by Anne Hathaway) and Flyboy ahead to scout things out.  Meanwhile the scientist agrees to teach Flyboy's daughter science and, ultimately, because she is very bright, to enlist her aid in solving the power problem.  The twist (spoiler alert) is that he, and he alone, knows that the power problem for the big ship is (apparently) insoluble.

So the comparison is between a father who leaves his daughter intent on saving her and a father who sends his daughter out knowing that he will never see her again.  The scientist has, however, a different plan in mind.  His daughter - and Flyboy - are carrying human embryos that will populate this new world.  So the real comparison is between Flyboy, who is intent on saving his daughter, and for whom saving mankind is a bonus, and the scientist who knows that he is doomed and that his daughter will have a strange life without him, but that she and the race will carry on.  But the kicker is that the scientist works with Flyboy's daughter for years, deceiving her into believing that she and the other humans will survive and that she may be reunited with her father.

In Freud's Mourning and Melancholia, Freud conceives of depression (melancholia) as a failed mourning process.  We become depressed, Freud argues, when we can't let go of the people that we love - when we can't mourn or grieve them.  This happens, Freud maintains, when we have not reached a level of maturity that allows us to experience ourselves as functioning autonomously - and others as doing the same.  He sets this up as a dichotomy - some of us are able to mourn, others can't.  Like most dichotomies, I think this is better understood as a continuum - and I think it is the case that we have different levels of attachment (attachment is a word that wouldn't be used in this way until 20 years after Freud died, so I can't fault him) to different people.  Thus, I think that it is easy to mourn the loss of colleagues, but much more difficult to mourn the loss of a parent or, worse, a child.

In my own case, while I have pretty thoroughly mourned my father, who died almost four years ago, he still "haunts" me - returning in my dreams with a clarity and vividness that is stunning - and reassuring.  When others talk of losing their father, I frequently tear up; sharing their grief, and continuing to process my own.  All that said, there is pathological grieving, and Freud's conception of depression as a failure to mourn, not necessarily a death, but frequently a more subtle but difficult loss, like an unavailable parental figure; someone who seems to be there but really isn't, and so we hang onto this relationship - and deny our disappointments with the other because to acknowledge them and the anger they cause would imperil our relationship to the person that we believe we depend on.  So there is tremendous psychological cost associated with staying connected with an unavailable other.

From this perspective, the scientist has "rationally" mourned his relationship with his daughter - she is a separate person who is capable of functioning autonomously and he wishes her well on her journey.  Further, he has rationally mourned the people of the earth - gravity won't save them, so there is no use crying over spilled milk.  Let's send the embryos and start over.  And I think the writer and director (who are brothers) and we as the audience are horrified by this.  They (and we) are rooting for flyboy and his saving - not people in general - but  this person - my daughter.

Now, here I have a casting problem.  Mathew McConaghey as Flyboy doesn't overtly convey his attachment to his daughter.  He conveys anger and is an action oriented guy.  We have to infer the connection.  Because I was curious, l looked up the casting decision and the casting person said that they cast McConaghey because he represented everyman.  And, OK, I think everyman, especially every man, is stereotypically cast as as being challenged in expressing his attachment.  And, interestingly, I think this is related to Freud's position.  In so far as we don't acknowledge the depth of our attachments, I think his position is that we are more likely to experience difficulty mourning.  Pretending to be a rock, a la McConaghey or Eastwood or Whoever, actually makes us more vulnerable, not less, in so far as we are all (to a certain limit - there are people whose disconnection is so great that they only connect sadistically) remote; McConaghey becomes everyman refusing to let go of his daughter.

And he is rewarded for it.  He finds himself in a space - after giving up both his daughter and the scientist's daughter - towards whom he has feelings - because he is invested in what is best for them - he finds himself in a space where gravity helps him be able to haunt his daughter - to become the poltergeist that he pooh-poohed.  And from this position, he is able to transmit the data that is needed to save mankind - to store it in one of his possessions that he left behind, and this is the right place to store it because this will be hung onto by his daughter.  She will never let go of it - because it symbolizes his connection to her - a connection she will never give up - not because, as Freud would have it, she is melancholic, but because she is human and no grief as intense as that towards a lost father is ever resolved - so we hang onto a totem because of the vestigial connection that we feel - and though it may be vestigial, it is certainly not impotent - quite the contrary, it is hugely powerful.

All that said, I still think that the last twenty minutes of the film are gratuitous.  Having made the connection and saving humanity is enough.  We don't need to see Flyboy connect with both his daughter and his girlfriend.  He's already done what needs to be done.  I think it is a testament to movie convention, which in turn, from this perspective, is a testament to how grounded in our "pathological" - meaning ungrieved - connections to people - to particular people - that we need to have a "happy" ending - an ending where our wishes to stay connected with those we love are gratified- we never have to face the pain of grief.   Especially when we are grappling with the issue of the damage we have caused Mother Earth - when we are concerned that we have irreparably damaged our home - the reassurance that we, like Flyboy, are concerned about those we love, even if that love has contributed in some small measure (and by, the power of multiplication, a great deal) to the impending disaster, and even if we know we should be more like the scientist, we may need the reassurance of the movie's happy ending that we can survive to be able to face the possibility that we won't.

POST APOCALYPSE UPDATE:
It is now April of 2020 and we are social distancing during the Covid-19 Pandemic.  We decided to re-watch this film on the small screen we both enjoyed it a great deal.  I remembered that I had posted about it, but not much more.  I reread the post with the Reluctant Wife and we were both surprised by the negative tone of my reading, though we came up with two very different hypotheses about it.

Hers:  It's a complicated film and I sometimes "get" a film much better on a second viewing.  She recommended that I watch all films twice before posting on them.  I think that is a good idea, but not very doable.  I will try to work harder to "get" films the first time through more frequently - particularly keeping characters straight.

Mine:  I think the apocalyptic nature of the place where we saw it and the apocalyptic and believable premise of the film evoked defenses in me.  Rather than feel uncomfortable - and bad for not having done a better job to take care of the planet - I blamed the film for being bad and overly saccharine to boot.  In fact, I think the reunion at the end of the film is essential to the premise.  It is our love for each other as individuals that allows us to accomplish the things that we have and might - including saving the planet.

I think there is something to both hypotheses - and I'm also leaving the post up.  I think it is too wordy and focused on Mourning and Melancholia, which I must have been reading at the time, but I don't disagree with the premise of the role that mourning takes - in fact, I think that may have applied to my own process of mourning our (and my) destruction of the planet that was just beginning.  As silly as it is to feel guilty about that, if we don't, we won't get anything accomplished.  In my viewing of the film the first time I was defended against the message.  In the middle of having a virus threaten us?  Not so much.

10th ANNIVERSARY VIEWING

OK, This is really embarrassing.  We went to see this film again in IMAX.  We had forgotten that we had streamed it after our initial viewing.  After this viewing, when I said I finally understood the movie, the Reluctant Wife said (again) that I should always watch a movie twice before posting on it.  Then when I looked this review up, I learned that I need three times.

The critical moment in the film that I missed twice was Ann Hathaway's character making a case for going to the planet with her lover on it - not the planet with Matt Damon on it.  I think both times before I was confused about who was whom - I thought her lover was the character played by Matt Damon, so I was processing that information instead of hearing what she said. 

Her argument with the character played by McConaghey that I have called Flyboy above was based on the idea that love - like gravity - has actual, physically observable effects.  She was essentially equating it with gravity as another Einsteinian low power attractor.  Since the point of the movie is that gravity can be transformed to create the power to send a big chunk of earth's population interstellarly, love, too, is something that is, in its usual manifestation, physically realizable, but small.

I don't disagree that the power of love is strong.  It may be, as the movie points out, that it is love that has driven us to accomplish what we have as a species (and ironically the Matt Damon character fleshes this thesis out - the character who has no attachments, but desperately wants to avoid dying alone).  But I wonder about it being a physical attractor - being concrete in the way that Dr. Brand (Hathaway) characterizes it.  

I think love is psychological and it resides with the psyche of the lover.  A parent's love for a child is mirrored by the child's love for the parent, but it is independent of it.  In the same way, a lover can yearn for a person who has spurned them.  We may believe that our love is indicative of something in the other that is moved by us - and certainly the Beatles were at the vortex of a lot of love from their fans - but I don't think all of that screaming was actually evoked by the personhood of John, Paul, George and/or Ringo.  I think it was, instead, a response to a sound they produced and to a deeply felt human yearning that there was social permission to express.

I think this may seem like a wet blanket on the Christopher Nolan version of love.  And if this movie was intended to portray the love that he felt for his children while he was off making movies - I think he may have deeply felt that love - he may have used it to fuel writing and directing great films - but I don't think the fantasied connection with his children was felt in the concrete ways depicted in this film.  I do think we need to in touch to feel and experience that love - we need to be in sync in ways that I as a child was not in sync with my travelling salesman father when we was away from home more nights than he was home.  I yearned for a man I did not know - and I think Christopher Nolan and my father's imagining (in so far as he did) that we were in touch while he was away served as a reparative fantasy for them, but not so much for me.

  

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

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Gabrielle Zevin's The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Engages in the Guilty Pleasure of a Bad Book

When my little sister started her menses, she was humiliated that, on the way home from a trip to the drugstore, I was reading her tampon box.  She complained to Mom that I was embarrassing her, and Mom clarified that I was just reading print on page - it's what I do - and that it wouldn't have mattered if it was a tampon box, a cereal box, or the paper that was going to line the cat box, I was going to read it.  Not to humiliate her, but because I was then, am now and probably always will be an indiscriminate reader.  This book is, theoretically, about helping people read discriminately.

What reader hasn't fantasized about opening up a book store?  What could be better than to sit in store all day reading - interrupted only by people coming in to talk about books?  And what better place to do this than in some out of the way vacation spot?  Well, be careful what you wish for.  A.J. Fikry opens ups just such a spot in his wife's hometown.  But he is an outsider.  Not just because this is a small town and he looks foreign, but because he is a reader - someone whose nose is always stuck in a book, and he cares more about books than people - and he has particular tastes in books.  And he is in mourning - and he is mean when he is mourning.

The book deepens, in so far as it does, as Fikry begins to recommend books to people based on who those people are and what kind of book they would like.  I have had the experience, first for myself, of telling a bookstore employee what I was looking for (a wonderful fellow at the Little Professor Bookstore - one of the early chains - turned me onto Roger Zelazny, still my favorite fantasy author), and then for the reluctant son (recently a local bookstore helper in the young adult section was able to help latch his interest in sports books onto a futuristic series involving sports yet to be invented).  This service requires the ability to match our own sensibilities with those of another - to imagine not what our reaction to a book would be - but what their's would be.  It is a wonderful sort of match making - I think you would like this book.  And, when it works, there's almost something mystical about it.  We have gotten both the book and the other person.

Melanie Klein, a psychoanalytic theorist who was keenly attuned to the raw underbelly of human existence, claimed that there is nothing we can do that is more hostile than to give someone a gift.  And recommending that another read a book can certainly be a hostile gift.  They will, if they accept the gift, invest their time, the most precious commodity that they have, in something that you have foisted off on them.  Recently I recommended a book to the reluctant wife.  She likes to read, but she is discriminating.  I recommended Beautiful Ruins, a book that includes a weird mash up of fictional characters and Liz Taylor and Richard Burton - actors that she admires.  It also has a romantic/off beat feel to it and it feels allegorical.  It is incredibly well written.  Like Fikry, it is a quick read.  All these elements lead me to think she would like it, even though many of the books that she likes do not fit this formula.  I was right.  She enjoyed it.  I felt relief that I hadn't burdened her - but also some joy - pride maybe? - that I had picked right.

Booksellers have, it is clear from Fikry, from my own experience, and from an article read long ago, played an important role in helping us get to know what books to read.  And they are a disappearing breed.  A good reviewer can also help us determine what to read or see.  When I lived in New York a million years ago, Janet Maslin's reviews of films allowed me to know whether I would like the film.  Sometimes she would not like it, but could explain the virtues in such a way that I knew it would work for me - other times she would like it, but I knew from her tone that it would not be such a good fit.  This requires the reader to get to know the reviewer.

Fikry gets to know his customers - eventually - at least one or two of them - and he is able to put to work his talent for organizing, for categorizing, for putting a hierarchy to the books that he has read - books that he has read in part based on the recommendations of the publishing house reps who get to know what he is looking - oh, one of the reps becomes an important character in the story - but most importantly he uses his talent to leave a legacy - a poignant legacy as it turns out - to his daughter - a daughter who arrives on his doorstep in what is an intriguing and self consciously described plot twist - a daughter who reawakens his interest in others - and his descriptions of the short stories he recommends to her - pithy and tantalizing rather than descriptive - form the introduction to each chapter.  Fikry is able to marry two loves - short stories and his daughter - through the medium of written descriptions.

Reading the book, then, occurs quickly.  It is like eating candy.  It feels good in the moment, but the characters are two dimensional.  I feel somehow guilty about enjoying this book so much.  I have important reading to be doing.  I am not spending time with the reluctant wife but have my nose stuck, again, in a book, and I'm not going to be a better person for having read it.  But it draws me along.  I resonate with the bookseller.  I want to know what the twists will be.  I'm not surprised by the character who is not who he (or she) appears to be in a deep way, but am, rather amused and a little bemused that I have, indeed, been taken in a beat longer than I need to have been.  I should have seen that coming.  And the central mystery is not all that mysterious and the sadness at the ending is somehow not all that sad - I really haven't gotten to know this character on a deep and emotional level.

What I have done is indulge in a fantasy - a light daydream.  It has been pleasant.  And it has made me think about a few things - like why I blog.  Not just to get page views - which have suddenly soared in the wake of my using a different format that allows readers to sample what I have to offer - but also to leave a legacy - something that my own children may be interested in perusing some day.  Perhaps helping others know that psychoanalysis is not something cold and foreign and distant (though it certainly can be), but also something that is warm, immediate, available and very very human.  That I might serve as a match maker between people I don't know and ideas that, despite my reluctant embrace of them, I love.  There is something of Fikry in me - which is consistent with a central theme of the book.  And I could learn to be discriminating - maybe I am practicing that by writing and preserving my reactions to books, movies and life rather than simply letting it wash by...

Fikry's interest in the rep scuttles her interest in her fiancee.  Why?  He points out that the rep and the fiancee don't have the same interests.  His thesis is that love is essentially narcissistic - we love others who share our interests.  We love others who are like ourselves.  But we also love those who are different - he turns the police chief onto books - and the police chief, in turn, turns others who previously had no interest in reading onto books.  We love not just those who are like ourselves, but we share aspects of ourselves that are unlike others - and they come to embrace something that they otherwise would not have known.  And we want to go there.  We want to explore.  We want to expand.  This book is enjoyable because it is circumscribed.  It tells a small story about a small place and a small band of people.  They are introduced in and the plot is developed in a predictable and very pleasant way.  The author pretends (and she has the luxury of being able to do that because these are, after all, characters) that these people can be understood, can be circumscribed, that there is no mystery here.  And yet, of course, in all things human, there is.  Because the book doesn't address that internally I, as reader, am cast out by it to see what in my life it reflects.  I find the organic, the unknowable, in the margins, not in the center - where the author coyly and artificially tells us there is nothing much to see.  A discriminating reader like Fikry would have little use for this book.  I, a less discriminating one, find it a guilty pleasure - a little like watching a favorite sitcom.  Ironically, given Fikry's cry that we read so that we know we are not alone, I am with the author and presumably other readers, but the space we are inhibiting is, like the sitcom space, comfortable but limited.

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

Post script:  Recently the New York Times magazine  published a piece noting that the number of independent book stores is on the rise again - they were in serious trouble after the big box bookstores and then the online bookstores and books emerged.  This is good news for readers everywhere.  Indeed, the thesis of the article is that while the industries that got art out to us have taken a hit or been reconfigured, this may actually have been in a way that allows us to have more direct contact with artists - and maybe even for more artists to flourish.  See a review that touches on this phenomenon in another medium - music - here.

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Marilynne Robinson’s Lila – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reads About Loneliness

Lila is the third (or maybe fourth) book in the Gilead trilogy.  I’ve not read the others and found this to be a compelling if emotionally difficult read, but certainly not one that is dependent on having read the other books - it stand nicely on its own.  It is an emotionally difficult read because it is so bleak, especially at the beginning where the protagonist is stolen away as a baby from a home where she is not adequately fed, not kept clean, and where she is put outside when she is crying so that she doesn’t disrupt those who are inside.  The woman who steals her is a migrant worker who carries her from place to place with a loose band of people who lead a marginal existence until the dustbowl hits, and then things get really bad.  At some point, her caregiver, Doll, settles into a town for a year so that Lila can learn to read – something that she is drawn to, but doesn’t get much practice with until she steals a bible from a church – but that is getting to the end of the story, which is also the beginning.

This book could be read on many levels and, especially as an analyst, a book that is written from the perspective of having access to Lila’s thoughts raises interesting questions about our ability to know what goes on in the minds of others, especially those that have had such impoverished backgrounds when we who are writing and reading books like this most likely have not.  What Robinson does is to describe a mind that is filled with poorly understood memories that flow into each other in ways that would be confusing if they were being handled by a less masterful writer.  We are propelled through this woman’s experience – both her current experiences and the past, which passes in front of our eyes in a beautiful unfolding of her experience and the intermingling of the two becomes the story that we are forced to create almost on our own because the narration feels so ungrounded by time and place.  We are given hints, our appetite is whet, and then we learn more, but never all that we might have known.  We never, for instance, get a good picture of what this woman looks like.  And that feels consistent with the story being told essentially from her perspective.  She is a woman without mirrors, physical or psychological – a girl and then a woman being moved forward by forces very much beyond her control.

So, there are two questions about her inner world that spring to my mind.  One – despite the fluidity of her memories and the shifting of time that seems consistent with a mind that has never known clocks or calendars, but instead days and nights stretching into seasons, there is a central sense of self – a certainty about who she is – that seems to orient her – to keep her upright – she has a deep keel despite having slipped through pretty shallow water most of her life.  This is supported by the consistent relationship that she and Doll maintained – she felt loved and valued despite not having the same roof – and many times any roof – over her head.  The other is whether she could realistically have the kind of bookish interests that this character has – and here I think we must imagine that a woman very much like the author has been born into a local universe that does not contain books.  And I think if we believe that – and what else could be the case – then this may be a reflection of what could have happened.

I’m sorry for that jag.  You see there are questions about the Romantic vision – one first put forward perhaps by Rousseau – that the natural state of man is one of being at one with nature and that if we were raised by wolves we would be even more human than we can be when we are the products of our citified lives.  Mowgli of the Jungle Tales would be the quintessential example of this.  But could it be that if we were raised by wolves we would simply be primitive – our animalistic selves would predominate?  Doll is not a wolf – but there are a lot of wolves barking at the door – or lack thereof – in Lila’s early world and she knocks around a great deal – but she is, in this book, baptized – not just in the religious sense, but also in the sense of being washed clean, and this is a decidedly mixed experience for her – but I think it exposes her essential goodness – and maybe even her puritan or more to the point Calvinistic goodness.  And are we essentially good or evil?

You see, the beginning and end of this book is that Lila – a wild one if there ever was one – a person who was all but abandoned, was stolen, lived on the run, loves and is at one with nature, but is also a person who, as a woman, became a prostitute to survive when Doll left her, who became a domestic and who was on the way to returning to the wild – leaving St. Louis behind to get back to the nomadic migrant life in Iowa – fatefully stopped at a Calvinist church in a medium sized town in Iowa and fell in love with and married the minister – a man who had been widowed for forty years – a man who was probably thirty or more years older than she – a man who had been as bereft and alone as – well as Lila was once Doll disappeared from her life.

To write that thumbnail sketch of the plot above makes this book sound farfetched, and yet it is not.  Of course it is an intentional allegory.  Lila steals the Bible and retreats to the abandoned farmhouse where she is squatting and she writes out the lines from Ezekiel – a book of the bible that I was not the least familiar with – and the metaphor comes home to her – of a baby that is covered in blood and dirt and that is washed clean by the lord – the baby is Israel – the baby is Lila and the minister is cleansing her – and the baby is you and me – cut off from those around us and hungering to be connected – to be cleansed and brought back into the fold.  And the allegory when put out there by a plodder like myself – seems like an evangelical tract that you would run from, but in the hands of this author the allegory and the plot work – on the personal and the religious level without feeling preachy or forced.  We are happy to both suspend disbelief – or rather to believe – on many levels.  And partly this doesn't feel preachy because it becomes clear that faith is a very complicated thing.

The plot works because the minister is very sensitively portrayed – he gets Lila – her wildness and her skittishness – and, most profoundly, her loneliness.  And he gets that he can be with her without having to force his way in – she will, in her own sweet time, out.  And this relationship - to my ear like the relationship between analyst and patient – unfolds slowly and beautifully.  There is at the center of this story one of the most touching and sweet love stories I have read – and I can’t imagine a more romantic rendezvous than the afternoon of Lila’s baptism. 

But this is not a Romance Novel.  Lila’s baptism comes at a great and terrible cost.  She is separated from the people she has loved – first and foremost from Doll, but from all the unwashed whom she has known and loved.  As she is transformed to the 1%, she leaves behind the 99% that have sustained and loved her.  At one point, I found myself thinking that this is, among all the other things that it is, a reflection on the guilt of privilege – on what it means to be one of the select – whether that is religious or economic or, on the level of the changes that a therapeutic relationship with a lover have wrought, of psychological health – to realize that there is a loneliness of privilege as well as one of poverty. 

This is also not a Romance Novel because of the disparity in the ages between the lead characters.  Lila must face what life will be without the person that she has connected with and we watch as she teeters between preparing to return to her former life and figuring out how to imagine living within the confines of her current one.  It is the minister that makes her citified life bearable.  She has lived in cities before – real cities – but never connected with anyone.  Here she is connected.  Will that connection take?  It seems to be taking, more and more, as the novel progresses, but we don’t actually learn her fate in this novel – perhaps in the others we do – but in this one that question is left hanging nicely in the air.

Robinson has imagined herself into a life and invites us to do the same.  She is also opening up a big part of her experience and of ours – what it means to be alone.  What it means, in the midst of that loneliness to sense the presence of others – whether a maternal figure – a paternal/romantic one – or the presence of God – and to be skittish in the presence of that other.  To fear that who we are cannot be accepted by that other – to fear that being accepted will lead us to lose what we already have.  On this most essential level, the novel works.  It articulates a kind of essential loneliness – one that Sullivan calls prototaxic – the loneliness of awe – of having no words to articulate the experience – but it also articulates the process of learning those words – so that this story could be the story of each of us developing – coming to find the words – to find the story – that best articulates our experience – even if that will cost us dearly it will also allow us to connect with that which is available.  Can we hope for more?

     

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

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Research and Treatment Outcome: The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Continues to Report from the Convention

Psychoanalysis has a long and uneasy relationship with traditional empirical research.  Freud was quite concerned that researchers would not appreciate that the unconscious cannot be observed directly and he privileged the analytic hour as the one and only position from which we can learn about the unconscious and, indeed, the functioning of the human mind.  Taking this position hamstrung psychoanalysis.  It interfered with it joining the mainstream of scientific development that revolutionized so many fields during the twentieth century.  I suppose it is a testament to the psychoanalytic situation and to Freud’s genius that he developed something from it that still has some relevance now, more than one hundred years later.  But we are woefully behind our peers who work from other disciplines, many of which were founded within an empirical tradition, of using research techniques to both a).  Understand how well our patients “objectively” benefit from our work together and b). Understand what is taking place between ourselves and our patients.

This year, a German researcher, Marianne Leuzinger-bohleber, presented the results of research that she has done with others over the course of the past decade or so.  She is working in a country where insurance is still paying for psychoanalysis – and where the insurance companies are, like those here, asking whether longer term more intensive treatment is worth it.  Some interesting results that mollified the insurance companies – who are concerned not just with their own expenditures on treatment but on the productivity of the workforce – including noting that those with treatment had fewer sick days after the treatment than the population as a whole – and that this discrepancy increased across time – so that they had many fewer sick days six years out of treatment than they did when ending treatment and that they were bucking the trend of the comparison population which had an increasing number of sick days as time passed.  They also noted that, when compared with medications and with shorter term treatments, psychoanalysis led to fewer relapses and, as with the result above, increasing measures of health across time.

I should note that in another session, the folks who study infant's attachment to their parents were discussing their speculations about treatment.  They have shown that poor attachment style in infants is related to difficulties as an adult.  They have also shown that poor attachment styles of parents predict difficulties in the attachment of kids.  Finally they have shown that attachment styles of adults improve as a result of therapy.  The step that is left to demonstrate – the study hasn’t been done, but it will be - is that therapy can interrupt the pattern of poor attachment – so that those who were poorly attached who go through a treatment that improves their attachment style will parent children who are less likely to be poorly attached.  Wouldn’t that both make sense and be neat?

So the question gets asked, what is it that causes these changes?  Why does psychoanalysis foster improved functioning?  Psychoanalysts have long written about this subject.  They have posited many factors.  The early analysts suggested that interpretation – particularly what were called mutative interpretations – were what caused the changes.  In essence, they proposed that increased insight caused the changes that we see in treatment.  More recent analysts have argued that what changes is the quality of the relating that the analysand does, and that this is the result of engaging in a deeply satisfying relationship with the analyst.  (This, by the way, has been a tough sell to the old school psychoanalysts who see a relationship cure as temporary and only lasting as long as the therapeutic relationship – but the relational group has demonstrated that something about the relationship with the therapist sticks).  Yet a third group has proposed that the process of freely associating frees the mind up and the patient can approach difficulties with more creative enthusiasm and solve problems with greater ingenuity and verve.

Leuzinger-bohleber and her group did an interesting thing – they measured all three of these qualities before and after treatment, plotted them in a three dimensional space – and looked at how they changed from before treatment to the conclusion of treatment.  The graph, which had empty spheres for the before data points and solid for those after, looked like two clouds – one dense and compact, centered around poor insight, poor relationships, and little creativity at the beginning of treatment and a much bigger, but also more divergent cloud up, to the right and in back of the beginning of treatment that were the bubbles post treatment.  Some people improved on one dimension, some on two, and some on all three.  A few did not improve, but the majority did (enough for the insurance guys to be impressed), but the intriguing thing is that improvements look different in different people.  Overall there is a shift in the cloud, but on an individual level, some people had much more insight, though their relationships didn’t change much; others were much more creative, but not necessarily significantly more insightful – a myriad of configurations that described the arcs of particular treatments. 

One size does not fit all.  What patients walk away with differs.  When we measure symptoms, there is a reduction – but this may be occurring for different reasons with different people.  One of us may feel less stuck because we finally get how it is that we have ended up at this particular point in our lives.  We may not change things much, but we may derive comfort from knowing – coming to peace as it were – with who we are and how we got here.  Others may figure out a way out of a complicated and convoluted trap – moving away from situations that previously baffled them – and these situations may be external, internal, or some combination.  Yet others may feel more connected with others – perhaps as a result of coming to trust a particular person they may be more willing to risk trusting others in the world.  For most of the people in the study, there was at least some of each of these elements – but there may have been a strong suit among the three – though many seemed to move significantly positively on all three dimensions.

So then the question becomes, what happens that these changes are coming about.  Traditionally the theorizing and the research have focused on what the therapist does, what the patient’s characteristics are, or on the quality of the relationship between the therapist and the patient.  In the discussion within this group, an idea emerged that we may have overly focused on the activity of the therapist.  We, as analysts, are constantly thinking about our technique.  Another group in the discussion presented data that suggested that even when an analysis is going poorly, the analyst may still be doing “good” technique as we measure if formally.  What might matter most – and what might be most mysterious and difficult to assess and to effect is what is going on in the patient.  What is the patient doing in the treatment?  Wouldn’t this be the best predictor of a good outcome?  And what does analysis allow?  It allows space for the patient to work – a place for the patient, in the presence of a reasonable other, to explore.  Perhaps our emphasis on what we are doing is partly a means of helping us stay within bounds – to help prevent us from interfering with a healing process that the patient “knows” how to engage in.

This series of thoughts, which draws on the conversation in the research group but also begins to move away from it, mirrors parts of the conversation with the attachment folks.  The attachment folks were commenting on how much care it took to provide a solid attachment foundation.  They were noting that it was kind of miraculous that the human species is doing as well as it is.  In fact, they noted, if positive attachments in infants to their caregivers were necessary to the survival of the species, we would be extinct.  So how do we pull ourselves up by our bootstraps?  Despite not having gotten all that we need, we are frequently able to provide for other’s needs.  Or, more precisely, others are able to make use of our well-intentioned but not perfect efforts to do what they need to do – to get better.  Yes, the better able to be attuned, to be present, to sense what is just outside of awareness and to offer that at a moment when it can expand awareness we are able to do and be the more we can help this process along, but we might want to focus some of our efforts on the healing desires and abilities of the people with whom we work – to think, as Jonathan Lear alluded to in his plenary address, which I have written about in another blog, not just about what is wrong with our patients and their situation, but to help recognize what might be right, and what might help them make it righter.

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

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A Delicate Balance and Jonathan Lear – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst goes to the Annual Psychoanalytic Convention

The American Psychoanalytic Association holds its annual convention every year in New York City.  This is an opportunity to hear and talk with the finest analysts in America, and many others from Europe, Asia, South America and Africa.  It is also a chance to spend some time with the reluctant wife in the Big Apple.  This year we took a bit of a busman’s holiday and saw Edward Albee’s play “A Delicate Balance” with Glenn Close, John Lithgow, Lindsay Duncan, Bob Balaban, Clare Higgins, and Martha Plimpton, a tight play about three days in the life of a family that is balanced on the edge of madness with the mother, played by Glenn Close, characterizing herself as the fulcrum.  It is a play that was first performed in 1966 – a moment that was itself a fulcrum.  On the one side was a way of doing things the way they had been done – well, not for all that long, but seemingly forever.  It was a kind of Golden Age of the ruling class of the United States.  We had won the war, we were doing things our way and things were going swimmingly – especially economically.  But, as this play and many other works of art, the anti-war movement, and the coming wave of the summer of love and a culture of youth that didn’t trust anyone over 30 was about to expose, there was foment underneath the calm surface.

The Playbill proposed that this play took place “now”, but it so apparently did not.  Set in a neighborhood not unlike the one I live in, the meals were prepared by an unseen “them” – presumably the help who, in those days but certainly not in mine, likely lived on the third floor and did the cooking and cleaning.  Also the brutality of the interactions between the players – brutal as it was – was quite tame by today’s standards.  There was a lot thicker veneer of civilization than in more contemporary plays about dysfunctional families – plays like August: Osage County.  And this, I think, put a greater pressure on the actors to portray the madness boiling just below the surface – the outrageousness of their experience had to be hinted at rather than being paraded across the stage in all its glory – and, not to disparage the great actors that were on the stage, I felt that they failed to create the kind of tragic tension that a play of this sort calls for.

John Lithgow, in particular, played a man who has a hard time saying no.  He likes to have people near him, but he doesn’t really want to be intimately engaged with them.  Perhaps because he fears that they will exploit him, or perhaps because he doesn’t like them, he just likes them to be at arm’s distance.  Well, when you are living in a house with a demanding, prima donna wife and her sister, a mean drunk (who functions as the Greek chorus in this play) and your daughter is about to come home in preparation for leaving husband number four, but before she gets there the neighbors, your best friends in the world, bland people, actually,  decide to come stay with you because they are frightened in their home – for no particular reason – there is a lot of reason to be uncomfortable.  But Mr. Lithgow remains remarkably serene through all of this – as if his ability to ward off the presence of others were so thick that he could take it all in stride – until he can’t, and then he seems to be bemused before becoming distracted and somewhat anxious.  But when the head gaskets blow – there isn’t enough grit – there isn’t enough discomfort under the bland exterior – to make that explosion believable.  We just aren’t as horrified as he is – or should be – at what flies to the surface.

And maybe this is a play, then, about our current state.  We are so assaulted by the stuff of life – whether it is the vaginal crème commercial for post-menopausal women we watched together as a family tonight, or the crude humor – with absolutely no innuendo – that the reluctant step-daughter takes in as her constant fare these days from stand-up comics on comedy central, or the horror of terrorism in its current iteration that we need to confront and deal with and don’t because we are, after all, comfortable.  We have built a huge insulating wall around ourselves that allows us to handle the assaults around us and to focus on what sporting exploit has occurred this week – to marvel at the latest sports score (reluctant son) or newest fashion or nail polish exploit (the other reluctant stepdaughter’s current obsession) and just to stay focused on the details of our lives while the world churns around us.

Jonathan Lear – a philosopher and psychoanalyst – gave the plenary address at the convention.  He proposed that Freud’s theory of mind is strongly and deeply rooted in the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle.  He noted that Plutarch described a Greek who offered a “talking cure”, had some success with it, and then closed up shop to become an orator.  Lear proposed that what Freud came up with – the impossible command to freely associate – was at the center of finally exposing the tensions that the Greeks first sensed.  But then he took a bit of a left turn.  He proposed that we analysts have spent too much time focusing on the bile that lies underneath the surface; that we should instead be using our craft to help our patients live lives of engagement – enjoying their relationships with family members and their engagement in the tasks of living.

Lear went on to propose a distinction between moral functioning and ethical functioning – moral functioning, he proposed, involves invoking rules of law.  Ethical functioning, by contrast, is something that emerges spontaneously out of connected living.  It is based on a sense of empathy with others and having a sense of shared goals and interests and working together to achieve them.  In A Delicate Balance, each of the characters seemed focused on their own needs.  Despite her protest that she was the selfless one who put her husband’s wishes into action, Glenn Close’s character was as self- interested as the others – pretending to be a loving wife and mother, but actually furious at the ways tending to other’s needs interfered with her ability to meet her own needs and, on another level, how everyone else’s self-indulgence sucked up oxygen that would, in a perfect world, fuel her flame so that it would shine all the brighter.

Lithgow’s character, then, contains our hope – the hope that he, who is comfortable, can tolerate  - can connect with others.  Close’s character hints that he can’t.  That he doesn’t welcome his daughter home or talk to the daughter's husbands before she divorces them.  She ridicules him, but she ridicules everyone and we have the hope that he can be more.  And here the analysts have another comment.  A discussion group with the attachment specialists indicates that at the Anna Freud Institute in London, the analysts are required, before they can start classes, to spend a year observing infants.  Why?  Partially to have a better sense of where we come from – but partially because observing infants requires us to confront raw emotions – pain, frustration, and also joy – and, because we are sympathetic humans, to experience those feelings ourselves.  This, the theory goes, better prepares us to be analysts – to be comfortable being present to the powerful feelings of our patients and the powerful feelings that are stirred in ourselves by them.

Well, John Lithgow’s character has never spent time with infants.  He is not connected with others, but pretends to be – and, I think – though I didn’t feel it from the stage – he deeply wants to be connected – to be comfortable not just at a distance, but actually while in contact with others, but he can’t tolerate it.  The best he can do is to be comfortable from a distance and, in the climax moment, he realizes and articulates this – and, realizing his limitations, he perhaps for the first time, feels deeply and powerfully – but what he feels so powerfully is not his capacities, but his limitations - and we should be feeling them with him.  That’s what we go to the theater for.  But this moment was not delivered, at least in my gut – which felt apart from, rather than within – observing rather than experiencing – seeing a shallow character – but just the shallow character, not the depth of the deeply caring man beneath it – a character careening from thought to thought – but not one exploring the taught line between what we believe ourselves to be and who we also are – the experience that the tool of free association allows us, at its best, to explore – and so it felt, not like theater, but like television – something to watch and be entertained by, but not something that deeply moves us.  While his character has never observed infants – or cared for them – we count on Lithgow to have done that.  And for this play, for this part, on this night, he did not access that part of himself – or more precisely, that part of me.

Morally, then, this play delivered.  I was present – in a very privileged way – to the work of six actors – stars – people that I have seen on the big screen and the small.  And they delivered.  They were working.  They brought a play to life.  I got my money’s worth.  But there was an ethical failure.  These people did not deliver on what I really wanted – a sense of connection – not with them as stars – as people to see, to have seen, to be able to brag about seeing – but people who connected with me not as a star but as a person – people who made me feel in my gut what I know to be there – and count on them to help me access – something about my true self – including its limitations, and the terrible pain that I don’t connect with others in the ways that I would like to.  This awful, horrible realization – one that I am all too comfortable not feeling so much of the time – is what I would have had us teeter towards – it is what would have brought us together, not as star and admirer, but as fellow humans sharing what it is like to be human. 

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