OUT OF MY MIND

ON PASSION: and the feeling of intensity.

Most people think that passion is something that we feel when we fall in love or lust – and while that is true, there is much more to passion. Passion runs the gamut of emotions. Passion adds intensity and a particular kind of alchemy to any feeling that we experience, highlighting its emotional reverberation in us. Passion is felt, the experience unfurls through our senses and bypasses our thinking mind. Passion can lead us to experience great pleasure and also, great pain. It can create a turbulence that augments and escalates all of our emotions, from love to hate to ecstasy to violence to desperation and despair. Indeed passionate states can threaten to overwhelm us with a feeling that enraptures us. Sometimes this is a good thing. It can lead to deep attachments and powerful relationships, as well as the creation of a novel, a painting, a sculpture, a song, a dance. Art, in all of its forms, understands passion well as it speaks the same language- emotional and based on inner experience. Yet passion can also lead us astray, into the territory of overexcitement, of excess, of feeling too much, of pain and suffering. Emotional intensity is the hallmark of passion, and its expression is known implicitly and felt corporeally. It is only after we have felt it that we can revisit it in our thoughts.

So what does it mean to be passionate? To have a passionate nature? To be passionate about things? And why only certain things?

Traditionally, psychoanalysis has viewed passion as the realm of the hysteric, that poor soul that suffered from ‘reminiscences’ which reverberated physically and could not be captured in words. Thus evolved the talking cure: helping to put words to experience that was so powerful it spoke through the body and its symptomatology. And while words do help us to understand and name our experiences and feelings, I think there are times when they cannot capture what is felt, particularly when that feeling is a passionate one.
Why?
Because passion involves an unconscious communication that transgresses spoken language and arrives at implicit experience directly, engaging relational patterns that are unthought but known through feeling.

Yes, passionate emotions can bring on emotional disequilibrium because they highlight the space between fusion and separation, and break down the boundaries between our private and our public life, between the thing and what we imagine it to be, and between the felt/experienced/lived event and the one that is narrated. Passion as an implicit, sensual and sensorial communication has to be experienced and felt, in order to be recognized, known and understood. Passion carries an early relational dialogue within it, which comes alive in the context of relationships to people and objects that evoke that early sensual echo.

How can this be?

Remember falling in love? How absolutely captivated by the other, how enraptured in sensation, imagination, possibility? When life itself seemed dull without the promise of that particular loved one? Passion.
And if that relationship broke your heart, remember the pain of that? Intense, never ending, haunting you through the day and rousing you at night? Passion.
Or perhaps you can recollect a time when you found yourself transported into another land by a novel, or enchanted by a piece of music -lost in the playing of it for hours at a time.
Or when you found yourself in the lines of a particular poem, which seemed to capture the most private parts of you, and speak only to you.

Passion has preferences and they are most personal. We do not choose our passions, they find us, often surprising us in the process.
I think this is because passion involves an ongoing relational exchange in which we feel implicitly recognized and known; in communion with an other through felt experience that is so strong that words are not enough to capture it. The passionate exchange has a logic of its own, embedded in us and unearthed by a particular object or person. So perhaps this is why passion is often defined as love or Eros – both need relationship to come about, and it turns out that passion and its evocation require a relationship as well.

ON IMAGINATION – and the power to make things right.

J. Ritter photo

“Logic will get you from A to Z; but imagination will get you everywhere.”

― Albert Einstein

 

 

I have always been partial to fairytales and science fiction because they helped me explore lands that I could only dream of, until, as a young child, I realized that I often dreamed of them while awake, and that I had the power to make entire worlds come alive in my head. So I have always been interested in imagination and the internal realms that it helps to bridge. To imagine is to see beyond the limits of what reality imposes. It is to move outside of the container of our world and play with possibilities of what could be. But being a psychoanalyst, what is most interesting to me about imagination is that it allows us to make things right, or as Walt Disney said, imagination restores order. I believe he was talking about restoring a personal order, taking what has happened in our lives and might continue to be present in our internal world, and making sense of it anew. Imagination helps us to make things right in the same way that fairy tales help us in the processing of trauma: it gives us a vehicle within which we can visualize and think of a different ending and other possibilities, as well as rehearse and invent ourselves in different ways. Fairytales do this through their narrative and story, when someone else’s imagination captures ours. But with the use of imagination it can all happen inside our head, putting us in charge of the narrative, the characters, the action. I think Walt Disney must have known this, as he believed that storytellers reconstruct personal narratives into stories that reach all of us, and in the process change us. Yes, imagination has the power to mend, repair, soothe, hold and contain our internal experience, including changing it into something we can live with and move beyond. This is how we build our internal world(s) and rehearse what our external one might look like.

The OED defines imagination as:

1) the mental faculty or action of forming mental images or concepts of external objects not present to the senses.

2) scheming or devising a plot with fanciful thoughts.

3) the creative faculty of the mind, the faculty of fanciful thought, the ability to frame new and striking concepts.

This definition explains why psychological theories of imagination have to do with cognition and perception –of images- but have little to do with the dynamic use of imagination. I will not bore you with these, and instead,  ask you to consider how we use our imagination.  Take for instance, what we do when we direct our attention inward, when we begin to imagine our thoughts and give them shapes, colors, narratives, as we begin to animate our internal life. The same can be said when we choose to meditate, or follow a relaxation exercise, we focus on internal sensations and play with imagery that makes it more dimensional to us. Or think of what happens when we read a novel and begin to know the characters and their lives: They become our friends or enemies, we feel about them and what they think and do, we become involved with them and their story, as if we could step into the book – and we do!

True, imagination can also help us to escape. We can think of this particular use of imagination as one of the many protective mechanisms of our mind, like a form of dissociation that retains the ability to create and is generative rather than disruptive. Imagination requires us to be active in the animation of our internal world, look beyond it and return to it restored. Perhaps this is what writers and artists do when they are most productive.

Our imaginative abilities have been there right form the beginning of time. In fact, it is unlikely that we would have evolved as a species if it was not for the use of our imagination and the ability to play outside the proverbial box. Imagination involves the ability to form internal images and sensations that are not perceived through our senses but nevertheless utilize them. It often involves memories, emotions, feelings, as well as our present and past experience and the ability to play. Our innate ability to imagine allows us to invent partial or complete personal realms within our minds- to be used as we wish.  As such, imagination is involved in creativity, and is a major player in the arts: literature, dance, painting, and music. The use of imagination also helps in problem solving, and in integrating experience and processing what we learn. It is a key to engaging in the world in an open manner, helping us to look beyond the immediacy of our own experience and step into the others shoes. It turns out to be crucial in the making of personal meaning,  the development of empathy and compassion and the ability to form relationships (think about the experience of falling in love and its use and reliance on imagination). Imagination is a powerful agent of change – for what we imagine can help us to shape the realities of our lives.

 “I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”

― Albert Einstein

 

ON MINDFULNESS – and minding your p’s and q’s.

Mindfulness is a term that gets used a lot these days, despite the fact that it has been around for centuries. Eastern thought, primarily Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism, and meditative disciplines have always had the concept of mindfulness at their core. The idea of mindfulness has entered western ideas through the world of spirituality and meditation, as well as through disciplines like yoga. In psychology, the meaning of mindfulness has been equated with being conscious and thoughtful about one’s experience and actions, having nothing to do with spirituality. In the realm of the behavioral sciences, mindfulness has always had to do with mind, and the process of our subjective experience. Interestingly, when we take both Eastern and Western notions of the idea of mindfulnesss, they provide a bridge between our internal world and the external realities of the world, and as such,  a way to connect emotions, thoughts and actions.

Put simply, mindfulness is about living thoughtfully. But what goes into being thoughtful? In psychoanalysis we are fond of using the term consciousness, by which we mean our experience of being aware. And what about awareness? Where does that fit in the sphere of mindfulness?  So many words to describe one experience.   Awareness is part of being mindful, in the same way that being conscious is. Both words describe a process of bringing one’s attention inward, of looking at our feelings and thoughts and how they affect our behavior and actions. Awareness allows us to have a subjective sense of something that leads to knowing what it is. Being conscious and aware lead us to being mindful, to being able to think and consider options and choices, to being able to alter our behavior and thoughts- and here is the cherry- to being able to change our very neural structure. Yes really.

Eastern disciplines arrived at mindfulness through various philosophical teachings and meditative practices which continue to be valued because their practice changes the self at its core. In western thought we have moved closer to these practices and ideas not only through various forms of spirituality, but through the fields of psychology and neurobiology.  The relatively new science of interpersonal neurobiology has validated many psychoanalytic ideas, and tells us that nature and nurture are inevitably intertwined rather than independent from or merely interactive with each other. Intertwined. Woven into the very fabric of each other. Inseparable. We are what we experience because what we experience stimulates and shapes the development of our brain and nervous system. Our mind is both embodied and embedded in relationship. Our personal neurobiology is relationally determined. This not only means that our early interactions with primary caretakers are responsible for the shaping and development of our neuronal systems  and the way we respond to intimate relationships later in life, it also means that relationships (therapeutic or otherwise) are the primary crucible for development and potential change.

Think of it- we are born into a relational system made up of the mother/infant dyad and the interactions that take place between them. It is up to the primary caretaker to introduce the infant to the world and mediate their internal experience of it. It is the primary caretaker that “regulates” early experiences for the infant, and that regulation is based both on the caretakers own internal experience  and her interactions with the infant. It is this interpersonal attunement between mother and child that shapes the ability to self regulate, and in adulthood, it is the capacity to self regulate that leads to mindful living.

Remember the adage “mind your p’s and q’s”? It reminds one that we must pay attention. It reminds us that what we do, down to its most refined detail, has meaning, impact and consequences- not only for us, but very likely for others as well.  Mindfulness is about minding our p’s and q’s: It is about being able to look at what we do, think about what motivates our actions and consider how our behavior and actions impact others. It is a concept that incorporates both the “I” and the “us”, the individual and the community. Psychology and psychoanalysis have tended to use the terms mindfulness and consciousness to define the experience of self-observation, introspectiveness and self-awareness. But  mindfulness also includes an awareness of others as recipients of our actions and shapers of our experience.  Mindfulness is inherently a relational term because it speaks to the nature of inter-subjectivity.

 

ON MAKE-UP, MASKS AND KILLER SMILES.

Recently I posted a blog on the power of laughter and humor. I was writing about the  kind that makes your belly tremble and your chest heave. The kind that moves the neurobiology of your insides and translates into mood shifts on your outside. The REAL kind. Today’s post is about its opposite, what I call the killer smile, but not because of its potential beauty, or because of its ability to connect to joy, but because of its ability to hide all manner of emotional workings.  The killer smile pertains to a masked quality, something meant to hide and distract from the real. Think of the smile of the Joker in Batman, forever turned upward in a pantomime of joy and fun, while behind the mask nothing could be further from the truth.

Killer smiles are a problem, and not just to the people that wear them. While they are meant to protect the owner, they mess with  reality- for the self and for others. In their attempt to protect, killer smiles deceive. They contain a mixed signal (I am smiling but I am  upset) that makes the other’s intuition falter, essentially saying: What you feel and think about me is not what you see, are you sure that what you feel and think is right? Look again…and the smile gets wider. In its aim to protect the self, the killer smile disarms implicit knowing in others, and often in oneself. The repeated experience of masking emotional distress with its opposite- a joyful smile- unhinges internal experience from its relational context and isolates it into its own compartment, far away from the possibility of coming alive with another. Killer smiles wear the mask of dissociation.

People with killer smiles have had to learn to smile early in their life, usually in the face of severe adversity and emotional trauma. For them, smiling has become a way of protecting themselves and holding themselves together. It is almost as if the smile proclaims: “You can’t hurt me, what you do does not affect me in the least.” And for some time, this may even become true. Yet in my office, people with killer smiles often discover that to maintain that smile involves disconnecting from their own experience and feelings, relying instead on their social and interpersonal skills to navigate the world, like an actor on a stage. It is no surprise that often, people with killer smiles have very good social skills and can negotiate quite well interpersonally, yet they are at a loss when it comes to dealing with their feelings. They are well liked by others and seen as easygoing, yet they often feel “not known” and very lonely. Because killer smiles work so well socially, they are (unfortunately) continuously reinforced. But a killer smile is meant to “kill” the emotional experience and feelings that are attached to the relational situations that made it necessary to smile in order to survive and hold oneself together. The killer smile continues to act as a shield to feelings of connection, dependent, vulnerability, shame, and fear. It also kills the possibility of real relationships, which are based on mutual experience and emotional connection. The killer smile protects but isolates.

Smiling in the face of emotional pain, as in what I am calling a killer smile, becomes a mask over time. A mask that is so closely worn that it becomes a second skin, like an application of make up that rearranges the features so that they no longer represent one’s internal workings but instead act to create an impenetrable persona. Such make up becomes necessary on a daily basis, as a layer of protection. In my work as a psychoanalyst, I have found that the tighter the smile the more fragile the inside. Whereas real smiles are connected to the emotions that bring them about, usually a positive connection to another, safety, playfulness, joy, happiness and love, killer smiles are about maintaining internal balance by avoiding any emotion that might trigger a feeling of connection and bring about dependency, vulnerability and fear. In fact, while protecting their owner, killer smiles are inappropriate to many of the situations that they are used in. A patient of mine has called the killer smile “a mechanical muscle reflex that looks like a smile but it is not”.

Indeed.

When one begins to deconstruct the killer smile and work with what is behind it, the scaffolding that has been holding up the self falls away and fear sets in. The possibility of real connection begins at that moment, as well as the possibility of being met and recognized where one is most vulnerable. The place where reparation is most needed. If one is fortunate enough to be in a relationship that holds the self while allowing enough space to explore what is actually happening – as in what good therapy is all about, or what a good relationship can be about –  then the mask can be left behind and new ways of experiencing emotional connection can begin to emerge.  It takes time to retrain those facial muscles to respond to what is actually going on in the here and now,  and to feelings that elicit different outcomes. It takes time to develop connection to another and trust them to help navigate emotions that have held painful and even traumatic  histories.

But that is what it takes.

 

ON LAUGHTER : And the power of humor.

A good belly laugh can change the mood, tone and connection to an other in an instant. Teasing or joking with someone can invite them into a space to play with something in a different way. I have noticed that in my clinical practice, the ability to tease or joke with my patients about a topic which may bring up shame, anger, tension or an emotion which threatens to foreclose their ability to stay present, helps to open up a space in which we can both tackle something difficult differently. Of course,  this is dependent on many things that have become established in my relationship with them- we share a common language and an understanding and trust that has been built over time. It is the context of our relationship that allows room for spontaneity and the ability to play, tease and laugh about something that is also painful, shameful and filled with conflict. When both my patient and I can play and “joke” about difficult matters, a space opens up where it is possible to look and speak about something in a new way. It is almost as if fear, tension, and shame dissolve, and then we are two people laughing within human conflict, playing with possibilities together and experiencing emotions and meaning differently. So this post is about humor, and laughter, and their ability to disrupt negative states of mind and open up potential space.

There is not much in the psychoanalytic literature concerning laughter and humor. Freud wrote Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious early in his career, and although limited in its scope, it remains a favorite of mine. His theory was that jokes bore a resemblance to dreams in that they both operate by condensing meaning and substituting signs. For him, a seemingly trivial event like a joke gave voice to repressed meanings, usually aggressive and sexual in content. Social psychology has added a view of humor as an incongruent social concept that violates an accepted norm in society. In order for something to be humorous it must violate the cultural moral order, it must be transgressive in some way. Ever wondered what’s behind the remark “Only joking!” ?  At the very least it allows someone to say something under the guise of it not being true. Hmmm. Yes, Freud was onto something. So was J.K. Rowling when she made laughter the means to dissolve paralyzing fear through the spell Ridikulous in the Harry Potter books. She too, knew that laughter and humor run counter to tension and fear. Laughter is a powerful spell indeed.

Current research on laughter and humor tells us that they are separate things neurologically speaking -related but not synonymous. Humor is a cognitively driven process that may or may not lead to laughter, and laughter is a seizure like activity (!) that can come about through humor but also through something like tickling. What they do share is the ability to disrupt negative states of mind, at a neuro-biological level. Humor and laughter activate meso-limbic brain systems that are dopamine receptive – they activate the reward system in our brain that generates the chemicals responsible for wellbeing (natural opiates). Aha. You probably already knew that because you felt it the last time you had a good laugh. But there is more.

It turns out that humor might be a truly unique human function (unlike laughter). Humor involves a complex assembly of specific neural pathways, which activate brain regions associated with abstract thinking, social perception, symbol recognition, emotional attunement and language. Many of these involve right hemispheric functions, which interpret emotional material (both linguistic and implicit), and engage the comprehension and expression of emotion(s) that is instrumental in attending to environmental cues for survival. Humor seems to initiate an inter-hemispheric dialogue that involves procedural memory, implicit knowledge, attunement to social cues and context, and even implicates mirror neurons.  In fact, humor may turn out to be our most cognitive complex attribute, in that it utilizes multiple layers and levels of brain power and structure.

Laughter on the other hand, turns out to be what scientists call a fixed action pattern– a reflexive action that can occur without conscious appreciation of all the causal factors involved. Laughter and smiling occur within the first year of life and are triggered by physical sensations and stimuli unrelated to the cognitive intricacies of humor. There are those who consider the laughter involved in peek-a-boo games as an embryonic form of humor, involving a sense of mastery that continues to develop(in relationship)  as a child grows. By the time a child reaches school age, her/his sense of humor resembles that of an adult, albeit without the richness of experience or breath of linguistic ability.

The power of humor lies in its ability not only to use words as complex symbols of emotion and meaning, but in its re-contextualization of meaning through relational negotiations of intricate self-other impressions that help navigate difficult feelings and potentially contentious situations. Returning to Freud and to psychoanalytic notions of the unconscious, humor and laughter release psychic tension associated with negative feelings and emotions. Humor and laughter are pleasureable, healthy anxiety reducing behaviors. According to current research, laughter and humor also facilitate cooperation between people by providing information on the empathy and sympathy levels of both participants. Laughter is a response that signals that one is both ready and able to cooperate. Now we are talking!

Humor creates a social bond between people on the basis of mutual understanding of many complicated social and cultural and personal cues. Humor is contextual. It is relationally driven and elaborated. It is spontaneous and playful. It is the stuff of magic, which can shift the self from one state to another through play, creativity, spontaneity and relationship.

 

 

 

On Beginning Anew

photo F. SconocchiaIt is the end of another year and beyond the celebrations and hoopla of the holiday season, it is a time to take stock of our lives, and for many, a time to think of what needs changing. The New Year often brings resolutions, and those resolutions are based on a reckoning with ones desires and expectations, ones hopes and dreams.  The New Year brings the promise of possibility, of starting anew.

In my office, I see many patients struggle with what is to come, particularly around the holiday season. This end-of-the-year holiday has been imbued with such significance that it often forecloses the possibility of thinking of what has been in our lives and what is to be. Yet there is something important to ends and beginnings, and to the rhythm of time and its’ movement through our lives. Important enough to celebrate it, or at the very least take note of it. Important enough to invite us to consider our lives and the choices that have shaped it – at least for the past year. Taking stock of what we do is something that many of us do throughout the year, yet at this point in time we are collectively called to think about what has been and usher in new possibilities.

Times gone by, the meaning of the Scottish song Auld Lang Syne, asks us to “take a cup of kindness yet” to remember old friends and past times. It is a song that encompasses the sadness and joys of our lives, and that asks us to continue and renew. Renewal is at the center of the New Year, as well as the letting go of grudges, misunderstandings and problems. The end of the year and the tic-toc of the midnight clock offers us all a chance to reconsider and do differently.

Perhaps this is why this particular holiday is celebrated across the world. In Scotland, there is Hogmanay and the tradition of the “first foots” who, shortly after midnight bring along a gift of shortbread or coal. After the New Year is rung in, the Scots consider it fortunate if a tall, dark and handsome stranger enters yours house. In Japan, there is Oshogatsu, the most important holiday of the year because it is a feast of renewal. The gongs of Buddhist temples strike 108 times at midnight on December 31st, presumably to expel human weakness. The Spanish eat 12 grapes on New Years Eve to secure 12 happy months in the New Year. The Italians eat lentils and sausages on New Years Eve to insure happiness and good fortune. The Dutch make bonfires out of their Christmas trees to purge the old and welcome the new. In Greece, vassilopitta is served and whoever finds the coin baked inside the cake is assured ongoing luck in the New Year. And here, at home in New York City, thousands gather to watch the ball make its one minute descent in Times Square- a tradition that began in 1907.

We all celebrate beginnings and the possibility of renewal, it is the endings that are more difficult, and yet beginnings do not happen without them. Endings inevitably include loss, and loss involves letting go, and here is the rub: one must let go to move forward. Beginnings do not begin until something ends. Every year at this time one more year comes to pass and another begins.

So here’s to the New Year and all that it may hold for you, and to letting go so that you may start anew.

THE COMPANY OF MEN – And why it is important.

Having written about women, and how important it is for us to have other women in our lives (https://www.drceccoli.com/2010/06/its-a-girl-thing/ ), it is with great pleasure that I once again step outside my world to dive into the other dark continent- the world of men, and how important men are to each other.

Men need other men- they need each others company. Men offer each other something that women can never give them – an implicit and embodied knowledge about being a man and all that it means and may come to mean. Yes, men provide something for each other that women are not a part of. And cannot be. Consider for example, D.H. Lawrence’s “Women in Love” – and the scene between the men when they fight each other, only to end up embracing each other in recognition: men argue, fight, disagree, and the more they do this the closer to each other they feel. Conflict and aggression, and the ability to work it out with each other, to survive each other in relation to each other, is part of the equation of masculinity. It is part of the way that men establish intimacy with each other. Men need to consort with their own kind, in implicit understanding, connection and validation. Men recognize each other in a million different ways that are specific to being a man: Gendered embodied knowledge that is implicitly known.

Yes, men need other men. The essence of all that is masculine requires the input of other masculinities. Not because women are not important, but because they are different and validate men through their difference. Men gift each other with identification – the implicit knowledge that comes from embodying the same developmental experiences which go on to  shape expectations and visions of manhood. Take men’s identification with their penis- consider what a lifetime of being able (and needing to) see your genitalia and hold it in your hands might do to establish that member of your anatomy as a crucial part of your identity, something that physically represents your sexuality, desire, sameness and difference. Women, on the other hand, grow up shrouding their sexuality, not being aware of it or what it looks like unless they go looking for it (and this is not so easy to do!). There is no reason for a woman to touch herself other than pleasure, and that takes women and their relation to their genitalia in a whole other direction- that of sexuality and societal prohibition. You may laugh as you read this but consider the psychological impact of it. For men, the connection to their genitalia is encouraged and culturally approved. That member of their anatomy becomes not only an identifying characteristic (it’s a boy!), but a physical part of their sense of self that embodies and shapes much of their identity and what is to come. Men are literally out there in the open, and amongst other men, from the very beginning. Perhaps this is why the comparison of size and “whose is bigger” often translates into what it means to be a man and conceptions of strength, vitality, stamina and power. Turns out size matters – but not in the way that is joked about.

Men need male friends, peers, mentors, role models. They need other men to participate in male rituals like contact sports, drinking, fighting, competing, sweat lodges, and all male groups. They need to play together, be competitive with each other and work out their aggression together. Identification, validation, support and creativity all stem out of such male to male experiences. Men also have a need to be intimate with each other, the kind of intimacy that stems from knowing the same developmental experiences and physical sensations, the kind that does not instill fear but recognition. Intimacy between men turns out to be a most important aspect of their identities and a source of creativity. There is a hunger in men for other men and a need to turn to each other for sustenance and definition, for company on the quest for defining and embodying masculinity.

The connection between men is primal and elemental. It is based on their shared anatomy and the way that it gives body to their subjectivity and individual notions and elaborations of masculinity and what it means to be a man. There is an implicit understanding- at a physical level- of what being a man is all about, and women cannot share in this. Much the same way that men cannot provide women with the kind of identification or validation that comes from knowing, from the inside, what something feels like.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ON MEN: Shaken and stirred.

 

Ah men. That other dark continent that somehow is supposed to be clearer, simpler, more known. To whom? I wonder. Other men? As a woman writing about men, I find myself besieged with stereotyped notions of masculinity and what it means to be a man. Culturally and societally embedded ideas within the folds of my psyche and playing out in my interactions and relationships with men. A conundrum that I am not sure any of us can avoid. So, as I began thinking about men, I decided to take on a pop culture icon of masculinity known to all– Bond, James Bond, 007. The man we all love, regardless of gender.

James Bond made his first appearance in 1953, with Ian Fleming’s book Casino Royale, and continued to visit us yearly thereafter until 1967, when Fleming died. As you might imagine, the books are different than the films, where Fleming had a decisive image and version of James Bond that remained consistent throughout his writing. In the past fifty years we have had many movie versions of Bond, presumably staying true to the original 007 of ink and paper, but somehow also transformed according to the generational and cultural visions of manhood and notions of masculinity specific to each decade. So that we are all on the same page, I list the many cinematic faces of Bond below, as Michael Wood of the London Review of Books has catalogued them, along with a bit of personal interpretation.

First, there was Sean Connery who did 6 films from 1962-71, with a  comeback in 1983. He embodies a sardonic spy, a tough Scot who refuses to give in and seems to smile in the face of adversity and danger. He promises that men can achieve anything and have anyone. Then came George Lazenby, the Australian actor who made one film in 1969 (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service), and stepped in and out of the role of 007 with equal speed. His was a handsome, more physically aggressive Bond who continued the legacy of his predecessor. Roger Moore followed with 7 films, spanning from 1973-85. He ushered in a campier version of Bond, a man with a nostalgic view of the war, who never gets bloody or dirty, and is really slick and unruffled. Timothy Dalton came next with two films (1987-89), and was the definitive broody Bond, who fights less with his hands and more with the possibilities that science fiction gadgets provide. From 1995-2002 we had Pierce Brosnan (4 films), who emerges as the alternative Bond, a tad flighty and disconnected from the dangers he faces, more focused on his leading lady and her safety, and dealing with technology and computerized versions of terrorist cells. And finally, from 2005 to the present, we have Daniel Craig (three movies thus far). Craig offers us the stripped down version of 007. He is closest in both character and looks to Fleming’s idea of the man: serious, cold, brutal, flawed, tortured and sexy as hell.

Ah yes, Bond. The man. The icon of masculinity for multiple generations of men. The knight for many a princess. Bond has followed many little boys and little girls to their adulthood, shaping their ideas of masculinity, and what it means to be a man along the way. Mention the name James Bond, and everyone, and I mean everyone, recognizes it. He is the man that all of us love.

Why?

The Bond image capitalizes on stereotypes of what it means to be a man: a particular kind of man, imbued with a nationalistic streak that is also wrapped up in stereotypes. Do these stereotypes turn out to be untrue? NO. They simply help to define and summarize how many generations of men (and women) view and embody their gender, and the particular ways in which it is articulated. And yet such stereotypes and iconic images are powerful and stay with us.

James Bond, the iconic man, embodies the ideal of masculinity. Let me count the ways: Bond is strong, persevering, loyal only to queen, country, and M. He loves women, both as a womanizer (every woman catches his eye and is a possibility) but also as a gentleman- women evoke the need for protection, safety and security. Chivalry is alive and well with Bond, even if he has to kill or hit a woman in the line of duty (in the books, this exception is very unsavory to him). Women, you see, also stir his heart and his yearnings for closeness and, dare I say, love. His relationships with men, those that he does not kill that is, are honest, tight, and based on a solid camaraderie that emerges from a shared sense of danger, the ability to be aggressive and playful with each other, to face conflict, to drink together until stupefaction (only in the books does Bond suffer from horrific hangovers), to sweat, bleed and live another day together. Ok sorry, I got carried away. But Bond loves his men (albeit differently) almost as much as he loves his women. Thus, he is a “man’s man” as well as the man women love to love. And in the latest film (Skyfall), we are teased with the notion of Bond’s bisexuality! Thus he truly is omniavailable! Bet you did not see that coming…all things to all of us?

Yes.

Bond embodies the fantasies of men as well as the fantasies of women. Bond capitalizes on sexual difference, and the “battle of the sexes”. The idea that women want men to be men in the powerful way that Bond is a man – he can protect you, love you, and set you straight when necessary. As well as the idea that men like their women to surrender but put up a fight first, that despite the fact that she appears to be independent she really needs her man. OY say you. OY indeed.  The notion that women love men because they are different from them in every way, and yet they want men to retain a masculinity that is both overpowering and yielding has caused many a poet, writer and scientist to throw up their hands! Just as the notion that a woman must be gentle to be feminine yet somehow become a lioness to be sexy has driven feminists off the deep end. Hmmm.

007 maximizes the inherent duality of gender by capturing masculinity and realizing it in its purest form. While it is impossible to be him, he still represents the ideal, and perhaps that is why he speaks to both genders. Bond embodies a set of specific attributes that are associated with masculinity and with being a man. He also enfolds generations of cultural records on masculinity, presenting a powerful image of what a man can or should be. These images have changed over time and with each particular Bond: the movies responding to the cultural emphasis of each generation, while the books live on with Fleming’s unperturbed interpretation.

Through the “omni” status of the James Bond in motion pictures, we can see  masculinity as individually interpreted on the basis of a cluster of attributes in search of unity. This necessarily operates within the restrictions that gender imposes no matter how fluid it is in its internal composition. Yet 007 has the advantage of reinterpreting himself according to the generation that he lives in, and thus the success of the movies and the various faces of each Bond. Throwing in the hint of bisexuality in the latest film makes Bond the gender bending icon of the 21st century: A man that is shaken by a mixture of cultural and generational expectations of manhood, and stirred by his internal negotiation of identity and sexuality, of desire and embodied reality. Fleming may have started out writing his version of the ideal(ized) man, but Bond has turned out to be much more than a stereotype. Paradoxically, James Bond proves that masculinity is but a term to describe a set of behaviors that culturally defines various possibilities for what being a man means.

Thank you James.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ON MASCULINITY: And What It Means To Be A Man.

I have been keen to write about masculinity and men for some time now, and am aware that in doing so I am traversing the great divide of difference between us. As a woman, I cannot avoid these differences, nor would I want to, rather I intend to speak from a position of difference.

In thinking about men, and what makes them men, I was immediately catapulted into the cultural and societal spheres which dictate masculinity and establish -early on- those characteristics that are considered male, and those that are considered female. It became increasingly obvious to me that in our current cultural climate, and its emphasis on being politically correct and all inclusive, the demarcations of gender and gender roles have increasingly become blurred and that the definitions of masculinity and femininity, as well as the attributes that go into those labels have necessarily become more fluid and porous.

In psychoanalysis we have been slow to develop theories of masculinity. For that matter, we have been slow and awkward in addressing sexuality and gender all together. After Freud’s initial and misguided forays into female sexuality and the “dark continent” it constituted for him, psychoanalysis has for the most part continued to build theories of sexuality and gender around pathological formulations rather than healthy and functional development. It is indeed an occupational hazard that, psychoanalysis often begins by focusing on what goes wrong.  So, early psychoanalytic literature had little to say on the subject of men and masculinity, borne as it were from Freud’s dealings with his mostly female patients’. Early ideas about masculinity and maleness centered on genitality, and later on the need to dis-identify from the mother, so that masculinity became a repudiation of femininity. A reaction against. A necessary distancing from the all-encompassing maternal/woman, based on a fear of being ‘penetrated’ or eaten up (recall the vagina dentata) by anything female. There existed an inherent paradox to becoming a man, where it was necessary to strip away the boy’s identification with his mother in order for him to identify with his father.

Then feminism came along and began to revise Freud and psychoanalytic notions of sexuality and gender. Where men and masculinity had been identified with the phallus, and with attributes such as strength, logic, and firmness, feminism swept up men (particularly heterosexual men) and delivered them into more rounded, softer, interior versions of themselves. It rendered masculinity a more dimensional sphere of male identity, one that included women and the feminine and did not require dis-identification with them. Male sexuality was now allowed and instructed to become as fluid and multi-dimensional as female sexuality has always been. This is where things got blurry and more complex. Or perhaps this is where we unintentionally returned to Freud’s original observation that human beings are essentially bisexual, and what that actually looks like in real life: softer masculinities, tougher femininities – caught up in a permeable gendered space in which to play with one’s sexuality. Undoubtedly Freud stopped short of elaborating just what that bisexuality looked like or would mean, instead he took it down the road of biology. But think of it, in deconstructing gender from its solid lego-like quality into a softer assembly, we have taken the hard edges that defined separateness and difference amongst the sexes and opened up space for possibility and also potential confusion. In the current climate, what is masculinity about?

Again, psychoanalysis remains sluggish in this area. It has been queer theorists that have advanced the conversation the most, perhaps because of their “other” status and the potential space to think outside the proverbial box. The current generation of analysts speaks about masculinity as the impossible quest, as a false idea that can become too rigidified in cultural stereotypes or so porous as to put one’s sense of identity in question. Current psychoanalysis views masculinity as involving multiple representations of what it means to be a man. For example, we no longer believe that a man must repudiate his mother in order to become a man, rather the opposite. We now think that boys use their identification with their mothers in order to integrate the more “feminine “ aspects of themselves, and that separating from her is a much more organic process that continues throughout the adults lifetime, and involves relationships with other women. Such a developmental-integration-separation of and from mom, allows the space to form multiple identifications on the way to identity formation, and renders a plurality to the notion of masculinity that liberates it from an essentialist position.

Or does it?

There are others, like myself, who, while privileging the early relational dyad as constitutive of personality and psychic development, also argue that the body is a gendered container that necessarily limits the ways that identity is elaborated. In this case, the interiority of a man is shaped not only by his early relational field, but also by his physicality and the requisite experiences that it dictates, and so the question of what it means to be a man is best answered by looking at how a man copes with his (internal) uncertainty about who he is versus the reality of his gendered body (yes, the phallus again), and whether this leads to psychological constriction and a stereotyping of the self or to a sense of possibility. Masculinity embodied.

Consider the developmental experiences that are exclusively male: The ability to touch oneself for purposes other than pleasure, or what a lifetime of holding one’s genitalia, privately and publicly and with cultural and societal approval, might do in terms of establishing a sense of male identity, to say nothing of sexuality. Think of how aggression is rewarded in the male world, along with competition and strength, and how these notions begin to weave the texture of masculinity. Consider what the specificity of the male physique encourages and limits based on its particularities. This is true regardless of sexual orientation. A man is a man is a man. There, I’ve said it. And how he embodies masculinity is  best answered by attending to the interplay of his internal world and the relationships that have configured it, and his gendered reality and the developmental experiences it has occasioned.

Difference is a good thing.

The Shadow of the Thing: Remembering the Unthinkable.

911-spirits of history by V. CeccoliToday marks an anniversary which I do not like, yet feel compelled to post on, since it is the “thing” that changed everything I knew up until the day that it happened. It is the one event in my privileged lifetime that reminded me of how fragile our sense of wellbeing, how frail our very life is and how karma and history are intertwined in the fabric of human existence. The one event that forever changed my adult life. Yes, it is September 11 once again, and twelve years later, I wonder whether our collective memory is as sharp as it was on that day, if we have managed not to forget the terrible events of that day, our worst and our finest hour.

On 9/11 everything changed in New York City, and D.C., and Pennsylvania. And elsewhere too, where television images and radio announcements carried the terrible events of that day all around the world. It was the day that everyone became an American or stood by America as it bled. Twelve years later, as I sit contemplating the water, deep blue and rippled with wavelets, and the sunny, clear skies, it seems as if this never happened. Well, almost. The truth is that the more beautiful the day is, on September 11th, the more the shadow of the thing comes alive for me.

It is the nature of our psyche to deal with trauma and its aftermath by dulling out the pain, exiling it and memory if necessary- so that we can recoup and continue. So that we can survive and live on.  The very definition of trauma involves a reaction to an event that is unexpected and unthought, an event that comes upon us out of nowhere and deeply confounds us because we have no way of explaining it and making sense of it. It does not compute with our lived experience to date. We are always unprepared for trauma, it is what makes traumatic experience traumatic. So, it is the beautiful days of September that bring on the memory of 9/11, the bluer the sky the crisper the air the clearer the memory, much the way a shadow fills its outlines on a sunny day. The sunnier the day the clearer the shadow.

The shadow of the thing always remains, because that is the nature of human experience and trauma. We internalize events and experiences (traumatic one’s in particular) so that we can attempt to sort them through, replay them in our minds with a different ending, perhaps even attempt to make them go away forever. We work things out internally, or we try to anyway. Often, it is helpful to attempt to work things out in relationship to someone or a number of others- to enlist another in the validation of our experience, as a witness and other to reality test our experience, help put words to it, put us in touch with our emotions and feelings and link them to our thoughts. Much of the time we can do this on our own, but trauma often requires the help of others who help to ease the isolation honor the emotions and feelings involved and help to speak the truth of what has happened.

On September 11 there will be a memorial in New York City, where the names of those who died and were identified will be read out loud, in front of their loved ones and in front of television cameras that will bring it to the world. The ghosts of the towers have been drawing our attention to their white light against the Manhattan night sky for over a week now, gentle reminders of what was and its loss. It is September 11th again,  the day that changed everything for many.