This dream analysis provides a revised version of an earlier analysis I had submitted to my treating psychiatrist at the George Washington University Medical Center, Suzanne M. Pitts, M.D. That earlier analysis to Dr. Pitts, dated February 8, 1993, presented a written interpretation of a dream I had had in March 1990, while I was in therapy with Stanley R. Palombo, M.D., a psychiatrist in private practice in Washington.
I may have had the dream on Friday March 16, 1990; my sessions with Dr. Palombo were on Friday afternoons. My older niece was born on March 16, 1975, so I may have had the dream on my niece's 15th birthday. On Sunday March 16, 1975 my mother telephoned me from the hospital to tell me that my sister had given birth to a baby girl. I was a student at Penn State at the time, living in State College, Pennsylvania. I can recall that I was reading the recently-published book "Freud and His Followers" by Paul Roazen when I received that telephone call. On Friday evening March 16, 1990 I would have watched the TV show "Baywatch." "Baywatch" was an American television series about the Los Angeles County Lifeguards who patrol the beaches of Los Angeles County.
The present text format is largely identical to the format of the previous analysis to Dr. Pitts, dated February 8, 1993; revisions are clearly indicated, and are found at the following places: paragraphs 7, 8, 16, and footnotes 1 through 5.
THE DREAM OF THE FOUR MILTONS
I have just completed a session with Dr. Palombo. I go outside the apartment building in which Dr. Palombo's office is located. Dr. Palombo is lounging in a swimming pool on an inflatable raft with a friend, also a physician. Dr. Palombo's friend says to me: "Dr. Palombo is such a humble person, he probably never told you about his background, did he? Dr. Palombo is an outstanding physician. He was founder of the department of psychiatry at the School of Medicine at Penn State." Dr. Palombo's friend mentions that Dr. Palombo is Jewish. At that point I think, "I knew it. I knew that he was Jewish. He's too fine a doctor not to be a Jewish doctor." But then I think, "But 'Palombo' isn't a Jewish name." First I reason that perhaps Dr. Palombo is an Italian Jew. (Compare the chemist and writer Primo Levi, an Italian-Jewish holocaust survivor. Also, for part of the year during the seventh grade, in the spring of 1966, I had an English teacher of Italian-Jewish heritage, Joanne Altus; I vaguely recall that her father was a pharmacist.) I then reject the idea that Dr. Palombo is Italian at all, and settle on the idea that he must be a Jew who has changed his name. I think, "His name must have been something like 'Palombofsky' and he changed it to 'Palombo.'"
I find myself in a bedroom. I imagine that it is a hotel room. The room resembles my parents' bedroom. I feel that I am an observer in the bedroom--that I have no active connection with the locale or the persons in the room. A woman in the room receives a telephone call. It is room service. The woman is advised that the hotel is sending a birthday cake up to the room, since it is the woman's birthday. Dr. Palombo arrives. The woman tells Dr. Palombo that room service is sending up a birthday cake in honor of the woman's birthday. Dr. Palombo becomes enraged. He says to the woman, "I am the great Stanley Palombo, a professor of medicine, and one of the greatest psychiatrists in the world. And room service is sending you a birthday cake? Who are you? You're nobody!"
1. In about May 1967, while I was a student in the eighth grade, our class went on a trip to the capital of Pennsylvania, Harrisburg, the seat of government. We visited the Capitol building and other sites. On the return trip we stopped off at Hershey, Pennsylvania, and visited the Hershey chocolate factory.
2. In the eighth grade I was elected by fellow students president of my home room class.
3. As part of public relations, the Hershey company used to distribute to visitors a complimentary packet of its chocolate products, together with a pamphlet describing the history of chocolate, the manufacturing process, the Hershey company, and the town of Hershey. The pamphlet also mentioned that the town of Hershey was the future site of the School of Medicine of the Pennsylvania State University, The Hershey Medical Center, then under construction. On the bus ride back to Philadelphia I can recall reading the pamphlet, which included an artist's rendering of the Hershey Medical Center. Until the opening of the Hershey Medical Center, Penn State did not have a medical school; the first time I learned of Penn State's plans to establish a medical school was during this bus ride back from Hershey. The facts concerning the Hershey Medical Center made an impression on me, but, at that time, I could not identify why.
4. In about November 1965, while I was in the seventh grade, I had elected to read, as part of an assignment for English class, a biography of the manufacturer and philanthropist, Milton S. Hershey. I can recall that I enjoyed the book a great deal. Mrs. Snyder was my English teacher at that time; she was later replaced by Ms. Joanne Altus. I can also vaguely recall that at the time I was reading the Hershey biography, I was ill (possibly bedridden) with a bad cold.
5. Collier's Encyclopedia contains the following biography of Milton S. Hershey. Note the resemblance between the manufacturer-philanthropist Milton Hershey and Victor Hugo's fictional creation, Jean Valjean. The Hugo character, in the guise of Pere Madeleine, accumulates great wealth from the manufacture of glass beads, based on a process of his own creation; the wealth created by his factory transforms the previously economically-stagnant town in which it is located, and he becomes the town's benefactor.
Hershey, Milton Snavely (1857-1945), American candy manufacturer and philanthropist, was born in Derry Township, Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, on September 13, 1857. After attending rural schools, he was apprenticed to a confectioner in Lancaster, Pa. By 1876 he was making candy and operating his own store in Philadelphia, and later he manufactured candy in New York City. Both these ventures ended in failure. Returning to Lancaster, he began to make caramels, an undertaking so successful that in 1900 the business was sold to the American Caramel Company for $1,000,000. Near his birthplace in Derry Township, he experimented with chocolate, perfecting the "Hershey Bar." In 1903 he began construction of a factory, which ultimately became the world's largest chocolate manufacturing plant. The town of Hershey was developed simultaneously, according to careful plans. In 1909, he and his wife, Catherine Sweeney Hershey, founded the Milton Hershey school to provide a home and an education for orphan boys. The school was endowed with the major portion of his wealth. College preparatory, business, and vocational courses are available to students, who live on a 12,000-acre (4,850-hectare) campus surrounding the town of Hershey. The M. S. Hershey Foundation was created in 1936 for the support of the public schools in Derry Township, and for the establishment and maintenance of Hershey Junior College, which provides two years of education, tuition-free, for residents of the township, children of Hershey employees, and graduates of the Milton Hershey School. Hershey died on October 13, 1945, in Hershey.
6. In August 1980, upon beginning my second year of law school, I moved to the Sylvania House, an apartment building in downtown Philadelphia. The building was a converted hotel. For the following three years, until August 1983, I lived in what was really a hotel room. In the spring of 1981 construction began--on a lot adjacent to the Sylvania House--on a hotel, the Hershey Hotel, owned by the chocolate manufacturing company (and subsequently sold to the Hilton Company). (Compare the conjunction of Sylvania House and Hershey Hotel with Pennsylvania State House and Hershey Manufacturing Company. See paragraph 1). The window of my apartment overlooked the construction site, just across an alley from my apartment building. I have very negative memories of the Hershey Hotel. First, the noise emanating from the construction site was incredibly loud. (I can recall on one occasion that in order to make a telephone call I had to take the telephone into the bathroom and shut the bathroom door in order to hear the party to whom I was talking.) As the building rose in height, it blocked the view from my window. Later, in the spring of 1983, when the hotel opened, the exhaust from the hotel's kitchen, just across an alley from my apartment window, filled the apartment with a less than agreeable odor. The associations to the Hershey Hotel are obviously anal: the noise, vibrations, and the unpleasant odor. The negative, anal associations to the Hershey Hotel contrast with my earlier-formed idealized associations to Milton Hershey, and may be related to the split dream image of Dr. Palombo as both an idealized physician and a frightful egoist.
7. [newly-added material: March 1997] It is useful at this point to observe that a hospital and a hotel have several prominent similar characteristics and several prominent polar-opposite characteristics, so that at an unconscious level the idea of a hospital (or medical center) can negate the idea of a hotel, and vice versa.
(Symbolism similar to that contained in the present dream informs the completed work of creative writers. In Death in Venice Thomas Mann depicts a cholera outbreak in the Italian resort city of Venice; the story's hero succumbs to the illness while vacationing at the Hotel des Bains on the Lido. Death in Venice elaborates the themes of forbidden sexual idealization (narcissistic mirroring), illness and death, and the vain pursuit by the hero of a restorative cure while a guest at a resort hotel.)
HOSPITAL
sexual intercourse disapproved or forbidden,
though enticements abound
place of suffering
place for cure
place to die
rented rooms with service personnel
food service
Hershey Medical Center
HOTEL
socially-approved place for sexual intercourse
place for recreation
place for restorative "cure" (vacation)
place for sex*
rented rooms with service personnel
food service
Hershey Hotel
*Sexual potency is the biological and, according to Freud and others, the psychological antithesis of
death. Rothenberg, A. "Janusian Thinking and Creativity." In: The Psychoanalytic Study of Society. Gertrude R. Ticho, M.D., contributing editor. Vol. 7: 1-30 at 6. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976).
With specific reference to the symbolism of the present dream, we see that the idea of a "birthday cake" is consistent with both a hotel and, ironically, a hospital: a hotel guest might plausibly be sent a birthday cake by room service, and, as a symbolic--or negated--image of a surgical patient about to be cut apart, a dream image of a birthday cake is also consistent with dream thoughts of a hospital.
HOSPITAL
surgical patient on gurney being wheeled to
operating room
cutting of patient (castration)
patient is center of attention (situation-
appropriate grandiosity)
death of patient
HOTEL
birthday cake on cart being wheeled to guest's
room
cutting of cake (prelude to oral incorporation:
body-ego equivalent of idealization)
birthday celebrant is center of attention
(situation-appropriate grandiosity)
celebration of longevity
The present dream comprises two symmetrical parts; the symbolism of one part negates the symbolism of the other. In Part I the affects of pride, narcissistic mirroring (idealization), and ego mastery are associated, in the manifest content, with the Medical Center (which carries the latent imagery of suffering and death); Part II features the affects of rage and identity threat in relation to a manifest joyful symbol (the birthday cake) in a hotel setting (a negation of suffering, death, and castration).
HOSPITAL
symbolic of suffering, death, castration
operative affects in Part I of dream are
pride, narcissistic mirroring (idealization),
and ego mastery
manifest reference in Part I of dream to
hospital as a source of pride negates the
identity of a hospital as a place of suffering,
death, and castration
HOTEL
symbolic of recreation ("sex and fun")
operative affects in Part II of dream are
rage/identity threat (castration)
manifest image of birthday cake, which
celebrates longevity, negates the image
of a dying surgical patient
8. [newly-added material: March 1997] Erikson has asserted that an important but neglected form of ego adaptation is the capacity to change the environment. Rothenberg, A. "Janusian Thinking and Creativity." In: The Psychoanalytic Study of Society. Vol. 7: 1-30 at 3. Gertrude R. Ticho, M.D., contributing editor. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976). In Erikson's view, the resolution of one individual's intrapsychic conflict may require or entail conflicts with the environment that ultimately destroy the existing order, yet provide an essential avenue for societal rejuvenation: "In the case of great young men (and in the cases of many vital young ones of whom we should not demand that they reveal at all costs the stigmata of greatness in order to justify confusion and conflict), rods which measure consistency, inner balance, or proficiency simply do not fit the relevant dimensions. On the contrary, a case could be made for the necessity for extraordinary conflicts, at times both felt and judged to be desperate. For if some youths did not feel estranged from the compromise patterns into which their societies have settled down, if some did not force themselves almost against their own wills to insist, at the price of isolation, on finding an original way of meeting our existential problems, societies would lose an essential avenue of rejuvenation and to that rebellious expansion of human consciousness which alone can keep pace with the technological and social change. To retrace, as we are doing here, such a step of expansion involves taking account of the near downfall of the man who took it, partially in order to understand better the origin of greatness, and partially in order to acknowledge the fact that the trauma of near defeat follows a great man through life. I have already quoted Kierkegaard's statement that [Martin] Luther lived and acted always as if lightening were about to strike behind him. Furthermore, a great man carries the trauma of his near downfall and his mortal grudge against the near assassins of his identity into the years of his creativity and beyond, into his decline; he builds his hates and his grudges into his system as bulwarks--bulwarks which eventually make the system first rigid and finally, brittle." Erikson, E.H. Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History at 149-150 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1958).
Recognizing that allusions to greatness and references to world-historical figures may provoke accusations of grandiosity, it is, therefore, well to point out that my life history--my lived experience--parallels in at least one important way Erikson's own life-history, a lived (and not a fantasy) experience that provided both the motive, or energy, and reality-based referent for Erikson's later psychohistorical explorations of ego adaptation.
"Erik Homburger Erikson was born of Danish parents in Frankfurt, Germany on June 15, 1902. His religious background was mixed. On his mother's side, one of his ancestors was chief rabbi of Stockholm; on his father's, there was a Protestant church historian and pastor. Erikson's parents separated before his birth, and when he was three years old his mother married Dr. Theodor Homburger, a Jewish pediatrician, in Karlsruhe. When he was growing up he was known as Erik Homburger, and for many years mother and stepfather led him to believe that he was Homburger's son. 'This loving deceit,' as he later called it, was undoubtedly a prime influence in the development of his interest in problems of identity. Erikson's experiences at school and synagogue compounded his personal identity confusion. Although born a Dane, he thought of himself as a German, but anti-Semitic German classmates rejected him, and at synagogue he was called 'the goy' because of his Nordic features." 1/ Current Biography 1971 at 118, Charles Moritz, editor. (New York: H.W. Wilson Company, 1971).
According to Brenman-Gibson "the creative process [is capable of transposing] any human experience into a symbolic equivalent." Brenman-Gibson, M. Clifford Odets, American Playwright at 624 n. 2.4 (New York: Atheneum, 1981). It is a plausible corollary that similar life circumstances, experienced by different individuals of similar sensibilities, may give rise to similar creative transpositions.
Erikson's culturally-confused life-history (not unlike my own)--linked as it is to Erikson's psychoanalytic explorations of alloplastic adaptation (and historical greatness)--points to the connection in the present dream text between, on the one hand, the reference to Dr. Palombo's alloplastic adaptation (his act of founding the Department of Psychiatry, an act of "greatness") and, on the other, the reference to his identity confusion ("But Palombo isn't a Jewish name!"). Perhaps the following unconscious thought gave rise to these connected dream ideas: "A great man (like Moses, an identity-confused Hebrew raised as an Egyptian) must always have had a confused youth. It cannot be, simply, that he did these great things as an adult without some earlier identity struggle; there has to be more to this story than we know." The dream idea of a self-founded "Department of Psychiatry" may reflect the wish fulfillment of a socially-marginal and lonely youth whose identity-mediated alienation obviates any meaningful or satisfying social source of identity recognition: it is a lonely youth's dream of a self-created niche, or environment, where that youth's particularized needs for identity recognition will be met, and where his ego capacities may be actualized. Cf. Post, J.M. "Current Concepts of the Narcissistic Personality: Implications for Political Psychology." Political Psychology 14(1): 99-121, March 1993 (discussing the "mirror-hungry" personality of charismatic political leaders who require sycophantic followers as well as an ego-expedient environment to actualize dreams of glory. Freud and his followers seem to fit into this category).
9. As an expression of a need for narcissistic mirroring the construction of Milton Hershey's model company town, Hershey, Pennsylvania, is dynamically related to a celebrated literary idea: Faust's image of an idealized new land, a paradise to be created on a reclaimed swamp (See Goethe's Faust: Part II, Act V, "Great Forecourt of the Palace," lines 11559-11586). (Note that Faust's occupation was alchemy; compare the occupations of Primo Levi (a chemist) and John Altus (a pharmacist 2/), in the dream narration. Also, note the similarity between Faust's imagined paradise and the Zionists' vision of the land of Israel; Jesse Raben, a fellow legal assistant at the law firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld--where I was employed at the time of the dream in March 1990--had lived in Israel.)
Faust: A swamp there by the mountain lies,
Infecting everything attained;
If that foul pool could once be drained,
The feat would outstrip every prize.
For many millions I shall open spaces
Where they, not safe but active-free, having dwelling places.
Verdant the field and fruitful; man and beast
Alike upon that newest earth well pleased,
Shall settle soon the mighty strength of hill
Raised by a bold and busy people's will,
And here inside, a land like Paradise.
Then let the outer flood to dike's rim rise
And as it eats and seeks to crush by force,
The common will will rush to stem its course.
To this opinion I am given wholly
And this is wisdom's final say:
Freedom and life belong to that man solely
Who must reconquer them each day.
Thus child and man and old man will live here
Beset by peril year on busy year.
Such in their multitudes I hope to see
On free soil standing with a people free.
Then to that moment I could say:
Linger on you are so fair!
Nor can the traces of my earthly day
In many aeons pass away.--
Foresensing all the rapture of that dream,
This present moment gives me joy supreme.
(Faust dies.)
10. During the fall term of my senior year at Penn State, in 1974, I took a history course, "The History of the American Worker," taught by Dr. Gerald Eggert. (In November 1974, Milton Shapp was elected to a second term as Governor of Pennsylvania. See paragraph 13.) As part of the course, students were assigned a book concerning the Pullman strike. (Of possible psychoanalytical interest is the fact that the name "Pullman" is phonetically related to the word "pulmonary," that is, relating to the lungs, the point of origin and destination of, respectively, arterial and venous blood. See paragraph 16.) Dr. Eggert was himself an expert on the Pullman strike. His Ph.D. thesis, to which he referred occasionally, concerned Richard Olney, the U.S. Attorney General, appointed by President Grover Cleveland in 1893, the year before the strike. Pullman, like Milton Hershey, had constructed a "model" company town (compare Faust's image of a man-made paradise), Pullman, Illinois, for workers employed in the Pullman Palace Car Company, a manufacturer of railroad sleeping, dining, and vestibule cars. Pullman sought to duplicate in his railroad cars the amenities and comforts available in the finer hotels. (Dr. Eggert later prepared a letter of recommendation for me for law school.) (The high school I attended, Central High School--an all-boys school--was located at the intersection of Ogontz and Olney Avenues in Philadelphia.) (I vaguely recall that Dr. Eggert had a daughter named Christine. My supervisor at the time of the dream (in March 1990) was Christine Robertson.) 3/
The Encyclopedia Americana contains the following discussion of the Pullman strike: "a nationwide railway strike in 1894 that culminated in the use of federal troops. It began with a strike of 2,500 employees against the Pullman Palace Car Company, based in a company town that owner George M. Pullman had built just south of Chicago. The employees were protesting wage cuts and high rents imposed on them by the Pullman Company. On June 26, Eugene V. Debs and the American Railway Union launched a sympathetic boycott of all Pullman cars. When the railroads retaliated by firing union members, the union struck the railroads, and by the end of the month the work stoppage had spread across the country. On June 30, U.S. Attorney General Richard Olney deputized 3,600 men to keep the trains running, and on July 2 he obtained a federal court injunction barring the union from interfering with the trains. When a rioting mob wrecked a mail train the next day, President Grover Cleveland ordered troops into Chicago. By July 20 the troops had been withdrawn and the trains were running under military guard. Government intervention had spelled defeat for the union. In 1895, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the government's use of an injunction in a labor dispute providing the enemies of labor with a potent weapon."
11. At the time of my therapy with Dr. Palombo I was employed by the law firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld. From the commencement of my employment in March 1988 until mid-year 1990, I was assigned temporarily to work on a project for the client Eastern Airlines. The project involved document production tasks in connection with ongoing labor litigation concerning Eastern Airlines and its unions. The litigation concerned, specifically, the tortured relations between the Company's manager's--most notoriously, Frank Lorenzo--and the airline pilots' and machinists' unions. Eastern's pilots and machinists had gone on strike against the airline on March 4, 1989. The applicable federal statute controlling collective bargaining in the airline industry is the "Railway Labor Act."
Early in my therapy, Dr. Palombo characterized my long silences following some of his interpretations or comments as "strikes." He would say, "You're on strike." (Dr. Palombo was the only mental health professional to use the word "strike" to describe my resistance). At the time of the dream (in March 1990) I was still engaged at Akin Gump on my assignment for Eastern Airlines.
During my therapy with Dr. Palombo, I complained of harassment by co-workers. Speaking metaphorically, one might characterize my co-workers' seemingly concerted acts of harassment as a kind of union job action against me. The dimensions of this "job action" seemed to spread, not unlike the Pullman strike, to encompass ever-widening areas of interest.
12. At the time of the dream (in March 1990) I was aware that a co-worker and friend at Akin Gump, Jesse Raben, planned to leave the firm in the very near future. He had plans to take a trip around the world, then enter law school in the fall of 1990. (Jesse Raben's father, Dr. Milton Raben, is a professor of radiology. Jesse Raben had once told me that his father's family name had been Rabenstein [See Faust line 4399: "What are they plotting 'round the Rabenstein?"], but that his grandfather, "an assimilationist," had changed the name to Raben.)
13. The Governor of Pennsylvania during the period 1971-1979 was Milton Jerrold Shapp. Milton Shapp had run unsuccessfully as the Democratic candidate for Governor of Pennsylvania in November 1966 (I was in the eighth grade at the time). My father had been an enthusiastic supporter of Shapp's. My father, a factory worker, was impressed with Shapp's exemplary labor-management relations as the owner-manager of the Jerrold Corporation, an electronics firm, and used to cite the fact that Shapp's employees had--without coercion--refused union representation. My father believed that Shapp's record of fair dealing with his employees revealed a great deal about Shapp's character and fitness for public office. (During most of my father's life after my birth, my father worked for a neckwear manufacturing company, Art Neckwear, owned and managed by Milton Schuman.)
14. Milton J. Shapp's name had originally been Shapiro. He changed his name to Shapp early in his career as a reaction to anti-Semitism.
15. In 1976 Milton Shapp, then Governor of Pennsylvania, announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States. "He was a solid liberal with an excellent record as a self-made businessman, a pioneer in the cable-television industry, and as the administrator of the state. His handling of a massive truckers' strike in 1974* that had threatened to cripple the state had marked him as a patient, tough, and shrewd negotiator." Witcover, J. Marathon: The Pursuit of the Presidency 1972-1976 at 149-150 (New York: Viking, 1977). "Governor Milton J. Shapp of Pennsylvania, sixty-two, a low key former cable-television executive with the look of a persecuted nebbish, who had compiled a good liberal record in two terms but as a Jew was bucking one of the great remaining political bugaboos for the presidency." Id. at 128. Governor Shapp withdrew from the race after his poor showing in some early primaries. (*It was in the fall of 1974 that I took the history course with Dr. Eggert described in paragraph 10; part of the course concerned the Pullman strike.)
16. The Democratic National Convention in 1976, which nominated Jimmy Carter as the Democratic nominee for President, was held in New York City. The Convention began on July 12, 1976, less than two weeks after my father's death on July 1, 1976. (The immediate cause of my father's death was heart failure, specifically cardiac fibrillation. It was as if my father's heart, that vital terminus of arriving and departing venous and arterial blood, had gone on strike. 4/)
[newly-added material: March 1997] My father's death occurred one day following a coronary-artery bypass procedure, on June 30, 1976. On the morning of the operation 5/ I spoke with my father for the last time, by telephone, from home--from a telephone located in my parents' bedroom. My father said: "They're getting me ready for surgery."
Robert Strauss, founder of the law firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, was the manager of Jimmy Carter's election campaign. Milton Shapp, as Democratic Governor of Pennsylvania, served as chairman of the Pennsylvania delegation to the presidential nominating convention.
I must have witnessed the following scene, televised on the evening of Thursday July 15, 1976, after Jimmy Carter's acceptance speech. "[Robert] Strauss, master of accommodation with all the subtlety of a nuclear explosive, orchestrated a grand finale that would have been comical had it not been for the good spirit of the moment. Suddenly he had everyone up on the rostrum with the triumphant, grinning Carter: Mo Udall and Scoop Jackson and George Wallace and Abe Beame and Hubert Humphrey and Sarge Shriver and Brendan Byrne and Raul Castro and Moon Landriue and even Strauss's wife, Helen. Like a drinker who has to have one more, and another, and one more after that, Strauss summoned literally dozens of the party's second- and third-string luminaries to the platform." Marathon at 369-370.
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FOOTNOTES
1/ The ambiguities of a great man's identity provide fertile ground for both the hero worshiper and the identity assassin. Bruno Bettelheim offers the following alternative interpretation of Erikson's identity struggle: "'Erikson tries to pretend to be the magnanimous goy, the god damn Jew. I know I am a selfish Jew, so help me god, so I can afford to look at things [as] they are. All this god damn pretense.' A year later, Erikson was 'a miserable so and so, who was a Jew in Vienna, when it paid, and is now a Viking in the States, when that pays.'" Pollak, R. The Creation of Dr. B at 230-231 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997). "Bettelheim [developed] an angry hostility to this man who had used his stepfather's name, Homburger, when studying, teaching, and being analyzed by Anna Freud in Vienna, but who became 'Erikson' once he took up his profession in the United States in the 1930s." Id. at 230.
2/ It is significant that although I had the present dream in March of 1990, I did not prepare the present dream interpretation until February 1993: the specific references to a "chemist" and a "pharmacist" in the interpretation text may have as much, or more, to do with the circumstances current as of February 1993, when I prepared the dream interpretation text, than those current as of March 1990, when I had the dream. It was in February 1993 that my then treating psychiatrist (Suzanne M. Pitts, M.D.) prescribed lithium for a supposed bi-polar disorder; I began taking lithium for about a two-week period in February 1993, beginning February 9, 1993, and then refused to continue the medication. My act of returning to this dream to prepare a written interpretation, in February 1993, may reflect a struggle over the issues of adaptation that were raised by the prescription of lithium--a struggle encapsulated in the question "Is it I who needs to change (autoplasty) or is it my environment that needs to be changed (alloplasty)?" The dream interpretation text that I submitted to Dr. Pitts, dated February 8, 1993, was later returned to me; it contains--with striking unintended irony--the following handwritten marginal notation written by her: "next appt 2/9 -- last appt discussed starting Li 2/9." Both Dr. Pitts and I failed to see that my act of presenting her an interpretation of a (then three-year-old) dream about Dr. Palombo was really my unacknowledged commentary on my relationship with her and my reaction to her pharmacologic recommendation. These ideas support the viewpoint that a dream interpretation is itself an analyzable text that communicates or disguises its own truths; inquiry into whether any particular dream interpretation is a "correct" interpretation misses the point. See Frieden, K. Freud's Dream of Interpretation. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990).
3/ It is useful to recognize that many nonanalytically-trained psychiatrists would dismiss the association to Dr. Eggert's daughter as evidence of circumstantiality, and the association of Christine Eggert with Christine Robertson as evidence of clanging. Cf. Frieden, K. Freud's Dream of Interpretation at 25 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990) (Freud argued forcefully, however, that the dreamer's associations are not random, but instead strictly determined). Cf. "A Conversation with Stanley Greenspan." The American Psychoanalyst, 28(3): 25-27 at 27 (1994) (it is vitally important that a psychiatrist "meet patients at the developmental level of their ego structure" [to meet the patient's particularized needs for identity recognition and provide an outlet for actualization of his ego capacities]; implicitly, the act of labeling a patient's associations as evidence of psychiatric symptoms is ego destructive). The reference to Robertson--in the context of the dream interpretation text prepared in February 1993--may, in fact, be a veiled allusion to Dr. Pitts, to whom the interpretation text was addressed. The reference to Dr. Eggert may be a veiled allusion to Jerry M. Wiener, M.D., chairman of the GW Univ. Medical Center Dept. of Psychiatry. (In the 1980's Dr. Eggert assumed the position of chairman of the History Department at Penn State.) In terms of the transference: GOOD FATHER = Dr. Wiener, Dr. Eggert; BAD SISTER/ DAUGHTER = Dr. Pitts, Christine Robertson, Christine Eggert. Also, the reference to "strikes" may disguise my struggle with Dr. Pitts concerning (and later refusal to take) medication. Six months later, in August 1993, I filed a complaint against Dr. Pitts (and other, previous, treating psychiatrists) with the D.C. Board of Medicine. Both my meeting with Dr. Wiener in August 1993, prior to filing the complaint, and my act of filing the complaint, elevated the narrow dispute with Dr. Pitts to a higher, political, level. Dr. Pitts' act of prescribing medication (and my job termination by Robertson), which I perceived as an "injustice," apparently satisfied my pre-existing, or unconscious, need to experience an injustice that I might later protest. It is well to add: Despite her psychiatric experience, as an analyst Dr. Pitts was a nobody.
4/ The question of whether the heart as a psychoanalytic symbol carries specialized meaning for me, distinct from universal dream symbolism, merits examination. The penis, for example, like the heart, "expands" and "contracts" in response to perfusion by blood, thereby suggesting the heart as a metaphor for phallic concerns; surgery on the heart would therefore be suggestive of castration. Other, more idiosyncratic, symbolism is conceivable. Cf. Shengold, L. "A Note on Symbolism: A Brief Communication." International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 74(5): 961-964 (Oct. 1993) (discussing the shoulder as metaphor).
5/ In the period immediately prior to my preparing the written dream interpretation Dr. Pitts had arranged, in late January 1993, that I take an EEG at the Hospital. The test is performed in the morning in a darkened room, with the patient positioned prostrate. It is hoped that the patient will doze off during the test to allow measurement of sleep brain-waves. The test, then, requires preparation: the patient is directed to avoid caffeine and not sleep the evening prior to the test.
Comment by Gary Freedman on October 14, 2009 at 11:31am:
"Despite her psychiatric experience, as an analyst Dr. Pitts was a nobody."
Oddly enough, this quote is a paraphrase from Paul Roazen's book. "Freud and His Followers." Discussing Victor Tausk's psychoanalysis by the analyst-in-training Helene Deutsch, Roazen writes: "Despite her psychiatric experience, as an analyst she was a nobody." . Comment by Gary Freedman on October 14, 2009 at 11:26am Delete Comment See Michael Sperber, MD, "Freud, Tausk, and the Nobel Prize Complex."
In 1966 Helen Tartakoff introduced a nosological entity, the “Nobel Prize complex,” to apply to people who have in common many of the following characteristics: They are preoccupied with the achievement of diverse ambitious goals, which may include, for example, the wish to become President, to attain great wealth, to be a social leader, or to win an Oscar. Many are intellectually or artistically gifted and possess charismatic qualities that others admire. They are often firstborn and frequently only children. They adopt an all-or-nothing attitude toward their aspirations. They are hypersensitive to disappointments in life, particularly to lack of recognition, and may become depressed and develop psychosomatic symptoms at the time of real or fantasized disappointment. They unconsciously look upon psycho-therapeutic treatment as a magical cure and expect to be rewarded during their treatment with the same applause they received from their mothers. .
Comment by Gary Freedman on October 14, 2009 at 11:18am:
Baywatch
Season 1, Episode 19: "The Big Race"
Original Air Date—16 March 1990
Cort promises to come up with a load of cash for a nursing home, but he needs Mitch and Craig's help to compete with each other in a water skiing race with a big cash prize. Meanwhile, Shauni is still grief-stricken and afraid to go back in the water in the wake of Jill's death.
Comment by Gary Freedman on October 14, 2009 at 10:23am:
Coincidentally, Dr. Rothenberg used to teach at Penn State, a fact I would have known in March 1990. Dr. Rothenberg referred me to Dr. Palombo.
____________________________________
Additional thoughts about "The Dream of the Four Miltons:"
http://dailstrug.blogspot.com/2011/06/paradise-lost-and-dream-of-four-miltons.html
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Do I Really Have Delusional Disorder?
I have been diagnosed with delusional disorder. I believe I have been under surveillance by my former employer, the law firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld. My belief system has been described by psychiatrists as a fixed delusional system of longstanding duration.
But according to the literature delusional disorder entails more than false beliefs about one's environment. Studies of people with the disorder show that there are specific cognitive impairments associated with the the disorder.
For example, people who have the disorder have specific difficulty performing on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST). Interestingly, I took the WCST in 1996 and I scored one of the lowest possible scores: six nonperseverative errors. I made no perseverative errors on the test, which people with delusional disorder tend to do. My results were consistent with "high concept formation ability." The testing was performed at the George Washington University Medical School Department of Psychiatry by a resident named Ramin Mojtabai, MD under the supervision of staff psychologist Robert Jenkins, Ph.D.
People with delusional disorder have also been shown to have difficulty understanding metaphors. I don't think I have that problem.
http://dailstrug.blogspot.com/2010/12/significant-moments-metaphors.html
I wonder if I really have delusional disorder?
Here's one research study that demonstrated the cognitive impairments associated with the disorder:
Isabel Boemmer and Martin Bruene, "Social cognition in 'pure' delusional disorder." Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, Volume 11, Issue 5 September 2006 , pages 493 - 503
Abstract
Introduction. Delusional disorders are characterised by monothematic, “encapsulated” and incorrigible false beliefs and misinterpretations of social signals. Due to the rarity of cases with “pure” delusional disorder (DD) in clinical settings most studies of social cognition in delusional patients have focused on patients with paranoid schizophrenia. In the present study we sought to examine emotion recognition, theory of mind abilities, and pragmatic language comprehension in patients with delusional disorder.
Methods. Social cognition was assessed in 21 patients recruited over a 3-year period who were diagnosed with delusional disorder, paranoid, erotomanic, or jealous type. In addition to an emotion recognition and theory of mind test battery, we included a novel German Proverb Test, which has been found indicative of subtle theory of mind deficits in schizophrenic patients. Executive functioning was assessed using the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST). Psychopathology was measured using the Positive and Negative Symptoms Scale (PANSS). Patients' task performance was compared to a group of 22 healthy control persons paralleled for verbal intelligence, education, and age.
Results. Patients with DD made significantly more perseverative errors in the WCST, they performed more poorly on the theory of mind tasks and the proverb test, but were unimpaired in basic emotion recognition abilities relative to controls. When executive functioning was co-varied out, the group differences in theory of mind disappeared, whereas the greater propensity of patients with DD to interpret proverbs literally remained significant.
Conclusions. In “pure” DD the basic social cognitive abilities appear to be preserved. Difficulties in metaphorical speech comprehension and executive functioning could, however, indicate more subtle social cognitive deficits in these patients.
But according to the literature delusional disorder entails more than false beliefs about one's environment. Studies of people with the disorder show that there are specific cognitive impairments associated with the the disorder.
For example, people who have the disorder have specific difficulty performing on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST). Interestingly, I took the WCST in 1996 and I scored one of the lowest possible scores: six nonperseverative errors. I made no perseverative errors on the test, which people with delusional disorder tend to do. My results were consistent with "high concept formation ability." The testing was performed at the George Washington University Medical School Department of Psychiatry by a resident named Ramin Mojtabai, MD under the supervision of staff psychologist Robert Jenkins, Ph.D.
People with delusional disorder have also been shown to have difficulty understanding metaphors. I don't think I have that problem.
http://dailstrug.blogspot.com/2010/12/significant-moments-metaphors.html
I wonder if I really have delusional disorder?
Here's one research study that demonstrated the cognitive impairments associated with the disorder:
Isabel Boemmer and Martin Bruene, "Social cognition in 'pure' delusional disorder." Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, Volume 11, Issue 5 September 2006 , pages 493 - 503
Abstract
Introduction. Delusional disorders are characterised by monothematic, “encapsulated” and incorrigible false beliefs and misinterpretations of social signals. Due to the rarity of cases with “pure” delusional disorder (DD) in clinical settings most studies of social cognition in delusional patients have focused on patients with paranoid schizophrenia. In the present study we sought to examine emotion recognition, theory of mind abilities, and pragmatic language comprehension in patients with delusional disorder.
Methods. Social cognition was assessed in 21 patients recruited over a 3-year period who were diagnosed with delusional disorder, paranoid, erotomanic, or jealous type. In addition to an emotion recognition and theory of mind test battery, we included a novel German Proverb Test, which has been found indicative of subtle theory of mind deficits in schizophrenic patients. Executive functioning was assessed using the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST). Psychopathology was measured using the Positive and Negative Symptoms Scale (PANSS). Patients' task performance was compared to a group of 22 healthy control persons paralleled for verbal intelligence, education, and age.
Results. Patients with DD made significantly more perseverative errors in the WCST, they performed more poorly on the theory of mind tasks and the proverb test, but were unimpaired in basic emotion recognition abilities relative to controls. When executive functioning was co-varied out, the group differences in theory of mind disappeared, whereas the greater propensity of patients with DD to interpret proverbs literally remained significant.
Conclusions. In “pure” DD the basic social cognitive abilities appear to be preserved. Difficulties in metaphorical speech comprehension and executive functioning could, however, indicate more subtle social cognitive deficits in these patients.
Significant Moments: Self-States And Their Transformation
The following paper discusses the possible psychological consequences of a case of scarlet fever that I contracted in childhood at about age three. My pediatrician at the time linked the scarlet fever infection to my practice of drinking spoiled milk from a baby bottle.
My use of the term self-state draws on contributions from several sources: Stern's and Sander's discussions of state transformation and the self-regulating other and Kohut's discussion of self-states as noted in self-state dreams.
When used by infant researchers, state refers specifically to variations in sleep and wakefulness that occur as the infant passes between crying and alert or quiet activity, drowsiness and sleep, wet discomfort and dry discomfort, hunger and satiation. Different states affect how things are perceived, how those perceptions are integrated, and how such information is processed.
State transformations in early life accrue to both the child's self-regulation and to the expectation that mutual regulation with the caretakers will facilitate or interfere in regulating one's affects and states. Thus, early state transformations are associated with mastery or control over one's own experience, and expectations that affect regulation can (or cannot) be shared with the self-regulating other.
With the advent of symbolic capacities and increasing elaboration upon one's subjective experience, self-states in the child and adult include the domain of the self in a psychological sense. Post infancy self-state transformations may increase a sense of control, mastery, or agency, but in the case of traumatic self-state transformations, such states as devastation, outrage, or fragmentation may become dominant.
The subjective discomfort of painful self-states provides an impetus for finding means by which such states can be transformed. A creative endeavor, one means of transforming one's self-state, enhances the range of the self-regulation. Furthermore, in the context of mutual regulations, expectations of a responsive environment shift the state of the self along the dimension of fragmentation-intactness toward greater cohesion and along the dimension of depletion-vitality toward an increased sense of efficacy.
Kohut described self-state dreams in which the imagery is undisguised or only minimally disguised, depicting the dreamer's sense of self. Kohut likened these dreams to Freud's discussion of dreams in traumatic neuroses, in which a traumatic event is realistically depicted. For example, a self-state may be depicted in a dream as a barren countryside, reflecting a sense of devastation and such self experiences as depression, despair, or hopelessness.
My use of self-state is broader than Stern's since I extend my perspective into adult life, and my use of the term is not confined to the dream imagery described by Kohut. Dream imagery provides a glimpse into a person's feelings of devastation and outrage, but the imagery of narratives can also convey self-states.
MODEL SCENES
To construct the model scene that depicts the self-state that I attempted to recapture after I was subjected to devastating criticism in the form of job harassment and job termination, I combined facets of my life history.
For the first several years of my development, I experienced a childhood characterized by an overprotective but unempathic mother and a distant, but at times harsh, father. My father was a highly-intelligent man who settled for far less in life than he was capable. He had quit an academic high school restricted to college-bound students in the tenth grade, and worked at a factory job. Though he was raised in a strictly Orthodox Jewish family, he was the only one of seven children to marry outside the Jewish faith, in 1946. My mother was a Polish-Catholic whose father, an immigrant coal miner, died in the great swine flu epidemic following World War I. My father suffered both overt and covert anti-Semitism from my mother's family during the marriage -- itself a form of criticism. My father coped with the attacks directed at him by relying on a deeply-rooted sense of his cultural and religious superiority.
My mother doted on me, but paradoxically, had a tendency to negligent, even reckless, caretaking. At age three I developed scarlet fever, an unusual bacterial disease. I was late in being weaned from the bottle. Though I ate solid food by age three, of course, my mother indulged my desire to drink milk that had gone sour in the bottle. The pediatrician, Dr. Bloom, who diagnosed the illness attributed it to the sour milk. "And why is he still drinking from a bottle? He's too old to be drinking milk from a bottle," the doctor said. (Dr. Bloom! "Just who does Dr. Bloom think he is?"). My father was very angry, and chastised my mother bitterly for "spoiling" me, in the doctor's presence. I felt humiliated and helpless in the face of the charges leveled at me. My secret oral perversion had been discovered! The secret was out! The doctor advised my parents that scarlet fever was considered a serious public health concern, and that he was bound by law to report my illness to the city health department. Several days later, the health department posted a quarantine notice on the front door of our home (1957). My private act led to unforeseeable consequences in the form of intervention by a government authority. In effect, at age three the government had determined that I was already "potentially dangerous."
The scarlet fever incident contributed to the centrality of solitary self-experience for me. From an experience of pleasure (in drinking sour milk from the bottle), I was suddenly transformed to a state of loss and an inexplicable sense of guilt. I felt like a felon and, if you will excuse the hyperbole, "would hide when the constable approached the house." The illness ushered in transformation from a positive, pleasurable, self-absorbed state to a secret state marked by guilt and a personal blame for wrongdoing. I did not find solace for my loss. On my own, I bore both my guilt and the surprising, disturbing impact I could have on others in my immediate world and beyond: indeed, reaching out to a world beyond my imagination, in the form of governmental authorities. The illness also signaled another transformation in the direction of having to regulate painful states on my own without the support of others. Both parents were concerned with public embarrassment, rather than with the state of their child. I propose that the model scene I have constructed organized my experience as a solitary, impactful onlooker: someone whose private actions could even trigger the intervention of government authorities. It is an experience that few three-year-olds have. An emotionally porous three-year-old who is "hypersensitive to the goings-on in his environment," cf. Freedman v. D.C. Dept. of Human Rights, DCCA 96-CV-961 (Sept. 1998), will be affected by that experience.
This letter, and particularly the above anecdote, is a metaphorical bridge of speculation that connects mystery to mystery, the known with the unknown. That bridge is like a single plank that requires the support of others to form a firm foundation. I offer the following thought. My age upon contracting scarlet fever, which resulted from my mother's indulgence of my dependency needs -- age three or three-and-a-half -- is the same age my mother was when her father died of a communicable disease, influenza: in an influenza epidemic that, because of its magnitude, had evoked a vigorous public health response by government authorities nationwide. Is it possible that my "good" mother was instrumental in setting me up for serious illness? Was my mother's seeming indulgence really an expression of a strong unconscious ambivalence toward me that was a derivative of her emotional reaction to her own father's death?
Incidentally, the anecdote above parallels themes in several plays by Henrick Ibsen. In Ghosts a mother provides poison to her son to enable the son's suicide in expiation of his father's sins; An Enemy of the People pits a truth-fanatic (who discovers that the waters of a spa town are polluted) against the town's mayor and its citizens; and in The Master Builder a mother, out of a perverse sense of duty, kills her twins -- she contracted a fever because she could not stand the cold, but, despite the fever, she insisted on breast-feeding the twins, who died from her poisoned milk.
Note that I was the only male child in the family. Oddly, when I was a young boy, my older sister created the fiction that my middle name was "Stanley," my mother's father's name. I actually came to believe at one point in childhood that my name was "Gary Stanley Freedman."
Be that as it may.
My mother had a passionate interest in motion pictures and, in childhood, was fond of playing with dolls. I picked up on these interests in a way. In early adolescence I developed a fanatic attraction to the Wagner operas, and I had an interest in the craft of play writing. In high school and college I took elective courses in drama and theater. At age thirteen I staged (after a fashion), in the basement of our family home, a highly-abbreviated version (to say the least) of Wagner's four-opera Ring Cycle for the entertainment of my parents -- though, in reality, my parents were uninterested, if not hostile to my effort.
My father was subject to bouts of depression and sometimes became bitter and brutal toward my family, but he took no steps to change his situation, other than threatening, from time to time, to leave my mother. He was frequently morose and withdrawn. I reacted to my father throughout childhood with a range of irreconcilable emotions: idealization, sympathy, anger, and fear.
Taken as a unity, to be spelled out below, these accounts suggest that, for me, self-states and affects had to be regulated alone, by myself. In later life, I transformed my despondent state after my critical rebuff at Akin Gump by drawing on the themes encapsulated in the model scenes.
In psychoanalytic treatment, analyst and patient construct model scenes to convey, in graphic and metaphoric forms, significant events and repeated occurrences in the analysand's life. The information used to form model scenes can be drawn from a variety of sources, including a patient's narrative and recollections. Model scenes highlight and encapsulate experiences at any age, not only early childhood, and are representative of salient conscious and unconscious motivational themes. The concept of model scenes is broader than and includes screen memories, which Freud equated with the manifest dream content dream, in that they point toward something important that they disguise. The memory itself and its "indifferent" content are to be discarded as the analyst recovers and reconstructs the significant, concealed childhood event or fixation. Whereas screen memories focus on reconstructing what has happened, model scenes pay equal attention to what is happening, whether it is in the analytic transference or in the person's life. For me, the model scene is based on recollections that capture my solitary self-regulation, self-restoration, and my triumph over my detractors.
MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY: SIGNIFICANT MOMENTS
The book is unusual in structure. It is drawn exclusively from published literature -- it is a collection of quotations, really -- with the quotes woven together to form a cohesive narrative, comparable in a sense to the structure of T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland." A single, cohesive narrator or hero does not appear in the book. Rather, the author manipulates the quotations; he hovers overhead, as it were, like a puppet master, pulling all the strings. I am represented, through my identification with various literary and historical figures, by identity elements or identity fragments, which are the quotations. The themes of the book are numerous and diverse. The themes include anti-Semitism, the craft of writing, opera production, communicable disease, genetics, inheritance, the discovery of a secret that brings ruin on the discoverer, scientific discovery, truth seekers, critical response by peers, defiance of peers and authorities, banishment and social isolation, the absence of an empathic or supportive environment, the self-regulation of affects, the death of fathers, the intervention of government authorities into the private domain of citizens, the seductive or destructive mother, alleged corruption and cover-up, among other topics.
CRITICISM AND RESPONSE
The negative response I received upon my job termination and its aftermath was diffuse. It came from the employer, psychiatrists (doctors), and government authorities. If I were asked why I began to write my autobiography in April 1993, four months after I had received the employer's responsive pleadings in a legal action I had initiated against the employer, I would have said: "I had to write my autobiography."
In Significant Moments, "the hero" (who appears in various guises, or is represented by various identity elements) makes a discovery that results in his being pitted against "the powers that be." The detractors of "the hero" are mocked and exposed as mean-spirited and unprincipled. I thereby expressed my distrust of the capacity of the "majority" to discriminate the "true" from the "false" and to exercise sound judgment. I showed "the powers that be" to be swayed by self-interest and incapable of distinguishing scientifically backed findings from self-serving rationalizations.
There is no decent, supportive public in Significant Moments. "The hero" naively values the support of "the powers that be" at the opening of the book. He believes that they will be responsive to truth and evidence. Before the book's end, "the hero" could rightly say that the most dangerous enemy of truth and freedom amongst us is the solid majority. "The majority is never right! . . . The minority is always right!" The minority to which "the hero" refers is himself. By the end of the book, he can trust nothing but his own values, perceptions, and beliefs.
Wounded by the shortsighted managers at Akin Gump, I asserted that the creative artist stands alone, a minority of one, to maintain his integrity and the purity of his vision. In Significant Moments I spoke with one uncompromising, solitary voice clearly depicted in "the hero," who loses all support and ends alone. "The strongest man in the world is the man who stands most alone." Increasing isolation drives "the hero" to proclaim, "I want to expose the evils that sooner or later must come to light."
To explore and to react aversively are dominant motivations for "the hero." He is uncompromising to the end, a man who does not mean to settle for rapprochement with the majority. He was ready to bring ruin upon himself and others rather than "flourish because of a lie."
In my response to the critics, I presented my hero as totally decent and honest, but naive with respect to political wheeling and dealing. His decency and goodness are contrasted with the narrow-mindedness of the majority. They are devoid of a sense of morality of their own and led by authorities who are rigid, unimaginative, self-serving, and bureaucratic -- banal at best and corrupt ("poisoned") at worst.
CREATIVE TRANSFORMATION: FROM JOB TERMINATION TO SIGNIFICANT MOMENTS
I had to write Significant Moments. The themes of that book, father-son tensions (real or symbolic), living a lie, the effects of learning "the truth," inheritance (in my case, the transmission of parental strengths and weaknesses), all manifestly rooted in my early life, are taken up in my book. In so doing, I addressed my compelling, burning, residual issue from my past and depicted it as a metaphor for my society as well. Significant Moments thus combines painful memories with a devastating social critique. Personally, I expressed my disillusionment at my father's legacy of academic, occupational, and marital failure, as well as my quest for an idealizable father of whom I could be proud.
Apparently I felt compelled to bare myself in a barely disguised form. I gathered together my past grievances and projected them on to "The Freud Archives Board." In them I embodied the lies, hypocrisy, deception, and duplicity that I hated in society. So long as they typified "the powers that be" and its "opinions," there could be no compromise. My uncompromising depiction of the "sins of the father," the "ghosts" that demand placing duty and public appearances above self-expression and individual freedom, expresses my long-held convictions in the purest, boldest form.
At the center of Significant Moments lies my determination to explore two sides of deception. Some self-deception is held necessary to maintain hope and to survive, yet there is also a pernicious self-deception that erodes ethics and undermines morality. Both Nietzsche and Jeffrey Masson were compelled to counter, respectively, Wagner's and The Freud Archives' deceptions of themselves and others. "The Heroes'" (Nietzsche's and Masson's) duty-bound rejection was felt by "the powers that be" (Wagner and Dr. Eissler) as both a rejection of their ideals and a personal betrayal.
I was shocked by my sudden job termination in late October 1991; but later (in April 1993), within four months of receiving the employer's responsive pleadings in the agency complaint I filed, I began work on Significant Moments. With my self-confidence shattered, if there was a moment when the capacity to transform shattered narcissism into artistic creativity was called for, this was it. The book became my response to the devastating experience of my termination and its aftermath. Note that it was only upon my receipt in late December 1992 of the employer's pleadings that I learned that the employer had allegedly determined that I was potentially violent -- that is, a physical danger to others: an allegation that must have resonated with my memory that at age three I had been determined by a municipal authority to pose a public health risk.
In Significant Moments moral integrity on one side is pitted against deception, greed, and narrow self-interests on the other. The battle lines are drawn clearly. Perhaps in outrage, all gloves are off. I myself step upon the stage and drag my enemy, conventional wisdom, front and center with me.
The hero pays the price for his naive belief in truth; he is socially totally isolated, but he remains undaunted. Throughout the book, he remains loyal to the idea that truth will win the day. He utters the line (through playwright Arthur Miller) that embodies "the hero's" defiance of the "majority" and defines the state in which he feels himself to be: independent, invulnerable, and exquisitely self-contained. "The strongest man in the world is the man who stands most alone!"
To me, the artist's strength lays in an undaunted capacity to maintain a vision in the face of opposition and to "cleanse and decontaminate the whole community." I must disturb, be perpetually misunderstood, and walk alone. Yet I would call Significant Moments an expression of the "comedy of life" in that it expresses my recognition that the creative artist cannot totally stand alone. Ultimately, he needs an audience to respond to him.
CREATIVITY IN SELF-STATE TRANSFORMATION
The artist accepts isolation as a consequence of his superior, unique vision of the world. He depicts his ideal, to follow the dictates of his artistic integrity, irrespective of the consequences. Compromise means accommodating to societal pressures, hypocrisy, and deception.
In Significant Moments the tyranny of conventional wisdom, the legacy of father to son, and the strength inherent in one's solitary loyalty to the "ideal" of truth appear on an unadorned stage.
It is always risky, when discussing an artist, to draw inferences about his life from his creative output. Nonetheless, parallels do exist between the artist's life and his creative work.
Traumatic, painful, or humiliating life experiences sometimes provide the context for an artist's work. To some extent, the creative product is the transformation by the artist of the effects of his painful past and narcissistically injurious experiences. Here, transformation refers to self-regulated alterations, the capacity to alter one's self-state, when, for example, it is characterized by guilt or shame, stirred by feelings of defeat and, when exposed to contempt, derision, or ridicule. To turn painful self-states into a sense of triumph requires transforming narcissistic injuries, often though not invariably, via narcissistic rage, into a sense of having righted a wrong, avenged a slur, or seized self-"intactness" from the jaws of injury.
Significant Moments is a self-revelation. As the book proceeds headlong toward its tragic denouement, the passages that describe the weather and the lighting are psychologically revealing. Thus, the portion of the writing that describes the high point of the Wagner-Nietzsche relationship refers to the brilliance of the sun. While the last meeting of Wagner and Nietzsche takes place on a cold, drizzly evening -- the night of a dinner party. Artists, including myself, often depict self-states of the characters through, for example, reference to weather. Changes in the weather foreshadow, just as a dream of a barren countryside may reveal and foreshadow, the state of the self.
The book also contains numerous biblical allusions and quotations. In adult years I have stood alone against my critics, who have usually been stronger and more numerous than my defenders. The source of my strength -- my ability to stand alone, undaunted -- I believe, is ultimately a positive inheritance from my father: namely, my father's ego-strengthening identification with the historical struggle of the Jewish people for survival. My ambivalence toward my father now becomes more understandable. My "inheritance" did not only include my father's failings, but contained a substantial quantum of support from him as well. My solitary faith in myself and my eventual triumph, coupled with my memory of my father's loyalty to the best in the Jewish tradition, may have provided the strength that has enabled me to stand alone and continue my struggle without the aid or presence of another.
After my disappointing job termination in 1991, my self-state could be characterized as enraged by new disappointments, as well as the revival of the old hurts and disillusionments. I sought refuge through the transformation of my painful state to one that may also have been an enduring legacy of my childhood, a state devoid of impingements from others and free of the disappointment I felt in my father. I sought a sense of supremacy, alone and at peace. Akin to a puppeteer, I longed to be above the critics and the mundane world, without concern for social status, economics, or prestige.
My use of the term self-state draws on contributions from several sources: Stern's and Sander's discussions of state transformation and the self-regulating other and Kohut's discussion of self-states as noted in self-state dreams.
When used by infant researchers, state refers specifically to variations in sleep and wakefulness that occur as the infant passes between crying and alert or quiet activity, drowsiness and sleep, wet discomfort and dry discomfort, hunger and satiation. Different states affect how things are perceived, how those perceptions are integrated, and how such information is processed.
State transformations in early life accrue to both the child's self-regulation and to the expectation that mutual regulation with the caretakers will facilitate or interfere in regulating one's affects and states. Thus, early state transformations are associated with mastery or control over one's own experience, and expectations that affect regulation can (or cannot) be shared with the self-regulating other.
With the advent of symbolic capacities and increasing elaboration upon one's subjective experience, self-states in the child and adult include the domain of the self in a psychological sense. Post infancy self-state transformations may increase a sense of control, mastery, or agency, but in the case of traumatic self-state transformations, such states as devastation, outrage, or fragmentation may become dominant.
The subjective discomfort of painful self-states provides an impetus for finding means by which such states can be transformed. A creative endeavor, one means of transforming one's self-state, enhances the range of the self-regulation. Furthermore, in the context of mutual regulations, expectations of a responsive environment shift the state of the self along the dimension of fragmentation-intactness toward greater cohesion and along the dimension of depletion-vitality toward an increased sense of efficacy.
Kohut described self-state dreams in which the imagery is undisguised or only minimally disguised, depicting the dreamer's sense of self. Kohut likened these dreams to Freud's discussion of dreams in traumatic neuroses, in which a traumatic event is realistically depicted. For example, a self-state may be depicted in a dream as a barren countryside, reflecting a sense of devastation and such self experiences as depression, despair, or hopelessness.
My use of self-state is broader than Stern's since I extend my perspective into adult life, and my use of the term is not confined to the dream imagery described by Kohut. Dream imagery provides a glimpse into a person's feelings of devastation and outrage, but the imagery of narratives can also convey self-states.
MODEL SCENES
To construct the model scene that depicts the self-state that I attempted to recapture after I was subjected to devastating criticism in the form of job harassment and job termination, I combined facets of my life history.
For the first several years of my development, I experienced a childhood characterized by an overprotective but unempathic mother and a distant, but at times harsh, father. My father was a highly-intelligent man who settled for far less in life than he was capable. He had quit an academic high school restricted to college-bound students in the tenth grade, and worked at a factory job. Though he was raised in a strictly Orthodox Jewish family, he was the only one of seven children to marry outside the Jewish faith, in 1946. My mother was a Polish-Catholic whose father, an immigrant coal miner, died in the great swine flu epidemic following World War I. My father suffered both overt and covert anti-Semitism from my mother's family during the marriage -- itself a form of criticism. My father coped with the attacks directed at him by relying on a deeply-rooted sense of his cultural and religious superiority.
My mother doted on me, but paradoxically, had a tendency to negligent, even reckless, caretaking. At age three I developed scarlet fever, an unusual bacterial disease. I was late in being weaned from the bottle. Though I ate solid food by age three, of course, my mother indulged my desire to drink milk that had gone sour in the bottle. The pediatrician, Dr. Bloom, who diagnosed the illness attributed it to the sour milk. "And why is he still drinking from a bottle? He's too old to be drinking milk from a bottle," the doctor said. (Dr. Bloom! "Just who does Dr. Bloom think he is?"). My father was very angry, and chastised my mother bitterly for "spoiling" me, in the doctor's presence. I felt humiliated and helpless in the face of the charges leveled at me. My secret oral perversion had been discovered! The secret was out! The doctor advised my parents that scarlet fever was considered a serious public health concern, and that he was bound by law to report my illness to the city health department. Several days later, the health department posted a quarantine notice on the front door of our home (1957). My private act led to unforeseeable consequences in the form of intervention by a government authority. In effect, at age three the government had determined that I was already "potentially dangerous."
The scarlet fever incident contributed to the centrality of solitary self-experience for me. From an experience of pleasure (in drinking sour milk from the bottle), I was suddenly transformed to a state of loss and an inexplicable sense of guilt. I felt like a felon and, if you will excuse the hyperbole, "would hide when the constable approached the house." The illness ushered in transformation from a positive, pleasurable, self-absorbed state to a secret state marked by guilt and a personal blame for wrongdoing. I did not find solace for my loss. On my own, I bore both my guilt and the surprising, disturbing impact I could have on others in my immediate world and beyond: indeed, reaching out to a world beyond my imagination, in the form of governmental authorities. The illness also signaled another transformation in the direction of having to regulate painful states on my own without the support of others. Both parents were concerned with public embarrassment, rather than with the state of their child. I propose that the model scene I have constructed organized my experience as a solitary, impactful onlooker: someone whose private actions could even trigger the intervention of government authorities. It is an experience that few three-year-olds have. An emotionally porous three-year-old who is "hypersensitive to the goings-on in his environment," cf. Freedman v. D.C. Dept. of Human Rights, DCCA 96-CV-961 (Sept. 1998), will be affected by that experience.
This letter, and particularly the above anecdote, is a metaphorical bridge of speculation that connects mystery to mystery, the known with the unknown. That bridge is like a single plank that requires the support of others to form a firm foundation. I offer the following thought. My age upon contracting scarlet fever, which resulted from my mother's indulgence of my dependency needs -- age three or three-and-a-half -- is the same age my mother was when her father died of a communicable disease, influenza: in an influenza epidemic that, because of its magnitude, had evoked a vigorous public health response by government authorities nationwide. Is it possible that my "good" mother was instrumental in setting me up for serious illness? Was my mother's seeming indulgence really an expression of a strong unconscious ambivalence toward me that was a derivative of her emotional reaction to her own father's death?
Incidentally, the anecdote above parallels themes in several plays by Henrick Ibsen. In Ghosts a mother provides poison to her son to enable the son's suicide in expiation of his father's sins; An Enemy of the People pits a truth-fanatic (who discovers that the waters of a spa town are polluted) against the town's mayor and its citizens; and in The Master Builder a mother, out of a perverse sense of duty, kills her twins -- she contracted a fever because she could not stand the cold, but, despite the fever, she insisted on breast-feeding the twins, who died from her poisoned milk.
Note that I was the only male child in the family. Oddly, when I was a young boy, my older sister created the fiction that my middle name was "Stanley," my mother's father's name. I actually came to believe at one point in childhood that my name was "Gary Stanley Freedman."
Be that as it may.
My mother had a passionate interest in motion pictures and, in childhood, was fond of playing with dolls. I picked up on these interests in a way. In early adolescence I developed a fanatic attraction to the Wagner operas, and I had an interest in the craft of play writing. In high school and college I took elective courses in drama and theater. At age thirteen I staged (after a fashion), in the basement of our family home, a highly-abbreviated version (to say the least) of Wagner's four-opera Ring Cycle for the entertainment of my parents -- though, in reality, my parents were uninterested, if not hostile to my effort.
My father was subject to bouts of depression and sometimes became bitter and brutal toward my family, but he took no steps to change his situation, other than threatening, from time to time, to leave my mother. He was frequently morose and withdrawn. I reacted to my father throughout childhood with a range of irreconcilable emotions: idealization, sympathy, anger, and fear.
Taken as a unity, to be spelled out below, these accounts suggest that, for me, self-states and affects had to be regulated alone, by myself. In later life, I transformed my despondent state after my critical rebuff at Akin Gump by drawing on the themes encapsulated in the model scenes.
In psychoanalytic treatment, analyst and patient construct model scenes to convey, in graphic and metaphoric forms, significant events and repeated occurrences in the analysand's life. The information used to form model scenes can be drawn from a variety of sources, including a patient's narrative and recollections. Model scenes highlight and encapsulate experiences at any age, not only early childhood, and are representative of salient conscious and unconscious motivational themes. The concept of model scenes is broader than and includes screen memories, which Freud equated with the manifest dream content dream, in that they point toward something important that they disguise. The memory itself and its "indifferent" content are to be discarded as the analyst recovers and reconstructs the significant, concealed childhood event or fixation. Whereas screen memories focus on reconstructing what has happened, model scenes pay equal attention to what is happening, whether it is in the analytic transference or in the person's life. For me, the model scene is based on recollections that capture my solitary self-regulation, self-restoration, and my triumph over my detractors.
MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY: SIGNIFICANT MOMENTS
The book is unusual in structure. It is drawn exclusively from published literature -- it is a collection of quotations, really -- with the quotes woven together to form a cohesive narrative, comparable in a sense to the structure of T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland." A single, cohesive narrator or hero does not appear in the book. Rather, the author manipulates the quotations; he hovers overhead, as it were, like a puppet master, pulling all the strings. I am represented, through my identification with various literary and historical figures, by identity elements or identity fragments, which are the quotations. The themes of the book are numerous and diverse. The themes include anti-Semitism, the craft of writing, opera production, communicable disease, genetics, inheritance, the discovery of a secret that brings ruin on the discoverer, scientific discovery, truth seekers, critical response by peers, defiance of peers and authorities, banishment and social isolation, the absence of an empathic or supportive environment, the self-regulation of affects, the death of fathers, the intervention of government authorities into the private domain of citizens, the seductive or destructive mother, alleged corruption and cover-up, among other topics.
CRITICISM AND RESPONSE
The negative response I received upon my job termination and its aftermath was diffuse. It came from the employer, psychiatrists (doctors), and government authorities. If I were asked why I began to write my autobiography in April 1993, four months after I had received the employer's responsive pleadings in a legal action I had initiated against the employer, I would have said: "I had to write my autobiography."
In Significant Moments, "the hero" (who appears in various guises, or is represented by various identity elements) makes a discovery that results in his being pitted against "the powers that be." The detractors of "the hero" are mocked and exposed as mean-spirited and unprincipled. I thereby expressed my distrust of the capacity of the "majority" to discriminate the "true" from the "false" and to exercise sound judgment. I showed "the powers that be" to be swayed by self-interest and incapable of distinguishing scientifically backed findings from self-serving rationalizations.
There is no decent, supportive public in Significant Moments. "The hero" naively values the support of "the powers that be" at the opening of the book. He believes that they will be responsive to truth and evidence. Before the book's end, "the hero" could rightly say that the most dangerous enemy of truth and freedom amongst us is the solid majority. "The majority is never right! . . . The minority is always right!" The minority to which "the hero" refers is himself. By the end of the book, he can trust nothing but his own values, perceptions, and beliefs.
Wounded by the shortsighted managers at Akin Gump, I asserted that the creative artist stands alone, a minority of one, to maintain his integrity and the purity of his vision. In Significant Moments I spoke with one uncompromising, solitary voice clearly depicted in "the hero," who loses all support and ends alone. "The strongest man in the world is the man who stands most alone." Increasing isolation drives "the hero" to proclaim, "I want to expose the evils that sooner or later must come to light."
To explore and to react aversively are dominant motivations for "the hero." He is uncompromising to the end, a man who does not mean to settle for rapprochement with the majority. He was ready to bring ruin upon himself and others rather than "flourish because of a lie."
In my response to the critics, I presented my hero as totally decent and honest, but naive with respect to political wheeling and dealing. His decency and goodness are contrasted with the narrow-mindedness of the majority. They are devoid of a sense of morality of their own and led by authorities who are rigid, unimaginative, self-serving, and bureaucratic -- banal at best and corrupt ("poisoned") at worst.
CREATIVE TRANSFORMATION: FROM JOB TERMINATION TO SIGNIFICANT MOMENTS
I had to write Significant Moments. The themes of that book, father-son tensions (real or symbolic), living a lie, the effects of learning "the truth," inheritance (in my case, the transmission of parental strengths and weaknesses), all manifestly rooted in my early life, are taken up in my book. In so doing, I addressed my compelling, burning, residual issue from my past and depicted it as a metaphor for my society as well. Significant Moments thus combines painful memories with a devastating social critique. Personally, I expressed my disillusionment at my father's legacy of academic, occupational, and marital failure, as well as my quest for an idealizable father of whom I could be proud.
Apparently I felt compelled to bare myself in a barely disguised form. I gathered together my past grievances and projected them on to "The Freud Archives Board." In them I embodied the lies, hypocrisy, deception, and duplicity that I hated in society. So long as they typified "the powers that be" and its "opinions," there could be no compromise. My uncompromising depiction of the "sins of the father," the "ghosts" that demand placing duty and public appearances above self-expression and individual freedom, expresses my long-held convictions in the purest, boldest form.
At the center of Significant Moments lies my determination to explore two sides of deception. Some self-deception is held necessary to maintain hope and to survive, yet there is also a pernicious self-deception that erodes ethics and undermines morality. Both Nietzsche and Jeffrey Masson were compelled to counter, respectively, Wagner's and The Freud Archives' deceptions of themselves and others. "The Heroes'" (Nietzsche's and Masson's) duty-bound rejection was felt by "the powers that be" (Wagner and Dr. Eissler) as both a rejection of their ideals and a personal betrayal.
I was shocked by my sudden job termination in late October 1991; but later (in April 1993), within four months of receiving the employer's responsive pleadings in the agency complaint I filed, I began work on Significant Moments. With my self-confidence shattered, if there was a moment when the capacity to transform shattered narcissism into artistic creativity was called for, this was it. The book became my response to the devastating experience of my termination and its aftermath. Note that it was only upon my receipt in late December 1992 of the employer's pleadings that I learned that the employer had allegedly determined that I was potentially violent -- that is, a physical danger to others: an allegation that must have resonated with my memory that at age three I had been determined by a municipal authority to pose a public health risk.
In Significant Moments moral integrity on one side is pitted against deception, greed, and narrow self-interests on the other. The battle lines are drawn clearly. Perhaps in outrage, all gloves are off. I myself step upon the stage and drag my enemy, conventional wisdom, front and center with me.
The hero pays the price for his naive belief in truth; he is socially totally isolated, but he remains undaunted. Throughout the book, he remains loyal to the idea that truth will win the day. He utters the line (through playwright Arthur Miller) that embodies "the hero's" defiance of the "majority" and defines the state in which he feels himself to be: independent, invulnerable, and exquisitely self-contained. "The strongest man in the world is the man who stands most alone!"
To me, the artist's strength lays in an undaunted capacity to maintain a vision in the face of opposition and to "cleanse and decontaminate the whole community." I must disturb, be perpetually misunderstood, and walk alone. Yet I would call Significant Moments an expression of the "comedy of life" in that it expresses my recognition that the creative artist cannot totally stand alone. Ultimately, he needs an audience to respond to him.
CREATIVITY IN SELF-STATE TRANSFORMATION
The artist accepts isolation as a consequence of his superior, unique vision of the world. He depicts his ideal, to follow the dictates of his artistic integrity, irrespective of the consequences. Compromise means accommodating to societal pressures, hypocrisy, and deception.
In Significant Moments the tyranny of conventional wisdom, the legacy of father to son, and the strength inherent in one's solitary loyalty to the "ideal" of truth appear on an unadorned stage.
It is always risky, when discussing an artist, to draw inferences about his life from his creative output. Nonetheless, parallels do exist between the artist's life and his creative work.
Traumatic, painful, or humiliating life experiences sometimes provide the context for an artist's work. To some extent, the creative product is the transformation by the artist of the effects of his painful past and narcissistically injurious experiences. Here, transformation refers to self-regulated alterations, the capacity to alter one's self-state, when, for example, it is characterized by guilt or shame, stirred by feelings of defeat and, when exposed to contempt, derision, or ridicule. To turn painful self-states into a sense of triumph requires transforming narcissistic injuries, often though not invariably, via narcissistic rage, into a sense of having righted a wrong, avenged a slur, or seized self-"intactness" from the jaws of injury.
Significant Moments is a self-revelation. As the book proceeds headlong toward its tragic denouement, the passages that describe the weather and the lighting are psychologically revealing. Thus, the portion of the writing that describes the high point of the Wagner-Nietzsche relationship refers to the brilliance of the sun. While the last meeting of Wagner and Nietzsche takes place on a cold, drizzly evening -- the night of a dinner party. Artists, including myself, often depict self-states of the characters through, for example, reference to weather. Changes in the weather foreshadow, just as a dream of a barren countryside may reveal and foreshadow, the state of the self.
The book also contains numerous biblical allusions and quotations. In adult years I have stood alone against my critics, who have usually been stronger and more numerous than my defenders. The source of my strength -- my ability to stand alone, undaunted -- I believe, is ultimately a positive inheritance from my father: namely, my father's ego-strengthening identification with the historical struggle of the Jewish people for survival. My ambivalence toward my father now becomes more understandable. My "inheritance" did not only include my father's failings, but contained a substantial quantum of support from him as well. My solitary faith in myself and my eventual triumph, coupled with my memory of my father's loyalty to the best in the Jewish tradition, may have provided the strength that has enabled me to stand alone and continue my struggle without the aid or presence of another.
After my disappointing job termination in 1991, my self-state could be characterized as enraged by new disappointments, as well as the revival of the old hurts and disillusionments. I sought refuge through the transformation of my painful state to one that may also have been an enduring legacy of my childhood, a state devoid of impingements from others and free of the disappointment I felt in my father. I sought a sense of supremacy, alone and at peace. Akin to a puppeteer, I longed to be above the critics and the mundane world, without concern for social status, economics, or prestige.
Character Study: The Roots of an Obsession
Subject is a 50-year-old male. He has been unemployed and profoundly isolated for years. Other than consultations with mental health professionals, subject has no social contacts of any kind with family, acquaintances, or friends. Subject trained as a lawyer, and has two law degrees.
Years earlier, while subject was employed, he had several acquaintances whom he would have liked to befriend. Each of the acquaintances was acutely ambitious, inner-directed, intelligent, idealistic, and independent in thought and action.
Subject is highly intelligent, verbally fluent, and creative. He devoted about ten years of his unemployment writing a lengthy autobiographical study that was unusual in structure. The content of the writing features subject's identification with historical and literary figures who were compulsive letter writers; who developed exclusive, idealized friendships; whose privacy rights were violated; and who struggled with the experience of loss, exile or banishment.
Subject visits his neighborhood library daily. Subject has a paranoid fantasy that the library manager is in daily communication with his former employer, a local law firm. Subject believes that the employer informs the library manager of subject's personal goings on, and that the manager reports back to the employer on subject's activities at the library. For some years subject had a vague notion that the manager might one day become his friend.
Subject imagines that the manager likes him and that the manager would welcome a social overture from him. Subject imagines that he receives subtle cues from the manager that the manager feels some personal connection with subject.
The manager appears to be a highly intelligent, underachiever who has little in common with any of his colleagues at the library. The manager is in his mid-forties, married, but childless. Subject imagines that the library manager is an individual who, from early life, had strong ambitions for success, fame, and independence, but that his early dreams and promise were not realized. The manager has worked his entire adult life in libraries, and subject imagines that the manager has severely repressed feelings of dissatisfaction with his life. The librarian has three siblings, all female. He majored in history in college, and subject imagines that perhaps the librarian had had a desire to attend law school.
At some point, many years into subject's unemployment, subject begins to write daily letters to the manager and save them on the public computer's hard-drive. Subject discusses in these letter his thoughts and feelings; the tone of the letters is friendly, informal and at times humorous. Subject imagines that the manager reads the letters and finds them interesting and entertaining. Subject further imagines that the manager transmits copies of the letters to the subject's former employer who, subject imagines, retains a personal interest in him. At the point subject begins his letter writing activity, his feelings for the manger grow in intensity. Subject becomes obsessed with the manager, who dominates subject's thoughts. Subject begins to experience a feeling "of mounting self-confidence to the point of excitement and feeling as though" he and the library manager will become friends, possibly close friends. See Fernando, J. "The Exceptions: Structural and Dynamic Aspects." The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, vol. 52 at 19 (1997) (discussing a patient's feelings associated with her repetition compulsion).
After a year of this letter writing activity, the manager summons the police to request that subject be ejected from the library and that he be banned from the library for a period of six months. The manager tells the police that he had chanced upon a letter that subject had written and saved to the computer hard-drive. In the manager's opinion the letter is threatening in tone and evidences a disturbed mental state. The police do not concur with the manager's assessment of the letter, but agree to enforce the manager's request that subject be banned from visiting the library. Subject willingly honors the police action, but continues to write letters to the manager that he transmits to subject's own e-mail account. Subject imagines that unidentified persons continue to read the letters and transmit the letters to the library manager.
Subject continues to imagine that he and the library manager will someday become friends, though he understands realistically that this will probably not happen. Subject remains suspicious of the circumstances underlying the manager's action in having subject banned from the library. Subject responds emotionally to the ban with feelings of "anxiety, anger, confusion, and humiliation." See Fernando, J. "The Exceptions: Structural and Dynamic Aspects." The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, vol. 52 at 19 (1997) (discussing a patient's feelings associated with her repetition compulsion). Subject is convinced that the manager lied to the police when he told them that he, the manager, had read only one of subject's letters. Subject imagines that he was the victim of a personalized vendetta by the library manager, whose actions (so subject believes) were prompted by irrational psychological motives that centered on the manager's own repressed feelings about subject.
The following material traces the evolution of subject's personality from infancy, with particular reference to those capacities, experiences, adaptations, and disturbances in subject's background and psychological development that supported his action in adulthood of creating a fantasized friendship with another adult male, as well as subject's action in writing letters to that imaginary friend.
INFANCY -- DISSOCIATION -- IDEALIZATION OF AN IMAGINED MOTHER -- CREATIVITY PRECURSORS
BIOGRAPHICAL MATERIAL:
It appears that since infancy, subject showed an innate capacity for dissociation. It is likely that subject had the ability to withdraw his emotional investment in his real mother, and redirect that emotional investment in fantasy to an idealized image of an imagined mother. It is also likely that the dissociation occurred independently of need gratifications. Subject's innate capacity for dissociation may have been a precursor for creative activities, such as letter writing, in later life.
THEORETICAL MATERIAL:
Philip Weissman believed that the future artist, as an infant, had the ability to hallucinate the mother's breast independently of oral needs. According to him the unusual capacities of the artist "may be retraced to the infancy and childhood of the artist wherein we may find that he is driven by the nature of his artistic endowment to preserve (or immortalize) his hallucinated response to the mother's breast independent of his need gratifications."
One major concept of Weissman is the "dissociative function of the ego." With the aid of this dissociative function, the creative person "may partially decathect the external object (mother's breast) and hypercathect his imaginative perception of it. He may then further elaborate and synthesize these self-created perceptions as anlagen or precursors of creative activity which must then await full maturation and development of his ego and his talent for true creative expression." In simple words, according to Weissman, the child who will become a creative person has the ability to diverge the energy originally invested in primitive personal objects and to invest it again in creative work. Or in still different words, the creative person is able to dissociate his early personal life from what will be the creative work, although this work derived from the same early personal life. Weissman, P. "Psychological Concomitants of Ego Functioning in Creativity." International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 49: 464-469 (1968) (as discussed and quoted by S. Arieti).
COMORBIDITY:
An innate capacity for dissociation can serve as a mediating factor in the development of a massive splitting defense in cases where the individual's early environment is characterized by abuse and deprivation. See Phillips, R.A., Introduction to "When Rabbit Howls: The Troops for Truddi Chase." (New York: Jove Books, 1990) (Phillips has been a clinical psychologist practicing in Chevy Chase, MD); and Shengold, L. "Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation." (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
Paradoxically, the emergence of a massive splitting defense (in the face of an abusive environment) that is mediated by an innate capacity for dissociation can be seen as a compromise with a more grave outcome, namely overt psychosis. In dissociative identity disorder (formerly called multiple personality disorder) dissociation is spoken of as a "capacity" that permits the development of discrete, fully functional identities in a single person in the face of abuse or deprivation; though a single cohesive personality, either normal or psychotic, does not develop. "[N]ot every child who suffers abuse or a major loss or trauma has the [dissociative] capacity to develop multiple personalities. Those who do have the capacity also have normal ways of coping, and most of these vulnerable children are sufficiently protected and soothed by adults, so dissociative identity disorder does not develop." THE MERCK MANUAL OF MEDICAL INFORMATION. SECOND HOME EDITION at 638 (Whitehouse Station, NJ: Merck Research Laboratories, 2003).
INFANCY -- BONDING WITH TWO MOTHERS -- OBJECT LOSS -- MATERNAL DEFICIENCIES -- RAGE -- IDEALIZATION AS DEFENSE
BIOGRAPHICAL MATTER:
When subject was born, his parents (and six-year older sister) lived at his grandmother's house, while the parents looked for a house to buy. They had been living in an apartment but had moved out of the apartment just before subject was born. Subject was raised for the first six months by two mothers: his maternal grandmother and his mother. Subject was bottle-fed, so that mother and grandmother were able to share the feeding and caring duties. Subject might have bonded with both mother and grandmother, so that when his parents moved, when subject was six months old, he may have experienced the loss of his grandmother as traumatic or at least disruptive.
Subject's activity of writing letters to an idealized imaginary friend may be a derivative of his early experience of deficiencies in maternal caretaking or loss of a maternal attachment object. Subject's idealization or obsessive preoccupation with the library manager may be a defense against feelings of rage--with maternal deficiencies or maternal loss both precursors of that rage. In sum, subject's obsession with the library manager may reflect subject's "quest for an idealized figure as restitution" for early maternal deficiencies and loss. See Goldsmith, G. "Freud's Aesthetic Response to Michelangelo's Moses." The Annual of Psychoanalysis, vol. 20 at 267 (1992).
THEORETICAL MATTER:
Freud had two mothers: his biological mother and a nanny on whom he was very dependent. Goldsmith argues that the experience was important for Freud's early development: that Freud experienced an infantile depression as a result of the loss of his nanny and that his repressed rage was expressed through its opposite--namely, idealization. Goldsmith at 259-61.
Goldsmith argues that the reactivation of archaic derivatives of maternal loss in Freud, where disruptions in rapprochement could have led to an instability of the ego states of love, caused Freud's "inordinate demand for exclusive possession of the loved one" during his engagement to his future wife. Goldsmith at 266 (quoting Ernest Jones).
Perhaps similar dynamics were at play in Freud's intense and exclusive adult friendship with Wilhelm Fliess and his similarly intense and exclusive adolescent friendship with Edward Silberstein. In adulthood Freud carried on a largely epistolary relationship with an individual named Wilhelm Fliess, his best and perhaps only friend. Freud's friendship with Fliess was passionate but, as a largely epistolary relationship, it was restrained and distant; in the letters it is as though Freud were in a dialogue with himself. The intensity with which Freud entered into his largely epistolary relationship with Fliess must have been a reflection of his disappointment with reality and his need to seek an idealized friend who existed only as a projection of his own needs. For Freud the ideal friend had to be an extension of himself. Grosskurth, P. The Secret Ring: Freud's Inner Circle and the Politics of Psychoanalysis.
SEPARATION/INDIVIDUATION -- RAPPROCHEMENT SUBPHASE -- TODDLER'S WOOING BEHAVIOR TOWARD MOTHER -- LACK OF MATERNAL INTEREST
BIOGRAPHICAL MATTER:
Subject's mother, though overprotective, was largely uninvolved and uninterested in subject's play or other activities. Mother interacted with subject, but in her own way and on her own terms; she was unwilling or incapable of immersing herself in or participating in her child's own world.
It is telling that in the first grade, subject's teacher summoned the mother to school to admonish her to help subject with his homework and to read to him. Subject's mother had never read to her son. Subject's mother used to say unashamedly: "I hate books!" It is interesting that as an adult, subject's interests and outlook do not match those of his mother; in terms of interests and outlook it is as if subject developed independently from his mother, though he was emotionally dependent on her.
Subject's activity in adulthood of visiting the library and sharing physical space with the uninvolved library manager, while at the same time covertly wooing the manager with undelivered letters, may be a derivative of his early interaction with an uninterested and uninvolved mother who ignored her toddler son's secret entreaties for attention.
THEORETICAL MATTER:
The rapprochement subphase (usually between fifteen months and eighteen months) is ushered in by the toddler's dawning realization that the mother is actually a separate person, one who will not always be available to help him in dealing with his newly enlarged world. Mother must now be approached on a new, higher level of interaction, characterized especially by sharing new discoveries in the "outside" world and by language. The early months of the rapprochement subphase are typified by "wooing" behavior of the child toward his mother, in which he tries to obtain her participation in his world within the context of some recognition of his separateness. Greenberg, J.R. and Mitchell, S.A. Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983).
CHILDHOOD INJURY -- SUPEREGO DISTURBANCE -- INABILITY TO RELINQUISH EARLY IDEALIZED IMAGE OF PARENTS -- IDEALIZATION -- REBELLION
BIOGRAPHICAL MATERIAL:
Subject suffered an injury to the oral cavity when he was two-and-a-half years old. While mother was cleaning some kitchen curtains, subject put a curtain-rod in his mouth; he fell, and the curtain rod punctured the soft-palette. The wound bled profusely and had to be cauterized. Subject's father blamed the accident on mother's overindulgence of subject and her "spoiling" of him.
As an adult, subject exhibits the trait of rebellion. Results of psychological testing state that subject "has a tendency to challenge or denounce social sanctions to the point where he may lose sight of his own best interests."
Subject's obsessive preoccupation with the library manager reflects his need to recapture in adulthood the early idealized images of his parents, which he never relinquished.
THEORETICAL MATERIAL:
Fernando describes details from the history of an analytic patient who had severely repressed demands for recompense for an injury she suffered in childhood and who for this reason was attracted to (more accurately, obsessed by) persons who displayed the character type of the "exceptions." The patient herself showed some signs of being an "exception." Fernando, J. "The Exceptions: Structural and Dynamic Aspects." The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, vol. 52: 17-28 (1997).
The patient, a young adult, had suffered a broken leg in early childhood. According to Fernando, the injury and its aftermath (parental blaming behavior) caused a disturbance in her superego maturation, and led to the character type that Freud termed the "exceptions." In the "exceptions," the early idealized parental images are never metabolized as in the normal person, and the individual's superego remains warped. Such individuals attempt to recapture in their interpersonal relations in adulthood representations of their early idealized parental images. Fernando's patient was obsessed with two persons, her only friends. The patient was not simply lonely; she wanted to affiliate closely with these two persons because they matched her internalized and idealized images of her parents.
The patient's development foundered on her inability to accomplish one of the major tasks of late adolescence: the integration of previously unresolved traumas into the character structure, or what Peter Blos calls the "characterological stabilization of residual trauma."
The relative lack of superego maturation and integration in the exceptions affects the maturation of the ego ideal. It interferes with the deconcretization of the ego ideal and its integration into the personality as a substructure within the superego system, a process that normally takes place definitively in late adolescence. This interference was evident in Fernando's patient who found it impossible to relinquish her attachment to the idealized images of her parents and instead began a prolonged attempt, beginning in late adolescence, to recapture her ideals in concrete form in her relationship with her two friends.
The accident and hospitalization of this patient were traumatic in the narrow sense of the term. During and immediately following the accident there was a breaching of the stimulus barrier. Ego functions (motility, perception, judgment, time sense) were temporarily overwhelmed (the period of numbness). The subsequent attempts at mastery by turning passive into active and through sexualization led to a lifelong fate neurosis: Throughout her life in small ways and large the patient repeated the sequence of mounting self-confidence that preceded the accident to the point of excitement and feeling as though she were "flying," followed by a period of "numbness," and finally by a repetition of the feelings of anxiety, anger, confusion, and humiliation associated with the hospitalization. She repeated this sequence over and over in the analysis.
The ego attitude of justified rebellion or entitlement, which is characteristic of the "exceptions," develops because of early mistreatment, injury, or maternal deficiencies; such disturbed experiences lead to a distortion in ego-superego interaction and interfere with normal superego maturation.
PRE-OEDIPAL FATHER ATTACHMENT -- FEAR OF MATERNAL ENGULFMENT -- IDEALIZATION OF PRE-OEDIPAL FATHER -- TENDENCY TO REBELLION
BIOGRAPHICAL MATERIAL:
Subject grew up in an environment dominated by female maternal figures, which promoted misogynist attitudes in adulthood. (Compare the early environment and personality of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche). Subject unconsciously desired to affiliate with his father as a defense against female (maternal) engulfment. Subject's actual affiliation with father, though, was disapproved by subject's mother who wanted to dominate her son's affections.
Father was in many ways a weak man who submitted to female domination. (Note the parallel with the library manager who works in a professional environment traditionally dominated by females and that employs a fair quota of male homosexuals). Father felt dominated by his wife, his wife's overbearing sister, and mother-in-law. A former psychiatrist stated to subject on one occasion: "I have no respect for your father at all: that he should have put up with that family situation for all those years." Father likely seduced his son into an alliance against "bitches" to justify his personal failure as a man. Lowen, A. Narcissism: Denial of the True Self at 116 (New York: Collier Books, 1985) (the author refers to this type of "seduction" as homosexual in nature).
Like the library manager, subject's father was an underachiever. Father quit a selective academic high school restricted to college-bound students in the tenth grade, despite a superior IQ that was measured at 125 in the U.S. Army (95th percentile). Father worked in menial factory jobs his entire adult life. Also, in some way vaguely similar to the library manager, subject's father carved out some measure of autonomy and a leadership role by being active in his union; he served for many years as shop chairman in his place of employment and was a delegate to the union's national convention, held in New York City, when subject was ten years old.
At the time subject's obsession with the library manager began, subject's interpersonal contacts were limited to three females, all of whom he disliked: a female psychiatrist, a female psychotherapist, and a female case manager.
Subject exhibits the personality trend of rebellion, a fact that is pertinent to the following theoretical discussion which links rebellion to the intensity of the early father idealization. Psychological testing of subject disclosed that he "has a tendency to challenge and denounce social sanctions to the point where he may lose sight of his own best interests."
THEORETICAL MATERIAL:
The role of the early father, writes psychoanalyst Peter Blos, was that of a rescuer or savior at the time when the small [male] child normally makes his determined effort to gain independence from the first and exclusive caretaking person, usually the mother. At this juncture the father attachment offers an indispensable and irreplaceable help to the infant's effort to resist the regressive pull to total maternal dependency, thus enabling the child to give free rein to the innate strivings of physiological and psychological progression, i.e., maturation. We find the roots of the boy's father complex at this point in the boy's development. The reverberations of this complex are never totally extinguished in the life of any man: they remain active and alive from "the cradle to the grave." We can hardly overrate their contribution to the process of growing up, of being a grownup, and of growing old. The resolution of the boy's paternal attachment is normally left incomplete at the end of childhood because developmental pressures of a somatic, cognitive, and social nature outweigh the completion of this task of infancy. Normally, the irresistible beckoning of the latency period wins out. In adolescence, the interrupted processes of psychological growth must be taken up again because they cannot tolerate further delay when the irrevocable termination of psychological childhood is in sight.
The boy's extinguished yearning for the comforting comradeship with father turns into a frightening prospect at adolescence, when the regressive pull to the state of dependency on the paternal savior grows in intensity, especially in case he becomes resurrected as the little boy's idealized hero. This psychic constellation is experienced by the adolescent as an intolerable conflict. I have frequently made the observation that the boy's adolescent revolt against his father asserts itself with more boundless violence, the more profound the son's early [actual or wished- for] father attachment had been and the more unaltered this [actual or wished-for] attachment (usually successfully repressed) had remained in the boy's emotional life. Regardless of how successfully--or shall we say, how normally--the decline of the early father attachment proceeded over time, the tendency to idealization represents a lifelong problem for every man. Blos, P. "Freud and the Father Complex." The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, vol. 42 at 426-7 (1987).
RESCUE FANTASY -- OMNIPOTENT PARENT -- PASSIVE HOMOSEXUAL VARIANT -- SUBMISSIVE AND PASSIVE ADAPTATION TO FATHER'S LIBIDINIZED EXPECTATIONS
Subject's obsession with the library manager may reflect a rescue fantasy characterized by subject's hope to be rescued from his painful state of loneliness, as well as his anxieties surrounding maternal engulfment, by regaining the idealized omnipotent parent. See Gillman, R.D. "Rescue Fantasies and the Secret Benefactor." The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, vol. 47 at 282 (1992).
Subject's obsession with the library manager may also be seen as a submissive homosexual fantasy in which subject has placed himself in the role of the passive "damsel in distress," while assigning to the library manager the "heroic" task of redeeming subject from his state of lonely isolation and castration.
The latter passive homosexual fantasy seems pertinent to Blos' observation that a son's subordination of his life's work, ambition, dedication, and achievement to the libidinized expectations of his father are experienced by the son as a submissive and passive adaptation. The effort to surmount this never quite ego-syntonic position of a boy's active-passive balance in the mastery of self and environment reaches a crucial impasse at the closure of adolescence. At that juncture this unresolved imbalance frequently merges with associative identity fragments of a feminine self representation. If this emerging conflict cannot be contained or resolved, an abnormal psychic accommodation will take its course. Blos, P. "Freud and the Father Complex." The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, vol. 42 at 440 (1987)..
SEPARATION/INDIVIDUATION -- FINAL RESOLUTION -- UNMETABOLIZED SUPEREGO PRECURSORS -- IDEALIZATION
BIOGRAPHICAL MATTER:
Subject, like many creative persons, "is loss-sensitive and separation-prone." Goldsmith at 267 (quoting Gilbert Rose). Subject would have experienced even relatively minor failures of maternal empathy as rejection. Subject's mother, though overprotective, was in fact unempathic and largely uninterested in her son's developing selfhood.
Subject's experience of his mother's lack of empathy as rejection resulted in a defensive resolution of the task of separation/individuation that was achieved ultimately by the rapid internalization of the dual aspect of the mother as both a gratifying and a frustrating (or critical) object.
Subject experiences a special need for a friend who will serve as a brother-figure or comrade-in-arms to restore his sense of narcissistic integrity.
THEORETICAL MATTER:
In cases in which internalization of the ambivalently-cathected maternal object (that embodies the combined functions of negative sanction and endowing approval) occurs abruptly and prematurely, without adequate neutralization of ego-ideal and superego precursor, shame and castration anxiety do not become integrated into a smoothly operating unconscious guilt mechanism. Pathological guilt, shame and castration anxiety together with a tendency to intense primitive idealization will be seen in pathological manifestations. Freeman, D.M.A., Foulks, E.F., and Freeman, P.A. "Superego Development and Psychopathology." The Psychoanalytic Study of Society, vol. 7 at 121 (1976) (Gertrude R. Ticho, M.D., contributing editor).
In such cases the male patient may have a special need for a "brother" or comrade-in-arms to serve as an alter ego or "narcissistic object" to moderate the demands of his harsh, primitive superego. The choice of such a friend is based on characteristics that the individual feels he needs in order to complete himself and restore his original feeling of narcissistic safety and well-being. In this narcissistic position, he will not be ready to feel or empathize with others or participate in close relationships. Freeman, D.M.A., Foulks, E.F., and Freeman, P.A. "Ghost Sickness and Superego Development in the Kiowa Apache Male." The Psychoanalytic Study of Society, vol. 7 at 145 (1976) (Gertrude R. Ticho, M.D., contributing editor).
OEDIPAL RAGE -- ANNIHILATION ANXIETY -- IDEALIZATION -- DISSOCIATION -- THE FANTASY OF HAVING A TWIN
BIOGRAPHICAL MATTER:
Subject experienced rage against his parents in childhood owing to the frustration of his oedipal wishes, and proceeded to annihilate his parents in fantasy. To remedy his consequent loneliness subject created, during the latency period, an imaginary twin sibling: a dissociated image of his ideal self. The imaginary twin sibling comforted subject in his loneliness.
Subject's obsessive preoccupation with the library manager as an imaginary, comforting brother figure may be a derivative of subject's latency period fantasy. Significantly, the dynamics of the fantasy of having a twin sibling center on the use of idealization as a defense against (oedipal) rage, a sequence that is overdetermined in subject's personality. See discussion above relating to INFANCY -- BONDING WITH TWO MOTHERS -- OBJECT LOSS -- RAGE -- IDEALIZATION AS DEFENSE.
THEORETICAL MATTER:
A common daydream which in spite of its frequency has received very little attention to-date is the fantasy of possessing a twin. It is a conscious fantasy, built up in the latency period as the result of disappointment by the parents in the oedipus situation, in the child's search for a partner who will give him all the attention, love and companionship he desires and who will provide an escape from loneliness and solitude. The same emotional conditions are the basis of the family romance. In that well-known daydream the child in the latency period develops fantasies of having a better, kinder and worthier family than his own, which has so bitterly disappointed and disillusioned him. The parents have been unable to gratify the child's instinctual wishes; in disappointment his love turns to hate; he now despises his family and, in revenge, turns against it. He has death-wishes against the former love-objects, and as a result feels alone and forsaken in the world. Burlingham, D.T. "The Fantasy of Having a Twin." In: The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child. Vol. 1 at 205 (1945). A further element in many daydreams of having a twin is that of the imaginary twin being a complement to the daydreamer. The latter endows his twin with all the qualities and talents that he misses in himself and desires for himself. The twin thus represents his superego. Id. at 209.
Years earlier, while subject was employed, he had several acquaintances whom he would have liked to befriend. Each of the acquaintances was acutely ambitious, inner-directed, intelligent, idealistic, and independent in thought and action.
Subject is highly intelligent, verbally fluent, and creative. He devoted about ten years of his unemployment writing a lengthy autobiographical study that was unusual in structure. The content of the writing features subject's identification with historical and literary figures who were compulsive letter writers; who developed exclusive, idealized friendships; whose privacy rights were violated; and who struggled with the experience of loss, exile or banishment.
Subject visits his neighborhood library daily. Subject has a paranoid fantasy that the library manager is in daily communication with his former employer, a local law firm. Subject believes that the employer informs the library manager of subject's personal goings on, and that the manager reports back to the employer on subject's activities at the library. For some years subject had a vague notion that the manager might one day become his friend.
Subject imagines that the manager likes him and that the manager would welcome a social overture from him. Subject imagines that he receives subtle cues from the manager that the manager feels some personal connection with subject.
The manager appears to be a highly intelligent, underachiever who has little in common with any of his colleagues at the library. The manager is in his mid-forties, married, but childless. Subject imagines that the library manager is an individual who, from early life, had strong ambitions for success, fame, and independence, but that his early dreams and promise were not realized. The manager has worked his entire adult life in libraries, and subject imagines that the manager has severely repressed feelings of dissatisfaction with his life. The librarian has three siblings, all female. He majored in history in college, and subject imagines that perhaps the librarian had had a desire to attend law school.
At some point, many years into subject's unemployment, subject begins to write daily letters to the manager and save them on the public computer's hard-drive. Subject discusses in these letter his thoughts and feelings; the tone of the letters is friendly, informal and at times humorous. Subject imagines that the manager reads the letters and finds them interesting and entertaining. Subject further imagines that the manager transmits copies of the letters to the subject's former employer who, subject imagines, retains a personal interest in him. At the point subject begins his letter writing activity, his feelings for the manger grow in intensity. Subject becomes obsessed with the manager, who dominates subject's thoughts. Subject begins to experience a feeling "of mounting self-confidence to the point of excitement and feeling as though" he and the library manager will become friends, possibly close friends. See Fernando, J. "The Exceptions: Structural and Dynamic Aspects." The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, vol. 52 at 19 (1997) (discussing a patient's feelings associated with her repetition compulsion).
After a year of this letter writing activity, the manager summons the police to request that subject be ejected from the library and that he be banned from the library for a period of six months. The manager tells the police that he had chanced upon a letter that subject had written and saved to the computer hard-drive. In the manager's opinion the letter is threatening in tone and evidences a disturbed mental state. The police do not concur with the manager's assessment of the letter, but agree to enforce the manager's request that subject be banned from visiting the library. Subject willingly honors the police action, but continues to write letters to the manager that he transmits to subject's own e-mail account. Subject imagines that unidentified persons continue to read the letters and transmit the letters to the library manager.
Subject continues to imagine that he and the library manager will someday become friends, though he understands realistically that this will probably not happen. Subject remains suspicious of the circumstances underlying the manager's action in having subject banned from the library. Subject responds emotionally to the ban with feelings of "anxiety, anger, confusion, and humiliation." See Fernando, J. "The Exceptions: Structural and Dynamic Aspects." The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, vol. 52 at 19 (1997) (discussing a patient's feelings associated with her repetition compulsion). Subject is convinced that the manager lied to the police when he told them that he, the manager, had read only one of subject's letters. Subject imagines that he was the victim of a personalized vendetta by the library manager, whose actions (so subject believes) were prompted by irrational psychological motives that centered on the manager's own repressed feelings about subject.
The following material traces the evolution of subject's personality from infancy, with particular reference to those capacities, experiences, adaptations, and disturbances in subject's background and psychological development that supported his action in adulthood of creating a fantasized friendship with another adult male, as well as subject's action in writing letters to that imaginary friend.
INFANCY -- DISSOCIATION -- IDEALIZATION OF AN IMAGINED MOTHER -- CREATIVITY PRECURSORS
BIOGRAPHICAL MATERIAL:
It appears that since infancy, subject showed an innate capacity for dissociation. It is likely that subject had the ability to withdraw his emotional investment in his real mother, and redirect that emotional investment in fantasy to an idealized image of an imagined mother. It is also likely that the dissociation occurred independently of need gratifications. Subject's innate capacity for dissociation may have been a precursor for creative activities, such as letter writing, in later life.
THEORETICAL MATERIAL:
Philip Weissman believed that the future artist, as an infant, had the ability to hallucinate the mother's breast independently of oral needs. According to him the unusual capacities of the artist "may be retraced to the infancy and childhood of the artist wherein we may find that he is driven by the nature of his artistic endowment to preserve (or immortalize) his hallucinated response to the mother's breast independent of his need gratifications."
One major concept of Weissman is the "dissociative function of the ego." With the aid of this dissociative function, the creative person "may partially decathect the external object (mother's breast) and hypercathect his imaginative perception of it. He may then further elaborate and synthesize these self-created perceptions as anlagen or precursors of creative activity which must then await full maturation and development of his ego and his talent for true creative expression." In simple words, according to Weissman, the child who will become a creative person has the ability to diverge the energy originally invested in primitive personal objects and to invest it again in creative work. Or in still different words, the creative person is able to dissociate his early personal life from what will be the creative work, although this work derived from the same early personal life. Weissman, P. "Psychological Concomitants of Ego Functioning in Creativity." International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 49: 464-469 (1968) (as discussed and quoted by S. Arieti).
COMORBIDITY:
An innate capacity for dissociation can serve as a mediating factor in the development of a massive splitting defense in cases where the individual's early environment is characterized by abuse and deprivation. See Phillips, R.A., Introduction to "When Rabbit Howls: The Troops for Truddi Chase." (New York: Jove Books, 1990) (Phillips has been a clinical psychologist practicing in Chevy Chase, MD); and Shengold, L. "Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation." (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
Paradoxically, the emergence of a massive splitting defense (in the face of an abusive environment) that is mediated by an innate capacity for dissociation can be seen as a compromise with a more grave outcome, namely overt psychosis. In dissociative identity disorder (formerly called multiple personality disorder) dissociation is spoken of as a "capacity" that permits the development of discrete, fully functional identities in a single person in the face of abuse or deprivation; though a single cohesive personality, either normal or psychotic, does not develop. "[N]ot every child who suffers abuse or a major loss or trauma has the [dissociative] capacity to develop multiple personalities. Those who do have the capacity also have normal ways of coping, and most of these vulnerable children are sufficiently protected and soothed by adults, so dissociative identity disorder does not develop." THE MERCK MANUAL OF MEDICAL INFORMATION. SECOND HOME EDITION at 638 (Whitehouse Station, NJ: Merck Research Laboratories, 2003).
INFANCY -- BONDING WITH TWO MOTHERS -- OBJECT LOSS -- MATERNAL DEFICIENCIES -- RAGE -- IDEALIZATION AS DEFENSE
BIOGRAPHICAL MATTER:
When subject was born, his parents (and six-year older sister) lived at his grandmother's house, while the parents looked for a house to buy. They had been living in an apartment but had moved out of the apartment just before subject was born. Subject was raised for the first six months by two mothers: his maternal grandmother and his mother. Subject was bottle-fed, so that mother and grandmother were able to share the feeding and caring duties. Subject might have bonded with both mother and grandmother, so that when his parents moved, when subject was six months old, he may have experienced the loss of his grandmother as traumatic or at least disruptive.
Subject's activity of writing letters to an idealized imaginary friend may be a derivative of his early experience of deficiencies in maternal caretaking or loss of a maternal attachment object. Subject's idealization or obsessive preoccupation with the library manager may be a defense against feelings of rage--with maternal deficiencies or maternal loss both precursors of that rage. In sum, subject's obsession with the library manager may reflect subject's "quest for an idealized figure as restitution" for early maternal deficiencies and loss. See Goldsmith, G. "Freud's Aesthetic Response to Michelangelo's Moses." The Annual of Psychoanalysis, vol. 20 at 267 (1992).
THEORETICAL MATTER:
Freud had two mothers: his biological mother and a nanny on whom he was very dependent. Goldsmith argues that the experience was important for Freud's early development: that Freud experienced an infantile depression as a result of the loss of his nanny and that his repressed rage was expressed through its opposite--namely, idealization. Goldsmith at 259-61.
Goldsmith argues that the reactivation of archaic derivatives of maternal loss in Freud, where disruptions in rapprochement could have led to an instability of the ego states of love, caused Freud's "inordinate demand for exclusive possession of the loved one" during his engagement to his future wife. Goldsmith at 266 (quoting Ernest Jones).
Perhaps similar dynamics were at play in Freud's intense and exclusive adult friendship with Wilhelm Fliess and his similarly intense and exclusive adolescent friendship with Edward Silberstein. In adulthood Freud carried on a largely epistolary relationship with an individual named Wilhelm Fliess, his best and perhaps only friend. Freud's friendship with Fliess was passionate but, as a largely epistolary relationship, it was restrained and distant; in the letters it is as though Freud were in a dialogue with himself. The intensity with which Freud entered into his largely epistolary relationship with Fliess must have been a reflection of his disappointment with reality and his need to seek an idealized friend who existed only as a projection of his own needs. For Freud the ideal friend had to be an extension of himself. Grosskurth, P. The Secret Ring: Freud's Inner Circle and the Politics of Psychoanalysis.
SEPARATION/INDIVIDUATION -- RAPPROCHEMENT SUBPHASE -- TODDLER'S WOOING BEHAVIOR TOWARD MOTHER -- LACK OF MATERNAL INTEREST
BIOGRAPHICAL MATTER:
Subject's mother, though overprotective, was largely uninvolved and uninterested in subject's play or other activities. Mother interacted with subject, but in her own way and on her own terms; she was unwilling or incapable of immersing herself in or participating in her child's own world.
It is telling that in the first grade, subject's teacher summoned the mother to school to admonish her to help subject with his homework and to read to him. Subject's mother had never read to her son. Subject's mother used to say unashamedly: "I hate books!" It is interesting that as an adult, subject's interests and outlook do not match those of his mother; in terms of interests and outlook it is as if subject developed independently from his mother, though he was emotionally dependent on her.
Subject's activity in adulthood of visiting the library and sharing physical space with the uninvolved library manager, while at the same time covertly wooing the manager with undelivered letters, may be a derivative of his early interaction with an uninterested and uninvolved mother who ignored her toddler son's secret entreaties for attention.
THEORETICAL MATTER:
The rapprochement subphase (usually between fifteen months and eighteen months) is ushered in by the toddler's dawning realization that the mother is actually a separate person, one who will not always be available to help him in dealing with his newly enlarged world. Mother must now be approached on a new, higher level of interaction, characterized especially by sharing new discoveries in the "outside" world and by language. The early months of the rapprochement subphase are typified by "wooing" behavior of the child toward his mother, in which he tries to obtain her participation in his world within the context of some recognition of his separateness. Greenberg, J.R. and Mitchell, S.A. Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983).
CHILDHOOD INJURY -- SUPEREGO DISTURBANCE -- INABILITY TO RELINQUISH EARLY IDEALIZED IMAGE OF PARENTS -- IDEALIZATION -- REBELLION
BIOGRAPHICAL MATERIAL:
Subject suffered an injury to the oral cavity when he was two-and-a-half years old. While mother was cleaning some kitchen curtains, subject put a curtain-rod in his mouth; he fell, and the curtain rod punctured the soft-palette. The wound bled profusely and had to be cauterized. Subject's father blamed the accident on mother's overindulgence of subject and her "spoiling" of him.
As an adult, subject exhibits the trait of rebellion. Results of psychological testing state that subject "has a tendency to challenge or denounce social sanctions to the point where he may lose sight of his own best interests."
Subject's obsessive preoccupation with the library manager reflects his need to recapture in adulthood the early idealized images of his parents, which he never relinquished.
THEORETICAL MATERIAL:
Fernando describes details from the history of an analytic patient who had severely repressed demands for recompense for an injury she suffered in childhood and who for this reason was attracted to (more accurately, obsessed by) persons who displayed the character type of the "exceptions." The patient herself showed some signs of being an "exception." Fernando, J. "The Exceptions: Structural and Dynamic Aspects." The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, vol. 52: 17-28 (1997).
The patient, a young adult, had suffered a broken leg in early childhood. According to Fernando, the injury and its aftermath (parental blaming behavior) caused a disturbance in her superego maturation, and led to the character type that Freud termed the "exceptions." In the "exceptions," the early idealized parental images are never metabolized as in the normal person, and the individual's superego remains warped. Such individuals attempt to recapture in their interpersonal relations in adulthood representations of their early idealized parental images. Fernando's patient was obsessed with two persons, her only friends. The patient was not simply lonely; she wanted to affiliate closely with these two persons because they matched her internalized and idealized images of her parents.
The patient's development foundered on her inability to accomplish one of the major tasks of late adolescence: the integration of previously unresolved traumas into the character structure, or what Peter Blos calls the "characterological stabilization of residual trauma."
The relative lack of superego maturation and integration in the exceptions affects the maturation of the ego ideal. It interferes with the deconcretization of the ego ideal and its integration into the personality as a substructure within the superego system, a process that normally takes place definitively in late adolescence. This interference was evident in Fernando's patient who found it impossible to relinquish her attachment to the idealized images of her parents and instead began a prolonged attempt, beginning in late adolescence, to recapture her ideals in concrete form in her relationship with her two friends.
The accident and hospitalization of this patient were traumatic in the narrow sense of the term. During and immediately following the accident there was a breaching of the stimulus barrier. Ego functions (motility, perception, judgment, time sense) were temporarily overwhelmed (the period of numbness). The subsequent attempts at mastery by turning passive into active and through sexualization led to a lifelong fate neurosis: Throughout her life in small ways and large the patient repeated the sequence of mounting self-confidence that preceded the accident to the point of excitement and feeling as though she were "flying," followed by a period of "numbness," and finally by a repetition of the feelings of anxiety, anger, confusion, and humiliation associated with the hospitalization. She repeated this sequence over and over in the analysis.
The ego attitude of justified rebellion or entitlement, which is characteristic of the "exceptions," develops because of early mistreatment, injury, or maternal deficiencies; such disturbed experiences lead to a distortion in ego-superego interaction and interfere with normal superego maturation.
PRE-OEDIPAL FATHER ATTACHMENT -- FEAR OF MATERNAL ENGULFMENT -- IDEALIZATION OF PRE-OEDIPAL FATHER -- TENDENCY TO REBELLION
BIOGRAPHICAL MATERIAL:
Subject grew up in an environment dominated by female maternal figures, which promoted misogynist attitudes in adulthood. (Compare the early environment and personality of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche). Subject unconsciously desired to affiliate with his father as a defense against female (maternal) engulfment. Subject's actual affiliation with father, though, was disapproved by subject's mother who wanted to dominate her son's affections.
Father was in many ways a weak man who submitted to female domination. (Note the parallel with the library manager who works in a professional environment traditionally dominated by females and that employs a fair quota of male homosexuals). Father felt dominated by his wife, his wife's overbearing sister, and mother-in-law. A former psychiatrist stated to subject on one occasion: "I have no respect for your father at all: that he should have put up with that family situation for all those years." Father likely seduced his son into an alliance against "bitches" to justify his personal failure as a man. Lowen, A. Narcissism: Denial of the True Self at 116 (New York: Collier Books, 1985) (the author refers to this type of "seduction" as homosexual in nature).
Like the library manager, subject's father was an underachiever. Father quit a selective academic high school restricted to college-bound students in the tenth grade, despite a superior IQ that was measured at 125 in the U.S. Army (95th percentile). Father worked in menial factory jobs his entire adult life. Also, in some way vaguely similar to the library manager, subject's father carved out some measure of autonomy and a leadership role by being active in his union; he served for many years as shop chairman in his place of employment and was a delegate to the union's national convention, held in New York City, when subject was ten years old.
At the time subject's obsession with the library manager began, subject's interpersonal contacts were limited to three females, all of whom he disliked: a female psychiatrist, a female psychotherapist, and a female case manager.
Subject exhibits the personality trend of rebellion, a fact that is pertinent to the following theoretical discussion which links rebellion to the intensity of the early father idealization. Psychological testing of subject disclosed that he "has a tendency to challenge and denounce social sanctions to the point where he may lose sight of his own best interests."
THEORETICAL MATERIAL:
The role of the early father, writes psychoanalyst Peter Blos, was that of a rescuer or savior at the time when the small [male] child normally makes his determined effort to gain independence from the first and exclusive caretaking person, usually the mother. At this juncture the father attachment offers an indispensable and irreplaceable help to the infant's effort to resist the regressive pull to total maternal dependency, thus enabling the child to give free rein to the innate strivings of physiological and psychological progression, i.e., maturation. We find the roots of the boy's father complex at this point in the boy's development. The reverberations of this complex are never totally extinguished in the life of any man: they remain active and alive from "the cradle to the grave." We can hardly overrate their contribution to the process of growing up, of being a grownup, and of growing old. The resolution of the boy's paternal attachment is normally left incomplete at the end of childhood because developmental pressures of a somatic, cognitive, and social nature outweigh the completion of this task of infancy. Normally, the irresistible beckoning of the latency period wins out. In adolescence, the interrupted processes of psychological growth must be taken up again because they cannot tolerate further delay when the irrevocable termination of psychological childhood is in sight.
The boy's extinguished yearning for the comforting comradeship with father turns into a frightening prospect at adolescence, when the regressive pull to the state of dependency on the paternal savior grows in intensity, especially in case he becomes resurrected as the little boy's idealized hero. This psychic constellation is experienced by the adolescent as an intolerable conflict. I have frequently made the observation that the boy's adolescent revolt against his father asserts itself with more boundless violence, the more profound the son's early [actual or wished- for] father attachment had been and the more unaltered this [actual or wished-for] attachment (usually successfully repressed) had remained in the boy's emotional life. Regardless of how successfully--or shall we say, how normally--the decline of the early father attachment proceeded over time, the tendency to idealization represents a lifelong problem for every man. Blos, P. "Freud and the Father Complex." The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, vol. 42 at 426-7 (1987).
RESCUE FANTASY -- OMNIPOTENT PARENT -- PASSIVE HOMOSEXUAL VARIANT -- SUBMISSIVE AND PASSIVE ADAPTATION TO FATHER'S LIBIDINIZED EXPECTATIONS
Subject's obsession with the library manager may reflect a rescue fantasy characterized by subject's hope to be rescued from his painful state of loneliness, as well as his anxieties surrounding maternal engulfment, by regaining the idealized omnipotent parent. See Gillman, R.D. "Rescue Fantasies and the Secret Benefactor." The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, vol. 47 at 282 (1992).
Subject's obsession with the library manager may also be seen as a submissive homosexual fantasy in which subject has placed himself in the role of the passive "damsel in distress," while assigning to the library manager the "heroic" task of redeeming subject from his state of lonely isolation and castration.
The latter passive homosexual fantasy seems pertinent to Blos' observation that a son's subordination of his life's work, ambition, dedication, and achievement to the libidinized expectations of his father are experienced by the son as a submissive and passive adaptation. The effort to surmount this never quite ego-syntonic position of a boy's active-passive balance in the mastery of self and environment reaches a crucial impasse at the closure of adolescence. At that juncture this unresolved imbalance frequently merges with associative identity fragments of a feminine self representation. If this emerging conflict cannot be contained or resolved, an abnormal psychic accommodation will take its course. Blos, P. "Freud and the Father Complex." The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, vol. 42 at 440 (1987)..
SEPARATION/INDIVIDUATION -- FINAL RESOLUTION -- UNMETABOLIZED SUPEREGO PRECURSORS -- IDEALIZATION
BIOGRAPHICAL MATTER:
Subject, like many creative persons, "is loss-sensitive and separation-prone." Goldsmith at 267 (quoting Gilbert Rose). Subject would have experienced even relatively minor failures of maternal empathy as rejection. Subject's mother, though overprotective, was in fact unempathic and largely uninterested in her son's developing selfhood.
Subject's experience of his mother's lack of empathy as rejection resulted in a defensive resolution of the task of separation/individuation that was achieved ultimately by the rapid internalization of the dual aspect of the mother as both a gratifying and a frustrating (or critical) object.
Subject experiences a special need for a friend who will serve as a brother-figure or comrade-in-arms to restore his sense of narcissistic integrity.
THEORETICAL MATTER:
In cases in which internalization of the ambivalently-cathected maternal object (that embodies the combined functions of negative sanction and endowing approval) occurs abruptly and prematurely, without adequate neutralization of ego-ideal and superego precursor, shame and castration anxiety do not become integrated into a smoothly operating unconscious guilt mechanism. Pathological guilt, shame and castration anxiety together with a tendency to intense primitive idealization will be seen in pathological manifestations. Freeman, D.M.A., Foulks, E.F., and Freeman, P.A. "Superego Development and Psychopathology." The Psychoanalytic Study of Society, vol. 7 at 121 (1976) (Gertrude R. Ticho, M.D., contributing editor).
In such cases the male patient may have a special need for a "brother" or comrade-in-arms to serve as an alter ego or "narcissistic object" to moderate the demands of his harsh, primitive superego. The choice of such a friend is based on characteristics that the individual feels he needs in order to complete himself and restore his original feeling of narcissistic safety and well-being. In this narcissistic position, he will not be ready to feel or empathize with others or participate in close relationships. Freeman, D.M.A., Foulks, E.F., and Freeman, P.A. "Ghost Sickness and Superego Development in the Kiowa Apache Male." The Psychoanalytic Study of Society, vol. 7 at 145 (1976) (Gertrude R. Ticho, M.D., contributing editor).
OEDIPAL RAGE -- ANNIHILATION ANXIETY -- IDEALIZATION -- DISSOCIATION -- THE FANTASY OF HAVING A TWIN
BIOGRAPHICAL MATTER:
Subject experienced rage against his parents in childhood owing to the frustration of his oedipal wishes, and proceeded to annihilate his parents in fantasy. To remedy his consequent loneliness subject created, during the latency period, an imaginary twin sibling: a dissociated image of his ideal self. The imaginary twin sibling comforted subject in his loneliness.
Subject's obsessive preoccupation with the library manager as an imaginary, comforting brother figure may be a derivative of subject's latency period fantasy. Significantly, the dynamics of the fantasy of having a twin sibling center on the use of idealization as a defense against (oedipal) rage, a sequence that is overdetermined in subject's personality. See discussion above relating to INFANCY -- BONDING WITH TWO MOTHERS -- OBJECT LOSS -- RAGE -- IDEALIZATION AS DEFENSE.
THEORETICAL MATTER:
A common daydream which in spite of its frequency has received very little attention to-date is the fantasy of possessing a twin. It is a conscious fantasy, built up in the latency period as the result of disappointment by the parents in the oedipus situation, in the child's search for a partner who will give him all the attention, love and companionship he desires and who will provide an escape from loneliness and solitude. The same emotional conditions are the basis of the family romance. In that well-known daydream the child in the latency period develops fantasies of having a better, kinder and worthier family than his own, which has so bitterly disappointed and disillusioned him. The parents have been unable to gratify the child's instinctual wishes; in disappointment his love turns to hate; he now despises his family and, in revenge, turns against it. He has death-wishes against the former love-objects, and as a result feels alone and forsaken in the world. Burlingham, D.T. "The Fantasy of Having a Twin." In: The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child. Vol. 1 at 205 (1945). A further element in many daydreams of having a twin is that of the imaginary twin being a complement to the daydreamer. The latter endows his twin with all the qualities and talents that he misses in himself and desires for himself. The twin thus represents his superego. Id. at 209.
Friday, October 09, 2009
My Brush With Gayness
I used to be a big fan of the TV show The Guardian. The Guardian was an American drama series which aired on CBS from September 25, 2001 to May 4, 2004. The series revolved around protagonist Nick Fallin, a corporate attorney sentenced to 1500 hours community service with Legal Services of Pittsburgh as the result of a drug conviction. The plot focused on Nick's community service and recovery from drug addiction, as well as his strained relationship with his father who was president of the corporate law firm where Nick was employed full time.
The lead character was played by Simon Baker. The lead character's father was played by Dabney Coleman. I used to watch the show faithfully every week. I loved the relationship between Nick and his father. It reminded me of the relationship between Neil Sagot and his father, Leonard -- both lawyers. I worked for Neil Sagot from 1981-1982. The show also reminded me of Glenn Fine and his father. Glenn Fine is the Inspector General of the United States. His father worked as a Justice Department lawyer, too.
Simon Baker is a very good-looking guy. I thought at the time: "What if this is a gay thing? What if I like this show because I am attracted to Simon Baker? Maybe I'm in love with Simon Baker. Maybe I'm really gay!"
Last fall, in 2008, a new show premiered on CBS called The Mentalist. The Mentalist follows Simon Baker as Patrick Jane, an independent consultant for the California Bureau of Investigation (CBI) based in Sacramento, California. He has a remarkable track record for solving serious crimes by using his amazing skills of observation.
When the show was being promoted during the summer of 2008 I thought, "Uh oh, another show starring Simon Baker. I wonder if I'll become addicted to The Mentalist as I was to The Guardian.
So I watched the first episode of The Mentalist in September 2008. Turns out I hated the show. I thought it was too gimmicky. I never watched the show again.
Turns out I'm not in love with Simon Baker, I guess. I may still be a homosexual. But I'm not in love with Simon Baker.
The lead character was played by Simon Baker. The lead character's father was played by Dabney Coleman. I used to watch the show faithfully every week. I loved the relationship between Nick and his father. It reminded me of the relationship between Neil Sagot and his father, Leonard -- both lawyers. I worked for Neil Sagot from 1981-1982. The show also reminded me of Glenn Fine and his father. Glenn Fine is the Inspector General of the United States. His father worked as a Justice Department lawyer, too.
Simon Baker is a very good-looking guy. I thought at the time: "What if this is a gay thing? What if I like this show because I am attracted to Simon Baker? Maybe I'm in love with Simon Baker. Maybe I'm really gay!"
Last fall, in 2008, a new show premiered on CBS called The Mentalist. The Mentalist follows Simon Baker as Patrick Jane, an independent consultant for the California Bureau of Investigation (CBI) based in Sacramento, California. He has a remarkable track record for solving serious crimes by using his amazing skills of observation.
When the show was being promoted during the summer of 2008 I thought, "Uh oh, another show starring Simon Baker. I wonder if I'll become addicted to The Mentalist as I was to The Guardian.
So I watched the first episode of The Mentalist in September 2008. Turns out I hated the show. I thought it was too gimmicky. I never watched the show again.
Turns out I'm not in love with Simon Baker, I guess. I may still be a homosexual. But I'm not in love with Simon Baker.
The Richard Wagner Society
Last night, at about 9:30, my neighbor boned his girlfriend. At least I assume it was his girlfriend. I don't know; she could have been a professional woman. My neighbor has sex several nights a week: sometimes several times a day. I don't have a sense that there's any romantic involvement between my neighbor and the women he bones. The woman will arrive in the lobby of our apartment building, my neighbor will go to the lobby to greet her, the two will go back to his apartment, and they will proceed post haste to the task at hand. Then the woman leaves. I don't know who she is: a professional woman, a girlfriend, or a fuck buddy. My neighbor is a noisy fucker. I get the impression he thinks he's auditioning for a porn producer. For all I know, he may be a retired porn star. Or maybe he videotapes his own performances.
I'm a consumer of porn. I love to watch couples getting it on. I find porn to be very erotic. But the funny thing is my neighbor's sex sessions are not at all erotic, at least not in my opinion. I find my neighbor to be just a noisy nuisance. There's the erotic fuck, then there's the noisy boning session. My neighbor's dalliances fit into the latter category.
Last night, while my neighbor was taking the slow road to the "little death," I thought, "Fuck it. I've had enough of this." I put on a DVD of the Brahms Third Symphony, with Leonard Bernstein conducting the Vienna Philharmonic. It's a sublime performance. I own a two-DVD set of the complete Brahms symphonies: all four of them. Yes, Bernstein videotaped his own performances. The Brahms renditions are outstanding, but I'm not pleased with the camera work. Also, Bernstein is in his late years. It's kind of sad to see Bernstein in these recordings, edging toward old age and death.
Brahms was a lifelong bachelor like Beethoven. And, like Beethoven, Brahms frequented professional women. In fact, Brahms was born in the red-light district of Hamburg. He began taking music lessons at age 4 and by age 8 showed great potential as a pianist. His parents hired him out to play in the bars and brothels of Hamburg. The story goes that from a young age, Brahms was sexually molested by working girls. He himself claimed that his early sexual experiences warped his sexual adjustment.
Recently, Brahms scholar Kurt Hoffman has suggested that the legend surrounding the sexual side of Brahms' childhood is false. Since Brahms himself clearly originated the story, however, some have questioned Hoffman's theory. Brahms' recently published letters also put to rest this story. The places he played were working-class restaurants in a then respectable area of Hamburg which only later became a slum.
Whatever the truth of Brahms' childhood, the fact is that the adult composer frequented the brothels of Vienna. Yes, the staid and respectable, stolidly middle-class elderly Brahms preferred frequenting brothels to marriage.
In the latter half of the nineteenth century Brahms and his supposed rival, Richard Wagner represented two opposing camps in the musical circles of Europe. Supposedly Brahms embodied traditional forms, while Wagner epitomized the "Music of the Future." Wagner and his adherents organized musical societies in major European cities to promote his music. These organizations were known as "Richard Wagner Societies."
Brahms viewed the polemics surrounding Wagner as humbug and claptrap. The story goes that Brahms took to euphemistically calling the local brothel he frequented in Vienna "The Richard Wagner Society." Supposedly, in the midst of a social gathering Brahms would rise and tell the assembled group, with gleeful sarcasm, "Well, I'm off to the Richard Wagner Society."
I'm a consumer of porn. I love to watch couples getting it on. I find porn to be very erotic. But the funny thing is my neighbor's sex sessions are not at all erotic, at least not in my opinion. I find my neighbor to be just a noisy nuisance. There's the erotic fuck, then there's the noisy boning session. My neighbor's dalliances fit into the latter category.
Last night, while my neighbor was taking the slow road to the "little death," I thought, "Fuck it. I've had enough of this." I put on a DVD of the Brahms Third Symphony, with Leonard Bernstein conducting the Vienna Philharmonic. It's a sublime performance. I own a two-DVD set of the complete Brahms symphonies: all four of them. Yes, Bernstein videotaped his own performances. The Brahms renditions are outstanding, but I'm not pleased with the camera work. Also, Bernstein is in his late years. It's kind of sad to see Bernstein in these recordings, edging toward old age and death.
Brahms was a lifelong bachelor like Beethoven. And, like Beethoven, Brahms frequented professional women. In fact, Brahms was born in the red-light district of Hamburg. He began taking music lessons at age 4 and by age 8 showed great potential as a pianist. His parents hired him out to play in the bars and brothels of Hamburg. The story goes that from a young age, Brahms was sexually molested by working girls. He himself claimed that his early sexual experiences warped his sexual adjustment.
Recently, Brahms scholar Kurt Hoffman has suggested that the legend surrounding the sexual side of Brahms' childhood is false. Since Brahms himself clearly originated the story, however, some have questioned Hoffman's theory. Brahms' recently published letters also put to rest this story. The places he played were working-class restaurants in a then respectable area of Hamburg which only later became a slum.
Whatever the truth of Brahms' childhood, the fact is that the adult composer frequented the brothels of Vienna. Yes, the staid and respectable, stolidly middle-class elderly Brahms preferred frequenting brothels to marriage.
In the latter half of the nineteenth century Brahms and his supposed rival, Richard Wagner represented two opposing camps in the musical circles of Europe. Supposedly Brahms embodied traditional forms, while Wagner epitomized the "Music of the Future." Wagner and his adherents organized musical societies in major European cities to promote his music. These organizations were known as "Richard Wagner Societies."
Brahms viewed the polemics surrounding Wagner as humbug and claptrap. The story goes that Brahms took to euphemistically calling the local brothel he frequented in Vienna "The Richard Wagner Society." Supposedly, in the midst of a social gathering Brahms would rise and tell the assembled group, with gleeful sarcasm, "Well, I'm off to the Richard Wagner Society."
Schizophrenia Has Robbed Me Of My Memory?
Funny thing. I have been diagnosed with schizophrenia. I exhibit cognitive dysfunction in the form of what are called "ideas of reference." I am unable to work because of my disability. And yet, my memory is fairly good. Usually people with schizophrenia exhibit disturbances in their ability to recall. Thank God, my schizphrenia has not robbed me of my ability to remember my past.
The problems that people with schizophrenia experience with memory are often quite unique. These people may have problems associating an event with the details of that event. They may remember the event but cannot recall the details, such as when, where and how it occurred.
Information processing may involve information in general. When it involves the connects between words their speech becomes unintelligible. This is called "word salad". They may associate words because they sound the same and not because they have the same or related meanings or are naturally connected with one another. This results in what is referred to as "clang associations.
Backward masking dysfunction involves a person's inability to remember a preceding event. This may occur even if they have normal working memory. This is usually the result of some distraction such as hallucinations or some disturbing internal process.
Why do people with schizophrenia experience these difficulties? They are probably related to structural and functional abnormalities in their brains. Function has to do with activity and may represent reduced or increased levels of activity.
Imaging techniques such as MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) and CAT (Computerized Axial Tomography) reveal a loss of brain tissue in people with schizophrenia, especially in the areas of the brain known as the prefrontal cortex and temporal lobes.
PET (Positron Emission Tomography), an imaging technique that reveals brain tissue activity rather than structure, demonstrates abnormalities in the brains of people with schizophrenia.
The prefrontal cortex affects logical thought and verbal memory, which may affect clear and fluent speech. Aggression has also been linked to this area. Abnormally increased activity in the frontal and temporal lobes is associated with auditory hallucinations. Reduced tissue volume in the temporal lobes is related to problems in other areas of the brain that influence memory, emotions, as well as delusions and hallucinations.
The problems that people with schizophrenia experience with memory are often quite unique. These people may have problems associating an event with the details of that event. They may remember the event but cannot recall the details, such as when, where and how it occurred.
Information processing may involve information in general. When it involves the connects between words their speech becomes unintelligible. This is called "word salad". They may associate words because they sound the same and not because they have the same or related meanings or are naturally connected with one another. This results in what is referred to as "clang associations.
Backward masking dysfunction involves a person's inability to remember a preceding event. This may occur even if they have normal working memory. This is usually the result of some distraction such as hallucinations or some disturbing internal process.
Why do people with schizophrenia experience these difficulties? They are probably related to structural and functional abnormalities in their brains. Function has to do with activity and may represent reduced or increased levels of activity.
Imaging techniques such as MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) and CAT (Computerized Axial Tomography) reveal a loss of brain tissue in people with schizophrenia, especially in the areas of the brain known as the prefrontal cortex and temporal lobes.
PET (Positron Emission Tomography), an imaging technique that reveals brain tissue activity rather than structure, demonstrates abnormalities in the brains of people with schizophrenia.
The prefrontal cortex affects logical thought and verbal memory, which may affect clear and fluent speech. Aggression has also been linked to this area. Abnormally increased activity in the frontal and temporal lobes is associated with auditory hallucinations. Reduced tissue volume in the temporal lobes is related to problems in other areas of the brain that influence memory, emotions, as well as delusions and hallucinations.
Monday, October 05, 2009
A Peculiar Memory, Indeed!
June 1987. I worked in the Computer Applications Department of the law firm of Hogan & Hartson in Washington, DC. Miriam T. Chilton had just been hired to supervise the department. My coworker Craig Dye had the idea to arrange a meeting in Miriam's office with Miriam, Craig and me to apprise Miriam of things in the department. I think Craig just wanted to impress Miriam with the idea that he had some importance in the department that he didn't really have. I have no idea why he included me. I remember Craig saying that he liked to keep Miriam "abreast" of the status of things in the department. I remember having the idea of reference: "Is Craig using the word 'abreast' with a sexual connotation?"
People wonder how I remember the things that I remember. It's because I am paranoid. I often see hidden meanings in the words that other people use. My paranoia actually creates a context for people's statements. I can remember what people say, often far into the past and concerning absolutely trivial things, because I can remember what paranoid ideas I attached to what other people said at that moment in time. I specifically recall Craig saying that he liked to keep Miriam "abreast" of things in the office because I remember that I attached a sexual meaning to Craig's use of the word "abreast" back in June 1987. Sometimes insanity has adaptive benefits. Because I'm paranoid and I attach a paranoid meaning to things, I can remember things that most people forget. I can say with certainty that Craig used the word "abreast" and no other word, such as "apprised."
Something else. I remember that during the meeting with Miriam and Craig I used the word "idiosyncratic." I remember that because Miriam and Craig looked at each other as if I had said something odd. Maybe they thought I was showing off -- at least that's the paranoid thought I had at that moment in time.
After the meeting, which ended at about noon, Craig asked me to go to lunch with him.
I had worked with Craig since the previous fall. Craig started working at Hogan on Monday, October 6, 1986. I remember that he was wearing a bowtie on his first day. I thought he looked freakish. Why on earth would a 27-year-old, common office worker wear a bowtie to the job? I specifically recall thinking: "This guy looks like a total, fucking freak!" One of my coworkers, Mary Jane Coolen, said to Cindy Rodda about Craig: "He is gay. He is definitely gay. There's no way Craig is not gay." I remember that Cindy Rodda told me that on the evening of Friday March 25, 1988.
Cindy and I had gone to dinner together that evening in late March 1988; we went back to my apartment and chatted. I remember that date because it had been an unusually warm spring-like day. Cindy and I watched a public TV broadcast of the Brahms Third Symphony conducted by Leonard Bernstein that evening. In his introductory remarks, Bernstein had said that the Brahms Third was his most "enigmatic" symphony. Honestly, I have no idea why I can remember that. But I usually remember facts that are connected in some way to music. I had previously associated the Brahms Third with Craig; Brahms had written the work as a tribute to his great friend and mentor, Robert Schumann. When Craig and I worked together, I used to listen to the Brahms Third all the time. Craig was always an enigmatic person. A mystery wrapped in a riddle!
In any event, when Craig invited me to lunch after the meeting with Miriam in June 1987 it was the first time Craig had ever invited me to lunch. We had never gone to lunch before or eaten together in the office.
Criag invited the Data Base Administrator, Espe Rebollar, to come along to lunch with us. I had no idea why he invited Espe to come along. I remember that we went to Pershing Park, a nearby square with a fountain in downtown DC. Craig didn't have much to say. Neither did I. Espe did most of the talking. I specifically recall Espe mentioning BART. At the moment Espe said BART, I said: "Bay Area Rapid Transit." Apparently, Espe had lived in San Francisco. I once saw a TV documentary about San Francisco's public transportation system. I remember thinking at the time: "Who on Earth would ever talk about Bay Area Rapid Transit -- 'BART'?"
Yes, I also recall things that seem peculiar to me.
People wonder how I remember the things that I remember. It's because I am paranoid. I often see hidden meanings in the words that other people use. My paranoia actually creates a context for people's statements. I can remember what people say, often far into the past and concerning absolutely trivial things, because I can remember what paranoid ideas I attached to what other people said at that moment in time. I specifically recall Craig saying that he liked to keep Miriam "abreast" of things in the office because I remember that I attached a sexual meaning to Craig's use of the word "abreast" back in June 1987. Sometimes insanity has adaptive benefits. Because I'm paranoid and I attach a paranoid meaning to things, I can remember things that most people forget. I can say with certainty that Craig used the word "abreast" and no other word, such as "apprised."
Something else. I remember that during the meeting with Miriam and Craig I used the word "idiosyncratic." I remember that because Miriam and Craig looked at each other as if I had said something odd. Maybe they thought I was showing off -- at least that's the paranoid thought I had at that moment in time.
After the meeting, which ended at about noon, Craig asked me to go to lunch with him.
I had worked with Craig since the previous fall. Craig started working at Hogan on Monday, October 6, 1986. I remember that he was wearing a bowtie on his first day. I thought he looked freakish. Why on earth would a 27-year-old, common office worker wear a bowtie to the job? I specifically recall thinking: "This guy looks like a total, fucking freak!" One of my coworkers, Mary Jane Coolen, said to Cindy Rodda about Craig: "He is gay. He is definitely gay. There's no way Craig is not gay." I remember that Cindy Rodda told me that on the evening of Friday March 25, 1988.
Cindy and I had gone to dinner together that evening in late March 1988; we went back to my apartment and chatted. I remember that date because it had been an unusually warm spring-like day. Cindy and I watched a public TV broadcast of the Brahms Third Symphony conducted by Leonard Bernstein that evening. In his introductory remarks, Bernstein had said that the Brahms Third was his most "enigmatic" symphony. Honestly, I have no idea why I can remember that. But I usually remember facts that are connected in some way to music. I had previously associated the Brahms Third with Craig; Brahms had written the work as a tribute to his great friend and mentor, Robert Schumann. When Craig and I worked together, I used to listen to the Brahms Third all the time. Craig was always an enigmatic person. A mystery wrapped in a riddle!
In any event, when Craig invited me to lunch after the meeting with Miriam in June 1987 it was the first time Craig had ever invited me to lunch. We had never gone to lunch before or eaten together in the office.
Criag invited the Data Base Administrator, Espe Rebollar, to come along to lunch with us. I had no idea why he invited Espe to come along. I remember that we went to Pershing Park, a nearby square with a fountain in downtown DC. Craig didn't have much to say. Neither did I. Espe did most of the talking. I specifically recall Espe mentioning BART. At the moment Espe said BART, I said: "Bay Area Rapid Transit." Apparently, Espe had lived in San Francisco. I once saw a TV documentary about San Francisco's public transportation system. I remember thinking at the time: "Who on Earth would ever talk about Bay Area Rapid Transit -- 'BART'?"
Yes, I also recall things that seem peculiar to me.
Friday, October 02, 2009
Gray Flannel
In September 1987 I worked in the Computer Applications Department of the law firm of Hogan and Hartson. In early September I started to go to lunch with two coworkers, Craig Dye and Daniel Cutler. The office building where we worked, Columbia Square -- designed by I.M. Pei, no less -- had a roof deck for the enjoyment of employees. Craig, Daniel and I started to have lunch together on the roof deck. A brief time after the three of us started to eat lunch together, Craig started to douse himself -- I mean literally douse himself -- with men's cologne. Gray Flannel.
The word "gray," by the way, is an anagram of Gary -- but sometimes cologne is just a cologne. In about September 1987, Craig also bought a dress shirt -- gray cotton with thin orange stripes; it was identical to a shirt I used to wear. But sometimes a shirt is just a shirt. In April 1987 -- five months earlier -- I had pointed out to Craig that the name "Craig Dye" was an anagram of "gray dice." -- It would take a Sherlock Holmes to carry this line of thought any further!
Craig used to stink up the whole office with his cologne. One day a coworker, Cindy Rodda, entered the office. She said immediately: "What's that smell?" She turned to me and said: "Is that you, Gary?" I didn't know what she was talking about. I remembered that I had recently changed laundry detergent, and I said to Cindy: "Are you talking about my New Tide? I just started using New Tide detergent." She said, laughingly, "no, it's not New Tide. New Tide!" She walked over to Craig, and said: "It's you!"
Now, that's interesting. I could have said to myself, "Craig just started having lunch with me. Maybe he's falling in love with me. He started dousing himself with cologne to seduce me!" But I never thought that thought. I may have paranoid schizophrenia, but I'm not crazy. Why would any rational man think that because another man in the office started using cologne, that it was a reaction to him? There is one answer to that question. Perhaps if I unconsciously had fallen in love with Craig, I would have interpreted every random act he did as a sign that he loved me. Perhaps, I would interpret his ignoring me as a sign that he hated me and wanted to destroy me. Every random act -- or its opposite -- committed by my beloved was instinct with his passionate feelings for me; so desperate was I for a sign that he was not, in fact, ignoring me. And that's Schreber! The fantasy compensates for an inadequate and unsatisfying reality.
To this day I have no idea what was really going on in that office in terms of group psychology. But some complex and disturbing dynamics seemed to be played out. Craig's private irrational -- his belief that I alternatively loved him and hated him -- seemed to be adopted by other employees.
On a day in about June 1987, two employees -- Espe Rebollar and Daniel Cutler -- were standing off to the side as I chatted with an employee, Clarence Pollard. Clarence Pollard, was a bright young fellow, a graduate of Yale University. Why wouldn't I chat with him? I overheard Espe say to Daniel: "He's (meaning me) trying to make Craig jealous." I thought Espe's comment was odd and disturbing. I knew at that moment that I had no idea whether Craig was even in the office; he worked in a cubicle. There's no way my chat with Clarence Pollard was in any way related to Craig. Elliott Mincberg, Esq., an attorney at the firm, knew Clarence Pollard. I think that both Mincberg and Pollard were fans of the character Sherlock Holmes. Or is my memory playing tricks on me?
I have a sense that Craig's private irrational (his paranoia) was being adopted credulously -- and ridiculously -- by other employees who interpreted meaningless, random acts that I performed as objective and real evidence of my motivations. Where have we seen that before? I am speaking of the private irrational of an individual being adopted as real and objective by a group or even a nation. Well, I won't go there. I'm not a Republican. Ha!
Recently, I watched a TV show about the Manson case. An individual knowledgable about the case said that Charles Manson has denied ever having instructed anyone to kill anybody. And the individual added: "And I believe him." Now that's interesting. It says something about the dynamics of disturbed groups. To people who say I am being paranoid about my experiences at Hogan and Hartson, I will deny that I believe that coworkers ganged up on me. It's quite possible that a charismatic individual can corrupt a group of people with his private irrational without directing members of the group to do anything.
The word "gray," by the way, is an anagram of Gary -- but sometimes cologne is just a cologne. In about September 1987, Craig also bought a dress shirt -- gray cotton with thin orange stripes; it was identical to a shirt I used to wear. But sometimes a shirt is just a shirt. In April 1987 -- five months earlier -- I had pointed out to Craig that the name "Craig Dye" was an anagram of "gray dice." -- It would take a Sherlock Holmes to carry this line of thought any further!
Craig used to stink up the whole office with his cologne. One day a coworker, Cindy Rodda, entered the office. She said immediately: "What's that smell?" She turned to me and said: "Is that you, Gary?" I didn't know what she was talking about. I remembered that I had recently changed laundry detergent, and I said to Cindy: "Are you talking about my New Tide? I just started using New Tide detergent." She said, laughingly, "no, it's not New Tide. New Tide!" She walked over to Craig, and said: "It's you!"
Now, that's interesting. I could have said to myself, "Craig just started having lunch with me. Maybe he's falling in love with me. He started dousing himself with cologne to seduce me!" But I never thought that thought. I may have paranoid schizophrenia, but I'm not crazy. Why would any rational man think that because another man in the office started using cologne, that it was a reaction to him? There is one answer to that question. Perhaps if I unconsciously had fallen in love with Craig, I would have interpreted every random act he did as a sign that he loved me. Perhaps, I would interpret his ignoring me as a sign that he hated me and wanted to destroy me. Every random act -- or its opposite -- committed by my beloved was instinct with his passionate feelings for me; so desperate was I for a sign that he was not, in fact, ignoring me. And that's Schreber! The fantasy compensates for an inadequate and unsatisfying reality.
To this day I have no idea what was really going on in that office in terms of group psychology. But some complex and disturbing dynamics seemed to be played out. Craig's private irrational -- his belief that I alternatively loved him and hated him -- seemed to be adopted by other employees.
On a day in about June 1987, two employees -- Espe Rebollar and Daniel Cutler -- were standing off to the side as I chatted with an employee, Clarence Pollard. Clarence Pollard, was a bright young fellow, a graduate of Yale University. Why wouldn't I chat with him? I overheard Espe say to Daniel: "He's (meaning me) trying to make Craig jealous." I thought Espe's comment was odd and disturbing. I knew at that moment that I had no idea whether Craig was even in the office; he worked in a cubicle. There's no way my chat with Clarence Pollard was in any way related to Craig. Elliott Mincberg, Esq., an attorney at the firm, knew Clarence Pollard. I think that both Mincberg and Pollard were fans of the character Sherlock Holmes. Or is my memory playing tricks on me?
I have a sense that Craig's private irrational (his paranoia) was being adopted credulously -- and ridiculously -- by other employees who interpreted meaningless, random acts that I performed as objective and real evidence of my motivations. Where have we seen that before? I am speaking of the private irrational of an individual being adopted as real and objective by a group or even a nation. Well, I won't go there. I'm not a Republican. Ha!
Recently, I watched a TV show about the Manson case. An individual knowledgable about the case said that Charles Manson has denied ever having instructed anyone to kill anybody. And the individual added: "And I believe him." Now that's interesting. It says something about the dynamics of disturbed groups. To people who say I am being paranoid about my experiences at Hogan and Hartson, I will deny that I believe that coworkers ganged up on me. It's quite possible that a charismatic individual can corrupt a group of people with his private irrational without directing members of the group to do anything.
Identity in Cologne: Not Everything Is Sexual
In a paper about Peter Süskind’s novel "Perfume" titled "Sniffing Out the Odorless Genius: Identity in Perfume," Catherine Villeneuve-Tang writes about the odorless character Grenouille's search for identity displaced onto his conscious striving to develop the perfect perfume. She writes:
The French describe a person’s intangible quality that charms the senses as a “Je ne sais quoi.” This phrase translated into English closely resembles the expression, “There’s something about her/him.” The notion of an attractive aura surrounding a person conjures up images of an invisible force at work. For the most part, ordinary human scent passes relatively unnoticed since all humans are accustomed to their own smell. But this general observation cannot be applied to one exceptional example of the human species: Grenouille, having no odor of his own, indulges in the minutest shred of scent and can deconstruct a person’s “je ne sais quoi” into the building blocks of smell. Ironically, Grenouille lacks all personal odor; he is inadequate in an area to which he devotes himself wholeheartedly. In chapter 29, Grenouille discovers his odorlessness and realizes that he lacks an identity which, according to his eccentric disposition, equals personal scent. His subsequent endeavors to create a perfect perfume reflect his desperate attempt to create an identity for himself. In Süskind’s Perfume, Grenouille’s desire for an identity and subsequent self-destruction elucidate the futility in manufacturing a false sense of self.
The French describe a person’s intangible quality that charms the senses as a “Je ne sais quoi.” This phrase translated into English closely resembles the expression, “There’s something about her/him.” The notion of an attractive aura surrounding a person conjures up images of an invisible force at work. For the most part, ordinary human scent passes relatively unnoticed since all humans are accustomed to their own smell. But this general observation cannot be applied to one exceptional example of the human species: Grenouille, having no odor of his own, indulges in the minutest shred of scent and can deconstruct a person’s “je ne sais quoi” into the building blocks of smell. Ironically, Grenouille lacks all personal odor; he is inadequate in an area to which he devotes himself wholeheartedly. In chapter 29, Grenouille discovers his odorlessness and realizes that he lacks an identity which, according to his eccentric disposition, equals personal scent. His subsequent endeavors to create a perfect perfume reflect his desperate attempt to create an identity for himself. In Süskind’s Perfume, Grenouille’s desire for an identity and subsequent self-destruction elucidate the futility in manufacturing a false sense of self.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon: The Eva Bleich Connection
Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon is a trivia game based on the concept of the small world phenomenon and rests on the assumption that any actor can be linked through his or her film roles to actor Kevin Bacon within six steps.
The game requires a group of players to try to connect any film actor in history to Kevin Bacon as quickly as possible and in as few links as possible.
In my second year of law school I met a fellow student named Eva Bleich in Professor Burton Caine's Constitutional Law class (Civil Rights) at Temple University Law School in Philadelphia. She used to badger me. She said she was trying to turn me into a mensch. Whatever that meant!
Eva Bleich was a German-Jew who had been born in Fuerth, Germany -- near Nuremberg. Henry Kissinger was also from Fuerth. Her parents were concentration camp survivors. Her mother lived in Florida. Her father, who was deceased, was originally from Berlin. Law was a second career for her; she had been a nurse.
We later had other courses together. Civil Procedure taught by Gerald Tietz. I once mentioned to Eva Bleich that Tietz was the name of a department store in pre-war Berlin. Try working that fact into conversations with most people!
Eva Bleich and I were also in Professor Myers' Conflicts of Law class and Professor Reinstein's Employment Discrimination class. She wrote a paper for Professor Reinstein's course on comparative worth for female employees.
Eva Bleich lived in New Hope with her husband, who had a background in mathematics but practiced law at a Philadelphia firm. I wonder if Eva Bleich's husband ever heard of Georg Friedrich Riemann, the famous German mathematician.
Eva Bleich used to drive to Temple Law School in North Philadelphia. In my final year of law school I worked part time at the law firm of Sagot and Jennings at Penn Center in downtown Philadelphia; Eva Bleich would drive me downtown to work after class. I used to tell her that she had a Christian heart. She got the joke. Jesse Raben never got the joke. Maybe you have to be the child of Holocaust survivors to see the black humor in that. By the way, Claudio Grossman saw the black humor in things; but then, he was a survivor of a different sort, driven from his homeland of Chile.
Penn Center was a complex of modern buildings in the heart of Philadelphia. It was conceived by Edmond Bacon, the father of the actor Kevin Bacon. Edmund Norwood Bacon (May 2, 1910 – October 14, 2005) was a noted American urban planner, architect, educator and author. During his tenure as the Executive Director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission from 1949 to 1970, his visions shaped today's Philadelphia, the city in which he was born, to the extent that he is sometimes described as "The Father of Modern Philadelphia."
The game requires a group of players to try to connect any film actor in history to Kevin Bacon as quickly as possible and in as few links as possible.
In my second year of law school I met a fellow student named Eva Bleich in Professor Burton Caine's Constitutional Law class (Civil Rights) at Temple University Law School in Philadelphia. She used to badger me. She said she was trying to turn me into a mensch. Whatever that meant!
Eva Bleich was a German-Jew who had been born in Fuerth, Germany -- near Nuremberg. Henry Kissinger was also from Fuerth. Her parents were concentration camp survivors. Her mother lived in Florida. Her father, who was deceased, was originally from Berlin. Law was a second career for her; she had been a nurse.
We later had other courses together. Civil Procedure taught by Gerald Tietz. I once mentioned to Eva Bleich that Tietz was the name of a department store in pre-war Berlin. Try working that fact into conversations with most people!
Eva Bleich and I were also in Professor Myers' Conflicts of Law class and Professor Reinstein's Employment Discrimination class. She wrote a paper for Professor Reinstein's course on comparative worth for female employees.
Eva Bleich lived in New Hope with her husband, who had a background in mathematics but practiced law at a Philadelphia firm. I wonder if Eva Bleich's husband ever heard of Georg Friedrich Riemann, the famous German mathematician.
Eva Bleich used to drive to Temple Law School in North Philadelphia. In my final year of law school I worked part time at the law firm of Sagot and Jennings at Penn Center in downtown Philadelphia; Eva Bleich would drive me downtown to work after class. I used to tell her that she had a Christian heart. She got the joke. Jesse Raben never got the joke. Maybe you have to be the child of Holocaust survivors to see the black humor in that. By the way, Claudio Grossman saw the black humor in things; but then, he was a survivor of a different sort, driven from his homeland of Chile.
Penn Center was a complex of modern buildings in the heart of Philadelphia. It was conceived by Edmond Bacon, the father of the actor Kevin Bacon. Edmund Norwood Bacon (May 2, 1910 – October 14, 2005) was a noted American urban planner, architect, educator and author. During his tenure as the Executive Director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission from 1949 to 1970, his visions shaped today's Philadelphia, the city in which he was born, to the extent that he is sometimes described as "The Father of Modern Philadelphia."
You Could Say I Was Home Schooled
I can still remember the day my sister started high school. It was her first day in the ninth grade. It would have been my first day in the third grade. My sister had had her first French class. She was 13 years old and I was 7. It was September 1961. She said: "Quelles couleurs sont les arbres?" Then she taught me to say: "Les arbres sont verts."
Then, complaining about the late summer heat, my sister kept repeating at the dinner table: "Quel chaleurs!"
I wonder if Murray had these problems with his older brother, Fred? I doubt it.
For the chapter: "The Perils of Having an Older Sister."
When I started junior high school, foreign language study was required. I took French. In November 1965 my mother attended the parent-teacher conference and met with, among others, my French teacher, Mr. Jack John Morris. Mr. Morris praised my French accent. "Gary's French accent is superb. Is there somebody in your family who speaks French?" That would be my sister, Edith Piaf!
Then, complaining about the late summer heat, my sister kept repeating at the dinner table: "Quel chaleurs!"
I wonder if Murray had these problems with his older brother, Fred? I doubt it.
For the chapter: "The Perils of Having an Older Sister."
When I started junior high school, foreign language study was required. I took French. In November 1965 my mother attended the parent-teacher conference and met with, among others, my French teacher, Mr. Jack John Morris. Mr. Morris praised my French accent. "Gary's French accent is superb. Is there somebody in your family who speaks French?" That would be my sister, Edith Piaf!
Monday, September 28, 2009
Thoughts of a Half-Jew on Yom Kippur
My first day of college was Monday September 27, 1971, obviously a day I will never forget. I attended Penn State and graduated in May 1975. The first two years I attended classes at the Abington Campus, an extension facility located in the Philadelphia suburbs. I transferred to the main campus at University Park, Pennsylvania at the beginning of my third year, in 1973.
September 27, 1971 was a beautiful, warm late summer day. My first class started at 2:00 in the afternoon. My class schedule allowed me to continue my full-time summer job at the Franklin Institute in downtown Philadelphia into the school year. I worked that morning, and left for class at about 12:30 in the afternoon, arriving at the Abington campus just before 2:00 PM. My first class was introductory philosophy with G. Fred Rieman -- ironically, Georg Friedrich Riemann was the name of a famous German mathematician. In fact, at the end of the term I was talking to Dr. Rieman after class and he said he started his career teaching math. I suppose it's like a biology teacher named Charles Darwin.
In any event, I already knew two people in the class: Bill Devuono and Gloria Goldsmith. Bill Devuono was in my high school class at Central High School in Philadelphia (230th class). We had been in the same social studies class in the 12th grade, taught by Jacob Finkelstein (Jake Wabbit, as he was less than affectionately known). Bill DeVuono was a friendly chappy. Central High School was an all-boys school in those days, by the way. Gloria Goldsmith and I were in the same 7th and 8th grade classes at Wagner Junior High School. I introduced myself to Gloria a few days after the beginning of the term at Penn State. She remembered me from junior high.
I can still remember what we talked about that first day of class in philosophy. The subject was "duty and responsibility." We discussed the Kitty Genovese case, the story of the young woman who was stabbed to death in the courtyard of her apartment building in New York City, while her neighbors stood by in their apartments and failed to call the police. It was a crime that became a metaphor. Did the neighbors have a moral duty to call the police? Strange that I can remember the subject matter of the first day of class.
The next class, after philosophy, was introductory English with Dr. Smith. I vaguely recall that Dr. Smith had a southern accent. That was not a very memorable class. Dr. Smith was not a memorable teacher.
In any event, that term I worked from 8:30 AM to 12:30 PM at the Franklin Institute on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I had French class, which took up the whole days; there were two classes (one in the morning and one in the afternoon), with a French lab sandwiched in (can I say that on Yom Kippur?). The teacher was Irma Jean Smith, from Kalamazoo, Michigan. She was working on her Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. The subject of her thesis was Jean Cocteau. She lived not far from campus, in Abington, and she spent her summers in Paris, working on her thesis. She smoked Marlboros. I'll never forget her lighting up a cigarette during the first class on September 28. I had never seen a teacher smoke in class before. I can remember the ducks quacking in the duck pond on campus during that French class. Am I starting to sound like Marcel Proust? Marcel and his madeleines -- can I mention THAT on Yom Kippur? Marcel Proust was half-Jewish; did you know that?
That reminds me of something. One day in French class, the sound of a Chopin piece entered the classroom; Chopin's piano pieces are like novels condensed into a sigh, as Schoenberg himself described this intense and concentrated music. Someone was playing a phonograph recording of Chopin in a nearby classroom. Miss Smith said, "At least they could play a French composer!" At that moment I thought, "Chopin's father was French" -- but being a shy, insecure student, I said nothing. By the way, on July 24, 1933, in the synagogue of rue Copernic in Paris, Arnold Schoenberg, who had converted to Christianity years earlier, returned to the Jewish faith. But that's neither here nor there.
Course work at Penn State was concentrated in those years. Penn State was on a 3-term, 10-week per term school year in those days. After I graduated college in 1975 Penn State switched to the conventional, 2-semester, 15-week school year.
By the way, September 27 is also Sheryl Dyner's birthday. She turned 56 this year. Sheryl Dyner was a biology major at Penn State who graduated in May 1975, like me. In a big coincidence (I know, Jerry Seinfeld would say there are no "big coincidences" -- a coincidence is a coincidence) Sheryl Dyner started working at the Franklin Institute after she graduated Penn State, in 1975. She worked for Irene Jacobs. But that's another story.
September 27, 1971 was a beautiful, warm late summer day. My first class started at 2:00 in the afternoon. My class schedule allowed me to continue my full-time summer job at the Franklin Institute in downtown Philadelphia into the school year. I worked that morning, and left for class at about 12:30 in the afternoon, arriving at the Abington campus just before 2:00 PM. My first class was introductory philosophy with G. Fred Rieman -- ironically, Georg Friedrich Riemann was the name of a famous German mathematician. In fact, at the end of the term I was talking to Dr. Rieman after class and he said he started his career teaching math. I suppose it's like a biology teacher named Charles Darwin.
In any event, I already knew two people in the class: Bill Devuono and Gloria Goldsmith. Bill Devuono was in my high school class at Central High School in Philadelphia (230th class). We had been in the same social studies class in the 12th grade, taught by Jacob Finkelstein (Jake Wabbit, as he was less than affectionately known). Bill DeVuono was a friendly chappy. Central High School was an all-boys school in those days, by the way. Gloria Goldsmith and I were in the same 7th and 8th grade classes at Wagner Junior High School. I introduced myself to Gloria a few days after the beginning of the term at Penn State. She remembered me from junior high.
I can still remember what we talked about that first day of class in philosophy. The subject was "duty and responsibility." We discussed the Kitty Genovese case, the story of the young woman who was stabbed to death in the courtyard of her apartment building in New York City, while her neighbors stood by in their apartments and failed to call the police. It was a crime that became a metaphor. Did the neighbors have a moral duty to call the police? Strange that I can remember the subject matter of the first day of class.
The next class, after philosophy, was introductory English with Dr. Smith. I vaguely recall that Dr. Smith had a southern accent. That was not a very memorable class. Dr. Smith was not a memorable teacher.
In any event, that term I worked from 8:30 AM to 12:30 PM at the Franklin Institute on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I had French class, which took up the whole days; there were two classes (one in the morning and one in the afternoon), with a French lab sandwiched in (can I say that on Yom Kippur?). The teacher was Irma Jean Smith, from Kalamazoo, Michigan. She was working on her Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. The subject of her thesis was Jean Cocteau. She lived not far from campus, in Abington, and she spent her summers in Paris, working on her thesis. She smoked Marlboros. I'll never forget her lighting up a cigarette during the first class on September 28. I had never seen a teacher smoke in class before. I can remember the ducks quacking in the duck pond on campus during that French class. Am I starting to sound like Marcel Proust? Marcel and his madeleines -- can I mention THAT on Yom Kippur? Marcel Proust was half-Jewish; did you know that?
That reminds me of something. One day in French class, the sound of a Chopin piece entered the classroom; Chopin's piano pieces are like novels condensed into a sigh, as Schoenberg himself described this intense and concentrated music. Someone was playing a phonograph recording of Chopin in a nearby classroom. Miss Smith said, "At least they could play a French composer!" At that moment I thought, "Chopin's father was French" -- but being a shy, insecure student, I said nothing. By the way, on July 24, 1933, in the synagogue of rue Copernic in Paris, Arnold Schoenberg, who had converted to Christianity years earlier, returned to the Jewish faith. But that's neither here nor there.
Course work at Penn State was concentrated in those years. Penn State was on a 3-term, 10-week per term school year in those days. After I graduated college in 1975 Penn State switched to the conventional, 2-semester, 15-week school year.
By the way, September 27 is also Sheryl Dyner's birthday. She turned 56 this year. Sheryl Dyner was a biology major at Penn State who graduated in May 1975, like me. In a big coincidence (I know, Jerry Seinfeld would say there are no "big coincidences" -- a coincidence is a coincidence) Sheryl Dyner started working at the Franklin Institute after she graduated Penn State, in 1975. She worked for Irene Jacobs. But that's another story.
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