Psychology Meets Politics, part 4: Not with a bang, but a whimper

 

Actions like separating children from their immigrant parents, with no records kept by which the children and parents might be reunited, certainly could be characterized as attacking the relational bonds, the more so as the children’s suffering and decompensation are well documented. Other executive orders leading to withdrawing funding for remedying the situations of people who are vulnerable, certainly are not impeded by concern for that vulnerability. If anything, 45 seems easily willing to characterize these vulnerable people as having brought their situations on themselves—by being poor, by living in the vicinity of environmental hazards, by working while studying at universities, by being born with disabilities—or at the least being deserving of mockery.

 

I believe also that many of 45’s well-known practices can be characterized as attacks on linking. Consider his pattern of hiring contractors and stiffing them on the agreed payment after the work has been completed. He has reneged on contracts with everyone from plumbers to lawyers to venues for events. He is so well-known for this pattern that he has encountered increasing difficulty hiring lawyers to represent him. Isn’t a contract a sort of relationship, even if a transactional one? Isn’t our entire capitalistic system predicated on payment received for work performed? To claim many many times that the work is always substandard makes me think of the (grown) enraged child finding a caretaker disappointing, inadequate. (There is also the issue of feeling entitled to receive anything and everything for free, but that is not my focus here.)

 

Fred Trump kept 45 afloat financially to flaunt as a puppet, albeit an implausibly successful one. Mary Trump’s examination of her family’s finances establishes that 45 has never made money in any of his ventures, and that Fred’s ‘loans’ were outright gifts. In this light, The Art of the Deal seems more like The Art of Being Born Into a Mob Family. Could 45 ever become a real boy? Becoming a reality TV success was not enough to reassure him. A ghost-written autobiography, whose author has been vocal about his profound regret for legitimizing Trump, was not enough. Literal golden walls and toilets were not enough. Becoming President would strike some people as a high success, but 45 has found his fantasies often thwarted. No military parade to coopt July 4—no invulnerable wall to keep out dangers—no Nobel Peace Prize—not even the cover of Time. Only what I imagine to be an indefinable unease, a haunting suspicion that he is getting stroked to be put to use by cold and powerful men. Still. Again.

Psychology Meets Politics, part 3: attacks on linking

So:  What might attacks on linking look like? The patient/target person/speaker declares themself to be disappointed in the authenticity, the adequacy, of the caretaker’s efforts. They push the caretaker away and declare themselves to have been abandoned. They behave in such a way as to encourage the caretaker to withdraw, or at least to refuse their demands in self-protection, effectively spoiling whatever good may have been offered. Then they declare that they have been abandoned again. They contrive relationships in which the caretaker wishes to prove themself different from the “others”—more steadfast, more faithful and true, simply more decent—some kind of better. What might have started out as a relationship between equals quickly, so very quickly, devolves into a master-supplicant dynamic. The supplicant is cast as an inadequate caretaker; the master positions themselves as a perpetually abused child, justified in whatever vengeance they care to inflict. Yes, justified:  all manner of punishment is justified as deserved. If you recognize this as the dynamic between abuser and abused, you are correct, and I am sorry that you know what I’m talking about.

 

You may suspect that people who employ these strategies have often had early experiences characterized by the twin evils of deprivation and absence of reasonable consequences. This is indeed the case. Both these conditions can be met by inconsistent, or unreliable or neglectful parenting, in which the child does not feel seen, does not feel that their needs will be met, nor that food and affection will be dependably forthcoming. These conditions are harmful and painful at any age; they are more damaging when the child is just acquiring speech. Consider also that, for a baby, a toddler, failure to be cared for is literally life-threatening.  Infants wail as though they will die if the caretakers can’t figure out what is wrong. They are correct. Empathic caretakers find an infant’s protests very hard to endure. Those infants who suffered in silence are much less likely to have survived.

 

Object relations theory would predict that a failure of care for such young children, younger than three years could produce a fear of annihilation that would be overwhelming. One defense against such a fear might be proclaiming oneself omnipotent. Object relations theory would predict also that such a child would find vulnerability frightening to the point of feeling life-threatening in its presence, and would reject also manifestations of vulnerability in others. Furthermore, such a child would see any failure to mirror his exact wishes as betrayal. “Attacks on linking”—undermining the forming and maintaining of relational bonds—would be a likely consequence, and an apt description of the woes to follow. Such a person would tend to require impossible proofs of love, and would readily find others to be falling short. Relationships of genuine reciprocity would not be established. Other relationships would be short-lived, unless the others could entirely subjugate themselves to the conditions of the now-grown child. Disappointment would lead to breaking off the relationship. Said child would also likely try to disrupt others’ relationships, in ways that might strike us as distinctly cruel, because of the danger felt to be carried by the prospect of vulnerability. Not merely the absence of regard for the experiences of the vulnerable.  No—not simple disregard. Rather, targeting the vulnerability and inflicting pain, so that the child might assure himself that he was not the one who was vulnerable. If this confusion about who is vulnerable and who is suffering, or must be made to suffer, strikes you as immature, you are guilty of profound understatement.

 

Psychology Meets Politics, part 2: Is there a there there?

Bion was….interesting. He seemed to delight in provocation. He developed his theories from working with an experimental group, self-referred ordinary people with no particular pathology or origin. He was frank in stating that his groups were not intended to be therapeutic, a statement which evidently impelled the group members to look for therapeutic benefit and to complain to him when they felt he was falling short of their expectations. He did not make individual interpretations based on individual histories or behaviors. Rather, he made statements characterizing the behavior or mood of the group as a whole, and he made these statements in object-relation terms, untranslated. That is, he did not say, “You are frustrated by the hard truth I am presenting you with, telling yourself that I mean to harm you.” He might say something like, “The group is suckling at the bad breast.”

But, to everyone’s surprise and I do mean mine, Bion’s group members ended by feeling that they had benefited from the experience. There is something to be said for making true statements about the events unfolding in front of us. One of Bion’s enduringly useful concepts is attacks on linking. Strictly speaking, he was referring to patients’ efforts to disrupt the bond between patient and therapist; more generally, the concept refers to efforts of people suffering certain kinds of pathology, or having suffered certain kinds of events, to disrupt the emotional bond between themselves and others in a caretaking capacity. Let’s set some context..

 

In the Trump family, Mary Trump fell seriously ill when Donald was 30 months old. She had given birth to his younger brother nine months earlier, and complications from that birth had gone undiagnosed. She underwent three surgeries within a span of ten days, and took months to recover. At that time, there were already four children:  Maryanne 12, Freddy 10, Elizabeth 6, and, Donald.

 

Fred Trump was devoted primarily to his business and is reported as finding the suffering unbearable, or at least intolerable. He kept 12-hour days and felt he had worked enough when he came home. By Mary Trump’s [niece of Donald, granddaughter of Fred] account, Fred also believed that giving in to emotions or needs of any sort would make a child “soft” and that the goal of parenting was to raise kids to be “killers”—ruthless in pursuing financial success. That is to say, his goal, when he took any interest in the children at all. Only boys were valued; girls were advised to go to secretarial school. Mary Trump the mother, who came from a hard-up working class background, had a housekeeper to do the cleaning, but Mary did all the cooking and childcare. I speculate that this was not only a matter of Fred’s notorious tightness regarding spending money, but also their mutual notions of what a suitable role was for a wife. Mary was a younger child of ten, and her mother also was regarded as cold. Or maybe simply tired, but it’s hard for a child to tell.

 

At any rate, while Mary Trump mother was hospitalized, who took care of the children? She recovered slowly, over a period of months. Who engaged with the children during that time? No one seems to remember exactly. Maryanne, who was 12, remembers bathing the younger ones. Fred’s mother, who lived nearby, provided meals, but, like Fred and his father, was remote emotionally. To some extent, the older children looked after the younger ones; still, a nine-month-old baby can be pretty overwhelming. And a rambunctious toddler in the middle of the terrible twos is a handful under even the best circumstances. Summarizing author Mary Trump’s wealth of incident and detail leads me to conclude that basic physical needs, on which our young existence depends, were unreliably met, never mind emotional needs. She elucidates other issues as well, such father Fred being perpetually dissatisfied with all his children, and fastening on Donald to be his shiny façade in the Manhattan world of influence and big money.

To be continued

Psychology Meets Politics, part 1 of 4: Meditations on 45's Attacks on Linking

Attacks on Linking

 

After the 1964 election, when many psychoanalysts and psychologist speculated on the mental status and personality organization of Republican candidate Barry Goldwater, there evolved an agreement among mental health professionals known as the Goldwater Rule. Briefly, we agreed that we would not speculate about the mental status of politicians unless we had ample information, such as can usually only be obtained under conditions of evaluation or treatment.

 

I believe the last four years have offered just such ample information. Besides the intimate family and financial documentation provided by 45's niece Mary Trump, 45 has been unusually prolific in documenting his trains of thought, his reasoning, and in giving accounts of his states of mind. Twitter is of course a rich source. So are 45’s rallies and the particular encouragements he has thrown out to his supporters. So too are the accounts, whether testimony or books or lengthy interviews, of the many subordinates who have been dismissed from advisory and Cabinet positions. 45’s many denials of having known these people may be regarded as self-serving, but also as finding it easy to deny connection with them. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Trump_administration_dismissals_and_resignations for a listing. I counted 185 up to March 2018, at which point I stopped counting.)

 

When I think of our Dear Leader, 45, I find myself thinking of other characters, in history and in stories. I think of Henry VIII, incapable of leading or strategizing, propped up by Cromwell, fancying himself irresistible to women. I think of the folk tale of the Fisherman and His Wife, and how she was never satisfied, berating her spouse who did all the work, demanding greater and greater splendor and aggrandizement, until finally she went too far and lost everything. I think of Pinocchio who wanted to become a real boy, and of the Velveteen Rabbit, who was told that becoming real entailed suffering and acquiring imperfections, and how they both succeeded in becoming real, but only through supernatural intervention. But after reading Mary Trump’s Too Little and Never Enough, an unsparing account of her family’s bleak dynamics, I find myself thinking also about Wilfred Bion’s concept of attacks on linking.

To be continued...

Joyeux Quatorze Juillet

Walter and I always wished that we could have managed to be in Paris, or anywhere in France, for Quatorze Juillet, or Bastille Day as we know it in English. We could afford once a year, and that in the spring, when prices and temperatures were kinder, but we'd always heard great things about the joy of the community celebration. 

We admired the way that dead soldiers were in the national consciousness.

We were moved by the ready understanding that loss and grief are part of life.

We were tickled by the way that the Eiffel Tower peeked in and out and around public life in Paris, enjoyed and mocked, ready to be bought by tourists who were not us.

So much pleasure in the reliable breakfast in the local café, where the waiter greeted us with "Bonjour madam, m'sieur, comme d'habitude?" [Good morning, folks, the usual?]

We adored the way people of all ages met in public for deep conversation. Probably these two were also 'comme d'habitude'.

I was tickled all to hell that the French national bird (unofficially) is the rooster, symbol of an agricultural nation where food matters.

We'd always heard that the local fire departments threw parties for their neighborhoods, with music, food, wine, and dancing. I'd have loved to have taken part in one of those, especially with Walter in his better days.

You can find the French flag, displayed sparingly and respectfully, not draped around people's asses and plooped on their heads. Le Petit Nicolas was the bearer of the security of the French middle class for many years.

Happy birthday, France. Happy birthday, nation of Méthode D, of making things work, of looking out for as many as possible, young and old, of endless discussion and veneration of mathematics, of belles lettres, of living well every day.

Peak of peeks

Recently my stats have shown me improbable peaks from many countries. Portugal! Azerbaijan! Turkmenistan! Romania! and glimpses from Russia, France, Great Britain (a name hated by my Scottish co-grandma, who prefers "United Kingdom", much as she quibbles with United, because at least there is no privileging of Britain), Germany, and, the Czech Republic. If perhaps not improbable, these are certainly unexpected. Not that I'm not delighted to see such visits, because I love the notion that this blog has a broad appeal to a narrow selection of people who live all over. Also an opportunity to use my favorite figure of speech, litotes.

Winter mountains, SoCal

Snow on the Rockies, from 35,000 ft

Snow on Mount Baldy, and how it got there

New snow on the San Gabriels

Bourne on the Fourth

flag in mourning

bedraggled flag

Oath:  an echo

 Allege obedience to the flagging

 Untied States. We’re America,

 toothless Republicans

 with bad-faith hands. Armageddon? Oh my god.

 Almost risible,

 this gibbering injustice. Free fall.

Thoughts on 45’s Statement that the Way to Slow the Escalation in the Number of Cases of COVID19 Is to Stop Testing

Street of the Market of White Coats, Paris

Toddlers playing at the pocket park near 

Sèvres-Babylone

“The sensorimotor stage is the earliest in Piaget's theory of cognitive development. He described this period as a time of tremendous growth and change. According to Piaget, developing object permanence is one of the most important accomplishments at the sensorimotor stage of development. Imagine a game of peek-a-boo, for example. ... Older infants who understand object permanence will realize that the person or object continues to exist even when unseen. Most infants develop this concept between 6 and 12 months.” 

From www.verywellmind.com

The Swiss scientist Piaget

has left us with nothing to say.

            Even if we don’t seek,

            even if we don’t peek,

Corona is still in full play.

The peek-a-boo game pleases babies,

but COVID is risky as rabies.

            If we can’t get tested,

            it can’t be arrested,

an outcome with no buts or maybes.

Good morning Romania!

Swimming through concrete or limestone needs no words.

Note my pink-laced shoe peeking into the shot as I work to get the entire word into the frame.

Bit of a cheat here:  this is actually ENTREE, but the tape has worn off the first two letters.

Good advice in any language.

Hello Romania! In the last two days someone in Romania--maybe even several someones--has looked through this blog. A lot. Many times! Hello, hello! Welcome! (Now I have used up my month's quota of exclamation points.) I do appreciate your visits. If you like, leave me a comment or two so I know who you are. It's always good to make friendly contact across time and space.

Rhymin' Simon

Golden Gate Bridge, not necessarily over troubled waters

Lately I've been craving the songs of Paul Simon. Thanks to the so very portable technology of the cell phone, I can listen as I walk the neighborhood. I knew the album name I allude to above, but I hadn't really paid attention to the man's craft. I'd never though to rhyme Scandinavia with behavior. I never would have come up with a situation where I had to pair radical priest with get me released. and I would have missed the wit of You're cool, you're hot / I'm not. Gives me something to think about other than who is and isn't wearing a mask.

Walter, Passing

Not Walter, but from the back there's a strong resemblance.

The gentleman in question, and his lady

Walter, passing. He does not have a bump on his head; that is a white-haired man crossing behind him.

Paris in the springtime is proverbial. Walter and I were able to travel to Paris several times, always in the springtime. In Europe, spring is closer to winter than it is here, and Walter always dressed accordingly, in sports coat or blazer, sweater vest, and a buttoned shirt, and often a hat. With his silver hair and distinguished head, he always fitted right in, passing effortlessly for French. He read French much better than he spoke it, particularly in the real-time haste of speech, and I spoke English with him. Waiters overhearing us often brought me a menu in English, which I always exchanged giving a sharp look. Walter always got a menu in French, which I generally had to translate, as his vocabulary did not extend to food.

 He passed for French so often that we got to expect it. Once we were having breakfast in a café during the World Cup play-offs. France had made it into the finals, and everyone was staring at the TV, peeling off reluctantly to get to work. One man after another stopped to murmur something into Walter’s ear, to gesture significantly at the screen, to look at him expectantly. He did not let them down. He shrugged, tilted his head, raised his eyebrows, looked up at them ruefully, made some sign with his hands. Every time, the man laughed, clapped Walter on the shoulder, and strode away, clearly feeling that he had been understood.

 Another time there was a major exhibition of Manet at the Orsay. The line snaked back and forth, filling the plaza. It was late morning, and it looked like we were in for a long wait. Suddenly I heard an announcement in French:   the galleries were so full that no one else would be admitted until after 1pm. I grabbed his arm and hissed, “Come with me! Now! Run!” Happily Walter trusted me enough to run with me first and get an explanation after. As we cleared the plaza, we heard the announcement repeated in German, then English. I had figured that much of the line would use the opportunity to get lunch, and I had noticed only one promising restaurant nearby as we’d walked from the Métro.

 The crowd surged but we had a head start. We got an excellent table against the wall, next to an older French couple, and had the Schadenfreude of seeing people turned away from the now-full restaurant. 

We ordered a good meal in the French style, and Walter got his usual pichet of house wine. Then we settled in to chat quietly and wait for our meals and to enjoy 90 minutes or so before strolling back to the Orsay. Apparently many Americans speak loudly, demand their food be brought quickly, and hustle away from the table. The couple next to us eyed us and we exchanged sociable nods. After we’d eaten, the husband struck up a conversation. That is to say, he started talking to Walter, and Walter gave his usual stellar performance. He looked at the other man intently, nodding now and then. He smiled wryly, shrugged, leaned forward. He gave every sign of participating. Certainly, he was a good listener, and the other man became animated, laughing, confiding his philosophy of life, his vulnerable moments, and who knows what all else. We wives watched this touching bonding. The woman said to me in French, “Your husband doesn’t understand French, does he?” “No, you’re right, he doesn’t,” I answered, “and your husband doesn’t know it, does he?” We laughed and enjoyed conversation of our own while watching the meeting of true minds across the tables. Walter was not malicious—far from it. He simply wanted not to disappoint his neighbor.

When Walter did venture French, he had a strong Brazilian accent, as he had started learning French during his schooling in Brazil. It seems that Parisians find the Brazilian accent adorable, and they always cooed over its manifestation. Another win for Walter.

Department of Self-Centered Silver Linings: Publishing in the Time of COVID19

Pointillisme: blurry new leaves through the rain from Le Select in Montparnasse

Often enough, I've complained about the long long times some editors need to review submissions. I try to be empathic and understanding:  I know (I hope) they have rich and full lives, and that editing a poetry journal is very much a side hustle; I appreciate the devotion to poetry; I try not to be too put out when they can't manage a form email to notify me that they didn't want my poems. Quarantine / house arrest is having one unexpected benefit, though. Apparently, reading backed-up submissions is less aversive than housework. I have received several verdicts on batches of poems, much more swiftly than I had been led to expect. It's disorienting! It's confusing! It's really nice!! It doesn't hurt that there are some acceptances in there too.

And to think that we saw it on Pasqual Street!

Before we were asked to do social isolation, before we were asked to limit trips to essentials, before we were told to stay home, a friend and I visited the Huntington Gardens, which are very close to the Los Angeles Arboretum. The Arboretum is home to a whole lotta peafowl. They come and beg if you're having a picnic. If there's a concert performance, they sing along, especially with the women (a peacock's cry sounds like someone's yelling "HELP!"). And, they visit the neighbors. As we drove back to my friend's home, we spotted about 15 in someone's front yard. And we witnessed the above spectacle. Note the slant and scrabble of their legs as they corner.