What is Happiness?

photograph of Sigmund Freud by Max Halberstadt

Everyone who has ever embarked upon a course of therapy entertains the notion that someday they will be changed, different and yes happy. Few people can probably define what happiness is (is it a form of hedonism where desires are satisfied, or a spiritual attitude which totally by passes the notion of gratification?). But that is a mute point, since no one would embark on treatment unless they believed that the outcome, which could be quantified, was positive. You think you want to go from here to there. Years pass and you have gotten to know your physician, or social worker or healer well and you keep waiting for that great come and get it day. As you get older your faculties start to fade, yet the longing for the missing piece of the puzzle remains (Freud wrote a paper called "Analysis Terminable and Interminable"). Your libido decreases, you become arthritic, the palette of experience from which you will produce your great artistic work (if you are a musician, writer or painter) begins to narrow. Yet you remain tenacious in your faith. In any case, the therapy has begun to furnish you with other rewards. It’s a kind of salvo for the pains of every day existence. Even as you experience a diminution of your powers, you at least look forward to seeing someone on whose metaphorical shoulder you can cry. He or she has become the repository of a life time’s worth of memory and, in fact, if there is any monument to your life, it becomes the putting one step in front of the other, the showing up which is the substance of the therapeutic work. Still you hope. You can’t live without hope. Perhaps the next week or the next month will bring your desired epiphany and then finally the day comes, not the day of revelation, but the day of your ending, the day on which you cease to be. None of the things you wished for or thought you wanted may have happened, but is there anyone who would say that you were a lesser person due to the years of introspection and all the attempts to live a better life?

Oedipus at Rest

"Oedipus Explaining  the Enigma of the Sphinx" by Ingres (1805)

Oedipus was actually unusual. Most people don’t leave home when they have the mistaken feeling that their presence is cursed and most people’s flight doesn’t become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Freud glommed onto the Oedipus myth to deal with childhood sexuality and the stage when a young boy wants to marry his mother and kill his father (as Oedipus did when he killed Laius at the crossroads and married Jocasta). The Electra complex posits a similar paradigm regarding the female offspring whose desire for the father leads to murderous instincts towards the mother. But the real essence of the Oedipus myth resides in the notion of flight and the notion of bringing about a dreaded result. Daniel Kahneman’s theory of “loss aversion” where irrationality drives seemingly rational decisions describes a similar set of circumstances. Meanwhile let’s deal what would have happened to Oedipus had he not decided to take “the higher road,” the morally superior stance which led to becoming the protagonist of one of the great tragedies of all time, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Oedipus had what a psychoanalyst might call an overly developed superego, something that worked against him to the extent it was maladaptive and ultimately mitigated against his own survival. But let’s take your average Joe or Jane who hears from the oracle, aka his or her therapist that he or she wants to murder his father and marry his mother or marry her father and murder her mother. He or she just keeps going to therapy, which doesn’t help the feelings of anxiety, dread and more than occasional impotence or frigidity that accompany his or her murderous wishes. He or she lives a fairly miserable life, racks up enormous bills for the years of treatments, but neither has to leave home nor hopefully murder anybody in the process. Gilles Deleuze wrote a book called Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia which attempted to redefine classic Freudian theory. But what about a post-modern playwright who dramatizes what would have happened to a feckless latter day Oedipus who didn’t run away from his fears. Wouldn’t such an author want to borrow from the fourth and last of John Updike’s Rabbit series, Rabbit At Rest and employ Oedipus at Rest as the title of his work?

Was Hamlet Suffering From False Memory Syndrome?

Ernest Jones wrote a book called Hamlet and Oedipus where he argued that Hamlet’s ambivalence about avenging his father results from his own incestuous wishes. Hamlet was in this case the perfect embodiment of the Oedipus Complex which is, as we know  is the mainstay of classical Freudian theory. Gilles Deleuze, a French philosopher may have had his own oedipal problems with the founder of psychoanalysis when he wrote Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, but both the Oedipus and Electra complexes are still important in the kind of therapeutic thinking that believes in unconscious drives, with Shakespeare’s play providing a perfect petri dish for discussion. But what if Hamlet didn’t have the wish to murder his father so he could sleep with his mother. What if he was say suffering from False Memory syndrome induced by Horatio telling him about the sighting of the ghost. You don’t have to be Oedipal to mourn the loss of a parent and Hamlet is in a very vulnerable state when he's given the information about a ghost appearing on the premises. In addition his informants are themselves prone to suggestion which as we know can lead to a kind of lynch mob hysteria. King Hamlet has died so it’s assumed that if a ghost appears at Elsinore, it’s got to be him. Rumors do get around. The fact is, if you are going to go down that road, you can’t discountenance the possibility it might be not King Hamlet, but the ghost of someone else. There are likely to have been few if any any productions of Hamlet which have been based on False Memory Syndrome, but it could be a fecund path for an ambitious young director. Another even more controversial episode in the history of the Freudian canon was the repudiation of the seduction theory. While there are many people who may have suffered sexual abuse as children, the central tenet here is that oedipal fantasy is what is driving some of these memories which are in fact neurosis.  While false memory syndrome may come from external suggestion, the memories Freud is talking about are the crux of the neurosis. But let’s not confuse Hamlet’s insides with his outsides. Maybe he's just wrong. Maybe Claudius isn’t guilty of anything and maybe Gertrude is just the kind of person who jumps into a new relationship because of the huge void left in her life. Some people mourn forever and some are able to go on with their lives. Like a lot of people who are as tortured as they are deceived, Hamlet then turns to art, whereby he dramatizes his cause by producing the Murder of Gonzago, a thinly veiled attack on his uncle. If you look at it from Claudius' perspective, he’s getting a bad rap since he feels guilty enough about enjoying the pleasures of the flesh with his brother’s widow. The last thing he needs is to have some ideologically driven storm trooper, some zombie from the Night of the Living Dead, programmed with a bunch of erroneous conclusions that he’s hell bent on enacting.

Beyond Therapy?

In a recent Times piece "Therapist and Patient Share a Theater of Hurt,” (NYT, 11/5/14), Robert J. Landy, director of N.Y.U.’s drama therapy program makes the following statement, “With certain forms of mental illness that do not respond to conventional treatment, we need a more radical approach, which therapeutic theater can provide.” That approach apparently can involve turning therapy sessions into dramatic works that sound like they could even make money. The article describes rehearsals for Borderline, a musical based on the interaction between a therapist named Cecilia Dintino and her patient, Jill Powell, an actress who appeared in “As the World Turns” and on Broadway in Grand Hotel, and Damn Yankees, but whose career had become sidelined by mental illness. One, of course, can only have sympathy for the suffering Ms. Powell has endured. Acting is no cakewalk and she wouldn’t be the first actor to  exploit their own difficulties in the service of art. The method acting technique employed by the The Actor’s Studio is based on using inner emotions and conflicts to create a character. But it’s one thing to reach inside one’s autobiography and another to titrate actual therapy into theater. If this were to become a trend it would also raise some humorous possibilities. For instance, Freudian analysis is notoriously long, longer even than the legendary long rehearsals Wally Shawn and Andre Gregory have undertaken for their productions of Vanya on 42nd Street and most recently A Master Builder.  With all the years it takes and all the silence in which the analyst says nothing, patients in Freudian analysis might contemplate the idea of producing a musical called When Will This End?  Perhaps if it were successful such a musical would amortize the cost of this notoriously expensive form of treatment. Cognitive, behavioral and interpersonal therapy would be just a few of the other therapies represented with Greenwich Village, Park Avenue and Upper West Side offices being turned into the equivalent of 42^nd Street’s theater row. No need to enroll at Juilliard or Yale, just tell it like it is. Maybe this was what Chris Durang was thinking about when he wrote Beyond Therapy?

Unheimlichkeit

Have you ever wondered where has everyone gone or found yourself waking up into what seems like an episode of The Twilight Zone, say "The After Hours" where the character gets off on the wrong, non-existent floor of the department store where the mannequins all come to life, only to discover that she herself is a mannequin on the lam. Unheimlichkeit is the feeling of estrangement or uncanniness referred to by both Heidegger and Freud and it literally means not feeling at home. You don’t have to be a character out of an episode of The Twilight Zone to feel it. Simply return to a favorite spot, say a small town in Vermont where you once vacationed on fall weekends when the kids were little or one of those old-fashioned railroad car diners, (there’s actually one called the Chelsea Royal in Brattleboro Vermont) and say you walk in to find a whole new cast of characters, say an upscale Relais and Chateau as opposed to the simple inn with the friendly room clerk with the green visor who once greeted you. Say the cozy little restaurant has been turned into an expensive outpost of some exotic new cuisine whose portions are so refined and microscopic that they’re lost in a sea of white china. Or let’s say you return to the 50^th high school reunion and you don’t recognize anyone, not even the girl or boyfriend, who sheepishly tugs at your sleeve, trepidatiously enunciating your name. Is this the creature you once undressed or undressed in front of? The house where you literally or figuratively grew up may still be standing, but it’s occupied by strangers. That old doorman in your parents apartment building is long dead and the new man blocks your way as you attempt to return to the past.