Requesting more Swift progress

I may not be very familiar with the music of Taylor Swift but I have, of course, heard of her stature in the music industry when she stood up for music artists’ income by pulling her music off Spotify (a streaming music service) in 2014. Now, in a victory that affects many more women and men, she is standing up “for...anyone who feels silenced by sexual assault.” On Monday (8-14-17), Swift won a victory [She was awarded what she asked for, a symbolic $1.] against a former DJ who blamed Swift for his firing when she accused him of groping her at a pre-concert photo shoot.

Our profession knows only too well the devastating effects on sexual assault survivors. Now, if only the U.S. President would stand up against bigotry and hatred. Many of us were more than chagrined at his waffling about such hatred evidenced last week in Charlottesville,VA with the death of Heather Heyer and injury to others. I do know one lyric attributed to Swift, “Haters gonna hate.” Unfortunately, many cannot “shake it off” and the consequences of hate also need to be given a voice. A voice is another important, empowering benefit of therapy.

More about narrative, or narrating one’s story

American writer Richard Ford, who has recently written Between Them -- the memoir of his parents’ (Parker and Edna) life and love-- shared with PBS Newshour’s IMHO (In My Humble Opinion) on May 19, 2017 some of the reasons one writes a memoir:

“To render testimony

To bear witness

To make sense of a recollected life...

Substantiate ourselves to ourselves…

To utter what must not be erased…”

and because “I missed them” and some longings are “acted upon even long after it might be

supposed that enough time has passed for longing to subside.”

Furthermore, “Age is a winnowing process and sometimes what gets sifted out as we seek to know the important consequence of lives are the actual lives themselves.”  About his parents’ lives, he recognized that though “as most parents are, [they were] all but unnoticeable in the world’s disinterested eye,” they were of importance to him because of the love and relationship they shared with him. [I am reminded of the iconic play “Our Town” (1938) by Thornton Wilder where the ordinary town of Grover’s Corners and the ordinary lives of its citizens are made extraordinary by the relationships people share.] He said of them: “Being their son seemed a privilege, and almost mysteriously, they opened for me a world of immense possibility.”

Perhaps in response to the current political climate, he added, “In a world cloaked in supposition and opinion and misdirection and often in outright untruth, things do actually happen. My parents’ lives did take place.”

Some of Ford's reasons for writing this memoir speak to our work (witnessing, remembering and making sense, even instantiating authentic beings through actual experience). When we listen with reverence and love to the stories of the lives of our patients, we validate the importance of their memories, their feelings and their lives. For as Ford noted from Saint Augustine ‘Memory is a faculty of the soul.’

More on storytelling narrative, and on how to do so, literally, or literary

A lot has been written in contemporary psychoanalysis about the need to free ourselves from strict theory and technique in favor of the process of the moment to moment experience of two people intimately engaged in the collaborative construction of relationship and of meaning, primarily for the patient’s benefit. I was pleasantly struck to find the same ideas about uncertainty, spontaneity, surprise, and surrender in the process of one author’s writing.

Listen to what George Saunders, author of the critically acclaimed and New York Times best-selling novel Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), tells Jeffrey Brown on the Newshour Bookshelf (March 28, 2017) about the process of writing: “The holiest state is to be a little confused by what you are doing and you are guided by the energy that the story is actually giving you as it is revised. That’s kind of tricky because it means you have to abandon your ideas about organization or thematics and really submit [surrender] to the story… and hopefully it will result in some new mode of beauty.”

I thought it aptly put. (He is a wordsmith after all.)

By the way, Saunders additionally said in the same interview that he was inspired by Lincoln who had somehow been able to “transform... sorrow into a kind of expanding empathy for everybody” and whose “response to fear or hardship was expansiveness instead of shrinkage.” Were that we all were so heroic.

The search for happiness, I mean, meaning.

Emily Esfahani Smith, author of “The Power of Meaning” reported in a PBS Newshour IMHO (In my humble opinion) segment on Mar 10, 2017 that psychologists have counterintuitively concluded that the chasing after happiness can leave people unhappy and lonely. It is instead the search for meaning and trying to figure out how to make our lives count which bring happiness. She cites the epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest known literary works (Mesopotamian, ~ 2500 BC), and sees in it the hero’s search for how to live knowing that he will die. Smith says his quest remains urgent.

Social scientists say meaning is found when we connect and contribute to something beyond ourselves, such as to family, work, nature, or god. Smith cites three conditions found in people who say they have meaningful lives: 1) They believe their lives matter; 2) They have a sense of purpose;  and 3) They think their lives are coherent and make sense. Storytelling itself gives meaning, she says, and offers clarity.

I am reminded of the work we psychoanalysts do, a connection which brings personal meaning to our lives, but also affords to our clients both a search for meaning and an attempt at a coherent story.  We know that a coherent narrative in Mary Main’s Adult Attachment Interview predicts secure attachment.  We know, too, that an important job in parenting is to convey to a child that she or he matters, has a right to exist, and is connected to something bigger (the family). Tomorrow, were he alive today, would be my father’s 96th birthday. I wanted to give a grateful shout out to my father for having always conveyed meaning to our lives by his love and dedication to his family (he was a great listener and storyteller himself) and to his work (he was a writer who showed joy and meaning could exist in one’s professional life), and by seeing his joy burgeon as he aged (through his interaction with his grandchildren).

Meaning through connection and narrative? Our profession was made for it.