The Literary Mind

"Precious": Being Black in America

Ilana Simons, Ph.D. — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 03:24:23 +0000

Some race conversations are harder than others are. At times we can talk about race with lightheartedness, and at other times, we can't. There are reasons for that. When talk leads to a real need for change, we usually resist it.

At least those ideas felt clear to me this weekend, when I saw two racially-charged movies on the same day--Precious, which is an amazing portrayal of black America; and A Serious Man, which is a lighter portrayal of Jewish America. The movies weren't made with intentions to refer to each other. Precious is a drama meant to make us seriously rethink race, and A Serious Man is comedy that aspires to make us laugh about it. But I was lucky enough to see them, by chance, back to back. And considering these movies together tells us something about the divergent ways that black and Jewish cultures are able to express themselves in this country.

Both movies feature a protagonist whose problems come from race and culture. Precious features a girl by that name who lives in Harlem in the 1980's. Precious, age 16, suffers from punishing social forces: poverty, a school that fails her because administrators don't understand her situation, and government agencies that blame her as they purport to help her. Her mother physically abuses her and her dad rapes her, leaving her with HIV and two babies, one with Down Syndrome. That's a hell enclosed by culture. In the other movie, A Serious Man, we get Larry Gopnik, a Jew in Minnesota in the 1960's. He suffers from his cultural situation too, if less urgently: He's got an unfaithful wife, a kvetching family, a sense of anonymity at work, and a God who doesn't seem to care for him. Here, being a Jew means bearing the weight of the world, with the occasional reprieve of slapstick.

It's important to restate that Precious sets out to be more serious than A Serious Man does. But this fact--that one movie is heavy and another is light--isn't inconsequential. It tells us something about what's possible in race conversations today. We are living at a time in which a Jewish filmmaker can make a movie about Jewishness and not spark a cultural divide, and a serious movie about black culture necessarily prompts one.

Indeed, critics and viewers of various races have been polarized in their reception of Precious. It's as if an honest portrayal of a part of black culture is something like setting off a bomb. Some writers blame the movie for reproducing stereotyped images of a violent black America (It's "racist hysteria masquerading as social sensitivity" writes Armond White in New York Press on November 4). Many blame the movie for being too bleak, for highlighting urban blight without offering an equal image of hope. White goes on in his article: Precious is "full of brazenly racist clichés (Precious steals and eats an entire bucket of fried chicken); it is a sociological horror show."

But Precious presents cultural truths with clarity--and the question is why this description of some people's experience in America sparks such recoil. One answer is that in this honest, new framing of American life, there's so much at stake. The movie shows what pain exists for a large portion of the population who don't have the recourses to civilly argue their case. It shows how difficult upward mobility is, and how ineffective government agencies are in fixing the situation. It shows how much people with power overlook people without power, and how wrong they are in some of their assumptions. This conversation leads to serious intersections: to necessary blame; to feelings of shame and anger.

In turn, a lot of people don't want Precious to say what it says so loudly. It seems more copacetic to enjoy the silence we've sometimes enjoyed. Indeed, President Obama referred to this silence between black and white cultures in his well-known speech on race in March, 2008. In that speech, Obama explained that many black Americans know an American experience which is so painful and divergent from dominant American myths that they feel they can not express it publicly: "[Their ideas about race and] anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But [they do] find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. [The] anger is real; it is powerful."

In his speech, Obama went on to say that white Americans also feel an anger which they don't publicly admit, and the result is that races put on masks for each other, and there's a communication gap between communities. Because the dialogue is repressed, anger and a sense that one group can't possibly understand the other grow, under the surface. "Resentments [among white Americans] aren't always expressed in polite company [either]," Obama said, and "to wish away the resentments of [either white or black] Americans" is to wish away a growing beast at the center of our culture.

When a movie like Precious comes along, a lot of people resent the voice. In understanding our fear of it--and the change that real dialogue would demand--it is useful to contrast the reception of Precious with the reception of A Serious Man, the Coen brothers' expression of the Jewish experience. The Coen brothers' film has been ringed--by the brothers, by the audience, and by the critics--with an unbearable lightness. That lightness speaks to the fact that Jewish Americans have developed a number of public voices which they feel comfortable with, and which popular culture generally accepts. Jewish public voices enjoy a familiarity with the wider culture, or a freedom of expression without immediate repercussion.

This is not to say that Jewish Americans have not suffered and do not suffer their share of discrimination and pain, but it is to say that Jewish Americans are doing relatively well in terms of basic concerns for health and safety, or how the American Dream is working out for them. In turn, the Jewish culture can comment on its relationship to the Dream without the threat of a larger overhaul of American structures. Jewish humor (although it emerged from darker times) is currently a part of the felt security. At the end of their film, the Coen brothers include a funny tagline: "No Jews were harmed in the making of this motion picture." That line seems to imply we are safe. It also implies we are a group. It is nearly impossible to imagine a line at the end of a film by filmmaker who was black reading "No black Americans were harmed in the making of this motion picture." That's because it wouldn't be true: People are constantly hurt because of the lack of public dialogue about black America.

In the Coen brothers' film, there is playfulness without imminent risk-as if this voice generally enjoys security in its situation and boundaries. There is a sense of joy and comfort behind "inside jokes" Jews can tell. Whether it's through Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Jerry Seinfeld, Philip Roth, or the Coen Brothers ("No Jews were hurt..."), there is a sense that the community "gets" itself, and that cohesion doesn't depend on further fighting with America at large. In contrast, the "insider" lingo of black culture feels more in flux, or highly active: this language has the power to divide, to mark a line of defense or attack.

It is important to note that under the umbrella of well-meaning humor, the Coen brothers let slip some racist moments in A Serious Man. These moments would never have been glossed over by the audience or critics had they appeared in Precious. At different points in the Coen brothers' movie, we meet a Korean student who seems schizoid in his stereotyped academic intensity, and a caricatured Goy gun-toting neighbor. Here, stereotypes feel light-again, as if, we're all in this game of prejudice and rebound together.

In thinking about fear and lightness in different cultural dialogues, also consider the newspaper headlines which have welcomed the two films in the past month. The New York Times presented articles on Precious with headlines of seriousness: "Precious Ignites a Debate on the Black Narrative" and "To Blacks, Precious Is ‘Demeaned' or ‘Angelic'" (Felicia R. Lee, NYT; Nov 20). It would be hard to imagine a headline reading "To Jews, [insert character name here] is ‘Demeaned' or ‘Angelic.'" In the context of Jewish culture, it would be hard to claim that an issue was so immediately or singularly divisive. In contrast, the headlines which have ushered in A Serious Man have been ringed with humor: "The Coen brothers' A Serious Man: More Jewish than matzo balls?" (Patrick Goldstein, LA Times, Sept 22); "Are you Serious?: The Coen brothers make the most Jewish movie ever - mazel tov" (Gary Thompson, Philadelphia Daily News, Oct 16), and "A Serious Man - The Coen brothers' most Jewish film to date" (Shlomo Schwartzberg, The Jewish World, Oct 26).

That last line is telling: "The Coen brothers' most Jewish film to date." There's freedom there--as if the brothers are at liberty to step in and out of their Jewish identities depending on the movies they're making. They can put on and take off their various cultural allegiances at will. It would probably be incendiary, in contrast, to call a film by someone who was black his "most black film to date." The lightness doesn't translate: Many Americans have more safety in their various cultural roles than black artists do.

I certainly don't mean to blame the Coen brothers for enjoying a sense of humor, or for the cultural position which some cultures occupy. I do only mean to draw a meaningful contrast: We are scared of talking about black America. Talk about black America makes us singularly serious and earnest. Talk about black America is especially hard to sustain without defensive reactions. I'd like to hear why you think this is.

The Four Moral Emotions

Ilana Simons, Ph.D. — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 21:36:07 +0000

In my last post, I wrote about the evolutionary value of emotions. One reason emotions are useful is that they get us to react quickly in response to danger. Although our rational (as opposed to emotional) minds do a lot to keep us at the top of the food chain, rational thinking is sometimes too slow for handling a threat (e.g. fighting a tiger). Sometimes, we need to react more quickly--and our emotions, like fear and surprise, help us do that.

But of course supplying speedy reactions to tigers is not the only use of emotion. In this light, recent research on emotion has focused not just on issues of an individual's self-defense, but on the larger social value of emotions. (For great writing on emotion, see Jessica Tracy, Richard Robins, and June Price Tangney). Emotions evolved--the thinking goes--not just to protect people, but to bind communities. After all, we all have a better chance at survival if the species works as a team, rather than battling it out to mutual extinction. In turn, emotions are useful because they seal a Social Contract, a system of ethics that protects the species--not just individuals--into the future.

Of course our "hottest" or most animalistic emotions are usually more self-serving than communal. These animalistic emotions, often called the "basic" emotions, are the emotions that Paul Ekman famously first labeled in the 1960's, in his work with tribes in Papua New Guinea. They're the emotions we show on our faces across all cultures, and they're thought to be biologically determined. We share most of these basic emotions with animals, and they are often listed as the following six: anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise.

As said, the "basic" emotions help individuals more directly than they help groups. Take surprise as an example. Surprise is a basic emotion that allows us to avoid what's unexpected and dangerous. If I turn the corner and bump into a tiger (or my unpaid landlord or my boss when I'm skipping work), my heartbeat increases and my muscles tense. I move quickly to avoid the danger. Surprise triggers escape--which is more self-serving than group-serving. Similar analogies can be made for most of the basic emotions.

But recent research on emotion has shifted the traditional focus away from the "basic" emotions to another set of emotions which are thought to be more distinctly human. Focus has turned to the "self-conscious" emotions, which are sometimes also referred to as "moral," "social," or "higher-order" emotions. These are the emotions that an organism can only feel if it has a highly developed sense of self-reflection. Usually, the "self-conscious" emotions are listed as these four: guilt, shame, embarrassment, and pride.

Researchers (great writers here include Mark Leary, Jeffrey Stuewig and Debra Mashek) tend to cite two requirements for feeling a "self-conscious" emotion. One: The person needs to be capable of "position-taking," of knowing how her behaviors would affect or be perceived by others. Two: She needs the ability to imagine how the reception of her behavior would reflect back on her character. For example, the fear you can feel in an interview (heart beating fast, voice constricting, palms sweating) is a basic emotion. But the shame that might set in as you leave ("Why do I interview so poorly?!") is a self-conscious emotion. The self-conscious emotion is the one that arises from understanding how others see us. It influences future behavior. If you are ashamed after an interview, you might take a class in public speaking or ask for input from your friends ("what kind of person do I seem like to you?"). The self-conscious emotion binds us back to others--to their expectations and ideas.

For another example, consider anger. The anger I might feel at having my wallet snatched is a basic emotion. But if I write a letter to the editor arguing for new laws addressing local crime, that's pride, a self-conscious emotion. I want to establish my morals in relation to the thief. Self-conscious emotions are emotions in which we imagine our conformity or nonconformity to society's norms.

All our emotions work with amazing coordination really--like a symphony. One emotion can trigger another, to keep us in balance with the group. For instance, a heavy tendency for joy, anger, and pride might tilt a woman toward a career in business. She might feel strongest when finding investment deals and making money on the back of others. In this, she scores big points for individual preservation. She gets rich. But in time--if she's screwed some clients--the feelings of guilt and shame might also set in. That would be a good thing for the Social Contract. Influenced by guilt, she might shift her behavior--giving to charity, mentoring some kid, working to protect the society for a bit. Some might say she's acting altruistically "for the wrong reasons," but guilt is undoubtedly "right" when we think of the social contract it serves. In this way, our emotions serve both to propel the individual and to protect the larger group that affords every individual safety. Emotions are our rubber bands for propelling individual (and group) gain while protecting the society in which gain happens.

All this is just one small way of thinking of emotion--specifically, with a heavy evolutionary lens. There are other ways to approach the phenomenon of emotion. For instance, I'd like to hear what anyone else thinks the value of emotion is. I think love, for one, would be an interesting feeling to talk about.

Why Do We Have Emotions?

Ilana Simons, Ph.D. — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 23:31:57 +0000

Mental illness often results from excess emotion. The overflow of emotion doesn't just drive mood disorders like Major Depression but fuels most psychological problems: phobias, anxiety, trauma, hoarding, obsessiveness, borderline personality disorder, and drug and alcohol abuse.

Why (oh why) were we made to feel so much? It's as if our wiring (which, when given the options of emotion and reason, gravitates to the former), were out to screw us.

The popular answer is the evolutionary one--that emotions have helped us survive. When we lived in the wild--with monkeys and mastodons and tigers--we needed emotions in order to react quickly to dangerous stimuli. If faced with a tiger, it's better to be rocked with a fear so strong it triggers a rush of blood than to sit around and theorize about the threat. We developed an emotional system because it could induce quick responses to danger (for theorists on emotion and evolution, see Antonio Damasio, Joseph LeDoux, and Robert Trivers).

But the claim that emotions keep things alive is too simple. After all, you can name a lot of efficient, enduring response systems that don't include emotion. Rivers are one--they skirt serious barriers and survive through history. Or consider an ivy plant. It has a very good sensory system and no love, fear, or drama to weigh it down. It winds itself up from the ground, over rocks, through the locks of gates, finding places to cling. It can endure weather changes, feed itself, and grow new cells. That's a solid response system not driven by emotion. So, again, why were we built to carry the burden of so much sentiment?

An evolutionary answer with a bit more detail is that we're animals: more aggressive and self-conscious than rivers and plants are. Aggression and the desire to survive that comes with selfhood helped scoot animals up the food chain. If you want to create a system that works hard to survive, make it consciousness and emotional. It will want to keep itself around.

On top of that, human beings are the most self-conscious animals. This makes us increasingly invested and crafty in our need for survival. We developed basic emotions (fear, joy) like the other animals. But then we developed a more complex rational system too, in which we could imagine our own past and future selves. It was the ability to reason about old and future selves (to set traps, and not just run from tigers) that allowed us to dominate the food chain. Rational thought helped us shape the world for our future: rerouting rivers, breeding plants, caging tigers.

We now have two highly developed systems: reason and the emotional core still sitting there, like the primitive animal inside us. As said above, mental illnesses often result from an imbalance in those two. And emotions kick us in the ass these days for a number of reasons. For one, even though emotions like fear used to be helpful in the wild, they're less efficient helpmates in modern civilized life. Of course we still have plenty to fear, but our threats are not usually immediate, like a tiger, but rather distant, like money and war and homelessness. The old fight-or-flight system is inadequate to the modern threats. You can fight a tiger; but you have to work hard, for a long time, to fight a financial crisis or the threat of terrorism. So, a lot of us suffer from a more generalized fear, or anxiety. There's a sense of danger without a practical opportunity to respond to it quickly. Perhaps emotions get out of whack today because they bubble without an effective outlet.

In turn, therapy these days often focuses on keeping our systems in balance--balancing our emotion and reason. One nice concept along this line comes from Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT). DBT has established the concept of the "wise mind," which is a useful integration of the emotional and rational selves. We get to "wise mind" when we're able to step back from emotion and reason with it. The wise mind puts emotion and reason in conversation, or uses reason to calm emotion down.

We likely have emotions because they help us survive. But they also tend to drive us crazy when given too much reign. Of course what I'm saying barely scratches the surface. After all, the other reason why we developed emotion is that emotion helps build relationships and bind communities. We would not be able to coordinate our goals so well if we did not love and fear and trust and feel a sense of pride. In this light, here's post #2, which focuses on the social use of emotions.

Why Do We Dream?

Ilana Simons, Ph.D. — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 04:17:53 +0000

Freud said that whether we intend it or not, we're all poets. That's because on most nights, we dream. And dreams are lot like poetry, in that in both things, we express our internal life in similar ways. We use images more than words; we combine incongruent elements to evoke emotion in a more efficient way than wordier descriptions can; and we use unconscious and tangential associations rather than logic to tell a story.

Freud essentially called dreams those poems we tell ourselves at night in order to experience our unconscious wishes as real. Dreams allow us to be what we cannot be, and to say what we do not say, in our more repressed daily lives. For instance, if I dream about burning my workplace down, it's probably because I want to dominate the workplace but am too nervous to admit that aggressive drive when I'm awake and trying to be nice to the people who might give me a raise.

Freud certainly had a catchy theory about dreams, but it was also limited. For him, every single dream was the picture of an unconscious wish. But people who have had boring dreams or nightmares might feel something missing from that formulation. In turn, recent theorists have tried to give a more accurate account of why we dream. In the following post, I'll list some of the current theories on why, at night, our brains tell strange stories that feel a lot like literature. I'd like to know if any of these theories resonate with you, or if you have your own belief about why we dream.

(Many great literary minds were obsessed with their dreams. Samuel Coleridge wanted to write a book about dreams--that "night's dismay" which he said "stunned the coming day." Edgar Allan Poe knew dreams fed his literature, and he pushed himself to dream "dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.")

Modern Theories on Why Dreams Exist:

Theory #1

The Evolutionary Theory: We Dream to Practice Responses to Threatening Situations

Ever notice that most dreams have a blood-surging urgency to them? In dreams, we often find ourselves naked in public, or being chased, or fighting an enemy, or sinking in quicksand. Antti Revonsuo, a Finnish cognitive scientist, has shown that our amygdala (the fight-or-flight piece of the brain) fires more than normal when we're in REM sleep (the time in sleep when we dream). In REM sleep, the brain fires in similar ways as it does when it's specifically threatened for survival. In addition to that, the part of the brain that practices motor activity (running, punching) fires increasingly during REM sleep, even though the limbs are still. In other words, Revonsuo and other evolutionary theorists argue that in dreams, we are actually rehearsing fight-and-flight responses, even though the legs and arms are not actually moving. They say that dreams are an evolutionary adaptation: We dream in order to rehearse behaviors of self-defense in the safety of nighttime isolation. In turn, get better at fight-or-flight in the real world.

Theory #2

Dreams Create Wisdom

If we remembered every image of our waking lives, it would clog our brains. So, dreams sort through memories, to determine which ones to retain and which to lose. Matt Wilson, at MIT's Center for Learning and Memory, largely defends this view. He put rats in mazes during the day, and recorded what neurons fired in what patterns as the rats negotiated the maze. When he watched the rats enter REM sleep, he saw that the same neuron patterns fired that had fired at choice turning points in the maze. In other words, he saw that the rats were dreaming of important junctures in their day. He argues that sleep is the process through which we separate the memories worth encoding in long-term memory from those worth losing. Sleep turns a flood of daily information into what we call wisdom: the stuff that makes us smart for when we come across future decisions.

Theory #3

Dreaming is Like Defragmenting Your Hard Drive

Francis Crick (who co-discovered the structure of DNA) and Graeme Mitchison put forth a famously controversial theory about dreams in 1983 when they wrote that "we dream in order to forget." They meant that the brain is like a machine that gets in the groove of connecting its data in certain ways (obsessing or defending or retaining), and that those thinking pathways might not be the most useful for us. But, when we sleep, the brain fires much more randomly. And it is this random scouring for new connections that allows us to loosen certain pathways and create new, potentially useful, ones. Dreaming is a shuffling of old connections that allows us to keep the important connections and erase the inefficient links. A good analogy here is the defragmentation of a computer's hard drive: Dreams are a reordering of connections to streamline the system.

Theory #4

Dreams Are Like Psychotherapy

But what about the emotion in dreams? Aren't dreams principally the place to confront difficult and surprising emotions, and sit with those emotions in a new way? Ernest Hartmann, a doctor at Tufts, focuses on the emotional learning that happens in dreams. He has developed the theory that dreaming puts our difficult emotions into pictures. In dreams, we deal with emotional content in a safe place, making connections that we would not make if left to our more critical or defensive brains. In this sense, dreaming is like therapy on the couch: We think through emotional stuff in a less rational and defensive frame of mind. Through that process, we come to accept truths we might otherwise repress. Dreams are our nightly psychotherapy.

Theory #5

The Absence of Theory

Of course, others argue that dreams have no meaning at all--that they are the random firings of a brain that doesn't happen to be conscious at that time. The mind is still "functioning" insofar as it's producing images, but there's no conscious sense behind the film. Perhaps it's only consciousness itself that wants to see some deep meaning in our brains at all times.

What do you think? We are all authors, in a way, every night. Is there a mind behind what's written in your dreams? Why are your dreams of use?

Four Ways to Fight Addiction

Ilana Simons, Ph.D. — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 22:18:23 +0000

The New York Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni's recent autobiography, Born Round (see link here), explains his addiction to eating and his methods for handling the addiction. The first half of the book could be the bleakest 100 pages I've ever read. For half of his life, this man couldn't get naked and couldn't see friends without planning months in ahead, because he was so obsessed with his body.

But there are some turning points in the book, and Bruni chronicles them like stars in the sky: radiant still points that teach tons about addiction.

Turning Point # 1: Being Outed

Bruni struggled with bulimia for about 6 months in his 20's, but he didn't self-identify as "bulimic." He thought of his occasional binge and purge as a novelty: a handy way for a smart guy to undo a big meal.

Addicts often use that self-styling: "The label doesn't fit me like it fits real addicts. I've just got special problems and special solutions." But long stretches of privacy distort reality. And even small-scale sneaky behaviors can snowball, without our knowing, into life-threatening patterns of thought and behavior.

For example, over months of "casual purging," Bruni adopted the false idea that his indulgences in fact needed to be undone. People like Bruni who rely on an occasional purge avoid learning a lesson that other people learn: how to deal with the negative emotions after eating too much and rebounding to a normal eating schedule the next day. Bruni entered a cycle which got worse the longer he kept it secret: Food became more and more frightening--the monster that sometimes brought chaos that had to be reversed.

One day, he was "outed." His two best friends confronted him, saying they knew he was bulimic. This changed Bruni's relationship to his own habits. Now his habits had a name with the power to shame him and to make him more accountable. Shame worked well here. Sometimes, the best thing for an addict's self-knowledge is being labeled, which ends secrecy and increases accountability.

Turning Point # 2: When Family Outs You

A second shaming, or making-accountable, happened in his 30's. This one happened in the context of family, which many addicts consider a hornet's nest. Family is a mirror for what we love and for what we avoid in ourselves. It's tempting to project what we want to disown onto family members or to blame them for who we've become.

Bruni had a tough relationship to his family insofar as they (all huge eaters themselves) had fuelled his obsession with food while fostering a warped self image. Because food was so important for all of them, he imagined no one in his family could really see him gain weight. One night, at a party, after too many drinks, Bruni made fun of a brother whom he envied, and his brother shot back: "At least I'm not fat."

That was a blow to his self-concept. Bruni ran into a bathroom downstairs, and cried. People close to us know us almost too well. They hurt us most and can change us quickly. After that night, Bruni finally decided to get serious about exercise.

Turning Point # 3: Behavioral Change Before Full Mental Change

There's really only so much progress any of us can make through talk. Often, the first answer to addiction must be forcing a change in behavior. After the family insult (and a few other public shamings), Bruni got a trainer. He surrendered some of his control over self image and over his choices: He hired expensive help, and this trainer made him work out. He threw his body into committed action before his mind could doubt it, and, throughout his life, that's the one way the weight came off.

Turning Point # 4: Changing Cultures

A second, bigger change helped him further. Bruni took a newspaper assignment in Italy. Changing cultures changed his life more radically than talk or a gym routine could. He went from the American eating culture to the Italian one, from a culture of high quantity and low quality to high quality and low quantity. You can't independently think yourself into an Italian mindset when you're living in America. Culture affects us to the core--it sets our "norms." In Italy, Bruni ate rich things, but they were served in smaller helpings, and he didn't have to battle alone to be "disciplined." People there simply didn't pile stuff so high on their plates and didn't snack between meals. The place you live, and the people living around you, determine cravings far more than we give them credit for. For the addict, the lesson here might be changing jobs or even states.

Flying back to the U.S. from Italy one year, Bruni sat behind a bunch of Americans who cracked open bags of chips between the meals. The old Bruni would have loved to do that, too. The new Bruni looked on from an Italian perspective, and those habits (his own old habits) looked misguided.

Small points of light change us. By the end of this good book about addiction, Bruni's telling us we've got to avoid magical thinking and be almost boringly honest about accountability. This doesn't mean avoiding food (or drugs or alcohol, necessarily, if those are our vices) altogether. It means understanding our cycles of self-punishment and exceptionalism. It means not sinking deep into self-hatred after indulgence, but buoying ourselves with accepting what we've done and moving on. Bruni writes about being kind to ourselves--both in terms of what we resist and what we devour.

see my book here

One London Bookstore is a Therapy Office, Too

Ilana Simons, Ph.D. — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 21:33:29 +0000

Alain de Botton is one of my favorite writers. His lyrical nonfiction makes complex concepts relevant to our daily lives. (See his How Proust Can Change Your Life and his latest, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work ).

He's a writer who appreciates the value of psychotherapy. Along those lines, he recently opened a bookstore in London that doubles as a therapy office, called The School of Life (check out the link here). The bookstore offers sessions with bibliotherapists, who can help find you books that are likely to change your habits; offers weekend getaways called “holidays,” with titles “Holiday to Heathrow,” and “Philosophy by Bicycle”; and hosts courses, not in abstract topics like “science” or “philosophy,” but in “How to Have Conversation” and “How to Die.” De Botton thinks traditional schooling has let us down and that overspecialization has shaped a lot of us into brilliant loners.

And...he started a production company to turn smart books into films and an architecture firm to help beautify the urban landscape.

I recently interviewed de Botton about a lot of it: what he thinks about therapy, the loneliness of writing, and how he found his wife. See parts of my interview below. You can read other parts here and here:

Simons:

You have had a great career disclosing the practical value of intellectual ideas. [You’ve written books about life—but you’ve also] started Seneca Productions, a company that makes smart and accessible T.V. shows; you helped create The School of Life, a venue for life-learning and therapy in London; and you were a founding member of Living Architecture, an organization that aims to create beautiful buildings for rent. Do you feel as if you've moved from books in relative isolation to an increasingly social focus over the course of your career?

De Botton:

…a few years ago, partly as a result of having undergone a very fruitful course of therapy and partly as a result of having studied the admirable career of Dave Eggers, I realized that I could quite easily engage with the more practical world if I really wanted. There was no need to spend my life solely in my [room writing].

I remember drawing up a list of my foremost concerns. This sounds absurd in the cold light of day, but on the piece of paper, I wrote: WISDOM and BEAUTY. In other words, what I really care about is trying to help the world to become a wiser place and a more beautiful place. How on earth to try and achieve these goals?

I started by looking at wisdom - and I was drawn to the example of the schools of wisdom of Ancient Greece and Rome, where philosophers would teach members of the general public about the principles of satisfaction and the root causes of misery. Where were the modern equivalents of these schools? I found that modern universities are not really engaged with such ambitions. If you went to any university and said that you had come to study ‘how to live' or ‘how to become a better and wiser person,' you would be politely shown the door - if not the way to an asylum. Universities nowadays see it as their job to train you either in a very specific career (like law, medicine) or to give you a grounding in arts subjects like literature or history - but for no identifiable reason, beyond the vague and unexamined notion that three years studying medieval literature may be a good idea.

So with some colleagues, I helped to start The School of Life in a modest shop and teaching space near King's Cross in London. On the menu of our school, you won't find subjects like ‘philosophy' ‘French' ‘History' and ‘the Classics'. You'll find courses in ‘Death,' ‘Marriage' ‘Choosing a career' ‘Ambition' ‘Child Rearing' or ‘Changing your world.' Along the way, you will learn about a lot of the books and ideas that traditional universities serve up, but you are unlikely ever to get bored, you'll make friends - and you'll come away with a different take on the world. There's even a bookshop in the school which does away with the traditional categories in bookshops like fiction or history and just sells books according to particular problems. So we've got a shelf titled ‘For those who worry at night' and another titled ‘How to be happy though married.' We call the shop a ‘chemist for the soul.'

It's always tempting to stick at standing on the sidelines complaining about a problem, but it's perhaps one better to try to make a change yourself. The School of Life is a small attempt to alter the way that learning gets done and to remind us that culture, if handled rightly, should actually feel entirely relevant and exciting and always make life more manageable and interesting.

Simons:

Your latest book, The Pleasure and Sorrows of Work, moves between cynicism about modern commerce and industry and awe for our technical innovations, for our world. When writing this book, did you feel more like the critic or the praise singer for modernity? More simply: Are we modern people in a relatively exciting space, or a really bad one?

De Botton:

You'll be frustrated at me for saying this, but I feel I sit squarely in the middle of this debate. Work has its definite sorrows and pleasures - and I wanted my book to sing of the pleasure and mourn the sorrow.

In the course of writing my book, one of the more consoling ideas I discovered was just how rare and historically ambitious is the modern idea that our work should deliver happiness to us on a daily basis. The strangest thing about the world of work isn't the long hours we put in or the fancy machines we use to get it done; the most extraordinary aspect of the work scene is in the end psychological rather than economic or industrial. It has to do with our attitudes to work, more specifically the widespread expectation that our work should make us happy, that it should be at the centre of our lives and our expectations of fulfillment. The first question we tend to ask of new acquaintances is not where they come from or who their parents were, but what they do - presuming thereby to discover the core of their identity.

When work is not going well, it's useful to remember that our identities stretch beyond what is on the business card, that we were people long before we became workers - and will continue to be human once we have put our tools down forever. As an entirely secular person, I'm struck by St Augustine's injunction that it is a sin to judge a man by his status or position in society. In other words, when work is not going well, we need to remember to distinguish our sense of worth from the work we do.

Simons:

Like many of your books, your latest contains a strong strain of loneliness. In interviews floating around online, you've said that you've known loneliness all too well for various reasons: your parents sent you to an English boarding school at age 8 when you could not speak English; your Jewishness is a possible source of alienation; you started going bald in your twenties and were undersexed in college. You don't feel at home in any one genre and gravitate toward topics of transience, like airports. Talk to me about loneliness? Sometimes I wonder if you exaggerate the image of your loneliness in certain spots as an aesthetic move--to touch us. It is a move I think works well in books: an author (who's not, when in the stage of editing, in a dire existential crunch) speaks of loneliness, and so touches a reader who's also alone. Can you talk about the aesthetics of an author's self-description, as humble or as lonely?

De Botton:

I do feel that loneliness is one of the great themes of all lives --whether we are objectively on our own or surrounded by friends and family. Our need to be understood is immense, and yet of course, we are rarely able to explain ourselves, to earn the attention of others, or to find people who are interested enough to care. So we end up alone and one of the things we do in this state is both to read and write. It hence feels natural to me that my own tendency to loneliness should surface in books. Writing is for me an act of communication with anonymous strangers--and perhaps the confession of my vulnerability acts like an invitation held out to the reader.

Simons:

Can you also tell me a little about the psychological services you offer through The School of Life? Why is this context for therapy different than another context?

De Botton:

I know this may sound odd in an American context, but in the UK, there is still an extraordinary amount of prejudice against therapy. The dominant assumption about anyone seeking therapeutic help is that they must be close to madness and disintegration.

So I was very keen that the School of Life offer therapy in a stigma free way, that it treat the idea of having therapy as no more or less strange than having a haircut or pedicure, and perhaps a good deal more useful. We spent a lot of time writing the copy and leaflets for the therapeutic services. The idea is to suggest that therapy should be a part of any educated self-conscious person's repertoire. Also, therapy tends never to be branded. One finds one's way to a therapist through slightly shamed means; one might have to ask one's doctor (as if one had a disease). So the idea with the school was to put therapy on the high street, to offer it as something you could consume like anything else; to normalize it and hence give it a more reliable position in our lives.

We have a huge amount of trouble understanding our motives and feelings. We are too close to the source. Therapy is an arena in which another person can listen to us with extraordinary attention while we describe ourselves - and can help us to make sense, a little sense, of who we are. The results are not always going to be extraordinary. So much depends on the attitude we bring to the process (this isn't like medicine, where a pill will work whatever the attitude of the patient), and of course, on the quality of the therapist. It isn't a magical solution, but it's a hugely intriguing development in the self-understanding and maturity of the race.

Simons:

Circulating online is a wonderful story about how you met your wife. At a party, you listed your detailed criteria for a love match to some friends ("a doctor's daughter who grew up outside London and works in business or science" ), and you were set up the next weekend. You married her. Can you be your own analyst here? If you'd avoided marriage thus far because of a fatal idealism, how did the idealist in you accept the actual woman?

De Botton:

The dominant assumption we have about love is that we shouldn't have a shopping list: that we should let ourselves be 'surprised' by our love matches, and that there is something controlling and sterile about having too sharp an image of whom one would want to be in love with. I suppose I was playfully challenging this one evening by giving a friend an incredibly detailed list of who I wanted to meet. Miraculously, this description jogged her memory and I was introduced to my now wife as a result. Naturally, the person I have married is complicated and diverse way beyond my necessarily sketchy initial description-but the things I love and admire in her remain those I knew I was seeking in her before I met her. This is a vision of love that would be instantly familiar to an Indian young man or woman - but it can sound odd in the Western context, so imbued is it with notions of the ineffable qualities of the beloved, whom fate will reveal but whom one shouldn't seek out too directly.

Simons:

Are there organizations in the U.S. that serve similar functions to the School for Life? I'm thinking, perhaps, of Philoctetes or even the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. Are you collaborating with any spots here?

De Botton:

I'm not familiar with these two institutions, but they do sound like they have similarities. It's my dream one day to be able to open up branches of The School of Life in NY and perhaps San Francisco-so collaborators and funders are most welcome.

see my book here

Today's Healthcare Debate Looks Like the Salem Witch Hunts

Ilana Simons, Ph.D. — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 13:56:45 +0000

The recent healthcare reform debates look a lot like the Salem witch hunts to me. Dialogue has broken down. In town halls across the country, we're talking about the actual fine points of "health care" to the same extent that people in Salem were talking about the fine points of "witches." People are paranoid, with a need to protect the existing social order, no matter what form their argument takes.

In Salem in 1692, people experienced anxiety that look a lot like our anxiety in 2009:

*Cost of the recent wars. William and Mary had just begun King William's War, a war with France in America, and the costs of war threatened to unsettle the existing social order in the relatively affluent town of Salem.

*Immigration issues. People fleeing the war were entering Salem, and Salem residents didn't know how to handle the financially insecure immigrants. Salem was also expanding in search of farmland and fighting Native Americans for the land.

*A New Leader. Salem had elected their first ordained minister, in the controversial Samuel Parris. Having a new, charismatic leader felt frightening to many of them.

*Race and gender issues. The witch hunts essentially started because two little white girls--Parris's daughter and niece--had a friendship with Parris's slave, Tituba. When the daughters dabbled in Tituba's religious customs, the town went crazy with a need to protect existing social structures. The first three "witches" accused were the town's social outcasts: Tituba, the black slave; Sarah Good, a white beggar; and Sarah Osborne, a white woman who had slept with her indentured servant and stopped attending church. The witch hunts were as much about race and the status of newly independent-thinking women as it was about anything else. For obvious parallels of all of the above, see our questions about race surrounding Obama and about gender surrounding Hillary Clinton.

In Salem in 1692, people felt economically and socially threatened. The result was a loss of rational thinking. And the witch hunts took shape akin to modern town hall meetings. Towns would gather in a seemingly open, democratic process in which people could bring their grievances public. The dangerous thing was that a "legal case" made against a witch could rest on what was called "spectral evidence": claims that people were haunted by the witches and therefore hallucinating. The evidence, in other words, was invisible--and considered sufficient to sentence people to death.

We're seeing a nearly parallel process these days, in that people are furious about the health care bill, but evidence is largely spectral. There are no "death panels" in the bill, but people claim there are. People are making false claims about socialized medicine (see this link), even death threats against the President (see this link), without reading the bill (called America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009, H.R. 3200, available online here). The argument about the health care bill seems to be an argument about something else: about race and class anxiety that we have not articulated.

(To dabble in facts, here's one thing I understand about the health bill: It demands that small businesses--those with 8 to 10 employees--either provide their workers with insurance up to federal standards, or pay about an 8% payroll tax. If small businesses can't provide the insurance, those workers will go with the public option.)

But the facts have been radically obscured, and the country's dialogue has broken down. Where do you sit with the facts and the feelings here?

see my book here A Life of One's Own: A Guide to Better Living Through the Work and Wisdom of Virginia Woolf

Is Kindness a Weakness?

Ilana Simons, Ph.D. — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 21:06:03 +0000

A new book, On Kindness, by psychologist Adam Phillips and historian Barbara Taylor, asks why we generally see independent people as strong and charitable people as dumber or less developed. It asks how we got to a place in human history in which heroism is most often depicted as independence, and in which we interpret small acts of random kindness as suspect--as a repressed need to be recognized, as a sign of an overly submissive nature, or even as a symptom of mental illness.

On Kindness starts with a short history of kindness, from Christ's notion that kindness was naturally human, through Enlightenment skepticism (Hobbes' claim that we are naturally greedy), to the modern ideal of ownership. Today, when prompted to imagine a hero, we think of independence; and kindness is generally considered the icing--the sweet lining but not the principle sign of a strong human being.

In parallel to this issue of kindness, see last week's great The New Yorker article, "The Kindest Cut," by Larissa MacFarquhar, in which she looks at kidney donors. She explains that some people donate their kidneys to strangers for no apparent reason other than a need to give something big to another human being. She notes how we tend to see this as pathological. While she tries for balance in her article, MacFarquhar herself indulges in caricature at times, depicting the donors as whacky, or suspicious in their willingness to give up a part of their bodies with no promised reward.

One of the donors, Melissa Stephens, aged 24, is introduced through her blog with its childish punctuation and all: "I LOVE CAKE, ask anyone. my favorite cake is funfetti with funfetti frosting.... i love my friends and i'd do anything for them. my biggest flaw is being too nice to people who are mean to me." So, when Stephens makes the decision to donate her kidney to a stranger, she essentially seems like an adolescent who's scared to know her more complicated desires.

Another donor featured in MacFarquhar's article gets seriously depressed after giving an unknown woman his kidney. He says it feels like withdrawal to come off the rush of feeling like a hero. By showing us the secret lives and conflicted emotions of donors, MacFarquhar is essentially asking what we feel about kindness: Are altruists generous because we all have a simple desire to give? Or, do these people have possible imbalances in their psychology, like excessive submissiveness or a repressed need to be recognized as worthy?

Taylor and Phillips do offer a short answer to those sort of questions in their book On Kindness. After exploring the history of kindness, they essentially offer their own definition of it, using Freud to root their argument. Their idea (via Freud) is essentially this: When we're children, we idealize concordance with the world. We don't yet have the frontal cortex to conceptualize the difference between a "me" and all of the physical stuff we hear, taste, and feel. We simply feel as if everything is one thing--existence without description. That's an initial vision of bliss.

But as we grow up, we begin to separate one thing from another, label it all, and come to identify with a sense of "me," in contrast to other people and events. This is how self-interest--aggression and defensiveness--develop. As we learn about the difference between ourselves and the world, we want to protect ourselves, to fight for our recognition or existence. Freud, the authors admit, comes to a standstill at this stage of maturity--saying that for most of our lives, we're aggressive in defending the self. We want to have sex to protect our bloodline; we largely want to protect or proclaim our stance in the world.

Taylor and Phillips essentially agree with Freud's picture of how greed emerges, but they add another stage to life (which Freud admitted but did not emphasize, and which Freud's sometimes-rival Alfred Adler ardently supported). They say that after individuation--and if we can think our way beyond an animalistic fear for our lives--we see that what humans call "meaning" only comes through collaboration. That is, without language and work among others, we have no meaning. But to honestly and openly acknowledge this fact, we need to make ourselves vulnerable again. We need to listen, to be patient--and, often, to be kind. Collaboration demands a giving and taking of gifts without guarantee of reward.

This is where real kindness sits, the authors say (modernity is perhaps just too much a rat-race for us to acknowledge this). Kindness is one of the highest modalities of human behavior, because it means moving from an infant's idealism, on to a young person's defensiveness, on to a wiser willingness for vulnerability. The wise-and-kind are the people who give in order to risk and thereby create.

There are more and less mature forms of kindness, Taylor and Phillips suggest. A child simply wants everyone to "make nice." An adult knows more about our natural needs to aggress and defend. In turn, an adult acknowledges her own vulnerability and defensiveness even as she tries to be generous. Call "mature kindness" a more "neurotic" than "simple" kindness. It's full of thinking. An adult who is kind is kind principally because she wants to foster a collaboration--as a risky but necessary part of living a full human life.

What do you think: What is the driving force behind generosity, or kindness?

Abstinence is a Decision

Ilana Simons, Ph.D. — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 16:36:49 +0000

I've recently been exploring the question of abstinence (see here and here).

A therapist recently told me a good story that adds another piece to this picture. He works with a high-functioning alcoholic who, like many alcoholics, has a high need for control. (On the addictive personality and the need for control see, for instance, this link.)

This alcoholic patient had just achieved 28 days of abstinence, without AA. Now he was trying to decide whether or not to let some drinking back into his life. He felt--he said--that his thinking was stabilized after 28 sober days, and he might now start drinking in a more controlled way.

He had been high-functioning: He was a doctor who hadn't noticeably let his drinking interrupt his work life or destabilize his marriage, and he had been drinking 2-5 drinks a night for the past 25 years. His stated reasons to stop were his health and protecting what he felt was a dwindling memory.

I like how the therapist intervened. He said this to him: You're someone who likes control. Think of abstinence this way: A decision to NOT drink is a decision you make. It will be a big decision. But the "decision" to keep drinking is really not a decision.

In other words, to abstain is a decision, and to go back to drinking is to slip. To me, that sounds like a useful reframing (though I still don't endorse abstinence for all alcoholics). We often talk about drinking in terms of indulgence: Drinkers are doing something wrong insofar as they're giving their child-selves free reign. That framing involves a sense of punishment: Keep that inner child in check! But here, the therapist had shifted the language toward a positive valuation of the adult side: He encouraged the patient to own and endorse a decision he was proud of.

I wonder if anyone here has the experience of framing abstinence as a "decision" in a similar way.

see my book here A Life of One's Own: A Guide to Better Living Through the Work and Wisdom of Virginia Woolf

Is Exposing the Rorschach Killing the Rorschach?

Ilana Simons, Ph.D. — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 17:51:23 +0000

The New York Times recently staged the Wikipedia-Rorschach debate that's been going on at least since June, when emergency room doctor James Heilman posted all 10 ink blots on Wikipedia, along with the most frequent form responses. Heilman says that restricting this information from the public domain would be akin to "the Chinese government's attempt to control information about the Tiananmen massacre," according to The Times.

Technically, Heilman has a point. The Rorschach material is no longer protected under copyright law, because the copyright has expired. And, Heilman is not bound by the APA code of ethics, which requires that psychologists "make reasonable efforts to maintain the integrity and security of test materials." After all, he is not a psychologist (I don't think), just a person, like many of us, who can buy a set of the inkblots from one of its distributors for $100 to $200. (Some restrictions do apply. Western Psychological Services, for instance, requires that people who buy the test from them have a Masters degree in psychology or a related field, but not necessarily a license to practice.)

There are other reasons to cool the hysteria we might feel about the disclosure of a reliable psychological tool. On the scary side, of course, Wikipedia does give away a couple "clues" that might help test-takers skew or at least invalidate their scores. For instance, Wikipedia reports that psychologists monitor for an appropriate number of responses to each ink blot, for the organization of responses, for complexity, and for references to the human figure. But "organization" and "complexity" are technical words to people who score the test, and vague descriptions to people reading the Wikipedia entry. Indeed, it takes years of training to learn the nuance of scoring a Rorschach. If the "answers" to receiving a certain score were so simple that they could be listed in a Wikipedia entry, psychologists would not need years of testing classes before they earned their degrees.

To put it another way, there's a richness to every Rorschach response that's akin to the richness of any sentence someone speaks in a therapist's office. It's our job as clinicians to interpret and not just score the thing. As Alvin Burstein from the University of Tennessee says in the NYT article, "The process of making sense of one's experience is gratifying. To take Rorschach's test is to make sense of ambiguity in the context of someone who is interested in how you do that."

Also, there's the issue that projective responses are pretty hard to fake. It's hard, for instance, for an anxious woman to "act convincingly calm" during a test. (I use that example to obscure what I want to say, to give a more specific example of how one could or could not "cheat" the test. I feel bound by the code of ethics!) But it's certainly hard for a psychotic person to decide not to give psychotic answers.

That said, I am surprised the ink blots haven't been so widely exposed until now. And I do think it's very sad--that the thrill of exposure here threatens to render a helpful tool, which took years to build, less helpful. I feel like someone's spat graffiti on the Mona Lisa, or crapped on the Museum steps.