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

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.

Settling in

Just a quick blog-post to say I’m settling in and enjoying the new house. It still feels quite strange and I’m feeling guilty about not unpacking all the boxes and not doing this and that. I am pretty pleased with the Chagall though.

I am also feeling a bit overwhelmed by this move. The strain is definitely showing since my anxiety is definitely worse than usual. It’s making me cranky and irritable and worried. I’m frustrated that I can’t just be done with the move already. Why do I need to keep on unpacking and organising and tidying and throwing away and making decisions?

If I wasn’t so tired I could go to gym and feel better but … well, I just need to take it easy.

Some good news on the book front is that my new books arrived. I’m loving The River Midnight (Lilian’s “stunning debut novel” from 1999) and I’m astonished at how well Lilian has realised the Polish shtetl. Great dialogue and I’m loving the vilda bayas, the four friends (wild creatures) who are now grown up. I’m a slow reader so it could take me a couple of weeks to finish this but I’ll post a review when I’m through.

Also very happy to have started Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. I read about this on Charlotte’s blog (I think) and have wanted to read it ever since. That’s good advice for writing and life – just take things bird by bird.

Steppenwolf on the couch

Illustration by Hermann Ackermann from the Heritage Collection edition

With Hermann Hesse’s novel Steppenwolf (1927) still fairly fresh in my mind, I want to share a few thoughts in the form of an “On the couch” post. My idea for these posts is to take a defining moment in a novel, an event which might lead a main character to seek therapy, and then to broaden the discussion to include some reflections on the author and the circumstances in which the novel was written.

Name: Harry Haller (aka Steppenwolf)
Age: 48
Occupation: Writer
Lives in: Germany in the mid-1920s

Harry, the Steppenwolf of the title, is a troubled man. He sees himself as a “wolf of the steppes”, someone with a dual nature that is part human, part wolf-like. He feels as if the wolf in him is too savage and makes him unsuitable for human company while the “human” side lacks energy, purpose and contentment. Not content with either state, it is as if he’s at war with himself.

Descriptions of Harry:

Though not very big, he had the bearing of a big man. He wore a fashionable and comfortable winter overcoat and he was well, though carelessly, dressed, clean-shaven, and his cropped head showed here and there a streak of grey. … Later I found out that his health was poor and that walking tired him. With a peculiar smile — at that time equally unpleasant to me — he contemplated the stairs, the walls, and windows, and the tall cupboards on the staircase. All this seemed to please at the same time to amuse him. Altogether he gave the impression of having come out of an alien world, from another continent perhaps.

At the very first sight of him … I was at once astonished by something curious about him … I suspected that the man was ailing, ailing in the spirit in some way, or in his temperament or character, and I shrank from him with the instinct of the healthy. This shrinking was in the course of time replaced by a sympathy inspired by pity for one who had suffered so long and deeply, and whose loneliness and inward death I witnessed. In the course of time I was more and more conscious, too, that this affliction was not due to any defects of nature, but rather to a profusion of gifts and powers which had not attained to harmony. I saw that Haller was a genius of suffering and that in the meaning of many sayings of Nietzsche he had created within himself with positive genius a boundless and frightful capacity for pain. I saw at the same time that the root of his pessimism was not world-contempt but self-contempt; for however mercilessly he might annihilate institutions and persons in his talk he never spared himself. It was always at himself first and foremost that he aimed the shaft, himself first and foremost whom he hated and despised.

He has recently taken a room in a boarding house and has been spending most of his time thinking, reading, writing, drinking and wandering the streets. On one of his wanderings a man hands him a pamphlet which is a “treatise on the Steppenwolf” and sets out the multifaceted nature of his character. It also tells him that he is one of the ‘suicides” — people who one day know that they will take their own life. For Harry, the day he has chosen for this ending is his 50th birthday. The knowledge that his suffering will come to an end comforts him but he also knows that this is an easy way out.

A chance encounter with a former colleague, a professor with whom he has often discussed Indian mythology, leads to a dinner invitation with the professor and his wife. The dinner is a disaster. The professor unwittingly insults Harry by criticising a column which he has written and Harry in turn insults the professor’s wife by criticising a picture she has of Goethe, which Harry finds thickly sentimental and insulting to Goethe’s true brilliance. At the end of the dinner, Harry is convinced that he’s not fit for polite society and resolves to return to his room and cut his throat. Instead he walks the streets, coming to rest at a dance hall where he meets a young woman, Hermine, who recognises his desperation and effectively takes him under her wing, alternately sympathising with him and mocking him and also providing him with a reason to live.

Here’s part of Harry and Hermine’s initial conversation:

Harry: Well, you see, it was really a small matter … it was a picture representing Goethe, the poet Goethe, you know. But it was not in the least as he really looked. That of course nobody can know exactly … However, some artist of today had painted his portrait as he imagined him to have been and prettified him, and this annoyed me. It made me perfectly sick. I don’t know whether you can understand that.

Hermine: “… And so, Goethe has been dead a hundred years, and you’re very fond of him, and you have a wonderful picture in your head of what he must have looked like, and you have a right to … But the artist who adores Goethe too, and makes a picture of him, has no right to do it, nor the professor either, nor anybody else — because you don’t like it. You find it intolerable. You have to be insulting and leave the house. If you had sense, you would laugh at the artist and the professor – laugh and be done with it. If you were out of your senses you would smash the picture in their faces. But as you’re only a little baby, you run home and want to hang yourself. I’ve understood your story well, Harry. It’s a funny story. You make me laugh. But don’t drink so fast. Burgundy should be sipped. Otherwise you’ll get hot. But you have to be told everything – like a little child!”

The relationship between Harry and Hermine is an interesting one, not least because Hermine reminds Harry of his childhood friend Herman (and thus the author too) but also because she mothers him and treats him like a child. Their relationship never really gets beyond the mother-child or teacher-pupil dynamic but I found Hermine intriguing, especially with regards to power and vulnerability. Unlike Harry, Hermine is more rooted in the everyday world and she introduces him to a lover (Maria) and the saxophonist Pablo, who in turn introduces him to the world of the Magic Theatre. The Magic Theatre allows Harry’s imagination to run wild and he has a series of vivid fantasies which culminate in the ambiguous, violent ending. As a symbol of the power of projections, the Magic Theatre is really excellent.

While not wanting to give away the ending, I found it disappointing. Understandably, Hermine’s life is not considered separately from Harry’s, but she seems to exist only to advance his development. There’s a narcissism about Harry, which makes him preoccupied with his own nature (and fantasies) and seems to hold him back from ‘real’ relationships.

**
Wikipedia provides some insight into the novel and also Herman Hesse’s life, which seems to reflect much of what his Steppenwolf goes through.

“In 1924 Hermann Hesse remarried wedding singer Ruth Wenger. After several weeks however, he left Basel, only returning near the end of the year. Upon his return he rented a separate apartment, adding to his isolation. After a short trip to Germany with Wenger, Hesse stopped seeing her almost completely. The resulting feeling of isolation and inability to make lasting contact with the outside world, led to increasing despair and thoughts of suicide. Hesse began writing Steppenwolf in Basel, and finished it in Zürich.”

Wenger also apparently spent quite a bit of time in a mental hospital, which makes me want to read up on their relationship. Any pointers here, Litlove (or others)?