Brainstorm

Get Kinky With It

Guest Blogger — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:04:51 +0000

By Jen Kim

The mere mention of the word "fetish" usually makes people squirm and feel really uncomfortable--like they just wet their pants. It's not pleasant, which is why I only feel safe discussing this taboo topic behind a protective 15-inch screen.

But you know what? Fetishism isn't hiding anymore.

Gary Brooks writes in The Centerfold Syndrome (1995):

"The difference between the sexual fetishist and the mainstream American man may not be as extreme as we have wanted to think. American boys, adolescents, and men are being taught, classically conditioned if you will, to become sexually obsessed with constant, intense, sexually arousing fantasies, and to make their sexual arousal more dependent upon use of sexualized images of nonliving objects than on real women with whom they are in relationships."

He cites a study in which a whopping 88 percent of Stanford MBA students "read" the Victoria's Secret Lingerie catalog. Oddly, Playboy, a magazine devoted to the bare physique, also publishes a special lingerie addition. Hmmmm.

In the past 15 years, what was once a taboo fetish (lingerie) has become a ho-hum obvious fabric of the American male psyche. Same goes for Baywatch (specifically a certain blond bombshell's mammaries) popularizing and celebrating the "giant boob" fetish that has enlarged the lucrative plastic surgery industry.

Since both these fetishes have gained mainstream acceptance, they are hardly stigmatized. Today, they are considered normal, perhaps, even healthy.

Why?

Simply, because enough of us admit to it. Back in the Victorian Era--remembered fondly for its extreme sexual repression--men got turned on by the sight of bare ankles. Sounds weird now, but then, that was the trend. Imagine how well Birkenstocks would have done back then!

The Victorian Era also spawned another fetish: spanking.

Myriad engravings, photos, and fantasy novellas depicting spanking and flagellation were circulated secretly among the conservative Victorians. I wonder if Lady Bumtickler's Revels ever became a best seller.

So who else likes getting spanked?

Apparently lots. Spanking magazines were hits in the 1980s. They featured spank fiction and photos that catered to both man-spank-woman and woman-spank-man audiences.

A google search reveals that there are about 2,740,000 websites relevant to "spanking fetishes." Still, it's considered abnormal or strange.

So, I can't help but think: Are fetishes bad?

Not necessarily. Dr. Daniel Harrop says, "There is nothing particularly wrong with fetishes, as long as no one is being hurt."

According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), it is only when a person is experiencing "fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors [which] cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational functioning," that he should seek help.

One technique in cognitive therapy aims to change the patient's behavior through aversive conditioning (exposing patient to a displeasing stimulus once he is aroused by fetish). In "thought stop," the therapist tells the patient to think of the fetish, and then immediately shouts, "Stop!" so the patient will be irritated and lose his focus. Eventually, the patient learns to interrupt these undesired thoughts using the same technique.

Psychoanalysis studies the patients' traumatic unconscious experience, which is the root cause of the fetish. Typically, dream analysis, talk therapy, and play therapy are common methods of psychoanalysis.

Take a look at the next generation of fetishes. Will they one day join the ranks of the once stigmatized, but now widely accepted foot fetish?

10 Weirdest Sexual Fetishes
Introducing an entirely new class of weird:

1. Acrotomophilia: sexual attraction to amputees, specifically their stumps.

2. Animal Transformation Fetish aka Furries: sexual attraction to anthropomorphic animal characters, i.e., dressing up as a stuffed animal or playing with stuffed animals.

3. Infantilism aka Adult babies: desire to be treated as an infant or toddler. Can or cannot be sexual. There are an estimated 100,000 adult babies worldwide, and one-third of them are also diaper fetishists. Here is an excellent case study of an adult baby.

4. Abasiophilia: sexual attraction to those who have disabilities, i.e., leg braces, casts, crutches, wheelchairs. This attraction is most likely triggered by an event in early childhood. It is most common among those who were children during the 1940s-1960s during the heyday of polio.

5. Crush fetish: sexual arousal from crushing things like insects, frogs, rodents, and lizards. This fetish also begins in childhood. In 1999, the US Congress criminalized the creation, sale, or possession of crush films depicting animal cruelty.

6. Emetophilia: sexual arousal from vomiting or watching others vomit.

7. Balloon fetish aka Looner: sexual arousal from inflating or popping balloons. Some Looners simply enjoy the color, smell, touch, and movement of the balloon.

8. Formicophilia: sexual arousal from insects crawling on your body.

9. Panty fetish: sexual arousal from panties. In Japan, vending machines and Burusera shops sell used school girl panties.

10. Hybristophilia aka Bonnie and Clyde syndrome: sexual attraction to criminals. Doreen Lioy sent fan mail to and eventually fell in love with serial killer Richard Ramirez while he was in prison. They eventually married in San Quentin State Prison.

Jen Kim is a PT intern

Dreams From My Daughter

Guest Blogger — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:30:17 +0000

By Jefferson M. Fish

One way of looking at Barack Obama's youth is as the story of a boy raised by a single mother and her parents who by dint of hard work and natural gifts overcame great odds to become President of the United States. This is a true story.

Another way of looking at it is as the story of a person who, because his father was from Africa, looks black. Since he grew up in a white family, however, he had to overcome impediments to developing a racial identity for which American culture provides no easy answers. This is also a true story.

Yet another way of looking at it is as the story of a boy losing his Luo ties before he knew he had them, becoming an American in Hawaii, and then being uprooted and taken with his new family to Indonesia at the age of 6, before leaving them behind to return to Hawaii at the age of 10. Another true story.

Many people-including me--find these stories of triumph over adversity inspiring. Some others, when thinking of Barack Obama as our president, find them upsetting. Their anxieties stem in part from a fear of the unknown: an inability to imagine what someone with his background might actually be like. What can we expect from a man whose white Kansan mother married men from Kenya and Indonesia? Children make fun of names-shouldn't childhood ridicule-for his names, for not being simply black or white or Kenyan or Indonesian-have had a negative effect on his personality? What kind of effect could his mother's marriages and life in Indonesia have had on a child?

These true stories of overcoming adversity are not, however, the only possible stories. There is much that they omit. They seem to imply that Barack Obama's childhood was unique-which, as with all individuals, it was. But it is also true that others, including my daughter, share key aspects of his multicultural multiracial upbringing, and that much is known about such children and their development. Barack Obama's experience resembles theirs in many ways, and these commonalities can provide reassurance for those who are made uncomfortable by his unusual background. Marrying someone different isn't for everyone, but as with other life choices, it has advantages as well as disadvantages.

Stories of overcoming adversity omit this positive side-that of profiting from unusual opportunities for growth. Dreams from My Father was written from a son's perspective. My wife and I grew up at the same time as Barack Obama's parents, and we raised our daughter in a family with a number of parallels to his. While there are significant differences as well, the similarities between the two families are suggestive-especially in that my daughter and he share characteristics with other children who grew up in comparable circumstances.
This story is written from a father's perspective. These reflections on how my wife and I raised our daughter are offered in the hope of promoting an understanding of our president and other children of cultural adventurers.
*
During the spring of 1969, while I was a postdoctoral fellow in the SUNY Stony Brook psychology department, I met Dolores Newton, an African American anthropology instructor who had just returned from her second stint of field work with the Krikati Indians in the interior of Brazil. I have to admit that it was Dolores's beauty that first caught my eye; but it was the fascination with someone so different from me that hinted at an interesting and potentially exciting life together. The better we got to know each other, the more unknown worlds we discovered. While black people in America have many experiences in all-white groups, few whites have had the corresponding opportunity. Getting to meet Dolores's family and friends gave me that chance and allowed me to see that, despite stereotypes to the contrary, blacks were actually more culturally varied than whites. In addition to people from this country, there were immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean, and even non-Westerners from Africa--while non-Western whites are hard to find.

Dolores and I read different books. We both had lots of records-mine were mainly Beethoven to Bartok, and the Beatles; hers were mainly Baroque, Folk, and Gospel. She played Marion Williams and the Stars of Faith for me:
Heart trouble, cancer, diabetes too,
If you need an operation God will give it to you.
He's a high-class physician. He guarantees his medicine too!

It was great music that I would never have come across without Dolores; its diction and enthusiasm were somehow missing from the halls of academe.
We were both social scientists, interested in understanding our fellow humans, but from the different perspectives of psychology and anthropology. (Ann Dunham became an anthropologist and Barack Obama, Sr. an economist.) People usually socialize with and are attracted to others like them and assume that their social reality is reality itself. Many social scientists find it interesting to question that assumption, and see those who are different from them more as a source of new insights than of discomfort. One of the things that drew me to clinical psychology was the opportunity to come into contact with exotic phenomena like delusions, hallucinations, and hypnosis. Dolores wanted to study living people who were as close as possible to our hunter-gatherer ancestors-and, by implication, as different as possible from us.

Even as social scientists, our contrasting perspectives were a source of continual surprise. We went to a party once, and in talking it over afterwards it was as if we had been to two different parties-- a Rashomon experience. I had noticed who was depressed or articulate or narrow-minded, while she had been paying attention to people's clothes as status markers.

One major difference between anthropologists and psychologists is that psychologists are very much of this culture, while anthropologists tend to be alienated from it. The anthropologist's fly-on-the-wall observer stance toward culture is sometimes misinterpreted as anti-Americanism by those who can't imagine what another culture might be like, or what the point might be of seeing the world through other people's eyes. It is as if the attempt to do so is disloyal or crazy. If looking at ourselves through the mirror of another culture reveals some warts then that must mean that we think the other culture is more beautiful.

Ann Dunham married a Kenyan and an Indonesian, had children by them, and lived for years in Indonesia. It was as unlikely a path for a girl from Kansas, via the University of Hawaii, as was Dolores's from Bedford Stuyvesant via Harvard to Central Brazil. (A curious similarity is that their interests and PhD dissertations both dealt with material culture-things people make.) One time, while we were dating, someone asked Dolores what the Krikati ate, and she mentioned bats, armadillos, and anteaters.
"What does anteater taste like?"
"It tastes a lot like monkey."

We were married in less than a year; and two and a half years later our daughter was born. While Dolores was pregnant, we gave a lot of thought to names. She thought that an American Indian name like Bearcat would go well with Fish, and for a while I was seriously considering Whirling Thunder as a boy's name. We considered foreign names, like Lyudmila or Oona. A friend of mine in graduate school had made up a satire on the MMPI personality test, and one of the items was "Sometimes I say things that are too terrible to think." My mother said "You aren't going to give her Krikati names, are you?"

A mother knows her son, and by that time she knew her daughter-in-law. We settled on Krekamey Ropkui, the names of two Krikati women Dolores had been close to and who had provided her with a lot of information. (Ropkui means Jaguar Woman.) I don't want to appear competitive, but when it comes to choosing names that do not conform to cultural expectations, there are lots of Barack Husseins in the world but only one Krekamey Ropkui.

When Krekamey was a few months old, I was carrying her around while grocery shopping. A little girl came up to me and asked her name. When I told her, she said "Why didn't you call her Mary?"

From the time of our engagement, it was clear that Dolores and I would be spending significant time in Brazil. It took a few years to land visiting professorships; but finally in the spring of 1974 when Krekamey was 22 months old we moved to Campinas, a city of about a million in the state of São Paulo.
We rented an unfurnished apartment on the top floor of a high-rise in the heart of the downtown area. While the place had a few modern conveniences, like closets, it lacked others which we had to provide. These included a refrigerator, a stove (running on gas canisters delivered to the door), and hot water (small electrical heaters had to be attached to the sinks and shower). There was no heat--Campinas has southern California weather, but when the winter temperature falls to 50 degrees, it is 50 degrees indoors too. So while life where we lived looked superficially similar to that in an American city-tall buildings, cars, people's clothes-once you got up close everything was different-including the roosters crowing at dawn.

Krekamey had a few hundred words in her English vocabulary when we arrived in Brazil--and then everything changed to Portuguese. We enrolled her in a preschool, and within a few months she was transformed from an American child to a Brazilian one. I remember one point while I was still struggling to speak rudimentary Portuguese my frustration when she effortlessly used the future subjunctive correctly. Meanwhile, her English sometimes deteriorated to "Portingles." One endearing sentence was "E quembody else vai come here?"-literally "And whobody [by analogy to words like somebody or anybody] else is going to come here?" Krekamey's speech and nonverbal behavior were so perfect that Brazilians often doubted that she was American-an illusion she furthered by refusing to speak English in public.

Krekamey's looks-or for that matter the appearance of our family-were perfectly normal in Brazil, and didn't provoke the curiosity we sometimes encountered in the States. On the other hand, when I was with Dolores and asked Brazilians a question they would sometimes answer her-assuming from my accent and her looks that I was an American married to a Brazilian.

We spent July of 1975, when Krekamey turned three, with the Krikati. Their village is located about 350 miles southeast of Belem, the city at the mouth of the Amazon. It consists of thatched roof huts-some with two or more thatched walls, and some completely enclosed by four clay walls--arranged in a large circle with a diameter about the length of a football field. The interior of the circle is grass, except for a large, round ceremonial area in the center; and a number of well trodden paths lead from one house to another or to the center. Chickens, some other domesticated animals, and a few scrawny hunting dogs wandered around or sought shelter from the sun. Dolores's census put the village population-from newborns to the oldest-at 215, with another 43 in a second, smaller scattering of houses in the forest. The Krikati could get there in a couple of hours, walking through light forest, but there were no clear trails or maps to show the way. That was it-the Krikati population, language, kinship system, oral history, customs, politics, art, religion, family life...you name it. Their complete social world consisted of 258 people, at least a fifth of whom were infants and young children.

The people, short and muscular by American standards, wore few clothes-both men and women were topless. Teeth filed to points, plucked eyebrows and eyelashes, and body paint all suggested a rather different aesthetic from that in New York or Campinas. There was a building called the farmácia-four walls and a roof, with a few benches but no medical supplies or other furnishings. As guests of honor we were invited to hang our hammocks there. It was a few nights before Krekamey woke up and realized that it wasn't birds that were flying around overhead.

"Mom, those are bats!"

"Yes, dear. Go back to sleep."

One morning, when we awoke, we saw that the benches were filled with people, looking silently at us. We were the most interesting thing around-a living television program.

Krikati kids have a great life. They roam around in bands and play for hours on end-no traffic, no crime, no pollution, no snow or ice. While I was serving as Dolores's research assistant cum family cook-making rice and beans in a pot over a single burner kerosene stove-Krekamey was off with the other kids. When we left the village, she was already speaking a few words of Krikati.

By the time we got back to the United States, at the end of the summer of 1976 when she was four years old, Krekamey's comfort with and intuitive understanding of cultural difference had become second nature. Black and white, United States and Brazil, American and Brazilian and Krikati-she had the idea that there are all kinds of people in the world, not only ones like those currently around her; and she shared with us the feeling that that was just fine. Although, despite our best efforts, she was losing her Portuguese, and was becoming indistinguishable from other American kids, her cultural understanding remained, and she even used it to manipulate us. For example, when we were teaching her table manners she said, "I don't want to eat like Americans; I want to eat like Indians." What she meant was, "I don't want to use a knife and fork; I want to eat with my hands." That fall we went to visit Dolores's aunt in Boston, and Krekamey asked, "Do they speak English in Boston?"

While my family's experience of bridging cultural worlds may not be typical, it is shared by others, including Barack Obama. Even without counting refugees and their families, who have special problems, the United States has huge numbers of immigrants, children of immigrants, intermarried couples and children of intermarriage-all of whom live with cultural difference as a daily fact of life. In addition, a much smaller number of children grow up with significant experience outside of the dominant American culture, and there is even a term for them-Third Culture Kids (TCKs). These include "army brats" from bases around the world, as well as children of diplomats, missionaries, and those in multinational corporations. While their parents are engaged in work in a foreign setting (and become more or less cross-culturally adept in the process) TCKs go to school with the local kids, develop friendships with them, get to know their families, learn to speak the language fluently and accent-free, and generally could pass for locals (with the possible exception of not looking like them).

Among TCKs there is an even smaller subgroup who grow up in families whose main concern is with cultural variation itself-children of anthropologists and other social scientists. Krekamey and Barack Obama are in this subgroup.
Immigration, intermarriage, and the world of TCKs all present both the challenges and opportunities of culture contact. To oversimplify matters, there are four kinds of adaptations possible.

The best adaptation, exemplified by Krekamey, Barack Obama and other TCKs, is a cultural "both/and." Kids who grow up in more than one culture can become adept at both. They might sometimes appear to others as (or even feel they are) cultural chameleons, but their perspectives from both cultures give them binocular vision--a unique asset in a complex world. They can serve as cultural interpreters or as bridges between cultures; and being able to experience the world in two ways gives them an intuitive understanding that there could be thousands of others. Living in another culture is stressful, and children of anthropologists have the advantage of a parent who can help them make sense of and profit from their experience. Krekamey can see the world through black and white eyes, and American and Brazilian eyes. It is something I envy in her. I came to other cultures as an adult, and had to work hard at developing a cross-cultural perspective. In comparison to her, I feel like a competent musician who has practiced diligently, but could never achieve the effortless performance of someone with natural talent. People like her-including, I believe, Barack Obama-cannot help but understand and value other people's perspectives.

The second best adaptation is to identify exclusively with the dominant culture, and to reject or minimize the other one. Children of immigrants (e.g., my parents) who strive to be 100% American will do well because they are living in America-but they pay a severe price by rejecting not only the unattractive or awkward cultural features their parents brought with them, but also the cultural strengths. For example, when my father was a child my grandfather would speak to him in Yiddish, but insisted that he reply in English. This meant that speaking flawless American English was more highly prized in my father's family than bilingualism. Times were hard a century ago, and perhaps a goal of fluent bilingualism didn't seem worth the risk of cultural marginalization. But from my point of view, this should have been a no-brainer-two languages are better than one.

The third adaptation, which doesn't work well, is to reject the dominant culture in favor of the other one. Children of immigrants who reject American culture in favor of that of their parents' homeland are bound to be unhappy because, like it or not, they are in the United States and American culture is omnipresent and inescapable. I am reminded of some of the wives of the male (they were all men in the 1970s) American executives who were living in Brazil. They socialized only with other Americans, didn't learn Portuguese or develop friendships with Brazilians, had trouble communicating with their maids, felt isolated despite their more affluent life in Brazil than in the States, and became depressed or took to drink or developed other problems. They suffered from their resistance to acculturation despite their evident money, power, and prestige.

The saddest adaptation, if it can be called that, is to reject both cultures. If some people like Krekamey (and, I believe, Barack Obama) profit from the best of both worlds, others are overwhelmed by the worst. In America we have the stereotype of the tragic mulatto, rejected as an outsider by blacks and whites alike and acceding to a marginalized fate. Sadly, there are some such people, just as individuals can be found who are similar to other stereotypes; but their existence is by no means typical, nor does it prove the accuracy or inevitability of the stereotypes. If anything, Barack Obama's presidency may encourage them to rethink their world view.

Despite their unique advantages, the very cosmopolitanism of adult TCKs sometimes leads them to feel rootless-unsure of their identity or of how to answer the question "What am I?" Surprisingly, in contrast to the fears of those who assume they are not American enough, their search for a rooted identity can make them more American than those who just do what comes naturally because that is all they know.

Krekamey's fair skin and ambiguous appearance left her the option of defining herself racially in various ways. Dolores and I raised her with the understanding that she could be whatever she wanted to be (and that others would let her be) but that she had to understand the racial situation in America in making her choice. If we had had more than one child, they might have labeled themselves in more than one way, and that would have been fine with us.

It was in college that Krekamey made up her mind that she was black (rather than mixed or bi-racial or even, conceivably though improbably, white-or refusing on principle to choose a label). As both her father and a social scientist, I have to admit that I was surprised by how much of a non-event this decision turned out to be. Neither her personality nor her interests changed. Like other TCKs, she had always had friends of varied backgrounds and hues and this continued to be the case-as it is to this day.

Ann Dunham was born two days after me, though in rather different circumstances. She must have been quite a woman, coming from the background she had and living the life that she did. I wonder if we passed each other in the corridor during a meeting of the American Anthropological Association. Barack Obama Sr. was born a year before Dolores. Perhaps Dolores and he walked by each other on the Harvard Campus during the fall of 1962. Ann Dunham divorced twice, adding psychological and financial strain to the cultural richness she offered her children; and she and both of her husbands died young. Dolores and I have been married 39 years; and Krekamey, who grew up on Long Island, says in comparing herself to some of her black friends that we raised her in a bubble. She did, however, major in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies and spend a year in Brazil before going on to become a pediatrician. In college she sometimes had the experience of knowing the meaning of Portuguese words without having studied them.

Intermarriages are common now, but we were pioneers back then. It is not surprising that Krekamey (and Barack Obama) might choose the rootedness of an African American identity over the global adventures open to a more ambiguously self-defined adult TCK. Krekamey married an African American architect, Christopher Craig, who was raised by his grandparents in Detroit in more difficult circumstances than those of Michelle Obama's childhood. Like Michelle Obama, he is a man who has worked very hard to get where he is, and like her he is a monocultural American. In marrying Krekamey he opened himself to a world larger than the one he grew up in.

Fish is the author or editor of ten books, and more than a hundred other works. His work has appeared in popular media—e.g., Psychology Today and The Humanist—and he has numerous academic publications. He received his BA in English, was an aspiring novelist, and taught English briefly, before going on to a career as a psychology professor. Recently retired, he devotes his time to writing and languages (he speaks Portuguese, French, Spanish, and German.)

CBT = Existentialism?

Matthew Hutson — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:03:21 +0000

I've recently come to the conclusion that cognitive behavioral therapy, the empirically-demonstrated gold standard for treating depression and a host of other problems, necessitates a belief in existentialism, a philosophy holding that we live in a meaningless universe.

How can happiness derive from appreciating the fundamental pointlessness of existence?

Existentialism (at least atheistic existentialism) does not argue that meaning does not exist, only that it does not exist out there in the real world. All meaning is human-constructed. You have complete freedom to interpret events however you like (a freedom that some find nauseating.)

CBT similarly places interpretive control in the hands of the individual. The premise is that thoughts lead to emotions (which lead to behaviors), and we can learn to control our thoughts--even if they've become habit. We're not at the mercy of an emotional system automatically placing valuation on experiences.

I suppose my connection between CBT and existentialism comes from a conversation I had several years ago with a girlfriend who was studying philosophy. I'd said that because of my depression I was an existentialist--I had trouble finding meaning in things. On the contrary, she said, I was *too* depressed to an existentialist. I was fatalistic. I instinctively saw everything as bad.

In high school I gave a talk to my school about my battle with depression. Toward the end I said:

"One of the most important tactics I have learned in my fight for control over my life is the power of optimism. Yes, this sounds trite, and even I flinch when I hear the O word, but it's not as much of a joke as I thought. Basically, I've learned that nothing in the world -- nothing that happens around us, no piece of news, no event -- is inherently bad or good. They just are. I have an incredible amount of control over my reactions to the world. As a result of depression, I'm used to judging nearly everything as bad, and it's gonna take a lot of work to change thinking habits that I've been using for my entire life. But now, instead of letting myself become a victim, I fight these habits, and I try to let myself believe that things can go my way."

Looking back, I had stumbled across the grounding for CBT. I was not quite adept at following through, however, judging by my later conversation with my ex. And I'm still not there. I have a hard enough time putting a positive spin on burning my toast. I don't know how I would deal with something much more absurd and tragic like the sudden death of someone close.

But at least I'm past the point of repeating the mantra "If it weren't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all."

The Red Book: One Man's Turmoil

Guest Blogger — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:39:38 +0000

By Dave Levitan

Before I read a single page of Carl G. Jung's newly published Red Book, I admit that I harbored a degree of skepticism. The book had lain dormant for half a century, first in the cupboard of Jung's Zurich home and then in a bank vault. My interpretation of that fact alone? "It was so crazy that even Jung didn't think it should see the light of day." We can call that skepticism, right?

The other aspect to my dubiousness lay in the fact that this text was described by the iconic psychologist himself as that from which "everything else is to be derived." Jungian analysis and theory exists at least to some extent on the fringes of the psychological landscape, with dream analysis and controlled conflict between the conscious and subconscious (known as "individuation") as its central tenets. That there could be a huge, red leather-bound, highly illustrated and calligraphic founding tome to this genre struck me as mildly overblown. And I had seen its actual contents described as a long series of Jung's "active imaginations," or waking dreams that he hoped would help him understand his own mind. My skepticism, I think, was not unreasonable.

Still, though, I was excited to get started. What would it be like to wade through those dreams and visions, trying to make sense of one man's internal turmoil? Would it be like reading a dream diary, or a mythological treatise, or a narrative of insanity? I dove in.

*****
Even the physical act of reading the Red Book is daunting. It is no bedside paperback, measuring 18 inches by 12 inches and tipping the scale at around 10 pounds. The first half of the book has ultra-high-definition scans of every original page, illustrations included, in a largely unreadable German-Latin-Greek calligraphy. The process of bringing those pages into the published version was brilliantly described, along with much of the Red Book's history, in a September New York Times Magazine feature.

The second portion of the book, if you can tear your eyes from multi-limbed dragons devouring things or goat-like humans staring your face off, contains the translation and various introductions and analyses by Jung scholar Shonu Shamdasani. Jung's text is divided into three parts: Liber Primus, Liber Secundus and Scrutinies. The text is littered with hundreds of footnotes from the translator, explaining mythological references and describing differences between various unpublished drafts. It is like reading a giant textbook, only, you know, fucking insane.

*****
Liber Primus reads almost like a personalized Bible. "There is no other way, all other ways are false paths," Jung writes. "I found the right way, it led me to you, to my soul. I return, tempered and purified. Do you still know me?"

Much of the first book is a conversation, or a series of interactions, with the author's soul, who appears to be female. He describes visions and voyages into the desert, dreams and his frustration at an inability to interpret them. I search for why this book might be that from which the rest of Jungian thought is derived and find lines like this: "Dreams are the guiding words of the soul. Why should I henceforth not love my dreams and not make their riddling images into objects of my daily consideration?"

There is a rhythm and cadence to his writing that is mesmerizing, but the content is so hard to decipher or interpret that it continually ruins that rhythm. I come to the line: "You will consider yourself mad, and in a certain sense you will in fact be mad," and, for the moment at least, I find it hard to argue.

*****
The stories in Liber Secundus begin to feel like parables. They are followed each time by lengthy ramblings and lessons about the nature of consciousness and the author's own psyche, but I find myself straining to find any particular thread on which to pull. The prophet Elijah and Salome, of John the Baptist's head-on-a-platter fame, are central characters in the story, and like almost every character they seem to come away from their interactions with Jung much worse for the experience.

Shamdasani wrote in the introduction that the book is generally about "the rebirth of a new image of God in his soul." In the context of the time period's intellectual leanings, I suppose this makes sense. Nietzsche had declared "God is dead" only 30 years earlier, and the inherent instability of language and consciousness portrayed by early modernist writers and artists painted an uncertain, almost vacant picture of our inner worlds.

The process Jung describes, though, seems anything but smooth and purifying, hardly a rebirth from that void at all. A section labeled Nox Tertia (third night) is full of terrified self-indictment: "Everything inside me is in utter disarray. Matters are becoming serious and chaos is approaching."

I finish Liber Secundus, and then Scrutinies, more interested, or involved, than when I began, but meaning still isn't exactly jumping off the pages. I call up Dr. Stephen Martin, a Jungian analyst and co-founder and President of the Philemon Foundation (whose goal is simply the publication of all of Jung's works), for some perspective.

"You're not going to buy the book and say ‘oh now I understand everything,'" Martin says. "If you want to have an intelligent discussion about the depth of the psyche, you're now going to have to refer to the Red Book. But it will be one of those longstanding processes of trying to understand something that's immensely complex."

*****
Am I just skimming the surface, then, and shortchanging a deep thinker by wondering about psychotropic gas leaks in his study, or an unruly personal chef mixing in peyote with his evening meal? Shamdasani, who translated the work and is among the foremost Jung scholars in the world, would certainly say so. At the unveiling of the Red Book exhibit at the Rubin Museum in New York in early October, he said: "This was no lurid psychosis, this was no psychedelic trip.... This was a controlled experiment. He knew exactly what he was doing.... This was not someone stripping and running around the lake."

No, stripping and running around the lake would at least be fun. This was a strange and dark encounter with one's subconscious, and reading through it makes me think that one's subconscious is probably "sub" for a reason. But for anyone interested in psychology, Shamdasani insists the Red Book is required reading: "Regardless of whether you are a believer or a detractor, this is an essential text."

In the end, though, I almost feel cheated. "You will consider yourself mad," Jung told me. It feels small, and cheap, and in a sense unworthy and off-base, but I no longer feel mad once the book is closed: I feel confused, intrigued by the book's mythological and literary merit, and maybe a bit dismissive of its supposed importance. Martin, though, cites the imperative that Jung himself used to deliver to his patients as a means to finding meaning in the book's pages: "When Jung says, ‘create your own Red Book...' what he means is, value the material that comes out of your own inner world, and treat it with respect, dignity and objectivity. And if you do that, your life will be different."

In spite of such exhortations to the contrary, I crawl out from under the 10-pound behemoth much as I began: skeptical. So yes, read the Red Book for its aesthetic appeal and for its uniqueness, for its lyricism and its place in a period's canon, but expect no revelations to come. One man's "controlled experiment" is another man's naked run around the lake.

Why Getting Revenge Isn't Worth It

Guest Blogger — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 01:26:11 +0000

Recently, an editor at PT asked me to dig up some good juicy stories about revenge. Most of the ones I found dealt with how the scorned practiced retribution against their (ex) lovers' bodily appendages à la Lorena Bobbit.

Reading about these unique crimes of passion got me thinking about my own style of revenge, which surprisingly, is NADA. But why? Is it because I'm a Leo--so self absorbed that I'm not willing to invest the energy and finesse required into seeking meticulously planned retribution? Perhaps, it is simply because I've never been hurt so badly... no wait, not true either.

I had a cheating boyfriend too. Like these newsworthy women, I was also enraged, but my rage never turned into a breaking news segment on the 6'oclock news. Instead, I locked myself in the bathroom for hours, trying to talk to my best friend, hoping she would tell me why this happened? I was so busy trying to understand the dynamics of the situation, I didn't know what to do. Was revenge a healthy response?

According to social psychologist Kevin Carlsmith of Colgate, the reason for revenge is to achieve catharsis. However, his recent study suggests that revenge is, in fact, counterproductive to achieving that goal. The study explains that those who seek to punish continue to think about the perpetrator, keeping the pain and the anger very much alive in their minds, while those who "move on" or "get over it" think less about the perpetrator. Carlsmith's team tested this theory by staging an interactive game where players could earn money if they all cooperated with one another. However, if a player did not cooperate, he could earn more at the expense of the others. Researchers planted certain "free riders" who would encourage everyone else to cooperate, but would later not cooperate himself. Two groups were tested--one that could punish the "free rider" (and they all did), and one that could not punish.

Interestingly, the results showed that revenge was not as sweet as it sounds. The punishers reported feeling worse than the non-punishers, but also predicted that they would have felt far worse if they hadn't been able to punish. On the other hand, the non-punishers, the happier group, believed that they would have been happier if they had the opportunity to seek revenge against the "free rider."

What does this all mean?

Carlsmith says, "Rather than providing closure, it does the opposite: It keeps the wound open and fresh."

He suggests that when we don't get revenge, we can trivialize the event. We are able to tell ourselves that because we didn't go crazy (hacking away our boyfriend's body parts), it wasn't the end of the world, after all. That way, it's easier to move on.

The verdict?

Studies say no to revenge. It only hurts yourself. Still, love, hate or hurt can drive any woman crazy, so men out there, please be on your best behavior.

Main Reference:

Carlsmith, Kevin M., Wilson, Timothy and Gilbert, Daniel, The Paradoxical Consequences of Revenge (September 29, 2008). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1277905

Jen Kim is a PT intern

In Memory of Claude Lévi-Strauss

Guest Blogger — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 19:21:37 +0000

By Scott Atran

Claude Lévi-Strauss, arguably the world's most famous and influential anthropologist, died on October 30 at the age of 100. This is a lasting memory of my first encounter with him.

In 1974, when I was a graduate student in anthropology at Columbia University, I wanted to organize a discussion of universals with people whose ideas I wished to know more about than I thought I could get from their writings. At the time, I was working for Margaret Mead as one of her assistants at the American Museum of Natural History, so I asked her how I might go about getting my wish. She said "talk to these people and see if they'll meet." So I went to see Noam Chomsky in Cambridge, Jean Piaget in Geneva, and Jacques Monod in Paris, and they agreed; but I wondered if Levi-Strauss would because he seemed so aloof . Margaret licked her lips and laughed: "Well, that's his look, aloof and frail, but he's more playful than he lets on and he'll outlive me by thirty years if a day. Just tell him I sent you."

I ran from La Bastille to the College de France on Rue des Ecoles and up the steps to knock on his door. He opened it, saw the sweat running down my face and, asked rather coldly: "Monsieur, que'est-ce que je peux faire pour vous?" I said I was an anthropology student from America and had a bunch of questions for him. He was gracious but distant and said, "Ask two."

First, I asked him why he believed binary operators to be one of the fundamental structures of the human mind. He shrugged and sighed and then replied: "When I started there was still no science of mind. Saussure, Marx, Mauss and music were my guides. Since then things have changed. Psychology now has something to say."

Then, I asked him why he became an anthropologist and he said: "I wanted to be a musician but having no talent I read philosophy and wanted to find out how different one human being's thoughts could be from another's and how much of that difference is truly the same. In Brazil, an opportunity came to try to find out, and I am still trying."

He dabbed his nose with a handkerchief, rose from his chair in that regal, crane-like manner of his, thanked me for coming and started walking me back to the door, when I turned to him and said. "Margaret Mead te dit bonjour." His dour demeanor turned into a child's joy." Would you like to come home to dinner with me now?" he asked, with a lightness that belonged to another person, another time. I declined with some idiot excuse because I still stank from running and didn't want to further embarrass myself. But I asked him if he would join the discussion with Chomsky, Piaget and the others that I had forgotten to tell him about until then. "Yes," he said kindly, "just tell me when."

At the discussion, which took place over the course of a few days at the Abbaye de Royaumont outside Paris, Lévi-Strauss sat patiently and said nothing as others spoke their piece or pontificated, or pleaded and shouted their oppositions. But his doodles of cats and other real and fantastical animals were stunning, and those he left behind were the objects of a fierce competition among some of the conference's participants, including myself. On the way to our last lunch, Noam Chomsky ─ who had dominated this conference of Nobel-prize winning biologists and world-famous mathematicians, philosophers, psychologists and anthropologists as I have never seen anyone do before or after ─ walked up to Lévi-Strauss and said in a shy sort of way: "Perhaps you remember me, when I sat in on your class at Harvard with Roman Jakobson?" Lévi-Strauss looked at Chomsky and said: "I'm sorry, but no." Those were the only words he would utter in the conference room.

In an interview the following year, Levi-Strauss was asked what recent intellectual developments he considered to be important. He said that what had transpired at Royaumont was the most significant intellectual event he had thus far encountered in the second half of the twentieth century. He also implied that his time was over: "I imagine myself in the New World with Columbus for the first time," he mused, "a symphony of sounds, of colors, of smells, of desires, and of hopes. Then I imagine myself on the moon with the astronauts, and all I see is gray, dust and barren rocks, and the earth I long for is far out of reach."

—Scott Atran is a Director of Research in Anthropology at the National Center of Scientific Research in Paris (CNRS) and a visiting professor of psychology and public policy at University of Michigan.

"Precious" and the Power of Writing

Carlin Flora — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 21:04:04 +0000

You may have heard of the stirring new film Precious, starring Gabourey Sidibe as an obese 16-year-old girl in late-1980's Harlem, pregnant (for the second time) with her own father's child, and a victim of shockingly cruel abuse at the hands of her mother, played by Mo'Nique.

It would be difficult to conceive of a child in worse circumstances than Precious, who, in addition to all her other problems, has trouble explaining her situation to the few adults who could potentially help her.

But a turning point occurs when Precious starts attending a small alternative school, where her teacher encourages her to write every day (even though Precious can barely read.) Expressing herself gives Precious the energy and confidence to seek out other options in life; she essentially writes her way out of her personal hell.

The movie is based on a work of fiction (Push by Sapphire,) but the healing power of journal writing is very real, having been shown in many studies. James W. Pennebaker, the most prominent researcher in this field of study, had undergrads write about either superficial topics or personal traumas four days a week, for six weeks. Those who wrote about painful times reported better moods and better health than those who scribbled about mundane happenings.

Follow-up studies by Pennebaker, Joshua M. Smyth and other psychologists have linked disclosure of personal feelings in writing to physical and mental benefits. Laid-off workers who wrote about their trials were more likely to find new jobs than a control group, asthma and arthritis patients who wrote about a stressful event just once were more likely to report health improvements than fellow patients who wrote about a neutral event, and people who wrote about a stressful time made fewer visits than average adults to health clinics over the next 15 months. Those who jot down what they ate in a food diary lost more weight than a control group, and women who wrote about past traumatic experiences slept better than those who didn't.

A diary lifted Precious out of her muck, and the evidence is strong that keeping one could help all of us shore up our immune systems and our inner resources.

What Does SuperFreakonomics Have in Common with Old Tobacco Ads?

Guest Blogger — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:31:01 +0000

What Does SuperFreakonomics Have in Common with Old Tobacco Ads?

By Dr. Melanie Fitzpatrick and Aaron Huertas

In their follow-up to the best-selling Freakonomics, economist Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner exploit the public’s desire for an easy fix to global warming and along the way, misrepresent basic facts about climate science.

Levitt and Dubner argue that rather than reducing heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions from human activity, we should “geoengineer” the climate by spraying sunlight-reflecting sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to cool the planet. It’s just the type of attention-grabbing contrarian argument Levitt and Dubner found success with in their first book.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t make any sense.

They say the problem is that the Earth is heating, so let’s cool it. But scientists understand that the real problem is that excess carbon dioxide is disrupting the Earth’s climate, making the planet warmer, stressing marine species by making the ocean more acidic, and changing the composition of the atmosphere. Levitt and Dubner are arguing for further disruption to correct an initial disruption. That may actually make matters worse. And in any case, their geoengineering proposal would do nothing to address ocean acidification.

Regardless of its merits, their argument is appealing at a surface level. Because scientific projections about global warming often focus on what will happen decades from now, too many people think global warming is a far-off problem and that we can wait to address it. The Los Angeles Times’ Rosie Mestel hits the nail on the head when summarizing a report on the psychology of climate change: “Our species doesn't seem especially well-wired to act with long-term rewards in mind. We're much better at seeking gratification right this second, which is why I ate that bag of trail mix five minutes ago even though I'd like to drop some pounds and had only just had lunch.”

Levitt and Dubner are essentially arguing that we can sit back, relax, and fix the climate later. But nothing could be further from the truth, according to the science. The carbon emissions we’re releasing into the atmosphere today will lock in climate change for generations. Policy and business decisions made today could significantly alter our future energy mix and resulting global warming emissions. We can’t simply turn the fossil fuel switch on and off. Addressing global warming is much more akin to steering a giant ship. We need to turn the wheel now so we avoid hitting the (melting) iceberg later in our journey.

To build their argument for geoengineering, Levitt and Dubner follow a simple structure: inaccurately minimize the role carbon dioxide plays in global warming, hype the potential benefits of geoengineering without noting the downsides, then mischaracterize solutions to reducing heat-trapping emissions to make them seem more implausible than geoengineering.

Misdirection on Climate Science

Most of the chapter’s scientific errors are committed in the authors’ attempt to give carbon dioxide a positive makeover. In particular, they make several narrowly true statements about carbon dioxide that, when presented out of their scientific context, will give readers the impression that excess carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is no big deal.

To cite a blatant example, Levitt and Dubner write, “…An increase in carbon dioxide means that plants require less water to grow.” And they cite a study that says excess carbon dioxide, “…yields a 70 percent increase in plant growth, an obvious boon to agricultural productivity.”

In reality, authoritative scientific reviews show that agriculture, along with human health, water resources, and natural ecosystems will suffer overall from climate change. One key finding from the United States Global Change Research Program’s climate science review is: “Crop and livestock production will be increasingly challenged. Agriculture is considered one of the sectors most adaptable to changes in climate. However, increased heat, pests, water stress, diseases, and weather extremes will pose adaptation challenges for crop and livestock production.”

Such wildly out-of-context statements throughout the book have the potential to leave readers in the dark about what scientists are really saying about climate change. Presenting the positive aspects of carbon dioxide to the exclusion of its negatives may lead readers to believe that excess carbon dioxide is no problem at all.

This same argument can be found in the oil-industry-friendly “CO2 is Green” campaign:

And the slicker Competitive Enterprise Institute “CO2: We Call it Life” campaign:

Each ad is filled with statements that are individually true, but meaningless once you put them into context. Yes, carbon dioxide is in the oceans and we do breathe it out (and in!). But that doesn’t mean excess carbon dioxide from human activities isn’t also changing the planet for the worse.

Similarly, a decades old Camel ad campaign claimed “more doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette.” Maybe that claim was true. But it leads viewers to think that there must be some medical advantage to smoking Camels, when, in reality, those doctors would have benefited from quitting smoking, just as their patients would have.

The book contains many similar errors, including oversimplifications of climate models, erroneous projections of sea level rise and misinterpretations of other scientific analyses.

Levitt and Dubner’s Sources Contradict Them on Geoengineering

Nathan Myhrvold, a geoengineering proponent that Levitt and Dubner cite extensively, has responded to criticisms on the Freakonomics blog. While the book goes out of its way to present geoengineering as preferable to reducing emissions, Myhrvold says, “Geoengineering is proposed only as a last resort to try to reduce or cope with the even greater harms of global warming!” And Ken Caldiera, the scientist on whom they rely for much of the chapter, also says his views were misrepresented in the book and that we must reduce emissions.

To be fair, Levitt and Dubner do note that Caldiera wants to reduce emissions. But then they inaccurately say he believes carbon dioxide is “the wrong villain.” And although they briefly quote Myhrvold comparing geoengineering to having “fire sprinklers” in a building, they mostly cite him dismissing low-carbon energy technology and promoting geoengineering technology.

To date, Levitt and Dubner have failed to account for the simple fact that their sources disagree with their suggestion that we should geoengineer instead of reducing heat-trapping emissions. And they have failed to explain how they think we should address ocean acidification.

Attacking the Wrong Solutions

Levitt and Dubner inaccurately portray solutions to climate change as solely involving personal behavior change. This is a classic straw man used to argue against action on environmental policy.

Yes, getting people to change their behavior is hard. Good thing that’s not the only way to reduce emissions. Getting people to use cleaner, better, more efficient technology is easy and that’s what a lot of global warming solutions are really about. Energy-efficient refrigerators still keep food cold, more efficient cars still get you to work, and lights that draw their power from wind turbines and solar panels work just as well as ones that rely on coal-fired power plants.

Climate change policy is largely about giving businesses and people incentives to reduce emissions. Current legislative proposals focus on capping emissions and letting businesses trade emissions allowances with one another so the market can find the most economically efficient way to reduce emissions. The first such system, implemented under the 1990 acid rain amendments to the Clean Air Act, was incredibly successful. The Economist called it “probably the greatest green success story of the past decade.” That program not only reduced acid rain pollution below the levels required, but did so at a cost that was less than a third of what the Environmental Protection Agency initially projected.

Ironically, one of those acid rain pollutants was sulfur dioxide, Levitt and Dubner’s proposed cooling gas.

Oddly, Levitt and Dubner don’t cite examples involving people making decisions about energy use to bolster their case. Instead, they focus on how hard it was for a hospital to get doctors to regularly wash their hands.

In fact, there are many examples of people voluntarily making decisions that help the environment. Voluntary recycling is now commonplace even though it was non-existent just a few decades ago. In recent months, people have shown an increased willingness to buy more fuel-efficient cars, drive less and take public transportation. Fuel-efficiency remains a top consideration for most car-buyers even though gas prices are much lower than they were last summer. And a company named Positive Energy has found that the simple act of giving people more information in their electricity bills induces them to lower energy consumption.

An Ill-Timed Argument

The book couldn’t have arrived at a more awkward time, given the momentum for reducing emissions in the United States and the rest of the world.

In June, the House of Representatives for the first time passed comprehensive climate and energy legislation that would dramatically reduce carbon dioxide emissions. And just a few days after the book came out, the Senate unveiled its complementary version of the same legislation. Meanwhile the world is gearing up for the next round of climate change negotiations in Copenhagen, Denmark in December.

Final Analysis

It’s fun to entertain contrary notions. Contrarian thinking even has a role to play in scientific thinking and public policy. But Levitt and Dubner’s purposefully contrarian and misleading arguments do not boost the quality of our public discourse about energy and climate policy. Worse, they degrade public understanding of science.

Levitt and Dubner have been rightfully corrected by a number of scientists. They would do well for themselves and their readers if they opted to distance themselves from this chapter and promise to correct it online and in later print editions.

Dr. Melanie Fitzpatrick is a climate scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Climate and Energy Program. Aaron Huertas is a press secretary at UCS.

I Hate Dating in NY

Guest Blogger — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:20:20 +0000

I met my first emotionally available man in New York. I had heard they were mythical creatures, like leprechauns or the Loch Ness Monster-- lots of stories, but never actually documented in real life.

Terence was a graphic design student, attractivish (6.1), sweet, affectionate, and really into me. We knew each other all of two weeks, but he decided that he wanted to "be with me exclusively."

I was intrigued by the offer, so I took a test drive, but in the end returned the keys to the dealer. Why? Isn't that all women are seeking these days? or claiming to seek?

We just want someone nice, someone who will open doors for us, pay for a decent meal, genuinely like us, and not stink of B.O. Terence satisfied all these requirements.

So what's the problem?

The problem is that I'm in New York, mecca for maximizers.

In his book The Paradox of Choice, Psychologist Barry Schwartz discusses the phenomena of "maximizing" and "satisficing." Maximizers tend to settle and strive only for the best choice. In a dating context, maximizers:

"Treat relationships like clothing: I expect to try a lot on before finding the perfect fit. For a maximizer, somewhere out there is the perfect lover, the perfect friends. Even though there is nothing wrong with the current relationship, who knows what's possible if you keep your eyes open."

Meanwhile, satisficers "settle for something good enough and do not worry about the possibility that there might be something better." This is not to say that a satisficer will take any old crap; he or she will simply accept "merely excellent" as opposed to the maximizer's penchant for "absolute best."

But this is New York City -- center of the world, influencing global commerce, finance, entertainment, fashion, politics, and culture. There is no one in this world who wouldn't kill to live in a brownstone on the Lower East Side. It is a city replete with status symbols, opportunity, and people. Lots of people. 8,214,426 to be exact, and all of these people share one unique quality-- ambition to be the best. Drive for success seeps out of people's pores like scary steam seeps out of the sewers. In other words, this city breeds and attracts maximizers.

Schwartz relates that maximizers are less happy, less satisfied, and more prone to depression, because making trade-offs and sacrifices comes at a high cost. Someone who refuses anything but the best will have a much harder time accepting something not as good. No one wants a ring from Robbins Brothers when they've been dreaming about Tiffanys, right?

Schwartz instead suggests that it is best for people to be satisficers or be satisifed with "good enough." He humorously illustrates this theory by describing a trip to the Gap to buy jeans. What should have been a simple task turned into a full day of torture, when the shop girl supplied him with a myriad of choices (boot cut, loose fit, slim fit, stone-washed, carpenter, etc) to ensure that he purchase the absolute "best" pair, instead of jeans that simply fit "well enough." This perfectly explains the paradox of choice. Having variety appears to be a good thing, but actually can make things more complicated.

So satisficing sounds great, right? Strive to be happy with good, because frankly, it's somewhat impossible to accept only the best, all the time. This isn't Natalie Portman world, after all.

Which brings me back to Terence. He's great, right? Well, he's an artist, but still a student. Talented, but jobless. Lives in the nice part of Brooklyn, but still it's Brooklyn...

The truth is that we encounter too many new people in New York-- in other words, we have so many choices-- it's quite difficult to focus on just one person, especially when he or she is not exactly the ideal. Distractions hide in every crevice of the city, making any time we invest in someone both brief and tenuous. The moment we get bored or think there is something better out there, we run away, because chances are, there is. We don't need to invest in "good enough" because we know that with so many choices out there, there has to be a "best."

It is also the scary cutthroat competition in this city which breeds the "best" mentality; people cannot slack off, for even a moment. We're here to do our best (because that's probably the only way we're going to survive), so how can we be expected to be satisfied with "good enough"?

Perhaps if I go back to LA or somewhere where ambition and crazy competition is more lax, things might work out with someone like Terence, but then again, why would I ever leave the best city in the world?

Jen Kim is a PT intern

Starting Over at Age 37

Kaja Perina — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 02:44:32 +0000

These days the rap is that we're living through a distinctly un-American blip in American history: Diminished expectations for many, radical reversals for the extra unlucky. Gone is the idea of doing better than our parents, or doing better than we ourselves did 10 years ago. But this country is built on wave after wave of such reversals. One wave included my own family.

My father and grandparents arrived in New York 58 years ago, fleeing the communists who had seized their native Czechoslovakia. New York City was the end of a three-year odyssey that took them from Switzerland to North Africa and back. For Rudolf Perina, who was 37, it was the beginning of a second adult life. In Czechoslovakia, he'd been a lawyer and racecar driver who managed his family's lumber business. But he spoke little English and read almost none, so he gladly accepted a job washing dishes at a Manhattan restaurant. On his second day of work, misfortune struck–-he mistook sulfuric acid for dish soap and suffered third-degree burns.

Nowhere in my grandfather's lengthy memoir does he rue how far he'd fallen. In fact, a half century after his escape, he wrote only of the paradoxical calm that settled over him while in existential limbo: "I found myself on the border of West Germany with one briefcase, a pair of pyjamas and 5000 worthless Czech crowns. I left everything behind, but to my surprise, left the worries behind, too. This change in my life was so sudden, so astonishing, that I did not have time or reason to worry."

As his hands healed, he began the slow climb to professionalism that countless immigrants have made before and since. Only when he'd re-established some semblance of the life he'd lost did his anxieties return, but never again with the same vengeance.

Manhattan is unrelenting-the restaurant kitchen in which my grandfather spent those two ill-fated days is long gone. It sat just a block away from the sunny loft in which I now work. If my grandparents could rebuild from scratch, I think, what is there for me to lose?

Today would be my grandfather's 96th birthday, and so I celebrate his saga, one of many. These stories are America's foundation: comebacks not preordained but won through gritty determination. And for some, a psychic payoff for turmoil that was so searing in the moment.