Opening the 2009-10 Program Series of Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society, Inc. was Bruce Reis, PhD, relational faculty at NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and a contributing editor to Studies in Gender and Sexuality. His talk “Reconsidering Masculinity” aimed to dismantle the monolithic model of heterosexual masculinity and showcased his most recent book (co-edited with Robert Grossmark) Heterosexual Masculinities.
Loosening the rigid normative of heterosexual masculinity, Reis hopes to open to multiplicity the long held (Greenson, Stoller, Elise, Chodorow) conception that boys must repudiate the feminine in order to become masculine. Elise, in particular, writes about the fear of penetration and the defenses against it (the “citadel complex”), but Reis cites Kaftal’s criticism: Elise does not take into account the paradoxes of gender, as if penetration were binary and as if fear of penetration were masculine. Diamond reminds us that there is a pre-oedipal identification with both parents and that gender identification with the same sex parent is not the whole story.
If there, as infant research is beginning to elucidate, no primary fusion with the mother, then there is no need to propose that separation from the mother is the role of the father. Father need no longer be cast as “the other” parent. Father’s presence may be playful, erotic (open to delight, pleasure, excitement, indulgence), and nurturing, making it unnecessary to conceive that boys must repudiate the nurturing mother. In other words, as Person writes, there is a plurality of masculinities.
Monday, September 14, 2009
HETEROSEXUAL MASCULINITIES
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Saintly Man, Ungodly Film? Controversies and Passions Fueled by Andrezj Wajda’s film, Korczak
Special Thanks to: The Consulate General of the Republic of Poland in Los Angeles as well as Film studio Perspektywy as patrons of the film's screening.
Writing for the New York Times in 1991, Vincent Canby provided the following portrait of Janusz Korczak (1878-1942). “….born Henryk Goldszmit, a the Polish-Jewish doctor and educator who devoted his life to the care, study and improvement of the lot of children. In the years between the two world wars, Korczak wrote, lectured, conducted a popular radio program and sponsored a magazine put together entirely by children. More important, he opened a home for Jewish orphans in Warsaw where he could put into practice his theories relating to children's rights. He died at Treblinka along with members of his staff and 200 children from his orphanage, which had been moved into the ghetto in 1940. Korczak was clearly some kind of saint.”
If it is largely in agreement that Janusz Korczak was a paragon, the same can not be said for the charges leveled at Andrzej Wajda's 1990 controversial film, Korczak released shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Korczak, the first of the films in this year’s series generated impassioned discussions that were ably led by the USF historian, Case Boterbloem and psychoanalyst and author, John Hartman.
Noting that Polish citizens whole-heartedly participated in the extermination of the Jewish people, Dr. Boterbloem provided the audience with the context by which to understand the political and social world of the Polish territory before and after the War that lead to “ugly scenes” after 1945. Multiple identities were not really possible; one was either a Catholic and therefore a Pole or one was Jewish. This of course, made Korczak unique in the way he crafted an identity which would encompass multiplicity: he felt himself to be a Jew and a good Polish citizen. Boterbloem added that there were some (not just Jewish) Poles who did believe that one could be both Pole and Jew (Judaic) as one could be both Pole and Catholic or both Pole and atheist. This inclusive view of Polish citizenship, in which Korczak believed, was very much also a principle in which the Polish social-democrats and communists believed before the German invasion. Anti-Semitism was rampant right through the 1960s and some in the audience would add that anti-Semitism remains pervasive in Poland.
Dr. Boterbloem also drew a portrait of Korczak as a pedagogue, involved in the New Education Movement of pedagogical progressivism along with Maria Montessori and Leo Tolstoy. And he told us about Korczak’s “Bill of Children’s Rights” such as “The child has the right to live in the present;” meaning, “Children are not people of tomorrow; they are people today.”
Dr. Hartman prefaced his remarks about the film by disclosing his affective reaction to the film. He wished that Korczak’s children would have lived. His feeling was related to an experience with a patient of Polish-Jewish descent who during her treatment with him, dreamt that she was in the beginning of the Holocaust. Later that day, she learned that she was facing a dire medical condition: stage IV metastatic breast cancer. She and Hartman concluded that indeed her preconscious awareness of the cancer provided the manifest content of the dream. His wish for the children and his wish for the patient were the same. He wanted life for both.
Hartman’s focus was on how to make sense of Korczak’s decision to die with his children. Hartman noted that Korczak could have taken the following actions: he could have saved himself because of his fame; he could have committed suicide (one could argue that Korczak committed suicide by Nazi); or he could have despaired and given up.
Background on the young Korczak was instructive. Hartman noted that Korczak’s father died under mysterious circumstances and it was thought, by his own hand. Having suffered from a psychotic illness, Korczak new his father as mentally unstable. Like his father, sexual conflicts plagued Korczak and he never was known to have formed a romantic relation. Perhaps even as one audience member later added, he feared that he would have fathered mentally unstable children himself.
Turning to Eric Erikson’s book, Childhood and Society for ideas, Hartman suggested that Korczak’s decision to die with the children was consistent with Erikson’s final stage of personality development: integrity vs. despair. Korczak lived a life as a doctor, writer, and advocate for children. A
death with dignity then would be an extension of his identity. Korczak manifested no ambiguity or compromise like some other Jews featured in the film who worked the black-market or who resisted German domination outright. While in his personal life, Korzack was extremely provocative to the Germans, he refused to wear an arm-band which would have identified him as a Jew and he continued to wear his old military uniform, when it came to the children he would take no risk. To abandon the children, Hartman argued, would have been a betrayal of everything in his character and everything his life meant to him: his core values, his identity and his life’s work.
The audience raised the following questions:
What was the meaning of the dream sequence at the end of the film?
How was it that Jews could be seen in non-ghetto neighborhoods?
What was the role of the black-market in the ghetto and the Jews that ran it?
How do we know that the film is an accurate representation of the final period of Korczak’s life?
How was the film received by the Polish people? What was the state of knowledge of the postwar generation about the ancestor’s role in the Holocaust? Why the film was not more widely distributed?
The film is base
d on a diary that Korczak kept, survivors from the orphanage, Korczak’s close friends and Polish witnesses. In short we learned and experienced first hand, that the film and its’ ending generates controversy. While Hartman took the view that the ending of the film is very much in the mode of the utopian vision of Korczak himself. He felt the film could be seen in the context of rumors that circulated in Poland that Korczak and the children escaped their fate of death. Boterbloem noted that others felt that this ending was a further example of the soft-peddling of Polish involvement with the murder of the Jewish people.
Claude Lanzmann’s, (director of the 1985 film, Shoah) influence at Cannes caused the film to be judged outside the normal categories and to be placed in a separate and special category of its’ own. The film has been suppressed around the world in part due to accusations that Wadja sweeps Polish anti-Semitism under the rug. In comparison to other films, there are relatively few film reviews to be found of Korczak.
Audience members had the following comments:
That the type of education Korczak provided his children did not equip them to survive in a hostile world or cause them to become politicized to the extent that they would join the resistance.
That well-organized resistance did take place in the Warsaw ghetto and Jews did not simply go to their deaths without a fight. This comment lead to a robust discussion about the role of denial. Some audience members felt, including Hartman that denial was massive and that many Jews believed they were going to work camps and would return. Even the then President of the United States refused to believe that death camps could be strewn throughout Europe. But an audience member challenged this view with the comment that the United States had conducted surveillance of the camps and were fully aware of the genocide and did not intervene in a timely manner for its’ own political reasons.
Another comment of note was Korczak’s self-comparison to a mother who could never abandon her children. This self-identification can be seen from an intersubjective perspective that we all have multiple parts of ourselves and Korczak was able to express this part of his personality. Another perspective could interpret this self-labeling as consistent with Korczak’s pacifist, idealist, utopian character stemming from his ability to manifest integrity, the final stage in Erickson’s theory of personality development.
Hartman and Boterbloem recommended the following resources for further study:
Hartman, J. and Krochmal, J. (2003). I Remember Every Day... the fates of the Jews of Przemysl during World War II. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Remembrance and Reconciliation, Inc.
Gross, J. (2001) Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland. Princeton University Press.
Jeffrey Veidlinger @ http://www.indiana.edu/~histweb/faculty/veidlinger.shtml
------------------------------
Case Boterbloem (Ph.D. McGill university, 1994) is a full professor in the Department of History, who has been at USF since 2005. He is the author of three books on Russia and the Soviet Union, all of which are in USF's library, as well as more than a dozen of scholarly articles. He teaches European history, Russian and Soviet History, and Theory of History at USF.
Dr. John J. Hartman is a Florida Licensed Psychologist and Certified Psychoanalyst. He is Training and Supervising Analyst at the Tampa Psychoanalytic Institute and a Clinical Associate Professor in the Psychiatry Department at the University of South Florida. He is the author or co-author of 3 books and 22 scientific publications.
Thanks to
*Mark I. Greenberg, MLS, Ph.D., Director, Special & Digital Collections and Florida Studies Center and Eileen Thornton;
*Carolyn Bass; Ula Szczepinska; Erin Blankenship of The Florida Holocaust Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida;
*USF News Coordinator Barbara Melendez for her article on the series located at http://usfweb3.usf.edu/absolutenm/templates/?a=1689&z=48; and to
*Lycia Alexander-Guerra, President, Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society for her support and the popcorn!
COMPARATIVE INTERSUBJECTIVITY
Tampa Bay Welcomes Back Bruce Reis, PhD
Dr. Bruce Reis, a guest in February 2009 of the Tampa Bay Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies, Inc at their Trauma Workshop Healing Haunted Lives, returned to Tampa to speak on Saturday, September 12, 2009 this time at the Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society, Inc. In his first morning presentation, Dr. Reis spoke on Comparative Intersubjectivity, highlighting Recognition, the Subject, and definitions of Intersubjectivity.
Jessica Benjamin reminds us that recognition is not, as some Interpersonal authors misconstrue, knowing the personality or preferences of the other, but rather is the recognition of the other as a separate center of consciousness, with her/his own desire and initiative, and as a subject ‘like me.’ She notes that mutual recognition is an ideal and that in reality there exists a constant tension between the need to assert one’s self (one’s own desire) and the need to be recognized (in relationship with an equal other subject). Reis notes this is a tumultuous tension, never easily achieved, and is constantly re-lost, just as Hegel noted that recognition is an ideal condition.
Philosophers have written of intersubjectivity for two centuries. Hegel saw life as subjects at war with each other, a ‘me’ versus ‘the world,’ or a life-death struggle between two hypothetical individuals where each’s desire (to omnipotently have her/his desire fulfilled) comes into conflict with the other (who has own desire). Hegel proposed possible outcomes: One vanquishes/kills the other, but this victory is pyrrhic as the other is then unable to meet the individual’s needs for recognition; One enslaves the other, but then the master cannot achieve true recognition when that recognition from the other (slave) is discounted; or, thirdly, and ideally, there is mutual recognition between two equal subjects.
Benjamin, relying on infant research, feminist theory, and the Frankfurt school, tempers Hegelian ideas with those of Winnicott. While both Hegel and Freud intimated that an infant does not want to recognize the other!, Winnicott thought infants do have a desire to know the other. Benjamin holds these antithetical ideas in dialectic tension: we want both to know and want to destroy the other. Reis points out how interpretations (e.g. ‘It is clear to me that you feel about me the way you felt about your mother’) can dominate the other.
Thomas Ogden also interprets Hegel and Winnicott, but comes to a different intersubjective theory. Like Winnicott he sees the subject (of the analyst or patient, or, of mother or infant) both as created and as already in existence to be discovered. Influenced by the British Middle School of Object Relations, he postulates “the analytic third,” not a concretized person, but a process, a dialectic tension between the Unconscious of the patient and the Unconscious of the analyst, a third created by both. This is a type of Relational co-created process where the patient’s material is partially structured by the analyst’s Unconscious. Whereas Wilfred Bion saw the analyst’s reverie as an objective, scientific tool which allowed the analyst to experience the patient’s Unconscious, Ogden sees reverie as a more personal experience for the analyst, presumably a mutual influnce.
Postmodern psychoanalysis, then, has moved from drive theory to object-relating, from getting to understand the patient-other to experiencing the distinct otherness of the patient.
While Benjamin writes of intersubjectivity as a developmental achievement (albeit one in constant struggle) the Boston Change Process Study Group (BCPSG) says intersubjectivity exists from the beginning of life. Infant research shows that infants are not in an autistic shell (Freud) nor in need of separation (Mahler), but that infants see themselves as separate from mother [primary intersubjectivity]. Benjamin sees this as a precursor to intersubjectivity, that the mother may be seen by the infant as separate, but not yet seen as a subject with her own consciousness and desire [secondary intersubjectivity, and where, e.g. one knows the mind of the other through a third].
For the BCPSG, then, there is no need to destroy the object (Winnicott) in order to see her, when she survives destruction, as separate. Subjects already exist! And there is not the Hegelian tension, not a tension between recognition and destruction between mother and infant. Instead, infants are observed to want to share the good company of others, and when infants and attuned mothers ‘fit’ there is mutual accommodation between the two. The BCPSG then has a different starting point than Freud or Object Relations, with a conception of mind not from inner (intrapsychic) experience, but from in-the-body behavioral interactions; nor from brain (neuronal level) function, but from function of embodiment where brain is in body and body is in a social world.
Stolorow, Atwood, Orange, et al, have a different perspective of intersubjectivity, based, in part, on phenomenology, hermeneutics, and Heidegger, where intersubjectivity is not a developmental achievement, but the ever present condition that allows experience to exist at all. They take a clinical approach similar to that of Self psychologists: empathic immersion where confrontation of the patient’s experience is eschewed. There is not a fight to the death, but instead a focus, like Kohut, on the developmental needs of the patient. The patient is the authority. This approach is different from Relational schools, where authority is deconstructed, and where the patient’s experience is not privileged over the analyst’s. In fact, one could wonder how privileging the patients experience, instead of holding it in dialectical tension with the analyst’s, is really intersubjective at all. Reis says Bion presciently answered this when Bion did not assume what was going on in the patient’s mind, but neither did he assume that the patient knew more than the analyst.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
This seminar provides an overview to psychoanalytic perspectives on development and looks at: infant- objectcaretaker communication and attachments, self-object experiences, Kleinian developmental positions, transitional s and transitional space, relational paradigms, Freud’s psychosexual stage theory, cognitive development, contemporary ideas about the development of gender and sexuality, and intersubjectivity.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
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.
Monday, July 6, 2009
Should Psychoanalysis be Taught?
In The New Yorker last month (June 8 & 15, 2009), Louis Menand, a professor of English at Harvard, in A Critic At Large, asked the question “Should creative writing be taught?” He quoted The University of Iowa Writers Workshop website which explained that
“…writing cannot be taught but writers can be encouraged.” This, naturally, got me to thinking about psychoanalytic education. Can one teach others how to be an analyst? or do we only encourage gifted clinicians to broaden their skills, by, for example, encouraging them to trust themselves, to include themselves, to look beyond themselves?
Because, among other things, an analytic attitude is both a way of thinking and a way of being in relationship, I have often wondered how instructors convey how to be an analyst. Do the therapists who cross the training door thresholds need only to learn theories and techniques, or do we as instructors need to model a way of being which also conveys not only what we do in the consulting room, but how we are? Having had the pleasure of participating as an instructor in courses, workshops, and seminars with mental health professionals interested in psychoanalytic thought, I am always in a quandary about how much right brain/ implicit learning to balance with how much left brain/didactic and explicit information to convey.
In observing colleagues I have sometimes not understood the answers in their models of instruction. [I have, for example, seen some instructors behave as classical analysts (anonymous, abstinent), saying little, encouraging little, as the candidates or attendees ‘free associate’ to the assigned reading material. Some have utilized bubba meisahs, regaling students with their own experiences. Some tolerate not only no other opinion, but no space is created in which others might speak. On occasion, if more than two instructors teach, I have seen them argue with one another about their ideas, sometimes getting uncomfortably personal, and seemingly oblivious to inviting student participation. None are behaviors that instructors may have explicitly wished to encourage in the consulting room.]
I try to imagine how varying theories might influence modeling how to be. As an instructor, can I encourage and co-create curiosity, enthusiasm, respect, and a space for mutuality, all ways of being in the consulting room? And how does one do this? When I think of my professional life I think of the many changes in analytic attitude which have evolved in my work. And I have great regret for analysands in my early training who I deprived of mutual recognition and relationship; where I took the stance of being the one who knows; and with whom I took pains to hide my love for them, stingy in my abstinence. In recent years, a number of my patients have found love for the first time. I like to imagine I had some small part in this, that is, having found my patients loveable, they reconfigured their convictions about their unlovability, and voila.
But how are we to reconfigure ourselves as instructors so that trainees reconfigure any old ideas about passively taking in what is spouted or printed? How do institutes allow for such alternative understandings in the classroom as to encourage therapists to allow for them in the consulting room? How do we model perspectival realism?
Ironically, here, in the psychoanalytic outpost of west central Florida, there are three or four psychoanalytic training institutions, but only a handful more of analysts. Here we have a few members of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and a few more who are members of the International Psychoanalytic Association, and a bit more who have had various training experiences and also go by the name ‘psychoanalyst.’ These training programs exist, not because of an interest in, nor a demand for, more training from local clinicians, though we all hope to cultivate the interest and demand (Build it and they will come), but because analysts in this area have found it exceedingly difficult to hold the tension between differences: differences of personalities, styles, power, and ideologies. I often wonder what implicit communication this sad fact models for potential trainees.
It is very hard to think independently in an institute and stay connected. For women in our local analytic community this may be even more difficult. One female colleague poignantly asked at a national workshop how one can hold on to one self while affiliating with an institute. Some find the only alternative is to align oneself with a powerful man of the hour. Another female colleague asked if, in Tampa with its tendency to empower machismo in male analytic leadership, perhaps the local analytic community cannot bear to brook ‘uppity’ women. She remained herself and was shunned by some, despite gracefully using her different voice.
In private practice, we strive to co-construct bridges between differences with clients/ patients, and they have some motivation to be in relationship with us. Where groups differ dramatically, it takes more than analytic being to be a skillful engineer.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Fears of Difference: The Diversity of Holocaust Experiences -- a film series
USF's Department of Women's Studies
The Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society
The Tampa Bay Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies
USF's Library's Holocaust and Genocide Studies Center
The Florida Holocaust Museum, St.Petersburg, Florida
USF Hillel
Venue:
Film: Korczak
Scholar: Cornelis Boterbloem, Ph.D.
USF, Professor of History
Clinician: John Hartman, Ph.D., Psychologist/Psychoanalyst
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Film: Facing Windows
Scholar: Patrizia La Trecchia, Ph.D.
USF, Assistant Professor & Director of Italian Studies
Clinician: Edward Stein, M.D., Psychiatrist/Psychoanalyst
Sunday, November 8, 2009 ------ *Program Begins at 1 PM*
Film: Paragraph 175
Scholar: Tamara Zwick, Ph.D.
USF, Assistant Professor of History
Clinician: Will Spell, LMHC, Psychotherapist
&
Film: Hitler’s Hidden Victims: Black Survivors of the Holocaust
Scholar: Edward Kissi, Ph.D.
USF, Associate Professor of Africana Studies
Clinician: Kim Vaz, Ph.D., Psychotherapist/
USF, Associate Professor of Women’s Studies
December, 2009
No film – Happy Holidays!!!
Presenter: Leita Kaldi
6:30pm-8:00pm
For More Information Contact: Urszula Szczepinska
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Film: The Reader
Scholars: Margit Grieb, Ph.D.
USF, Assistant Professor of World Languages
Darrell Fasching, Ph.D.
USF, Professor of Religious Studies
Clinician: Elizabeth Reese, MSW, Psychoanalyst
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Film: The Summer of Aviya
Scholar: Rina Donchin
Director, USF’s Hebrew Program
Clinicians: Edward Stein, M.D., Psychiatrist/Psychoanalyst
Harris Feinstein, M.D. Psychiatrist
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Film: A Secret
Scholar: Madeline Camara, USF Associate Professor, World Languages
Clinician: Lycia Alexander-Guerra, M.D. Psychiatrist/Psychoanalyst
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Films: And the Violins Stopped Playing and Purple Triangles
Presenter: Yale Strom, Artist-in-Residence, San Diego State University
Clinician: Michael Poff, MSW, Psychoanalyst
Sunday, May 9, 2010
Film: The Nasty Girl
Scholar: Professor Dana Plays, University of Tampa, Film and Media Studies and Women’s Studies
Clinician: Michael Poff, MSW, Psychoanalyst
Click here for film descriptions.
USF Libraries Holocaust & Genocide Studies
The Center’s mission is to cross international boundaries to engage information specialists, scholars, educators, students, analysts, and activists in a centralized, interdisciplinary, collaborative, and synergistic approach to genocide education, mental health and public policy, and prevention.
The Florida Holocaust Museum
The mission is to honor the memory of millions of innocent men, women, and children who suffered or died in the Holocaust. The museum is dedicated to teaching members of all races and cultures to recognize the inherent worth and dignity of human life in order to prevent future genocides.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Psychotherapy in the Entertainment Spotlight
Posted by Heather Pyle, PsyD
Considering the recent success of HBO's acclaimed series, "In Treatment", it would seem that a refreshingly different spotlight is being cast on the field by the entertainment industry. While not a new release, "What Do You Make of These Sounds", Dar Williams' (known for her music on the New England Folk scene) poignant song about psychotherapy has been receiving renewed interest on psychology internet listservs recently. It's good to see the benefits of therapy are in the public eye despite the current healthcare climate and seductive appeal of the ever-present "quick fixes."
If you haven't yet heard this song, the video is available on YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR5_DvbMLJk . It is well worth a listen.
Lyrics (Courtesy of Lyricsmode.com)
I don't go to therapy to find out if I'm a freak.
I go and I find the one and only answer every week.
And it's just me and all the memories to follow.
Down any course that fits within a fifty minute hour
And we fathom all the mysteries, explicit and inherent
When I hit a rut, she says to try the other parent
And she's so kind, I think she wants to tell me something,
But she knows that it's much better if I get it for myself...
And she says
Oooooooh,aaaaaaah, what do you hear in these sounds?
And... oooooooh,aaaaaaah
What do you hear in these sounds? ? ? ? ?
I say I hear a doubt, with the voice of true believing
And the promises to stay, and the footsteps that are leaving
And she says "oh", I say "what? "...she says "exactly",
I say"what, you think I'm angry
Does that mean you think I'm angry?"
She says "look, you come here every week
With jigsaw pieces of your past
Its all on little soundbytes and voices out of photographs
And that's all yours, that's the guide, that's the map
So tell me, where does the arrow point to?
Who invented roses? "
And.......Oooooooh,aaaaaaah
What do you hear in these sounds?
And...oooooooh,aaaaaaah
What do you hear in these sounds? ? ? ? ?
And when I talk about therapy, I know what people think
That it only makes you selfish and in love with your shrink
But oh how I loved everybody else
When I finally got to talk so much about myself............
And I wake up and I ask myself what state I'm in
And I say well I'm lucky, cause I am like east berlin
I had this wall and what I knew of the free world
Was that I could see their fireworks
And I could hear their radio
And I thought that if we met, I would only start confessing
And they'd know that I was scared
They'd would know that I was guessing
But the wall came down and there they stood before me
With their stumbling and their mumbling
And their calling out just like me...and...
Oooooooh,aaaaaaah, the stories that nobody hears...and...
Oooooooh,aaaaaaah, and I collect these sounds in my ears...and
Oooooooh,aaaaaaah, that's what I hear in these sounds...and...
Oooooooh,aaaaaaah, that's what I hear in these......
That's what I hear in these souu ouuun nnnds!
Words and Music by Dar Williams
Thursday, May 28, 2009
"The Temple Guardian"
Because the subject matter is about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (and the Tampa Bay Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies, T-BIPS, supports a network of low fee - pro bono therapy for family members of Afghani and Iraqi soldiers and veterans, called The Veterans Family Initiative, VFI) and because it was written by Charles Larsen, a long time colleague of mine at the Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society, and perhaps because it is set in FLorida, a mutual colleague of mine and the author's sent me a description of the novel "The Temple Guardian." Here is our mutual colleague's description:
The Temple Guardian, by Charles Larsen, is an action packed literary novel available from Amazon.com.
“The Temple Guardian,” delves into the consequences, including ripple effects, of warring upon several people. A Haiku precedes each chapter.
The male protagonist is Michael Stark, age 55, a Vietnam combat veteran who has struggled with his demons for many years. His female opposite is Norma Jennings, a nurse who has been impacted upon by her former husband’s service in the First Gulf War.
Almost all of the contemporary action takes place in South Florida, and in a small fictional town near Steinhatchee. Explosive action and sensual explorations are juxtaposed with philosophical, tranquil, and lyrical experiences. Dreams, flashbacks, and reflections provide insight into the way events, past and present, weave themselves into our lives.
It is a novel about the process of emerging from the crippling effects of post traumatic stress, a struggle that most of us engage in while attempting to build our lives into meaningful wholes. There are apparent movements toward acceptance and resolution, then setbacks in the current world, which threaten to reverse any apparent progress. There are near Platonic dialogues between Michael Stark and a Catholic priest (also a Vietnam veteran), as well as between Michael and a Vietnamese man who once held him captive under horrific conditions. There is vivid action in the flashbacks and memories of both Michael and Norma Jennings. Contemporary action takes place in North Florida, the Everglades (where Michael’s 17 year old daughter is assaulted by drug dealing Vietnam veterans), and in the Florida Keys.
“The Temple Guardian” is a tale of struggle, of overcoming, and also failing. In the end there is a resolution of sorts to the angst felt by Michael and Norma, namely a sense of hope.
