My e-mail to Andrew Sullivan is below. (Here’s the published version, and the original post to which I responded.)

On Apr 6, 2011, at 3:08 AM, Douglas Faneuil wrote:

Oh no Andrew! You’ve got to temper that clip from The Royal Tenenbaums with a little bit of wisdom. To leave it hanging it the air like that, barely acknowledging its grisly appeal… argh!

Regardless of what you think of that movie (imho it’s an hyperstylized character drama in search of character) that scene is just God-awful. It romanticizes and even glamorizes suicide as a kind of artful shrug, while completely burying any consideration of its consequences.

I know, I know. Many of your readers will shout back at me, “It’s art!” I’m a former artist myself, and a staunch free speech advocate. I wouldn’t dare ask you to take the clip down. But we have to realize as a group, whether society at large or readers of The Dish, that speaking about and depicting suicide carelessly, without consideration for those who are prone to it, is a costly practice.

Suicide Contagion, or the emulation of suicidal acts, can be triggered by actual suicides as well as fictionalized ones. Most of us will watch that movie clip and move on. But those harboring thoughts of dying, or God forbid fantasies of dying, may very well find something more meaningful there – and hang onto it.

I know we’ve got to pick our battles, and I don’t mean to be a fanatic, but suicide rates are staggering. One of the reasons why is our reluctance to face its many harsh realities – and instead see it as a kind of private, solemn, and even beautiful choice.

Trust me as someone who knows: suicide is none of those things. It’s not private because it can’t be contained – it’s not the end of suffering; it’s the proliferation of suffering. It’s not solemn because most, if not all of the time, it’s a literal mad scramble. We’d like to dignify suicides with forethought and reason. It’s so much easier to digest, say, Virginia Woolf’s suicide if we allow her capability and agency. But it can’t have been as pretty as Nicole Kidman played it. (The director of ‘The Hours’ built a railing beneath the water’s surface so Kidman would appear more sure-footed going under.) Finally, there is no beauty in it. Suicide is the wreckage of beauty. When we buried my sister, only 27 at the time, a vivacious, fun-loving beauty with a laugh you could hear a mile away, I was beside myself with how decrepit she looked. The 20 hours she took to die added 20 brutally hard years to her face.

Say what you will of that scene in The Royal Tenenbaums. Some among us deserve- no, need more.

In this case, though, form obviously trumps content. The beauty of this campaign is that it’s transformative. The literal message implies a static present, but the act of reaching out, of making these videos, itself shatters that illusion.

These videos prove that people have been moved already. They allow us to see a changing landscape in bloom. The point isn’t really that things will get better; it’s that – look! – they are getting better…

And that sharing our pain makes all the difference.

Bless you, Dan Savage.

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[This is a gorgeous essay. I hate to excerpt it at all. -Ed.]

More on Andrew Solomon

I’m a fan of Freud. Despite a lot of funny ideas, his investment in self-awareness – and his method of attaining it, free association – makes him a crucial figure in the enlightenment of our species. Nonetheless, we live in dark times. I’m not a pessimist about nature, but I don’t believe in the progressive arc of history. As Freud himself asserts, human beings have to work to improve themselves. I take this to be true writ large. Without a vast, shared commitment to better our world, we will doom ourselves to horrors old and new. And a sentiment of shared commitment seems to be waning.

As always, though, bad news spells opportunity. In times of darkness, great minds usually arise to challenge the status quo; Freud himself is an example of this. Surprisingly, then, Freud’s philosophy is at the heart of the most scathing critique of modern society I have seen in some time: Adam Curtis’ The Century of the Self.

Curtis doesn’t take issue with Freud’s ideas directly. He attacks them for their consequences. If you have any interest in Freud whatsoever, you MUST watch this documentary. Here is Curtis in his own words:

I don’t say there was a conspiracy but that consumerism had an ideology just as much as fascism or communism did. It was another way of managing the masses in an age of mass democracy. People like [Edward] Bernays were the first architects of that. And the model they used was fundamentally the pessimistic Freudian view that we are just emotional, irrational creatures and nothing more…

Bernays [Freud's nephew] provided the ideas that were used by the US government, big business, and the CIA to develop techniques to manage and control the minds of the American people. But this was not a cynical exercise in manipulation. Those in power believed that the only way to make democracy work and create a stable society was to repress the savage barbarism that the psychoanalysts told them lurked just under the surface of normal American life…

What happened was that a group of psychoanalysts took what Bernays had begun and invented a whole range of techniques to get inside and manage the unconscious mind of the consumer. By the early 50s the ideas of psychoanalysis had penetrated deep into American life. The psychoanalysts themselves became rich and powerful and had many famous politicians, writers and show business celebrities as patients. And, as their ideas took hold, a new elite began to emerge — in politics, social planning, and the business world. What linked them was the assumption that the masses were fundamentally irrational. The way to manage a free market democracy, like America, was to use their psychological understanding to control this irrationality in the interests of everyone.

This may sound a bit marxist for your tastes, with its powerful elite controlling the minds of many. But Curtis is really the opposite of a conspiracy theorist – he’s interested in the consequences of good intentions. With an eye and ear for breathtaking historical detail, he illustrates how Freud’s followers undermine the notion of public good.

It’s safe to assume Freud would be horrified by Curtis’ picture. Freud meant to demystify the unconscious, as a way of freeing us from pain and misery. But his savviest disciples proved to be master manipulators. More shillers than healers, they used Freud’s theories to toy with the unconscious instead.

Curtis’ history is beyond shocking, if only because none of it is secret. He weaves together a grand narrative that seems utterly obvious and yet painfully fresh. Yes, it is true: Freud is the great uncle of public relations, the grandaddy of consumer culture. Watch The Century of the Self and you’ll be convinced.

Part One: Happiness Machines

Part Two: The Engineering of Consent

Part Three: There Is a Policeman Inside All Our Heads He Must Be Destroyed

Part Four: Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering

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[A fun read on the benefits of mental unrest. When hypomania looks like an asset, can we call it a "disorder"? (After all, it's in the DSM-IV.) This question is a bit of a red herring; it poses a dichotomy where none exists (i.e., you're either sick or you're not). The trickier and truer question is, if illness has its benefits then how should we treat it? Hopefully no one would want to "cure" a successful entrepreneur like Seth – except, perhaps, his future wife and family. According to the article, he sleeps at the office and works every waking hour. He doesn't even bother with friends.

This may work for him now, but will it always? That's up to him, I suppose. But a determination to avoid hypomania's drawbacks, in this case anyway, can be seen as a drawback itself. It's understandable why Seth doesn't pursue relationships – he sounds terrible at them. But life demands a certain kind of mental flexibility. It's nigh impossible to avoid change, even in the realm of our own desires.

I hope I don't sound like I'm pathologizing Seth. Barring the violently ill, treatment only belongs to those who seek it. What I'm advocating for, really, is a more fluid concept of "mental illness" in the first place. Illness needn't be a burden or an albatross. Often, as in Seth's case, we may prefer to think of it as a "condition" instead. However we classify them, though, states like hypomania should be recognized as such. Hypomania may be a gift to Seth right now, but – like all gifts – it may come to feel like a curse in other arenas. Such is the nature of reality itself, not just mental illness. -Ed.]

photo: Man & Wifey

I mention this in light of an ongoing debate: what is the best approach to mental illness?  This question has plenty of stock answers – too many, perhaps. When we boil down a complex issue to just two sides, it helps us to digest subsequent arguments. Making a simplified choice at the start of a debate (pro or con?) gives us a footing for grey area. But human beings don’t like grey area right off the bat.

Unfortunately, mental illness is grey area. In its most extreme forms it may not be – everyone agrees that John Hinckley was a sick man – but extreme forms of illness are just that; they’re rare. Most of the time, mental disorder expresses itself within a vast spectrum of behaviors that we can and do normalize. Sadness, emptiness, anxiety, fear, compulsion: these aren’t just symptoms.

The inherent “greyness” of illness makes it a difficult topic. We can reduce it to black and white, but that never does justice to our cause. Take, for example, this recent bit of news:

The level of Americans’ prejudice and discrimination toward people with serious mental illness or substance abuse problems didn’t change over 10 years, a new study has found… [Sociologist Bernice Pescosolido] and her colleagues compared the attitudes of people in 1996 and 2006. During this period, there was a major push to make Americans more aware of the genetic and medical explanations for conditions such as depression, schizophrenia and substance abuse… People who believed that mental illness and substance abuse had neurobiological causes were more likely to be in favor of providing treatment. But these people were no less likely to stigmatize patients with mental illness or substance abuse problems. [my emphasis]

First of all, this is progress. If more people support treatment, that’s a huge plus. Nonetheless, these researchers sound disappointed: “It’s time to stand back and rethink our approach,” said Pescosolido.

Really, guys? Obviously doctors are going to take a medical approach. But I’m a bit astonished that doctors, of all people – the ones who have the most direct experience with illness in all its various forms – think that purely medical explanations are going to satisfy us. Yes, it is absolutely crucial for people to understand illness as a medical problem. As I’ve written in the past, classifying something as a “mental illness” is just a way of acknowledging that treatment exists. But reducing these woes to brain chemistry in order to make illness more approachable?  It’s almost comic. I’m not suggesting that brain chemistry is too complicated for the average person (the fundamentals are easy to grasp, actually). It’s deeper than that. No one wants to think of their emotional life, no matter how unbalanced, as chemical soup.

First of all, this robs us of agency; it suggests a lack of free will. Second of all, it’s an obvious over-simplification. It’s not a distillation of the issue; it’s reductionist. (From a recent post: “It is time… to wonder deeply in and about our gifts, rather than reduce ourselves to primitive urges and selfish genes.”)  Everyone feels in their bones the reach of illness, that illness itself is wrapped up with fundamental things. Even if mental disorder is “just” errant neurons, we know from experience that our psychological development is a feedback loop – that our thoughts, feelings and actions inform our future selves (i.e., our neuronal development). By definition, sufferers can’t control their illness, but invariably they will make decisions that affect its course.

What does this have to do with stigma?  Everything. The premise of my efforts here and elsewhere is that stigma makes illness more difficult to bear – and that whatever exacerbates mental illness is actually part of it. Mental illness is simply too amorphous, too expansive and too rich to reduce to molecular biology alone. People may not articulate this in my way, but this argument is at the heart of a lot blowback against a medicalized view of mental suffering. People do believe, and they want to believe, that when it comes to mental illness, everything matters – not just science.

I’m inclined to agree. Part of my discussion with the students this summer included a brief lesson in neurology, showing them how SSRIs actually work in the brain. This is an essential piece of my attack on stigma, but it’s just a piece. I spent much more time talking about the stigma itself: how it arises, why it’s damaging, and how to combat it. I also talked to them about life in general, and in particular feelings of failure and/or hopelessness: how to recognize them, how to address them, and why they’re okay – why they’re essentially, actually, to a life well-lived. This can be abstract stuff. Brain chemistry is more concrete. But if we don’t acknowledge that our attitudes matter, then why change them?

“And yet it seems to me that the process itself, in its very commitment to interiority — its attempt to ferret out prime causes and pivotal events from the psychic rubble of the past and the unwieldy conflicts of the present — can be intriguing enough to stand in as its own reward.”

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[This is a doozy of an article: long-winded, self-involved, not entirely pleasant to read. The obligatory horror stories of pathologically insensitive therapists make me cringe; I believe them but feel they're sensationalized and unbalanced. With the utmost sympathy, Daphne Merkin does seem like a person destined for therapy. I don't mean this as an insult – I wouldn't be featuring this article if I did. (I wouldn't be here if I did!) Merkin's struggles are real, and she's honest about them. As a result, she doesn't offer up the most likable self-portrait. I don't know if that's her objective, but in any case she bravely illustrates a core tenant of therapy: we evade the truth of ourselves at extremely high cost. If you read this article, read it with an open mind. Daphne Merkin may not be "your kind of person," but the sympathy that she feels for herself in the face of obviously frustrating emotions is, I'm sure, a consequence of her life in therapy – a consequence and a great accomplishment. -Ed.]

Here’s a passage from her scathing critique of Freud, whom she obviously admires yet nonetheless finds hyped (bear with me):

If there is one thing that Freud asserts consistently… it is just this–that the mind is not to be trusted. Freud’s self is encapsulated, engrossed by an interior drama of which it cannot be consciously aware–unless instructed in self-awareness by means of psychoanalysis. That is to say, the center of emotional experience, the source of motive and inhibition, is inaccessible to the self as experience [my emphasis]…

If this conclusion was shocking to Jung, it is, nevertheless, a Freudian understanding of a state of things very widely attested to, an understanding that saw a painfully achieved equilibrium [Freud's civilization and its discontents] where others saw decline and dissolution [the Nazi's Jewish problem], that saw in unrest the inescapable fate that is individual and collective human nature [again, Freud's view] rather than corruption, evil, and subversion, which were taken to be alien or Jewish in their sources.

Why a vision of man and society so specific to an extraordinary historical circumstance should have been universalized as for many years it was is an interesting question… Considered aright, his metapsychology might be seen as the testimony of a singular observer to the emotional stresses of life in a fracturing civilization. It might be seen as a gloss on the fact that grand theories of human nature, however magisterial, can be based only on encounters with the world in circumstances that are always exceptional because the factors in play are always too novel, numerous, and volatile to permit generalization.

…Freud tried to bring the assumptions of rationalism to bear on the myths and frenzies that were carrying Europe toward catastrophe. In the event, he brought to bear not reason but rationalization, treating the Europe of his time as timeless and normative [my emphasis], and therefore, in its fractious way, stable. Notably, he attempted to redefine the unconscious, a concept then broadly associated with primitive racial and national identity, making it instead a force in a universal yet radically interior dynamic of self. Granting the perils of delusion, fear, denial, and all the other excesses to which the mind is prone, this severely narrow construction of the mind, suspicious of every impulse and motive that does not seem to express the few but potent urges of the primitive self, bear the mark of its time. Yet… it continues to hold its place among the great, sad, epochal insights that we say have made us modern.

Uhm, whoa. I’m not going to try and unpack this whole passage. While I find it pretty convincing (more on that in a moment), I do think there are some holes in her argument. First of all, Freud didn’t conceive of everyone as a patient. Yes, he devised a universal theory of unconscious conflict; and yes, he broadened the scope of psychiatric treatment immensely. Nonetheless, I don’t think Freud insisted that man “cannot be consciously aware” of himself without psychoanalysis. After all, how would Freud have arisen if that were true? Freud’s genius, and his lasting contribution, is his method, free association. His narratives of psychological conflict (the Oedipal conflict, penis envy) may go in and out of style, but folks will be sitting on couches forevermore.

Freud may seem obsessed with the negative influence of the unconscious mind. But first and foremost he was a doctor, and not in the academic sense. He was treating disease (or pain at least). Should it be so shocking that he sees conflict everywhere? That he is skeptical of self-treatment? Certainly his time and culture influenced his thinking – but his roster of subjects (i.e., patients in distress) may have influenced him just as much. Freud studied hysterics, not Buddhist monks.

My other gripe with Robinson’s passage is her suggestion that Freud’s time, and by extension any time, is utterly unique. Specifically, she seems miffed that Freud commands so much respect these days. But doesn’t it make sense that we should pay such close attention to Freud? If one agrees with Robinson, as I do, that Freud’s theories attempt to extrapolate from from a particular time and place – that they seek to explain and contain the anxieties surrounding the “myths and frenzies that were carrying Europe toward catastrophe” – then wouldn’t we be wise to listen to him intently? The world agrees: the horrors of WWII are too horrifying to repeat. Is it so odd that we’ve lionized Freud under these circumstances? Perhaps his perspective is tainted, but Freud’s relevance may persist for this very reason. In other words, the horrors of WWII have tainted us. How could we not fear our worst tendencies after Naziism? To undermine Freud’s theories as the “testimony of a singular observer” indicates, in my mind, a lack of shared anxiety with Freud, a lack of anxiety about our own capabilities. Like it or not, this anxiety may be the defining feature of modern life – and with good reason. We have proven ourselves capable of unimaginable cruelty and annihilation. Of course each moment in time is unique, but some are more unique than others; or as Mark Twain put it: “All generalizations are false, including this one.”

*     *     *
Having said all that, Marilynne Robinson’s mission feels plenty apt, and I’m wholly on board with her. In short, she wants to lift us up. “I believe it is only prudent to make a very high estimate of human nature,” she writes, “first of all in order to contain the worst impulses of human nature, and then to liberate its best impulses.” Our contemporary urge to commemorate the Holocaust, and our appreciation of Freud, dawns from a desire to curb our worst impulses, to be sure. Robinson, however, is far more focused on liberating our best impulses. In broad terms, she takes issue with what she calls “parascientific” literature, a “genre of social or political theory or anthropology” that, “using the science of its moment” and with a “characteristic certainty,” reduces human nature to a set of primordial first principles and, from there, claims to settle life’s deepest questions. (Why is blood thicker than water? Genes. Why am I depressed? A chemical imbalance.)

Scientists are inclined to conquer mystery, not revel in it; the pleasure, for them, comes in finding things out (to borrow from Richard Feynman’s famous title). Parascientific arguments go beyond this. They debase alternative modes of inquiry, especially those with an inward, subjective bent. (Ironically, Freud gets plenty of flack for his subjective methods.) Robinson finds these arguments both grandiose and soul-deadening.

I’m inclined to agree. Science in the modern era argues for itself alone; it not only promotes its own findings – it promotes those findings as Truth. But Robinson reminds us how real science actually upends such confidence:

These phenomena [the discoveries of dark matter and energy] demonstrate, as physics and cosmology tend to do, that the strangeness of reality consistently exceeds the expectations of science, and that the assumptions of science, however tried and rational, are very inclined to encourage false expectations. As a notable example, no one expected to find that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, and that the rate of its acceleration is accelerating. It is a tribute to the brilliance of science that we know such things. And it is also an illustration of the fact that science… is not a final statement about reality but a highly fruitful mode of inquiry into it.

Robinson wants us to abandon our fetish for final statements, in order to reacquaint ourselves with inward contemplation – and ultimately “encourage an imagination of humankind large enough to acknowledge some small fragment of the mystery we are.” She blames the language of modern science, more than our epochal advancements in cruelty and suffering, for a lack of soul-searching and wonder over the miracle of our own being. Whichever the culprit, I relate to her yearning.

The 20th century, more than all others combined, reflects our staggering capacities for good and evil. Like a small boy who accidentally injures his father, the realization of our own power has scared us, and scarred us, deeply. Perhaps Freud’s genius was more attuned to our time than his own. His grand project – “turning hysterical misery into common unhappiness,” in his words – can be read as a kind of survival manual for a traumatized planet. Absence of Mind strikes me as an early step beyond this trauma, into a richer appraisal of who we are.

Human existence is an impossible mystery. “Something terrible and glorious befell us,” Robinson writes. It is time, she suggests, to wonder deeply in and about our gifts, rather than reduce ourselves to primitive urges and selfish genes. After all, what stops us from annihilating ourselves is exactly the opposite of the reductionist’s view: the intuition that we, and the world that gave rise to us, are too beautiful and mysterious to finish being.

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[I don't want to suggest that buying an iPad is an act of murder, but in our ever-demanding quest for cheaper products, we're the ones forcing big business to "externalize costs." (Watch The Story of Stuff for an excellent illustration of this phenomenon.) If an iPad seems miraculously cheap, it isn't – someone, or something (the planet, say), is paying the price for your savings. The notion that everyone should be able to afford an iPad is delightfully democratic. Unfortunately, citizens in any fairly representative government wouldn't stand for conditions like Foxconn's. Democratizing technology seems at odds with democratizing the world. -Ed.]

I love this cartoon. The joke works because we want to pay for inner strength; it should feel difficult, like a triumph – something deeply reached for.

But I don’t read it as an outright critique. As much as this cartoon questions the legitimacy of drugs, it also pokes fun at modernity. The joke works, too, because reaching for the medicine cabinet is so utterly unromantic. Where once there were shaman, vision quests or holy insight, now there’s Rite Aid, $10 and a ’scrip for Paxil.

Nonetheless, is it so far-fetched to find strength in the act of helping oneself? How much humility does it take to crack open that white bottle cap for the first time? It’s easy to conceive of “pill-popping” as a shortcut, an easy way out – until we’re the ones faced with the choice. We may have a hard time admitting it, but inner strength isn’t always there. Sometimes, we need to reach out.

And that’s an act of courage in itself.