Elon Musk: Walter Isaacson promises to reveal the man behind the Musk mask.

 Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Psychoanalyis, Psychology, Children, Spectrum, Trauma

In one of my weekly conversations with my reluctant son, as we were discussing politics and the influence of Musk on Donald Trump, he noted my lack of knowledge about Musk and offered to lend me a recent biography of him.  I was intrigued and, on his next visit home, he brought it to me.  It is a long book: more than 600 pages, but the chapters are brief – three to five pages generally, and reading it is more like reading people magazine both in the length of the entries and also in their generally journalistic style. 

The biographer, Walter Isaacson, has written previous biographies of historical people (Leonardo DaVinci and Benjamin Franklin), but also more contemporary folks (Henry Kissinger and Steve Jobs).  For this book, he was clearly invited to be in Musk’s inner circle as he wrote the book and there are times when he enters in as a player, letting people at Twitter, for instance, know critical information about Musk’s thinking as the Twitter takeover is happening and everyone is scrambling to make sense of the situation.  This could have led to the kind of hagiography that Ernest Jones employed as a devise in his early biography of Freud – a person he knew and respected.  Isaacson appears to have kept more journalistic distance than Jones, but that is a low bar for evaluating the “objectivity” of an observer.

Musk’s early life strikes me as beyond bleak.  He was mercilessly belittled by his father and experience significant episodes of bullying from his peers.  While Isaacson acknowledges this and repeatedly refers back to it, he does not, I don’t think, give it enough weight to it as a contributor to Musk’s psychological make-up.  He repeatedly chronicles episodes of Musk failing to understand the impact of his behavior on others, something that he attributes to Mush being “on the [autism] spectrum”, as Musk himself does.  But I think his need to attend to others – to keep an eye out for what they might do to him next, may contribute to his ability to manipulate and, actually, read others – not by virtue of empathy, but more cognitively, mathematically, or even as a kind of computer code – because x happened, I expect y will occur next, and this is not the result of deep insight, but simply a predictive algorithm based on past experience.

In so far as Musk is driven by his past traumatic experiences, the paucity of his internal experience may be the result of the external focus that he needs must have engaged in to ward others off.  This seems to make him a psychological brother to Donald Trump – both of them were savaged by their fathers.  That said, Musk, unlike Trump, was able to be tremendously successful in the endeavors that he has engaged in.  This is attributed by Isaacson to his having read science fiction as a kid – particularly Asimov, Heinlein and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  I was an avid reader of Asimov and Heinlein and have been curious about the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy forever – and have now acquired a copy.

I think that the values that Musk picked up from Heinlein and Asimov have led him to love humanity, but I don’t think they put much of a dent in his hatred of humans – not just the particular ones who have caused him harm, but the many who could – and still do.  Heinlein in particular, in his book Stranger in a Strange land, a book about a human returning to earth from having been born and lived his early life on Mars, articulated for me, as an isolated, nerdy adolescent, the yearning that I had to be in contact with others.  It also presented a vision of that contact being able to be made through sexual interactions with women.   I think Musk has found solace in his relationship with women (though these are often stormy and complicated as well as soothing), but perhaps even more so in his relationships with his children.  I think it possible that he has so many children not just because of his stated concern that the declining birth rate is the greatest threat to human kind, but because each of his children push him towards being able to feel connected to others in a loving way.  This is perhaps most completely chronicled in his relationship to X, his youngest son through much of the book.

 Musk’s hatred of particular people – usually expressed by firing them or firing off angry tweets at them – is mirrored by Trump’s snide dismissal of those he denigrates, and both, from a psychodynamic point of view, could be understood as trying to turn passive into active – becoming the aggressor rather than being aggressed against as they try to battle the critics who mirror their fathers’ early criticism of them.  From a slightly more sophisticated vantage point, they could also be understood as laboring against the internalized critical voice that results from an identification with the criticizer, and they project onto others the traits or thoughts and feelings that they struggle against, and then attack them out there rather than attacking themselves.  From this point of view, Musk rails against the soft aspects of corporate life and the lazy workers it attracts while rationalizing his bouts of gaming engagement as helping him learn techniques to better manage his companies.

This book, though, oddly calls up Bill Clinton, whose autobiography was long on the ins and outs of the various challenges that he faced throughout his life, but short on a description of how his mind was working during the period of time he was facing those challenges.  Clinton’s background reflected more neglect than malice – but I don’t think any of the three – Clinton, Musk and Trump - all very bright men, two of whom became president and one who became the richest man in the world, built internal worlds that give them much sustenance.  Clinton comes the closest of all three to experiencing gratitude for all that he has witnessed and been able to engage in, but his is more of the gee shucks variety – how could I be here at Camp David negotiating Middle East peace treaties when I am just a kid from Arkansas – while neither Trump nor Musk appears to be any less hungry at this point in their lives - still searching for whatever it is that will make them happy.

Musk’s professional accomplishments are tremendous.  I had a patient refer to him last week as an Einstein – but I think Thomas Edison or Henry Ford are better models.  They were engineers and tinkerers and Musk is certainly both of those.  They were also the models for Tom Swift, a fictional inventor about whom over 100 short novels – much like the Hardy Boys series – have been written.  Tom Swift invented stuff of fantasy and vanquished all sorts of enemies – just as Musk has done, in fact, and in his mind.

Perhaps the most revealing thing about the book, though, was how badly I had misperceived Musk through my connection with him through the media – and I think this is why the reluctant son recommended the book to me.  For instance – I have been appalled that Musk sided with the Russians by cutting off the Ukrainian’s access to Starlink, his satellite-based internet connection system.  I was appalled that a private citizen could make a decision about something with such important international implications with no governmental oversight.

What I didn’t know was that Musk had largely donated the Starlink system to the Ukrainians – with some financial aid from various countries, but his share in the creation of the system, according to the book, was 60 million dollars.  And Starlink was critical to their early survival of the Russian invasion.  Musk was, in fact, fighting against the Russians throughout, but turned off the Starlink system just around Crimea when the Ukrainians were planning to deploy drone submarines guided by Srarlink to attack the Russian Navy.  He severed that connection because he feared that if the Ukrainians had been successful, that could have led to an escalation in the war so that the Russians would have felt justified in using nuclear weapons.

My concern about a private citizen – especially one whose knowledge of war tactics comes largely from gaming and reading histories of warfare and whose diplomatic skills are negligible when he is not negotiating from a position of having the upper hand against an opponent – making decisions about the kinds of tactical resources our allies can have access to during war continues to be valid, I believe.  I also believe that Musk’s interests lie in a science-fiction-based conception of what human well being looks like.  He does not have a good sense of the value of human lives that are not, in his estimation, productive and focused on the current threats to human life.

His idea of what is most important to preserve, and thus the centrality of his drive to populate Mars, is human consciousness.  He believes that it is, based on our observations, unique in the universe.  Human Consciousness is something that I have increasingly come to focus on in my History of Psychology course as it has evolved over the years that I have taught it.  Recently a friend who is a philosophy professor clarified that one of the positions I take with my students was first proposed by Epicurus.  The position is that death will not be a traumatic experience, because all of the faculties that we use to experience the world and the pain that results from that interface will cease to exist.  Indeed, the universe itself exists, to me, only in so far as I percieve it.  When I die, it does, too.  From this perspective we could understand Musk's central driving factor as being a fear not of humanity ceasing to exist, but as a fear of his own death.

Musk disdain for human beings the governments they create belie his being born on third base and believing he hit a triple.  No, he did not inherit wealth in the way that Trump did, but we live in an incredibly interdependent world.  Thousands of people working together result in our being able to eat bacon and eggs every morning.  Musk’s decisions about building cars and rocket ships are carried out by engineers who were trained in elementary schools, junior and senior high schools, colleges and universities – and they would not have been able to carry out the visions that he mapped out without the background that was supported by a dizzyingly complex social system that certainly has inefficiencies in it, but, while his engineering mantra of you haven’t cut enough if you don’t have to add something back in works on an assembly line with a clearly defined product – the assembly line of education is a much more haphazard undertaking whose output – the kind of workforce that he can tap into – is not one that can or should be dominated by capitalistic ideals, even if that is the system it is feeding (and supported by).

After reading this book, I have a better sense of Musk.  I admire him more – but continue to mistrust his ability to generalize his belief that he can improve everything he puts his hands on.  Isaacson is more caught up in what could be seen as cult-like worship, though he appears on the surface to have retained journalistic objectivity.  I don’t fault him for being part fanboy.  I could not objectively evaluate the outcome of a treatment that I have conducted: I am too closely allied with the subject of the investigation.  Fortunately others – consultants in my case, the reader in the case of Isaacson, can put what we hear into perspective.  We can worry about Musk and the gaggle of other billionaires who exert outsized influence on this government that is, in theory, by and for the people; and we can experience that anxiety regardless of which party is in office. 

Postscript 2/16/2025: This post was conceived and written before DOGE went into operation.  It is clear from its working that Musk is applying the same principles to Government that he honed in the private sector, particularly at Twitter (now X).  There are problems with this - in addition to his continuing to fail to think about or be concerned with the impact of his firing people on the people he fires and the institutions that they serve - Government is essentially different than the private sector.  Musk felt at many times that his ventures might fail.  His changes at Twitter endangered it as a viable entity.  Indeed, businesses do fail.  There are no remaining members of the Dow Jones Industrial group (from which the average is taken) who originally belonged.  GE (a company founded by Thomas Edison) was the last founding entity to lose its status.  If our government fails, we are in a profoundly different position than having the stockholders of a company lose their investment.

The patient I mentioned above commented this week that the government is not like a private corporation.  When Musk runs Tesla or SpaceX, he constantly states that the only laws that matter are the laws of physics.  When you run a country, the laws that matter are constitutional.  Violating those laws is like violating physical laws when building a product.  The thing may limp along for a while, but the tear in the fabric of the social contract will not heal itself.  We need to rebuild our country - return it to being the one that we have agreed to live in - or face the consequences of living in a world where the rule of law no longer applies.  That is scary beyond belief to me.

Btw, in addition to Asimov and Heinlein, Musk credits The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as helping form his cosmology.  I have long wanted to read that book - hearing that it is a kind of widely shared antidisestablishmentarian book.  It is that - but it is decidedly tongue in cheek...  It is written by a writer for the Monty Python group - and its regard for the value of human life is cheeky, at best.  We are a laughable species whose main purpose is to consume...  Not the philosophical base that I would have an unelected de facto president use as the basis for making decisions that affect millions, if not billions, of people.

Postscript 2/18/2025  It occurred to me overnight that one of the motivations for Musk to take on the DOGE position is that it gives him access to LOTS more data.  I was initially concerned that the 19 and twenty somethings working for him would post my bank account information on the dark web (which they may), but I think his motivation is to gather more information for his AI initiatives.  If he can get his computers to understand the financial system (and his competitors don't have access to this information) and the other governmental systems, he can train them to anticipate and therefore use that information for what he will deem to be prosocial goals - including expanding his wealth so that he can help a few of us get to Mars so that when this planet is destroyed - whether by AI or by climate change or by whatever - human consciousness - including that of his son X - will survive.  And this is the stuff of science fiction - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to be precise...

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Suits: Is the law this base?

  Suits; American TV series; Psychology; Psychoanalysis; Psychoanalytic/Psychological understanding of suits and the law.

Suits is a nine season, 10-16 episode per season drama series that has recently been streaming.  It is the first such long series that I have watched from beginning to end (I never made it to the end of Mad Men, for instance), though I have made it to the end of shorter, series – both in time of episode and number of episodes, including Succession, another long drama series.

When the Reluctant Wife first proposed that we watch it, I was intrigued in part because the Reluctant Son is in law school and I was curious to see how the law was being portrayed – to see what I might learn about the law.  Spoiler alert – the characters play fast and loose with the law – and the script frequently leaves big holes in it about how conclusions are reached and what the legal issues actually are.  The characters seem to be explaining the law – or, more frequently, the reasons why the law would force someone to do something they don’t want to do so they settle – but I learned very little about the law from the program.  The Reluctant Son was a much more reliable source about a world that I know very little about.

Not only are the descriptions of the law thin, so is the entire premise of the show.  Mike Ross (Patrick J. Adams) is a kid who is doing a favor for a friend who is a drug dealer.  He is being pursued by the police when he is carrying a briefcase full of marijuana in an office building and he ducks into a law office, where he talks his way into being interviewed for a position as an associate attorney at the most prestigious and cutthroat practice in the city.  In the interview, we discover (as does the partner, Harvey Specter (Gabriel Macht) that Mike has a photographic memory.

It turns out that Mike, though he has studied law books to illegally take the LSAT for others, has not graduated from college.  The same drug dealing friend who set him up to get caught with a briefcase of weed got him kicked out of college for cheating.  Yet Mike still has faith that this drug dealing best friend guy has his best interests at heart.  Well, the small-time drug dealer has met his match in filling the father role in Harvey Specter – the best closer in New York – and someone whose scruples are both much more in tact and much looser than Mike’s best friend brother/father figure.

It turns out that Mike desperately needs a father figure.  His parents died in a car accident when he was a tween (or so), and (we learn much later) he was screwed out of a reasonable settlement by an unscrupulous lawyer.  His grandmother has raised him to be a morally upright, good boy, and he is supporting himself through being a bike messenger and getting a hefty fee to take other’s LSATs for them.  Harvey offers Mike an opportunity to make an honest man out of himself – to use his talents to engage in the law – on one condition – no one can know that he is not actually a lawyer.

This secret turns out to be Mike’s only moral failure.  Even carrying around weed was to help someone else out – a moral action that cancels out the illegal aspects of it (at least in his mind – and presumably in the minds of the viewers) – and Mike’s moral compass continues to be his guiding star, and the star that increasingly guides the very high powered law firm – all while Mike is learning from Harvey about how to use “leverage” to manipulate people into doing what you (or your client) need them to do.  He becomes, in essence, Batman – a vigilante working at the margins and/or outside of the law – where the law can be defeated by an evil presence because it is constrained to act within the law – and the vigilante’s moral compass can stay focused on true north.  Of course, in the jocular interplay between Mike and Specter, Mike is Robin and Specter is Batman.

One of the reasons I stuck with this show as long as I did was the artful way that cliffhangers were used.  For the first few seasons everyone who knew about Mike’s secret was in danger of being found out in seemingly every episode – and the circle of people who knew kept widening and the danger to the entire firm became more and more in the balance.  Eventually the cliffhangers hung on other aspects of danger – including in Mike’s evolving relationship with his work mate, girlfriend,  fiancé, and eventually wife Rachel Zane (Meghan Markle – who left the show after the seventh season to become the Duchess of Sussex).  Will they (whoever they is this week) be OK?  Will they be found out?  Will the new person who discovers the secret use it as leverage?  To what end?  Tune in next week… or, since it is streaming – don’t touch that remote – we will answer the dire question in the next episode.

Somehow this set of cliffhangers remained generally engaging though it was also exhausting and even tedious at times as we would binge on two, three, and sometimes four episodes at a sitting.  I think one reason it was not more tiresome is the contentious nature of each of the characters.  Partly in their role as attorneys, or legal secretaries, or paralegals they were confrontational with their clients – but also with each other.  There was a kind of bracing authenticity to the interactions as people would tell each other what they really thought about the other and about their relationship or, if it was impolitic to do that, they would talk with each other about what was really going on in a professional or personal relationship and strategize about how to handle the situation.  These conversations were refreshingly direct, honest and the communication was clear – even if its intent was to figure out how to tell a lie to someone so that the desired outcome would be achieved.  Combativeness seemed to be an essential cornerstone to being so clear in their communication (Harvey boxes as a means of staying fit – carrying the pugilistic feeling literally into the ring).

Another element that kept my attention was the genuine likeability of the characters.  Donna Paulsen (Sarah Rafferty) is Harvey’s mind reading secretary – sort of an attractive Radar O’Reilly (a character on the TV show M*A*S*H who always knew what his commanding officer needed) – and Donna is always a covert love interest – only at the end of the series do she and Harvey become a genuine item (and the tension of not being straightforward about their attraction to each other in this show that is based on honest interaction only increases the ironic tension).  Her caring for Harvey, but really for the entire firm is the counterbalance to Mike’s moral uprightness in a sea of turpitude.  And she sees Harvey’s moral fiber beneath his make the deal at any cost outward armor.  Louis Litt (Rick Hoffman), a winsome and clownish character who is always artlessly climbing towards the top of some hierarchy while being a loveable buffoon who inevitably fails in his efforts but is always contrite when he realizes his errors, provides comic relief and, as his character develops, pathos.

The show, in a word, articulated my worst fears about the legal profession.  These lawyers were more interested in their own well-being and were working hard to beat every other lawyer – but they had a kind regard for each other and treated those that they bonded with as family.  

When I was a graduate student, there was a term for people who cared about each other but not about the rest of the world.  This was a type 2 psychopath.  A type 1 psychopath was someone who viewed everyone as an enemy and felt no remorse for harming others as long as they were able to profit from the interaction.  A type 2 psychopath is one who behaves like a type 1 to everyone outside of the core social group - often their family.  Outsiders are all marks to be taken advantage of, but they care deeply about those who are in the family.  In this way, this show might mirror the Sopranos – or another show about the mob – who are a well-known group of type 2 psychopaths.

Does it worry me that my reluctant son, reluctant though he may be, is going to be working for a high-powered law firm?  Will he become focused on the firm’s profits at the expense of his very soul?  Yes, that worries me.  Do I hope that he will have the integrity of a Mike and keep the firm on the moral high ground?  There are indications that this may happen.  He was a summer intern at the firm he will be working for and while there he observed one of their top lawyers depose a man who was suing the company the firm represented.  The firms attorney, by building a relationship with the plaintiff – by treating him as an ally rather than an adversary – an ally in investigating the truth of what happened to him – was able to clarify that the person had, indeed, been injured, and needed to be compensated, but it was not the company that the firm represented who was responsible, but another party, and the plaintiff agreed (and so did that plaintiff’s attorney) that it made more sense to sue the other company.  This was a regular Specter and Mike move.  Let’s make sure that the bad guys pay – and that our guys are not the bad guys.

Of course, it is not always the case that our guys are the good guys.  One of my old reluctant roommates from graduate school asked me to listen to a podcast about BP’s Deep Water Horizon oil spill and its aftermath.  The podcast is called Ripple.  It documents the antics of BP and their attorneys to protect the corporation from suits over the long-term effects of fisherman who were hired to clean up the spill after their fishing was ruined by it – and the fact that only one person has successfully negotiated compensation for the health consequences.  This person represented himself for a long time in the fight, calling in attorneys to help only near the end of a twelve-year battle, but most importantly, he had moved to Tennessee and had the case moved there.  His belief is that the court system in and around the gulf coast is essentially owned by BP – and the podcast made the point that BP had been put in charge of the clean up and of documenting its effects on the environment and the workers by the federal government.  It was a case, the podcast maintained, of the fox guarding the hen house.

A case where the fox is guarding the henhouse is exactly the kind of case that Mike championed on the show.  When Megan Markle became the duchess of Windsor and left the show, it was easy to write she and Mike out – they went to the west coast and joined a firm that engaged in going after big corporations.  He could not continue to do that at a New York law firm that was tasked with defending corporations – those corporations would not hire a firm that was going after businesses like themselves.  Mike was increasingly portrayed as taking the big firm tactics and using them in support of the little guy – using leverage, but also bluffing – and calling the other person’s bluff – essentially playing high stakes poker as a means of resolving disputes.

Some would say that this is psychological warfare and should be right up the alley of a psychoanalyst.  There are, in fact, two psychotherapists who play significant roles in the series.  And though the psychotherapists are clad in Hollywood garb, the writers and actors got the essence right – both therapists are anti-suits in their approach – they are working to ally themselves with their clients and to help them see through the context of a caring relationship how out of balance their lives are and the importance of moving relationships to the center of their lives rather than treating relationships as additional areas in which to exercise leverage.  Interestingly, both psychotherapists engage in boundary violations with their patients – demonstrating the dangers of becoming too passionately involved in professional relationships by their actions…

But psychological warfare is not, ultimately, what practicing psychologists and psychoanalysts study, even though that warfare or poker playing gets dubbed "psychological".  I would be a terrible poker player.  I am not trying to outwit my patients.  I am trying to connect with them.  Sometimes that does mean that I have to practice abstinence – meaning to step back and let them solve something for themselves – or to feel something deeply even though that may be painful and all I can offer at that moment is myself as witness to their pain.  And also as witness to their survival of the lived experience of it.

The reluctant son took a class in law school last semester on mediation.  There was a lab associated with the class, and he needed to mediate ten cases at a small claims court across the course of the semester.  Courses were referred to mediation as an alternative to trial.  If the cases were not successfully mediated, if the parties could not come to an agreement, the dispute would go back to a trial and the judge would decide how to resolve the issue. 

We discussed the cases and the ones that were most successful (meaning that the reluctant son was pleased with the outcome) were the cases where there was a dispute between friends or family members over some financial issue.  The complainants were frequently able to come to an understanding of the underlying issues – and there were even cases where the emotional disagreement was identified and addressed!

There were other cases that were more complicated.  Someone who had been in section 8 housing for 10 years was moving to a new apartment and the landlord wanted to keep the $200 deposit because the apartment needed to be painted and the carpet needed to be replaced.  The tenant sued to get his deposit back.  The landlord’s lawyer came to the mediation and threatened to countersue for $400 because of other damage they found.  The lawyer “generously offered” not to countersue if the complainant would drop his case to get his deposit back.  The reluctant son was not allowed to tell the complainant that the lawyer was using leverage and likely bluffing.  The complainant agreed to withdraw his suit – and was satisfied with the result: from his perspective he had saved $400!

The reluctant son tells me this last case was consistent with the evidence from studies of mediated solutions.  Poorer people have poorer objective outcomes from mediation, but they have higher satisfaction with the outcome of the mediation process than do more well-heeled people who make use of this avenue.

In my view, the legal system should be used as a court of last resort.  Most of our disagreements are not primarily about money.  In fact, most of the disagreements that provided the cliffhangers on suits were not primarily about money, but more often about grudges, or getting even, or trying to get more power, and money became the means of determining the outcome of the issue.  This was generally satisfying as the good guy – the one we identified with and that Mike and Harvey Specter represented – almost always won.  But the legal system is about winners and losers and it is an adversarial system that determines who is at fault – who is to blame.  Real life problems are rarely that simple.  And the more complete solutions require bargaining in good faith – meaning, bargaining based on the assumption that the other person, too, is a good person.

It is also the case that, in real life situations, to achieve the best possible outcome, the kind the reluctant son will feel good about, we need to be as candid and upfront as the characters in Suits are.  We need to let people know how we really feel about the issues that affect us.  This is difficult to do.  We have been socialized to be indirect, to be "polite", which means, on some basic level, duplicitous.  We need to hide our feelings and to pretend to resonate with the feelings of the other.

In order to make a negotiated system work well, all parties need to act in good faith and to be honest and direct.  This means that they have to assume that the other person is a well-meaning individual who also wants to find a harmonious solution to whatever difficulty is being faced and that they will represent their true desires truthfully.  Rarely do we achieve this state of affairs, and so we, especially in the United States, settle back into a position that what the other person is doing is not fair and we triangulate in someone to referee between us.  Sometimes, as in Louisiana, that referee appears to be biased against us.  Sometimes we need to find an advocate who is wilier at the “psychological” ability to outwit the other guy – which often means coming to have a sense of who that person is, what they want, and why they want it not by listening to what they say, but by inferring what their motives are by closely watching their actions and then figuring out how to provide a satisfactory version of what they really need rather than what they think they need.  Ultimately, in the final season of suits, the characters that we came to be identified with, the people that we cared about, had a “happy” ending – which generally involved their finally expressing and addressing their relational needs – and ultimately, at least for some of them, giving up on the rat race that had used money and adrenaline to create the illusion that those needs were being addressed.  Of course, this let's the air out of the balloon of unmet needs that has kept us glued to the set, and we are oddly deflated by at all this happiness...

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Go Tell It on the Mountain: James Baldwin’s Coming of Age roman a clef that Comes together in One Day.

 Go Tell it on the Mountain, James Baldwin, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Civil Rights, Personal Narrative, Power of the Concrete

When I was a kid, I lived in segregated West Palm Beach, Florida.  The woman who came to clean our house every other week was African American, but she was one of the few blacks that I saw, and I don’t remember speaking with her.  I think one of the fifth-grade teachers at Belvedere elementary may have been African American – but I almost never interacted with African Americans. Blacks were, therefore, fascinating to me.  When we went to New York City, I wanted to go to Harlem, because what little I knew about African Americans was that they lived in Harlem.

This summer, reading Eddie Glaude Jr.’s book, Begin Again, about the process of maintaining forward progress on civil rights in a world that seems to think that they have been taken care of them when that has most decidedly not been the case, got me interested in James Baldwin, an author whose works I had not read.  Glaude was using Baldwin as a guide to rethink civil rights and how we should begin the civil rights movement again. 

Going to the source, I picked up Baldwin’s first novel.  Surprise, surprise, it was about Harlem.  One day in the life of a family, but more particularly, a boy in Harlem.  I have read Circadian novels before, Mrs. Dalloway being the quintessential tale in a day, but this day, though ordinary on the outside, is extraordinary at its center.

Go Tell it on the Mountain is not an easy read.  It is particularly hard to get oriented.  Who are these people?  What is the source – not only of their poverty, but of their rich internal worlds that are filled with moral striving, interpersonal conflict, and wide varieties of spiritual and emotional experience?  If I had picked up this book instead of wishing to drive through the streets of Harlem, where I would probably have been overwhelmed by the poverty and seen little beyond it, I would have learned a lot more about what I was looking for.  And I would have found complex, human beings engaged in living meaningful lives not, as I would have thought, on the margins of the world (though the violence and poverty within and around them are palpable), but in the center of a rich culture that oddly mirrored and contrasted with my own.

I think, though, that this book is not an easy read because Baldwin wants you to be disoriented.  It is pretty clear that this is a roman a clef (a thinly veiled autobiography), though I think Baldwin has invented a narrative that allows for the emotional experience of growing up in his family to be communicated by introducing elements in the plot that are not part of his known biography – at least as he relates it in the essay Notes of a Native Son, which was a quick and easy read after this novel.  In the novel, he both simplifies and complicates the family – primarily with the aim of helping us become as confused as the central character – John – by the hatred that his father has for him.  

Rather than being loved as the eldest – rather than being loved for the apparent gifts that he has, gifts that will allow him to take on his father’s mantle and join him in the family calling, John is scorned by his father who dotes over his younger, wayward brother.  The father, who is a laborer by day and a preacher by night in a storefront church and who surrounds himself with angels of the parish, is crestfallen when the younger son, Roy (probably short for Royal) is knifed in a fight, leaving him bleeding, scarred, but unrepentant. 

We are introduced to John in church, on Sunday morning, with his family, immediately after the knifing and we find, to at least my surprise, that he is not a believer.  He has not been taken by the spirit – he has not come forward to be embraced by Christ and welcomed into the community of saints.  He knows this – and the rest of the congregation knows it.  He is both a member of the community and not.

I was raised in the Episcopal Church, and the rite of becoming a Christian was formalized.  You were baptized shortly after birth – and then you went through confirmation – where you confirmed your faith – when you were 14 – John’s age.  But this was a formal procedure.  It involved classes (I must have learned something in those classes, but all I retain now is a dim memory of being required to go to them), and then a group ceremony where the bishop anointed you.  This felt a little like the scene in The Crown where Elizabeth is crowned and the Archbishop watches closely to see the spirit of God enter her at that very moment – but I don’t think anyone was watching any of us in the confirmation class all that closely – we just stood there while the Bishop did something.  Neither we nor the queen was an active agent – the magic of God was visited upon us with, at least to me, no visible shift in our being.

That is not what happens in John’s church.  If you are going to be a member, you need to choose to be saved.  You need to express a desire and have the community respond to that desire.  Part of what felt disorienting in the first part of the book was how alone John seemed to be – and how alone I felt as I empathized with him.  Not only did he not belong with the saints, and didn’t seem to want to, it felt that no one, with the possible exception of his mother, was recruiting him to join the saints – no one was encouraging or supporting him.  This led me to feel, through him, a tremendous sense of isolation – even as he was clearly socially a member of this group of saints – and there was a positive expectation that he would not, as his brother had done, transgress the bounds of the community.  John was a good boy who was not welcome in the inner sanctum – and didn’t, somehow, want to be there.

Confusing the reader is, then, a vehicle for helping the reader to empathize with the hero.  The hero (John) does not understand, any more than we do, why his father hates him.  Our confusion drives the desire to know, which keeps us reading, and keeps John working to make sense of his relationship with his father.

John does want to transgress some boundaries, though it is not quite clear why – or more particularly how he would do that.  He feels guilty for various homoerotic stirrings – and we wonder whether his father, on some level senses them and therefore is rejecting him – or perhaps John fears that his father will reject him and so does not reach out in a way that would lead him to be loved.  We are puzzled by the sins that John wants to commit – they are not clearly articulated, so they seem willful in the sense of being desired in order to prevent him from being pulled into the community, or perhaps he is afraid of being pulled into the orbit of his raging and inconsistent father.

In the second part of the novel, after introducing us to John, Baldwin introduces us to Gabriel, the father.  Here we discover the complicated relationship between Gabriel and John, one that John is apparently unaware of and one that John will, presumably, come to know later so that he can write the book.  In the meantime, he (in the form of Baldwin as author) does write some of Gabriel’s sermons, and this was the point where I woke up to the pleasure of reading this book.  The sermons were beautifully written, and I suspect a point of pride for the author.  Though they were attributed to the father, they clearly flowed out of the pen of the son.

It turns out that Baldwin did become a preacher – and these sermons are certainly his.  And they may be both an homage to the father – and the glory of his father's early preaching, when he was a fiery force to be reckoned with – and they are, I think, a point of personal pride – they are saying to the one who withheld his love, look what I can do.  What I can do is every bit as good as what you did – and perhaps a mite better  (I just heard the childish jingle, “Anything you can do, I can do better” ring in my head).

A friend who was reading the book with me commented that the language in the book became somewhat repetitive and almost hypnotic.  We posited that the source of the author’s linguistic abilities was in his reading of the King James Bible, and the vehicle of self-expression was in first hearing and then, for some, the delivery of sermons.  I began to think of the church as being not just the spiritual home of many African Americans, but also of its being their intellectual home.  This would, I suppose, mirror the ways in which the church helped bring Europeans out of the middle ages and into the renaissance.

After we are introduced to the rest of the family and the characters, already broadly known, take on nuance and three dimensionality, we return to the church, for the evening service.  John opens the building up to prepare for the service (he does a lot of work for a non-saint, I’m just saying), and he cleans the building and wrestles with Elisha, an older teenage boy, one who is saved, but in danger because he is interested in a girl at the church.  Again, the excitement of wrestling with another man, the theme of homosexuality, is a prelude to this final act.

The family, and a few other saints, gather in the church.  The service begins – and so does John’s awakening.  I don’t want to spoil this moment for you – or compete with Baldwin’s writing if you have read it.  Just let it suffice to say that to get to heaven, John has to go through hell.  And part of that hell is moving from being confused and isolated by that confusion to becoming furious – tapping into the reservoir of anger and hatred that has built up over a life time of being unacknowledged.  And wrestling with this anger takes the place of wrestling with Elisha.   He is now wrestling openly with God and the devil, and doing it in the aisle of the church as those around him look on, realizing that he is in the midst of a terrible struggle.

Perhaps the wish to sin that he has been holding onto is driven in large part by the wish to express his anger directly at his father – to confront him, wrestle him – perhaps to murder him.  The desire to transgress is strong within him, despite his being the dutiful son – the one who, on the surface, is without apparent passion.  But the passion is apparent in what one would assume would be his physical writhing - the others in the church can see his conflict express itself through his body - but we get to observe it from the inside - and the turmoil is intense.

The outcome of the struggle is as powerful (at least to me) as the struggle itself.  We are rooting for him to express the wish to be saved – we fear it will not arrive – but when it does, he is able to achieve it without giving up or succumbing to the father.  The competition that I saw play out with the writing of the sermon becomes a preview of the integrity that he maintains in his acknowledgement of his need to be saved.  He will become a saint with integrity – and the wherewithal to protect that.  He is not his father’s son – doing his father’s bidding – he is his own person, embracing his own belief – one that he can own on his own terms, not the terms of his complicated and, ultimately, corrupt father.  He finds his own way to becoming part of the community while retaining the position of one who stands apart.

At this moment, there would be a lot of directions to go in discussing this book.  The relationship of the father and son is very rich psychodynamic material.  I could reduce it by generalizing it – showing that it fits under a particular Oedipal umbrella.  And while that would work, and might even be edifying, and would be worth discussing, it would also leave us without the texture of the very particular struggle that John has gone through, and something essential would thus be lost.  Such a process would also be a second reduction.  The rationale that Baldwin gives for his father’s hate in Notes of a Native Son is that his father was increasingly psychotically paranoid as he aged. 

The beauty of this story is that the richness of the struggle of the son to be confused, to be angry, to be afraid is preserved by the anti-diluvian process of complicating the father – not washing him clean with the clinical diagnosis of paranoia, but filling him with a backstory of sin, betrayal, and brokenness that leads him to harbor secrets from the son, secrets that the son fills in with his own explanations, and his own judgements of the shortcomings of the father – explanations that are only hinted at, only poorly articulated, but that are deeply felt, expressed and wrestled with as the son comes to grips with becoming a man and a man of faith.

Creating a narrative, changing the facts of his upbringing, allows Baldwin to own the essential, felt nature of being the son of the man his father was – and the son of his mother – and the 14 year old in contact with the world that he was in contact with – not as that world, including his mother and father, existed in an objective sense, but as it was constructed by him as a subject – a very particular subject with a keen sense of what is right and what is wrong.

When I was wrestling with this book – trying to like it – I complained to the reluctant wife about the difficulties of reading it.  She suggested that the book on Baldwin is that his essays are where his brilliance lies and where he best expresses himself.  She was somewhat surprised that I had chosen to enter his world through the novel.  Having completed my own mini version of his conversion, I am glad that I chose this entry point.  Whatever is in the essays (which I may or may not get to), springs from this fountainhead.  His understanding of the injustices that necessitate a Civil Rights Movement spring from the lived experience of mad and crazy father – one who is rich with contradiction, with a moral compass and a rigid and errant sense of justice; one who can see in others the rot that he cannot see in himself and sometimes unloads his own rot there rather than discovering.  It is not a great leap to see the white patriarchy in this country as a version of Baldwin's father.

I am now in danger of doing what I said I would not – reducing this story, as Baldwin might have done were he to have become a psychoanalyst and presented the case of his paranoid father – and a country with paranoid tendencies – to a gathering of other psychoanalysts.  We would together come to a better understanding of the puzzling aspects of the current political climate, but I think that conclusion would not have been as useful as his political essays were at the time they were written and, according to Eddie Glaude, Jr., as they can be now. 

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Blessing America First: David Buckley’s take on the first Trump State Department transition

 Trump, Populism, Psychoanalysis, Religion, Foreign Policy, Psychology

Our local Association for Psychoanalytic Thought (Apt) was thinking about the year’s program of events – and we hit on the theme of passages, especially given that it is a BIG election year.  A member of the board from Louisville knew David Buckley, a political science faculty member at the University of Louisville, who has just published a book detailing his experience as a one-year academic fellow at the State Department from 2016 through 2017.  Because his particular area of expertise is the intersection of religion and foreign policy, he was assigned to work with (and observe) the State Department Office of Religion and Global Affairs.  This afforded him a front seat to watch the impact of the Trump Administration on the functioning of the State department.  His book is an academic/scientific report on what he observed.

When Apt decided to start the passages group of presentations, we thought that something about the election would be good.  We put together a panel with the psychoanalyst from Louisville, Bill Nunley, myself, and David Buckley to describe populism and how it works.  In preparation for the event, I spent a month and a half reviewing other analysts’ take on populism and reading David’s text: Blessing America First: Religion, Populism, and Foreign Policy in the Trump Administration.  I actually finished the book the morning of the presentation.

As the election drew closer and I became convinced that Trump would not be elected, I was framing my remarks in the context of populism as a historical phenomenon that has recurred throughout history, is spearheaded by Trump now, but I was concerned about who might take over his mantle after his defeat.  The panel was presented the Friday after the election, and I had to pivot towards thinking about populism in the present tense rather than preparing for some distant moment as the results on Wednesday made it clear that he had been re-elected.

I actually had to pivot a bit before that.  Apt is a separate organization from our local institute, but it is sponsored by the institute.  When I sent the materials to advertise the event to the institute director to distribute them to the institute’s mailing list – which is routine for our organization – the request was held up and then denied.  Because the title included Trump, the institute did not want to be associated with the presentation.  I was so confused when this news was delivered to me that I couldn’t quite figure out why they objected.  Psychoanalysis (as my posts on a wide variety of topics attest to) is relevant to the entire spectrum of human functioning.  I’m not actually sure went into the decision, though I was told it had something to do with not wanting to alienate anyone in polarized times, but it still brought me up short.  Was this censorship?  Was it fear of reprisal?  I became paralyzed in the moment that the news was delivered.

Though I think this was a bad decision on the part of the institute, it was a helpful one to my thinking about how to frame the evening.  My job was to talk about what drew people to Trump – and I had been engaged in somewhat slippery and lazy thinking – wanting to attribute things that I think about Trump to those who voted for him, which I think is both unfair – and way too reductionistic.  The factors that go into any decision are manifold and, especially with decisions as complicated as choosing a leader, it does not make sense to isolate a single factor.  That said, I do think there were important factors at play that influenced this election – more on that later.  For now, the meeting did go ahead.  I was able to cobble together (with the institute's help) a mailing list and the usual sized group materialized - about 30 people - and we had a good conversation.

Blessing American First is a difficult read.  Dave is a careful and thorough thinker.  He has biases and, as a scientist doing qualitative field work in an area that he is passionate about, he wants to make sure that his positions are scientifically defensible.  This makes his writing tiresome, even tedious at times, as he cites sources to support his observations (it could be a lighter and much easier read if he chose to follow populist guidelines regarding truth and facts...). The book is also dense because it is based on a sister discipline that shares many ideas with psychology (my first scientific language), but it is not my discipline, so the terms and the methodology are similar, but just enough different that I have to keep on my toes, which uses a fair amount of energy. 

All that said, the book is enlightening.  The first and most important point of information that Dave defines populism.  This term is used to refer to Trump (and to Andrew Jackson) and I have had the vague sense that it is related to popularity – as in, this is a candidate who promises people what they want to hear and so he is popular and wins the election because of the popular vote (even though Trump did not win the popular vote the first time). 

Jonathan Lear, a philosopher and psychoanalyst, was using a definition like this to tie Trump's appeal to Plato’s Republic.  In the Republic, Socrates proposes that the next logical form of government after democracy is dictatorship.  I remember reading this in college and thinking that it made no sense because citizens in a democracy would never give up their power.  Lear pointed out that Socrates argument was that in a democracy, everyone improves financially – and once the citizens get a taste of wealth, their appetite for it increases and they are happy to install a dictator if he promises greater wealth.  We are willing, Socrates maintains, to sell our freedom for the promise of more earthly goods.  Hearing this argument again as an older man, I find it convincing.

David is helpful with the definition of populism by first pointing out that there is no single definition.  People use it in a variety of ways and contest which definition makes the most sense.  Dave argues for two definitions of Trumpian populism: First that it rests on “thin” ideological grounds that distinguish “the people” from various undesirable outgroups.  I have heard fascism defined in a very similar fashion.  A second definition – or characteristic of Trumpian populism - is that there is a “personalistic strategic logic that rejects institutional constraint.”

Both of these definitions – or descriptions – proved useful to both Dave and to me in thinking about Trump.  Dave is very much an organizational person.  He praises the virtues of a bureaucracy.  From his perspective, a bureaucracy was something that founders built into the federal government by virtue of the checks and balances they created between the three branches of government.  Each branch is overseeing the other two, and this is because the founders, who had successfully overthrown a king whom they believed to be a self-interested ruler, recognized that anyone in power could become self-interested, so they designed a government to check that self interest.  They even mistrusted the people,  creating the electoral college so that the people would not be entrusted in a direct vote for the president, but that state representatives would actually do the electing.

From his perch at the USAID, David was able to see how the bureaucracy was able to create stable relationships with religious leaders in other countries so that they could help communicate, through the pulpit as it were, ideas that the State Department saw as important.  So, for instance, in Nigeria, where corruption was a major problem, contacts with religious leaders helped to communicate how those in power were being corrupted, helping the country's turn away from corruption (Of course, if another country were to exercise this type of influence in our country, we would call it election interference, but American Exceptionalism allows us to do things that we would not accept from others).

The effect of a bureaucracy is that getting anything down requires a great deal of time and effort.  This is a virtue from Dave and the founder’s perspective.  It means that the government will be stable and non-reactive.  But Trump has been able to paint that as a liability rather than a virtue.  The bureaucracy has become the dictator that we need to rebel against, and Trump’s personalism is the needed antidote.  He will not be constrained by the bureaucracy – in part because he will upend and or eliminate it.

Growing up, bureaucrats were referred to in my household as loafers who leached their incomes from the working people of the world who were accomplishing things.  The bureaucrats, for unknown reasons, seemed to be opposed to production, profit and self-determination, so eliminating them would be a good thing.

As an adult, watching my wife work in the federal government, I have come to have a very different view, but I still have sympathy for my family members’ views, including that the world is a simpler place on the local level – and that, when we know the character of our neighbors and their needs, we can provide for them more effectively that a distant nameless and faceless entity.  Certainly, my battles with insurance companies to meet the needs of my patients across the course of my career has not endeared me to all bureaucrats as an adult.  On the other hand, I am very aware of the ways that bias can be expressed unconsciously, to that our local well-intentioned help can have negative consequences.

Dave helped me recognize that what Trump effectively does is to mobilize fear – fear that some unknown person working for their own ends – or the mindless ends of a thick ideology, one that is freighted with all kinds of compromise and red tape, will not be as effective as directly meeting the needs of the people as he will be.  Which leads to the question of why the people who are drawn to the message are not stopped short by the character of the person.

One of my patients says that Trump comes across as trustworthy because what you see is what you get.  With politicians in general, there is a pause as they process information and think about what the import of what they are about to say will be on this population or that – how it will affect this country or that.  With Trump we do not get this.  He is quick to provide a response – and there is little evidence of conflict about what he asserts at any given moment – even if what he is saying is inconsistent with what he has said at another time, he believes what he says to be the case in the moment when he is taking that position.  He thus feels genuine and reliable in the way that the high school quarterback, now grown older and drinking in a bar, seems likable, and we cut them both a little slack if they exaggerate things a bit to make the story better.

More to the psychoanalytic point, we actually want someone who plays a bit fast and loose with the facts and who is suspicious of others when we are dealing with an enemy, and Trump consistently reminds us – as part of the in-group out-group aspect of  populism – that we are dealing with an enemy.  As the manager of the rhythm and blues band formed in the movie The Commitments maintained when he was questioned about hiring a savage as a drummer and bouncer, “He is a savage, but he is our savage.”

What I mean by that last statement is that when we go to war, we want someone who is ready to fight to lead us.  War is both a very real phenomenon, and a metaphor.  Psychoanalytically, we can arrange our defenses (a military term to describe how we handle interpersonal relationships and our own feeling states) from primitive through neurotic to “healthy”.  Our primitive defenses are used when we feel most constrained, disempowered, and unsafe – our healthy defenses are used when we are more trusting and open.  We measure the psychopathology of the patients that we work with based on their defensive structures.  So, those who use the most primitive defenses are psychotic, those who use more advanced defenses are neurotic, and those in between are referred to as engaging in borderline functioning.

The problem with this system is that we all use defenses all across the board.  Chris Perry, a researcher in Canada, has rated the use of defensive functioning in ordinary conversations between psychologically healthy individuals and has noted that about 20% of the defenses being used are from the psychotic end of the spectrum - we dip into primitive processing on a regular basis.  Under pressure – when we are scared, or disempowered, this percentage will necessarily increase.  When Trump tells us there is an enemy that we need to fight against, we become, momentarily, more primitive in our thinking.  In this regressed state, we engage in thinking that is more circumscribed and simplistic – we think in black and white terms.

Lest we get too excited about the impact this effect this has on others, we should check the impact that it has on ourselves.  How narrowly do we begin to think when we are riled up – whether because we agree with Trump or because we agree with the other person?  (How quickly did I devolve into primitive thinking when my request to send the invitation to the panel through the institute's listserve was thwarted?)  The answer is – quite a bit.  In fact, the best ways to influence an election are two: Get out the vote and talk dirt about the opponent.  Negative campaigning works.  It just does.  We are herd animals who are trusting by nature, but this means that, to protect ourselves, we have to be overly sensitive to negative information – we weight negative information about four times more heavily than positive information – and that negative information leads us to regress and look around for a bully – or a strong man – who will take care of things for us.

Hannah Gadsby decided to quit doing stand up comedy because she realized that she was making people laugh by helping them reduce the tension that they were feeling – but that, in order to reduce that tension, she had to make them tense to begin with.  She thought this was sadistic – and so she went on tour to apologize to her fans and to promise to quite harming them and, because the tour was a smashing success, she decided to rethink her retirement and has been working as a comic ever since.

Trump’s approach is much the same.  He gets us anxious, and then he promises that he will be the cure.  And that is how he functions in office.  What Dave was able to document are the ways in which Trump bypassed the structures of the State Department, and the ways in which people began to be able to function based on the relationships they either had previously had with Trump - and they were put in positions of power in the State Department because of them – or because of the ways they were able to establish relationships with Trump – or with the people within his orbit.

Bureaucracy, for all of its’ inefficiencies, tolerates and even thrives on dissent.  When Trump would propose something, like the Muslim ban, that the career staffers at the State Department objected to, they would sign off on statements indicating their disagreement and thought they were doing their bureaucratic duty and helping Trump see an alternative perspective.  Trump’s response, through Sean Spicer, was to tell those who disagreed to pack their bags.  This language has been mirrored by those Trump would appoint to cabinet positions in his second term.  The message is clear – your opinion doesn’t matter, what matters is whether you align with the leader or not.

Of course, this does lead to concerns about a second term.  Where there were some adults in the room in the first term, those have been driven out and said they don’t want anything to do with Trump indicates they will not be in power in the second term.  Trump is apparently stocking a war chest funded by his allies in the business world to campaign against Senators who disagree with him.  We will see if this Senate takes any more seriously their need to advise and dissent than the previous one did.

Ultimately, I found the investment in reading this book worthwhile.  It helped me get my bearings for this disorienting passage back into the Trumpian state.  Seeing, in detail, how Trump operated before helped me make sense of the concerns that people across the political spectrum were voicing.  Once he has power – and, in a normal world, this would be his last administration, but I don’t think we can count on that with him – he can exercise it in ways that suit him and those he turns toward.  The populist, according to Dave, is most interested in maintaining power – so he does – to go back to my naïve understanding – what is popular.  Of course, the question at this point is, who is his constituency?  Who will help him retain power?

Long ago I opined that Trump could be a nuclear terrorist.  I think he has assumed office in part by terrorizing us (again) and he has therefore assumed control of the nuclear arsenal and the military apparatus (again).  I am not opposed to reducing waste or limiting the size of the bureaucracy – but the necessity of many governmental services is not something that Trump seems tuned into.  I think he imagines, like the kid born on third base who thinks he hit a triple, the country as simply been waiting for him to fix it rather than building itself into the beacon of freedom and power that has made it the world power that it has been for the last 75 or 100 years.  We survived Trump's term of office last time.  We will have to see what is on his mind this time.

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Conclave: Leadership, surprisingly, requires uncertainty

Conclave Movie, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Leadership, Uncertainty 

Conclave

This is a film about uncertainty.  I am going to be an advocate for uncertainty in this post about it.  But I am certain about one thing: this is a film worth seeing – and seeing it in the theater if you have the opportunity to do that.  In fact, I think that the scene during which Dean Thomas Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) articulates how a new pope should be chosen should be required viewing before any political convention, but also before making a decision about hiring or appointing a person for any executive role.  The essence of the speech, I think, is that we want a leader who is uncertain, not one who is certain; a leader who is curious, not one who already knows the answer, including to questions that have not yet been asked, but also to those that have been visited many times.

But don’t we want a leader who knows the way?  Why would we hire a guide to lead us through the jungle if they didn’t know something about the paths that are available, the risks that exist, and how to prepare for them?  Well, I do think that is one of the shortcomings of this film.  In reaching for the answer to this two-pronged dilemma – the need for expertise, for knowledge, for a plan; and the need for openness and the ability to embrace novelty – we can err on either side, and I think this film portrays that in a very provocative way.  I won’t reveal the particular provocative twist – one that was clearly intentional and intentionally corrective and therefore critical of the church – but will speak to the more prosaic difficulties of erring on the side of openness.  As my wife says, we should have open minds, but not so open that our brains fall out…

What is portrayed in this film; richly, lushly, but also realistically, is the process of making a group decision – a political decision – and the intrigue but also the personalities and characters that are involved in that process.  In order to make statements that are universal, this film anchors itself in the particular, and that particular contains within it some stark realities that are represented in terms of the process, but also visually as well as in the plot and the dialogue.

One of the odd particularities of choosing a pope is that the chosen person must come from a very tiny pool – the Cardinals that are assembled for the conclave.  They must choose one of the people assembled to make the decision, all are voting members, and they are locked onto seclusion – conclave – until they reach a decision as the result of an iterative process where they cast one secret ballot after another until an individual emerges as the choice of the majority.  Initially there are many options, but those get winnowed down across time and, eventually, a leader emerges – a leader who (at least in principle) has not campaigned for himself but is discovered to be the best candidate as a result of the lived process of making the decision.

Visually, the Vatican is the particular place of this decision making and the vestments of the church play a not insignificant role in defining the film.  The colors are arresting.  The crimsons of the cardinals’ clerical garb are lavish.  The build up towards the pageantry of the decisional process is a visual feast.  At the same time, there are more prosaic elements.  Putting the Cardinals on a bus to drive from the dormitory to the Sistine Chapel to engage in the voting procedure allows the modern world to intrude into this highly ritualized ancient rite that is intended to be hermetically sealed from the outside (modern) world.  That seal is even more dramatically and violently broken at a critical moment in the vote casting to underscore the ways in which no process, no matter how sacred, can quite rise above the outside influences; the very real political environment, that surrounds every decision of import.

On a smaller scale, there was something depressing about the communal eating space for the Cardinals and the cells of the dormitory they stayed in.  Yes, the eating space emphasized the gender differences between the Cardinals and the Nuns who served them, but it was more than the privilege of the males, it was the feel of the room that the food was served in that reeked of gender differences.  Even though the silverware and china and crystal goblets were meticulously curated, the room itself felt much more like a school cafeteria than a noble or even holy space.  It felt hollow – in a way that (forgive my sexism here) spaces designed by men for function rather than form – feel.  There was a kind of Dickensian bleakness; the conspicuous consumption couldn’t quite hide the underlying lack in lives that are devoid of a feminine engagement with the textures of cloth, the softness of upholstery, and the warmth of wood that make the ceremonial spaces seem more inviting than the hard marbles of the living spaces; the living spaces that seem to be designed to be cleaned rather than lived in.

The decisional dilemma is presented as one that has initially has five viable options for the next Pope – and they are each members of pretty traditional categories.  At one end of the spectrum, there is the conservative MAGA candidate (the film was released before the US election with, I think, the now apparently vain hope that it would influence that decision).  The candidate representing this conservative, let’s put the genie back in the bottle vision is Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto), who wants to return to the Latin Liturgy and return to having an Italian Pope; himself.  More centrally and controversially, he sees the interactions with other faiths as a war – especially with the Muslims, and he wants to arm the Christian soldiers to engage in a fight to the death with infidels.

Two other conservative, but less reactionary candidates are also in the mix.  Cardinal Tremblay (John Lithgow), a power motivated political operative in a culture where open campaigning for the office is forbidden.  His bid for power is defeated when his scheming is exposed – in a very powerful scene where Sister Agnes (Isabella Rossellini) clarifies that though the women are given no official power, they have eyes and ears and can influence the process through sharing what they know.   Cardinal Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati) is an African Cardinal whose blackness would help modernize the image of the church as representative of its entire congregation, though his strong stance against homosexuality keeps him solidly in the conservative side of the group.  Ultimately his youthful behavior exposed by political skullduggery will scuttle his candidacy.

On the liberal end of the spectrum is Cardinal Bellini from America (Stanley Tucci) who pushes all the liberal buttons in terms of issues like sexuality and expanding the role of women in the church and acts the part of the liberal candidate, pretending he is not interested in becoming the Pope while deeply wanting to have the position and especially the power that comes with it – and assuming that all of the others, like him, not so secretly want that power.  The first dark horse candidate to emerge is Dean Thomas Lawrence, also a liberal.  In his opening speech, intended to set a tone and apparently endorsing Bellini as the liberal (uncertain) candidate, Lawrence demonstrates the kind of leadership that at least some in the group long for and that his speech both cries out for and embodies.  Not surprisingly, then, he garners more votes on the first ballot than he bargained for – or actually had interest in receiving.

Lawrence asserts himself, then, as an interesting character – one whom we know was very close to the deceased Pope (along with Bellini), who is interested in the church changing, but genuinely has no interest in leading those changes.  He has had a crisis of faith and wanted to leave the post of Dean – among whose duties is to lead the group through the discernment process for choosing the next Pope – but the prior Pope put pressure on him to remain in his post, and it becomes apparent that he is the right man for the job – and apparently for the Papacy.  Plato let us know in the Republic that the philosopher king who has no interest in the job can be exactly the right person for it.

But Lawrence is not the only dark horse candidate.  There is a new Cardinal – the Cardinal of Kabul – who shows up at the conclave.  This Cardinal was made a cardinal in secret to protect him from the cabal in Kabul who would surely have executed him if he was known to have a high office in the church.  Lawrence meets him, makes the decision that he belongs in the conclave, and befriends him, as do an increasingly broad pool of other Cardinals.  This relatively young and certainly new memeber of the group of Cardinals, Cardinal Benitez (Carlos Diehz) is originally from Mexico and has served in war torn areas. 

When the ultra-conservative Tedesco makes his impassioned plea for war on the infidels, it is Benitez who is able, in a very Christ-like fashion, to confront him.  Pointing out that he has served in multiple war-torn communities – most recently in Afghanistan; he takes the position that the church should not be stoking war, but making the case for peaceful resolutions to conflict.  The impact on the Cardinals (and the audience of the film) is powerful.  It felt like the moment in my life when I was at a basketball game where the players for the college where I teach got into a brawl with the players from our cross-town rivals and I was screaming “kill them” or something equally inappropriate and my 12-year-old son – standing beside me in the stands – said, “Dad, those are our friends.”

So, Benitez, unknown to the Cardinals (and played, in this cast of notables, by an unknown actor), becomes the darling of the conclave.  This may seem like a spoiler, but I don’t think it is.  Benitez’ role as the dark horse who becomes the favorite son is more than hinted at.  He is compared to the turtles that inhabit one of the fountains near the chapel.  These turtles keep wandering off and need to be brought back to the fountain which is their home.  Turtles seem to me to be creatures who are benign – they don’t hurt others – they are cold blooded and need heat from the world to survive.  They are laconic – somewhat other worldly - and have built shells to protect them from a dangerous world.  Benitez, like the turtles, seems both soft on the inside, but also hard enough on the outside to be protected against those who would attack him or, in the position of Pope, sway him from his principles.

Of course, my concern, as it became apparent that the film was tilting towards anointing Benitez, is that empowering a stranger to lead the community is fraught with danger.  We should thoroughly vet candidates before we appoint them to positions.  What we discover after the fact may turn out to be something that we should have known ahead of time.  That turns out to be the case here, but the discovery (which I won’t spoil) is presented as both revolutionary and benign – even noble. 

Ultimately, the Cardinals listen to Thomas – they choose a leader that they are uncertain of – and one who articulates the value of being uncertain.  That said, the pragmatics of running an organization as complicated as the Catholic Church (or the United States Government) without deep knowledge of the institution and the people inside it seems to be realistically risky, at best.  My conservative roots would make it hard from me to join that consensual decision at the end.  But I admire and resonate with the intent behind the film – to help us have faith that our intuitive selves, and the intuitive beings around us – are not just competent, but the preferred leaders in our communities.

Uncertainty is scary.  When I was an intern in Houston, we had a clinician, an expert in psychoanalytic and in suicide present to us.  His position was that suicidal clients need to come to terms with their desire to kill themselves.  He told a particularly chilling story of driving away from a multi-story  parking structure after a session with a suicidal patient, leaving her standing at the railing on the top floor thinking about jumping, not knowing whether she would do that or not.

The traditional thing to do at that point would be to call the police to come to intervene to prevent her from hurting herself.  His position was different.  It was that we need to trust that people have the right – indeed it is necessary – to sort out the most difficult aspects of their life in a way that will ultimately make sense to them and that will allow them to live with the decisions that they make.  To force someone to live – by keeping them away from the ledge – does not resolve the difficulty.  Only they can do that.

While I am not endorsing his decision to leave while his patient was in a dangerous space (and the research suggests that suicide is also an impulsive decision and if we reduce access to easy means of suicide the rate of suicide in an area goes down), the ability to hold still while a patient considers options – to let the material emerge without knowing where it will go – to provide an environment that allows people to feel safe in not knowing and safe in trying out hypotheses and doing thought experiments to see what the consequences of particular actions are – these are all essential tools of the analytic therapist and part of the engagement in psychoanalysis proper.  The leader of the psychoanalytic treatment, like Thomas’ ideal leader of the Church, should learn or by nature be prepared to be uncertain – to be curious – but also to have faith that the uncertainty will lead in a fruitful direction.

The analytic paradox that the movie portrays in the political setting is that Lawrence is certain that his methods – being uncertain - will lead to the best possible outcome.  The particular outcome that the movie lands on is being used to argue against the value of the method – at least from more conservative commentators – because the process takes a decidedly liberating dimension that can be read as a traditional liberal position.  Of course, that is inherent, I believe, in the psychoanalytic method – even if psychoanalytic politics are frequently quite conservative and we seem to get to the table very late on a number of liberal issues where we could have been leaders, but we end up contributing our considerable fire power to the cause often after the fact (and here I am talking about our history of misogyny, homophobia, and racism).

 

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