Gotham Diary:
Be careful what you wish for
15 January 2014
At Crawford Doyle the other day, I saw lots of inviting nonfiction titles, and yet at the same time there were no must-haves. I picked up Hugh Wilford’s America’s Great Game, a history of CIA Arabism during and shortly after World War II, and felt pretty sure that this was something that I ought to read, but I groaned a little at the homework aspect. Like 1971, the book about Bangladesh that I read last week, America’s Great Game is about Western influence upon and interference in the development of national sovereignties that succeeded collapsed empires — developments that are roiling the world today, at the cost of massive suffering — and, after I’ve read it, I’ll have another look at James Barr’s A Line in the Sand, which I want to do anyway to refresh my grasp of the history of Syria. I’ve already jumped into Wilford’s book, and I’m happy with his writing, even if I didn’t really need to hear another word about Endicott Peabody and the Groton School (the Haileybury of the CIA).
While I was overcoming my reluctance to acquire yet another tome — not that America’s Great Game is unduly lengthy or at all crabbed; I can already tell that it’s going to be a gallery of clever fellows larking about — I was lingering over the nonfiction counter at the rear of the shop when a staffer placed a book in an empty spot. I looked down at it: The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves, by Steven Grosz. In between the title and the author’s name there appeared a blurb by Andrew Solomon: “Impossible to put down.” Indeed it was — by now I held it in my hands. I read the inside jacket copy.
This extraordinary book is about one ordinary process: talking, listening, and understanding. Its aphoristic and elegant stories teach us a new kind of attentiveness. They also unveil a delicate self-portrait of the analyst at work and show how lessons learned in the consulting room can reveal as much to analyst as to the patient.
Had this been written on purpose to seduce me, it could not have been more effective. “Attentiveness,” “delicate self-portrait.” Flipping through the pages, I could see that The Examined Life would be easy, agreeable reading. But my curiosity was triggered by an alarm. How could a selection of anecdotes from psychoanalytic practice be anything but dubious? Psychoanalysis is a long, hard, slog, and it is bounded, for the analyst at least, by a kind of theoretical mechanics that at certain points is almost inexplicably complicated. (Just read Janet Malcolm’s In the Freud Archives if you doubt me.) I have wasted untold hours trying to understand the finer points of transference, only to be repelled by the relationship’s inherent unseemliness. (I wouldn’t make a good thoracic surgeon, either.) How could such matter be shaped by a light hand and retain any substance?
I read most of The Examined Life yesterday, finishing it in the early evening. I had to put it down several times, and this was always difficult. I would finish one chapter and charge right into the next. No two patients had the same problem, and the analyst’s perplexity varied greatly. Some patients needed to be nudged into accepting the obvious. Others presented nothing obvious at all. There were men, woman, and children, old and young, gay and straight, neurotic and worse than neurotic. Some patients found relief, others not. On several occasion, the analyst was riven by self-doubt. Grosz makes it very clear that his expertise, such as it is, does not make him superhuman; patients might invest him with super powers, but he takes pains to ensure that the reader does not. The reader, after all, is not a patient.
I flagged only one passage.
Psychoanalysts are fond of pointing out that the past is alive in the present. But the future is alive in the present too. The future is not some place we’re going to, but an idea in our mind now. It is something we’re creating, that in turn creates us. The future is a fantasy that shapes our present.
This sleek nuggest of wisdom — excuse my Wow! — concludes the story of a young woman who came to see Grosz after the sudden death of her father in an accident. She had been very close to him, emailing and talking on the phone often. She was disturbed to find that she wasn’t upset.
Then it emerged that her relationship with her boyfriend was at a standstill — and that this didn’t upset her, either. Instead of facing up to the man’s disinclination to marry and have children, the patient was entertaining fantasies of her father showing up at her wedding. Grosz realized that the young woman was stuck by her refusal to mourn the future — the future that she so lovingly imagined, and that now had been called into sharp question by her father’s sudden death. I think that this is what economists call the sunk-costs problem, but I didn’t make that clever connection until just this minute; reading Grosz’s account of his patient’s plight, I was almost as overwhelmed by her emotional investment as she was.
Grosz doesn’t tell us how things worked out for this girl. That is not the point. The point is that his insight might be useful to people who don’t need treatment. The future is a fantasy that shapes our present. Be careful what you wish for!
***
I used to say, of a late family member, that she was a fetishist. She was wholly unwilling to accept the “good enough.” There was no “good enough.” Something either was or wasn’t satisfactory, and to be satisfactory it had to meet her detailed expectations. She invested her happiness in things and rituals; she could not be happy without them. She did not define happiness in terms of her own feelings; she would never have asked, “Do I feel happy?” She defined happiness in a set of circumstances, so that the question was, instead, “Can I be happy here?” If the circumstances were deficient in some way, then, no, she could not be happy. It also struck me that being happy was not terribly important to her. She would much rather be unhappy than gulled.
So you can imagine your future, as many otherwise intelligent people do, as a sequence of status upgrades. As they progress through the ongoing present, people adjust this imaginary sequence to suit “reality” — they recognize that they will never occupy the White House — but this abandonment of “unrealistic expectations” can leave an abrasive residue of disappointment.
It is better to imagine a future in which you have a meaningful relationship with a special person, and in which you manage to support yourself by doing something that you like doing. These are not sequential dreams. It’s not a matter of going to law school, becoming an associate, and making partner at a big law firm, in that order. It’s much more complex, and it is totally immediate. To have a meaningful relationship with a special person requires you to become a special person yourself, right now; someone who listens, someone who anticipates correctly, someone prepared for unconditional sacrifices. You don’t have to be good at these things to embark on a meaningful relationship, but you must intend to get better at them. And you have to be clear-headed enough to have an open mind about what your special person might look like, because while this is important it is only one of several important things, among which are the ability to listen, to anticipate correctly, and to prepare for unconditional sacrifices. Not to mention quirks and foibles that you, and possibly you alone, find irresistible.
So it is with “work.” However important whatever it is that you make or produce might be to other people, it cannot be as important to you as the making or the producing. Other people get the end result; you keep the process. Ideally, this process not only suits you and brings in whatever income you require, but can also, on the off-chance that it makes you very rich, be adapted to an end that, while not so lucrative, is socially beneficial. Your dream of making tons of money ought to dovetail you into volunteering.
Our society does not make any of this easy, so that’s something else that we’ve got to tackle if we’re to be happy: we have to make the world a better place. Opportunities for doing so abound in everyday life, and they rarely involve real sacrifice. The Golden Rule still obtains, but there is a lot to be learned about it. How, precisely, do you want to be treated? What makes you happy? Take your time answering that question.