In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex – Nathaniel Philbrick teaches the Reluctant Psychoanalyst about the Unconscious Mind

Melville’s Moby Dick is a book I have not read.  It was one that used to be on the curriculum of my undergraduate college, but it was replaced by Melville’s Bartelby the Scrivener – a much more modest book.  Moby Dick is about the furious pursuit of a White Whale who has turned the Whaling world on its head by attacking one of the whaling ships.  It is one of those Big Books – meaning not just that it is a great book, but that it is really long.  I have never taken the time to plow through it.  This more modest book by Nathaniel Philbrick tells the story that Melville used as the basis for his tale of Captain Ahab’s revenge- but the captain of the Essex, George Pollard, sought not revenge, but survival, both in the immediate aftermath of his boat being sunk by the whale – in a harrowing journey with his crew across the open sea – and then after his next commission also sunk, this time on a reef, when he was able to return home much more quickly, but could only get work as a night watchman.

This is a tale that is told on many levels.  I will enumerate some of them.  This book is about to be released as a film and I am curious about which themes will emerge in the movie.  I think the first theme is a morality play.  The Essex was an old boat at the time of the final voyage in 1820.  It was also part of a fleet of boats sailing out of Nantucket that had decimated the sperm whale population in the Atlantic.  Though, as the author points out, the number of whales taken in any given year was not nearly as high as at the height of the factory ship whaling era in the 1960s, these whales that produced oil for lubrication and lighting in the US and Europe before petroleum was used were harvested at a rate that led the whalers to sail further and further from home.  In 1820, the prime hunting grounds were about 3,000 miles off the west coast of South America in an area the authors refers to as the heart of the ocean because it is as far from land as you can get anywhere in the world.

To get to this spot, the Essex made a stop at the Galapagos Islands – the islands made famous by Darwin’s stopping there to observe species not seen elsewhere – and by the tortoises named after the islands.  The crew rounded up tortoises to throw onto the ship where they would live on deck – unfed – slowly dying of dehydration and starvation until the crew decided to kill and eat them.  As if this weren’t cruel enough, before reboarding the ship, one of the crew, as a stunt, set fire to some of the vegetation – the fire spread and wiped out all of the flora on the island and the turtles that didn’t die on shipboard starved to death on land.

So a modern audience was, I think, at least partly cheering when a large whale – one who was not in the group being pursued by the Essex’s whaleboats – found the Essex manned by a skeleton crew – took a look at it and rammed it – not once but twice – the second time apparently with the premeditated intent of harming it.  The hunted became the hunter and the old, worm eaten keel was stoved in and the ship sank – so that when the crew returned in three whale boats from hunting, they were suddenly in survival mode, gathering up the tortoises to keep in the three whaleboats (open rowboats to which they lashed make shift masts) as they rowed and sailed almost ninety days and 2,500 miles to be rescued only after they had been subjected to the starvation and dehydration they had inflicted on the tortoises.  Further, they had been reduced to eating their shipmates who died of natural causes or drew lots to be killed so that some could survive and, in one of the two boats that made it, the men were rescued huddled in the bottom of their boat, out of their minds, clinging to the bones of their shipmates sucking the last marrow out of the bones.

Brutal.  And, at least to me, this tale is a transparent attempt to clarify what the consequences will be to us of not respecting Mother Nature, even though that is never stated directly.  Instead,the tone of the book is dry and dispassionate – clinical.  We are not preached at.  Instead we are told in excruciating detail what we know scientifically about the process of dehydration and the process of starvation; edifying in a macabre sort of way.  And it is left to us to realize that this is a cautionary tale about us – overfishing, thinking that we can do what we want and there will be no consequences - but there will be, including the possibility that we will become as primitive as these men did.

This is also a story about the miserable lives the whalers led shipboard.  While there were great riches to be had – in the 1820s when the rest of the world was in a deep depression, Nantucketeers were quite wealthy, providing a universally needed supply - it was really tough work to get this supply.  The killing of whales and then the rendering of their bodies for oil was physically demanding – it stank in a slimy penetrating way that got under the skin and ruined the men’s clothes.  The food was marginal and the dangers of the sea were constant.  They used the skin of the whales to burn an open fire on the ship deck to boil the oil out of the blubber and store it in barrels.  Even without the toil, the men were away from their families for years at a time – to return to find children they had never known now two years old and stay with them for a few months before leaving again.  

Owen Chase

This is also a story about leadership.  I can't find a picture of Captain George Pollard.  His style – a conciliatory one – one in which he takes other’s opinions into account – turns out to be problematic.  He takes the his first mate’s advice, Owen Chase (pictured above) about heading to South America instead of using the trade winds to go to Tahiti.  A mistake, as it turned out, that cost the lives of most of the crew.  The first mate’s leadership style (he ended up captain of the second whaling boat) is one the author preferred.  This man was a “fishy” leader – a complement in the whaling industry – and one intended to articulate that he was demanding and autocratic.  And this style of leadership was a better one when the boats needed to be conserving resources.  The first mate did not stick with his fishy character, but was more flexible; he became more compassionate when the provisions had nearly run out and the men needed not discipline but a sense of hope and support.

The captain’s professional afterlife turned out to be a mess after his second shipwreck.  The first mate went on to become a successful whaling captain; though, from the end of the voyage to the end of his life he was hoarding food and he ended up being driven mad by intense headaches.  The captain’s life – as unsuccessful as it may have been materially and professionally – was apparently a happy one.  One reason he survived was the he was short and rotund, so he had more body fat going into the ordeal, which helped him survive it.  As an old man, he was a jovial, portly man who looked after the town in his job as night watchman.  Is this another morality tale?  If so, it is a bit harder to figure out who the good guy and who the bad guy is – who should we emulate?

This is also a story about classism and racism.  The men who died first were African American.  All the men who survived came from Nantucket and were white.  The author acknowledges that there are multiple factors that led to this outcome, but he emphasizes the biological – the ways in which the diets of the lower class and black sailors were poorer and thus they had less body fat going into the ordeal.  He also acknowledges that this was a difficult part of the story for the Quaker community of Nantucket to grapple with.  Their abolitionist stance was, at heart, an anti- discriminatory one, yet the pecking order of the whaling ships rigidly supported a class system.  Again, is this a cautionary tale?  Certainly we are anti-discriminatory and we sustain a classist society that is in conflict with that position.

But I think that, at its center, this is a story of the sea.  Or, I should say, another story of the sea.  I have reviewed many of them in the short time I have been blogging.  It bears a resemblance to The Life of Pi – both involve shipwrecks and cannibalism – and to the book A Pearl in the Storm about the first woman to row across the Atlantic – and there is a certain heroism in both.  I also reviewed a book written by an African American about a weird science fiction type remnant of the whaling ships written about by Edgar Allen Poe in the story Pym.  I am surprised by how many others there are.  One could, in the style of the author of this book, note that more than half of the world’s population lives within 100 miles or so of an ocean – that we have spread by sailing the seas – and that our inland cities – like the one I live in – are mostly situated on waterways.  And we could leave it at that – water was the dominant mode of transportation.  It is still a very important one – think of container ships – and much of our food comes from the sea.  And we have to live on the sea in order to transport our stuff and to reap its bounty.

But, as a psychoanalyst, I think the pull of the ocean - the thing that pulls us into its heart - is much more primal than that.  I have to admit to a deep and powerful fear of water.  Not because I’m incompetent on the water – I lived near the ocean as a child and learned to sail, canoe and row.  I swam competitively for years – and it was there that I first noticed the fear.  In practices we would swim to the point of exhaustion and then swim some more.  I would find myself swimming in water that I could easily stop and stand in but I feared that I could not make it to the end of the pool – that I would drown before I got there.  More recently, I was swimming across a lake at some friends’ cottage when we were visiting them on vacation and I realized that if I had a heart attack I would drown before I could swim to either side.  Ironically I was not as fearful as when I had been in the pool where I could stand up, this was more of an intellectual realization than a gut fear, but it was very real and hard to shake.

While Freud maintained that there were no universal symbols in dreams – we need to follow the associations of each individual to find out what this particular thing means to this particular person – there are some that are nearly universal. So he thought that a house so frequently symbolized the self that it makes sense to consider that as a very likely meaning in any given dream.  Similarly, I think that water is often used by the dream machinery to symbolize the unconscious.  If we think about the threads of this tale from that perspective, we can begin to see how the various themes might be related.  We don’t all go to sea – nor, fortunately, do we become shipwrecked.  We don’t all engage in cannibalism, nor do we become so dehydrated that there is a very real likelihood of death despite being surrounded by water.  But we all do traverse a life that in some way seems very ordered and productive – we live in the conscious parts of our mind that, like the whaling ship, has compartments and crew that take care of various tasks.  We also sail this ship across a surface – a part of one’s self that has depth, but a depth that we can barely see into.  And we profit from some of the spoils that emerge from it – though fear becoming lost in it, drowning in our own fantasies about how the world is constructed.

Moby Dick, that book that I have not read, becomes a tale, both of revenge against an external agent, but against that part of ourselves that would destroy us.  It is the tale of a fishy man who fights against nature, as if that were possible – either on the actual sea or in the theater of the mind – where our baser selves – our primitive, needy and demanding selves threaten to sink us at any time – not least because we are convinced that the conscious self is at war with us and will plunder what we have – will reap it and in the process tear something valuable from us.  We need to keep our boats afloat – we need to stay above the waters else we will perish – so we struggle against the sea – in the outer world, maintaining a class system, even though the lower classes, whether animal or human may revolt against us, and, in the inner world against nightmare visions of ourselves – distorted, awful visions from which we wake, sweating, in the night – relieved that it was just a dream, but fearful that the dream portrays something true about us.

So it is ironic, I think, that this dry book will become a movie.  I’m remembering a book that I read recently but did not post about, Beautiful Ruins, and a central plot component was that a character was recruited to pitch a movie to the Hollywood producers about the Donner party – the settlers that got caught in a mountain pass in winter and had to resort to cannibalism to survive.  The pitching of this movie, despite the earnestness of the man pitching it, was guaranteed to fail.  It was about cannibalism and no one would go to see a movie about that!  This is a book with layer after layer of grime and filth and fetid stuff, and then, at its center, cannibals: eat or be eaten: seemingly the law of nature.

My last post, on August: Osage County, looked at the way that something that played well in the theater did not translate to the screen.  The Harry Potter Books made perhaps the best paper to screen transition – it was almost like a transliteration.  This book, because of the clinical remove, allows us to look closely at things that are difficult to see – and smell and touch.  We don’t recoil from them because we have created them.  The author gives us words, but our images are only as gruesome as we can tolerate.  On the screen, we may be forced to look away (in a dream, we wake up).  Or we may become numbed to what is portrayed before us (we remember chaotic dreams only vaguely on awakening).  It is also the case that the themes pulled out here are pulled out – we are not hit over the head with them.  Will they come through on the screen?  Will the director read this text in the same ways that we do?  

The book resolves, more or less, by looking at the reception these men received when they went home.  The author’s research has led him to conclude that the townspeople were generally accepting of the returners.  The returners, for their part, seemed to maintain a healthy reverence for the intensity of what they had experienced.  The captain seemed to, more or less, be able to come to grips with being the person who had survived a harrowing journey.  The first mate was not as competent at doing that.  When we come in contact with others, if they have an understanding of just how primitive life can be – especially when our unconscious rears up and attacks us, and we learn how lost we can become in the wake of such an attack, others who have lived at sea are not too quick to judge.  It is hard to be a seafarer – or a warrior – or even to survive in the comfort of a middle class lifestyle that is supported by labor (physical and psychological) that, if we allow ourselves to be aware of it in its raw form, can sicken us.  

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August: Osage County – The Play’s the Thing

August: Osage County – the movie – was a play first.  The reluctant wife and I went to see it on Broadway five or six years ago.  It was a very odd experience.  It was a hot play, but I think we might have gotten half price tickets – or maybe just the cheapest seats – they were in the very back row of the balcony a million miles from the stage.  The weirdness started, though, in the lobby.  There was a buzz in the place.  People were selling T-shirts with August: Osage County emblazoned across them.  It was like being at a rock concert.  Sometimes there is this kind of atmosphere on Broadway, but in my experience it is usually at a musical.  And this was a play.  And a heavy play at that.  Weird. (Recently we went to see Hamilton and the experience was like that, but on steroids).

So, we are in the back of this big theater – I can’t remember if there was a curtain, but the stage was dominated by a huge three story house that opened up to the theater – and that had – at least in my memory – space for a truck to drive up beside it.  Now, my memory is notoriously bad for details and it has been a long time since the play – so I remember at best bits and pieces of what took place – but I remember the feeling.  It was like watching an operatic tragedy.  Every time you thought the family situation couldn’t get worse, it did.  Much more so.  But what was weird was the reaction of the audience.  With each new wave of tragic family mess – the audience began to laugh.  I felt discomforted by it.  These were terribly destructive things that were being described and enacted.  Drugs and alcohol and vicious comments paraded across the stage.  People tore into each other.  People killed themselves.  And others, who could have prevented it didn’t.  And these people clearly loved each other and were bent on destroying each other….

And we laughed.  It took me a while to join in.  I felt guilty.  After all, laughing at other’s misfortunes is not something a psychoanalyst, reluctant or not, should do – but laugh I did.  At first I laughed timidly, but then with force – not at the characters, but at the situation, which was tragic – powerfully so.  People who loved each other were cruel to each other.  And it felt increasingly cathartic to laugh.  To cry would have felt – I don’t know – disempowering?  I’m not sure.  The mother of the family – the woman who seemed to be the primary source of all this terrible delicious unbearable grief seemed, at least in my memory, to simply be a force of nature – releasing a monsoon, a tempest of bad juju on those around her.  And there was a terrible understanding that all of these parts, all of this grief, all of this bad, bad feeling hung together like a puzzle – each piece connected to every other and, as in opera, there was a terrible beauty to the symmetry of it all – a terrible, hilarious beauty to the symmetry.

So when the film was released, I was interested in going to see it: but it was widely panned.  Meryl Streep – and Julia Roberts – between them seemed to have destroyed this movie.  What was light and buoyant on the stage became overbearing on the screen.  So, I stayed away.  Why watch something that I had liked be destroyed?  But then it came up on the Netflix recommendations and I thought, “What the heck.  I wonder what this thing that I now barely remember – I wonder what happened when it migrated from stage to screen.”  So I pushed the button and a terrible (in the best sense of that word), mean spirited harpy appeared on the screen.  Meryl Streep portrayed a woman who was just hell on wheels.  She would have run circles around my somewhat crazy feisty grandmother – run circles around her and put her in a meat grinder.  She just veered from one bad moment to the next.  And yet I don’t think that it was Streep’s performance that was at fault (see a critical essay about a performance of hers on Broadway in A Delicate Balance here – I’m not always taken with her).  I think it was the change in media that doomed the movie.

August: Osage County is set in Oklahoma.  I don’t remember this to be the case, but in the Broadway version I might have been concerned that the sophisticated New Yorkers were simply laughing at those Okies from the sticks.  I assume the two were closely related – the screenplay was written by the playwright, but, with a few minor exceptions, the movie did not help me remember the play.  They felt more like distant cousins than identical or even fraternal twins.  But certainly both were set in Oklahoma.  And certainly the Meryl Streep character referred to the woman her husband hired to look after her while she was treated for mouth cancer as an “injun” in both renditions – but it felt harsh on the screen – anachronistic and just mean – while on stage I can imagine that it felt curious and odd – like watching something on the street. 

One time my friend, The Wired Hermit, came to town and went shopping with us at a local grocery store in a rough part of town.  He is a psychologist as well as a hermit, so when we warned him that he might see or hear things that he wasn’t used to, he reassured us that he would be fine.  Well, as if on cue, we went into the grocery store and saw a child begging his mother for a toy or a piece of candy.  The mother yelled at him, “What do you think?  I sh*t money?”  The wired hermit said, “Oh, I see what you mean.”  And we went on with our shopping.

The experience was of watching something from afar.  It was appalling, and I felt upset – especially for the child, but only momentarily.  The swirl of shopping took us onto other things.  That said, these many years later, it is remembered.  And I could imagine myself as that child if I tried, but that is not the first level of contact – the first level is more distant.  I think the way the New Yorkers and I experienced the play – as something alive and present, but also distant (OK, everybody else at the play was sitting closer than we, but you know what I mean).  On the screen – even our relatively small screen – Meryl Streep was right there – bigger than life.  I could see each line on her baggy face – and she wasn’t someone I was driving by – but someone who was present – omnipresent – oppressively present – overwhelming in the way that poor child (I’m imagining) must have experienced his mother – not as someone who can be left – but as someone who is itching for a fight – not just with her family, but with me.  The tension in the room does not have the quality that we analysts refer to as an “as if” quality – it was not like while also being unlike unpleasant moments in my interactions with my grandmother – it was godawful.

A candidate (student) at our psychoanalytic institute graduated on Friday.  She is what we call a “research candidate”, meaning that she is not a clinician, but an academic who studies texts and films and videos and writes about them from a psychoanalytic perspective, and she decided to join us to learn more about contemporary psychoanalytic practice – and authors (The academy tends to rely on the tried and true golden oldies like Freud and Winnicott as their source material for theories about human functioning rather than referencing contemporary clinically based psychoanalytic writing).  Her particular interests include the phenomenon of reality TV.  As we discussed this, we also talked about the ways that we connect with movie (and reality) stars.  It seems that their lives – and our gossip about them – connect us.  We live in a small community – almost with them.  When my stepdaughters talk about them, it is as if they are close friends and neighbors.  One of them might say, “Oh, I didn’t know Rhianna was dating Beauregard,” as if she should know that, as if Rhianna should have told her, for goodness sake.  Of course my son and I regularly talk about sports players as if we knew them, too.  

So does the large and small screen makes these people real to us in ways that they aren’t on stage?  Well, I think we first need to consider the importance of actors.  Because they are human, because they are human beings, I think that they stitch together the characters that they play – they fill in the gaps – gaps that are apparent in a character, for instance in a cartoon – even one as well done as the recent Inside Out  – that is explicitly looking at character.  We don’t see the nuances, the reactions that – though perhaps coached by a director, and practiced in schools - also come from the recesses of a particular individual’s mind – a mind that is then mediated by the particular muscles of the face and body that this person uses not just to portray others, but to live their own lives – to inhabit themselves.  And we thus see both a version of the character and a version of the person who is portraying the character – some mixture of the two - that has a depth - a three dimensional quality that no character can have.

When Stephen King was run over on a Maine road by a man driving a pickup truck who was not watching the road because he was reaching behind the seat to get a beer out of the cooler and to swat his dog who was howling out the back window, a reporter on NPR asked him whether the driver was like a character in one of his books.  Stephen King disagreed strongly, stating that any person is infinitely more complex than any character that he could create.  And I think that actors make characters come to life – as do we, when we read a good novel by a gifted who writer who both hints at the character, but also leaves us room to animate him or her with our own memories, but also projections from our own psyche.

I think that August: Osage County on stage left us enough room to be able to distance ourselves from the characters – to objectify them in ways that are similar to the ways the we objectify injuns and Okies – there but for the grace of God go I – and allowed us to have ample distance from both our projections and identifications with them so that there could be an interplay between our conscious emotional experience and our unconscious one – so that we could laugh and not know that we were laughing at the ways that this connected with our own lived experience, but to experience the genuine emotion – the cathartic emotion – from that experience and to translate it, not into tears, but into laughter – an affect that might be even more cleansing than crying.  We left the theater feeling unburdened, not weighted down.

On the screen, similar material had the opposite effect.  Instead of a character at some distance, like the woman in the grocery store, Meryl Streep was this awful woman who had a history that led her to be awful, but also a person who, regardless of our sympathy for her plight, was just plain mean and the “as if” quality of the interaction collapsed.  I don’t want to generalize yet about this.  I think it relates to many things, including Telephone Treatment, and our tendency to isolate ourselves with various screens (including, of course, the one you are looking at now).  It is certainly the case that seeing things on screens can also numb us or distance us from the plight of many, as well as make them real.  What makes one thing happen in one instance versus another – why does August: Osage County have a tragi-comic impact on stage – or an opera fail to transfer to the screen for reasons related to the type of observing you are doing, and, something I haven’t talked about here, being in contact with an audience that is sharing the experience with you – whether a sporting event seen on the screen, with all its close ups – loses something essential (the reluctant son and I saw Lebron play in person - and he is much more fluid, much less muscular, than on the small screen), despite the fact that college and professional sports are having an increasingly difficult time selling tickets – and whether online learning (talked about in MOOCS and SMOCS) is the equivalent of the in person experience – these are big and important questions that we should be working to better understand.

Live theater is a scary thing.  It hangs in the air, alive with possibility.  I sometimes fear that I will cry out at a performance - something that we all get to do at the end of a really good performance, or at the end of a really good play in a sporting event - or to distract the other team when they are preparing to do something critical.  There is something deeply human, deeply satisfying about being in the presence of an artist performing - and something deeply satisfying about being that artist -whether one is talking with one's analyst or analysand, or with an audience of one or ten thousand.  There is an opportunity to create something as tenuous and momentary as a laugh or as lasting as the memory of a mother berating her child, or Martin Luther King's I have a Dream speech - a speech that was, so I'm told, at least partly extemporaneous.  How do we master the fear that we will cry out - or choke - to have nothing of value to say?  How do we keep our wits about us and articulate something that is meaningful?  This is worth knowing.  And it is worth teaching to our children - so that they can touch each other in the most intimate way imaginable - with each other's minds.


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Katherine Faw Norris' Young God - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Goes Primitive

There was a period of time after the reluctant son was born when I could not watch much TV.  Seeing someone die would tear me up.  This wasn't just some actor pretending to die - nor was it some person irrelevant to the story who needed to die so that things could move along.  This was someone's son or daughter who had died and they were not going to be able to recover from it.  David Lindsay-Abaire, who wrote the play Rabbit Hole about a couple who lost their child, gets this.  In talking about writing the play, he said that he remembers being a writing student at Juilliard and his teacher telling him to write about what terrified him.  He remembers thinking, "I got nothing."  Then he had a child.  And he said, "Oh, so this is what she was talking about."

Don't read this book if you or your spouse have recently had a child.  Or have adopted a child.  Or if you are attached to a child.  Especially a thirteen year old child who might, in some way, remind you of the hero of this book - the Young God, Nikki.  This girl has grown up seven social rungs below white trash.  In the opening scene, after Nikki has successfully made the jump, her mother goes off the wrong side of a 50 or 60 or who knows how many feet high waterfall leap  into a river - which kills her - and Nikki flees the scene with her mother's boyfriend so that the police won't pick her up for being truant or return her to the group home she has run away from.  The boyfriend takes her home and, because he "wants to stick his dick in her", has sex with her.  And then she steals his car to go find her daddy who might be out of prison.  Only to be disappointed by him when she finds him because he is no longer the biggest and best drug dealer in the county.

OK, I've probably given away too much of the plot - and my summary may be wrong because it hangs together and fills in details that are, at best, hinted at in the book.  Instead of telling a story, Norris careens from describing one scene to the next.  And, though I think she offers an homage to J.D. Salinger on about the third page when Nikki states the river is witch-tit freezing (Holden Caufield in Catcher in the Rye is the only other person I have heard in life or in literature state that it is as "cold as a witch's tit"); this is not a schizophrenic break of a privileged kid, nor is it the existential crisis of well read, intelligent, upper west side Franny Glass, nor is it wrapped in literary confection.

Norris is though, I think, reaching for literary greatness.  Her style is more like Hemingway than Caufield, because it is brutal and spare, but I think she is trying to capture the psychology of her subject - to help the reader know what it is like to be Nikki, just as Salinger let us know what it is like to be Holden - though I think even more so Franny.  She does this, as Salinger did, not by writing in the first person, but by writing in a style that reflects the functioning of the hero.  In this case, the world is immediate -things are described simply and clearly - the visual images are bright, but there are smells and feelings - itchings - as well.  Stuff is spatially oriented.  Temporally, things jump from one moment to the next - especially as drugs enter the picture and a scene stops when consciousness does.

Nikki's character is as spare as the style of the writing.  And how complex could she be?  She has been trying to survive in a world that is not built to provide the care and attachment that builds a complex, Salinger-like character.  Instead she is curious and driven - she wants to be on top - not to be a victim of circumstance.  She wants to be a player, not the one played.

In this, Norris comes close to making the mistake that I think Stieg Larsson makes in his Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series.  There, Steig, a man, characterizes trauma as an organizing rather than a disorganizing factor in the life of his heroine.  As I read it, this is a male fantasy of being able to attack a woman - to harm her - without hurting her.  Instead, she benefits - honing her anger into the ability to achieve revenge.  And this myth apparently plays well with the women who, I assume, are the primary consumers of it.  They like to identify with the heroine who is impervious to - or at least makes use of the slings and arrows of the powerful other and ultimately is able to bring him down.

Nikki is not unscathed (nor, to be fair, is the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo).  And the quality of the damage is portrayed as much in the dissociative quality of the chapters - representative, I think, of the state of Nikki's mind - not in a description of her thoughts.  What we know is that she is powerfully curious and ambitious.  What might be missing is a sense of attachment - or a longing for that and using the cruelty of others as a masochistic substitute for the desired connection.  And this creates the experience of the psychopath - the antisocial personality that is dispassionately disconnected from those around him or her - seeing others - using them - as a means to an end.  She is also thirteen.  How psychopathic and how in the moment is she?  How self aware?

I was struck, in the middle of reading this book, at just how dependent Nikki is on a world that is completely foreign to her for her to get along.  She needs not just the cars that she is stealing and learning to drive - and the guns which she learns to clean and load and fire (both the result of highly sophisticated engineering and manufacturing knowledge)- not just the ax that she uses in various ways and the lessons about how to dispose of a body so it won't be traced, she needs the highways and the trucks that carry the heroin that she will sell - the hotel owners who keep open the run down motel 7s that serve as brothels.  She needs a world she neither cares about nor understands, but she doesn't sweat that (Of course, again, to be fair, we take these things for granted too, certainly all thirteen year olds do, but we who are out here are a bit curious about or knowledgeable of them.  Nikki isn't).  She takes what emerges.  Learns what she needs to survive, and uses it to create a space where she can thrive.  Or come as close to that as her circumstances will allow.  And she gets that this is a very precarious world and she needs to be vigilant in it.  How long will she make it?  We don't know.

I have referred elsewhere with concern and puzzlement to Freud's weird position that to be truly happy - meaning most in line with our drives - doing what we were built to do - we should be having sex with all those we want to and killing those who get in our way.  Nikki achieves this Freudian Nirvana state, but it looks a lot more like a Hobbesian nightmare - a life that is nasty, brutish and all too likely to be short.  She seems to be hurtling through her life - not unlike the reluctant stepdaughter on her way to college - but the stakes, if anything, seem higher.  Well, they are - there is mayhem in the stepdaughter's life but precious little murder.  That said, Nikki's life will be little noted nor long remembered - despite her ambition.  The reluctant stepdaughter lives in a very different social web than the one described here (OK, maybe I am somewhat defensively taking some distance).

The reluctant stepdaughter, even though she is reluctant to acknowledge her part in thinking about her experience, can do that.  Nikki can't.  The Oedipal themes that are played out in this book do not evoke reflection on her part - nor, at least in my case, on the readers.  They do not evoke particular aversion for her - except that Nikki's father does not live up to her expectations.  In fact, they don't seem to evoke much of anything - except acting them out.  We become numb to the sexuality and the violence - at least I do - it is simply the next bit of action that occurs.  And I think this is intended to convey the experience - and that is that this occurrence just is - it is experience unmediated by thought, guilt, or inhibition of any sort, the experience of Nikki. It is as close as we can get to what Freud thought was the natural state.

Don't read this book if you have just had a child.  Do read this book if you want to get a sense of what it might be like to try to stay on top of the wave rather than to be swept under by it if you are a kid at the very bottom of the food-chain in the United States.   Read it if you, like me, are curious about what this state of being might be like.



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Steve Jobs through the eyes of Aaron Sorkin and Victor Strecher – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst has Visions of Vulnerability

A Meaning Driven Life was the title of Victor Strecher’s talk today at the reluctant wife’s Temple today.  In it, he quoted Steve Jobs wish to “put a dent in the universe”.  Coincidentally, we had been to see Aaron Sorkin’s film about Jobs yesterday.  I am a big fan of Sorkin (see a recent essay on The West Wing).  My guess is that Sorkin is pretty full of himself.  Maybe not so full of himself as Steve Jobs was, but full enough of himself that he might have identified with Jobs enough to have written a film – not unlike his film Social Network about Mark Zuckerberg – that makes this tremendously talented but also intensely narcissistic person, if not likable, at least sympathetic.  I was surprised, then, at how brutal the film was – at how much I cared about the characters and how hurt I was by their actions – by how human the film felt.  And it was Strecher’s talk today, one that brought out themes from the Religion and Psychology talk I attended and wrote about last week, but didn’t include in that post, that helped crystallize for me what I think that Sorkin was getting at.

Strecher’s talk was organized around a personal experience that, in his words, broke through the defenses of his ego.  The experience was not one that broke him.  Quite the contrary, and this distinction is important, he characterized it as having broken him open.  His daughter was born healthy, but was infected by the chicken pox virus when she was six months old and it attacked her heart.  He was told that she would die within a month, but there was a chance she would survive with a heart transplant.  He talked about that with his family and they decided to try the transplant because there was a chance that she would not just survive but be able to thrive and they committed to helping her live a big life.  She did survive, but needed a second transplant at 10 and would have needed another one soon after her twentieth birthday, but she did not live long enough to need it.  She died at 19 of a heart attack, and the grief at her loss is what broke Strecher open.

The movie Steve Jobs is also organized around the relationship between Jobs and his daughter, and I think the intent is to help us see into the box (a section of the film was devoted to Jobs’ obsession with the Cube – the failed product of the company NeXT that he started when he was fired by Apple – and it not being perfectly cubic) that was Jobs (played by Michael Fassbinder)– the box of a person so intensely focused on having everything about himself be perfect that no imperfection could intrude.  His daughter Lisa (played by three different actresses at three different ages, Perla Haney-Jardine, Ripley Sobo, and Makenzie Moss), born out of wedlock to a woman he despised, personified such a threat.  So did Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen), his Apple co-founder who had the engineering chops to make the computer work.  And so did Andy Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg), the nebbish guy who helped his daughter find a therapist and paid her tuition when Jobs, in a snit, refused to do so.  Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet) the chief of advertising for Apple but mostly the personal assistant to Jobs and, to a lesser extent John Sculley (Jeff Daniels), the CEO (for a while) of Apple and father figure to Jobs, worked hard to help him keep the box together, but that proved difficult for each of them.

At one point in the move, Wozniak states, “It’s not binary.  You can be decent and gifted.”  Victor Strecher proves this point.  He brings ancient and modern philosophy and contemporary social science together to demonstrate that the purpose driven life leads to better health outcomes.  His website, www.dungbeetle.org includes both information about his graphic novel that illustrates how his grieving process broke him open and an app that will both help you articulate a purpose, but also to track how purposefully you are living.  And he does this while being incredibly personable and connected.  He talked about the Greek statues of their Gods being made of terra cotta, but having within them a gold bust – and that this inner bust – the bust within the bust that you would have to bust the bust open to see – is a representation of the daimon.  The same daimon that Socrates referred to in order to stay oriented in a turbulent and confusing world. 

To live a purpose driven life, Strecher, now quoting contemporary research, maintains, we should live a life that is eudaimonic. This is straight out of Socrates – eu and ic surround the daimon – and the researchers (including Strecher himself) mean living a life that is consonant with our internal compass – that little piece of gold that is at the very center of our being.  The scientific literature contrasts eudaimonic with hedonic living – living that is based on sensual pleasures that emerge in the moment.  Strecher cited numerous positive health outcomes related to eudaimonic living –including fewer strokes, lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease, and a lower risk of death related to heart disease.  He is not condemning pleasure – in fact a little hedonism fits nicely into a eudaimonic life – but a life without a keel – one in which we are skittering across the surface bouncing from one entertainment to the next – is not one that is conducive to health.

Strecher, at least in my mind, took a bit of a left turn here, in answering a question from the audience.  He noted that etymologically the daimon became the demon of religion and proposed that religions began to impose rules in order to squelch the daimon.  I think it is a little more complicated than this – both the protestant and the counterreformation movement – led by Ignatius Loyola – helped the individual reclaim their direct connection with the spiritual world.  Loyola, in particular, wrestled with the question of how to distinguish good spirits – I suppose demons or daimons – from bad ones – a question that the reluctant wife and Strecher puzzled over together in the question and answer period.  Who is to know whether an action that is taken based on one’s conscience is in line with God’s will or not?  Abraham Lincoln was said to say that he hoped God was on our side, but he was smart enough to know that he couldn’t know that for sure, even if most of us would now question why he would wonder.  But it ain’t that easy.

And it wasn’t easy, at least from Sorkin’s position, for Jobs to discern what was right and what was wrong.  In one of the early brutal scenes, Sorkin denies his parentage of his daughter Lisa to her mother and, at the same moment that he disowns her, cruelly explaining to Lisa that he did not name the Lisa computer after her – that Lisa is an acronym - he is clearly taken by her – engaging her in play with the first Mac – and doting over her as he teaches her how to save her creation.  His solution to this dilemma is to remain in her life as a manipulative presence with intermittent contact while she remains in the care of her well-meaning but poorly prepared to parent mother – an unstable woman who is fiscally irresponsible.

Jobs is able to justify his mistreatment of Lisa in the same way that justifies his mistreatment of the Apple employees who have kept the company afloat – their imperfections make them obsolete and worthy of his disdain.  He thrived on making things perfect, and if your actions could help him achieve that, you were of use to him.  John Scully, the father figure, notes with Jobs that he was adopted – and tries to assure him that he was chosen by his adoptive parents rather than not discarded by his birth parents – to assure him that’s how it’s done.  Jobs replies that his first adoptive parents kept him for five months and then returned him and, even more poignantly, that his second adoptive family didn’t meet his mother’s requirements, and, because his adoptive mother feared the mother would be able to veto her as the parent, refused to love him while he was in her care until she knew that she would be able to parent him.

If anything can screw up the ability to get in contact with one’s daimon, an early childhood history like that has a very good chance of doing that.  Jobs decided that he needed to be perfect.  I think it went something like, if I am perfect, I will never be rejected again.  Wozniak, in a recent interview, suggested that the real life Jobs made some kind of transition when Apple became a real company, and moved from being a screwball guy who engaged in pranks to being a person who was so committed to what he was focusing on that he didn’t care what others thought of him.  His disregard for others' negative views towards him became then his greatest strength – he could assert what he wanted without fearing the interpersonal consequences – but also his tragic flaw.  He was closed not just to criticism, but to the love that others might have offered him and that he might have offered to others who could have been dear to him.

Strecher’s grieving of his daughter closed him off from the world.  As one of his friends said to him at one point in his grieving – “Don’t you have another daughter?”  For Stretcher, the moment of being broken open was a moment that came in a dream – a moment of seeing still water.  He had read a poem that urged him to stay awake after a dream and to make use of it, not to turn over and go back to sleep.  He woke and, because he was at his cabin on Lake Michigan, he allowed the dream to propel him into his kayak which he rowed far enough offshore that land was almost out of sight, at which point, at sunrise, he felt infused by his daughter and felt her urging him to live – to return to living – to let go of her as a weight and move towards carrying her with him as he moved forward in his life – or even, perhaps to allow her to help sustain him as he did that.  This moment was the moment in which he felt most broken open – and most open to choosing a new direction – to live, and I know this might sound hokey, with purpose.

Jobs moment of breaking open is much more constricted.  He is able to acknowledge to his daughter, at the urging of the Kate Winslet character, that he is “poorly made”.  This acknowledgement of his imperfection, this owning of his failings – including and especially as a parent – is a far less than complete acknowledgement of all that has gone on between them.  It is also not a reformation of his life – nor of their shared life.  It is not an infusing of those lives with the kind of meaning that Strecher is referring to.  But it is a start in that direction.  It is an acknowledgement of his brokenness and of his being broken open both by Lisa and by his attachment – very much against his will, but I think in harmony with his daimon – to her.  It is also a window into the closed world of the perfect narcissist – a window that we infrequently get.  Having written that, I am aware of a terrible irony.  Narcissists frequently live with their antennae set on transmit - we hear everything, but have access to nothing truly intimate.

These two events have led me to think about the fact that psychoanalysis was born as a clinical discipline rather than as a philosophy.  I think that is because it emerged out of the moments of being broken open that bring patients to the offices of a psychiatrist, psychologist, counselor or social worker – but also a priest, rabbi, imam or other religious figure.  Psychoanalysis is a scientific explanation for the organization of the self that grew out of contact with moments of breaking open.  Indeed, I think the method that Freud proposed, the abstinence of the analyst in his or her stance to the patient, encouraged multiple moments of being broken open as part and parcel of the healing process;  that the ego must be broken open for the daimon to be able to emerge.  While he proposed that the interpretation of the analyst lead to healing, we are now more prone to believe that the relationship with the analyst promotes this; that in those moments of openness, we need a daughter who can forgive us, no matter how beastly we have been.   Whether we, like Strecher, have been beastly to hang onto her or, like Jobs, to ward her off, we need to open ourselves to her and embrace her, to take her into our hearts, and, by doing that, to become more fully human – carrying our flaws and our virtues into places where they can be embraced by those who can appreciate that we are, indeed, doing the best we can to live up to our daimon – even if we can, at best, poorly apprehend him or her at any given moment.   

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Religion and Psychology – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Learns from Ken Pargament about Mixing Faith and Science

Ken Pargament presented to my department on Psychology and Religion on Friday.  What a treat.   Ken is a clinical psychologist who has been looking at how studying religion can help us provide better care to our patients in various settings.  He started – and ended – by pointing out that how we go about gaining knowledge differs tremendously between scientific and religious traditions.  He attributed the schism between the two camps, in part, to the differences between the assumptions about knowledge.  In particular, he noted that, as psychology matured beyond the original founders – Wundt in Europe and James here, both of whom were interested in religion as a psychological event- as psychology turned increasingly to an empirical base for its evidence, Freud’s psychoanalysts and Skinner’s behaviorists dismissed theology and religion as psychologically determined phenomena – Freud articulated it as a defensive strategy (see Freud’s Final Session) and Skinner as an example of superstitious behavior (meaning behavior that was randomly reinforced.  Pargament noted that science is characterized by skepticism, observation, empriricism, pragmatism, and replication while spirituality is characterized by faith, revelation, intuition, religious authority, and mystery.

The upshot of all this was that religious behavior was dismissed by scientists rather than studied.  But it was also the case that psychology (broadly) has attracted individuals – both basic scientists and practitioners - whose beliefs are wildly at variance with those of the population as a whole.  This can be measured in various ways, but religious believers make up about 25% of psychologists, while 95% or more of the people that they study and serve endorse religious beliefs.  And various factors including, I believe, beliefs about separation of church and state, but also more idiosyncratic stuff – like feeling threatened by religiously based practitioners - lead to health interventions by professionals who are largely uninformed by a big part of the patient’s life (and psyche).   This causes some disconnects – including between practitioners who believe they are offering a secular intervention, but, when participants are interviewed afterwards, it turns out that they have attributed changes that have taken place to the God they were praying to when they were supposed to be simply urging themselves to relax.

So a psychoanalytically sensible intervention that Pargament described is offered to women who have been traumatized early in life and have difficulty conceptualizing God in a benign or helpful manner.  Nichole Murray-Swank has created a protocol for helping people visualize a Loving God.  This makes all kinds of psychoanalytic sense.  We build concepts of people out of our earliest experiences.  When those are corrupt, so are our conceptualizations.  Helping individuals work to create benign or positive experiences of others – including God – is part of what we work to help individuals do through object relationally based conceptualizations and interventions.  Partly we do this through the integrity of our work.  Murray-Swank is proposing a more directed means of doing this.  She offers visualizations of God as a cleansing waterfall that pours through the body.

How would having a more benign view of God help?  Pargament proposes that religion and spirituality, when they are helpful, can be particularly so at transformative moments.  These moments are sometimes thought to be existential moments – when we are confronted with death or loss of meaning or a sense of being abandoned.  And these moments can, under spiritual guidance, prove to help individuals be able to cope with potentially debilitating experiences.  Of course religion can also be harmful at such moments, just as treatment can.  But we have a lot to learn from spiritual traditions (see a post about JesuitSpirituality).

Pargament offered some very simple and direct observations about how to improve our clinical functioning.  He suggested that we include questions about spiritual beliefs in our routine questioning at the start of a treatment.  Simply asking lets the patient/client know that this is not something that is off-limits, but something that the therapist is curious about.  A friend of mine – a Monk (see The Wired Hermit) – went into analysis and a number of his friends joked that his religious delusions would be analyzed out of him.  His position, and one that turned out to be the case for him, was that his beliefs, being an integral part of him, became more so as part of the treatment. 

Though my friend found that psychoanalysis deepened his faith, that is not to say that he has no doubts.  Pargament notes that doubting is part of faith and counsels religious advisors to discuss their own doubts and spiritual crises to help those who are confronting such crises normalize their experience rather than to feel further isolated – as if what they are experiencing is unique and a mark of failure.  Similarly, he believes that spirituality can be improved by using psychological principles and knowledge. For instance, in addition to supporting articulating crises of faith, he suggests that a developmental model of religion, one that clarifies how our sense of God changes across the lifespan, so that our childhood concepts, while still relevant, are fluid and become more complex and layered as we ourselves are better able to understand and integrate complexity.  While regular cognitive psychological developmental literature could contribute a lot here, psychoanalytic developmental theories may be particularly useful to religious and spiritual practice.

Of course, being at an institution that is both religiously affiliated and has a large undergraduate program, I think there are opportunities to integrate psychology of religion studies into the breadth of the curriculum.  Developmental psychology could, for instance, illustrate the developmental arc described above as part of the teaching of development.  Similarly, Social Psychology could talk about the influence of religious communities on members, Abnormal Psychology could talk about the distinction between hearing voices and religious traditions of having conversations with God – and could note, while they are at it, that auditory hallucinations of loved ones who have died are normative – more than half of us experience them – rather than a symptom of madness.

The most interesting part of the talk to me, however, was when Ken returned to talking about how it is that we know things.  A lifelong researcher who has put his faith in science, he recognizes that there is a faith aspect to being a scientist – Why do we believe that a probability of < 5% of an event occurring is the sign of something being valid?  But he also sees that data tell us about the world.  He believes, though, that most of us don’t count on data.  Nor do we rely on an organized faith based vantage point for organizing our view of the world.  He says that mostly we just know what we know – we believe what we believe and we don’t really question why. 

Some have argued that psychoanalysis is a faith based tradition.  That there is a shared vocabulary for understanding human experience and that this vocabulary is what is important, not so much how well it maps onto actual human experience.  That may be the case, especially at some moments in our work.  But we may be even more insidious.  We may just know what we know because it feels right.  Mark Solms (see the post on the Conscious Id) has maintained that this is how we know, even at our most sophisticated, but I think there may be lazy “knowing”, this every day knowing that psychoanalysts, psychologists, and people of faith engage in all the time.  And this kind of “knowing” is something that I think we are built to engage in.  It is the knowing of prejudice.  It helps us function more efficiently, but at great cost.  If I am understanding Pargament correctly, faith traditions and scientific traditions have a lot to learn from each other not just pragmatically – both have useful ways to intervene with people in need – but more fundamentally.  We can become better at knowing by working to understand how each other’s traditions come to agree on what is known – but also what is not known.  Pargament maintained that what is characteristic of both types of knowing, when practiced diligently, is that they lead us to be able to be surprised.  And thus, within both traditions, we remain curious, hoping to better understand the world and reveling in knowing that we cannot know all that there is to be known (including that our tradition, whichever it is, is the only one that can validly determine what is known in the world).

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Life of Pi and Getting a Dog - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst sees Life Reflected in Art

We live in an urban neighborhood, one that was once grand, and still is, but it is now surrounded by decidedly mixed neighborhoods and ours becomes, periodically, the target for individuals or groups.  Most recently a group of teenagers has been going around the neighborhood, casing houses, and returning to those that are not well protected to rob them.  I stupidly left a basement door open after a weekend of working in the yard, and these kids discovered that and returned to rob us.  The reluctant wife was, understandably, furious about this (as was I).  She also felt violated and concerned about our well - being.  So she decided that we should act on a long held notion of getting a dog - not someday, but now.  She fell in love, on an internet website for adopting dogs saved from the pound, with Mack, a two year old bull mastiff mix who is, in person, a handful.  He is a delightful, exuberant dog who has, in the words of our dog trainer, not learned his manners, and our job is to teach them to him.  But to do this, we have to establish dominance and maintain it on a consistent basis.

That is also the task of Pi, in the book and now movie Life of Pi.  Named Piscine Molitor Patel after a beautiful swimming pool his Uncle enjoyed in Paris, Pi shortened his name when Piscine, which sounds like pissing when pronounced, became a way for his schoolmates to snicker at him.  The aggressive reclaiming of his identity by transforming it and owning it is a beautiful foreshadowing of what will be the center of the later narrative.

Born and raised in French Colonial India, an economic downturn leads the late adolescent Pi's family - he has an older brother, his mother who is the botanist in the family business, a zoo that his father, a business man, runs - to leave the country on a freighter with the animals from the zoo which they will sell to establish a new life in a new country.  They never get the opportunity to do that because the freighter sinks in a terrible storm and Pi ends up on a lifeboat inhabited by himself, an orangutan, a hyena, a zebra, a rat, and Richard Parker, a bengal tiger.  The zebra has a broken leg and is eaten, shortly after the rat, by the hyena, whom the orangutan hits.  The hyena then kills the orangutan and Richard Parker emerges from below the canvas, where he has apparently been sleeping off the effects of the seasickness medicine he was overdosed on, to kill the Hyena, leaving only he and Pi to face over two hundred days together on the open sea as they drift across the Pacific to finally make landfall in Mexico.

Pi was initially taken by Richard Parker when he shows up at the zoo.  He imagines that he sees some intelligence in his eyes and tries to connect with him.  Pi's father disagrees and asserts that Pi is merely seeing the reflection of his own soul in the eyes of the tiger.  Being stuck on a lifeboat with a tiger and a bunch of crackers let's Pi test his father's theory and discover how we mirror each other - as humans and as animals - as we engage with each other and, in the process, discover who it is that we are.

As harrowing as this story is - and it is harrowing, and here I offer a spoiler alert, it is not nearly as harrowing as the alternate plot.  Pi reveals this alternate to a writer who has come to hear his tale at the urging of Pi's Uncle.  After telling of surviving with Richard Parker, and Richard Parker disappearing into the Mexican jungle without so much as a look backwards, Pi tells the alternate version - that he was not on a lifeboat with animals at all, but with a sailor, the surly and subhuman cook from the freighter; and his mother - oh, and a rat.  The sailor, like the zebra, had a broken leg.  The cook, after eating the rat, killed the sailor, in part to use his meat as bait - and perhaps to dine on him - and then kills Pi's mother in rage when she slaps him for his barbarian behavior.  Pi, a vegetarian pacifist, is horrified and angry.  When the cook leaves the knife that he used to kill the sailor unguarded, Pi murders him, unleashing a part of himself, portrayed by Richard Parker in the first version of the story; a wild, unbridled part that he is absolutely terrified by, but that also gives him the will to survive on the open sea as he struggles with and tries to protect and save himself - a person who is more complicated and dangerous than he ever had any idea (this plot device is also used in Don Juan DeMarco, where it is used to illuminate defending against a different internal force).

The book and now the movie are brilliantly done.  The images in the movie powerfully bring to life a representation of the inner world that is rarely attempted on screen.  And it does so by persuasively telling the story of a boy surviving on a lifeboat - and the raft that he makes of life-preservers that he makes to float alongside the lifeboat - with a tiger - for over 200 days.  The boy must learn, in very tight quarters, to master the tiger.  To create separate spaces; his raft, but also places that he pees around on the boat; to kill fish (despite his abhorrence of killing); to leave an island they discover that would house them indefinitely, but that would also consume him; to wrestle with this animal and to care for it - despite his fear of it and his anger at all that it has destroyed.

The book and movie work on this level.  My struggles with Mack, while not as dramatic, mirror Pi's struggles with Richard Parker.  When Mack, who initially was friendly and more or less willing to go along with the program, first objected to a command, took a nip at me, and then growled and barked, I was both scared, but also angry and ready to assert myself; to become, in the current vernacular, the alpha dog.  I think that, when I do that in the rest of my life, I do it in such a cleverly hidden way that I can delude myself into thinking that I am not being aggressive.  I can, for instance, ask my son if he wants to take out the trash when what I am really saying is, "Take out the trash."  But with Mack, when he jumps on my bed and starts pulling at the covers with his teeth, my grabbing him in an instant by the scruff of the neck, lifting him into the air, then dropping him to the floor and forcing his neck to the ground to show him who is boss, all while saying quite firmly (bystanders might say shouting) "No, bad dog," there is no hiding my own aggression, my assertion, my commanding the situation.  For Pi, this is magnified, both by the contrast with his consistent, deeply held pacifism, and by the extreme aggression with which he has to engage a tiger - not to mention the fear that he will become his next meal.

I can return my Richard Parker to the pound.  The thieves have been caught, and, for now, there is no imminent threat.  Pi could, theoretically, kill Richard Parker, until we remember the other version of the story.  The only way to kill Richard Parker is to kill himself - an act of violence that will require Richard Parker's cooperation - meaning he will need to engage his own violence to bring about his death, but he is working to tame - to limit - to humanize - the very primitive force that he would need to kill himself.  And the convolutions in that last sentence illustrate the wonderful thing about this narrative device:  Yann Martel, the author of the book, and Ang Lee, the director of the movie, have figured out how to portray internal, psychological struggles, struggles that are ineffable and difficult to witness, even or especially from the inside, in vivid, concrete fashion.  Because it is through our engagement with the world, whether talking with our friends (or analyst), training a dog (or a tiger), or surviving in an open craft in the Pacific, that our unconscious selves emerge, guiding the (somewhat) conscious actions of engaging with, battling, anticipating and parrying to maintain our physical and/or psychological well being.  And thus the story of Richard Parker brings to life what would otherwise be a dramatic but invisible story, one that we would not be able to follow - the struggles between a man's conscience and his knowledge of the actions he engaged in when enraged as he is swept across the ocean by wind and waves.

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 Post script:  This was originally posted on 11/25/12.  I have reposted it today to improve the ability of the title to be searched.  We did ultimately return the dog.  When it was continuously threatening and scaring the children - jumping on their beds and growling at them - and tearing up whatever was in reach while we were out of the house and it was caged - it was too much even for the the reluctant wife.  Much later we did a sweet dog that was found after it had survived one of the coldest winters on record on its own.  He is small enough that I can comfortably return to being largely unaware of how frequently I assert my alpha dogness.