The Lotus Eaters: Tatjana Soli's profound debut novel

 The Lotus Eaters, Tatjana Soli, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Lessons learned, vietnam war, meaning of

The Lotus Eaters

The Lotus Eaters is a woman’s coming of age story set in Vietnam during the American war there.  The civil war, and the war between Vietnamese culture and American culture becomes the intrapsychic battle that the hero, a person who thinks of herself as nondescript in her California home environment, explores as she becomes a war photographer.  She becomes a was photographer, on the one hand, in an overdetermined way: her father was a soldier, as was her beloved older brother and, when her older brother is killed in Vietnam, she is drawn like a moth to flame to the site of his death.  But she also becomes a war photographer in an almost whimsical way – "Oh, there is a war on, I’ll just go over and take some pictures as if I were a tourist going to Europe and, like that tourist, I might only last a week, but maybe I’ll like it there and decide to stay."  Like Odysseus men in the land of the Lotus Eaters, I may decide to stay because I like the flavor of the lotuses.

Frankly, as I started into this book I was much more reluctant to read it even than I am about my psychoanalytic identity.  This is a war, I thought, that is better forgotten.  I was creeped out by the descriptions of the jungle and leeches and the uncertainty of who might attack from which vantage point.  I felt on edge, uncomfortable, and, on another level, manipulated.  Why is the author choosing this space, I wondered.  Is there a point to the discomfort evoke by her writing, decades after the war is over, her first novel about a war she didn’t experience herself?  Why is she returning to this most embarrassing and misguided moment of ours?  Does she want to rub our noses in just how out of touch we were?  

Fortunately I managed to manage my concerns long enough to get over the hump and be pulled into the central dilemmas that are played out very intentionally against a backdrop that suits them and helps highlight how they are played out, in a hidden way, in our contemporary world.

In describing how a good photographer works, the author lets us know her intent.  The good photographer, she maintains, does not instruct us.  She tells the story, and, when we hear the story, we construct the intended meaning ourselves rather than having it given to us.  

The author of this story starts near the end of her story, telling us about the photographer’s experience on the day that the US pulls out of Vietnam.  In the process of doing this, we learn the outline of what will be told, in effect, as a flashback through the rest of the novel – the story of a love triangle between the hero and two others – an American and a Vietnamese.  The American we know will die in the war and the Vietnamese man will be the person the photographer manhandles onto a helicopter out of the country on that last weird day as she chooses, to her apparent surprise and our own, not to join him on that last helicopter ride out.

We spend the novel, then, with a question.  How do we get to that day that we think of as final? How do things work out so that the particular configuration the author has set up can be resolved and make sense?  Not to spoil things, when we get back to that moment, there is enough still unresolved that we realize that the story does not end where we imagined that it would, but just a bit more needs to be played out, and we are hungry for it.  We have been setting the stage, through this long and complicated novel, for an ending that will be both a resolution and an opening to new questions about how what we now know about this woman will play out in her life and, vicariously, in our own.

So, I will now violate the author’s rule and talk directly about what the book means rather than tell the story.  She has already told that story, and what follows is a reaction and my own interpretation and experience of the impact of the story.  I do not mean it to definitive.  I, like the author, was not in the Vietnam war.  I, unlike the author, am not a woman.  So, like the author, I will have to imagine myself into places that I cannot inhabit.

One reason that a woman might want to locate a woman’s coming of age story in the Vietnam war is that the patriarchal attitudes of men are perhaps never more clearly on display than in war – and this war is a particularly good canvas on which to paint those attitudes – neither the photographic core nor the military was meaningfully inhabited by both sexes.  Further, the cultural divide between the American and the Vietnamese cultures is starker during a time when we are occupying and, at least in theory, fighting on behalf of people we, on some other level, despise and devalue.

The point here is that in our current cultural space, where our political correctness would force us to whitewash the differences, she might be accused of imposing a latent sexism and racism rather than being able to describe them in their natural and naked shape before we knew enough to better hide and disguise them.  To put on my psychoanalytic hat, in so far as this woman is writing about contemporary issues, this woman chooses to do that where the defensive structure of the culture is not so well developed.  Because we, as Americans and as men, are able to unselfconsciouslessly assume that ours is the best way to operate, we can express that in undisguised fashion.  Discovering there are flaws in the assumptions underlying both of these aspects of ourselves, we don’t necessarily quit believing in this truth, but we hide our belief in it better than before.

So, the question for a woman coming of age in a man’s world – and especially in a Western man’s world, is how does she remain/become true to herself?  What is a feminine self?  What is required of a woman – or of this woman in particular?  How can she make use of the psychological and social landscape, one that is determined largely by American males, to become a woman?  And isn’t this a contemporary problem, one that is complicated by men who disown their beliefs and values – who hide behind being woke while still practicing a variant of a very old and deeply culturally engrained pattern of behaving?  So, let’s strip the curtain off and deal with what’s lying underneath.

There are a number of teachers in this novel – many of them are men.  The two main teachers include the first lover – the photographer who is driven to get the best picture and is the quintessential American male.  Comfortable in his bravado, married to a woman who represents a world that he disavows, and comfortable being sexual with women he does not care about.  While he is all of these things, he is also troubled enough by this construction of himself to desire the hero – to feel that she is a worthy compliment to him and someone he can both admire and connect with, something that he has not done before.

The second teacher is also the second lover, a Vietnamese man who embodies a very different culture and a very different form of masculinity.  Rather than wearing who he is on his sleeve, he is reserved.  His world is, if anything, richer and more emotionally alive than the first lover – a person he serves but with whom he also becomes friends – but access to this man's emotional world is not offered or even imposed in the ways that Americans engage with other people – it is earned.  His tight rein on himself is necessary – he needs to serve many masters while letting each know that he is caring for them in the best possible way – while he needs to remain true to himself, far from an easy task.

There are other teachers, but it is important that there is a female teacher – a French woman who is left over from the former occupation of the country – a woman who is in the fashion business and who is wise to the ways of men.  The hero and this woman form a friendship that helps sustain her as she navigates numerous treacherous waters.

I would like to focus on two central learnings this woman engages in.  The first thing that this woman learns about herself, much to her surprise, is that she is brave.  Much braver than she imagined herself to be.  This courage is not about standing up for herself, though.  In fact, it comes about in the process of losing herself – of becoming so focused on what she is doing that she is unaware of herself.  At this moment, she both does extraordinary work and she is supported by and accepted by men – for a variety of reasons.  Some of the men profit from her courage, some of them are moved by it, and some of them recognize that she needs to be protected because her courage leads her to not think of herself.  She is also, and this is implicit, protected by the mantel of being an American.  She has a particular kind of freedom to be brave and to survive that those around her do not.

The second thing this woman learns (I am writing as if this were linear when in fact both learnings are more parallel and intersecting and they are both learned and forgotten and learned again) is that she is not a tourist or a dilettante.  She is here with a purpose.  This is a complicated piece of learning – and one that has to be learned in different ways in a veritable kaleidoscope of situations.  On one level, the American occupation is the occupation of tourists.  They do not move in and join with the natives – they hold them at arm distance. 

Our hero learns the Vietnamese language and eats their pho.  She connects with them individually – sometimes as a tourist – she spends a day weeding a rice patty, but goes back to being a tourist the next day - but who these people are begins to seep into her bones.  Some of the military guys have “gone native”, but this seems like an extreme version – one that is not authentic.  She goes to tourist sites, she photographs the Ho Chi Minh trail, but his is hardly a guided day trip.  And she doesn't go native in some faux macho way, nor faux femme way, but as herself, as an American female in a foreign and intriguing land.

More centrally, though, she wrestles with the urge to be a tourist – to see the best sight and go home and show the slides to her friends as a kind of trophy of her visit – and she wrestles with the urge to be not just any tourist, but the best tourist – to have the most compelling slide show not just to show the horror of war (while she is simultaneously drawn to it), but to beat out the other tourists at being the best tourist and, in the process, she intermittently loses sight of the fact that this is a war in which human beings are dying in gruesome, awful ways.

How can she – how can we – live lives of authenticity when we are surrounded by sights and experiences that we need to protect ourselves from?  I suppose this second learning is a subset of the first – how can we learn to have the courage to face the things that are terrifying and to engage with them rather than turn away?  How can we develop the wish to be connected, deeply and powerfully, to a transient and deeply flawed world without losing our capacity to be awestruck by it?

As I’ve written about these two things that she learns as she grows up, I realize that these are not static teachings, but ones that come and go.  They are “known” to a different extent at different moments.  I am struck that this book reflects an organic principle of a good psychoanalytic therapeutic encounter, it is periodical and self-contradictory.  The integrity of this story, one of the reasons that it works for me, is that the hero does not move from not-knowing to knowing, but rather moves in and out of knowing, forgetting and learning anew and in new ways as she moves forward.  She is both cannier and more naïve as she develops, and this feels true to me – or at least true to my own development.  She is, at no place in this novel, and certainly not at the end, done.

And perhaps that would be the third thing, then, that she learns – and the author teaches us in the well-crafted ending – that she is able to live in a world that is complex and internally inconsistent.  Things are not as they seem – the story that we thought we were being told at the beginning is not the story that we end up hearing at the end, and yet it is.  As we become savvier, we might not have to become more cynical – we might become capable of withstanding the intensely contradictory nature of life without having to resort so frequently to blotting that life out.  We might be able to live – to return to contemporary life – with men, including myself, who deny patriarchal values while simultaneously practicing them.  We might be able to extract from flawed models useful means of moving forward.

As I was reading the novel, it felt like the Vietnamese lover was set up as the desired and more virtuous model, and I think he was.  This is, after all, called the Lotus Eaters.  The hero will want to stay in the land of the lotuses.  But the Vietnamese lover was not a perfect model.  I found myself uncomfortably aware of how hiding the richness of his inner life, especially from the hero, left her cruelly isolated from him – or reliant on a kind of knowing that invites, I think, a kind of fantasy that can lead to delusional distance from connection.  If the writer intended a less complicated version of the world than I think she delivered to us, I would encourage us not to be satisfied by that version – not to be satisfied by the idea that there is a solution, but instead to join our hero in what I believe to be the position she attains, that we can, indeed must, live in a world that is deeply flawed and yet deeply, achingly beautiful – and we can trust ourselves to navigate and improve it as we work towards a better version of it, while simultaneously careening perilous close to destroying it and ourselves.

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Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow; The Game is Rigged

 Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow; Gabrielle Zevin; Psychology; Psychoanalysis; fantasy; Sadie Sam characters; Play; Gaming's limits

How weird to be reading a book about gaming (something that I do very little of) while learning about playing games at the American Psychoanalytic Association’s annual meeting from a neuroscientist, Mark Solms.  Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow takes its title from Banquo’s cry of lament after losing his wife in MacBeth.  The speech – and therefore the book – is a meditation on the ephemeral nature of life – its brevity, but also our unwillingness to admit that.  Indeed, the criticisms of online games at the conference were two; one that the interactions are not real (more on that in a moment) and two that gamers never die truly die, they just restart the game – there is always another tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

In the magical land of Harry Potter, where seemingly anything can happen, Rowling put in one absolute boundary; death.  Once someone has died, they are dead and no magic can revive them.  This parameter would, from Mark Solms’ perspective, make the books “real” rather than a game.  In a game everything is imaginary – and it is when the real intrudes – when a player in a football game actually dies – that the game quits being a game and becomes reality. 

So, computer games – including first person shooter games, but also games in which virtual worlds are made or a script is followed – are not real because you never die – unless, perhaps, you reach the highest level and solve the problem.  But even then, apparently, you can play the game again to try to do it more efficiently or effectively.  I once had a friend who didn’t like the character that he had constructed in Dungeons and Dragons (a game I have never played), so he set about to kill himself so that he could be assigned a new avatar.  It took him forever to die.

Games, according to Solms, are fun to play precisely because we don’t die.  We play them again and again, but only if we can “win” somewhere between 40 and 60 per cent of the time – or maybe, if we stretch it, between 30 and 70 per cent of the time.  We find it “fun” when there is a chance that we will win, but also a chance that we will lose.  Computer games capitalize on that by having us do better than we did before – winning, if you will, often.

But they don’t have the same kind of interactional capacities that real life games – the rough and tumble games of wrestling or the interactive games of skill that are played between real people rather than with avatars include figuring out, for instance, how to make the teams fair enough that either can win.  So, the psychoanalytic concern is that children growing up with avatar driven games don’t learn how to interact with people in the real world – they don’t learn how to read when the other has had enough and won’t play anymore unless you let them take the lead role for a while.  They won’t learn the subtleties of relational dynamics (and intrapsychic defenses) that are essential to becoming equipped to play in the very real and rough and tumble world of adulting.

I think this book is also written as a game rather than a novel.  One example of how it imports game architecture into its structure it the way it uses time.  We are constantly going back in time to discover the backstory of the characters. The way this works in gaming is illustrated by the protagonist, Sadie playing a game that she played as a child where she learned that she has to pick up a screwdriver rather than the more satisfying cudgel to bash in the brains of zombies because, she knows, the screwdriver will later be necessary later to fix the elevator.  It is only possible, then, to know in retrospect what we should have done in the game, and it is only in retrospect that we discover in this book what some of the most important elements of the story are.  Psychoanalysts use the term “apres coup” to articulate this sense of wishing to know then what I know now, or only being able to figure out “after the fact” that something is important. 

We, then, are playing a game when Zevin gives us those necessary details in retrospect.  We know that the other central player, Sam, has a broken foot which is a central dynamic in the plot, but we don’t know for a very long time how it was broken nor do we know the full impact on his character of the broken foot until that point and we find ourselves rethinking the role of the foot in Sam's life.  We need to pick up the pieces, carry them along on the journey, but also to assemble them once we have the tools to do that. 

This is both a book about gaming, then, and it is centrally a game about three people that are brought together by games and who end up making games together.  The book is highly structured – it is written as if it were a multi-level game that we, the readers, are playing.  If it were truly a game, the object of the game would be to help the two characters (Sadie and Sam) who are destined to come together accomplish that.  This premise (and the consummate story telling) make it hard to put down - will they get together?  How will they get together? - so I was confused that I was finding it vaguely unsatisfying until I figured out why. 

The author brings us into the book in the same way that a designer brings us into a game, she has us identify with the characters in the story.  To do this, she spells them out in broad strokes – they feel like fantasy figures, rather than real humans.  I want more detail from her, more grit, more character, but I think she is expecting that we, the readers, will bring that to the characters, just as I have noted in other posts that actors bring their lived experience (and their imagination filtered through that lived experience) to the characters that they play and this helps flesh those characters out.  Banquo comes to life because of the felt grief of the actor who plays him, not because the lines, by themselves, lead us to feel sorrow. 

A play or a movie is a collaboration between the writer, the director and the actor (as well as the set designer, the make up artist, the cameraperson, and certainly the other actors) to bring a relatively flat script to life.  This book, despite its length, reads more like a script than like a novel.  The ending feels inevitable from early on and we are invited to figure out how it will be accomplished.  Ultimately, though, the collaboration has to be with the reader, and this reader, while he admired the architecture of the game, and he kept turning the pages with joy, was ultimately not satisfied because the characters were not given the kind of detail that allowed not just the scripted, plot driven ending to occur, but that allowed the psychological ending to hold true.

I went back and looked at my critique of Zevin’s previous book, The storied Life of A.J. Fikry, and the complaint was the same.  The characters weren’t complex there either.  This woman is very good at creating worlds, at building a suspenseful plot, and at putting the players in position.  Weirdly, these characters were interesting.  I cared about them.  But they didn’t end up feeling real.  In particular, Sam, the character who is matched with Sadie and it seems that they are destined to come together is not, I don’t think, ultimately believable.  He is a fantasy character.  Someone whose desire to connect with others, so apparent throughout his life and his pursuit of Sadie, is imagined by this author to be satisfied by becoming her play partner rather than her lover.  And Sadie's remoteness - her comfort with this compromise solution - is not, to me, adequately communicated as a lived component of her character rather than simply being a fact about her.  I don't feel the pain or the conflict or the even just the mistrust that makes her remote.

On some level, I get that a play partner is a better connection than a lover.  As grandparents say about their grandkids, we can play together and then they go home.  The domestic, and all its squabbles, gets separated from the messiness of the real.  Sadie saves Sam early in the book, then Sam saves Sadie. They also deeply disappoint each other.  This is the stuff of real play.  Then, towards the end of the book, Sam saves Sadie again, and he does this by creating a space where they can be together virtually and she can both know and not know that she is interacting with Sam.  He works to rebuild her trust.

In psychoanalytic psychotherapy we call this progression rupture and repair.  In the virtual space, they marry, something Sadie in a real space is deathly opposed to.  I wrote that last sentence and then deleted it.  Deathly seemed too strong.  But maybe it isn’t.  Maybe for Sadie (And perhaps for Zevin) marriage feels like a death sentence.  Mark Twain wrote that it made no sense to write about the life of a married man because he had no life.  And for women in our culture, many have commented that this has been even more the case.  I can get that on a sociological level, but I read novels to get the particulars of how that plays out for this person.

Sadie remains unknown to me.  This is frustrating.  She is remote - from her early lover who is a cad, from the man at the other end of the triangle and from Sam.  All of that is fine.  But her being remote from the reader - and leaving it to the reader to connect with her remoteness out of her own is, apparently successful - the book is selling very well - but it leaves this reader at a loss.

I’m tempted to take the easy path and say that Zevin’s a grown up a gamer and has learned about life from video games, not from playing games on the playground.  That would, I’m sure, be incredibly reductive.  But I do wonder if she spent more time gaming than reading and playing with friends.  I was also surprised to learn that she has been in a relationship for the last twenty years and that she is has been writing for that long as well.  I had thought that her writing would get more complicated as she matures, but I’m now thinking that she is letting us know that this is her version of a well lived life. It does not surprise me that she is also a very successful writer for a young reader audience. 

I think this book may best be understood as fantasy and a version of an online game and enjoyed as such.  The danger, of course, is that if this book is imitating life, the fears that the analyst's have about gaming feeding the need to play without providing the nourishment that play does may be realized when we turn to entertainment in our books that is as thin as that provided in our consoles.

Postscript:  I have been thinking about this since I posted and I don't think that I articulated the concern about the lack of character.  When Zevin goes back to fill in the backstory on one of the characters, it is frequently to relate an event - often a traumatic event.  This event is supposed, I think, to explain something about the "current" functioning of the character.  It does "explain", in the sense of filling in a back story, but she fails to explain how the incident impacted the character.  

As an example: the character in the first game that Sam and Sadie create is Ichigo.  Ichigo, the lead character, loses his parents when he is preverbal and has to figure out how to fend for himself.  This terrible thing happens - it impacts him - and his development is going to be completely different from every other human, but his avatar is nondescript.  I am referring to him in the masculine, but the avatar has a indiscriminate form.  The characters in the novel are not as nondescript, but they are on that continuum.  We are not just the sum of what happens to us, we are what we have done with what has happened to us, and I want to the author to more clearly articulate how that has occurred in her characters. 

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Mark Solms at the 2023 American Psychoanalytic Association Meetings – Play is the Thing!

  

Mark Solms, Play, Drives, Psychological Defense, The Unconscious, Models of the Mind, Free Association, American Psychoanalytic Association

Mark Solms presented, as he often does and I have often chronicled, at the American Psychoanalytic Association meetings this year.  He was once again discussing a case that an analyst was presenting, but this time it was a child analyst presenting her work with two five-year-old girls both of whom had divorcing parents and both of whom she helped through play therapy.  And play therapy, I think, turned out to be a fast ball down the middle of the strike zone for Solms to talk about how neuroscientific results can impact psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, but also how our knowledge as therapists can expand our neurological understanding, and, for me at least, how neuropsychology helps me understand the human condition.

Solms began with some introductory remarks about play.  These felt both familiar – I have heard him talk about play before – but also somewhat novel.  I think he has developed his thoughts about play since he last presented in person three years ago, and maybe it was different for me to hear them in a new context.

He started out by pointing out that, by definition, play is not real.  When it becomes real, when a dog actually bites another dog, it is no longer play.  He went on to state that play is one of theseven “psychological” drives that include two attachment drives, aggression, seeking, and etc., but that, unlike the other drives, neuroscientists have not been able to articulate a particular neural location for the play drive (there are also lower physiological drives of hunger, thirst, etc.).  Partly this is because it is a superordinate drive and recruits the other drives in the process of playing – but also, so it seems to me, it is a drive that may be a later drive that developed later - it may be unique to mammals (and perhaps birds) – and thus might have a different neural “location” than the other drives – more on my naïve theory making in a moment.

Why is play a drive, then, if Solms can’t locate it in the brain?  Partially this is definitional.  Neuroscientists describe drives as homeostatic systems.  When we play, we are driven to win.  But if we win all the time, other people don’t like to play with us.  So, we have to manage our play so that the others get to win and so that we get to win – there is a sweet spot that we need to find between winning all the time and having people to play with.  From Solms’s perspective, all play is hierarchical, so when we are wrestling (most mammals wrestle), the other player has to win some of the time, but if we are playing doctor/patient or teacher/pupil, the other player has to have an opportunity to spend time playing the dominant role.

Play is also considered a drive because all mammals play.  And, if we deprive a rat or a dog puppy of ½ an hour of play today, they will play an extra ½ hour tomorrow as if to make up for this pre-determined need.  Play is both a drive, but also a means of satisfying the drive; like aggression, which is both the drive and the means of satisfaction of the drive.

After his brief introduction to the terms, a child psychoanalyst presented two examples of her work.  Each example was, to my mind, brilliant.  And, in each example, the critical intervention(s) that helped move the child from being a non-patient to someone who was working with the analyst to address their problems had occurred when the analyst was a.) able to engage the child in play b.) accompanied by the statement from the analyst that she didn’t quite know why she made the intervention that she did, but she could see, in retrospect, that it was a very helpful intervention.

Both children were having difficulty at school and were surly in one way or the other.  The analyst’s interventions invited them to take what they were doing in the room, which could be interpreted as hostile – and, indeed, seemed to be intended to be hostile, and treated the actions as if they were a kind of game or, more precisely, made them into a game.

One of the little girls started throwing the therapist’s toys out of the 2^nd story window of the therapist’s office.  The therapist turned that into a game of constructing Kleenex and string to attach to the toys as a parachute and the game became whether this parachute worked or not, and whether the character that was being thrown deserved to have a gentle or a hard landing. 

Solms was able to demonstrate how redirecting the aggression into the play turned it from an action directed against the analyst into a symbolic action that the analyst and the patient could appreciate together.  He also clarified that play and language serve similar ends, they allow for an “as if” quality to occur – and when the therapeutic relationship has an “as if” quality, then problems can be worked out without having to, in fact, engage in activities that are dangerous or that solve one problem (harming through aggression the figure that the child is angry at) while creating another (threatening the relationship with a needed figure without whom the child feels panic).

In this interpretation, Solms equated play and language.  They are both a means of manipulating symbols rather than manipulating things.  When we make this transition – and Solms was playfully asked by the presenting analyst to address the ways in which play develops across the lifespan – when we can symbolize in play and in language, we gain a tremendous amount of power – but it is power in a different realm.  We don’t have to hurt the other to establish dominance.  We don’t have to construct something in order to see if it will work – we can construct it in words or on paper and we can create equations to test its strength. Of course words and play are also both means of communicating with another - and we can see from their response the impact of our speech/play on them.

Play, then, is Solms’s key to civilization.  There are consequences in words and ideas that don’t – indeed shouldn’t be – worked out in actuality.  We should play cops and robbers to be able to learn right and wrong – we shouldn’t have to go to jail to learn not to do certain things.  Similarly, the Oedipal situation, one that is viewed by so many with a kind of disgust because of thinking that we actually want to kill our father and have sex with our mother, is viewed that way because they are seeing it through a concrete lens of actual action – at which point it is no longer play, but something else – trauma and/or tragedy.  For the Oedipal situation to be successfully navigated, the child and the parents need to be able to play with it, and the sexual and aggressive drives need to be sublimated.

For Freud, sublimation was a process of keeping the drive out of awareness through defense.  It could then be “enacted” in a dream or in some version with a therapist (in my version, played out with the parents.  In both cases presented, the parents were divorcing or divorced at the time of the engagement- and they were not playing with the patient).  For Solms, sublimation is a process of play – acting on the aggression – throwing the toys out the window – but doing that in the context of a relationship with someone with whom you want to maintain that relationship – this strange woman who is happy to throw her toys out the window if they are given a means of floating rather than hurtling to the ground is a keeper.   In this case, the aggression only became sublimated in the context of creating a game.

In the last three paragraphs, I acted as if I was reporting verbatim what Solms said.  I did not.  I played with his ideas, just as he played with the clinical material and organized it in a new and fascinating way as he did so.  I hope that I have stayed true to Solms’s ideas, as I think he did to the ideas of the presenter, while also articulating them in a way that organizes my ideas and thinking about the situations – the situation between the analyst and the children and the situation between Solms and the analyst.

This also allows me to think that it may be no accident that we, as mammals, have language.  It is a representational process – as is playing.  And play may be, at least in our evolutionary history, a necessary precursor to speech?  In this case, the drive to play (and to speak) would be located in the part of the brain that is unique to mammals – and to birds – the cerebral cortex.  As I said, I don’t know what I am talking about here – Freud’s language would be that play and language are ego drives.  The other drives are located in the “lizard” brain, with projections into the cerebral hemisphere.  Play, language, and then the checks on the drives would be in the cerebral hemisphere – and would be inhibitory rather than expressive drives.  OK, I’m done playing amateur neuroscientist and, if you are a neuroscientist, you are free to scoff…

What was most useful about this talk was the idea of play as central to treatment; whether kids’ or adults’ treatment.   The therapist’s job is to create a space for the patient to play – and this requires creating a space that is safe – where things that happen will be “as if” they are real, but never actually real.  And the consequences of the play will be played with – will be discussed rather than acted on.

Earlier in the day I had attended a talk asking whether free association was still a cornerstone of psychoanalytic technique.  It was hard, after seeing the Solms presentation, not to think that free association is a version of play.  It is creating a space where the patient feels free to talk about whatever seems relevant – or irrelevant.  The patient's job is to wander through their mind and report what they choose to, and the analyst’s job is to play with what is offered, to wonder with the patient about their mind works and how it is organized.  One of the things that the analysts presenting in the morning agreed to in that session was that a patient should be able to keep some of their experience private.  This is essential to psychological safety and to fair play.  Free association is both a personal exploration and a joint endeavor, something that the presenting analysts were not so comfortable with thinking about.  Perhaps introducing the idea of play would have helped them think about analysis as an interpersonal as well as an intrapsychic event. 

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Carol Gilligan and the Dobbs decision at the American Psychoanalytic Association convention – again!

 

Carol Gilligan, Research, Dobbs Decision, Roe v. Wade, In a Human Voice

Three years ago, after having been awarded an honorary membership in the organization, Carol Gilligan gave an address at the American Psychoanalytic Convention .  Then we didn’t meet in person for two years – instead we met on zoom while the pandemic raged, and the format changed.  Instead of multiple presentations going on simultaneously, we all watched the same set of presentations.  Ironically, those presentations were, the first year, on diversity.  It is very nice to be back in New York and to be back to engaging in a truly diverse variety of small group interactions, including what are called discussion groups.  In these groups, anywhere from 10 to 50 members meet in a room and discuss material that is being presented.  Often that is a case or a particular way of intervening.  This morning it was Carol Gilligan talking about her next book, In a Human Voice, to be published on the 50^th anniversary of her revolutionary first book, In a Different Voice.

She began her talk by remembering how she came to write about women’s morality in the first book.  It turns out that it was by accident.  She had been working with Lawrence Kohlberg, the psychologist who revolutionized thinking about morality by tying it into a developmental framework.  He pointed out that we think about morality differently as we get older.  When we are five, we worry that we will get in trouble.  When we are ten, we worry about doing the right thing based on a set of principle-based rules and, when we are teenagers, and if we are really advanced, we might reconsider the rules based on our own understanding of how the world should be run.

Kohlberg studied morality by asking people what they would do in hypothetical situations.  Gilligan wanted to know how they would act when they were actually facing a morally complicated choice.  She intended to interview men who had been drafted to serve in the Vietnam war about their decision to enlist, but it was 1973 and Nixon ended the draft.  But then the Supreme Court legalized abortion in the Roe v. Wade decision, and voila…  Gilligan had a group of people who would be facing moral choices that were not abstract but very real.

She pivoted and began interviewing women in South Boston and some women who were students at Harvard about the decision that they were confronting.  It didn’t occur to her, at first, that she had moved from intending to interview an all-male cohort to interviewing women. 

What she discovered was that the Roe v.  Wade decision had given women a voice.  They were now empowered to make decisions that were incredibly complex and, unlike men, they did not make these decisions based on principles, but based on thinking about the relationships in their lives.

Pre-Roe, she maintained, the virtue of being a woman was being silent.  Roe raised the question; can you be a good woman and have an abortion?  But behind that lay the question; can you be a good woman and have a voice?

Gilligan asked one of the women how she was going about making this decision.  She said that she was concentrating on, “Being as awake as possible”.   And this, Gilligan noted (and I wholeheartedly agree), is a very difficult state to maintain.  

Being “as awake as possible” is the state that we try to help our patients achieve in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.  It is a difficult and frequently a painful state to maintain. 

One woman decided to have an abortion in large measure because she was supporting her husband while he was going through law school and he would not be able to finish school if she had to leave her job to care for a newborn.  He relationship with her husband outweighed the relationship with a potential child.

This was a decision that was made based on the care that she used to define her goodness.  But choosing to have an abortion would also have called into question (I am imagining) her goodness in her own mind.  Making moral decisions in the real world, with real world consequences, is difficult.

So, Gilligan maintained, the Dobbs decision is intended to silence women.  To take us out of the uncomfortable place of making relationally based moral decisions and return us to the more reliable solid ground of making principled decisions.

Of course, Roe v. Wade did not prevent us from making principled decisions.  In the session with Gilligan, I realized something about my own experience with Roe.  When I fell in love for the first time, a very long time ago, Roe was new in the land and I fell in love with a self-professed feminist.  I learned a great deal from her about feminism and what it meant to be a woman.  Her position with me was that, if we became pregnant, she would have an abortion.  This pronouncement was based on the principle that this would be best for her. 

Similarly, it would be possible to decide, on principle, not to have an abortion.  Fortunately, we did not become pregnant.  We did not have to decide (and I was told up front I would not have a voice in that decision).

The next two sessions at the conference could not, on their face, have been more different.  I went from a conversation about women having a voice to two meetings about the use of research in psychoanalysis.

There is a long history here.  Aaron Beck, who invented Cognitive Behavioral Psychotherapy (CBT), was a psychoanalyst, but he was kicked out of the American Psychoanalytic Association because he was doing therapy.  It was only when the CBT folks started producing a lot of evidence that CBT was an effective therapy that the psychoanalysts started clamoring for research to prove that what we are doing is also effective.

The two research presentations each focused on the efficacy of treatment, but more than that they focused on the elements of the treatment that lead to that efficacy.  They were not just asking; How is treatment effective?  They were asking; What is it that we do that leads to change?

This is actually quite dangerous.  If we follow the path of those doing CBT research, the researchers, who are not primarily psychotherapists will begin telling the psychotherapists exactly what to do in treatment.  They will be silencing the therapists, just as Dobbs is intended to silence the women.

I was not comfortable speaking in a roomful of feminists about my experience with my principled feminist girlfriend, but I did approach Dr. Gilligan after the talk, and we agreed that my example supported her concern that the face off between the pro-choice and the pro-life people misses the mark.  It is not about the principle of choice, it is about acknowledging our discomfort with complicated decision making.  It is about our becoming more willing to trust people to make difficult decisions – and to trust them to do this bearing both principles and relationships in mind.  It is about helping them be as awake as possible to what they are thinking and feeling when they are deciding what would be best in a given situation.

Ultimately, psychological research can empower therapists to have more rather than less options available to them at any moment in a treatment to meet the needs of this patient at this moment (and to assess whether what we thought would be helpful actually turns out to have been helpful).  I was able to articulate this position to the researchers in the room.

I’m not sure that the researchers got it.  The essence of the argument is that we, as human beings, have evolved over millions of years to be able – in addition to wreaking havoc in each other’s lives – to care for each other.  This a subtle and complicated process that takes place too quickly and too subtly for us to be able to choreograph from afar.  We need to be as awake to the moment as we can be – meaning that we have to feel as deeply and access as much knowledge and skill as we able to – in order to be usefully responsive to another human being at their most vulnerable moments.

The researchers who were presenting were learning from clinicians as well as informing them.  This thing that we do called living is very complicated business.  We cannot afford to silence women – or psychotherapists.  We need to hear every human voice and respond to each one as best as we are able.

  

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The Lying Life of Adults on Netflix: Movies can bring life to books.

 

The Lying Life of Adults; Elena Ferrante; Video; Psychoanalysis; Psychology; Bracelet; Beauty

I read The Lying Lives of Adults a few years ago and posted on it.  It is a tremendous coming of age book set in Naples and Milan in the 1980s.  It is also a complicated book with manifold complex characters interacting in intriguing ways.  It was a difficult read for me – not just because of the complexities, but because, I think, of the crossed cultures, and the crossed genders (mine and the lead character’s) in interaction with the cultures.

When my post on the book The Lying Lives of Adults suddenly started getting hits, seemingly out of the blue, I knew something must be going on.  Well, it turned out that the Italian film had dropped as a six-episode series on Netflix.  Thank you internet for this wake up call! 

The Reluctant Wife and I finished watching the series last night, and what a satisfying watch it was.  Despite one possible elaboration, the fidelity to the book went beyond being technically on target, it brought the spirit of the book to life in ways that my Midwestern US male imagination wasn’t quite able to construct from the page.  So, I will take a second whack at describing the impact of the book as interpreted by the film…

Twelve year-old Giovanna (Giordana Marengo) begins to awaken when she overhears her father Andre (Alessandro Preziosi) saying that she is as ugly as his sister, her Aunt Vittoria (Valeria Golino).  Vittoria is the sister that her father (Andreas in the book) left in the gutter when he ascended to the heights of Naples, rising out of the ghetto by virtue of his education and marrying well.  

Giovanna responds to the broadside from her father by seeking out the shunned and ignored Vittoria who becomes the family truth teller – calling things out as she sees them, helping Giovanna see through the lies of everyone around her.  Vittoria has the grit and clear vision of the ghetto perspective.  But, it turns out, she has been lying about herself.  Giovanna asks why she has been lying about her own life, and Vittoria responds, “Because the lie is more beautiful than the truth.”

The book and the movie, then, can be understood as working from an aesthetic perspective to ask questions about life and love and how to live.  Is a beautiful life a well-lived life?  And who is to determine what is beautiful?  Should we deceive ourselves (and those around us) to create the illusion of beauty?  How would we live a genuinely beautiful life?  These questions are especially relevant in a world that is, in so many respects, ugly.

I think that the film allowed me to more viscerally experience many aspects of the ugliness of Giovanna’s life than I could imagine them on the page.  Most immediately, the boorish behavior of men – the constant objectification of women – is somehow clearer when depicted on the screen than when seen on the page, at least for me.  Also, the particular aesthetic of both Naples's industrial core and its bourgeois high rises is hard to imagine from a different continent.

It is also clearer on the screen that Giovanna, who is deftly portrayed by a woman in what appears to be her first screen appearance, wants to be appreciated not as an object by others, but to have her subjectivity be beautiful.  She wants to be appreciated by the powerful men in a world where they value each other based on the beauty of their words.  She wants to be appreciated as one of them.

This does not mean that she is unaware of her physical beauty or the beauty of those around her.   She is afraid, after all, that her father no longer finds her beautiful at the beginning of the film.  It means, I think, that she comes to lose faith in physical beauty, works to be appreciated for her words, and is exploring, as adolescents do, what the meaning of the physical contact that proceeds from either to provide evidence of love really means.

The most immediate cause of her confusion about the meaning of love is not her own explorations but the dissolution of her parent’s marriage.  Vittoria encourages her to closely observe that marriage – and she can see it falling apart, perhaps before her parents can.  Vittoria then sees evidence of the fractures that Giovanna wouldn’t understand – and pushes the marriage over a cliff.  She notes that a family heirloom – an indication of love, has been given by Andre not to Giovanna, as Vittoria thought would happen, nor to Giovanna’s mother, Andre’s wife, but to another woman (The details of who this woman is are available in the post on the book, here I am going to avoid the complications of describing the manifold players).

Giovanna is crushed by her father’s infidelity and shuns him.  He, given a chance to be with her, complains that SHE is not empathic enough with HIM.  It is suddenly clear that this man she has always admired and modelled herself after is much less mature than he appears – perhaps less mature, and certainly less able to manage his emotions, than she is.  And, to stay true to the central theme of this post, his immaturity and weakness make him ugly.  In a word, his pursuit of beauty has made him ugly.

Vittoria acts as a helpful corrective here – she acknowledges that Andre’s raising Giovanna – his ability to have instilled in her an ability to appreciate beauty – is a testament to his own aesthetic value.  He must be beautiful to have brought such beauty into the world.  (Not an argument that the #METOO movement – in terms, for instance, of the value of the aesthetic products of boors - puts much store in!).

Vittoria’s unexpected support of Andre comes at a moment in the film after Giovanna has demonstrated a fidelity that Vittoria predicted she would not able to manage, and I think Giovanna also surprised herself at having done this, and she was a little undone at having done this.  And this is the turning point in the series, one that is predicted in the opening sequence that takes place before the opening credits.  In that scene, Giovanna swims to the bottom of the sea, searching for the bracelet.  She finds it after much searching, but then she leaves it behind as she swims back to the surface.

The bracelet signifies, among other things, the false loves that we seek out, the false loves that express, in a word, the lying life of adults.  The bracelet was originally stolen from Vittoria’s lover’s mother-in-law to be given to Vittoria – a testament to her lover's extramarital love for her.  It made him feel good to show off his admiration for Vittoria, even though it caused pain for his wife and children.  And Vittoria’s lie is that his love for her was true love – a love that she has remained faithful to, despite her lover’s death.  A beautiful lie, but a lie.

The question that we are left with at the end of the film (and the book) is whether Giovanna can construct a beautiful life not on a lie, but on some other foundation.  In order to do this, she must become an adult, and she concretely arranges to do this in a way that will be painful, brief, and weirdly reparative.

In her exploration of her attractiveness to men, she flirted with and then avoided a repulsive but insistent man whom she cruelly ridiculed for a physical feature – and she purposely repaired that rupture in the relationship with him when she used him to cross over into becoming an adult.  This interaction was clearly not an act of love in the conventional sense, but at its heart there was affection and concern – something that Giovanna expressed throughout her two-year journey of questioning the lives of adults.

 The beautiful life that Giovanna would pursue would, then, include genuine interactions, but these would be founded in the kind of brutal honesty that Vittoria demonstrated when she came clean about lying.  What form might this take?

We get snapshots of this.  Her father’s communistic and leftist views are exposed as hypocritical by his bourgeois striving.  The glowing, deeply spiritual character’s Christian values are exposed as hypocritical by the looseness of his sexual mores.  Giovanna demonstrates Communist and Christian values while staying appropriately critical of both institutions.

At the end of the book and film, Giovanna leaves on a trip, perhaps to a new life, with Ida, the younger sister of her close friend – a writer.  I speculated before that this might be Ferrante. Giovanna has been appreciating her writing, she loves it, and this friend has been writing about a beautiful world.  Giovanna has appreciated her ability to articulate beauty, even while they are both struggling to survive the deceit of the adults they have relied on.

Lies are, I think, essential to human life.  We lie first and foremost to ourselves.  We do this because we live in a harsh world.  Telling ourselves little falsehoods, mirrored perhaps on the loving falsehoods that our parents tell us, help us navigate the world.  Giovanna's father's lie that she was beautiful - and his lie that she is ugly - are the wellsprings of the tension in this film.  The actress playing Giovanna vacillates smoothly between moments of physical and spiritual beauty and ugliness.  The truth is that we are constantly moving along a variety of spectra - we are neither this nor that.  Any attempt to pin us down, to encircle us, the way a bracelet encircles the wrist, through a precise representation is a lie, because it is a static description of a dynamic being that, at best, captures a facet of who it is that we are.

Recently, in writing about the White Lotus, I commented on the psychology of the lies of omission – the things that we don’t tell people because they might hurt them.  The lies that are told here – many of them are lies of omission, but many of them are lies of creation; creating or implying beauty where there is none - do not, in fact, create beauty.  I think that Giovanna’s lie to the repulsive man is a lie to create a false but healing moment.  She has learned how to lie – and to do that charitably, but I hope that she will be using lies as infrequently as possible – working instead to be that rare thing, an adult who can be reasonably truthful and beautiful.

In the spirit of not lying, I have to admit to unsettled feelings about the depictions of nudity in this film.  At the beginning and end Giovanna is depicted in the nude.  It would be a lie to say that 16 year olds don’t have sex and aren’t sexual.  And I think my interest in response to these images may be part of what is driving my discomfort.  I don’t know how old the actress is.  But I am concerned that a movie that is championing female sexuality and power as up to the task of fighting with masculinity shouldn’t have to pander to the male gaze quite so frankly.  On the other hand, perhaps my discomfort is the director's intentional use of my own male gaze to help me realize that I am not so different from the men depicted in this movie. 

 

    

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The White Lotus Season 2: Relationships and Lies of Omission

 

White Lotus, HBO, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Lying, Lies of Omission

The Reluctant Wife had watched the first season of White Lotus without me.  I was appreciative of that.  From what I had heard, there were no likeable characters, it was a series about rich people with nothing better to do with their money than to spend it on being pampered, and I, frankly, was not interested in it.  Don’t we live in a world where this is the last thing that we need to be ogling?

Of course, a part of me thought – but wait, what if this series is asking us to take a good look at ourselves and see if we have met the enemy and they are us?  Could it be that rather than a vehicle for envy, which I assumed it would be, it might be a fun house mirror that would expose us to ourselves.  But that part of me was actually pretty quiet.  I mostly thought this was about the 1%, and I have no fascination, at this moment, about knowing more about those who are privileged and know not what to do with themselves.

Then she started watching season 2 and, tired one night, I sat through one of the first episodes.  Apparently the first season is set at a White Lotus resort in Hawaii, and this second season is set in a White Lotus resort in Sicily.  There was something about the vibe of the place that was intriguing – that the 1% inhabit resorts that are cheek by jowl with the world that the rest of us inhabit – and the beach resort did not feel that much different from some of the nicer hotels that we have stayed in…

So, we went back and watched the first episode, and I discovered that each of the seasons have been told in flashback.  The end of the week in paradise (in both seasons) is shown first, and in each, a woman discovers a body of one the hotel guests floating in the water, but we are not told who it is and we rewind to the beginning of the week.  The whodunit is really a who is it that gets killed, and I was hooked.  I wanted to know which of these despicable characters was going to achieve their just reward by the end of the week.

The characters, though played by familiar and sometimes beloved actors, were, indeed, not likeable.  The central four characters are two couples – the classic American Quarterback type, Cameron (Theo James) and his blond and attractive wife, Daphne (Meghann Fahy).  He is a graduate of Yale and married and had kids while becoming a very successful (and rich) money manager, though it also seems that he has come from money and has never wanted for anything.  He is getting together (in the adjoining suite) with his college roommate Ethan (Will Sharpe), who is of indeterminant Asian descent.  Cameron “affectionately” bullied Ethan in college and, now that his roommate has successfully sold his tech startup and is fabulously wealthy, he has arranged for this get together.  Ethan brings his wife Harper (Aubrey Plaza), a straitlaced lawyer who self righteously sues men who violate women’s right to a safe work place.

Meanwhile, in the next set of rooms, we have three generations of men – grandfather, Bert (F. Murray Abraham), father, Dominic (Michael Imperioli), and twenty-something-year-old son Albie (Adam DiMarco)– vacationing in Sicily to find their roots.  The grandfather left Sicily as a very young child and wants to take everyone back now that the family has made good and meet relatives he assumes to be living in the little town his family came from, but who knows?

And just down the hall are the only members of the first-year cohort who have come back to a White Lotus, the incredibly rich and incredibly narcissistic and empty woman Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge) who found her husband, Greg (Jon Gries) in that other White Lotus.  He has insisted that they come on vacation together again.  She brings her “assistant” Portia (Haley Lu Richardson) with her, a young, clueless girl who is pretty fed up with assisting generally meaning helping Tanya pull herself back together after a crying jag started because she has been slighted by someone in yet another way.  Portia is also an unwanted interference in Tanya's husband's eyes, so she is supposed to just stay in her room - which she does not do. We discover pretty quickly that Tanya’s husband is as tired of his wife as the assistant is, and he jets off to a “business” meeting that is actually some kind of rendezvous with a lover.

This mess is overseen by Valentina (Sabrina Impacciatore) the white gloves manager/ matron/ concierge/ front desk person overseeing the White Lotus, who is constantly fighting with Lucia (Simona Tabasco) the local sex worker providing services to multiple guests and Mia (Beatrice Grannò), Lucia’s friend, a singer who enjoys being party to some of Lucia’s sex work.

While I thought this series was going to be a whodunit or perhaps primarily about sex (and it is both of those), I think it is mostly about lies and lying.  We are introduced to the couples at the center when they have breakfast together and are getting reacquainted/acquainted with each other.  Cameron and Daphne are pretending to be deeply and comfortably in love with each other, but it is apparent very quickly they are not particularly committed to or knowledgeable about much of anything and it is hard to take them seriously as people.  Ethan, who is a bit remote, and Harper, by contrast, are dialed into various causes and concerns, they seem genuinely invested in a better and more just world and – here is the tell – they never lie to each other.

Even though Ethan and especially Harper are no fun and they are altogether too earnest and judgmental, I am immediately in their camp.  They are, it seems - and certainly by contrast with Cameron and Daphne, real.  And they are struggling with how to manage the changes that are occurring in their world when they, unlike Cameron and Daphne who have always been obscenely rich, are suddenly discovering themselves to be one percenters.  Hmm…  might they have what it takes to make the transition without selling out?  Could this be a hiding place for good solid American middle-class values in a false and insipid world?  For just a moment, we hope so.

There are no such hopes for our three gentlemen of Sicilian descent.  Bert’s wife has died, Dominic’s wife and daughter have refused to come on this vacation because Dominic is such a cad, and Albie, the innocent son, could help his mother and father reconcile, but knows too much about his father’s infidelities to help them do that because he would be deceiving his Mom if he touted his father.  And this is before we discover that Dominic has hired Lucia to service him on this vacation.  Bert tries to warn Dominic that he is playing with fire to be playing with Lucia right under Albie's nose, but Dominic counters that he learned from Bert to be a two timer – he grew up with it and the pain it caused his mother, while Bert refuses to imagine that his wife knew anything about his affairs and insists that she loved him.

In this group, we are introduced to the lies of omission.  The form of the lie is: I will not tell this information because it would only hurt you.  It is in your best interest for me to lie to you.  Being honest with you would only bring you pain, so why do that?  Of course, this lie is also tremendously self-serving, and contains within it a lie.  If I told you what would hurt you, I would be found out not to be wonderful, and you would insist that I change my behavior, and I don’t want to do that.  So this is a lie both to the other person, but also to and on behalf of the person telling the lie - and the wonderful irony is that the liar is NOT lying - he is not saying anything at all. 

This kind of lie has been showing up in my clinical practice all of a sudden.  I won’t tell him or her this or that because it would hurt them.  Sometimes the person is struggling to tell the truth – they are being forced to do that so that they can move on with their life – and sometimes when they do that the feared outcome does not happen.  The other person does not fall apart.  Not infrequently, the other person realizes there is a problem and pledges to work with the former liar to work on that shared difficulty.  They say, in effect, thank you for broaching that subject.  I, too, have been afraid to do that because it would be disruptive to face and address this central difficulty in our relationship, but if you are going to put the cards on the table, so will I, and we can now play a productive game.

While I wanted this kind of “healthy” outcome to occur, I was not convinced it would.  Where is the drama in that?

Lies of omission are not the only kind of lie.  There are many different kinds of lies – and we lie all the time – first and foremost to ourselves (this is the center of Freud’s discovery of the unconscious – we keep things from ourselves – we defend against thoughts all the time), but we also lie to those around us, and especially those who are closest to us. 

Tanya is consistently lied to by those around her.  They don’t just omit things, they make things up.  Partly they do this because she is so fragile that they have to in order to keep her from falling apart, but partly they do this because she is so needy and clueless that she is drawn into the lies that others tell her, pretending that she has protected herself against her gullibility, but actually being used by others more and more egregiously.

The pleasure in Tanya's subplot comes from the ways in which Tanya, with Portia’s help, finally begins to see what is being done to her and, in a kind of dimwitted but bullheaded self-protective set of acts, outwits those who would take advantage of her.

Valentina, the front desk matron, who is trying to both cater to these various entitled people and ride herd on them, is ultimately a victim of the kind of lying that Freud warned us about – self-deception.  She is uncomfortable with her sexuality – something that stands out as a kind of naivete that is possible in a repressive, Catholic community, even in someone who is servicing individuals whose sexual more’s could not be more liberal and loose.  It is Mia, Lucia’s friend, who sees through Valentina’s horrible conflict and helps her feel safe enough to grow into herself.  Mia is not without cunning in doing this.  It is good for Valentina, yes, but it also helps her cement employment at the White Lotus.  This kind of open lie – Valentina is personally naïve but aware of what people want from her – seems to be the least concerning of the lies that are told.

It is the lies in the two couples that are most alarming.   It does not take long for Harper to suss out that Cameron and Daphne’s loving relationship is a sham, especially when Daphne kidnaps Harper, taking her to another city without telling her that she intends for them both to spend the night there.  This leaves the boys, Cameron and Ethan, on their own.  Daphne is punishing Cameron for former misdeeds by withdrawing from him – and she knows he is too immature to manage himself without her.  True to form, he enlists Ethan in escapades to manage his insecurities that sicken Ethan, but these escapades take place in Ethan and Harper’s room and when Harper returns, she thinks that Ethan is lying to her when he maintains that he did not engage in adulterous behavior.

And here is the turning point for the lies.  Harper knows that Ethan does not lie.  He is rigid about that – it is written into his character that he will not.  So how could he lie about this?  Well, the problem is that Ethan, who would never deliberately deceive Harper by telling a lie of commission, engages in lies of omission all the time.  Centrally, he has not directly told Harper that he is no longer attracted to her.  He has not acknowledged that there is an important deadness at the center of their marriage. 

As I alluded to earlier, this would be a moment that could go in very positive directions.  Ethan could confess, and they could work on this together and they could ride out of Dodge (or the White Lotus) on the moral high road, having the marriage that they want to have and that Cameron and Daphne could never dream of having.  Without spoiling more than I already have, this doesn’t happen.  Instead, Ethan’s lying is used by Harper as an excuse to engage in lies of her own, and this is what reignites the passion in their relationship.

I think that the lie that is being told by the writer here is that not knowing the other – being lied to by your partner – is what will maintain the relationship.  I get this.  Some mystery is required to keep a relationship going.  But it is my solidly middle-class belief that we are so vastly different from every other human, even those that we choose to spend the rest of our lives with, that there are always mysterious elements to be plumbed.  We don’t need to manufacture them, they exist, and our efforts to acknowledge them and work them out lead to moments of connection, but also moments of disconnection, and these bring us back to the table to understand the mysterious gulf between us again and again and again. 

I am beginning to think that the writer and I both agree that love is, at heart, driven by anxiety.  It is mysterious that someone else could love us.  We fear that, if they truly knew us, they would not love us.  For the writer, this is an invitation to deceive the other, so that they will find us desirable.  We are something that our lover cannot own, or we are desirable to someone else and therefore we are desirable to our lover.

Ironically, the writer includes a much more hopeful – or pedestrian version – of love in the resolution of the family men drama.  Albie, the naïve son, falls for Tanya’s assistant Portia, but Portia is drawn away, in a parallel fashion to Harper, to a bright and shiny object.  Albie finds solace in Lucia, who, as he says, plays him.  His father indulges Albie in a lesson about being played, Albie thanks his father by working to patch things up with his mother, and Albie and Portia are able to have a rom-com moment.

OK, I said I wasn’t going to spoil things further, but I did.  I wanted to make the point that if the writer wants to hang onto us, the audience, he has to throw us some slop.  There has to be the hope that, even amidst all this wealth and our own attraction to bright and shiny objects, we also can discover that having a direct and honest relationship contains within it ample rewards. 

I think that the complications must be soothing to those who don’t believe it is possible to come clean.  There is an alternate way to stay attached.  It is a dangerous and volatile way, but attachment through deception is possible.  On some level – thank God for the ability to have a stable relationship based on deception, for we can never be truly honest with ourselves, much less with others.  At the same time, though, I think we are likely to have a better relationship when we are striving to minimize deception even if we can't eliminate it.  

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