Break-up songs and comfort reading

Fleetwood Mac are a good band to listen to when you’re dealing with a break-up since many of their songs have to do with relationship troubles and they have had their fair share of failed relationships (with each other).

The ‘famous five’ of Mick Fleetwood, John and Christine McVie, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks – I wonder what it was about them that so captured the public imagination around the time of their Rumours album? I think people could relate to these talented musicians who were very open about the relationship troubles they were experiencing.

One song I’ve listened to quite a bit this weekend is “Go Insane” by Lindsey Buckingham. Not because I’m going insane but because I love the haunting guitar-playing and the soulful cry that Buckingham produces

Other than listening to break-up songs, what else have I been doing this weekend? Some comfort reading. I’m enjoying Gardening at Night by Diane Awerbuck which is a local coming-of-age story which is funny, wry and well observed.

I’ve picked this up again after an absence of maybe two years and I’m not sure what made me put it down last time – perhaps I was distracted and I didn’t have the energy for Awerbuck’s ironic detachment. I see that Andre Brink commented that Gardening at Night shows “a South Africa the international reader has not yet seen: the wood of smallness and ordinariness and quirkiness of everyday life behind the trees of politics”.

It’s a story of a young girl who grows up in Kimberley, studies at Rhodes University in Grahamstown and then escapes to Cape Town where she teaches at an upmarket all-girls’ school. It’s also clearly based on Awerbuck’s own life which, while nothing out of the ordinary, is told with such a vivid (and wry) imagination that it becomes refreshingly different.

Here’s the opening paragraph:

There is no sea in Kimberley. We make do with drunken every-other-Sundays on the river, frightening small children and trying to waterski barefoot. The water is cold Milo but not fit for human consumption, as the sign says. There is always a capsized hand on its surface, clutching a beer snaffled from the bar. There are no ladies of the lake, or kings to be called, but there are mutant catfish that live on the bottom of the pan, whiskers trawling for white feet in the water. Eating them is a bad idea; they taste of river mud and lost scuba divers with too little oxygen in their tanks.

I like the image of the capsized hand clutching a beer bottle which evokes the lady of the lake and then the shift to mutant catfish eating oxygen-deprived scuba divers. Would that qualify as King Arthur meets science fiction meets South African autobiography?

The style is close and chatty but also distant with an amused detachment.

Almost at random here’s another extract which I enjoyed:

Gordon goes out after and I only know she is weeping because I can hear them through the window: a spy in the House of Love. He tries to hug her and she pushes him away and screams at him that she does not want to be friends; inside there is loud clinking of glasses and clearing of throats. But her throat is not clear. She re-enters and I push my spine against the wall – cold, but not as hard as a woman whose blue eyes are pink and whose heart we’ve cracked open. I expect her to curse me like a bad fairy at a christening, but her suit contains her; it holds back her wrath in her Wonderbra chest. She has come back for her handbag made of the skin of some thing and then she leaves, looking taller than she is, clicking down the driveway and into her car.

The narrative style here reminds me a bit of Kate Atkinson. She can pack a punch into a small scene, which seems almost casually strung together. The narrator is both present and removed at the same time. She’s shrinking against the wall in case she gets a good klap and she’s also attentively watching the other woman clicking down the driveway, smirking a little at the Wonderbra and the high heels.

I’ll be back next Monday probably. Have a good week.

Psychotherapy without the Self (but with a glass of wine)

You have to be somebody before you can be nobody. Did you know that? No? Well then you’re probably not a Buddhist. But, you may well ask, why would I want to be nobody? I’m quite happy just being me. That’s not the point. Well not for the purposes of today’s discussion, which is about the first part of Mark Epstein’s Psychotherapy without the Self. He didn’t say psychotherapy without a glass of red wine though so if I come across as slightly blurry around the edges, that’s why.

Now let’s just accept that I’m not quite going to do justice to this book today. But I might just clarify some ideas and pique your curiosity to read or discuss this further. I think serious stuff could do with a bit of levity anyway.

Two central ideas which can be quite helpful here are those of the ideal ego and the ego ideal. Now I often confuse the two so try not to get confused as well. It might help to see them as Other and Self. Apparently the goal of meditation (or one of the goals of meditation) is the strengthening of the ego ideal and the diminishing of the ideal ego.

Follow? I didn’t think so. Let’s try again. If the ideal ego is the (ideal) Other and the ego ideal is the Self then we may consider the ideal ego as the mother before the fall whom the Self is trying to get back to. But this is a doomed enterprise and in fact progress lies in the strengthening of the aforementioned ego ideal (aka the Self). These are the dual orientations of narcissism.

Next up are the central concepts of concentration, insight and mindfulness.

Concentration allows the mind to remain fixed, without wavering, on a single object such as a sound, sensation, image or thought. Mindfulness allows attention to a rapidly changing series of objects but, as such, demands a sufficient degree of concentration to facilitate that process. (p.29)

Now it may be quite revealing that the object I chose for my meditation practice was the mountain. The mountain is big in Cape Town (you can’t miss it) but it has different associations to different people. One of the women in my spirituality group told us that in children’s drawings, mountains are often representations of the breast. So perhaps my meditation on the mountain is really a meditation on the breast? (Let me know if this starts to sound a little flakey. It sounds perfectly logical to me, but then my judgement could be a touch off key with the addition of the Cab Sav).

Now I see from my notes that we have two new concepts here. The Knowledge of the Appearance of Terror. And also Terror and Delight as two central experiences along the path of mindfulness and insight. That makes a lot of sense when you read the book. Trust me.

One problem that I have with concentration is that my concentration tends to wander. One minute I’ll be thinking about the meditative path and next minute I’m remembering the time I got lost in a forest in Sabie and I scratched my contact lens and it was bloody sore and it was probably as a result of trying to impress that American girl and I really shouldn’t have because … (well never mind).

Getting back to the two poles of narcissism, I was thinking that one way of conceptualising the balance between the ego ideal and ideal ego is to think of an (emotionally) abused woman who still loves her husband. Even though he treats her horribly, she still idealises him. It’s not an easy task (say for a therapist) to try and help her to invest that emotional energy in herself rather than him and thus to empower herself. It’s not easy because in some sense the part of her that identifies with the husband is stronger than the part that identifies with herself (if you follow).

At this point in my reading I got a little confused but then we arrived at the Ten Imperfections of Insight, which I can tell you from experience are usually only learned the hard way. As in hitting your head against some faulty perceptions and learning slowly but surely that you are wrong. Fans of CBT will be pleased with this section, which was strongly reminiscent of the various thought-mistakes in CBT. Think all-or-nothing thinking and the like. The Buddhists also talk of pseudo-insight, which I think could be like an “Aha!” moment which is actually distracting you from deeper insight.

Two more ideas before we end.

Meditation may ultimately be conceptualised as a vehicle for freeing an individual from his own narcissism, a liberation that is not complete until the experience of enlightenment (p.38).

My question on reading this was : So what does that enlightenment look like and how do we know when we’re there?

And then, quite serendipitously I chanced upon this quote from the Dalai Lama:

Encountering sufferings will definitely contribute to the elevation of your spiritual practice, provided you are able to transform the calamity and misfortune into the path. (from the Dalai Lama’s Book of daily Meditations)

I was all set to use that in my talk last week but at the last moment I was told that I didn’t need to give the talk after all. I think that’s known as avoidance rather than enlightenment!

I hope that you all will forgive me if I take a few moments to meditate on an apple pudding with custard. There’s no terror here. It’s pure delight

Some thoughts on Change

Derrick Jensen, activist and author: “…Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organized political resistance. An Inconvenient Truth helped raise consciousness about global warming. But did you notice that all of the solutions presented had to do with personal consumption—changing light bulbs, inflating tires, driving half as much—and had nothing to do with shifting power away from corporations, or stopping the growth economy that is destroying the planet?…

“…I want to be clear. I’m not saying we shouldn’t live simply. I live reasonably simply myself, but I don’t pretend that not buying much (or not driving much, or not having kids) is a powerful political act, or that it’s deeply revolutionary. It’s not. Personal change doesn’t equal social change…”

You can read more of his article from Orion magazine here. Unfortunately he provides almost no answers other than taking on the system. I seem to remember that An Inconvenient Truth advocated that individuals reduce their carbon footprints and consume less and more wisely, but also that they use political and social power as well.

The reason I’m beating this drum today is that I read an alarming (although not alarmist) article in Business Day yesterday about how climate change is affecting fishermen (and women) here in the Western Cape and how the rainfall in the Southern Cape has changed drastically for the worse. It’s easy to overlook the effects of climate change here in Cape Town. What’s a bit more rain here and there and some hotter days in summer? But for those living a few hundred kilometres away, their lives are much worse off now as a result of global warming.

I also read an interesting take on personal and climate change as part of this year’s Blog Action Day (the theme of which is Climate Change). I’ll be interested to read some more on this so let me know if you have any articles or links to recommend.

As for personal change, that’s a subject for a lifetime’s worth of blogs (and books) itself.

Halloween meme

In the spirit of Halloween, and even though we don’t do Halloween here in SA, I thought I’d ask my resident horrorphile (the lovely P) to answer Emily’s 13 meme questions which I first saw over at Courtney’s. Here goes (and this is unedited by the way, which is really saying something about my ability not to be too controlling!)

1). Which urban legend ghost scared the bejeezus out of you when you were a kid?

I used to find any kind of poltergeist scary.

2). Which horror movie has the best premise?

I think the original Saw (yes, the rest were pretty lame) was brilliant. I LOVE it when there’s a twist I’m not expecting, and when the ‘dead’ guy gets up right at the end of the movie after lying there, er, ‘dead’ the whole time, well, I was impressed that I’d been misled! Plus – and I guess these don’t count as horror movies but rather as thrillers – The Others and The Sixth Sense. I loved the twists in these too.

3). What is the most disappointing “treat” to receive in your bag on Halloween night?

Well, we don’t really do the whole trick or treat thing in SA but I’d say any kind of fruit wouldn’t score highly on the excitement scale for me. Give me chocolate, please – Lindt or Cadbury if possible!

4). What’s the best non-candy item to receive?

Er, I’ll pass on this one…. Trick or treating is all about the sweets, isn’t it?

5). Did a monster live in your closet when you were a child?

No. But I had a thing about the possibility of something lurking under my bed, and would often peak under there before I turned out the light at night.

6). Which supernatural creature sent chills up your spine when you were ten and still does?

I used to find vampires pretty intriguing – I remember seeing a movie where a vampire scales the wall outside someone’s bedroom and it freaked me out. But I don’t find them that scary any more.

7). Which supernatural creature makes you yawn?

I’m afraid zombies don’t really do it for me. I think the way they move just makes me want to laugh – plus I think I’ve seen too many zombie spoof movies! (Sorry, Courtney!)

8). What’s your favorite Halloween decoration?

I agree with Courtney – the carved pumpkins with candles inside do look pretty sinister. And they remind me of the movie Halloween….

9). If you could be anywhere on Halloween night, where would you be?

On the couch watching some of the scariest DVDs imaginable, with a stash of chocolate and chips. (And with you to snuggle up next to, babe! Sorry to drag you into this scenario – I know you’re not crazy about scary movies!)

10). What’s the scariest book you’ve read so far this year?

Sadly I haven’t read any scary books this year, but Misery and The Shining by Stephen King are two of my all-time favourites….

11). Haunted houses or haunted hayrides?

I haven’t heard of haunted hayrides but they sound like loads of fun! I’ve been on haunted walking tours in London and York, though, and they were mostly funny but there were a couple of scary moments too!

12). Which Stephen King novel/movie would you least like to find yourself trapped in?

I think either Misery (at the mercy of Kathy Bates and her sledgehammer – eek!) or Cujo.

13). Which are creepiest: evil dolls, evil pets, or evil children?

I’d have to say evil children. The child in The Omen (the book and the movie) terrifies me!

Green Yellow Blue

I am slouching in my armchair with a laptop on my knees and looking forward to home-time. Today was tough. One OD and all the hullaballoo that went with that and then a lot of health assessment follow-up interviews. Trying to decide whether people should be yellow or green.

“I think I’ll make you green. That OK with you?”
Or: “So you don’t mind my keeping you yellow on the system?”
“No, I’m G3K3 anyway so I’m not deployable.”

Seems like a lot of people are unhappy in Cape Town and wanting to be transferred back to Pretoria. I wonder how many people are unhappy in Pretoria and wanting to be transferred to Cape Town? Perhaps we could just do a swap?

I’m not particularly happy or unhappy in Cape Town at the moment but I do have blue fingers from my (ultimately successful) attempt to make playdough. It was quite difficult mixing and kneading in between doing nine (mostly short) interviews today but somehow I managed to scrape off the blue sticky stuff, wash my hands and get back to the interview room each time. I didn’t have any cream of tartar (one whiff of a jar of Tartar sauce told me that it would not make a good substitute) and I didn’t have a lemon so I couldn’t substitute that. But the playdough still seems OK. I’m all for making a mess if you have enough time to clean up afterwards but today’s messiness in-between interviews was a little crazy.

In other news, I’m making good progress with Mark Epstein’s Psychotherapy without the Self despite the fact that it’s pretty difficult to read an academic-style book on Buddhist psychology in summer. I think Buddhism might work better in a cold climate with lots of reviving coffee in case I nod off. Trying to read it on a Sunday afternoon when I’m just itching to pick up the loppers and have another go at the (sadly fungus-infected) lemon tree again doesn’t really work. I keep losing my place and having to read the same paragraph three times and then I’m still not sure that I get the gist of it.

But there’s some good material there and I’m almost ready to declare that Mark Epstein is my new favourite psychological thinker except that I know that he’d disapprove of such thinking. Not at all Buddhist. But he’s good on the self and the other, narcissism, steering a middle path between reification and nothingness and a whole lot besides. Watch this space.

In totally unrelated news, P and I watched the first two hours of The Sound of Music last night. This was totally blog-inspired and an excellent choice. I’m still not sure how to solve a problem like Maria but I do know that it involves a lot of harmonious singing, some dancing and getting very spirited about your favourite things. It also doesn’t matter if you wear the curtains as long as you know your Doh-re-me.

I’ll try and be more active in the blog comments this week but I am reading some blog-posts when I get a chance – in between the crises.

Cape Town stories

It’s another windy day in Cape Town and I’m a bit tired from family celebrations. My mom’s turning 70 on Tuesday and yesterday we celebrated in style at The Greenhouse restaurant at The Cellars-Hohenort in Constantia. It was like being in a very stylish tree-house looking out over the maginificent gardens there. Very fitting for someone whose main passion is gardening.

But that’s not what I’m on about today. I’ve been wanting to post on novels set in Cape Town for a while but I’ve battled to find 10 (or even 5) that I really want to write about. Today I have three – two books and a play.

1. In A City Imagined, which is a collection of 19 different writers’ reactions to and associations of Cape Town, Stephen Watson writes:

In the past it has been common to hear that Cape Town comprises a tale of two cities only. There is the city of the privileged, their rose and vanilla mansions hugging those contours of privilege close to the city’s mountain chain, its forest slopes, and better beaches. On the other hand, there sprawls the immense city of the dispossessed and deprived, the apartheid dormitory towns and squatter camps, steadily filling up the waste ground between the city’s mountain backbone and the barrier range of the Hottentots Holland.

One of the things I enjoyed about this collection of memories, stories and associations of Cape Town is that it showed me this city that I know so well, and have lived in for the majority of my 39 years, in such a familiar and yet different way. Each of the 19 contributors brought their own perspective and personality to their accounts and the result is a tale of 19 cities. Damon Galgut writes about the beauty of the city which is also tinged with longing and regret and sorrow almost. We have gay Cape Town in Mark Behr’s account of his first love and having to betray his lover for the sake of the military. Then we also have PR Anderson on the Newlands Forest, Jeremy Cronin on Simonstown, Finuala Dowling playing tour guide and Sindiwe Magona remembering her family’s home in Blouvlei (near Retreat) before Group Areas moved them to Gugulethu (which has the ironic name of Our Pride).

I liked this quote which Watson gives from Albert Camus writing about his native Algiers: “What you can love in Algiers is what everybody lives off: the sea visible from every corner, a certain weight of sunlight, the beauty of the race.”

Then we have the actor Antony Sher writing about his memories of Cape Town:

Back in the Sixties all I wanted to do was to leave Cape Town. These days I can’t wait to come back. It isn’t just that I rejoice in South Africa’s flourishing democracy; it’s also because those childhood impressions of my birthplace are imbedded in me, even if I was rather careless about collecting them in the first place. The sense memories are like seeds: they lie dormant for most of the year while I’m in the UK, but I only have to step off the plane at Cape Town International Airport, and the sunlight only has to hit them, and a plunge in the sea only has to water them, and they blossom again, and their fragrance breaks my heart.

Reading Antony Sher’s account of playing Cape Town, I felt a sense of serendipity since I kept making connections. For example he talks about saying goodbye to his mom who has Alzheimer’s and then he mentions the delicious bagels that Katie, his mom’s ‘coloured’ cook, learned to bake from Antony’s mom, who learned it from her mom, who learned it back in the tiny shtetl of Plungyn in Lithuania. Alzheimer’s? The shtetl? What was next I wondered. Well it turns out that he’s friends with Janice Honeyman, who was then directing Sindiwe Magona’s play Mother to Mother at the Baxter which P and I had seen a few days before.

2. Mother to Mother is a moving and poignant one-woman play based on the book of the same name. Magona was a friend of the mother of one of the killers of Amy Biehl, a young American volunteer who was tragically killed in Gugulethu the year before South Africa’s first democratic election in 1994. The book is an attempt by this mother to explain to Linda Biehl, the mother of the victim, how such a terrible thing could have happened. I remember being so shocked at the time that this vibrant young woman who was trying to make a difference in a poor country far from her home had been killed by an angry mob of protesters. I can’t vouch for the book but the play was heart-breakingly sad but also funny and hopeful at the same time. There was a powerful sense that it will be through telling stories such as this one, as difficult as they are, that the traumas of the past can be reworked into a more inclusive and integrated future.

3. The third book that I want to mention here is Whiplash by Tracey Farren. It’s a first-person narrative about a prostitute (or sex worker to use the more PC term) who lives in Muizenberg. I found this an ambitious and interesting first novel and I really admired the thought behind it but I just couldn’t stay with the narrator for the whole 300 pages.

Tess is a (white, blonde) prostitute who lives in Muizenberg and the novel is a first-person narrative addressed to her mother. The story is raw and gritty and shows up the violence and exploitation which is bound up with the sex trade. Tess is addicted to codeine pills and appears to want to numb out her working life. Her narrative is a bit disjointed and jarry but she has some excellent descriptions. For example one of her clients gives her a ticket to a prestigious horse race and she and her friend get all dolled up and go there to the absolute horror of the men and their wives.

It slowly emerges that Tess was abused by her stepfather as a child and that sex work is her way of dealing with this abuse. Her mother seems to have known about the abuse but did nothing, becoming sick instead and eventually developing cancer. It’s unclear for much of the novel whether she’s still alive.

What I found difficult to relate to is the disjunction between Tess’s voice, which is rather defensive and monotonous at times, and that of the author, who has clearly done her research into sex work and is interested to tell this story. I kept wanting to hear more of this voice as opposed to the numbed-out monotony of Tess.

I also found it difficult to feel much empathy for Tess since she herself seems often quite far removed from her own pain. The emotional numbness serves to distance us from the experience. I can understand that she would want to escape the sordidness of the sex acts that she is involved in but the euphemistic word of “jumps” makes it sound almost like a game. I’d be interested to read more about this seedier side of Cape Town but I think it would help to be a lot more transparent about that other voice. Just describing the process of writing makes me as a reader much more involved in the novel.

Regrets? I’ve had a few

• I don’t regret the rosé with a light lunch at the hospital (a few slices of cheese on French bread and some baby tomatoes, which left a definite hole in my tummy only partially filled with chocolate cake). But I do have other regrets – social ones, work ones.

• What got me onto this subject was watching the latest episode of the wonderful ZA News here (along the lines of Spitting Image). Former president Thabo Mbeki is funny on the subject of regrets. I love Zapiro’s puppets and all of them are good – Tim Modise as the presenter, Tutu and Mandela, Manto, former prez Mbeki and the others. This was initially intended for the SABC but they chickened out so their loss is the web’s gain.

• I’ve almost reached 150 posts here at the Couch Trip and I’ve realised that I’ve fallen into the habit of blogging about once a week (mostly on a Monday). I don’t think I’ve lost my blogging Mojo just yet but I have been wondering about how long I’ll keep going and whether I should focus it a bit more on psychology rather than the general whatever-I-feel-like format that it currently has. When I’m busy and/or stressed I don’t do the rounds of usual blog-reading that I would like to. But I do think my life is a lot richer for the blogging friends that I’ve made and I always come away from my regular blog-reads with some good ideas and grateful for the sense of shared experiences.

• I also know that I need to shake up my real-life social interaction. I’ve fallen into a bit of a rut where friendships are concerned and reading Sandy’s blog-post (over at Blogging Behavioural) about making friends made me realise that I can do something about it.

• Today is the day that I got an offer of more permanent employment with the military. Part of me is relieved that the offer finally came through but I’ve also got used to being temporary here so it’s with mixed feelings that I will sign the acceptance letter and fax it back to them. I’m almost ready to leave again and so it feels quite weird to be signing a letter saying that I’m going to stay.

• I’m working on a short talk for my group on Tuesday about literary representations of Cape Town. I intended to draw on ten novels about Cape Town but I think that I will find more than enough material in the excellent A City Imagined by various authors and edited by Stephen Watson from the UCT English department. It’s interesting that while Cape Town is such an incredibly beautiful city many people (and writers in particular) react to it with such mixed feelings and with a sense of tangible disappointment. I’ll post on this next week when my head is a bit clearer.

• Friday is generally not a good day for me. I’m not exactly sure why but I think the friendship drought has something to do with it. I enjoy the solitude and the chance to read and recover from the week but I’m also wishing for more stimulating company. I nearly went to a book launch this week at the excellent (and independent) Book Lounge but P was busy with her taxman and I just wasn’t up for it. I felt like a bit of a coward and the trip to the gym only put me in a worse mood.

• I have a low cringe threshold for John Cleese in Fawlty Towers. I bought the complete edition for P for her birthday and we watched the first episode the other night. Basil Fawlty is sooooo awful. It’s that similar feeling I get when I watch The Office. I can appreciate the humour but the awkwardness of it makes me want to curl up into a ball and start rocking! One DVD series that I AM loving is Planet Earth. The visuals alone are breath-taking.

Some thoughts on The Road Less Travelled

Self-help guru, absent father, cheating husband, excellent writer, self-centred prophet, genuine seeker after truth, a ‘decent person trying sometimes to be better’, a very wounded healer, a “bit of a shit”, a paradox.

M. Scott Peck (MSP), the author and pop psychiatrist who so successfully blended psychology and religion in his international bestseller The Road Less Travelled (RLT) was all of these.

Right now I’m still trying to get my head around the fact that M. Scott Peck appears to have been such a fraud. Perhaps that’s the wrong word and an over-reaction on my part. But I do feel a sense of betrayal and it makes me question my belief in psychology as a profession. I know that I will probably come to a more “middle of the road” position with time but for now I’m still in a bit of shock.

Perhaps I should back up here. You’re probably wondering what the fuss is about. Basically it boils down to this. Peck published the RLT in 1978 but it only became a phenomenal bestseller a few years later (selling over 10 million copies worldwide) when he hit the lecture circuit. At the height of his fame in the early nineties Peck was a cultural phenomenon. His message of taking responsibility and facing up to personal problems and moving forward in love and discipline hit a chord with millions of people. But from the mid-nineties (I would guess) it emerged that Peck the man was very different from the message that he preached. He was, in the words of one reviewer, a ’serial adulterer’, was addicted to gin and smoked a pack of cigarettes a day. He also had an estranged relationship with two of his three children.

So what to make of the man and his message?

“Love is the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth” is one of the catch-phrases of the RLT. But what does this mean? What is the “new psychology of love, traditional values and spiritual growth” that he preaches? Having read the book and quite a few of the reviews, I’m a bit more sceptical about the whole concept of spiritual growth and even more wary of self-help gurus.

“I may meet a woman who strongly attracts me, whom I feel like loving, but because it would be destructive to my marriage to have an affair at that time, I will say vocally or in the silence of my mind, “I feel like loving you, but I’m not going to”.”(p.126)

In the words of Dr Phil: “And how did that work out for you, Dr Peck?”

Peck is good on the art of listening. He talks about selective listening and listening with full attention and rightly says that both are fundamentally necessary for raising a child. There was a link here with what Litlove talks about in her material on motherhood – that the mother often needs to split her attention in two to both pay attention to her child and to care for herself. But MSP doesn’t address the difficulties of this. He’s more about preaching the solution to all of our mental health problems than he is about containment.

Peck also has an incredible sense of superiority and grandiosity at times. He goes to a lecture by a famous man and feels tremendously smug afterwards because he could extract so much value from the talk that others couldn’t. There was also his presidential bid in 1983 and his comments that, basically, we all have God in our unconscious but that some are more godlike than others.

Reading the RLT, I had many reactions. There were sections which were brilliant and which made me glad and grateful that I’d re-read it. And then there were long sections which had me confused and also frustrated and a bit irritated. Take this fairly uncomplicated passage for example:

“Finally, it is only when one has taken the leap into the unknown of total selfhood, psychological independence and unique individuality that one is free to proceed along still higher paths of spiritual growth and free to manifest love in its greatest dimensions.” (p.149)

What is ‘total selfhood’? What are the “higher paths of spiritual growth”? What are the “greatest dimensions” of love? Now I’m sure Peck has a lengthy answer to each of these questions but it’s hard to take them seriously when the evidence seems to suggest that the man was fairly massively self-deluded. The impression that I got was that love and spiritual growth are easily hijacked to fit his agenda. Acting in the name of “Love”, MSP can then lecture anyone and everyone. But is that really love? Should parents be lecturing their children? I read that Peck gave up his private practice in the early 1980s because he found that his patients were “slow” and “did not listen”. Ah well, there you have it.

It was interesting to me to see his attitude to his wife Lily (a medical student from Singapore whom he met and married while they were both at Columbia). In the Introduction to the RLT he writes:

“I would also like to thank my teachers and colleagues. Principal among them is my wife, Lily. She has been so giving that it is hardly possible to distinguish her wisdom as a spouse, parent, psychotherapist, and person from my own.”

Now it’s natural after the fact for me to look for psychopathology wherever it might be found. But one thing strikes me about this quote. The fact that he can barely distinguish his wife’s individuality from his own. How do you love someone if you can’t distinguish their own needs and thoughts and desires from your own?

He also says about Lily :

‘The purpose and function of Lily is to grow to be the most of which she is capable, not for my benefit but for her own and to the glory of God.”

This just doesn’t sit well with me. It’s too easy to disguise your own agenda with that of the “glory of God”.

As a quick exercise I did some ‘discourse analysis’ on the concept of spiritual growth as Peck sets it out in the RLT. What can we say about spiritual growth in terms of discourses, individual gain, subject positions and ultimately subjectivity? What ways of seeing the world or living in the world are provided by the concept? One striking aspect for me is that it is about a path of enlightenment, developing higher and higher awareness while seemingly neglecting (or delaying) the more physical realm. There’s a mind/body split which is interesting, especially since it seemed to be the physical desires that tripped Scotty up: gin, cannabis, sexuality to name the three most obvious ones. There’s also something slightly obscene about a spiritual self-help guru charging $15,000 a pop for a motivational talk. I’m sure it’s all market-related but you get my drift.

On the subject of good and evil, I also found myself at odds with Scotty. It’s easy to speak from a more “enlightened” position but we have the benefits of Melanie Klein here, particularly when it comes to looking at people’s so-called good and bad sides. There’s almost no awareness of projection in the RLT and definitely no consideration of Klein’s concept of splitting, which has been so fundamental to modern psychotherapy. Peck talks about each person having a good, healthy side and a bad, sick side. Evil here is laziness and being good means working almost tirelessly towards spiritual growth and evolution.

“Others of us may be rapidly growing, our dominant healthy self reaching eagerly upward in the struggle to evolve toward godhood; the healthy self, however, must always be vigilant against the laziness of the sick self that still lurks within us … [...] within each of us is the original sin of laziness, the ever-present force of entropy pushing us back to childhood, to the womb and to the swamps from which we have evolved.” (p.296)

Apart from noting the interesting indirect metaphorical connection between the womb and the primeval swamp here, I also think it could be helpful to bring in a bit of Winnicott. Is Peck suggesting that we leave behind the playfulness of being a child and be rational (and spiritually evolved) adults? Is this being sane and healthy? Winnicott points out that being sane is often about acknowleding your ‘true self’ as opposed to the false self which arises in relation to strict parental authority or adverse early experiences. I would hazard a guess that MSP’s ‘true self” found lots of expression in his ‘deviant behaviour’ and also in his grandiosity and lust after fame and power.

Writing in the Times Online, Andrew Billen sums it up pretty well in his review of The Road He Travelled, the biography of Peck by the British journalist Arthur Jones:

The paradox of this colossally self-deluded man is that he is, on his better pages, a font, or conduit, of clear-headed advice. The precepts of The Road Less Travelled — that life is difficult and is best approached by discipline, delaying gratification and taking responsibility — could not be more grounded. His dismissal of the myth of romantic love as “a dreadful lie” and insistence that real love is not a feeling but an act of altruism is useful too. As his original intended publisher said, it is a phenomenal book until he blows it in the third section and brings God into it. (May 2005)

I would be interested to read Jones’ biography to see if he gets much beyond the “Scotty was a fraud” sensationalism and explores the wider links with the mental health profession. Just as it helps to see Freud and Jung in their respective contexts, we could benefit from understanding the phenomenon that was M. Scott Peck. What I will take away from this book and the reviews of it are the complexity of the man and his message, and some wonderful stories and profound questions. I’ll be interested to hear your thoughts as well.

This and that

• Only 13 Mondays before the end of the year. That’s a scary thought. Apparently the Christmas rush (or the build-up to the Christmas rush) starts on Thursday. I was interested to read about Super Thursday in the book trade, which happens this Thursday the 1st of October. That’s the day the UK publishers release about 800 titles in time for Christmas. No prizes for guessing which book is likely to be one of the major sellers this year. The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown (good review here).

• I’m busy with my Cape Town reading project. The aim is to read or re-read 10 Cape Town novels before the end of October. I’ll post on this in due course. Most of the novels I’m reading seem to be written by women. I wonder if that dynamic is more pronounced here in SA than in Europe – that it’s women who do the bulk of the novel writing and reading?

• I’ve also started re-reading The Road Less Travelled by M. Scott Peck. This was first published in 1978 but is still relevant and topical. Peck talks a lot about suffering as being necessary for personal growth and draws a lot on Buddhism. The opening line if I can remember it correctly is “Life is Suffering”.

• I’m also having to work, which can be annoying. It’s not the patients that I mind so much as the talks that I’m called on to give. This week I need to brief a group of people on “How to tell when someone has a psychological problem”. Ok that wasn’t the exact title but that’s what it boils down to. I’m not sure this is the kind of audience who will appreciate being told that everyone should go for (or could benefit from) therapy. And I also don’t want to do therapy with everyone here. I’m not allowed to give the diagnostic criteria from the DSM-IV so I’ll have to make this a more general “signs and symptoms” talk. Ho hum.

• I’m feeling guilty about the dog. We’ve been staying in the new house for a month now and I still haven’t managed to get an internal fence so that the dog can come and live with us. The parents are being quite patient and long-suffering about looking after her but I can also see by Joschka’s expression when I come to visit that she’s wondering when I’m coming to claim her.

• On Saturday we watched The Life of David Gale (starring Kevin Spacey and Kate Winslet). I thought it was brilliant (if a little far-fetched).

• Don’t mention the cricket. (We lost again – this time to England).

Have a good week.

Living the life of luxury

Franschhoek

P won a weekend at a five-star hotel in Franschhoek so we were able to celebrate her birthday in style.

As you can see, the Mont X is a beautiful hotel set in the Cape winelands and it also boasts its own boutique winery. The weekend came with a complimentary five-course meal (with wine at every course), wine-tasting, cellar tour and so on.

The prizewinner

P was ecstatic at her prize, although it did take some getting used to being treated as treasured guests. When we arrived in the trusty Tazz, we were whisked off for a complimentary drink while a porter lugged our bags into the suite. The maitre’d was hilarious. He oohed and aahed over us as if we were royalty and punctuated his exclamations with some fine hand-wringing and lots of superlatives.

“The King and Queen! I’m honoured! How has your stay been so far?”
“Fine thanks. We’re very happy.”
“Beautiful!”

It was a little disconcerting having a slightly manic bald man approach us at regular intervals to enquire about our enjoyment of the meal. But I soon saw that he treated most of the guests this way and the old dears seemed to appreciate it, leaning in for some of that infectious enthusiasm.

At dinner on Saturday night, I looked around carefully at our fellow guests to see what kind of people can afford to stay in this kind of luxury. The model couple at the table behind us looked like they’d stepped out of an American soap opera (except with less bosom) and I couldn’t help thinking they regarded us as the poor relatives. I don’t get out much and so having another beautiful woman’s cleavage in my line of vision was a little unnverving. As much as I tried to give P my undivided attention, I was pretty curious to see what the other patrons were up to.

Across the way was a woman I could only imagine as Ferial Haffejee’s mean younger sister (FH is a highly regarded local newspaper editor). Whenever I glanced their way she gave me the evil eye as if to say, “Who YOU looking at? We black folk have just as much right to be here as you!” Which is ironic really, since of all the patrons we were clearly the least well-off. I did notice that FH’s mean younger sister and her husband had a moment during the Michael Jackson medley (movingly played by our Italian pianist Alfio). As soon as I made out the opening bars to “Heal the World” I noticed that evil eye and her consort were holding hands and feeling touched by the memory. (I’m not being bitchy here I promise.)

Pete on the couch

The couch was, if not to die for, one of the highlights of my stay. If that sounds camp or slightly sad then so be it. We also had a pretty funny after-dinner drink with a couple from Constantia. The husband was drunk as a lord and name-dropped shockingly. As he clipped his cigar and sipped his cognac, he let it slip that he mixes in the same company as Charles Davy (Chelsea’s dad) on his shooting trips to Zimbabwe. I actually liked him a lot (name-dropping and business ethics aside) and was rather disappointed the next morning that they seemed to shun us out of embarassment.

“J was terribly garrulous last night,” said Mrs Constantia when we passed them at breakfast. Since we were rather badly hungover ourselves, we could only nod in sympathy and try to reassure them that we weren’t about to trash their reputations.

The CK restaurant

The main restaurant at Mont X has the ever-so-slightly pretentious name of Mange Tout (which refers to a snow-pea and also apparently means “eat it all”). This is the other one, the more downmarket Country Kitchen. Well yes. If downmarket means that it comes with its own boutique wine cellar with fantastic wines and is decorated in the style of Provence.

All in all, we had a fabulous time and were quite disappointed to return home. I guess there’s always Betty’s Bay hey dad