Ethics and Outrage

A few weeks ago at brunch at the home of friends we were expressing our disappointment with the US President. We agreed that Obama seemed to lack outrage, a righteous indignation, at what is happening all around us. It seems Obama has not expressed outrage since the unfortunate arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr in Cambridge, MA in July 2009.

So I was very happy to come across the interview with Stephane Hessel two evenings ago on the PBS Newshour. Hessel, a German born Jew raised in Paris, a member of the French Resistance, and a concentration camp survivor, was cogently speaking about his book Time for Outrage--Indignez-Vous! In Time for Outrage, published in October 2010, Hessel asked people to get angry and indignant when their government is not doing what is necessary to preserve the dignity of people.

The subsequent Arab Spring and, later, Occupy Wall Street, hearten him, and he encourages younger people -- now 94 years old, he quips that almost everyone is younger than he—to engage in a cause with outrage, not by violence, but by a determined will. He believes that international law, encouraged by Franklin Roosevelt and the UN charter, the ideals for which WWII was fought, are the values now threatened by failing financial fidelity and corruption around the world. He also sees as unacceptable the treatment of Palestinians by Israel, treatment of the world’s immigrants, that social security does not cover requirements of living, and the organization of lobbyists to oppress our governments.

Just yesterday, in TBIPS’ Practical Analytic Subjectivity course, the class was discussing Claire Allphin’s An Ethical Attitude in the Analytic Relationship (Journal Analytical Psychology, 50:451-468) in which she reminds us that “the source of ethical capacity is the ability to accommodate conflicting needs…” a plea for intersubjectivity if I ever heard one. She cites John Beebe’s obligation of the ethical attitude to protect (the patient’s) self esteem, or, as Hessel might say, each person’s dignity. I was reminded of a 20th century Christian hymn which sang “guard each [one’s] dignity and save each [one’s] pride” as the class, later, discussed interpretation and the exhortation to avoid shaming a patient by the meaning we may bring to their narrative or behavior.

Perspectival Realism and Rape

Whose reality is it? Whose truth? As is often the case with sexual assault (a crime which usually occurs with few witnesses) it comes down to a battle of credibility, seeming, then, to put the complaining victim, not the defendant, on trial. Yesterday, August 23, 2011, after three months of investigation, the sexual assault charges against former IMF President and likely French presidential hopeful Dominique Strauss- Kahn were dropped. His accuser Nifassatou Diallo, an immigrant from Guinea, Africa was the hotel maid where Strauss-Kahn was staying. The NY prosecutors, perhaps having rushed to charge a man who was getting on a plane to France (a country without an extradition agreement with the USA), yesterday sounded angry at the accuser for the changes, for which she was discredited, in her story.

Certainly defendants can be falsely accused. With changes in the justice system over the decades, the victim is no longer accused of dressing provocatively or 'asking for' the sexual encounter. But questions will always remain in the case of Strauss-Kahn about what happened in that ten minutes. So many questions! Is Diallo a person who could seize the opportunity of a powerful man's sexual activity for her own financial gain? Can't liars and druggies be raped? And while it is said that there are men who would pursue a sexual encounter with anyone at any time, I ask myself: why would such a powerful and wealthy man be so indiscriminate, so pressing with motivation at that moment?

At the time of her report to coworkers, boss, and police, Diallo appeared credible and credibly shaken and injured. "Beyond a reasonable doubt" favors the defense, as is should. But therapists know that trauma causes disorientation and dissociation, making memory patchy. I can therefore understand Diallo moving to clean the next hotel room or returning to clean the room where the alleged attack occurred. I know that people are known to be motivated to please authority, whether the police or the prosecutor (or the rapist) by telling them what they want to hear. Many people can possibly understand lying to gain asylum as Diallo did to stay in the United States. I ask myself: Will this case set back courage to report crimes such as rape or crimes perpetrated against immigrants?

Let Freedom Ring: Psychoanalysis and Politics

While USA unveiled its Martin Luther King, Jr monument yesterday August 22, 2011, Libyan rebels, after six months of fighting, captured the capital of Tripoli. Of this victory US President Barack Obama said, "The pursuit of human dignity is stronger than any dictator." The PBS Newshour aired last night at least ten minutes of footage of Libyan men rejoicing in the streets, on rooftops, and in cars. In the footage of these hundreds of men I noted, maybe, a half dozen women and wondered to myself if women of Libya, 42 years under dictator Momar Gadhafi, will have a voice as Libya reinvents itself in its striving toward democracy. UK Prime Minister David Cameron intimated as much in his support of a "free, democratic, inclusive Libya." UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called this a "hopeful moment."

In the consulting room, freedom is described more personally, whether freedom from unconscious conflict, or freedom to embrace our multiple selves, or even freedom from the tyranny of the procrustean bed of analysts who hold too tightly to their theories. Individuals require what countries transforming themselves require: access to frozen assets, building of infrastructure, secure enough borders, and (an international) community. Therapists help patients develop their voices. In this moment of hope, my hope for Libya is that the international community aids Libya in including female voices for a truly inclusive endeavor.

Psychoanalysis and Compassion: the Death Penalty

With the two recent posts on this blog, one by Tim LaDuca on May 31, 2011 (about the compassion of psychoanalysis), and one by Loren Buckner on June 2, 2011, (describing --regarding the Anthony case-- how even good parents can sometimes harbor hateful, even murderous thoughts, toward their children), I was reminded of an article I had read.

Appearing in the May 9, 2011 issue of The New Yorker, the article The Mitigator by Jeffrey Toobin reported on the decline of the use of the death penalty, particularly in Texas, where defense attorneys have, in the last decade, finally begun to utilize the opportunity to present mitigating evidence to the prosecutor before the charging decision is made. In addition to medical history, MRIs, and character witnesses, an extensive life history is conducted and used to help explain how “'a beloved brother and husband and father and son can also commit a terrible act.’” This enables the jury to have mercy, both on the defendant and the defendant’s family members.


Scharlette Holdman, an anthropologist and “a pioneer in the field” of providing into evidence a mitigation narrative (e.g. for Ted Kaczynski the Unabomber) said, “'That narrative is not there for the asking…It requires not just knowledge and skill but experience in how you search for, identify, locate, recognize, and preserve the information.’” Having read this article, my first thought as an analyst was: who is better to help identify, recognize, and construct a compassionate life story than a psychoanalyst? Forensic work is not my favorite, but it seems to me that the mitigation narrative screams out for the skill of the psychoanalyst, especially one with experience in childhood traumas, who is an expert in co-constructing a compelling story of a person’s life and is able “to create a complex portrait of a haunted and troubled defendant.”

The article featured Danalynn Recer, a Texas attorney and defense strategist for capital cases, who is quoted as saying, “'I don’t apologize for saying I love my clients in all their complexity. We insist on seeing their humanity despite what they’ve done.'” Now couldn’t that also be said by analysts about their clients/patients?

Obama and Contemporary Therapy

Many times since his inauguration, President Barack Obama's approach and/or language has uncannily called to mind the philosophical leanings of contemporary psychoanalysis. He has talked about rupture and repair, and has held in tension disparate opinions (causing some early on to accuse him of being indecisive). Last night (March 28, 2011), ten days into the Libyan conflict, from National Defense University in Washington, D.C., President Obama addressed the nation about U.S. action in Libya. In his usual circumspection, he spoke both to those who want no U.S. action there and those who want action increased to the point of removing Moammar Gadhafi.

He explained clear goals and expectations (opposing violence against one's own people; advocating freedom to choose one's own government; a government responsive to the aspirations of its people) and extolled negotiation with other heads of state (the United Nations coalition) saying, "We should not be afraid to act, but the burden of action should not be America's alone." This comment of Obama's called to mind for me the psychoanalytic situation, where participation, the burden of knowing and uncertainty, the courage and the hope, belong neither to the analyst nor the patient alone. These are negotiated, apportioned according to the moment, and shared between two people who have no way to foresee the outcome.

As therapists, we welcome into our offices the longings of our patients, constructing together an increased breadth of possibility or freedom. So just as in the quote above I might have substituted 'the therapist's' for "America's", so in this later quote from Obama's address, I might substitute again 'the therapist' for "the United States": "Wherever people long to be free, they will find a friend in the United States." Always proud to be a U.S. citizen, Obama makes it easier. Likewise, I have also been always proud to be a psychoanalyst.

Violence Against Women and Failure of Intersubjectivity

To recognize (ala Benjamin, 1988: affirm, validate, empathize, know, identify with, ) an Other and see an Other as her/his own center of subjectivity and as a separate agent with her/his own desires, denotes a capacity for intersubjectivity. When intersubjectivity breaks down, complementarity more easily ensues. Without recognition and reciprocity, one more easily falls into polarities and into the complementarity of ‘doer-done to.’

It was with horror that I listened on Friday (October 30, 2009) to National Public Radio’s story on the brutal gang rape of a fifteen year-old girl after a homecoming dance in Richmond, CA. Also horrific was the report that as many as two dozen students watched, photographed with cell phones, and even invited friends down to see the assault that lasted more than two hours.

Only ten days earlier (October 20, and 21, 2009) NPR had aired another horrific story: On September 28, 2009, at a pro-democracy rally in the west African capital of Conakry, held to speak out against Guinea’s military leader Capt. Moussa Dadis Camara, “rogue” soldiers perpetrated human rights violations, killing, by some estimates, more than a hundred demonstrators. In broad daylight the soldiers committed sexual violence against women. In a predominantly Muslim society like Guinea’s, fathers, husbands, and families may reject a woman who has been raped, making rape all the more effective as a tool of political repression. Some of the women were dragged away and held captive for days, raped repeatedly, and reportedly taunted with ‘a woman’s place is in the home, not at a political rally.’

And it was not so long ago that the decades-old crime of Roman Polanski's rape of a teen girl again occupied the media.

There may be lots of theories about why men perpetrate violence against women. In Richmond, CA a classmate of the 15 year-old victim said of the perpetrators, "They weren't raised to respect girls." One of the few universals in human experience is that we were all once helpless and dependent; the non-egalitarian distribution of childcare responsibilities makes women a likely target for the resentment of children who grew up uncomfortably dependent on, and under the thumb of, the powerful maternal figure. Children who were without the opportunity for agentic mastery as compensation for preceding helplessness, who grew up without the recognition of their own subjectivity, who did not witness the subjectivity of their mothers, are handicapped in their capacity to develop intersubjectivity.

These young men, soldiers, pedophile insist on the privilege of their own subjectivity over that of the Other. Without the capacity for intersubjectivity and to see an Other as part of the plurality of the human race, one can deny the need, or justify no need, for obligation to behave justly and ethically toward others. No where do we have a more acute failure of recognition than when the violence of rapists obliterates the humanity of women. Complicit on-lookers further aggravate and humiliate by their seemingly publically sanctioned violence against women, the unrecognized sex.

OBAMA WINS NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

The stunning announcement this morning that the new President of the United States Barack Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize "marks," per French President Sarkozy, "America's return to the hearts of the people of the world." Obama's abilitry to recognize the inevitability of rupture and of repair gives Obama a place in the hearts of modern psychoanalysts.

Obama brings hope and respect for dialogue. While columnist David Brooks of the New York Times, among others, may complainingly ask: [but] "Can he make a decision?" I think this query overlooks the rabbinical tradition of aspiring to see both sides. As Lewis Aron writes in The Tree of Knowledge: Good and Evil: "an argument that threatens to resolve a controversy is considered a difficulty [kushia], while one that restores the controversy is called a solution [teruz]!" To have circumspection, to see both sides and to hold both in tension, is one of many things which makes Obama a postmodern president. To fall on one side of the discussion can prematurely foreclose further dialogue. Obama, like an effective psychoanalyst, seeks to keep the dialogic process ongoing. Even had he not dedicated himself to an era of international cooperation on nuclear arms, respect for, and endeavoring to, keep open the dialogue, for that alone, I think he deserves the Nobel Prize. Obama does us proud.

“Shielding the Flame”: Marek Edelman, Commander in Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Dies at 90

"Dr. Edelman was one of a handful of young leaders who in April 1943 led a force of 220 poorly armed young Jewish men and women in a desperate and hopeless struggle against the Germans." *

The armed resistance was included breify in the film Korczak and speaks to the oft-stated question about Jews passively going to their deaths, not fighting back. Dr. Edelman rejects such dualisms and hierachies of courage which give special status to the armed resistance saying, it was much more courageous to go to one's death in silence.

*A version of this article appeared in print on October 3, 2009, on page A21 of the New York edition. To read on line, click here.

The Genocide in Me: A Documentary

Vamik Volkan characterizes the intergenerational transmission of trauma as the psychological DNA that passes down from those who originally experienced the trauma but were not able to process it adequately, to their descendents who are then impelled to attend to the defeat, loss and humiliation of the earlier generation.

This is the context of the life of filmmaker, Araz Artinian, who is torn between loyalty to her community’s traumatic past and her desire to open her life to people and experiences of her own generation. The demands of her family and community are to sustain an Armenian identity which is dramatically walled off from odars, literally strangers or foreigners.

Her family’s experience of the 1915 Armenian genocide at the hands of the Turks has held them hostage for more than 7o years. In some instances, it has even alienated them from other survivors. For example, Araz’s grandmother was pejoratively known as ‘the tricolor woman’ because she wore the colors of the Armenian flag on her head and her waistband. She was the object of ridicule by her neighbors. Such was her conviction of the necessity for remembering the atrocities of the past that she named her son, Araz’s father, ‘The Revenge of the Armenians’* and admonished him to never forget his identity.

*********

Trauma destroys time, Robert Stolorow once told a patient. Stolorow was grounding his thinking in the idea that the present contains both the future and the past. “Experiences of trauma become freeze-framed into an eternal present in which one remains forever trapped.” Araz says as much in her statement “everything that happens in my life, goes back to 1915.”

The family enacted prohibitions to avoid losing their identities. They imposed these on the children, forbidding mixed marriages and insisting on observance of cultural markers. Araz’s family restrictions became ‘absolutisms’ which Stolorow defines as beliefs that are not open for discussion. Absolutisms constitute a naïve realism that allow us to experience the world as predictable and stable. Trauma, a major loss of innocence yields a rupture between the traumatized and those that are not; namely because the traumatized have first hand experience outside the boundaries of everyday normality.

Stolorow proposes that the isolating estrangement felt by survivors stems from a conviction that the traumatized and ‘normals’ live in separate and unbridgeable worlds. Araz wants to exit the ‘ghetto’ of her existence to open herself to others, to difference. She desires to do this while staying connected to an identity she described as ‘more than herself;’ This is an instance of what Stolorow would call “the contexuality of our sense of being and of the intersubjective contexts in which it can be lost and regained.”

Stolorow, R. (2007). Trauma and Human Existence. New York: The Analytic Press.

*Vrej-Armen Artinian. (photo: Ian Oliveri © InformAction Films inc. & Twenty Voices)

Sotomayor, Empathy, and Perspectival Realism

U.S. President Barack Obama has nominated Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. Her confirmation seems inevitable, and she will be the third woman and the first Hispanic to serve on this highest Court. Pundits report that she is the most experienced nominee in a century. Certainly her nomination is also a nod to diversity: female, Latina. But, while some might think diversity would have been better served by, say, a lesbian nominee, there is significance in Sotomayor’s postmodern view that it is “important to acknowledge the influence that personal experience could have on decisions.”

Psychoanalysis, too, is entering an era where there is no longer an objective authority, where individual subjectivity can no longer be ignored as if it does not have influence. Who each of us is, including all our experiences, influences every thought, every action, every relationship, even as we strive as analysts to be with our patients.

And if Sotomayor’s breadth of experiences, including those with loss, poverty, and illness, as well as motherhood, Ivy League education, and as a judge, allow for more of the “empathy factor” (empathy: the ability to put yourself in another’s shoes) then I am with Chris Kelly when he jokes in his “Empathy for the Devil: …I can’t imagine how it feels to be against empathy.” Empathy is not only a mainstay in our therapeutic work, but it is a too pervasively absent quality on the world’s political stage. Should it not also pervade the judicial system where both fairness and mercy must be held in balance?

Sotomayor, who quipped that a "wise Latina" could reach a better decision than a man, admits she “fell flat” when trying to play off Sandra Day O’Connor’s comment that a wise old woman would probably arrive at the same decision as a wise old man. Much has been made of Sotomayor’s injudicious comment. Though poorly expressed, Sotomayor makes a valid point about the value of differing perspectives in applying the law.

On NPR this morning, the host said it differently, “Lots of different people can have lots of valuable experience.” This is what we might call perspectival realism: that no one has a god’s-eye view, instead each of us brings only a tiny slice of reality of experience from a vast array of possibilities in experiencing of an idea or an event. I might hope that an old woman might arrive, not at the same decision as an old man, but at a different one, equally valuable, offering yet another slice. If Sotomayor fell flat, it was in her temporary lapse of empathy when one privileges one sex, one ethnicity, or one subjectivity over another. All of us have lapses. If we are to remain connected to one another, particularly in the consulting room, then we must allow lapses in the other, negotiate our way through, and keep with the work of relationship.

Living by One's Convictions

I was impressed yesterday to learn that Gov. Palin has a five month old son with Down's Syndrome. Many an expectant mom would have made a different choice. My heart also goes out to Bristol Palin who is an expectant mom at age seventeen. I agree with the Governor's announcement that this is a difficult choice requiring lots of support. Today a young woman, still a child herself really, will need to contain an infant's raging, teach subjectivity to a toddler, and, later, help with homework perhaps alongside her own studies, and frankly discuss sex with her teen. I am so happy that just eighty-eight years ago women who had reached majority age were granted choice, to vote.

In February 2008 on this blog I reviewed the film "Juno" and asked the presumptous question of how an otherwise educated teen could find herself in the predicament of being unwantedly pregnant. I will not presume to ask such a question now, as the decision belies the wanting. (Many decades ago when I was a teen, the belief was that only "good" girls got pregnant because they were not planning to have sex, and so were unprepared---recognizing birth control is not 100%).

In our consulting rooms with our therapy patients, nothing is off limits to discuss. This, unfortunately, is not so in the personal forum nor the political arena. Not all teenage girls have a supportive, educated, or well to do family. Regardless, there are those girls who may not want to carry a pregnancy to full term. Palin, of course, wishes to over turn Roe v. Wade, and so lives by her convictions. I applaud those who do. In a world troubled by people and countries who find it hard to recognize the center of subjectivity inherent in each other's experiences, I do not, however, expect others to live as well by my convictions. Having daughters myself, I am for freedom of choice, for them, their bodies, and their dreams.

Has David Brooks become a relationalist?

Has David Brooks, the usually-conservative New York Times columnist, become a relationalist or a contestualist?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/opinion/12brooks.html

Edward H. Stein

Psychoanalysis and Campaign 2008

Rupture and Repair and the 2008 Presidential Campaign

Kim Vaz, Ph.D., Chair of the Womens Studies Dept. at the University of South Florida, and advanced candidate in psychoanalytic training at the Tampa Bay Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies, shared with me recently some interesting insights about the presidential campaign, and about one candidate in particular, Barack Obama.

Noting that our nation is in a crisis of identity, confronted by otherness, she sees parallels between Obama's stance and that of the analyst: If our nation is in a crisis, having to integrate the multiple selves/identities that are Americans--no longer the faceless of Montana or West Virginia--then Obama, Vaz says, asks us to look to him to "hold'' these "multiple identities that have fomented his imagination and his life of public service."

Obama tells us, as an analyst would, there will be 'ruptures.' And, like an analyst, Vaz notes, Obama tells us that though, 'not a perfect man, nor born of a perfect man, he will be, unlike his father, there, to listen, to learn, to lead, to fulfill promise.' "In other words," says Vaz, "there will be repair."

Vaz further notes that the 2008 campaign brings the "outsider identities of gender, age, and race" center stage. She expects, "We will need all our identities, foreign and U.S. born; male and female; old and young; black, white and brown, to solve the complex global problems America faces."