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.”

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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.

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[I have a friend in medical school – a psychiatrist in training – who tells me that AA gets tremendous credit for being the most effective addiction recovery program in existence. This surprised me, because a) I didn't know that AA's success rate is the gold standard, and b) I thought that many of AA's strategies were at odds with certain classic, psycho-therapuetic mores. The latter appears to be true, although this article suggests a welcome shift in attitude. If AA offers the best chance for recovery, than psychotherapy should follow its lead. Therapists, say the authors, should break out of their comfort zones when the failure of addiction looms; the successful treatment of alcoholism may require more communion with patients than is commonly advised.

This makes a lot of sense to me. In my own treatment (not for addiction, admittedly), my therapist never shared her own stories. I knew next to nothing about her life, and I assumed it would stay that way. But in one instance, she shattered this well-established practice – it was shocking to both of us – by sharing an incredibly intimate story about a death in her family. I could see this made her nervous. Clearly she was going out on a limb, defying her own notion of "best practices." Yet her intuition paid off. Her story changed my life, not because it made me feel any closer to her, but because it made me feel closer to others (certain others at first, and then more generally). I went from feeling confused and frustrated to feeling sympathetic and forgiving.

She told me her story, she said later, in an attempt to give me facts that she never thought I'd get, i.e. I wanted explanations from people who couldn't give them to me. The revelation of her family's secret became a stand-in for the experience I'd been missing, both literally – she told me something I never thought I'd hear – and figuratively – her story gave shape to the actions of people in my own life. She drew a parallel, but she also broke a boundary. Both helped my treatment; I can't say which helped more. This is the art of psychotherapy: the acknowledgment that, despite an appropriately clinical approach, any rules-based system is bound to fall short in the face of us. -Ed.]

This pending law in Nebraska correlates abortion with mental weakness; it suggests that women who are pressured to have an abortion should be handled with kid gloves. First of all, women face all kinds of pressure from all sides at this juncture: lovers, friends, family, and even circumstances themselves. Making a choice under pressure doesn’t mean that it’s a bad choice. Most important choices in life are made this way. Second of all, if we’re honest about these pressures, then we can see this law for what it is: an attempt to use the stigma of mental illness against women considering abortion.

As you probably know from reading this blog, I’m all about de-stigmatizing mental illness. This stigma leads to suicide all the time – every day. It killed my sister, who took her own life before she was willing to take an anti-depressant (even after she filled a prescription). So the thought of using this stigma, reinforcing it, for political victory makes my blood boil. Whatever your position on abortion, we must do better than this law.

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This remarkable result is not well known outside a small circle of sleep researchers for three good reasons. First, sleep deprivation is not as convenient as taking a pill. Second, prolonged sleep deprivation is not exactly a desirable state; it leads to cognitive defects, such as reduced working memory and impaired decision making. Finally, depression recurs after the mother, inevitably, succumbs to sleep, even for a short nap. Nonetheless this is an incredibly important observation; it shows that depression can be rapidly reversed and suggests that something is happening in the sleeping brain to bring on episodes of depression.”

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[Fascinating as a short-term means to dampening pain – but one still has to wait till nighttime to lose any sleep. -Ed.]

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[A wonderful follow-up to this post. Props to Cathy Horyn, who really hits all the bases in writing responsibly about a suicide.]

The movie Greenberg stars Ben Stiller as an introverted, volatile, self-obsessed jerk. Its ad campaign promotes Greenberg as a kind of “lovable loser,” a 40 year-old ne’er-do-well with the affected charm of a teenage cynic – i.e., someone we can relate to. Yet it’s not a fair portrait, exactly. Greenberg is far less likable than you’d expect.

At the start of the movie, we learn that Greenberg’s troubles run deep: he’s just been discharged from a hospital, but “not that kind of hospital,” his sister-in-law warns; “he had a nervous breakdown.” She’s warning Florence Marr, the family’s nanny (played by Greta Gerwig). With the household in Thailand, Florence doesn’t have much to do. But she’s asked to check in on Greenberg, who’s crashing at his brother’s house, just to make sure he doesn’t need anything. Greenberg exhibits the classic symptom of co-dependency in LA: he doesn’t drive.

Florence approaches Greenberg with a forced nonchalance, fluttering around him and avoiding eye contact. She’s quintessentially West Coast. Terrified of confrontation, eager to appear cool, she waits for Greenberg to make a move. And despite his palpable anxiety, he does.

Stiller plays Greenberg brilliantly. (The script, by director Noah Baumbach, gives him plenty to work with.) Greenberg looks so uncomfortable in his own skin that half the time he could be wondering where to put his hands. And his awful, mangy hairstyle suggests a person entirely at odds with the material world. A neurotic character like Greenberg is prone to be overacted, yet Stiller and Baumbach give us something real: a man not defined by his neuroses but genuinely beset by them. In an early sequence, Stiller approaches a swimming pool with a haunted, brazen look. ‘Oh no,’ I thought – ‘is he gonna hurt himself?’ But Greenberg attacks the pool instead, desperate to overcome his inner wuss. In seconds we realize that Greenberg can’t swim. The pool wins.

Rather too quickly, Florence falls for Greenberg. She seems to want an easy life, but what she really wants is to make a complicated life easier. She finds a foil in Greenberg. With her eagerness to smooth everything over, she drifts through the ugly circumstances of their relationship like a college intern. She sighs a lot. (Her brief character setup is a passive one night stand, suggesting that Greenberg is an unfortunate love interest in a long line of many.)

Am I making this sound like a horrible movie? Because it’s not. Florence and Greenberg are not admirable people. I shudder at the thought of being either’s parent. Greenberg, when he’s not grouching about trivial wrongs, can be shockingly nasty. And Florence laps it up like a hungry, lazy dog. So why should anyone go see this movie? It’s a tough question. The film, like the relationship, is not a pleasant experience. But to answer this question – Why watch this? – is to answer something else as well. Why put up with anyone?

I am not at all a masochistic moviegoer. More than most, I loathe directors who take advantage of an audience. But in Greenberg, Baumbach expertly toes the line. He fashions a character that is just shy of insufferable. Any more annoying, and we’d wind up hating the experience. Any more sweet, and Greenberg would become a stock character: the down-on-his-luck dude who finds redemption in love (yawn). In testing my limits as a moviegoer, Baumbach had me thinking about my limits as a friend. How much patience did I have for Greenberg? Would I have had more or less if he were a real person? Would I have considered someone like him at all?

This is the fundamental conundrum of mental illness. Often, if not all the time, mental illness is defined by how much it aggravates us. The more frustrating a condition for us, the more severe we judge it to be. So if we’re committed to helping the mentally anguished, what limits can we rightfully have? If a family member or friend has become intolerable, isn’t that more evidence of need? How do we balance our own lives and those of more turbulence? The answer to “Why put up with anyone?” brings us back to the Golden Rule. We put up with exasperating people because we know how easily we can become exasperating ourselves.

So is Greenberg mentally ill? Absolutely. Some may disagree, likely because Greenberg seems too “normal.” But that’s exactly the point. Psychiatric disorder in cinema tends toward the extreme: One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, A Beautiful Mind, The Aviator. Yet Greenberg presents the most vivid, honest portrait of illness I’ve ever seen on the big screen. Here’s a guy desperately trying to cope with the smallest niceties in life – and failing. When his best friend surprises him with a birthday cake in a restaurant, he storms out before yelling, “Sit on my dick!” The outbursts are painful to watch; they’re far from endearing. But you feel for the guy. Greenberg is a reminder of just how tough life can be.

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