March – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Pictures John Lewis Remembering the Civil Rights Movement

John Lewis’ three part graphic novel March recalls in vivid, one might even say graphic detail, his experience of the Civil Rights Movement.  He joined a movement that had been gaining momentum and that already had towering leaders, and he emulated these leaders and interacted with them as he, in turn, led the younger contingent.  He led students and others in restaurant sit-ins and on the streets of the south to confront racism using non-violent techniques.

When I teach the History of Psychology, students have, at best, a sketchy knowledge of the civil rights movement.  We generally focus on the Brown vs. Board of Education case that went before the Supreme Court and that struck down Plessy vs. Ferguson where the court had ruled that separate railway cars for African Americans and for European Americans were fine as long as they were equal (which they almost certainly were not).  We do this because two psychologists, Mamie and Kenneth Clark played a key role in that trial – their data from the doll study – a study where they used colored dolls (their term) and white dolls to show that segregation had harmed African American Children by leading them to have internalized racism – to hate themselves because they were of African American decent.

Actually the last sentence in the last paragraph is wrong.  It is the historical way that the story is told, but when you read their data, the internalized racism, present both in the southern children in segregated schools and the northern children in integrated schools, was worse in the children in Northern Integrated Schools.  The paper does not make much of this – both groups clearly have internalized racism – but it does portend what may have actually happened – integration of the schools actually increased racism and the detrimental effects of it on blacks.

The class references this study because it is the first time that data from a social science experiment was cited in a Supreme Court decision.  And we note that it was two African American psychologists who were able to set this precedent at a time when psychology was struggling to be recognized as a viable and respectable science.  Mamie and Kenneth Clark – African Americans who experienced open racism from their doctoral supervisors - are the only two psychologists that I know of that changed not just the course of psychology but directly changed the course of history – contributing the deciding data that led to what many have cited as the most important decision of the Supreme Court in the 20^th century.  Pretty cool that this was done by minority persons – and minorities in the field.  Kenneth was the seventh African American to achieve a doctoral degree.  Mamie didn’t come much later.  And they did things no other psychologist has done.

John Lewis, whose graphic novel charts the work that he did to both call into question the failure of businesses to heed the court's call to end segregation and to work on establishing the right to vote for African Americans, picked up where the Clark's left off.  His story is an endearing one that follows an arc that was typical for many generations of important political figures in US history.  He started life as the child of poor farmers in Alabama.  He had aspirations of becoming a preacher – and his first congregation were the chickens that he was raising.  But he didn’t just preach to them – he became attached to them – and he would refuse to eat the chickens he had named when they were served for dinner.  He loved them.

Another feature of his story that is a very typical American theme is that he was driven to go to school and to do well there.  When he was needed on the farm and was forbidden to go to school because he was to work in the fields, he would hide until he saw the school bus coming and then he would run out to take it to school.  Ultimately, Lewis would see the world – as a teen he traveled to the big city of Buffalo, New York with an uncle – and he chose to go to college in Nashville, Tennessee.  It was there that he first began fighting for civil rights – he organized sit-ins at local diners.  It was also there that his work started to take precedence over his schooling - he prioritized the movement over his schoolwork.

I think that the graphic format is the right vehicle for this story.  The story is titled March and, though Lewis was erudite and gave speeches that helped the movement, his emphasis is on the actions that he and others took.  He will sometimes cite speeches (I will quote a surprising one in a moment), but it is the action of marching, not the “I’ve been to the mountain top” moments that he maintains is the reason that the civil rights protesters accomplished what they did.  And the visual emphasis of the books support this action based approach.  The story tells about deeds as much or more than it talks about words – and though there are plenty of words – they are mostly words of dialogue – decisions that are being made – they are frequently words about when and where to march.  Lewis presents himself as a man of action and this book is written and drawn to convey the actions that he took – and the actions that others took against him - not to articulate the fine grained thoughts that he had.

That said, the philosophy of nonviolence is pretty clearly articulated.  Perhaps more clearly, the teaching of the philosophy to those who marched – the training and the importance of the adherence to the principles – and the difficulty of doing this are clearly stated.  What is less clear – and perhaps it takes a bit of psychoanalysis to articulate it – is how it is that the nonviolent movement clarified how much aggression was being used by whites to suppress blacks.  The movement exposed the lie that is at the heart of American exceptionalism – an exceptionalism that maintains we are not the aggressors – we only come in when called upon – it is others that are violent and we are pacifists who are reluctantly drawn into war – and even more that it is we whites who are not the violent ones – it is the blacks (whether black hats or people of color) who are bad and do bad things (and doesn’t the doll study demonstrate that they know they are the bad ones?).

What the nonviolent movement was designed to do was to expose the truth that we are all aggressive – and that none of us are without blame – as effectively as any analyst’s couch ever did.  Whether it was furious counter clerks dumping bleaching chemicals on students who sat in at segregated lunch counters or the burning of the bus that carried freedom fighters to the south – or the murder of black organizers or the murders of white students who came south to help out – and whose bodies ended up buried in a dam being built – the peaceful assertion of rights – inalienable rights – exposed the hostility that those in power were using and had always used to retain that power.  And Lewis’ self-portrayal here as the student of Martin Luther King, Jr. is that while King articulated the tactics of nonviolence – Lewis, the student, practiced them more devotedly and more consistently than King did – and in doing this he pushed the issue in ways that words never could.  Lewis does not, however, try to elevate himself to a position of exceptionalism.  He feels violent impulses - most powerfully, ironically, when King is threatened and he moves to physically defend him.

One of the challenges in teaching about racial and gender battles in the History of Psychology has always been to help the students get a sense of the level of injustice that existed – and even more to get them to appreciate the levels that still exist.  OK, to be frank, this is something that I myself have struggled with.  James Cone’s visit to our campus helped me better understand this, as did Ta Nehisi Coates’.  But I think the unprovoked actions of Trump – and the actions of hate groups – and the nomination of Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court bench – have helped me and my students be much more aware and sensitive to the ongoing aggression that is at the heart of the repression of African Americans and other marginalized groups, including women.  I still have to do background work, but the students are more quickly able to see that we are not just talking about history, but the current state of affairs when talking about prejudice and marginalization.

An example of the vivid immediacy of the material that Lewis portrays is Nelson Rockefeller’s speech at the 1964 Republican National Convention.  In the speech, Rockefeller quotes himself as having said a year earlier that, “The republican party is in real danger of subversion by a radical, well-financed, and highly disciplined minority, wholly alien to the sound and honest conservatism that has firmly based the republican party in the best of a century’s traditions, wholly alien to the sound and honest republican liberalism that has kept the party abreast of human needs in a changing world, wholly alien to the broad middle course that accommodates the broad mainstream of republican principles.”  Despite this, the party nominated Barry Goldwater – who, unlike DonaldTrump, was soundly defeated in the general election.

These books are introduced and supported by Lewis attending the inauguration of a very different president – Barack Obama.  His reminiscences serve as a means of understanding how we were able to stand at that moment – the swearing in of the first president of clearly African descent – the first president who identified as a person of color.  But, it seems to me, Lewis might be asking whether that swearing in portended a backlash – a thinly veiled racist tinged backlash by the radical, well-financed and disciplined minority that would hijack not just the republican convention, but the country as a whole.  Just as the integrated black students in the north internalized self hatred more than the segregated black students in the south, northern and southern whites externalized their hatred of blacks in the wake of being ruled by one.  

Lewis' book has the potential to expose a new generation to the powerfully racist, sexist and repressive forces in their naked form that drive what I hope to be a minority of people to keep others from sharing in a privilege that we should be striving to allow all to have access to – the privilege of leading lives that are as free as humanly possible.  By focusing on denying access, I believe that those in power help to maintain the delusion that they are exceptions to the arc of being human – that they are the immortals who will always be on top.  Unfortunately this kind of thinking is not good for any of us.  It is my firm belief that a rising tide raises all ships - and by blocking the tide, we create a stagnant swamp that we will all be forced to wallow in until we are able to find fresh sources of water.

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

For other posts looking at Race in America see: James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree, and applied to a Rock Musical, Dorothy Holmes presents to the 2016 Psychoanalytic Convention, 2017 Convention Aktar, Powell and Trump, hearing Ta-Nehisi Coates talk, Black Lives Matter,  John Lewis' March, Get Out, Green Book and Blackkklansman, Americanah, The Help, Selma, August Wilson's Fences, Hamilton! on screen, Da 5 Bloods, The Black Panther, and Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me.

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Three Identical Strangers - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst watches a movie about experimenting with identity

Documentaries are not generally my thing in movies, but this week we have watched two – Free Solo – because the idea of man against nature was compelling – and then Three Identical Strangers – a movie that will be discussed at our local psychoanalytic institute without a screening there (we recently watched and then discussed Medea).

This film – intended to be dark – starts out on a light and high note.  There is an interview with a charming middle aged man who is remembering going off to a community college, but his reception there is almost dream-like.  He is met by people he has never seen before who are excited to see him – attractive women come up to him and kiss him and say that it is good to see him again – but they are calling him by the wrong name.  Finally an individual says to him that you look exactly like my roommate from last year – they call the roommate – and it turns out that both of these young men were born on the same date and both of them have been adopted.  They drive to connect with each other – and it is love at first sight – they have found a long lost twin they did not know and they roll around like puppies as they connect with a person who is a mirror image of themselves.

This odd happenstance makes the news and then things get even odder because it turns out they have a third identical twin – also adopted – also born on the same date.  Identical triplets.  How is this possible?  Identical twins occur when a fertilized egg in the womb divides and, instead of staying together, splits and two individuals with identical genetic material grow in the womb.  In this case, after having split once, one of the split off twins splits again – and three individuals with identical genetic material are now growing together in the same womb (though actually this happened twice - their fourth brother died at birth). 

Researchers love identical twins (and triplets is a bonus).  There is a long and rich literature that looks at what is inherited and what comes about as a result of the environment to try to tease apart the nature/nurture questions that we have about our human condition.  Identical twins that have been separated at birth and placed in two separate families – generally because of adoption – are particularly rich sources of such research because the similarities between them, sometimes uncanny similarities – can be attributed to some kind of genetic predisposition.  So we wonder whether such things as liking plaid versus plain shirts can be traced to our genes.  In a more controlled fashion, identical twins are used to study the inheritance of predispositions to certain disorders – and if your identical twin is diagnosed with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia (whether you are raised together or apart), you are much more likely to be diagnosed with that disorder as well than if, for instance, a twin that was from a separate egg and sperm combination – a fraternal twin – is diagnosed.

But that lurks in the background of the first part of this film.  In the beginning, the brothers reunite, they become minor celebrities – they go on talk shows – they fall in love with each other – and are attracted to similar women.  They are the toast of New York – and in early eighties New York, they get into Studio 54, hang out with celebrities and live the high life.  As they realize that they have something they can cash in on, they go into business together.  They open a restaurant where they are the main attraction and, in addition to the food, what attracts people to the place is the party atmosphere.  Each of the boys was adopted by a Jewish family through a Jewish adoption agency, and raised Jewish; in the restaurant they essentially put on a Bar Mitzvah party every night that everyone is invited to.  And people come to be included and have fun and the brothers do a million dollars in business in the first year.

But then things begin to get dark.  As one of the relatives points out, the boys did not grow up together.  They didn’t learn how to resolve differences between them.  They came together and looked at the similarities.  It was only over time that they began to see and to have to confront the differences (The reluctant wife and I noted that this is true of marriages as well – the similarities draw us together – and it is only after we have committed to each other that the differences seem to emerge – and to suddenly have more weight than we ever expected them to).  One of the brothers – the one who was interviewed first – decided to leave the business.  The second brother weighs in about how difficult this was on the third brother – and it is only then that we realize that the third brother – the most fun loving one of all – has not been interviewed in the present day.

Well – spoiler alert – he wasn’t interviewed because, in the wake of his brother leaving the business, he went home one day after work and killed himself.  Ouch.  The film takes on a decidedly different tone.   No longer light and airy and fun, we are now feeling the loss – and we begin to try to figure out what happened.

A million years ago, when I was in training, one of my wise supervisors, Fred Shectman, convened a meeting to do a psychological autopsy after a patient that we had worked with as a team committed suicide.   I had done the psychological testing of the patient.  I am embarrassed to admit that I did not remember him – in my defense it had been six months and I had tested many people during that time – but I did remember what Fred said at the beginning of the meeting.  He said that, in the wake of a suicide, we (meaning anyone who was involved in the suicide - treaters, family members, and friends) look to manage our feelings of guilt and blame – and that we can move back and forth between the two - assuaging the one by feeling the other - I am not to blame, I am not guilty - you are and, vice versa, you are not to blame, it is I who feel guilty about what I did or failed to do.

This film can, I think, be understood against that backdrop.  The question that was lingering took center stage – why had these boys been separated at birth?  The parents had gone to the agency when they found out about the separation (after the boys were reunited) and had confronted the director and others there.  The agency responded that they were concerned that the boys would not be adoptable as a package.  All three sets of parents said they would have adopted all three if they had known.  The agency stuck with their story – but one of the parents – going back to find an umbrella they had left in the meeting – found the people they had been meeting with drinking champagne and talking as if they had just ducked a bullet.

To make a long story short, the agency – a very well respected and powerful agency – was conducting research.  The boys had been intentionally placed in three very different homes – each of the families had earlier adopted a girl from the same agency – and now the boys were being placed in an upper class home, a middle class home, and blue collar home.  Why?  Well this becomes a mystery that the film tries to track down.  No results of the study have been published.  Why?  The data from the study have been sealed in a library at Yale.  Why?  We begin to look towards the researchers as the bad guys.  The central researcher, the director of the Freudian Archives, is now dead, but there is an investigative reporter who had tried to get the answers out of him when he was alive but failed.  Two research assistants are interviewed – one who might have been more aware of the design and one who did the follow up testing – he want into the boys homes and did psychological testing and observation on them on a regular basis.  From the first we get a sense of the research atmosphere – from the second we find that there are likely additional twin pairs that have not yet found each other (though a few have done so).  Ultimately there were 6 or 7 pairs, including the triplets, which were in the study.

What is going on here?  My guess is that this was a study to look at whether the environment – the different homes – was more influential on the intellectual and emotional development of these kids or whether the genes were predictive.  There is a period of time in the movie where there is a focus on the mental stability of the mother of the boys and there is some speculation that it is a study about the heritability of a mental illness.  While I think this is a possible research question, I think that the instability of the mother – she is tracked down by the boys who notice that she can drink them under the table – is based largely on her drinking.  This is too small a sample to have a solid study looking at the inheritability of mental illness – in my opinion.  But it is mysterious about the records being sealed and the air of secrecy about the design.

What is more poignant is the discovery that the three boys were kept together for the first six months of their lives and then separated – they would have been pre-verbal and couldn’t speak about the sense of being apart – but at least two of them would bang their heads as a means of soothing themselves when they were young.  Were they trying to communicate that they missed their brothers?  Were they more inconsolable for having lost brothers – something that might have had a distinct attachment code over and above the maternal attachment?  Hard to know.  The book is that object permanence – the sense that this person is different from that – comes on-line at nine months – but I think there is room to wonder about what being a triplet and then an only may have felt like on a visceral level for a kid who was six months old.

The movie shifts its sights and focuses on the father of the man who killed himself.  The father is portrayed as being a strict disciplinarian and distant.  And he was the father of the most outgoing boy.  Was there a fundamental mismatch between them?  The most outgoing of the fathers took all of the boys under his wing when they were reunited and the outgoing son connected most with him, and was the loss of that connection – when that father died – too much for the outgoing son to bear?  Who is guilty and who is to blame?

As haunting as these questions are, the movie keeps coming back to the mystery of the research.  What were those researchers interested in?  But a funny thing happens – as people are painting the researchers as villains they subtly and not so subtly end up asking the researcher's questions.  They wonder whether the difficulties that the adolescent boys had were genetic – or were they caused by the separation – or by the conflict with parents who weren’t a good match.  They marshal evidence to support their positions – pointing to when this occurred or how that emerged – or how something was mirrored in all three boys even before they knew each other.  The conclusions they reach – and these are smart people who know these kids well – are less interesting to me than that the family members – and we in the audience – are asking the very questions that it is likely the experimenters were interested in knowing.

Was it harmful to have separated these boys and the twins and to do that because of research interests?  Sure.  Shouldn’t the parents at least have known of the existence of the twin/triplets?  Absolutely.  And shouldn’t the parent’s permission have been sought to experiment on the boys?  Of course.  Would the parents have consented?  Perhaps not.  And that might have been a very good thing for the boys.  But the questions still would have been there.  What is causing the similarities in these individuals – and what is causing the differences?

Btw, I don't mean to be minimizing the ethical breeches that researchers - especially by today's standards - committed.  But I think that in fifty years we may well wonder about the "informed consent" that we engage in today.  How, our future selves may wonder, could we have consented, or been asked to consent, to whatever we consent to?  We do experiments because we don't know the outcome of the experiment - if we knew with certainty that the outcome would be positive - we wouldn't need to ask permission.  Even when something has been "proven" safe - say a psychoactive medication - do we really know that to be true?  If we start taking a medication that turns out to be a lifetime medication two years after it has been invented - we cannot know what the lifetime impact of taking that medication will be - no one has done it.  But I digress...  

We can’t know whether something as traumatic as the suicide would have been prevented – or if something worse would have been caused by raising the boys together.  But the questions would still have been asked.  We want to know what leads us to become who we are.  Is biology destiny?  And more than that – I think (and Heinz Kohut thought it long before I did) that there is something deeply intriguing about discovering a doppelganger – a twin – out there in the universe.  Wouldn’t it be interesting to look into another’s eyes and see your own reflected?  Wouldn't it be good to know what of our identity was in our genes - what was determined by our environment - and what was the result of the choices we ourselves made?  I don't think these questions can be definitively answered, but the existence of twins allows us to get as close as we can to these very tantalizing questions - questions that are tantalizing enough that we might not think about the best interests of those we are studying because we are so caught up in the possibility that we might be able to address questions that are unanswerable...

I will report back in January after the discussion of the film on additional perspectives that others have taken…


So: Postscript:  If I went to the meeting in January, I don't remember it.  I think it was rescheduled and I couldn't attend, but today I read an interesting article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) about the ethics of this case.  It is available (at press time 7/18/19) at:  https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2737146.  The thesis of the article is that the movie got some of the facts wrong about the ethics of the case.  First of all, the decision to split the boys (and in the case of some of the twins) girls up was not made by the researchers.  It was made by the agency.  And the decision was based on "wisdom" of the day - twins developed language late (probably because they developed their own language and didn't need to learn the adults), they didn't get as much attention form each parent (there are two to look after rather than one), and they get connected to their twin in ways that may impair their becoming their own person.  So it was the agency that decided to separate them - "for their own good".  The researchers saw this as an opportunity - they did not create the experimental separation - they just measure the impact.

One of the concerns was that the records were sealed - none of the data have been published.  The reason for this, according to the article, had to do with confidentiality of the records and the decision of the researchers to protect the privacy of those who unwittingly participated in the study vs. publishing the results of their work.  They decided, based on the small numbers, that any description could be traced to individuals and that would have violated their right to privacy.  So the records were not sealed to protect the researchers, but to protect the participants.

The authors of the article conclude - as did I - that it is problematic to judge the actions of those in the past based on current standards.  We would currently see the benefits - as well as the costs - of keeping twins and triplets together.  We would currently inform the families of what was being done.  Some of the participants in the study have now accessed their records as the privacy laws have changed and they can now do that.  This does not mean, however, that researchers can access the sealed materials yet.  By the time they can, I'm not sure how much interest there will be in the data - the instruments that they used will be unknown to current researchers and the group will still be so small that it will be hard to know whether the results are caused by nature, nurture or chance.

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

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Free Solo: The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Wonders What It Would Mean to Live Life Without a Net

Climbing, Oscar Winning, documentary, psychoanalysis.

When we saw the trailer for this documentary film about an individual, Alex Honnold, who decides to climb El Capitan without ropes – an even bigger and more imposing rock face than Half Dome, also in Yosemite National Park, and which Honnold has previously climbed without a rope – I expected a film about a daredevil – a swashbuckler who was interested in cheating death in a variety of ways – by climbing – but maybe by drinking or doing drugs – and I certainly think that I would have expected that he would have been a womanizer.  But this film is about a person and an undertaking that has daredevil qualities that are inherent in what is being done, but there is an odd aesthetic that is at the core of this film, this person and this quest that is much quieter, but certainly every bit as tension filled and vertigo inducing as the swashbuckling film I anticipated.

There are a number of themes that overlap and interweave in this film.  The first is the role of the filming of the undertaking.  Free soloing is the art of making difficult climbs – life threatening climbs – without any aids or ropes.  It is man or woman against the mountain.  Or more properly – against the rock face.  Not just getting to the top of the mountain, but doing it on the most inhospitable face.  Filming what is essentially a solo undertaking makes it public in a way that violates part of the freedom inherent in the name.  It also yokes the filmmaker to the climber – if the climber should fall to his death, is that partially the fault of the person who films him?  What role does the filmmaking play in the climb itself - including the potential to fatally distract the climber?

The second yoke that keeps this from being a free solo is the relationship between Alex and his girlfriend, Sanni McCandless, a woman he met when on a book tour describing his climbing and she, who had no interest in climbing at the time, on a lark, gave him her phone number when she got his autograph, and we are not told about the ensuing courtship, though we get to see them developing a relationship in the shadow of his attempt to engage in a solitary and dangerous activity that might rob her of him – and she has some thoughts about that.

The third yoke is the tie between this kid – it is hard to think of Alex as a grown man – partly because of his relatively slight stature, but mostly because of his gee-shucks approach to the world - and the mountain on one hand, and the need to keep body and soul together on the other.  He is living in a marginal world where his only home is his van and his only food is stuff he cooks on the burner in the van – and a real shower is a huge luxury.  Because of his accomplishments, he now has a reasonable income, but he is still incredibly uninterested in earthly goods that are unrelated to climbing.

But the center of the film is the technical, emotional, and physical challenge of making a 3,000 foot vertical climb with thousands of moves – each of which could prove fatal if not done correctly – and some of the moves are simply incredibly technically challenging under the best of circumstances.  How does one prepare for and undertake such an endeavor?

These elements, interestingly, overshadow the final climb – so that by the time it takes place, as thrilling and crazy as it is, it is no longer what it might have been – something overwhelming and poorly understood – instead it is, for the viewer as for the climber – the thing that has been pointed to since the beginning of the film and it seems somehow, oddly, destined to be occurring – and it is only through the cut-aways to one of the cameramen who can’t watch, who is afraid of what it is that Alex is doing and unwilling to watch him fall to his death – that we, oddly, become aware of the gravity (as it were) of what is occurring on the screen before us.

I did a little rock climbing in high school – mostly as part of a counseling experience that would ultimately lead me into the therapeutic profession.  This was the infancy of what would one day become ROPES courses that all kinds of people would engage in to learn team building skills and to learn to rely on their buddies.  We did that – holding the rope for each other while we engaged in scrambling up the sides of buildings and walls of rock cut by creeks in the middle of mostly pancake flat Columbus Ohio.  We learned to use carabineers and to belay down, which was great fun.  But we also learned something of the power of concentration – as we paid attention to each foot and hand hold and tested them before trusting our weight to them – not wanting to fall even if the rope would ultimately hold us.

Alex didn’t want to fall either, but he did.  He fell before this project began and his girlfriend was responsible for the rope that was to hold him, but she didn’t pay attention to how much had been played out and his fall led to compromising two of his vertebrae.  It was almost the end of the relationship, but she convinced him that he would not be better off for not having her.  He fell multiple times attempting the most difficult part of the climb up El Capitan while trying each of the two moves to get across a particularly tricky spot – he was in harness and practicing.  On another practice climb, near the bottom in a part of the climb that he found very challenging because of a lack of purchase on what he described as a glass-like wall, he fell, and, though Sanni had the rope, he sprained his ankle.

The ankle sprain occurred about a month before the end of the climbing season.  The camera crew was prepared to film the climb.  They followed him to the local gym where he climbed the rock wall with his boot on.  Other climbers told him it would be a six month recovery arc.  He thought he could climb again in a month.  When he started out to do free solo El Capitan a month after the injury – on a climb that, because of the time of year – had to start at four in the morning and he sported a headlamp to climb in the dark – he seemed as foolhardy as I imagined him to be.  What a relief when he – spoiler alert – aborted and decided to come back and do it the following year.

That winter, he and his girlfriend bought a condo together in Las Vegas and their relationship developed on screen.  He had been coy with her about when he would attempt the solo climb in the fall – and they began to play back and forth about how much he was allowed to know how much he meant to her as he prepared to attempt it again the next summer.  But it was also important that she knew that his primary interest was in the climb.  During the interlude, he also did some psychological testing on an fMRI scan to ascertain what was going on with him.  Looking at images that would cause distress and therefore brain activity in the amygdala to others, his amygdala was non-reactive.  He was essentially not anxious about things others would be anxious or aroused by.

I think there are two diametrically opposed but perhaps related constructs that might help with this.  One is the idea of Obsessive Compulsive functioning.  In this approach to the world, an anxious person defends against their anxiety by organizing their world so that the likelihood of something bad happening is greatly minimized.  This can be a very effective means of isolating anxiety, and if that is what has happened in this case, Alex has so effectively managed to distance himself from his fear reaction that he has interfered with it pre-emptively.  He no longer fears because of the disciplined way that he has managed fear.  Another component of that is that he has exposed himself over and over to the feared stimulus to the point where he is inured to it.

The explanation that requires less mental gymnastics is one that comes from the literature on thrill seeking.  Individuals who qualify as thrill seekers seem to have a lower base rate of arousal and need to engage in thrilling activity to, on some level, feel alive – to feel the adrenaline rush of knowing that this life really matters.  These individuals have been studied clinically as having more difficulty connecting with others – primarily in terms of being antisocial or sociopathic – though Alex’s mother refers to Alex’s father as having been on the Asperger’s spectrum – and this might be another expression of this fundamental lack of arousal.

What is interesting is that the other climbers and the film crew (who are all climbers) talk about not knowing Alex and what drives him – they don’t seem to have a sense of him as a person.  He is personable – charming even – both in his public interactions, for instance with students at his high school, but also in his interactions with his girlfriend – where he is, as I have said, coy.  He also talks with climbers from the generation before him and clearly venerates them – but his conversations are generally technical and when he is goofing around and responding to them about his girlfriend, again he is coy.  That said, there are cameras on for all of these interactions and, just as they, by their very presence, alter the climb, so they alter the person they are observing.

After the sprained ankle, we are treated to the preparation for the climb.  How many times does Alex climb El Capitan with ropes?  We don’t know.  He talks with another climber who prepped for a different free solo climb by doing the route he would solo forty or fifty times.  I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Alex made the El Capitan climb at least that many times – and that he practiced the difficult bits many more times than that.  By the time of the solo climb, I think he knew essentially every step that he would take – each handhold – and how he would navigate the whole thing.  It reminded me of Scott Hamilton’s commentary on a beautiful Olympic skating routine when asked what was going on in the skater’s mind at that moment and he replied that skater was thinking outside blade, inside blade, crouch, lift, turn, etc. – focusing on the elements of the routine – and not, as we the audience were, on the beauty of what was occurring.   In the final climb when Alex seemingly effortlessly handles on of the technically challenging bits we know the five or six step routine that we see him doing, he grins for the camera – clearly having enjoyed pulling that off – but he is also headed forward into the next challenge at the same moment.

Whether because of nature – an amygdala that is under-responsive so that Alex has to manufacture extreme ways of exciting himself – or because of nurture – anxiety that he manages by over-preparing to do what he does, this film is a record of single mindedness.  It portrays the discipline and isolation that is necessary for the arduous but ultimately gratifying work of free soloing.  

What does Alex do when he is done?  He looks oddly fresh – as if he has just been for a brisk walk in the park rather than having completed a grueling and harrowing four hour test that has taken him to the limits of what man can accomplish.  He celebrates with the crew at the top of the mountain and then calls his girlfriend – and, as we listen in on the conversation, he is clearly pleased with what he has accomplished and pleased that she gets what it is that he has accomplished – and then he goes back to his van and spends the afternoon working out – preparing for the next climb.

While it is possible for me to admire this singlemindedness, it is impossible for me to imagine engaging in any activity with this kind of relentless focus.  My mind reels at the paradoxical loss of freedom to achieve a free solo.

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Medea – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Watches A Feminist Tragedy ripe for yet another moment in history….

Last night, there was a showing of Lars von Trier’s 1988 Danish made-for-television adaptation of Medea, with Larry Jost, one of our local Philosophy professors, discussing it and the play with a group of psychoanalytically interested folks.  Not having read Medea or seen it performed before, it was very helpful to get some background and, he being an old school professor, gave us handouts that included dialogue from Euripides’ play, which brought to life how Euripides originally gave form to Medea’s fury. 

The version that we saw was, as the discussant characterized it, stark and highly stylized.  Watching it was among the slowest – but also reasonably satisfying – 80 minutes of my life.  As the reluctant wife suggested, it was like watching grass grow – interesting grass – but still.  The getaway scene at the end has got to be slowest getaway scene ever recorded on film or video.

The plot starts before the film – so it was helpful to have Jost, if after the fact, play the role of the chorus and the Gods, filling us in on the back story.  Medea helped Jason and the Argonauts steal the Golden Fleece from her country.  Jason, a Greek, wooed her and they married, not just on paper but in action, becoming true partners as they figured out how to loot her father’s prize possession.  Medea was, as the film characterized her, a practitioner of the dark arts.  To slow her father and his army down when he was chasing after her and Jason, she murdered her brother, dismembered him, and scattered the parts because she knew that her father would stop the chase long enough to gather the pieces and give him a proper death rite.

Jost spared us a film version in which this is graphically and brutally depicted in the opening scenes.  In our version, there is just the title art, which depicts two children hung in a tree, foretelling the central drama of this tragedy.  Then we meet Medea  (Kirsten Oleson) on a bleak, desolate and wind and water tossed shore, being greeted by an Athenian who is sailing into town and will be leaving the next day.  He promises her safe passage, no matter what.  Jost let us know that this is one of the plot devices that Aristotle objected to – he felt that it was too convenient for Medea to have an escape plan provided for what is about to transpire.

We next learn that Jason (Udo Kier), who is an ambitious man, has decided to throw Medea over, abandoning her and her two children, to marry Glauce (Ludmilla Glinska), the daughter of Creon (Henning Jensen), who is the king of Corinth.  This would put Jason in line to the next king.  Indeed, at least in this version, immediately after the marriage it sounded like he would be taking on some or perhaps all of the executive duties of the kingdom.  There’s just one problem – Creon doesn’t want Jason’s ex (or other) wife and children hanging around – presumably as a threat to claiming the inheritance of the crown that Glauce’s children will one day own.  Again, Jost informs us that Medea is loved by the community and has been accepted by them.  But Creon tells Jason that his love for his own child trumps Jason’s love for his children, and he banishes Medea effective today – the wedding day.  When Creon delivers this message, Medea begs for an additional day to get her things in order, which he grants.

Medea accomplishes a lot in her day.  She collects some berries, makes a poisonous mash, which she attaches to her own wedding crown.  She confronts Jason – who argues that in his position as king – even after her banishment – he will be able to better care for Medea and the children than if he weren’t in this position of power (we are left in the film to imagine how pleased Medea is with his generosity – Euripides makes it clear by giving her the words to express it just how furious she is about this gambit).  She seduces Jason (whose new wife won’t join him in the marital bed until Medea is gone), and convinces him to have their two boys take the crown to Glauce as a gift – and in order to ask her to ask Creon to allow Medea and the boys to stay.

Jason and the boys head off on this errand.  Glauce is pleased with the gift – but pricks her finger on the poisoned barbs and dies – as does Creon when he finds her.  Jason finally gets it (boys can be pretty thick) and heads out towards Medea – fearing what she may next have in mind.  And this is where things get interesting in this particular film version.  In the original play, Medea murders her sons – I think off stage – with a sword.  This is enough to get the Athenians riled up.  In the “historical” myth, Medea leaves, and the Corinthians murder her children.  But Euripides solution is so much more economical and horrifying.  She could have murdered Jason.  But instead she uses the boys – whom she knows he loves as only a parent can – against him.  If she had murdered him, that would not have wreaked revenge.  Destroying the things that he loves – not just his new bride and her father – throwing his ambitions into chaos – but his offspring – and making him live with knowing that he has been, through her, the instrument of their destruction – is horrifyingly sadistic.

There is, of course, a small hitch.  They are her children, too.  In the version we watched, they are not murdered off screen with a sword, but, as the title art suggests, they are hung.  The twist is that the eldest of the two boys gets what is going on and offers to help his mother complete this horrifyingly impossible task.  When his younger brother runs away from the tree, he chases after him and delivers him to the mother, who hangs this youngest son, holding him and loving him as she watches him strangle to death – as if she were putting him to sleep for the night.  The eldest son then offers her a noose that he has tied for her to use to hang him, which she again does while holding him in her arms.

Wow.  What a deeply, intimately, horrifying moment.  As one of the audience members in our conversation pointed out, the movie director did not give us more information about the boy, so anything that we say about the child’s motives would be projection.  Unfortunately that shut the conversation down because I think that is a critical addition that this director has made and he is inviting us to project into this (and much else in this tremendously pared down version of the play) what we are experiencing (As kind of footnote to that comment – it is just possible that a modern depiction of this tragedy doesn’t require Medea (or the boy) to articulate all that she is feeling – we may be better equipped than the Greeks to imagine what it feels like to have power in play in our relationships – and the variety of responses that we generate may help us realize where we are as we struggle with it).

I think the boy, like his mother, has been discarded by his father and knows that.  He knows his connection to his father has been irrevocably severed by his father, but, like his mother, he knows that this is a surface and that, underneath that surface, his father is also irrevocably connected to him – even more than his father is connected to his mother.  The only way for the father to know how deeply he is connected, though, is for the father to be the victim of the severing rather than the perpetrator of it.  It is only in this way that his father will come to know what he has actually done – and this is the only way that the boy – as well as his mother – can wreak the revenge that they both want – to remind the father of what they both (and each) mean to him.

How’s that for projection?  Well, I think it is too much.  It is worthy of Melanie Klein when she is ridiculously insinuating what the infant is fantasizing.  But it also seems to me to have a bit of the ring of truth.  So where does it belong?  I think this is something like what the Director intends – and I think it is something like what Medea must be thinking on the son’s behalf.  She is expressing, I think, not only her rage – the rage of the jilted wife – but also the rage of the jilted son – and she is acting on her own behalf, but also on his.  The son’s death becomes the vehicle of his own (real, imagined, future and/or present) rage.

A modern version of the Medea play is Tony Morrison’s Beloved.  In this novel, which I read so long ago that I cannot bring it to life here (and I am too mired in the middle of the semester to re-read it), a runaway slave kills her children – who are also the children of her master – as revenge against the master.  This drives her crazy – and Morrison writes – as I remember it – from within that craziness.   The killing of her children – as one of the discussion members last night pointed out - allows the mother to re-own herself.  She thrusts off the yoke of having born a man’s children that he does with as he will – negating her ability to own even this – the product of her body.  The only action she is left with is a destructive one – one that destroys not just the child but a part of herself.  Unfortunately, when we re-own ourselves in this way, we realize ourselves anew – and all that we are capable of.

Would that this were just fiction.  Would that this were just a tragedy on the stage.  One modern version of it has been characterized as “Parental Alienation Syndrome”.  The name is unfortunate because it medicalizes something that is much more human and tragic than it sounds.  Parental Alienation occurs in divorces when one of the parents uses a child or children to wreak revenge on the other parent – by, for instance, getting the child to accuse the other parent of sexual molestation.  This can result in a Medean equivalency, where the accused parent is jailed and prevented from having contact with the child. 

Of course, we are watching, in 2018, this film in a larger context.  The midterm elections are looming and we do not know whether the misogynistic unholy alliance of the current administration with congressional representatives of the desire to keep women and other marginalized people under control will be upheld.  As if to prove that the more things change, the more they stay the same, Medea’s children would never be Greek citizens because she in an immigrant.  The urge to have power over others – and the terribly destructive reactions that may feel like (or be) all that is left as the available alternatives to disempowerment continue to reverberate today.  Sometimes those who are drawn to power don’t realize that sharing it might enhance rather than diminish that very power, and that not sharing it - keeping others from ownership - might have tragic consequences; having nothing, one means of reclaiming yourself is destroy what has been taken from you.

At the end of this film, Medea meets the man from Athens at his boat, which is sitting on dry land.  While Jason is chasing around, finding out about the havoc she has wreaked – she waits serenely for the tide to come in – for it to lift her and her boat and carry her off to a new place and, in at least one version of the myth, a new life as the wife of the captain of the boat (where more mischief will, of course, occur).  While she is re-owning herself, Jason is driven mad by the discovery of his sons’ deaths.

Postscript:  While I have labeled this a feminist tragedy - and I think it is - it is important to note that it was written by a man at a time when women had no voice.  It is what a man imagines it must be like to be scorned.  This movie version is also written by a man - as an homage, in fact, to another man's interpretation of the tragedy.  I am reminded of the feminist who objected to Caitlin Jenner's feeling comfortable determining what it means to be a woman - from a perspective that was originally that of a man.  Succinctly she said, "I am tired of men determining what it means to be a woman.

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Episodes – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Realizes that Sometimes it takes a Brit to help us see ourselves....

The Reluctant Wife has been binge watching a series called Episodes.   Originally available on Showtime, it is now a completed series of five seasons that is available on Netflix.  The premise of the show is that two British comedy writers married to each other, Sean (Stephen Mangan) and Beverly (Tamsin Greig), have a successful show in England and the rights to it and their talent are bought up by a Hollywood network to air the series in the US and Matt LeBlanc (Played by Matt LeBlanc) is plunked into that series by the producers and agents and studio heads and powers that be, ruining the show, their marriage, and rudely awakening them to what Hollywood and fame can do to undermine their integrity while simultaneously casting a spell on them so that they become starstruck, transfixed and mired in a world that they hate but can’t seem to pull away from.

Watching this series has felt like eating candy – it tastes good, but it doesn’t fill me up – in fact, I feel a little sick – OK, rotten to the core – after watching it.  I feel as sucked into the series and Sean and Beverly feel sucked into Hollywood.  And that reminds me, oddly, of the feeling of having been sucked into watching the Rocky Horror Picture Show when I was teenager.  Just as I am currently identifying with the good, clean Sean and Beverly from England, I identified then with Brad and Janet – virginal kids from the Midwest who stumble into an alien universe.  Hollywood as the alien universe is filled with beautiful people who are so enamored with themselves and so pampered that they don’t even know where the sheets are kept.  Rocky Horror’s alternate universe included a seemingly seamier assortment of sexually obsessed transsexuals, transvestites and, of course, Meatloaf.  In both cases, I am both repulsed and fascinated.  I want nothing to do with these alternate universes – and I want to live – or wallow – in them and their lurid qualities.

The actors who play Sean and Beverly don’t fit on the screen with any of the others.  Beverly has lines around her eyes – delightful, expressive lines that help make her real and alive – but no other woman character has any lines – their faces are all stretched tight by genes, botox, surgery or some combination.  Sean is just plain goofy looking.  At one point, he is compared to Wallace and Gromit, the British claymation characters, and it is an apt description.  It is not hard to see how this dweeby couple would be star struck.  It is also not hard to see how they would experience themselves as simultaneously superior to these characters whose antics betray levels of shallowness that compete with the Himalayas.  Every time LeBlanc or his pals do something low – they top it with something even more astoundingly low.

So what is the fascination?  With Rocky Horror, it’s clear.  Sex – as messy and dirty and confusing as it is – especially when we start bending genders – is still sex.  We are built to be drawn to it.  Brad and Janet’s prim personas soon drop away and they, like we, revel in what the “creatures of the night” have to offer.  How is it that Matt LeBlanc – the least interesting of the pretty banal group of white kids that hung out in New York together in Friends those many years ago – holds any fascination at all?  I fear that it may have to do with a crazy identification with him.  I think that he is a bit like us.

“Hold on,” you may say, “are you saying that you feel like one of the beautiful people – one the vacuous beautiful people?  You aren’t that pretty, pal.”  True.  And I don’t play basketball well either, but I still dream of being Michael Jordan.  But it’s more than identification based on wishing to be like.  I think we are, in odd ways, quite close to the essence of the Matt LeBlanc that Matt LeBlanc plays in this dramedy.

I am fond of pointing out to anyone who will listen, that we are the most privileged people to have ever walked the earth.  Queen Victoria – Alexander the Great – Louis the XVth – have very little on us.  For one thing, we have indoor plumbing and none of them – with the possible exception of the Queen in her dotage – did.  We can also fly.  In fact, we can get from city to city faster than any of them could, whether by land, sea or air, and in much greater comfort.  And when we get there, we can find accommodations that they could not have imagined – and we don’t have to carry bring along a whole retinue - we can stick a few things in an overnight bag and go.  We live in homes that are warmer – and cooler – than any of them did.  We are living (perhaps not sustainably, but still…) better than anyone in history has ever lived.

So, while Matt LeBlanc, like Queen Victoria, has no idea where his sheets are kept – we (who wash and put away our own sheets, thank you very much), like Matt and the Queen, command more luxury than our grandparents could have imagined.  And what are we doing with that?  How are we using it to serve the greater good?  Do we appreciate it?  Do we wake up in awe each morning that our homes are reasonably clean, dry and temperate?  That we eat fresh food that comes from halfway around the world?  Nah, we complain that the oranges we bought last week are going moldy or that our internet connection is lousy or that we ran into too many red lights on the way into work this morning.

When we see through Sean and Beverly’s eyes what Matt and his ilk are up to, we are, I think, gazing at a fun-house mirror version of ourselves.  We see a pampered group of people who are so concerned about getting their own cut of whatever pie is being cut up that they don’t actually taste the pie – they don't have a clue just how damn good it is.

OK, but it is not just a mirror.  We are, as Hannah Gadsby points out, looking at the people who are responsible for our stories – for the narratives that we carry around inside of us and that will give order and meaning to the lives we lead.  And these people – perhaps oddly reflecting us – are as distracted by things like texts and pettiness as we are.  As a neighbor recently pointed out to me when I was complaining about the political state of affairs while walking the dog – we are living in Rome, not Athens.  We are not the beacon shining bright to gather others in – we are self-absorbed idiots in search of even greater creature comforts - and a good fight at the Coliseum.

As I was writing this piece in my head, I thought to myself – if people have read other posts, they will wonder what has happened to the irrepressible optimist who wrote at least some of them.  The more psychologically minded might wonder if that fellow is depressed.  Well, all is not currently jolly around here – locally, regionally, or nationally – but I think this show and its craving for me (I don’t desire IT - IT wants me to watch and admire it) – evokes an awareness of the finitude of narrative – of the limits of the story about the human condition to lift ourselves above the human condition.  It does not quite have that power.  We are always – in fact, we are always more deeply – human.  We are drawn to sex and creature comforts – and to believing that whatever we are interested in at this very moment is the most interesting thing ever.

Thank goodness Beverly and Sean are lurking around the corner – noticing what we are doing, calling us on it, and writing about it (and the writing on this show is very good).  Perhaps, in addition to being sucked in and drowning in the saccharine sweetness of it all, we can also laugh at ourselves a bit – step back – and take a moment to appreciate that this is a pretty wonderful world that we live in – the one that’s just outside our own craniums.

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Blogging about Blogging II: The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Articulates His Blogging Envy and Concerns about Net Neutrality

I have been blogging for about six years and wrote about the process of blogging four years ago.  This is an extended postscript to that, but it is informed by having written a post in a very different environment and also by some interest in the disappearance of net neutrality.   First things first.  With some nudging, I wrote a heavily edited piece for the American Psychoanalytic Association’s blog, one that is on the Psychology Today blog site and with my real life name as the byline.  My initial version of the post – they asked me to write about dreaming after refusing my first offering to explain what psychoanalysis is (here) – was considered way too wordy and was not catchy enough.   

The intention of the feedback about my first attempt at a dream post (here) was to make the post more attractive to the average blog user.  The feedback from the editors (isn’t a blog supposed to a reasonably immediate and spontaneous reaction to the world?) was not scathing - they wanted me to retitle the piece – to call it 7 Reasons you should interpret your dreams – or something like that - and to create more white space on the page – and for God’s sake (they said) use less words. The intent was to make the material more visually appealing, especially for people accessing the blog from their phones, which is the way that people increasingly read blog posts these days.

In addition to offering suggestions about what I should do, they moved my words around in ways that sometimes didn't make sense to me – the coherence of the piece was lost.  So I rearranged my now fewer words to get some coherence and tried to reinsert ideas that I thought were important to the overarching idea of the piece, and I used their proposed outline of 7 reasons.  The resulting piece, I thought, was fine, but a bit fluffy, at least when I sent it off (you can judge for yourself - I included it at the end of this post).

 

The central concern I had when I reread the fluffier dream post on an official blog site with my name attached was that it gives the impression that learning to interpret your own dreams is pretty easy.  In the post, I reported that we (a co-teacher and I) had good luck getting students to interpret dreams in a class.  When I have talked with others who have tried to accomplish dream interpretation with a class, they want to know how we did it because they have not had a similar experience.  I don’t know if the process we used will work in other settings, or, if we repeat it, with another class – but it is a process that includes readings about dream interpretation and practicing by interpreting other people’s dreams and interpreting literature as a dream of the author before starting in on interpreting, with the help of classmates and teachers, one’s own dreams.

   

The point is that writing a post that is light, fluffy and engaging can mislead people who will then be frustrated when they wake up in the morning and are puzzled by dream symbols that they don’t feel they have the skills to interpret (because they don’t in fact have those skills).  It might make for good reading and also, though, disappointment if people want to execute the process.  But, because this might be exactly what people want to hear, according to my editor, they will be drawn into reading the piece and, after all, isn’t that the point?

I was recently told that Psychology Today decided to feature the edited dream post on their website – they chose to put it out there for their 1.7 million follower’s on Facebook.  This will, based on past results, likely result in somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 page views of the post.  Wow.  To put that into context, I have been blogging for six years as the Reluctant P.  I have a total of 130,000 page views of over 200 posts.  My most popular post has about 3,500 views that have been garnered over the course of five years.  So, 10,000 views in the first month of a post? Wow.

As evidenced by the last paragraph, part of blogging is the feedback loop that comes from the statistics that are gathered.  In a recent Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, Jerry Seinfeld talked about not understanding how novelists and other writers work.  As a stand-up comedian, he gets immediate feedback about the quality of his jokes – people laugh or they don’t.  If someone writes a bestseller – why?  What is it about the piece that led the people at Psychology Today to nominate my post to be headlined on their website?  I don’t know.  What leads people to read this Reluctant P. post but not that one?  I don’t always know.  Sometimes I am able to discover what people have searched for and that helps (and sometimes there is little other material out there about a topic), but which posts are the ones that readers get excited enough to browse for other posts at the end of their reading?  I don’t know.  All I have is the gross numbers.

I also don’t know why the Psychology Today editors chose to highlight the piece on Facebook.  Is part of the reason the post was selected was that it was short?  Was it because it was suggesting that a hard thing is easy, and that it was therefore sexy?  Should my posts follow this pattern?  I am not willing to mislead people in exchange for more readers – which leads me to wonder why I was willing to do that when I actually put my name to it.

But I think another reason is that it was on a very different platform – whether it was featured on the Facebook page or not, it likely would have garnered more views than a similar post on the Reluctant P. site, which is stand alone.  More insidiously, the Reluctant Psychologist site has been losing readers.  People are not coming to the site at the rate they were.  My paranoid self wonders if the timing of this is related to the ending of the net neutrality laws.  Has Google changed their algorithm to include in the rankings of sites that those that have advertising (which mine has not had to this point) would be rated below those that have ads?  This is my hypothesis.

 

The data that I have to this point is limited.  One of the things that I can access is where searches are coming from.  In the history of my site, the ratio of hits from the US has been 50 to 1 over the next country – Canada – and 100 to one over the country after that – England.  But in the past month, there have only been four times as many hits from the US as from Canada.  I think this is a little fishy.  But it is not proof.  I also don’t know whether the decrease in hits might have to do with factors other than including ads – the ads that Google would supply to me would, I think, probably not raise great revenues for them – then again, every dollar, or penny in the case of clicks, is a penny in the Google bank.

So, I have been thinking about an experiment (at the risk of repulsing my readers and – perhaps more to the point having them get bored with what I write and clicking to sites that would advertise on mine – thus losing them forever).   In this experiment, I will add ads to my site, and see what happens to traffic.  After they’ve been around for a while, I will get rid of them (apparently it will cost me ten bucks to do that) and we’ll see if things change after that.  If the traffic goes up then down, I’ll bring them back on board, to prove the relationship. 

Even if the ads bring in readers, should I keep the ads?  Psychology Today wants short posts – people can’t attend to longer material is the implication.  Am I contributing to this by including flashing doohickeys that will distract the reader from reading my post – and send them careening off to another corner of the internet?  Isn’t the point of psychoanalysis to engender deeper rather than more surface engagement with material that is, or should be, enthralling?  At what point does this medium, one that helps me connect with people about something I care deeply about (despite my ambivalence) actually interfere with the intended communication?  

The insidious concern is that we are driving ourselves to distraction.  By building a world that is filled with more and more shiny objects there is more opportunity to engage with that world (I am, btw, all in favor of that), but engaging deeply - and learning how to follow a train of thought without being distracted into another area - is the real gift of analysis.  I believe that when people are freely associating they are able to follow a thought to its roots, to not be distracted, in the case of neurosis, by defensive functions and, in the case of being an engaged reader or thinking, not being distracted by stray thoughts that are not central to the thesis.  Great works of art and of thought involve immense effort as people work to articulate what is at the heart of a given complex matter.  For us to truly follow them there requires more than skimming a wikipedia article about the topic - it involves immersing ourselves in it - of being quietly connected to a living, breathing person, idea or experience and resonating with it.  I fear that we are building a culture that is, from stem to stern, opposed to this lofty but difficult to achieve goal.

  

By the way, I’m under no delusions – adding a few ads will not give me the power of Psychology Today – they have a stable of people writing – and managing their content and web presence.  They know what their readers want (that said, I have taken some satisfaction in the rejected post – the one on what psychoanalysis is – having been my “best seller” of the last few months).  I have added below the content of the material that ended up in the Psychology Today post – if you are curious to compare…  

[Post script:  I am somewhat relieved that when I tried to add ads to this blog I was rejected.  The robot that makes decisions did not include reasons for the rejection, though did encourage me to resubmit when I had fixed the problems.  When I wrote to Google about this as a quandary, they responded that they could not individually respond to emails...  So, I am stuck with my paranoid ruminations - I can't perform my experiment.  But at least I preserve the uncluttered reading space.]

7 Reasons You Should be Interpreting Your Dreams

How to get to know your unconscious self

As we age the things that we desire from life become more complicated. Sometimes we want things that don’t feel right to us.   For example, we may want our boss’s job.  If she knew that, it could get us into trouble. So we hide that desire from both our boss and from ourselves.

Instead of talking or thinking about taking that job, we might dream about beating someone at a game.  The person that we beat would resemble the boss in some important way, but also NOT resemble the boss in some other important way.  Our unconscious recognizes the symbolized person as being equal to the boss, feels satisfied by the dream, and lets us continue to sleep because our secret wish is being gratified. 

Dreaming is a very complicated activity. According to Sigmund Freud, the goal of a dream is to satisfy those desires that we can’t even voice, much less work towards satisfying, when awake. This means that we need to decode our dreams in order for them to reveal our unconscious wishes. This is not always easy! 

Dreams Are Not Just Random

In a class I teach on dream interpretation students are asked to bring in their own dreams to analyze. Every time a student presents their dream something similar happens.  As dreamers begin to analyze their dreams they describe the process as “unnerving”.  They thought they were bringing meaningless dreams to class, but the dreams end up having important and relevant information about what is currently going on in their life and about their wishes and desires.  Each student discovers that their dreams are not just random, but have important meanings.

For instance, a student had dreamt about being on a luxury liner that she was swimming on and off of.  As she began associating and had supportive ideas from her classmates, she began to think about this as representing her family: a vehicle that had carried her to this point, but one that she was increasingly “swimming away from” as she began to direct her own life.

Dreams can be unsettling

When a dream is interpreted, it can reveal something that is very disturbing. For example, we may discover that we are in a relationship with someone who reminds us in very important ways of a parent and wonder whether we have married our mother or father. There may be an uncomfortable moment that this person is too close or too familiar – that there is something incestuous about the relationship. Thus, dreams can reveal uncanny, extraordinary and unexpected aspects of ourselves.

Here are 7 reasons why it is important to interpret your dreams:

1.           Take advantage of your dreams. You dream every night. When you wake up and think about a dream, you have an opportunity to access a product of your unconscious.

2.           Dreams are familiar territory.  They are formed, in part, by what has gone on the day before. 

3.           Dreams are not just reiterations of what happened during the day. They also include our actively working on problems that were “insoluble” in the light of day. Some important scientific discoveries occurred as the result of a dream.

4.           Remembering and interpreting your dreams can open up the weird and offbeat parts of yourself that are kept under wraps.

5.           Although we may be unaware of the unconscious, it is revealed in our dreams.  If we understand how the dream is constructed, we can understand something about the part of our minds that we can’t see. 

6.           Dreams are meaningful.  Each of us makes up our own sets of symbols and we use these symbols to hide the meaning of our dreams. So the boat in the dream of the student does not mean that all boats symbolize a family. This is her own idiosyncratic use of the symbol.

7.           The meaning in dreams is hidden because the truths of dreams can be strange and unsettling. Dreams are intended to keep us asleep.  To do this they grant the wishes of the parts of ourselves that want something – and would wake us up to get it.  For example, a child who is hungry will dream of eating something wonderful and this will satisfy them enough that they can stay asleep.

To get started interpreting your own dreams try these:

•            Keep a dream journal by your bed and write down the dream as you wake up.

•            Try to think about the dream soon after having it. The longer you wait the harder it is to remember. 

•            Consider telling the dream to someone who knows you well. It need not be a therapist; a close friend or lover can often see things that are out of your awareness. 

•            Think about your dream as a work of fiction or a poem and try to interpret it as you would a work of art. 

Sweet dreams!

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