Behind the Green Door
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 1 The possibilities for elucidating the nature of humanity through affect excite and encourage me. On the simplest level, it reassures my sense of the aesthetic to consider it as truth that there is more on heaven and earth than that which can be explained by any social or biological determinism. Yet, only belatedly have I considered the way I approach the concept of affect. Is the critical eye, the dispassionate, vivisecting spectrometer the right tool to apply to the idea of feeling? The question throws into light not simply the academic attitude toward the subject, but my own ingrained position, which ever seeks the removed stance. I ask myself, is there a cost in maintaining this distance? Is there a possibility of change? And, is there a benefit to such change?
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 1 Reading Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?, I encounter a story in which the author is deeply involved in a committed exploration of herself, an effort that really can only be lauded. Everyone from Plato to Ben Franklin to the oracle in The Matrix advises: know theyself. While the project might not be assailable, the angle Bechdel chooses is one that is immediately antagonistic to my sensibilities in that it validates the methods of psychoanalysis. Bechdel begins with dream interpretation, incorporates the talking cure, and demonstrates how her investigation of Freud, Jung, and Winnicott informs her understanding. The historical presence of psychiatry parallels her own historical presence within the work (the ground of the narrative), tying the investigation of one directly to the other and thereby fueling a sense of alienation in me, the reader.
¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 1 In a phrase, my impressions of psychiatry are bad. For instance, Erich Fromm, a post-Freudian contemporary of Winnicott, takes time in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973) to justify his extended diagnosis of Hitler as narcissist and necrophiliac. He states that the way that Hitler’s nose crinkles when he smiles looks like someone smelling something bad, an indication of his orientation toward the fecal, the fetid. How is anyone to take such a thing seriously?
- ¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0
- Hitler was dead and gone when Fromm wrote this, and a retrospective diagnosis has little chance of a correlative cure.
- Basing data on a “feeling” he gets from looking at a photo of a person might be valid in the context of examining affect (like the one I am engaged in), but Fromm does nothing to foreground this as anything but unassailable fact.
- Crinkley Nose = Genocide?
¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0 Simply put, this example establishes presumptions for a scientific basis for data. I cannot put faith in such presumptions, and this results in a similar lack of faith in possible predictable results.
¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 0 My disdain for psychiatry, then, flavored my entire engagement with Bechdel. However, it was not until after the class engagement with Are You My Mother? had completed that a casual reflective moment gave me pause. Walking to class the afternoon following discussing Bechdel, her engagement with the process of therapy floated through my mind. I was frowning judgmentally, considering the placement of formal therapy as an indicator of privileged position, perhaps not indicative of a certain social class, but clearly exclusionary of others.
¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 0 Seemingly out of nowhere, this alien thought intruded itself into the periphery of my internal discourse. It said: You’ve been to therapy.
¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 0 I almost swept the thought aside, but then, I realized that it reflected a literal reality, and one that probably should have been pertinent in my thoughts regarding this text. Secondly, it occurred to me that at no time while reading Bechdel had I once thought of the three times in my life when I have seen therapists in an effort to overcome personal tensions. Perhaps six months out of my life have been spent under the guidance of a therapist. How had I ignored this private history, and how had it utterly failed in forging a personal connection to the efforts of Alison Bechdel?
¶ 9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 0 To a certain extent, I can justify discounting the relevance of my own experience. Bechdel’s search for self-enlightenment bears little resemblance to my clutching at a safety valve in order to maintain function. Hers is a story with a much wider character arc than mine, a better subject for full-length fiction, while the history that connects with my therapy might be short-story worthy, at the best. Bechdel comes to a resolution, a factual breakthrough in her existence which offers fresh context on her issues with herself and with her mother. My encounters with therapy ended when I felt that I had reached a survivable plateau, the moment that my outlay of cash could no longer be justified in return for superfluous sessions aimed merely at making me feel better. Bechdel recites an epic, while I recollect something too mundane for the backstory of an Abilfy commercial.
¶ 10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 0 Justifying how I might dissociate my experience and hers, however, does not justify why I did not even allow myself the opportunity to perform this distancing. Somehow, once I had brought it to my own attention, it seemed utterly unlikely that I should have read through an entire work dealing with a woman’s experience in therapy and never acknowledge my own. When I read Wendell Berry, I never fail to think of my own time in the woods of northern Florida, on the Santee River of South Carolina, caught by blackberry briars, eating wild tangerines, swimming the wide dark water and dreading the weeds close to shore, wet fingernails scratching at my legs as I stretch to stand and climb out, up the bank. When I read In Memoriam, don’t I always think of the first friend I ever lost and hear the mewing notes of Vaughan’s “Little Wing” that I played over and over, feeling my sadness compacted into increments of six minutes and forty-nine seconds, repeated for weeks? Except for pure carelessness or early onset dementia, how can I excuse such a superficial involvement in Bechdel’s text?
¶ 11 Leave a comment on paragraph 11 0 Bechdel begins with a dream and, waking, extrapolates meaning from it. The dread that the daily life that I was experiencing was a dream was what lead me to accept the idea of meeting my first therapist. Ironically, my perspective from the present offers a sense about that time with very much the same shading; from the now, the life of my younger self seems as much like a remembered dream as reality. Perhaps I might say that I am waking now and ready to interpret that life-dream. It is closer to the truth that the idea that it is all a dream no longer provokes the wrenching anxiety that it once did, so that the truth of my position, waking or not, has become irrelevant to me. I might just as well interpret the dream from another dream, and justify it in Jungian terms that Allison Bechdel might appreciate, as one persona examining the mask of a self that no longer matches the mask I now wear.
¶ 12 Leave a comment on paragraph 12 1 Which brings me back to psychoanalysis and my rabid dislike for the practice, where two fall-back explanations suggest themselves. As an American, when I look to the source of a problem, I must allow at least a moment for the standard maxim: follow the money. As a male imbricated within the residual patriarchy of society, I should also allow for the classic: cherchez la femme. Both have something to say about my revulsion, directly and indirectly. Success is hardly success in the American mythos if it is success predicated upon something other than the efforts of an individual. The meme barrage of the right of just a few years ago, declaring that they did, in fact, “build that” testifies to the impassioned survival of this viewpoint. In that light, admitting the need for help in therapy was tantamount to admitting nothing short of failure for all time. More than that, however, success in that American scheme centers on the ability of the individual to transfigure the socio-politico-economic environment in accord with their will. Allowing “another” will to shadow the will of that individual threatens to change it, to become the subject which is changed rather than being the divine force of change itself. To one committed to the concept of the romantic individualist, submitting to being changed is utterly horrifying. Was this my view? When I was sixteen, I got glasses for the first time, and refused to wear them for the next three years. This was not from physical vanity, but from my belief that the optometrist had overstepped himself in dictating how I should see the world. You might imagine how much less willing I was to allow that another might influence my feelings about how I saw the world.
¶ 13 Leave a comment on paragraph 13 0 Frankly, I was not prepared for the warm memory-foam cocoon that comprises most therapy, the easy, comfortable, comforting support of others validating and soothing as a necessary step towards nudging change. It surprised me, and while I could see its addictive qualities, that made me no less suspicious of its ultimate goal, infringing upon my sense of self. Given this conservative commitment to the fossilization of my soul, one might suspect a certain level of application of my resistance to change to also be demonstrable in my personal relationships as well. Yet, when I look for the woman, I find a different story.
¶ 14 Leave a comment on paragraph 14 0 I had been in love for years, had enjoyed an almost exclusively positive relationship with a woman, one which ended amicably, if sadly, as our goals and interests diverged. It was she that gave me her favorite book, The Art of Loving, by Erich Fromm that introduced me to the psychiatric giant. For her, I was willing to set aside prejudices against medicine and consider as objectively as I could the seemingly rational precepts of that book about the mature and deliberate approach to building relationships with others.
¶ 15 Leave a comment on paragraph 15 0 It is a very sad thing to say, but I think I suffer more self-recrimination for allowing that lapse in my armor than many of the terrible things I have said and done through my life.
¶ 16 Leave a comment on paragraph 16 0 It is also very sad to say that it is my contention at this point that this is the source to which I have traced my defensive barrier against the subject of psychoanalysis and the subject of therapy within Are You My Mother?
¶ 17 Leave a comment on paragraph 17 1 In turning the mood of this slightly less crazy (slightly) and slightly more positive, I return to the questions of change that I posited at the beginning. I am, above all, really rather comfortable with myself, after all these years. Change in myself is not an issue of enormous importance – I no longer worry about the dissolution of some lofty sense of integrity. What is important is allowing myself full access to my feelings in regard to the texts that I consider. It is no more helpful to me to either willfully obscure my feelings, as I did in my relationship (in which I might have argued that Fromm’s title promised one thing while the text delivered another, denying the art of interaction and making it into mechanics) than it is to subconsciously obscure them when the weight of guilt and pain suggests that in doing so, I can spare myself. I conclude that the critical eye will be my central tool, but it can only be of real service if I allow myself to see what might very well make me feel.
I find your writing in this essay to be both honest and personal. It can be hard (at least it is for me) to think about why I react to some things the way I do, and harder still to acknowledge when they show things about me that I didn’t think I was. The way you look at the issue of therapy in light of your own experiences and your reaction to Bechdel seems to me to be critical and analytic, but also affective and understanding.
I kinda understand some of your reservations about Bechdel – I also empathize with what she’s trying to do (and does), but like you my own experiences has me skeptical in places where her experiences didn’t match my own. That section out of Fromm’s book seems a little ishy to me as well – I’m not sure how seriously that kind of “fact” can be taken. Maybe Fromm was metagaming, starting with the answer clear in retrospect and pre-justifying it on the body, finding the photographic ‘proof’ after the fact. Or something. Didn’t phrenology (the “science” of telling personality by the physical characteristics, especially the head) fall way, way out of favor?
I can follow your reasoning as to why your own experiences do not mirror Bechdel’s, but also the consternation you write in realizing the question didn’t occur to you until later. I have done the same thing – just because the answer is ‘no’, doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have thought to ask the question. finding my motives can be hidden from myself is always disconcerting.
The way you talk about your younger self and the way you’ve changed is powerful. when you’re writing about how it seems dreamlike, you highlight how different you are now than what you were. On the other hand, your ability to accept yourself for what you are, and accept change highlights (ironically) your personal sense of integrity. Maybe its just me, but being confident enough to allow myself to change means that I know that I will still be me afterwards (contradictory, but real). And this kind of integration shows in your resolution to balance the critical eye and the ability to feel rather than discarding one for the other.