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

The River Midnight (1999)

Like the mythical Polish shtetl of Blaszka in which it is set, The River Midnight is boisterous, tangled with secrets, and startlingly generous. Told more as nine interwoven stories, Lilian Nattel’s debut novel portrays Jewish village life in the 19th century as both dense and wondrous, something akin to Gabriel García Márquez’s Macondo — with similar touches of magic realism. The novel uses a roughly nine-month period in 1894 as its framework, each chapter recounting many of the same events through the eyes of successive characters. Along the way we encounter the pettiness, charity, gossip, and customs that sustain the village, making its cramped life both full and frustrating. At the center of this whirl is Misha, the midwife, whose own pregnancy is one of the book’s abiding mysteries, and who, despite her inscrutability, elicits a resolute affection from her fellow villagers: the men who have loved or admired her, and the women she has befriended, provoked, and, ultimately, redeemed. “I have to hold the secrets of the whole village,” Misha explains, and as we learn of her girlhood friendships and adult loves, the twined network of those secrets becomes increasingly apparent.

The novel’s ambitious fragmentation, while it may occasionally lead us down the same stretch of road, is undeniably effective – revealing the bottomless texture of mingled lives. And while the story’s magic realism is a bit intermittent and tangential, Nattel more than compensates with lush, scrupulous detail and an unerring eye for the tension between self-interest and benevolence. In The River Midnight, she has created a world where flesh and prayer, accident and magic, coincide. — Ben Guterson, Amazon.com

What a wonderfully rich, multi-layered novel this is. I’ve been avoiding writing this review for over a week now since I’m really not sure that I can do justice to it. My own reactions were a bit like the nine different perspectives of the nine main characters. On different days and in different moods I would approach the book with wonder, curiosity, empathy, anxiety and delight. Wonder and curiosity at this world I knew very little about, enjoyment and delight at the dialogue, the character sketches and the plot, and some anxiety about whether it would all work (it does).

This is definitely one of the best books I’ve read this year and one that will stay with me for a long time to come. What I particularly liked about the way that Lilian portrays her characters here is that she does so with what Helen Benedict (writing about good profiles) would call verve, originality, humour and music. Whether she is describing Hannah-Leah, Faygela, Emma, Alta-Fruma, Hershel, Hayim, Yarush, Berekh or Misha, the characters sparkle and chatter away independently of their creator.

I read that Lilian said that each of these characters could be seen to represent part of her and I could definitely see the similarity with Faygela (six children and all) but also Hannah-Leah, Emma, Alta-Fruma and even possibly Berekh and Hayim. I was expecting to be repelled by Yarush’s story and I was surprised to find that it was told with compassion and humour. Physically strong while morally and emotionally weak, Yarush never becomes two-dimensional.

Reviewers have compared the River Midnight to a Chagall mural and complimented Lilian on her supple narrative technique and the depth of her study and passion. For me this novel is also the best type of history – stories of everyday people in superb detail but packaged in a way which is easy to take in and to relate to. I couldn’t help laughing at one (sadly misguided) reviewer who lamented that important historical events are mentioned only in passing and that the narrator keeps us at the level of the peasants’ huts. This same blogger also seemed disappointed that the characters were all Jewish. What was she expecting from a novel about a Polish shtetl – Christian characters staying in middle class apartments?

For someone who’s not Jewish, I had no trouble at all relating to the characters and the Yiddish words (from schmeckel to pripicheck). With the Holocaust as a kind of a silent, foreboding future event, I thought that the novel had an added poignancy which was enhanced by the fact that the shtetls live on only in history books, archival records and wonderful historical novels such as this.

If you haven’t done so already, check out the Q&As on Lilian’s blog and also Becca’s review.

Othello complex

As soon as I wrote the prescription, I knew I wanted to post about this. “Othello” said the writing on the yellow square of paper and when I handed it to him I was smiling.

“Is it a DVD?” he asked.
“Well it’s a Shakespeare play. But I’m sure they have it on DVD.”

I didn’t ask him whether he’d ever seen a Shakespeare play or whether he knew who Shakespeare was.

“I have a friend who puts things on DVD so I’ll ask him.”
“Great. You can let me know what you think.”

Earlier I was trying to explain what Othello was about.

“Well there was this guy, a military guy. Othello. He was a black general and he was very successful. And the world at that time was dominated by whites. Anyway, he had a beautiful wife called Desdemona and there was this evil guy called Iago who tried to make Othello believe that Desdemona was having an affair. He stole her handkerchief and then Othello got really jealous and he was so convinced that Desdemona was having an affair that he killed her.”

My client looked a little confused so I added by way of an afterthought, “It’s a tragedy.” I worried a bit that he might think I was indirectly suggesting that he kill his wife but I dimissed that idea as too far-fetched. Just to clarify my intention and to try and sell the play a little more I added, “But it shows the power of jealousy in taking over your mind.”

It’s not everyday that I get to bring Shakespeare into the consulting room and I was rather pleased with my intervention. (I’m also aware that a psychiatrist would have opted for an SSRI like Prozac but I believe in tragedy as treatment here at the Couchtrip.)

Of course it could totally confuse my client and be totally irrelevant to him. Perhaps I need to find a more modern (and accessible) DVD which relates to romantic jealousy and which will not encourage him towards violence.

I also realised that at the very least I could probably get an article out of this, especially since it connects up with another of my pet subjects, projective identification.

Turning to the Net I quickly find two leads. Here and then Wikipedia

This looks like a helpful quote:

“Romantic jealousy is here defined as a complex of thoughts, feelings, and actions which follow threats to self-esteem and/or threats to the existence or quality of the relationship, when those threats are generated by the perception of a real or potential attraction between one’s partner and a (perhaps imaginary) rival.” (White, 1981)

What would you suggest as a more accessible (and modern) book or movie on the theme of romantic jealousy?

Rattled

It started with an email this morning to my tenants. I’m trying to sell my house in Joburg and my tenants have been pretty difficult. They wanted to buy and we agreed on a price and then they couldn’t get credit because they were blacklisted. So I waited. And waited some more. And gave them a time-limit which came and went with no word from them. So I made plans to put the house on the market and they came back to me and said they didn’t want the house anyway.

Cut a long story short – now that the time is approaching for them to move out, they suddenly want to buy again. But that ship has sailed and now they suddenly want to jump on it again.

The sorry bottom line is that I just basically don’t trust them. So I emailed them this morning saying sorry, I just can’t go back to our original agreement. Which is fine. But I know my tenants. They have so much justification now just to dig their heels in and be obstructive about providing access for show days. First they “forgot” and then they needed to change the show day because a guest was coming to stay and then there was their grandchild’s christening. Fine. I can be flexible.

But when I got a desperate call this morning from an estate agent I don’t know wanting to rush through an offer for an “out of town” buyer (who could, it just so happens, buy and then rent to my current tenants for two years) I smelled a rat. It comes back to trust. So now I sit with only a sniff of a buyer in the immediate vicinity (he’s talking to the bond people) and a pissed-off tenant and estate agents trying to pull fast ones and I’m 1400km away from having much control over this. I’ve just got to trust the process and trust the estate agents whom I do have a relationship with. It will happen in due course.

I’m also feeling rattled because I would really love to do tons of reading on Cape Town (for a post I want to do on Cape Town novels) but I can’t do that at work. And now my group wants me to do a presentation to them next month on this as well. Plus mercury retrograde seems to be playing havoc with my appliances. The DVD player, the cellphone, the microwave – they’re all pleading for help.

And I’m still recovering from the various outward cashflows that accompanied the buying and moving into of the house.

Anyway, what this means is that when patients don’t pitch for their appointments, I’m secretly a bit pleased. Not all the time. I like my patients and would like to help them. But just sometimes (like now).

Incidentally, I can also report that blogging can make you happier. According to the knowledgeable and well-connected John Grohol of PsychCentral, a Taiwanese study by Ko and Kuo (2009) found that blogging increases your sense of connectedness and wellbeing. Now if only I could find a blog that reduced my house-related anxieties and also did my Cape Town-reading homework for me.

Rugby, apartheid and Empathy Deficit Disorder

At the Western Province versus Blue Bulls rugby game on Saturday (which I attended with my dad and one of his friends), I got smacked on the head by an over-zealous Blue Bulls fan. It happened like this. On the way into the stadium, I got caught up in the crush of fans waiting to be searched for weapons. As we waited our turn to be patted down, the fans with the WP jerseys inevitably started taunting the fans with the Blue Bulls jerseys.

One inebriated WP fan with no front teeth and a little daughter in tow would lean into the face of a female Blue Bulls fan and shout “WP jou lekker ding!” (WP you lovely thing!) while another man took a placard with “PROVINCE” on it and kept shoving it right in front of her eyes. She kept ignoring the chants and knocking the placard out of the way with her hand. In front of her a woman in a Springbok rugby jersey bobbed up and down as she faced the other fan and joined in the chorus of “WP jou lekker ding”.

Then Ms Blue Bulls got hold of her team’s flag and started waving it around, knocking the placard out of the way each time the drunken WP fan put it right in front of her face. Somewhere in the melee, she also managed to smack me on the head with it. Already annoyed at being caught up in this little scene, I caught the flag and muttered “moenie my slaan nie” (don’t hit me) before managing to get away. The Blue Bulls fan looked momentarily embarrassed at having hit me and then continued waving her flag.

Now I mention this little incident because it seems to represent, on a very small scale, a lack of empathy. Not the hitting on the head perhaps (because that was an accident) but the drunken taunting of an opposing fan. As I’m typing this I realise that I could well have misread the situation entirely. Perhaps the Blue Bulls woman thrived on the attention she got but I found it quite annoying that the WP fans seemed to enjoy her discomfort. They had a captive audience and they were not going to miss out on having their bit of fun.

What I’m leading up to here is a broader discussion on the lack of empathy generally, particularly in South Africa.

Washington-based psychotherapist Douglas LaBier wrote an interesting article a while back on what he calls Empathy Deficit Disorder. It’s not something you’ll find in the DSM but it’s surprisingly common and is associated with many mental illnesses, especially the personality disorders, autism and schizophrenia.

Empathy is something that’s largely ignored in the popular media (or at least our popular media). On Friday a colleague was telling me about an interesting presentation on empathy, ‘mirror neurons’ and gender differences. Basically the study found that women have a far greater capacity for empathy than men, regardless of whether the person they observed was considered ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Men on the other hand actually took delight in the pain of those they considered ‘bad’. I could see this played out on Saturday at the local rugby game. A player on ‘our’ team gets hurt and we feel his pain whereas if an opposing player goes down in a crunching tackle, all the home fans cheer with delight. Now I’m not suggesting that they want to see him stretchered off the field but I’m always amazed at how South Africans in particular take delight in the setbacks of opposing teams. If the Aussie cricket and rugby teams are doing badly, the average South African sports fan will be puffed up with glee. And then they will feel crushed and rather depressed when their team loses. I just don’t get it. Hence my surprise this Saturday when the Aussies whalloped the Springboks and everyone got rather glum about it. It was just one game and the Springboks are still favourites to take the Tri-Nations so why not feel happy for a resurgent and very talented young Aussie team?

But that’s just sport. On Sunday P and I took a walk around our local supermarket – not the one we usually go to but the one that’s closest to our house. The lack of common courtesy, sensitivity or even awareness of the personal space of others came as a bit of a shock to me. Now I will often accidentally bump into people and apologise but your average shopper seems solely focused on their objective and oblivious to anyone else. They won’t even look at you while they effectively push you out of the way and there are very few smiles or acknowledgements of others’ emotions (and you’ll be lucky if you get a few words out of the cashier as well).

It’s easy to generalise this to society as a whole but it does strike me that apartheid was a fundamental lack of empathy towards the ‘other’ to an astonishing degree, justified in the name of ‘science’ and rationality. Terms such as ‘separate development’ and ‘racial differences’ were used to justify why those with the power (whites) should basically exploit those of ‘other races’ for their own advantage. I’m simplifying here but that’s what it seems to come down to. Is it any wonder that the ‘formerly disadvantaged’ (as well as the formerly advantaged) display an alarming lack of empathy in the form of a violence and abuse?

LaBier says:

EDD develops when people focus too much on acquiring power, status and money for themselves at the expense of developing … healthy relationships. Nearly every day we hear or read about people who have been derailed by the pursuit of money and recognition and end up in rehab or behind bars. But many of the people I see, whether therapy patients or career and business clients, struggle with their own versions of the same thing. They have become alienated from their own hearts and equate what they have with who they are.

So what’s the solution? LaBier suggests that …

Just as you can develop EDD by too much self-absorption, you can also overcome EDD by retraining your brain to take advantage of what is known as neuroplasticity. … [...] By focusing on developing empathy, you can deepen your understanding and acceptance of how and why people do what they do and you can build respect for others. This doesn’t mean that you are whitewashing the differences you have with other people or letting them walk over you. Rather, empathy gives you a stronger, wiser base for resolving conflicts and trumps self-centered, knee-jerk reactions to surface differences.

I also think we need a concerted approach to teach empathy as part of the curriculum and we need to elect public officials who display this quality. And, more generally, I’d like to see a greater awareness that South Africans as a whole need to work on this if we’re to have a more healthy, happy society.

Pushing up the daisies

I found this lovely spring poem by Robert McCracken on Amanda’s blog. Amanda describes herself as a domestic goddess in training. (My female side wants to chip in: Aren’t we all, darling?)

Spring
Today is the day when bold kites fly,
When cumulus clouds roar across the sky.
When robins return, when children cheer,
When light rain beckons spring to appear.

Today is the day when daffodils bloom,
Which children pick to fill the room,
Today is the day when grasses green,
When leaves burst forth for spring to be seen.

My new neighbours (the ones whose car I accidentally nudged with the gate when I arrived last week) went to see the wild flowers on the West Coast this past weekend. Which led me of course to turn to my trusty friend Flickr. Here’s one from Drum Africa Safaris.

Amanda asks what spring means to us. (Er, P, should I be writing Spring or spring?) Well, I’m a great fan of life, love, sunshine and flowers (who isn’t?) But one association which probably says a lot about me is that my first ever blog-post (over at the old Blogmark), written on the 1st of September 2005, was about suicide. I was feeling glum after I had just missed out on getting into Clinical Psychology Masters and I was also intrigued by a story I read that said that depressed people are more likely to end their own lives in spring rather than in winter. There’s part of me that quite admires the paradox of this. Apparently the rush of energy that spring brings can cause those suffering from depression to take the plunge (if you’ll forgive that expression). (I wanted to add that it might tip them over the edge but well I just added that anyway, didn’t I? Damn impulse control …) Not the happiest thought right at the beginning of spring but the phenomenon of “spring suicides” should make families and friends (and therapists) perhaps a little more aware (and sensitive).

One thing I also realised about spring (and which is common news to more scientifically-literate people) is that the days quickly become a lot lighter. In winter and summer the sun will rise fractionally earlier or later each day (depending on which side of the equinox you are) but in spring and autumn this rapidly changes. The effect on our moods can be quite dramatic (cf. SAD or Seasonal Affective Disorder) and makes for an interesting change in the therapy room as well. Some patients will decide to go off their medication so that they can lose weight for summer while others will sink deeper into their pits of despair. The signs of life all around them are more confirmation that they, in contrast to everyone else, have that big L on their foreheads for the world to see.

So here’s wishing you Happy Spring to those in the southern hemisphere and Happy Fall to those up north!

Update: P says I should opt for lower case. This post also makes me think I should post on Gallows Humour and whether we should even be laughing at suicide. My instinct is that we can laugh at it (if this comes from a place of respect and empathy) but that this laughter could easily be misconstrued as disrespect. It’s so hard to know whether people are laughing with you or at you.