Belfast and The Tender Bar: Memoir can hit home differently when it is grounded in love.

Movie Belfast; Movie Tender Bar; Psychology; Psychoanalysis; Memoir; Kenneth Branagh

We watched The Tender Bar, a film directed by George Clooney, a week ago and then watched Belfast, a film written and directed by Kenneth Branagh, this week.  I was struck by the similarities between them: both are films based in memoir; each includes terribly well-acted experiences that occur around and within a boy in the late 1960s/early 1970s (JR (Daniel Ranieri) on Long Island and Buddy (Jude Hill) in Belfast); each boy grows up to be an artist; both boys have a longing for an absent father that is capably filled by family members – a grandfather and, to a lesser extent, a grandmother in each, and JR’s uncle in The Tender Bar; and they are both well-crafted movies following a well-trod path eerily echoing each other.

While both were satisfying movie watching experiences, Belfast had an emotional impact that was seismically more profound than that of The Tender Bar; I was taken aback by the unexpected power of the film, even as I was watching it.  Why, I wondered, is this film affecting me in this way?  Especially because I found myself being critical of it in advance of seeing it and also as it unfolded, how could I be so moved by it?

Both movies are disorienting.  You don’t quite know who is who in the beginning of each.  The voiceover in the Tender Bar introduces the characters and their relationships, but something about the chaotic nature of them – and I think also that Ben Affleck, playing the part of Uncle Charlie Maguire, seemed too clean cut to be as seedy as the character seemed to need to be – and that his performance was such a close reprise of his role in Good Will Hunting that The Tender Bar felt more like a variation on a theme or perhaps déjà vu with prodigious language skills as a substitute for math skills, that it left me a bit disoriented.

Belfast; however – a film about which I only knew that it was a memoir of Kenneth Branagh’s childhood – took my breath away in the opening scene and never quite gave it back.  I came into the film expecting to learn how a great light of the English Stage and Screen learned his craft.  I left with that, but not at all in the way I expected to receive it.

I have always secretly hated Branagh.  I think mostly out of envy.  Why does he have all this talent?  How come he gets to strut and preen on the stage and screen?  It’s ugly of me, I know, but there’s the truth.  Especially when I saw him in the remake of The Orient Express, a film he directed and starred in; the grandiosity of his character seemed to reflect the personal grandiosity that I had sensed emanating from him in perhaps all of his films including his uncut Hamlet (though I won’t rule out the possibility that I projected it onto him).  This is also tinged by my entirely naïve fear that he imagined himself too pretty for Emma Thompson (and I will state that this is completely a projection on my part).

So, I was well prepared to dislike this film, and dislike it I did at the git go.  Naïve not just to Branaugh, I was naïve to Belfast as a historical place.  When the camera jumped the wall from present day Belfast – a small port city with shipbuilding capacity, a modest but clearly modern skyline, with a certain gritty but likeable exterior to the Belfast of the late 1960s, portrayed in black and white, with streets so clean they had to be a movie set and an idyllic neighborhood where everyone knew each other and was looking out for each other, I thought, “Here we go, this feels like we’re in the cleaned up New York of the original West Side Story and Officer Krupke is just around the corner…”

What was just around the corner, of course, was harrowing.  The Troubles emerge and spoil the idyll.  And the tension in the film revolves around the ways in which the family is torn by its attachment to the Belfast they have grown up in – articulated most clearly by the boy’s mother Ma (Caitríona Balfe) and by Buddy himself – and by the wish to get the hell out – articulated by the boy’s father, Pa (Jamie Dornan)  who works in England and comes home only every other weekend and us – the audience – who fear for Buddy’s (and everybody else’s) life.

One of the differences between the two films is the personality of the boy at the center of it all.  Each boy has a close relationship with his mother – and, in the absence of the father (the boy in The Tender Bar’s father is The Voice on your AM dial, calling out the hits on various New York Radio Stations which JR listens to on his radio at roughly the same time that Buddy is in Belfast listening to orders from police through megaphones), each boy gets wisdom, including and especially about women, from a relative. 

It is not clear what JR does with the wisdom he gleans.  Unlike in Belfast, we get to see him operate as young man (played by Tye Sheridan).  Here he can take the weary worldly wise attitude of uncle Charlie and direct it at the parents of the girlfriend who has just jilted him in her family home – and he dismisses her parents as cruelly as she has just dismissed him.  But he, like his uncle, can’t seem to take his own advice and stays stuck in adoring an inconstant lover – a lover as inconstant as his father has been.  His task – the coming of age that he must achieve – is to harness the powers of observation that his younger self used to create stories and pursue his art (writing), rather than to pursue a career (writing) that will impress his lover.

Let me explain the last sentence in the last paragraph.  One of my dear friends from childhood, the drummer in the band that I played with in High School, is a professional musician.  When he and I met recently for lunch, we talked and I was impressed with his success (trust me, it is remarkable).  He was lamenting, though, being a professional musician.  He writes and performs music to meet other’s needs and he is handsomely paid for doing that.  But he is also not free.  He envies the busker who opens his guitar case, plays his songs for whatever people will pay, and plays whatever he chooses.  What he told me was that guy – the busker – declares himself an artist.  He said, “I, on the other hand, write and play what people tell me too.”

Now, don’t get me wrong.  The author of the book from which the movie was made (JR Moehringer) has to create stories that his agent and his editor believe will sell (and, I just discovered, he has earned a Pullitzer for his reporting – so the wish to be an artist rather than a professional is apparently an unachieved dream).  And my friend plays – and plays with – and creates – music.  He is an artist.  But the freedom of coming of age – the sense of owning one’s own destiny (rather than being constantly in debt to bookies, as Uncle Charlie is, and forever in love with an unloving paramour, as JR appears to escape from) is the hoped for experience of this movie.

The theme of Belfast, though, is sad rather than hopeful.  While Buddy’s Pa tries to lure Ma to take the family to Nova Scotia or Perth, Buddy overhears them and processes what he hears with his grandfather.  Unlike Uncle Charlie’s scattershot advice about managing women, Buddy’s grandpa has an endearingly romantic notion of what it means to be in love, and he enacts this with his wife (played fetchingly by Dame Judith Dench), Pa enacts it with Ma, and Protestant Buddy enacts it in his achingly earnest courtship of Catherine, the Catholic girl for whom he tries to master maths so as to be able to earn the seat across from her.  To achieve freedom, but more importantly safety, Buddy (and Pa and Ma and his older brother) must leave behind much that they love.  

The relationships in Belfast are built on more solid foundations than those depicted in The Tender Bar.  The protagonists in each movie make use of what they are given as a launching pad that propels them far.  Each takes their own character (Buddy, unlike JR, is not primarily an observer – he acts – meaning that he emulates his father’s drive to more actively chart the arc of his life (including by getting caught up in the troubles in his own 9 year old way) and we know this will take him far and to a place that is consonant with who they are as people.

Perhaps in my harsh judgement of Branagh, I am emulating JR.  Invited into Branagh’s home and feeling jilted by my envy of his talent and opportunities, I have chosen to devalue them as JR devalued his girlfriend’s home.  Perhaps Branagh’s skill and opportunity rests on a solid foundation that, no matter how idealized it may be in the rosy hues of hindsight, provides him with the pluck of the truly joyful kid whose life has been tempered by learning, all too early, how dear and fragile that joy is and how dependent it is on loving the people in your life.  His action, sharing that love with actors on screen - and therefore with those of us who connect with him (when we aren't feeling too much envy), connects us to something essential about who it is that he is - something that all the ugliness of The Troubles and the complications of the roles he has played on stage and screen, and also in life, cannot shake out of him.    

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COVID Chronicles XXV: What, No Snow Days?

 COVID, Selye Stress Response Syndrome, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Strain in the University

It is February of 2022, roughly the second anniversary of our discovery of the COVID-19 virus (and two years since a go round that I had with a very serious cold that knocked me out for the better part of a month – could it have been COVID?).  We are still trudging forward – the omicron strain has been infectious enough that it doesn’t seem to have anyone new to infect.  We continue to mask on campus, though we are all required to be vaccinated and the students do not mask at the basketball games.  Many of them have also quit making use of the on campus health facility because if they are found to have COVID, they are put in quarantine and not allowed to go to class.  To their credit, many of them are self-quarantining until they believe themselves to be safe…

Last weekend I was talking to a colleague from Vienna, and he reports that it is against the law in Austria not to be vaccinated.  To this point, they have not been enforcing the law, but in a month or two they will levy a fine of 600 Euros on anyone who is not vaccinated, perhaps on a monthly basis.  He predicts that, if this occurs, there will be violent rioting in the streets, and I don’t doubt it.  Denmark, meanwhile, has lifted all restrictions.  These two wildly different positions clarify that we simply don’t know whether the pandemic has become an endemic or whether we are creating exactly the right conditions for the virus to become really virulent.  Time will tell.

In the meantime, I am quarantined at home by a blanket of snow.  The University is closed, but classes are being held – sort of.  The mandate from the administration is that classes must be asynchronous.  That means that we are not allowed to hold classes by zoom at the appointed time.  Now you may have had to read that last sentence twice.  It is senseless.  We have been holding zoom classes as a means of surviving the pandemic.  We are not able to get to school, so what are we to do?  In the old days, class would be cancelled, we would adjust the material to be covered and announce the changes at the next class.  But we no longer live in those times.  Nature cannot prevent us from meeting now, we have technology.

So why can’t we use zoom?  The logic here is twisted, so I will try to explain it as best I am able, but I’m not sure I’ve got it.  In an attempt to be responsive to students and faculty who may have other things going on when a snow day occurs (such as caring for children – or going sledding, perhaps, in the case of our undergrads), synchronous classes will not be held.  Instead, on a day when lots of other things may be going on, we are to come up with a new assignment, tape a lecture which can be viewed at anytime, and create a meaningful activity for our students to do.  We should not hold zoom classes because for those students who can’t go to zoom classes because their professors are unable to provide them, they may feel they are not getting what their peers are getting.

There are all kinds of problems with this logic.  The most problematic aspect is that the administration should know what kind of pedagogical engagement should be used for our students at a particular, unpredictable moment in the semester – to know that it is anything but zoom (though implicitly, because others would be jealous, it is likely to be zoom) – and we should be able to create that exact needed asynchronous learning opportunity with no notice while managing the other fallout from a snow day. 

It’s exhausting to complain about this.  How much tone deafness can a faculty that is already beleaguered tolerate?  The irony is that this is the first salvo from a new administration, one that we thought would be friendlier and more supportive than the last (and, at least in their imagination, they appear to be attempting to be just that).  The problem with both administrations is the assumption that college professors need to be told how to teach their classes – that they can’t be trusted to create the best possible experience for their students at a given moment based on the circumstances.  Or, from a more paranoid position, that we won’t object to working on a day that nature has told us to take off because we are so angry about how we are being told to work…

I must admit that I feel some sympathy for people who are trying to exert control after having been out of control for two years.  How did I exert control?  I held two classes by zoom, recorded them, and told the students who did not attend that their assignment was to watch the recording.  I provided both synchronous and asynchronous learning opportunities.  Most importantly, I provided the best possible means of delivering what was needed by those students at this point in the semester in each class. The material in each class was dependent on interactions between the teacher and the students.  Those who couldn’t attend can watch that interaction take place – not as good as being there, but better to see their peers engaging than to be lectured at about something that requires participation.

 Perhaps they will fire me for it.  A peer provided me with the link to a video of a professor’s “welcoming” his students to class where he clarified that he experienced the students he was being forced into the classroom to teach as “virus vectors” and encouraged them to stay home and watch him teach.  After the video went viral, his school fired him – and he had tenure!  Perhaps they will fire those of us who don’t join the great resignation, and they can have all the control, and teaching responsibilities, themselves.

Near the beginning of the pandemic, I referenced Hans Selye’s stress response curve, not as a means of understanding our response to infection by the virus, but as a means of understanding our response to the social consequences of the virus.  I obviously think that is a potentially useful application of that curve, but I am also aware that it is a means of understanding acute stress – the kind of stress that a virus puts on an individual’s system.  Especially as the pandemic has extended, the strain has become chronic, and the effects of that are both more subtle, but I think also, perhaps, more pernicious.  I was talking with a friend about this and wondering if we know what the social consequences will be and he rightly stated that we don’t even know what the impact of this has been on each of us.

In a recent meeting of the faculty as a whole, it was clear that there was great dissatisfaction with the position that we are in.  The administration (as in this post) became a lightning rod for that dissatisfaction.  Members of the benefits committee noted that they had requested that the administration provide N95 masks for faculty to wear in addition to the two fabric masks they provided at the beginning of the pandemic.  The incommensurability of the level of dissatisfaction and the laughably small, but likely unobtainable remediation was a poignantly visible marker of how much work we have to do to recover from the chronic strain of, for instance, managing the fear that we will die by entering the classroom - something that we have then distanced ourselves from, as if that fear wasn't very real - because we did not, in fact, die.

If I were to think catastrophically about this (and one of my nicknames within the family is captain catastrophe), I think that climate change is nature’s desperate attempt to regain equilibrium.  The intense storms that we are seeing are a way of releasing the excess heat that has built up in reaction to the greenhouse effect.  The virus (as if it were a sentient being, and not a barely alive and so small as to be invisible agent) might be trying to rid the planet of the perpetrators of this overheating and habitat destroying monster. 

Even if this is not the case, I do wonder whether it is wise to ignore nature’s call to slow down – take a day off – and go sledding with the kids.  Our continuing to become more and more isolated from the natural world – to stay in our rooms and study harder – promotes further isolation from an awareness of the ways in which we are products and citizens of the environment.  More than that, we have been entrusted to be stewards, and when we emulate university administrators and attempt to exert too much control over that environment rather than recognizing that it has its own rules and methods of managing situations, it appears likely we will pay a very heavy price for our hubris.

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

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), please try using the service at the top of the page.  I have had difficulty with these and am looking for something better, but these are what I have at this moment. 

For other posts on COVID:

I:       Apocalypse Now  my first posting on COVID-19.

II:      Midnight in Paris  is a jumping off point for more thinking about COVID.  (Also in Movies).

III:    Hans Selye and the Stress Response Syndrome.  COVID becomes more normal... for now.

IV:    Letter on the occasion of a Town Hall Meeting

V:      COVID craziness at the University continues with no end in sight.

VI:    Get back in that classroom  Paranoid ruminations.

VII:   Why Shutting Classes Makes Fiscal Sense A weak argument

VIII: Catholic Social Teaching Marshaled to support Rationalization...

IX:    What will school look like?

X:     Denial is not just a river in Egypt...

XI:    Back in the Classroom

XII:  Labor Day is for WORK!

XIII: Ennui

XIV. Where, Oh Where have my in-person students gone?  Split zoom classes in the age of COVID.

XV.  The First Complete COVID Semester is Done.

XVI.      More of the Same: The Second COVID Semester begins.

XVII.     Surviving the First Year of COVID: Will education be the same?

XVIII.    I miss my mask?

IXX.      Bo Burnham's Inside Commentary on the commenter.

XX.       The Olympics Mark the Oddness of the Time In Between.

XXI.      It's baaaack...  Joy and Horror and Maybe a Little Bit of Hope

XXII.     The Great Resignation Hits Home

XXIII.    The Great Resignation (cont.): A Family Reunion

XXIV.    COVID in the Classroom: The Great Dis-integrator

XXV.     First COVID, Now No Snow Days?

XXVI.   Not with a Bang but a Whimper: COVID is over... or is it?

XXVII.  Post COVID (we can hope) reflections on morale and morals...

XXVIII. How will we move on from our Empire of Pain? (Also in books)

XXIX.    A New Year's reminiscence.

    

Jane Campion's The Power of the Dog: Gender not Sexuality is Key to Understanding the Film

 Jane Campion, The Power of the Dog, Gender Roles, Sexuality, Film, Psychoanalysis, Psychology

This film is jarring and scary.  Part of what makes it scary is that there is a sense that it is kludged together – that it is not a seamless film that is going to tell us a nice tight narrative – but rather there is something horrific about it, as if we thought we were going to see a Western, but instead we are watching something like the Texas Chainsaw Massacres.  And, btw, this is a Jane Campion movie – what are we doing in Montana with a bunch of men?

In the opening scene, if we can call it that, we have a voiceover of an unseen boy promising that, in the absence of his father, he will protect his mother.  We are then thrown into an odd world.  Two men; brothers, live in the same bedroom in twin beds.  One of them, Phil Burbanck (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a rough and ready cowhand who looks the part – slim and ruggedly handsome.  The other, George (Jesse Plemons – in a part that is strangely reminiscent of the part he played in the creepy film I'm Thinking of Ending Things) is pudgy – his brother calls him fatso – and, as the movie unfolds, George is reticent and we aren’t sure if it is because he has nothing to say or because he is a bit dim-witted.

The two brothers, it turns out, have been running a very successful cattle ranch for 25 years and we join them on their annual driving of the cattle to market (I don’t think this is ever spelled out – it just seems to be something that we should know from having watched Westerns.  It is as if we are somehow more in the know than we should be, and in this I think it is a signal that we are in a dreamscape).  The brothers, their cattle, and the hired hand cowboys show up in a three building town to spend the night.  They trundle into the whorehouse while Rose Gordon (Kirsten Dunst) the widow inn and eating house owner next door, who has been warned that they are coming, prepares for them by turning her son out of his bedroom so that she can rent it out and preparing to feed this army of men in addition to the usual cadre of folks from around here.  Her son, Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is making paper flowers, with which she decorates the tables that he will wait on.

When the men are a bit liquored up and excited about the potential of whoring, they come to the boarding house where Phil mercilessly bullies Peter before using one of Peter’s flowers to light his cigarette.  Peter – or Pete as Phil mockingly calls him – is thin, gawky, and, like the flowers that he has made, delicate looking.  In a word he is feminine.  And Phil tears into him, with the boys behind him, treating him as men have treated sissies from time immemorial. 

I was not surprised to learn from an interview that Campion was doing dream work during the making of this movie.  The settings are stark.  The music is discordant.  The interior of the house that Phil and George live in seems much larger than the exterior would suggest it could be.  Peter’s appearance is unsettling – he appears to be a mark and incredibly unaware of that – in a way that is dangerous.  The foundation of everyone’s life in the film seems shaky – perhaps especially Mr. cocksure Phil.  And the plot moves forward with the kinds of gaps in it that are the hallmarks of dreams.

Much to the dismay of Phil, George starts courting the widow Rose.  Phil’s overt objection is that she is just after their money.  We are aware, though, that Phil does not want to lose George – his partner.  George may not be swift – he is certainly taciturn – but he knows how to plow through Phil’s bullying and, in short order, he is married, Pete is packed off to boarding school, and he and Rose are happy.  George is tearful about their happiness and Rose is lovely in her affection for him.  Then they show up at the ranch where Phil makes Rose’s life miserable, especially when George is away.

To this point in the narrative, I have left out perhaps the most important character – Bronco Henry.  Bronco Henry never appears onscreen because he has been dead for 25 years.  Bronco Henry taught ranching to Phil and George and he was a legendary cowboy – especially in Phil’s mind.  Phil has preserved Bronco Henry’s saddle and regularly mentions his feats of derring-do and also his deep store of wisdom.

When school is out, Pete returns to the ranch to find his mother drinking all the time and scared, not just of Pete, but of her own shadow as Phil mercilessly and subtly bullies her – and now Pete.  But Pete discovers something about Phil – and Bronco Henry.  They were lovers – and the ultra-macho Phil is a closeted gay man.  Phil does not know that Pete knows about his sexuality or his experiences of Bronco Henry.  Phil is simply angry that Pete has discovered Phil’s sanctuary, and Phil chases him off calling him a bitch – one of his favorite denunciations of man and beast when he is angry.

Phil has now become a much more interesting character.  We learn that he was Phi Beta Kappa at Yale, when the governor comes for dinner, but he has repudiated that identity and he doesn’t show up on time because he is too “dirty”.  When does he arrive, it is with a mean spirit and the pretense of not being good enough company for civilized people.  He exposes her as fraudulent – and himself as superior – in a clear rejection of the feminine that she represents and that we know he hides within himself.  He is more interesting, but continues to be boorish.  The very picture of toxic masculinity.

An interesting dance ensues.  Phil continues to needle Pete, but he also spends an increasing amount of time courting him, teaching him about ranching and about being a man – handing down wisdom from Bronco Henry to Pete.  We watch, enthralled and concerned (with Rose), as Phil draws Pete into his orbit.  What possible good can come from this alliance?  We fear, as we imagine Rose does, that Pete will, like Rose, be defenseless against Phil’s strength.

So I think this film becomes an important battleground, testing whether our feminine or masculine selves will dominate.  What gives a soul grit – to conger up another film about the west?  Campion seems to be asking whether we are going to remain captive to toxic masculinity which, in this depiction, is fueled by the denial of the feminine within.  In playing the parts, Cumberbatch (Phil) and Dunst (Rose) agreed not to meet on set except in scenes where they were working together.  It was as if (in my mind) Cumberbatch experiencing affection for Dunst would derail him from an ability to portray the hatred of her as representative of the disowned aspects of Phil’s character.  Coming to know the feminine, in other words, would threaten Cumberbatch’s ability to hate it.

Phil’s love for Bronco Henry – something that he highly values and publicly depicts in idealized masculine portraits – unleashes self-hatred.  Our dependency makes us vulnerable – in Phil’s case, to being left by George (and having been left by Bronco Henry with his death).  That he needs others (other than the gone and therefore capable of being perfect Bronco Henry) is a deeply etched character flaw that he would rid himself of – if only he could.  His self-loathing, then, is less about his sexuality and more about his femininity.  He wants to kill and distance himself from that, and offers to teach Pete how to be a man – so that Pete, like Phil, can master this inner feminine demon.

Pete, on the other hand, who is in love with Rose, is able to nurture his feminine self.  He uses his femininity to his advantage.  He reads Phil and we (or I, at any rate) surmise that Phil is hungry – and hungry for something that Pete has to offer.  What is that?  I think that Phil, more than anything, wants to become Bronco Henry – and Pete is the person with whom he can do that.  Phil crafts a lariat so that he can train Pete in the ways of being a cowboy with the tool that he himself has crafted.

One of the lovely things about this film is our uncertainty about the extent to which Pete is being seduced and the extent to which he is not.  We know, on one level, from the opening voiceover, what the outcome of this film will be.  But the ways in which Pete uses Phil’s woundedness, both physically and psychologically, to protect his mother – and his love for her - is both subtle and wondrous to behold.  We discover the true strength of a man (who looks like a boy) who has seen and dealt with loss – not as Pete has by denying it and falsely and incompletely idealizing someone that is gone, but by dealing straightforwardly with that loss, looking it straight in the face, and choosing the aspects of the identification to preserve.

The man who emerges victorious in this film – the man who is able to preserve love in a harsh and brutal world – is the man who is most deeply and authentically engaged with both his masculine and feminine selves.  It is the man who integrates the gendered aspects of himself to retain the connections that matter to him, even when those connections are unreliable.  This man is autonomous not because he has cut himself off from others and from parts of himself, but because he has integrated his relationships to others and to those parts of himself and made peace with them, as unsettling as that process is – and as unsettling as the actions that process unleashes are.   

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

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Anthony Doerr's Cloud Cuckoo Land - Is Dreaming of Eden Good for Us?

 

Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Novel

Cloud Cuckoo Land is a very long book (over 600 pages) by a Pulitzer Prize winning author that has a central concern the issue of climate change.  In this, it would seem to closely resemble a very long book that won the Pulitzer Prize, The Overstory.  Both books also use a similar approach of following different characters through the arc of the book with the connections between the characters unfolding across the course of the novel.  Despite their surface similarities, these two books lead to vastly different experiences for the reader.

That Cloud Cuckoo Land is so long is somewhat ironic in that the tale that lends the book its title – presumably a tale created by the author but attributed to a lost classical writer – Diogenes – is quite short.  The translation of the story, by one of the characters in the novel, is included as one of the threads that makes up the interweaving stories of the characters – characters that span classical times to the 1400s to current days and into the future.  And I think each of the characters in each of the stories, could, in his or her own way, be read as living the tale of Cloud Cuckoo Land.

The length of this book, if you have not read it, should not scare you off.  It is a page turner.  You will be done with it before you know it (and there are a lot of blank pages – it isn’t really 600 pages long…).  Besides, we are in the middle of a pandemic, retreating from another surge, and this book will give you lots to think about that surge and the process of being isolated.  It will also, in contrast to The Overstory, reassure you.  Somewhat.

I hesitate to say that.  Part of what is delightful about this book is the suspense that hangs in the air – we do not know how things will turn out for any of the protagonists for long stretches of time.  I will try not to undercut that by doing big reveals – but this book is a story told by a master storyteller about the power of a story to transform peoples’ lives.  It is an ode to the story and to its value.

The story that the storyteller has chosen to put at the center of the entire tale is a comedy – it (theoretically) comes from the lost trove of comedies from Ancient Greece and may be the earliest novel, a form of art that the Greeks, who excelled at so many things, failed to master.  The did, however, get comedy.  And the art of the comedy is not to make us laugh, but to help us live in the world.  It, like tragedy, cannot transform our world into something that it is not – even if its protagonist can be turned into a mule and then into a crow by witches.  Just as the witches in MacBeth foretell a story that humans must act out, so the witches in this story tell an allegory that people act out in the various ways that they do within the interwoven tales.

I found myself feeling that the author was being self-serving – he was advertising for his craft by making up a story that includes the positive outcomes that one can expect from stories.  He has a singular way of doing this.  The threads in the sub-stories do not so much weave a pattern as they are knotted together to form a single strand – and part of the magic of the story telling is the fear that if any of the strands breaks the loves of the people, separated by millennia, will be broken as well.  And yet the string holds.

In this way, this feels more like the impact of psychoanalysis than the impact of group psychotherapy or, frankly, writing or teaching or televangelizing or anything that reaches a broader audience.  At the same time that the author is selling his craft, he is also significantly underestimating its power by focusing on the individuals who are in line to be affected by this story.  Maybe he expects that we will realize, as he, for instance, points to the similarities between his tale and the much better known story of the Odyssey, that the power of the story is being underestimated here.  Or maybe his point is that a single story, known to a very tiny group of people, can have different, but equally powerful effects across millennia, continents, and even space…

Many years ago my mother wondered about my pouring as much energy as I have into learning a craft (psychoanalysis) that I would necessarily be able to practice with only a few people.  My quick response was that I would be practicing with people in positions of power and the effects of my analyses would be felt far and wide.  Well, I don’t know how much that has been the case.  But I do think that the ways that I have learned about how people function, from learning the craft, from my own analysis and from working with my patients, has informed my teaching and my research and hopefully that has had a few ripple effects.  I also, of course, hope that the work with my patients has affected not just them but those around them.  Certainly the lives of the characters are not the primary lives that this author is interested in, but rather the lives of us, the readers.

So, the question becomes, what does the author want us, the reader, to take from this work?  Perhaps he realizes that we don’t have the reach that he does.  But we can, as the characters do, carry the author’s work forward.  Maybe it’s that the experience we have of each story is what matters.  The irony, then, is that this story, as a comedy, allows us to live with the world as it is.  It, in the words of Hannah Gadsby about standup comedy, creates tension (over and over in each of the parallel stories) and then resolves that tension.  We walk away, as we sometimes walk away from a good therapy session, feeling more or less good about ourselves.

It is weird to think, then, that a tragedy does the same thing.  We look deeply into some aspect of ourselves – something that is horrible and disruptive – and we experience catharsis – we see the consequences of our wish for power (in the case of MacBeth, for instance).  But this also leads to a kind of cleansing.  We walk out of the theater, or the book, or the therapy hour clean.  The world is a mess and so is my part in it.  Movies and books that don’t do that – and here I am nominating The Overstory as such a book – are different.  They leave us unsettled and feeling that there is more to do. 

I suppose this suggests something that I found quite disruptive when I was in psychoanalytic class while also being in my own psychoanalysis.  Ed Kohn, who was teaching the class, proposed that the goal of psychoanalysis to teach the analysand – the patient – to engage in self-analysis.  His point was that we will never be perfectly analyzed.  We will always be discovering parts of ourselves that are unknown to us – and we will always be encountering new situations that will try us in new ways. 

I think that both tragedy and comedy don’t quite capture this part of experience.  They reassure us that this mess we are in is like every other mess people have ever been in (in the case of this novel, people have always striven towards Cloud Cuckoo Land – a sort of Eden in the clouds).  And we always fall short of it, but somehow we muddle on.  The Overstory has the ability to leave the reader with the concern that maybe things would not go on as usual – that we might have to do something to prevent a collapse of the entire system…

 

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

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The Lost Daughter: Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Directorial Debut Explores Maternal Cruelty, Guilt, and Resolution

 

Psychoanalysis and Psychology of Film

The Lost Daughter: Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Directorial Debut Explores Maternal Cruelty, Guilt, and Resolution

One of my favorite psychoanalysts, Thomas Ogden, in teaching us how to read other psychoanalysts, give us a single sentence of Donald Winnicott’s to read:

It seems to me that there is in it [the baby’s injuring his or her fingers or mouth by too vigorously sucking his thumb or hand] the element that something must suffer if the infant is to have pleasure: the object of primitive love suffers by being loved, apart from being hated.

In this sentence, Ogden tells us, there is sadness and beauty to the language, particularly in the words “the object of primitive love suffers by being loved.”  I have experienced the forcefulness, and even violence, of my children’s primitive love and their primitive love for me when they were infants – and even now that they are well into adulthood.  I, like most parents, have experienced sleep deprivation, agonizing worry and emotional fraying as a consequence of trying to meet their primitive love with love of my own.  But, as Winnicott is saying in this sentence (in accepting, but unsentimental voice), that is the nature of the beast – the nature of being the object of primitive love.

Winnicott uses the word object in this sentence not in its usual [psychoanalytic] technical sense (i.e. as synonym for a person in the external object world or a figure in the internal object world), but in its everyday sense (the object of the transitive verb love: the object of that kind of love.  More difficult for me to fully and genuinely acknowledge in reading and being read by Winnicott are the ways in which my own primitive love, both as a child and as an adult, has caused others – particularly my parents, my wife, and my children – to suffer.  And that, too, is inescapably the nature of the beast.

Gyllenhaal’s adaptation of Ferrante’s Novel the Lost Daughter is a second meditation (in my mind) on Winnicott’s sentence, one that is wholly in line with Ogden’s interpretation (and experience) of it and my own, but with a bit of added vigorish – it is the experience of being the maternal object, one that is, I believe, deeper, richer, and much more complicated by biology and gender roles than the already complicated task of being the object of paternal love.  As if that weren’t adding enough complexity, it is about the relationship between mothers and daughters.

Having read just one Ferrante novel: The Lying Lives of Adults, I trust that Ferrante’s take on this complex relationship will have an added level of complexity – performing these gymnastics in the context of the Naples mob will up the ante even further.  But Gyllenhaal has written the screen play for American actors (and a Brit) – and then shifted the scene from the Jersey Shore to Greece because of COVID, creating a kludge of a backstory for the characters that somehow, weirdly, works, but certainly in a novel, American, way.

The film unfolds in the present, in Greece, and in flashback in the life of Leda (Olivia Colman in the present, and Jessie Buckley is the flashbacks).  In the present, Leda takes on Nina (Dakota Johnson) as her pseudo daughter.  In the flashbacks, she has two biological daughters, Bianca (aged 7) and Martha (aged 4).

I will tell the story in chronological order, not the order in the film, in order to orient you.  I think the story is told in flashbacks in order to disorient which heightens the experience, but vastly complicates the telling.  I admire Gyllenhaal for much in this film, including the complexity of the storytelling that keeps us off-balance but never loses coherence.

Leda, at about twenty, had her first child.  She was married to a decent enough guy, but their relationship, between the stress of raising two kids while trying to get his academic sounding career and her foray through graduate school going, became largely transactional.  Leda struggled to master Italian, write academic journal articles, and attend to the never ending demands of her daughters.  Leda goes to an academic conference, and one of the leading lights in her field, a handsome and brilliant scholar played by Peter Sarsgaard, recognizes her talent and she starts a torrid affair with him.  She leaves her husband and children, not for this man, but for freedom.  We are told that she returns to the children three years later, but we know the damage has been done.

Twenty years later, Leda takes a break from her job (she now lives in Cambridge and presumably teaches at Harvard) to stay in a ramshackle inn/bed and breakfast in Greece.  There, her solitude is disturbed by a boisterous, huge family of Greeks and Greek Americans who, the beach boy Will (Paul Mescal) tells us, is a bad family (we assume they are the Greek mafia).  She stands up to the boys in the family on multiple occasions, and while we admire her, we think she is foolhardy and vulnerable and we fear for her. 

Leda strikes up a relationship with Nina, a member of the Greek family who has a daughter, Elena, who is about the age Bianca and Martha were in the flashback, and Leda empathizes with, supports and undercuts Nina and her parenting of Elena all at the same time.  She also supports and undercuts Nina’s affair with the beach boy Will. 

The film ends where it begins, with Leda slumping to the sand with an apparent injury.  At the beginning of the film, I took it to be a gunshot wound and kept looking for Leda to piss the boys off enough to kill her.  But her “suicide by cop” is much more satisfying than this.  It is Nina who kills her.  Angry that Leda has stolen Elena’s doll – Nina stabs her with the hatpin that Leda lovingly provided to hold in place the floppy hat Nina’s husband had given her. 

Leda had just confessed that she is a terrible mother.  We know, and Nina can’t, that Leda has had a complicated relationship with the doll.  The doll was stolen when Elena’s daughter went missing because she was angry that Nina was not paying more attention to her.  Leda knew that it was Elena’s favorite doll.  Leda, who is no favorite of the family, finds Elena, much to everyone’s relief (they had feared Elena drowned). 

Elena’s disappearance parallels a period when Bianca had abandoned Leda because Leda was unavailable.  Leda tried to give Bianca the special doll from her childhood – she wanted to share with Bianca an attachment.  Bianca, furious with Leda, defaces the doll and, in a fit of rage, Leda destroys her own doll, tossing it out the window onto the street below.  Elena’s doll becomes a sort of substitute for the lost doll, but by taking it from Elena, she causes Nina the pain that she, Leda herself, felt with an inconsolable child.  Returning the doll at the moment she does, allows Nina to feel betrayed by Leda’s cruelty, just as Bianca did, but Nina is an adult and has the power to act on her fury.

I said the film ended the way it began, but of course it didn’t.  After Leda slumps to the ground, injured, she loses consciousness.  She wakes the next morning as the tide comes in.  An orange – an important means of connecting with Bianca and Martha – materializes in her hand and she calls her daughters and has the kind of warm phone call that mothers and daughters can have (but have not, to this point in the movie).  Leda may be dead.  Whether she is or not, there is a sense that having been liberated from her guilt, she is free to have the kind of exchange that she, and her daughters, could only have dreamed of.

It is easy, from the vantage point of the elder, so say that then, when we were young, and stepping into our relationship with our children would have meant so much to them and to us, that we should have done more of it.  That doesn’t address the intensity of the desire to step into the relationship with our work, or our adult relationships, and the impossibility, at moments, of doing both – or either – as single-mindedly and effectively as we might have.  If we don’t do this now, we feel, we will irreparably damage – what?  We imagine it is both our children and our careers or our loves or whatever else we are pursuing.  By having an affair, by quitting the job, by leaving the marriage to pursue the career, we imagine that we will escape the pressure.  Leda, and Winnicott and Ogden, suggest otherwise.  We cannot love, or be the object of love, without suffering. 

What we suffer is complex.  One part of it is guilt.  The movie would offer us the solace that being paid back in kind for our cruelty will expiate our guilt.  I think that gives the movie a nice wrap, but it doesn’t quite heed Leda’s experience and her words.  There is no cure for the suffering of love.

 

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

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The Great: Camp tells us something about neuropsychoanalysis?

Hulu Series The Great, Catherine the Great, Peter III, Russia, Bingeworthy fare, psychology and psychoanalysis of The Great.

The Hulu series The Great is a campy, anachronistic vision of the beginning of the end of the aristocracy in Europe told from the vantage point of Russia and the 18^th century Tsar, Catherine The Great, but also from 21^st Century views of diversity, equity and inclusion.  More essentially, I viewed it, as I walked through the TV room while the reluctant wife was watching it, as a high budget soap opera carried along mostly by badly choreographed softcore porn. 

Sadly, I became hooked…  but, then, it turned out to be more interesting and to have (some) more depth than it initially appeared to.  The story is originally subtitled “An Occasionally True Story”, but by the end of the second season it is more truthfully subtitled “An Almost Entirely Untrue Story”.  Catherine (Elle Fanning) is a naïve ingénue bartered into marriage by her scheming mother (who has married off two of Catherine’s sisters to kings and has the remaining one in the wings to marry the king of France).  Catherine, raised to rule as a member of the German aristocracy is married to emperor Peter III (Nicholas Hoult), son of Peter the Great.

Peter, to use Freudian vernacular, is pure id.  Never having been constrained and now being the head of a powerful but brutally primitive nation, he is who Trump imagined himself to be: someone who can kill whomever he wants in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue and get away with it.  This Fifth Avenue is, of course, the court of Russia and he is not killing random citizens but members of the court and scheming to kill his new wife, who has nothing but disdain and loathing for him.

Catherine is the ego to Peter’s id.  She is educated and wants to bring this backwards Russian country into, well, the 21^st century.  She wants to curb and redirect the Russian passion towards expressing love rather than simply naked aggression.  She wants to replace superstition with reason and enlightenment.  She is also consistently flabbergasted that Russia attaches itself so powerfully to its primitive and backwards ways.

This morning I was reading an account of the brain as understood by neuropsychoanalysts (Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing – Mark Solms is the titular head of this band of intrepid scientists).  One of the points they made is that we don’t have a single brain – but multiple brains that have very different purposes.  We have an invertebrate brain that becomes hungry, and then a vertebrate brain that knows how to move us from here to there – clumsily at first, but then, as it learns how to navigate the world, with more grace.  The greatest chasm is between our ancient feeling brain and the much more recently acquired conceptual one; the latter can organize and anticipate and, for all intents and purposes it manages the older more primitive one.  All of these brains (and others) are kludged together (I guess kludge is one of those super technical neuropsychological terms).  Antonio Damasio tells us the disparate parts are “mediated” by the hypothalamus – I guess calling fouls when one part of the brain oversteps the bounds of another part – or doesn’t respect its position, but also integrating them, when we are at our best, so that the parts function not as warring factions but as a symphony of complimentary parts.

So this series kludges Catherine and Peter together.  He is full of appetites – sexual, aggressive, and gustatory.  He loves truffles – both hunting and eating them.  He imagines that he truffle hunted with his father – who would in fact begin the truffle hunt, but abandon him to fornicate with whatever lovely had caught his eye that day.  This leaves Peter the son with a hunger for a father figure and, in the age of gender bending, the very, very feminine Catherine may be just the father figure Peter is looking for.

Peter, wanting to live up to the legacy of his father, is a person who has always had great privilege but he also is, in fact, just a spoiled little boy who is cruel and spiteful.  The courtiers who surround him love the power that they might wield as he focuses on his rather narrow and petulant interests, leaving the running of the country to them, but also by his embodying the unbridled passion of Russia.  They want to retain the status quo, one that supports their debauched ways and allows them to live lives that are unrestrained by concern for the citizens of the country – or for the plight of women.  

Catherine, on the other hand, is the embodiment of the enlightenment.  She believes that reason, and love, will conquer aggression and cruelty.  Catherine gathers an odd assortment of allies who are concerned about Peter’s inability to lead.  She convinces some of her group that reason should be the wave of the future, though some go along with her to get rid of the chaos of Peter’s reign.  Together she and her group depose Peter and, though still married to him, she imprisons him in his quarters.

At one point, Peter prevents Catherine from killing him by gifting her Voltaire as a courtier and she is all agog. Catherine begins a school for girls and threatens to free both the serfs and women.  When she impetuously frees the serfs in reaction to her frustration at the pace of introducing real reform, chaos ensues and she is ashamed of not having been better able to control her passions.  Ironic?  You betcha…

While Catherine and Peter are presented as diametrically opposed forces who are the embodiment of very different characters, they are also both human – and are able to appreciate each other and, across time, to recognize themselves in the other.  Church and state also force them to produce an heir and, when they do, Peter’s maternal connection to his son belies who has been to this point.  Meanwhile, Catherine’s rationality and convivial approach to international relations becomes sorely tested and she goes beyond being impetuous to becoming murderous.

Catherine takes on aspects of Peter, though she uses her drives that mirror his to further the dictates of her goals and aspirations.  She becomes, by the end of the second season (when this post is written), a truly duplicitous and therefore effective ambassador.  The vehicle for this transformation, ironically, is her love for Peter.  Meanwhile Peter’s transition to being a loving father and admiring partner is his love for Catherine, something that seems to occur almost in spite of himself.  Of course, despite his attachment to her, he cannot help being himself, which creates one of the critical tensions at the end of the second season.

In so far as this series was nominally grounded in the biography of Catherine the Great, this premise is strained as the writers, producers, actors and directors pursue a timely and relevant commentary on… what?  I think this may be a sophisticated commentary on our current political state – an international crisis of transition from the modern aristocracy of the developed world’s middle class, a privileged class that imagines itself to be moral (in the United States, to be Christian), while exploiting the resources and labor of those in less privileged countries, to a new order that promises to be more equitable.  Whether we will achieve this new state of affairs is very much a question.  While we paint the plutocrats, in this rendering, as the devils making this state of affairs continue, we are all complicit.  From this perspective, the series portrays the kludging together of the old and the new social orders.

While I think the series works on the level of social commentary, I think its appeal is more visceral.  I think the kludging that I have outlined above of the aspects of the self; the integrating of our disparate “brains” on both the metaphoric level of Catherine and Peter representing the single entity of a person at war with themselves, and on the level of the individual characters of Catherine and Peter coming to terms with aspects of themselves that they had worked to ignore, these kludgings ring true for us.  We know what it means to struggle with curbing our drives – while not even knowing that we are doing that.  We also know what it means to have acted on our drives without restraint.

The beauty of art – even this art which rather clumsily appeals to our prurient interests (clumsily presumably because of safe guards instituted to protect actors in scenes that imitate sexual interactions without quite being those interactions – though I do wonder if the clumsiness is, at times, an intentional commentary on that process of imposed restraint)- is that it is much more interesting than reading a journal articulating the brain mechanisms that are related to the action of this drama and the drama of our own lives.  The interesting thing is that both represent something essentially human, and therefore of interest to us.  (More on this particular primal attraction in other posts…).

          

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

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COVID Chronicles XXIV: Dis-Integration in the classroom.

 COVID, University Teaching, Impact of COVID on thinking

It is Christmas Eve and all through the house, everyone is dashing around madly preparing for the big day… and we are rapidly approaching the end of the second year of living under the cloud of COVID and omicron suggests a third may be on the way.  In a continuing attempt to chronicle what this looks like from a tiny corner of a hugely complex set of interactions, I will begin this report by talking about my students – and their integrative failures.

This fall, I taught a course that I continue to enjoy after teaching it for five years – History and Systems of Psychology.  I have grown into teaching the course more and more from the perspective of a disparate field that is at odds with itself.  It has been an opportunity to pull together the seemingly disconnected aspects of my professional identity as I work to help the students understand how this wide-ranging field belongs under one tent.

 The quest to understand and then articulate this field’s integrity has been mine since I first taught Introduction to Psychology in 1985.  How do Freud and Skinner belong in the same bed?  Why is it important for our students who, though they are majoring in psychology, and will mostly end up in business, learn about how the eye works?  How is it that the cold arithmetic of science belongs in a field that is curious about the warmly complicated relationships of parents and children; bosses, employees, and workmates; and the intimacy of both lovers and therapist/patient dyads and groups?

This fall, the intent at the beginning of the semester was for all of our classes to be in person, with everyone masked.  This was a relief, after teaching classes last year.  Then we wore masks in the classroom but only half or a third of our students, all wearing masks, were allowed in the room with us.  The unmasked ones were to be on Zoom and the “privilege” of being in the room rotated.  By the end of the semester, though, I was frequently the only person in the physical room as everyone else opted to stay home.

I was really looking forward to being with the students again – and they were clearly enjoying being in each other’s company.  There was a buzz in the room that I had really missed.  This  quickly began to fall apart.  Students would come down with symptoms and ask to be on zoom.  The camera was right there in the room – why not turn it on?  Then someone else had to go home to care for a sick relative, etc. 

Fortunately, through the semester most of the students stayed in the classroom for the regular classes.  But, in the age of COVID, testing of students is a challenge.  Our new president noted that her daughter, currently in college, has been taking open book tests for the past two years.  Why would we do this, you might ask?  When students take a test remotely, we can keep an eye on them through their computer screen.  We can lock the computer they are using, but when monitoring twenty or thirty students, we can’t make sure they have nothing else in the room with them, including another computer.  So we capitulate to prevent cheaters from having an advantage and afford everyone access to whatever they want.

So, since it is open book exam, and you don’t have to be in the physical classroom to take the exam, you just have to be on zoom, exam days were the only days that I was the only person in the physical classroom.  Everyone else opted to take the exam from elsewhere.  Some were in the library, some in their dorms or at home, but no one chose to take the exams in classroom.

One result is massive grade inflation.  My students are doing much better on tests than they ever have.  The average grade for the class has gone from a high C or low B to a high B or low A.  The students are pleased by that, but they don’t realize the downstream consequences (or maybe they do, but don’t care).  It becomes harder and harder for excellent students to distinguish themselves from mediocre ones.  Everyone is “above average”.  To compound things, there is a movement away from standardized testing as a determinant of who should be admitted to graduate school.  Partly this is related to concerns about testing being a measure of privilege rather than ability.  I think this is true – but so are grades.  Partly this is related to COVID, and I don’t follow this logic.  It is possible to take standardized tests remotely – there are means of having those exams remotely proctored. 

The average GPA of a graduating senior at my University was a 3.4.  This might have made sense if we were a highly competitive University, but we are not.  We have very bright and motived students, but we also have students how are neither so bright nor so motivated and all kinds of combinations of the above.  When there is grade inflation, there is also grade compression.  In order to stand out, you have to have close to a perfect record.  This means that we are picking students for graduate school who have not had a bad semester, because this “ruins” their record relative to others.  The students we are choosing are the students who have not had failed to achieve good grades all the time. 

When we select students with near perfect records to become clinicians, they frequently focus on grades and other marks of accomplishment as a means of valuing themselves and, inevitably, others.  They work to help their clients achieve As.  This can lead to an insidious replaying of our clients’ childhoods in which they are once again being exhorted by parental figures to do better.  This is antithetical to the psychodynamic principle of meeting someone where they are and understanding their situation so that the tangled web of their lives can be unsnarled.  Instead of asking client’s what is wrong, and tolerating the confusion of not knowing, along with their clients, these students learn what maladaptive thoughts are and teach their clients to avoid them.

OK, I seem to have gotten off the track and gone on a rant.  I hope to show you, soon, how this is relevant. 

Part of the problem with the open book tests that I have given is that a big chunk of the questions are asking about “facts”.  My students, and everyone else in the world, have become really good at chasing down facts.  “Just Google it” is the constant refrain.  This semester, for the first time, the upper level students had electronic text books that are provided by the University rather than buying paper textbooks.  There are all kinds of problems with this that I’m sure you can appreciate – e.g., the students don’t start building a personal library in college, and there is a very different experience of reading a written text and one online.  But the problem I want to focus on is searching the text.  Instead of nosing around in a text for an answer, the students are now able to search for a term.  This gets them to the sentence with the answer.

So, when I gave as a final exam a paper addressing the question that was central to course – How do all these disparate parts go together to be one science? – the students did not treat this as the integrative assignment it was meant to be.  Instead, they consistently searched the elements in the question and then pieced them together.  For instance, I asked about the tension between positivism (which is a particular scientific view) and holistic approaches to the human condition, and asked them to reference a psychologist who embodied each approach.  They searched for positivism in the text and wrote about August Comte, the philosopher who originated positivism, but they did not acknowledge that he was writing 100 years before psychology was invented.  They lost track of the big question as they ferreted out answers to little parts of the question.

Our students, indeed all of us, have become very good at picking out “facts” and then figuring out which of the options in the multiple choice is correct.  When they sew together “facts” taken out of context, they create an ill-fitting quilt.  The pieces are OK, but the whole does not blend into a coherent narrative arc. 

Creating a narrative arc has always been a challenge.  I’ve been working on creating the narrative arc that holds together my field for most of my career.  It’s still a work in progress – a bit of an ill fit together quilt.  But I worked on helping the students see how the strands came together across the course of the semester – or demonstrated it.  Some of the students in the classroom were able to engage in a conversation with me about these issues, and this is the time-honored way to work towards integrative thinking.

The semester this year was set up so that the students would go home the weekend before Thanksgiving.  They took the final after Thanksgiving.  The last class before Thanksgiving was virtual for everyone.  This was the summary for the semester – and should have helped them prepare for the final integrative essay.  Five or six of them had their cameras on.  Most did not.  Were they engaged in the class?  Did they think about the issues?  Did too much turkey interfere with their memory?  Were they afraid to write out their thoughts so they looked for the safety of the hunt and transfer means of addressing questions?

I know that 6 year olds have lost a lot during the pandemic.  So have 9, 12 and 15 year olds.  For each developmental epoch, there have been losses.  My students have almost certainly had social losses – but I think they have had cognitive losses as well.  Perhaps more importantly, they have been driven deeper into the morass of determining whether something is true or not based on whether it meets some external criteria of truth.  They are not being driven by, and therefore, for those who would head into becoming psychotherapists, are not going to feel comfortable facilitating helping others feel their way into what is true for them rather than looking around for the proper bar to jump over.

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

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), please try using the service at the top of the page.  I have had difficulty with these and am looking for something better, but these are what I have at this moment. 

For other posts on COVID:

I:       Apocalypse Now  my first posting on COVID-19.

II:      Midnight in Paris  is a jumping off point for more thinking about COVID.  (Also in Movies).

III:    Hans Selye and the Stress Response Syndrome.  COVID becomes more normal... for now.

IV:    Letter on the occasion of a Town Hall Meeting

V:      COVID craziness at the University continues with no end in sight.

VI:    Get back in that classroom  Paranoid ruminations.

VII:   Why Shutting Classes Makes Fiscal Sense A weak argument

VIII: Catholic Social Teaching Marshaled to support Rationalization...

IX:    What will school look like?

X:     Denial is not just a river in Egypt...

XI:    Back in the Classroom

XII:  Labor Day is for WORK!

XIII: Ennui

XIV. Where, Oh Where have my in-person students gone?  Split zoom classes in the age of COVID.

XV.  The First Complete COVID Semester is Done.

XVI.      More of the Same: The Second COVID Semester begins.

XVII.     Surviving the First Year of COVID: Will education be the same?

XVIII.    I miss my mask?

IXX.      Bo Burnham's Inside Commentary on the commenter.

XX.       The Olympics Mark the Oddness of the Time In Between.

XXI.      It's baaaack...  Joy and Horror and Maybe a Little Bit of Hope

XXII.     The Great Resignation Hits Home

XXIII.    The Great Resignation (cont.): A Family Reunion

XXIV.    COVID in the Classroom: The Great Dis-integrator

XXV.     First COVID, Now No Snow Days?

XXVI.   Not with a Bang but a Whimper: COVID is over... or is it?

XXVII.  Post COVID (we can hope) reflections on morale and morals...

XXVIII. How will we move on from our Empire of Pain? (Also in books)

XXIX.    A New Year's reminiscence.