Psychoanalysis On The Couch

Wendy Dennis makes much of the way the TV show The Sopranos has popularized psychoanalysis (“Why Psychoanalysis Matters,” September), calling it “a brilliant advertisement.” It is no coincidence that for generations both television and psychoanalysis have exploited the human mind’s capacity for self-deception. Psychoanalysis is largely about dredging up memories, and, when dealing with memories, your mind makes things up because it’s no longer a living part of your experience. The situation is similar when you watch TV, which feels like reality because your mind automatically fills in the blanks. Reliving your memories and watching TV are both simulations: they do not challenge you in the way real situations do.

It’s true that many people who live unfulfilled lives can benefit from brief therapy, but only if the therapist’s focus is on bringing about change and expanding the person’s world. But what does it say about a person when he goes to a psychoanalyst for one or more days a week for years? It tells him that he is incapable of changing himself. It fosters dependence, rather than independence.

Real change doesn’t come from insight into our childhood traumas, but from meeting challenges on a day-to-day basis. This cannot be done by reliving memories, no matter how emotionally convincing they may be. For most of us, change and maturity require years of just getting on with our lives. This is slow hard work, not always rewarding in the short term, and usually not very glamorous. But there are no substitutes. The opportunity for “deep expansive reflection” that psychoanalysis affords is ultimately nothing more than a very expensive form of entertainment. Like watching television, it can be fascinating, but its effects on personal growth and maturity are superficial at best.

Charles Justice
Prince Rupert, BC

It sounds as if Wendy Dennis had a marvellous time in her personal psychoanalysis, and I am delighted for her. While I agree that The Sopranos is one hell of a good TV drama and that Dr. Melfi is an excellent role model for a shrink, I do wish to raise caveats that may sprinkle a few showers on her parade.

Contrary to Dennis’s laudatory paean, the “art” of psychoanalysis is still as far away from a scientific (neurochemical or neuro-imaging) underpinning today as it was in Sigmund’s time. I would enjoy reading the hard data she cites for the practice’s “80 percent” effectiveness rate and other imagined claims for its worth, as most psychiatrists and psychologists would beg to differ strongly. Dennis ignores, downplays, demeans, or is seemingly ignorant of the success, and scientific validity, of many other so-called talking therapies.

Psychoanalysis has traditionally been limited to the educated, affluent, and introspective. It may have some benefit for those interested in self-exploration, but so do other approaches. For those with “real” psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia or bipolar depression, or suffering from the ravages of living (Iraq, New Orleans, and the like), it can be an exercise in futility, or worse.

Saul Levine
Professor of Psychiatry, University of California at San Diego
Chairman of Psychiatry, Children’s Hospital
San Diego, California

Having recently been through psychoanalysis myself, I was touched by Wendy Dennis’s examination of its beauties and faults. Dennis made me appreciate how fortunate I was to have found a senior psychiatrist with whom I could relate honestly and openly. Both of these ingredients are the sine qua non of not only successful therapy, but also all intimate relationships. The only thing I would add to Dennis’s piece is that a sense of humour and encouraging non-judgmental friends are significant ingredients in the therapeutic process. There are no quick fixes to the healing of our interior lives.

Jim Streeter
Toronto, Ontario

The Ragged Sail Of Empire

James Laxer contends that the resources underpinning the American drive to spread liberal democracy — and with it a form of free-market economic policy amenable to US interests — are quickly eroding (“The Rising Fall of the American Empire,” September). This point is certainly commonsensical. Even as it approaches the beachhead of greater international peace, security, and co-operation, the landing craft on which US interests sail (cobbled together from such disparate materials as patriotism, pluck, and paper currency) has begun to take on water. Mr. Bush’s attempts to spare the ruling class their share of the burden of the “imperial” project — a historical first in time of conflict — is as indicative as anything of how shaky the uss Empire has become.

Suppose we adopt Laxer’s rhetorical assumption that the cultivation of American liberal-democratic values abroad will continue to be an inevitable, feasible, and justifiable priority for the United States and the West. His proposed solution to the impending bankruptcy of the US imperial project then contradicts his own assessment of that project’s origins. Laxer ventures that it is a genuine subscription to the doctrine of American exceptionalism — that nation’s earnest belief in the ascendancy of its guiding political, social, and economic models — that drives the United States on the course of empire-building. Yet he submits that the only sustainable means of propagating the American model is to hand the project over to an international institution, the United Nations.

Suppose we further adopt, as Laxer does, the hoary cliché of the United States as Rome. The idea that American exceptionalism can be circumvented by an international body, professing to espouse American ideals, would be akin to Rome allowing the barbarians to run the world, so long as they did so according to the Roman model. The Romans would countenance no obeisance to an idea that the Other had anything like the ability to properly govern themselves.

As demonstrated by foreign policy dictates like the Monroe Doctrine — and more recently by the popular American conception that “Old Europe” objections to the Iraq war were somehow “wrong” — the same sensibility is an integral element of American exceptionalism. Furthermore, when God is so solemnly invoked as the source of American pre-eminence, as Laxer notes, for what reason need the US cede sovereignty to an assemblage of the ostensibly less blessed great unwashed?

Convincing the United States to place the American imperial project in the hands of the United Nations would entail an outright renunciation of the exceptionalist ideology. Belief in the inevitability of the American value system would need to be thrust aside. But therein lies the crux: if the United States does break with notions of the ascendancy of the American way, what rhetorical value will the liberal-democratic model retain for its inheritors to draw on?

Sean Carrie
Toronto, Ontario

James Laxer is wrong to call the current United States an “empire.” The United States is not an empire in the traditional sense since it lacks formal outposts, and it is not one in the currently fashionable sense of an amorphous, decentralized system of rule. We all know where the current centre of global power lies: just beneath Canada on the map.

The US is currently the most powerful state in the international system, and history teaches us that eventually other states will challenge it. Perhaps we shouldn’t wait that long, in which case Laxer’s recommendations may be helpful. But reforms should be undertaken with a clear understanding of the political situation that we face. The rhetoric of empire is imprecise and alarmist, and it contributes more to hysteria than to clarity.

Jacob Schiff
Chicago, Illinois

James Laxer responds: Sean Carrie contends that my goal is to convince Americans that they should entrust their “imperial” project to the United Nations. To the contrary, my starting point is that such projects constitute a dead end for humanity. I believe that the American imperial project is unsustainable in its present form, in part because the American ruling class is unwilling to bear its burdens, and that the American empire delivers neither democracy nor material wellbeing to the Iraqis and others that it claims to liberate. We need to shed the temptation to think, as do Michael Ignatieff and others, that the American empire can play a civilizing, nation-building role in places like Iraq. Where missions to rescue peoples from ethnic cleansing, genocide, and other crimes against humanity are needed, it is to the United Nations that we should turn, not to America or its would-be imperial successors. I am hopeful that Canadians, and others in second-tier countries, may be willing to make the large investment needed to underwrite such a role for the UN. It is my further hope that many Americans, who recognize the existence of an American empire as Jacob Schiff does not, will organize for a non-imperial future for their country, seeing in this the last, best hope for American democracy.

The Happy Minority

I was pleased to read Paul Adams’ views on the efficacy of a minority government in Canada (“Revenge of the Small,” September). That we’ve managed to thwart an early election, get a budget passed, and pass breakthrough legislation on same-sex marriage is a sign that the government is working. We are the inhabitants and stewards of a rapidly dwindling resource base; a new and sometimes messy minority government is just a benign start to what Canadians face in the twenty-first century.

To push the political envelope further, the day may come when our first-past-the-post system changes to a form of proportional representation. While this prospect frightens some, it is key to increasing diversity within governments. Imagine a Canadian government that includes a First Nations coalition or a Green Party coalition or even gender parity among cabinet ministers. Now that would be a sweet revenge.

Nina Pruesse
Midland, Ontario

Paul Adams wishfully predicts that under a minority parliament, Bloc MPs might start “breaking ranks with their party to take positions important to their constituents.” This misses the fact that the Bloc actually has a strong, united vision that does not have to be questioned by their constituents: the Bloc’s vision for Canada is a Canada without Quebec. If the separatists win the next election in Quebec, Canadians can expect another referendum. Faced with such an event, a minority government in Ottawa will likely not have the strength or consensus to combat such an attack.

If anything, Adams’ article is evidence of the problem that neither Liberals nor Conservatives have guiding visions for Canada. After all, the Liberal minority government was quite willing to accomplish some of the ndp’s goals this past session. The fractured political leadership of the country’s two largest parties only reflects the lack of a coherent plan for our future. Taken alongside the Green Party’s increased funding in the last election, our present political period seems one of party building and rebuilding, or fighting for time until the conclusion of the Gomery Inquiry, rather than a successful experiment in minority governing.

Peter Ryan
Fort Erie, Ontario

Poppycock

Consider carefully both the numbers and the argument in Sean Maloney’s article on the poppy growers of Afghanistan (“Poppy Fields Forever?” September). Their crop is valued at $30 billion (US) annually, of which a mere $2.8 billion remains in Afghanistan as revenue for the local economy. The remaining $27 billion passes into the hands of international criminal gangs, which market the derived narcotic worldwide. By some tortured reasoning, Maloney concludes that Afghans are the ones who will “ultimately have to decide what they want to do about narcotics.” Is he being ironic?

It is the complete failure of our war on drugs — with its punitive, ineffectual laws, clumsy law enforcement, and ill-advised policies — that creates the conditions for traffickers to prosper. Virtually all the profit from narcotics is well up the supply chain from growers. Placing the onus for change on the poppy growers of Afghanistan is like asking a Ford or GM assembly-line worker to knock it off because of our culture’s addiction to the automobile, and the death and destruction that ensues.

Living in Canada, with a full belly and money in the bank, it’s easy to pass judgment on the survival methods of poor people on the other side of the planet. Let’s redirect our search for responsibility. Saner, more helpful drug policies in our part of the world, regulating the flow of narcotics as we do for alcohol and tobacco, would help remove traffickers from the narcotics equation.

Brian Mason
Victoria, BC

Sean Maloney responds: I am not at all being ironic when I state that the Karzai government will have to decide, as a sovereign government should, how to allocate scarce financial resources, and where counter-narcotics programs fit among its priorities. There is no attempt in the article to place the onus for change vis-à-vis the Western drug problem on Afghans. Indeed, those of us who have studied the narcotics problem know very well that targeting at source, interdiction in transit, and focusing on changing the needs of the end user are each critical to the development of any counter-narcotics strategy. Moreover, I make no attempt in the article to defend any existing strategy or propose a new one. It appears Brian Mason would have us disengage from any counter-narcotics effort in Afghanistan so that poor farmers can make a living. Fair enough. But with the overlap between the narcotics industry and international terrorism, is that wise or realistic? Lashing out emotionally, on the basis of some personal guilt complex over full bellies in North America, does not further our attempts to understand the problem. Nor does it assist us in examining alternatives to deal with it.

Klezmer Funk

While David Coodin points out certain parallels between klezmer and hip hop approaches to mainstream culture (“Jew Funk,” September), it’s important to emphasize that Josh Dolgin’s fusion of hip hop and Jewish music stands squarely within the mainstream of Jewish musical innovation. Dolgin’s work is a sophisticated if less sectarian echo of such luminaries as Isaac Taub of Kalev, the eighteenth-century Hasidic leader who composed some of the greatest and best-known songs in the Hasidic canon. Taub is said to have adapted them from songs learned from shepherds, which he then emended — one might say circumcised — to meet Jewish needs. Indeed, Taub’s masterpiece, Szól a kakas már (The rooster is crowing), provides Dolgin’s work with all the yikhes, all the Jewboy pedigree, that it needs: the greatest religious song in the Yiddish tradition was written in Hungarian by a rabbi who usually spoke Yiddish. It is Dolgin’s intuitive understanding of this tradition that makes his work so important to the klezmer revival.

Michael Wex
Toronto, Ontario

Film And Old Folks

Turning to Alastair Brown’s article (“How I Fell For Film” September), I was hoping to find the same kind of infectious fervour for film that Pauline Kael describes as “movie love.” For Kael, loving films “goes deeper than connoisseurship or taste,” but for Brown it is all and only about connoisseurship and taste — and obsessive name-dropping. According to Brown, only his generation is truly able to appreciate film, while I and my film-loving friends are the “children of Blockbuster Video” and “look obsessively to video games for inspiration.”

No wonder Brown and his cronies are sounding the death knell of cinema as an art form and political force: they are literally a dying breed of elitists, who think they have a monopoly on loving films. With cinematheques sprouting up in cities around the globe, unprecedented access to the greatness of African cinema, and more and more women behind the cameras, now is a great time to be a film lover. Luckily, future generations will live on loving films, foiling Brown’s hope that he and his generation will get to take cinema to the grave with them.

Claire Smart
Toronto, Ontario