My Mother, My Father, My Money

Obama State of Mind

Simon Y. Feuerman, Psy.D., L.C.S.W. — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 16:03:42 +0000

Yesterday's NY Times assessed President Obama's China trip somewhat unfavorably. Although they called the criticism "premature," they threw in a few digs of their own, using words like "disappointing" and "dispiriting" in the context of the trip.

In today's NY Times the columnist Maureen Dowd went much further. For the first time, she wrote, Obama's approval rating dipped below 50%. This is how she summed up the first year of the Obama presidency:
"Dither, dither, speech. Foreign trip, bow, reassure. Seminar, summit. Shoot a jump shot with the guys, throw out the first pitch in mom jeans. Compromise, concede, close the deal. Dither, dither, water down, news conference.It's time for the president to reinvent this formula and convey a more three-dimensional person."

It seems that the main critique of Mr. Obama thus far is that either he is not clear exactly what he believes or he is not standing up fully for what he believes. He has been fairly criticized for not standing up to the banks on the domestic front and not standing up for American values and interests in the Middle East, Iran, China, Japan and Russia. Just last week he began the Asian trip by entertaining a major concession to our major Far East ally regarding the Marine base in Okinawa.

Don't get me wrong. We therapists would be the last one to knock bridge building and flexibility. The problem is that the president's talent for conciliation and reconciliation though a precious quality in many situations, may also be a defense in others.

I love my profession and always wonder how its knowledge can be applied to help and heal individuals and groups of people. This makes me wonder: If the President wanted help to stand up to others could psychoanalysis help?
I would have to say, probably yes. Psychoanalysis is very good in dealing with defenses. We do not break them, but rather we study them. We create an atmosphere of warmth and with a light touch we encourage the patient to study his defenses instead of just employing them. Group psychoanalysis in particular is an accelerated, highly effective strategy for getting to core of a characterological difficulty.

In the case of the President, his "peacemaking" tendency would no doubt manifest itself in the group. It would be identified and highlighted by the leader and group members and he would then be encouraged to educate the group as to its origins. Group members might also be invited to speculate as well.

There is little doubt that some would see his self-described early longings for an absent (and abusive) father as a factor that influences his day-to-day behavior in the present. A colleague of mine tells it like this: you have to have a father that you loved and loathed and one that loved and hated you in the right amounts in order to stand up to Iran, Japan, Russia and North Korea

This is no easy task, Mr. President. We citizens are here to help you succeed.

My Spouse Is Overweight

Simon Y. Feuerman, Psy.D., L.C.S.W. — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 19:51:19 +0000

When I was growing up there was a couple on my block. She was heavy and he was thin.

My mother who never failed to notice anything, particularly weight, would comment: She is heavy, but he is thin. Periodically, we would run into them and my mother would repeat "she is heavy and he is thin." Appearances had great meaning to my mother, but she would never permit herself to say anything beyond that.

As I got older I began to wonder about that couple. Did she want him to be thin and smaller than her? Did he want her to be heavy? If she died and he married someone else, would the next woman also be heavy? If he died, would she again choose a man smaller in frame than she?

Apparently, neither of them minded and they have as far as I know, lived out their lives with the normal happinesses and miseries known to people who live in this part of the country. And yet the question still intrigues: was he thin because she was fat? Was she fat because he was thin?

Recently, an obese man I know confided in me that part of his obesity is his identification with his mother. We were eating at a social function and he said with a degree of shame that when he gets overweight as he is, he begins to have breasts.

Naturally, the thought made me very sad. There must be better, less hazardous ways of identifying with his mother. Why was he stuck in that way? That was a question that would have to wait for another day, but apparently, in order to deal with his dangerous weight issue, one would probably have to explore his relationship to his mother.

The funny thing is that we tend to think of our bodies as belonging to ourselves and they do of course, but they seem to develop in relation to somebody or something. For example, in past decades pediatric studies have revealed that the onset of puberty in young girls is getting earlier. Some studies have shown that in households where the father is absent, the girls tend to mature earlier.

Our bodies seem to react to people and to things. We know that people age under stress, they shrink, expand with sadness and happiness. Many people I know are trying to lose the same 10-15 lbs for years. Freud noted that people tend to play with objects, they might throw them or damage them or maintain them because they are representatives of people, usually important people in their lives. People they have strong feelings about.

When we overeat, or under-eat, exercise, work out or not work out, lose weight or gain weight, in addition to strong environmental factors, we might also consider that we are sending messages to people. The idea that we are always in profound communication to somebody might help some of us make progress.

The pride of the Yankees -- not?

Simon Y. Feuerman, Psy.D., L.C.S.W. — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 15:15:31 +0000

Do you like baseball but you have no team to root for or haven't decided? That may be a good thing.

A few years ago when the Yankees played the Boston Red Sox for the American League Championship series, I asked my analyst which team he was rooting for. I knew from prior conversations that he was a Yankees fan, but wanted to indulge with him in this seemingly irrelevant topic. As it turned out, his answer surprised and enlivened me.

"I really have not yet made up my mind whom to root for," he said. "The Yankees are a great team and all that, but the Red Sox are real fighters. They are very game. It's going to be an exciting series."

The idea that one could choose "important" loyalties in the flash of a moment was stimulating to me. I knew where I had come from. I had tribal and geographical origins and fealty. I was a Jew the son of a Jew, an American and a New Yorker. My entire lifetime, my brother and I had been Yankees fans. How could we be anything else? These things were as much a part of me as my hands and feet.

Yet the thought of being able to switch and simply go with what was happening inside you purely in the moment, is an indescribable freedom and may be a fountain of creativity.

Thinking further along these lines, I was intrigued by how much weight we seem to put into things that deserve no weight at all. It really does not matter which team wins, but yet we invest them all kinds of deep meanings -- even with our identities.

For example, a close friend of mine is a life-long Mets fan, among other reasons, because he identifies with them. They are him, full of potential, long-suffering -- complete with a similar narrative of spectacular melt-downs, (his reversals of fortune, his many marriages) occasional brilliances (his prizes and windfalls).

Loyalty is a great and laudable virtue, but some loyalties are constricting and compulsive. Our automatic loyalties to religion and tribe and even political party are worth investigating. They may not only be silly, but they may be holding us and humanity back from creativity, progress and maturity.

May the best people win!

Why we buy old cars

Simon Y. Feuerman, Psy.D., L.C.S.W. — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 22:11:51 +0000

Last week a friend of mine came by with his family to visit. My friend Steve is a wonderful man who lives at some distance from us so it is rare that we actually see each other. He has the most amazing disposition and no matter how much time passes between our meetings - warmth and mirth rise instantly to the surface every time we get together. The jokes and lively reminiscences flow easily between us.

I had always had a strong interest in cars and I casually asked him if he had driven to town in his Chevy Suburban (he has 6 kids). "No," he demurred. "I came here with our new motor home -- 1979 vintage." "What?" I exclaimed.

"Yes, it's 37 feet long - really something to see," he said modestly. I jumped up. "I must see it." "Of course," he said. "It's so big I had to park it on the main street right around the corner."

Sure enough there she stood in all her glory. I don't think you could know what 37 feet long is until you see it, but let me tell you it's big. I jumped in through the side door with my own kids and his in tow. It was the pinnacle of late 1970s gorgeous sleaze complete with champagne glasses over the kitchen sink, a large bedroom in the back with a king size bed and a small television lodged in a shelf on the right hand side -- a plush interior. Did it really have a faux shag carpet? Or was that my retroactive imagination.

My friend urged me to drive it and I accepted his offer. Any of you ever had fantasies of driving a NY city bus with the big steering wheel with a fare box to your right? That is what it was like - the oversized wheel, turning it, playing the happy bus driver with a big grin while taking impossibly wide turns. As I drove around the neighborhood an indescribable elementary, crude happiness came over me. It was a happiness that was at once giddy and surfacy and yet also sprang from deep inside my maleness.

As I drove, Steve confided that he had for years and years dreamed of getting it. His father had one when his original family was young and he felt a persistent, unrelenting desire to recreate this for his own family.

I alighted from this behemoth full of joy. This puzzled my children. "What makes you so happy to drive that heap, my 12 year old son asked me. Truthfully, I did not know what to say. My 10-year-old daughter added that she has never quite seen me like that.

That night I thought about my friend's persistent dream. I have many dreams that I have denied over the years, but one of them at once idiosyncratic, eccentric and at the same time attainable was to buy a 1959 Chevrolet Bel-Air. My father had that car when I was growing up in the 1960s in Atlanta, Ga. That car of my early youth imprinted itself unreasonably on my brain and has been there distantly in my dreams for decades. The big cat whisker fins in the back and the oval speedometer and gauges in the front have stayed in the folds of my grey matter to the degree that no passage of time can seem to dim.

I immediately went on Craigslist and to my surprise - a 59 Chevy was being sold somewhere in NJ. I was so excited to see the pictures. It needed restoration, but the ad said it was running and given that it was 50 years old, in excellent shape. I breathlessly dialed the number as though I was dialing into the past - trips with my mother to the Briarcliff shopping center in Atlanta for a haircut at "Jim the barber's," shopping sorties to the Piggly Wiggly in the summer with the breeze blowing through the windows and the sing-song of Martin Luther Kings sermons wafting from the radio. I even remember the sound of the transmission shifting when my mother, hit 20 miles per hour as we drove up Lively Ridge Road.

Perhaps I could go home again. "I want that car," I told the owner. "I want it." But then reality set in. I am not mechanically inclined and there is no way that I have the budget or the time to restore it. It would be a heap that would sit in my driveway, rusting, a curio at best. My wife was perplexed but supportive and my children were bewildered. Why spend the money so senselessly they asked me in earnest?

What was I up to? What am I up to?

My male friends instinctively understood this strange impulse to buy a 50 year old car. My brother commanded me to get it. "You must have this car," he barked into the phone from his home in Queens. I might even come with you. My close friends, each one to a man, admitted they had similar fantasies: this one for a 1966 Oldsmobile Toronado, another one for a 69 Cadillac coupe de ville convertible.

It seems that restoring these old wrecks, one friend said, is like restoring and reenacting our past. The women, on the other hand, struggled to understand. My sister found this quest totally incomprehensible. It is not as if women don't reenact the past, but they seem to do it differently.

I wondered about this as I hurriedly drove across the county to take a look at the car. Nothing though prepared me for the feelings I had when I laid eyes on her

Why do Polanski, Letterman, and Senator Ensign create so much discussion?

Simon Y. Feuerman, Psy.D., L.C.S.W. — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 18:33:51 +0000

Why do Polanski and Letterman, Senator Ensign create so much discussion?

To paraphrase Tolstoy, decent people are all alike, but indecent people (and that includes all of us) are indecent each in their own way. Polanski, (heinous) Letterman (naughty) and Ensign (arrogant) have provided interesting material this week, sounding themes that may be similar, but really are different and many of us (me obviously included) are deeply interested.

Certainly, we have always been drawn to the sordid doings of powerful men. That is nothing new. For some people it's good for a little fun and a few laughs. Part of that fun maybe sorting out what is simply naughty and what is really heinous. Now we all get to be judges and philosophers.

But seriously folks, there really is something about these kinds of transgressions that draw us in. Suppose the story was that Letterman had hit one of his employees in a fit of anger or that Polanski had assaulted someone physically but not sexually. Would that generate so much discussion? I doubt it. An apology would be issued and perhaps, appropriate jail time served, but people would yawn and move on.

The escapades of powerful people are exciting among other reasons because they tend to turn the tables - a kind of Roman holiday for our times. Things start to look a little different when these things come to light. We always knew something was up with Letterman, many people are saying this morning. Now we know! It's like the pieces of a chess game get moved around a bit. Alliances shift, sometimes real (and psychological) kingdoms are torn asunder, acquired or lost. That's excitement!

Moreover, when prominent people screw up in this way, (btw, everyone else does too) they serve an additional psychological purpose for some people. These public figures become juicy targets on which to oceanic sexual guilt. This is not necessarily a good thing.

While it is good to cultivate our sense of what's right by talking about what's wrong, sanctimonious hysteria and even sexual jingoism, and gloating will stop people from making emotional progress. You would think by the sound of things, we have a populace of purely moral people. We certainly do not!

America has become a waterfall of pornography, rivers of it flowing from every computer terminal and television into our living rooms and offices, sex scandals by the minute. Our society is marred by unbridled sexual (and other kinds of) greed.

Yes, this week's news cycle has delivered great material: first Polanski and now Letterman and today's NY Times article on Senator John Ensign's moral lapses and unethical actions.

Roman Polanski has been served up as a true sexual villain, but more than that -- he is a nexus of negative sexual stereotypes, true academy award material: Now at 76 years old in addition to being a rapist he now qualifies for that archetypal role: lecherous, dirty old man (with a young, beautiful wife, yet!). He should go to prison just for wanting sex at his age. Not to mention that he is French and an "intellectual" And we all know how immoral those French intellectual artists are.

This morning we have Letterman: with his jaunty disarming humor making a joke of something that really is not so funny. And now a US Senator, complete with contrition, trying to make everything okay with a staffer he slept with and her family by "arranging" payments and compensation unethically.

Are anyone's hands clean? You and I know that the stuff that we're all made of is often more fragile than tissue paper. Fortunately, so long as we have Polanski (heinous), Letterman (naughty) and Ensign (haughty) we can all feel a little less guilty.

Connection and prayer: it's not for everyone

Simon Y. Feuerman, Psy.D., L.C.S.W. — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 22:10:13 +0000

One year I was hired to lead a prayer group on Rosh HaShana that was decidedly not up to the challenge of prayer. This group - a collection of people from all over were by and large as unfamiliar with each other as they were with the prayers. They gathered together in a small room in a converted mansion in a leafy suburb every year for reasons that were unclear even as they did it.

Here a Russian émigré, there an Argentine, here a former prize fighter, there an opera singer. I myself had always felt comfortable among the lost or at least the restless - a man of a bit of faith here, some haphazard scholarship there. I hold an inheritance of deep Jewish knowledge, sections of Talmud, verses, an intermittently tuneful voice and a practiced, nearly rabbinic eye and so, in my younger years, this was not an unreasonable assignment for me.

Nevertheless, this group was a particular challenge. Aside from a skeletal core group of worshipers, throughout the day, assorted people came in and out as though paying their respects. It had a wake feel, but it was missing a body and there was certainly no casket.

What made these people come to shul? I wondered, even as some of them may not even like each other or God?

Ostensibly, they came to talk to the Creator, but still, all men, believers and non-believers, must find their own way. The problem was that in this shul, there seemed no rush to do so. They were emotionally paralyzed and they did not want to be cured too quickly if at all.

As we took took turns opening and closing the ark, I wondered, did everyone's hearts have to be so closed? Wasn't there a simple, natural connection between God and people? In the elongated memories of my grandparents' world - the world of Fiddler on the Roof -- it seemed to exist as a given, like water and air. What did they have that we didn't? They were poor to be sure, but so were these people. This was a group of broken men in body and soul. Neither money nor spirit here. Not a millionaire among them. Not even close.

But one thing was different: in the old world there was persecution. The unspeakable persecution of the Czar and his hordes horrible as it was, strange as it may be to say, might have served a function. Not that we needed it, but being reliably oppressed may have put some in an interesting mindset. "Happiness" is what the British psychoanalyst DW Winnicott called having a "reliable persecutor." The reliable persecution of old relieved doubts and even made some to feel impervious to the forces of History. History, with its rises and falls and conquests of Kings, Queens and foreign lands was for the gentiles, almost entirely irrelevant. The past was a straight line with bookends at each side beginning with the destruction of the Temple and our painful banishment from the Land of Israel by a vengeful, but compassionate Gd and at the other side, our imminent redemption at the end of days by the Messiah, a descendant of the Davidic dynasty. Citizenship in the meanwhile was in not in any country, but rather, in a republic of discourse, a Republic of the Talmud, forever, guests as it were, among the gentile nations. It was this very persecution that made some certain of Gd's love and our imminent redemption by His hand.

The day ambled along. The sun climbed to great heights, peaked, then started to move lower and the shadows got longer. I could take it no longer.

With the ark open, I invited anyone who had something to say to man or to God, to say it now. There were no takers. "This is a chance to tell your story...to say something, anything at all - even to tell a joke," I emphasized. Still, there was nary a murmur from the crowd.

What had become revealed at that moment, in plain old English, was a lack of connection either to God or man. There was neither the thickness of what the African writer, Chinua Achebe, calls congregational memory nor the social connection between people. I could sense that what people deeply wanted was to have a better past and the hope was that this could be accomplished in some kind of parallel process, a group ceremony, like a mass wedding. The future and the present were too overwhelming, too anxiety provoking. Like in a long dysfunctional marriage, why start talking now? Why stir things up? Talking to each other was not a value. We needed a better past and now!

From where I stood, talking, and connection to each other were ultimate values, but that was not the way here. Connection is not for everyone -- and for some with deep trauma or early deprivation, too much of it or not the right kind can be experienced as toxic even dangerous,

Finally, just as we were about to continue, one man with an accent tinged with the old Bronx shrugged and said, "Everyone has a story. I guess, maybe next year, everyone will hear mine. I pray everyone should have a good year in the meantime." It was a promise for the future and a meager one at that, but that would be all. The shofar blasts blew and shortly after, the men shuffled into the next room where they had gefilte fish, a shot of whiskey and a few pieces of honey cake. A New Year had begun.

I Curse You!

Simon Y. Feuerman, Psy.D., L.C.S.W. — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 16:23:15 +0000

A friend of mine was cursed by his analyst!

Yes, after 20 years of working wonderfully together, it seems that a piece of madness was jarred loose and the analyst, apparently fed up with a difficult impasse they were both experiencing, called my friend David, a chazer, Yiddish for pig. If that weren't enough, the analyst added "you're much more deeply disturbed than I thought" and "You need a lot of help" and he clearly implied that David would never amount to much.

According to my friend, this was not a momentary break of empathy that was designed to penetrate levels of defenses, but a mean-spirited exchange that devolved to a kind of a sibling fight, a shouting match with insults traded and name-calling. A pair that had "grown" together over two decades and many successful experiences in treatment together and in life (separately) ground down into something out of Billy Crystal's fight with his brother in the film Mr. Saturday Night.

My friend's fortitude and sense of humor notwithstanding, he was understandably devastated. This was a curse of biblical proportions like the curse of a father. 6 months later and David still experiences intrusive thoughts of the fateful meeting -- a trauma in the full sense of the word.

What a horrible end. David's analyst was like a father to him, someone who was an extremely helpful and positive person in his life, but now the damage is irreparable. By degree David is painfully coming to terms with what happened even as he does this, I wonder: what is the psychological purpose of a curse? Why did the analyst curse David? Why bother to curse at all? If they were at an impasse, why not just walk away and say nothing? Certainly in David's case "nothing" would have been more therapeutic than "something."

To be sure, curses have been around for a long time -- and blessings too. (They seem to be two sides of the same coin) The first of these are famously recorded in the Bible: Gd blessed Adam and Eve and He said to them, "Be fertile and increase, fill the earth and master it..." and then later, when they betray their Creator:

"Cursed be the ground because of you
By toil you shall eat
all the days of your life,
Thorns and thistles shall it sprout for you
By the sweat if your brow shall you eat
Until you return to the ground
For dust you are and to dust you shall return"

Of course there are curses throughout the Bible. Noah curses his son Ham and his descendants. Jacob curses his sons and so on. God Himself curses various peoples and nations. Nor did curses cease in ancient times. To talk of the mundane together with the sacred we have in modern times the "curse of the Bambino" Babe Ruth's famous curse against the Boston Red Sox, and the supposed Kennedy family curse.

I remember from childhood a different friend of mine whose father had cursed him. "Henry, you will end up either in prison or dead before you are 25," his father told him. (He ended up being quite successful and today he is 47.)

Curses and blessings run through the families like the maze of wiring that lead into the basement circuit breakers. Some are said out loud. Others are just believed silently.

I believe, in the case of humans at least, they are a profound construct to keep people connected. It seems to my mind that curses follow from a relationship between 2 people often fantastically intense, but not necessarily positive. Often they come out of rivalries between two entities where somehow each is completed or made whole by the other. Father-son, mother-daughter, business-partners, people who were once passionate lovers.

Sometimes it emerges from a relationship somehow where each has taken in the other as a crucial part of their identity frequently to the point of obsession. Think of the historic feuds: Hatfields and the McCoys, the Yankee - Red Sox rivalry, even Republicans and Democrats.

When viewed this way, it seems that the true purpose of a curse is to cement a relationship between the curser and the cursed. To make sure that the two of them are bound together. From what I understand about my friend's impasse with his analyst, it would seem that unconsciously, the analyst, ordinarily a terrific professional and a good person, was threatened by my friend's separating from him.

And so he cursed him.

We Are All Prisoners*

Simon Y. Feuerman, Psy.D., L.C.S.W. — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 21:29:55 +0000

Today's NY Times reports that the now famous victim of a decades-long kidnapping, Jaycee Dugard has suffered sexual abuse, neglect and emotional manipulation...to an extent hard to imagine.

But therapists say the biggest challenge facing Ms. Dugard, may be switching families. "Her captor was her primary relationship, and the father of her two children and...separation may be difficult for all of them," said one child expert."...it is an extreme version of a phenomenon that is really not that uncommon: a child engaged in an abusive relationship when young and, not knowing any better, coming to accept it as their life, adapting as best they can," offered another professional.

Obviously, this is a horrifically extreme case and yet its extremeness illuminates the normal.

In a way most of us become prisoners of what we have experienced. Not only are we prisoners, but even when we are free, we still (unconsciously) attach to our psychological captors. The philosopher John Paul Sartre once famously remarked that we are condemned to be free. We don't always want to be free. This may be one of the reasons that we repeat the past. We repeat the good and we repeat the bad, but we repeat. We are in a sense, at least when it comes to the bad, repeat offenders. We ingeniously take the present and turn into a repetition of our early life and it seems to be even beyond our control even as we do it.

For example, a relative of mine, Eric, is cheap as the day is long. I knew his father, a holocaust survivor, very well. He was a tailor from Lodz, Poland. He constantly was patching up his son's old clothes, counted the minutes that his son spent using hot water in the shower and would charge him for phone calls that Eric would make. When Eric would reach across the table to take a hunk of bread, his father would whack him.

Yet, this horrific treatment only served to slightly dim the fierce father-son attachment. Now dead more than 20 years, my friend is unfortunately as close to his father as he ever was. Already on his third marriage, each of his relationships has been disfigured by his cheapness. I remember that his first wife was "forbidden" to have any household help even though she had just that week given birth. At the same time, Eric is a marvelously creative and successful, honest human being.

Another friend of mine I once met in a training group "refused" to enjoy sex. It was couched in the narrative language of a series of sexually incompetent boyfriends, but it was understood by the group at least, to be a powerful reenactment of her relationship with her mother, a stern German-Jewish woman for whom pleasure was pathology.

Nor is the compulsion to repeat confined to the negative. A man I know is a philanthropist, but not by "choice." His father, a Polish Jew who became very rich in the button business loved to give away money. Various rabbis, from the ne'er do wells to the illustrious came to him for donations. They would stream up to his office every working day, all day and receive monetary gifts large and small and make great displays of gratefulness. There wasn't a cause that his father didn't like from the rinky dink to the august museums and universities. When his father died, my friend felt "compelled" to live his father's life and continued this worthy but rather odd form of daily theater. He is a warm and wonderful human being who takes pleasure in philanthropy, but there is an unstated shadowy depression that hangs over him. It is possible that this "depressive shadow" may have something to do with his addiction to prescription painkillers. He would do well to "look" at himself, but instead he just goes on automatic.

It makes you think: why bother going forward if our past is our only future?

Don't despair. There are ways to avoid repetition, but it's not easy. If you can afford to, you can hire someone to review your life with you and bring it down to slow-motion frames. This is commonly known as psychoanalysis or psycho-analytically oriented psychotherapy. When you catch the repetition in progress if you talk about it enough you can turn the ship around even in rough waters.

In a future article we will discuss the elements that go into a successful analysis and successful life. You can really have more.

*Acknowledgment to Ncaps Learners and faculty

Till Debt do us part

Simon Y. Feuerman, Psy.D., L.C.S.W. — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 20:10:27 +0000

My 12-year-old son keeps on asking me to buy a new car.

Not only does he want a new car, he wants me to help him decide among several different new ones. Every few hours (he is home in the summer) he asks me about the new Chevy Volt, or the Honda Pilot or some other nifty new model. His tastes range from crossovers like the Nissan Murano and the Rogue to minivans (the Kia Sedona, Honda Odyssey) to sportscars like the Corvette and the Mercedes. I told him that we don't have the money for any of them.

This does not keep him from scheming for ways that he "can get we want." Unlike many conversations across the generational divide this one is evolving to greater heights and knowledge both for him and for me.

For example, my smart son has become a devoted student of Obama's "cash for clunkers" program. He followed the program from its inception in July until its abrupt end at the beginning of this week. He carefully examined the fine print and the rules about gas mileage and trade-ins and declared it to be a "good deal." He points to our 1999 clunker outside and then to our neighbor's shiny new minivan across the street. "Let's trade up" he says hopefully. This was back in July.

I cautioned him that it's not so simple. Being a good deal does not make it a good deal for everyone.

Undeterred, he tracked the extremely successful program in the last few weeks. "...If it's working for so many people why not for us?"

I explain: the cash for clunkers program is good for people who were already going to buy a new car. It's like if you're already on your way to buy a bicycle and someone gives you a $50 coupon that's great, but if the coupon entices you to buy something that you weren't going to buy in the first place, then the coupon is a seduction.

Apparently, many Americans must have been on their way to the showroom to buy a new car. In fact, today's NYT report shows that consumer spending is up even though incomes are flat. How can this be?

According to the venerable newspaper, the consumer is in fact being enticed. Not only did new car sales get a hefty boost, but generous tax rebates for first time homebuyers is what is responsible for the much ballyhooed up-tick in home prices.

"But how can so many people need a new car or new home?" he asks. Do they need one or don't they?

He asks a salient question. What does the word "need" mean in a consumer society?

For a psychotherapist this is an especially important question. I remember when I first began in the field I asked my supervisor, "how long should a patient stay in group or individual treatment?"

He said, "Until he gets all of what he needs in life and most of what he wants."

I always thought that phrase begged further exploration. What do needs mean in a consumer society, where we "need" a new car every few years? If these are needs, then what are wants?

Further my son asks, why is the government seducing consumers with rebates? Isn't that bad? And, most importantly, why are people falling for it? Do we want to be suckered?

My son wants to know more about this topic and so do I.

The lure of the incurable*

Simon Y. Feuerman, Psy.D., L.C.S.W. — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 18:01:29 +0000

Many people feel deep down that they are incurable. No wonder. We have tried to work with ourselves - to make more money, to lose those few pounds, to find love, to give love. And nothing works.

The problem is that we are "incurable" and our marriages and relationships are incurable or so many believe. Occasionally, there's a glimmer of hope, but most of life we feel is out of our locus of control. Yet I often wonder, what is the psychological purpose of such a belief?

Do we want to feel incurable? What do we get out of this curious state of feeling?

Pity the poor friend of mine. Pity more his unending line of girlfriends. Bright, intelligent, looks like a Greek god, but forever repeating his early life. He "can't" find happiness with a woman. Woman after woman ends up being the "wrong" one and he feels he "must" get rid of them. Someone in his group suggested that he not a victim, but rather a slayer. He bristles at the idea, but he does after several decades of repetition believe that there is something in him that is the source of his misery only that he is, sadly, incurable.

Another friend of mine is a perennial loser. Kind she is as the day is long, as hard a worker as there ever was, but she goes from job to job, project to project always on the short end, walking out with nothing or very little. She feels mildly cheated in every business situation and decided at some point to spend the rest of her life in a sulk.

She wears her poverty as some kind of virtue, but in reality, there is a problem. She can feel it. It's like having a low-grade fever. You know it's there, but you can pretend it's not. She told me that she went recently to her (new) analyst and told him that she didn't want to come because she was afraid to confirm what she already suspects: she has an incurable disease. She was born under a bad sign and is fated to have nothing or next-to-nothing.

To her surprise, her analyst confirmed for her that she was "terminal," but that she should consider coming to treatment as a contribution to general science. She was enraged, though she knew he said it somewhat in jest. "You may be hopeless," he said, "but you can make an important contribution to the field on how we might cure someone as incurable as you."

My friend told me that something stopped in her when he said that. She could not think of herself in quite the same way anymore. Over coffee one morning she told me that she thinks that she had an investment in seeing herself as incurable. "That is the way my mother saw herself and me."

We both started to notice how much of the world seems invested in its own intractability. Years ago I remember listening to a friend of my father's, describe race relations in this country. He talked with a lot of intelligence about it, but I could not help but notice how much pleasure he took in the "intractability" and "irreconcilability" of the problem. Too much pleasure, I think.

*Acknowledgment to Ncaps learners and faculty and to the late Hyman Spotnitz, MD