PK: I think it's a social demand. Introversion is not rewarded in
our society. I was on a talk show last night where someone called up
saying thank you, she'd been introverted and very afraid of change and
through reading the book was willing to take medication. I thought it an
interesting view of the function of the book. On one hand it's very
gratifying for an author to find that his or her book has opened up some
potential of the self for someone.
On the other hand, the book argues that one ought to be free to be
introverted. No book is strong enough to counteract the enormous social
forces depriving the people who are introverted. They may be very
valuable for a company, or as family members, but they have a lot of
trouble getting a spouse and getting raises, and getting heard. People
need to be concerned. There's an eerie confluence between what Prozac
does and what society demands. Precisely, society demands a kind of
muscular assertiveness.
PT: Don't we all have a right to have the best possible life within
the domain of the drugs that are available? There'll always be those who
take the purist approach: I'm not tainting this temple of my body.
PK: Don't fool with Mother Nature. They may be right. And it may be
that in the long run they'll live healthier and be happier, more
fulfilled. But there's certainly in this hypothetical case the
possibility that they'll be wrong as well.
PT: There is something to be said for progress, and progress may
well include these drugs that change things we thought were irreversible.
Take Shakespeare. If you gave him the option of taking a drug such as
Prozac when he was writing his tragedies, he probably would have said,
yeah, I feel really rotten, I worry about all sorts of terrible
things.
PK: We're certainly better off that Shakespeare had been just the
way he was.
PT: You've raised a lot of issues and weighed them back and forth.
What do you, Peter Kramer, believe about the nature of
personality?
PK: I'm a member of my own culture, and I don't think that what I
say is at all culture-free--the end of the millennium American culture
and a professional culture. I try to take some distance from that culture
and say we shouldn't buy into all of this or we should be aware that
other cultures have other perspectives.
That being said, I would say I'm more aware of the role of inborn
temperament than I was earlier. I am slightly more aware of and more
pessimistic about changeability, malleability through psychological
means. I see biological effects of trauma. People who are traumatized are
not just traumatized through cognitive memory or even through the kind of
wincing effect one gets along with memory; they are traumatized in terms
of static biology. That may be changeable through psychotherapy and new
experiences, but probably very extensive, intensive, and explosive
therapy or experience. It may be most parsimonious in those cases to give
medicine as a starting point for doing the psychotherapy.
I think a certain pessimism attends that point of view. For all
that's said about Freud being a pessimist, he was really a tremendous
optimist to believe that traits that are the result of trauma would be
very responsive to awareness of the truth. The extent to which human
beings respond to truth is overstated.
PT: You talked about the biological and the psychological, but
nothing in the interpersonal or social realm.
PK: It goes without saying that we are very social beings, that
we're probably biologically driven to be cooperative, altruistic,
dominance-seeking--all the things that Darwin talked about.
And that we exist almost only in a social setting. It is very hard
to meet other people in any pure sense without all the problems of the
observer influencing the field and the moment, and the culture and the
family and the group influencing the presentation of the person in front
of us, and the unknowability about whether there is really any person
independent of contacts. All those things are what makes psychotherapy or
meeting a person for the first time or knowing a person very interesting
and difficult.
That perspective also makes us hard to surprise. I happened to be
on the air on some talk show when O.J. Simpson was being sought in Los
Angeles. I didn't say very much, but my thoughts were, it's very hard to
surprise a psychiatrist.
We have seen dozens and dozens of people who look from the outside
to be very squeaky clean and who on the inside have all kinds of urges
and impulses, or who look very different in different contexts. That is
almost the norm, that people are surprising and unpredictable.
PT: Has the sort of celebrity that comes from your book changed you
at all?
PK: I think it has affected me. The book tour was an exercise in
maintenance of differentiation of self. I oscillate on this. A lot of
what I pride myself on over the year was being the same person and not
being swept up in debates that didn't interest me, and not getting a
swelled head.
At the end of the year I said, maybe I should have instead made hay
while the sun shines and spun off the CD and the fiction movie, maybe I
should have signed on to the speaking agency. I didn't take advantage of
all the things that the culture offers to a best-selling author. Maybe
trying not to be swept away may not have been what I wanted.
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