Why most shrinks don't take many notes

This is why, re Marilyn Monroe. Her doctor is dead, but someone supposedly got notes and/or tapes. Who does tapes? Bad idea. BTW, Atlas Shrugs has a charming photo - art, not porn - of Marilyn, here.

Denial of Evil, Nihilism, and the Left, Part 1

We who try to be reasonable are befuddled by why the American and European Left have a reflex to defend the Jihadists, and to oppose combating them. The fact that they do so is amply demonstrated, endlessly, by the Great Horowitz, among others.

My theory is that the Left is nihilistic at heart. For whatever reasons, they have passed criticism and have come to hate their own civilization, which is admittedly imperfect but which, at the same time, cannot be matched anywhere, anytime, in history in its freedom, opportunity, safety, stability, and idealism. (Yale's famous rejection of the Bass donation was a high-water mark of this self-hating trend.) The consequence is an anti-Western bias, but they refuse to offer an alternative, either because they do not have one, or because any offered would be rejected by voters. My belief is that our civilization is a fragile sculpture, a rare and precious thing, and that our Western Civilization is one of the most amazing things that humans have created, with, at its core, the idea that every individual human matters, as a child of God. That’s the core of it all, and it is at the core of Western medical practice and medical ethics too, since Hippocrates. We care for their injured in our hospitals, and they behead their prisoners. That is a big difference, one which relegates them to the barbarian category. “All men are created equal…”

It is not my brief on Maggie’s to get into politics, but I cannot ignore this one. What is behind the Left’s apologizing for Jihadists? Why does England welcome them? Why does the US welcome them? Why France and Germany and Sweden? Why does Canada welcome them? Why welcome your destroyers into your home?

I wrote a piece on Evil several months ago, but it had no political content. Hatred and destructiveness can derive from hundreds of sources, but most of the time social norms and rules prevent us from acting on such impulses. They are very human evils, or sins, if you will. If you live in a culture, or subculture, which endorses them, many will be pleased to follow – see Nazi Germany, the Mafia, the Weathermen, or any number of murderous, sadistic civilizations and cultures and subcultures throughout history - and relieved to be given a sanctioned outlet for such emotions. Humans are natural-born killers, after all, just like chimps, and it takes a heck of a lot of civilization to keep us on the right side of the road.

It’s clear to me from all that I have read that the Jihadists have long identified Jews and Christians as the “other” – sub-humans occupying potentially Islamic space. We do not do the same to them – on the contrary, we in the West bend over backwards to make them welcome and to accommodate their ways. Their denial of our humanity is their evil, even if it is endorsed by their culture and their religion, and their using our generosity and tolerance for their own purposes is evil as well, though they see it as justified by Mohammed. Fooling an Infidel is not a sin, and we "nice" infidels are too eager to be fooled.

So we quickly arrive at the religious core of morals and ethics, from whence they derive. The Jihadist believes that war on the West is demanded of him by God. I refuse to get morally relativistic and multicultural about that about that - leave that to the anthropologists. To me that is evil. Why does the Western Left like to ally themselves with this? One might imagine that woman-hating, fascistic, anti-human rights, primitively-capitalistic, oil and opium-dependent, hyper-religious movements would be anathema to them.

Memories of Childhood

Children's memories are famously unreliable, as are adult's memories of the past. Memory is distorted in hundreds of ways for hundreds of reasons for which there is no space here. But there is a truly "dark age" of birth through about age 6 in which children have what Freud termed "infantile amnesia." Nothing from that period seems to be retrievable, at least not in the usual ways.

Cognitive Daily speculates, and provides an excellent thumbnail summary, on the subject of infantile amnesia here. But I'd like to add a psychoanalytic dimension to the subject, despite the Munger's discomfort with analytic theorizing - some of which is surely deserved and some of which has to do with different disciplines. The realm of "meaning" crosses many discipline boundaries, and is a strange and baffling subject.

Several points of interest:

1. Memories from birth through 6 may not be retrievable in the sense of  "I remember my 4th birthday party," but emotional reactions, and states of mind - neither of which are readily expressible, may be solidly engraved in the old hippocampus - and why not? Deep memories can be visceral, not just visual and verbal.

2. People create things which psychoanalysis terms "screen memories." These are not literally accurate memories, but they are mental constructions which may capture something meaningful from the past - an issue, a conflict, a fear, a joy, a wish, etc., in a similar way in which dreams do. Thus in analysis, we tend to be more interested in the psychological meaning of memories and recollections than in their objective truth. We psychiatrists and psychoanalysts are not historians of truth, we are historians of meaning. When we have a spontaneous memory, it probably carries a telegram, from ourself to ourself, relevant to the present.

3. Memory distortion - I said I would say nothing about this, but just one superficial comment. We all re-write our histories, especially to protect ourselves from pain, or to protect our self-respect, or to create a story we can feel good about, or to portray ourselves as virtuous victims, or to justify ourselves or to rationalize things (meaning an effort to justify, or to make sense out of something we have done or thought, that we are not comfortable with), etc. etc. We do not do this consciously or willfully - our devious, self-deceiving brains do it for us. Humans are forever at battle with their consciences...those that have one.

One of the most interesting things we observe in patients in analysis is how the "narrative" of their life changes over time. Thus anyone's autobiography is a momentary story, a construction of reality, usually with a self-serving psychological purpose - and the most common is to preserve an illusion of self-regard - something which darn few of us hominid critters deserve to hold, but which we must fake to survive. There is nothing easy about being an animal with a soul. (Just ask any hunting poodle - they will tell you all about it.)

IQ

In the psychological-medical fields, we find IQ to be a useful measure, along with many others. IQ has only very broad predictive power for adjustment to life or for achievement in life, but a person's reasoning ability, curiosity, analytic talents, and their sensitivity of pattern-recognition, all say something important about a person and the tools they have to deal with life. But a very high IQ doesn't equate with "success", whatever that is, though it certainly correlates with the richness of the life one is able to live; a lower IQ, on the other hand, cannot interfere with happiness or with achievement in less intellectually rigorous areas of life.

In the variety of folks we encounter in medicine, it is common to see folks of high IQ doing relatively menial jobs, but who must find outlets for their abilities in all sorts of surprising interests, intellectual hobbies and obsessions. I recall one truck driver whose hobby of Latin translation was almost obsessive, and wonderful. And a refridgerator repair guy who could have taught the Cornell Lab of Ornithology a thing or two...not everyone spends their spare time stupified, watching sports on TV or the other crap.

And neither is it rare to find folks of very limited talents and potential, but of slippery, conniving character, shoving themselves forward in the world, beyond what substance they really bring to the table - especially in sales, finance, and politics - the realms of BS, the schmooze, and the con job, and, in some cases, genuine integrity.

IQ shows a bell-curve distribution across a given population, with the peak around 100. Along with social class and background and emotional maturity, IQ tends to be an important part of social affinities and friendships - people of similar IQs are "on the same page." There seem to be optimal IQ ranges for different areas of life. CEOs of Fortune 500 companies tend to be in the 120-130 range - very smart but not so smart that they get tangled up. Attorneys today, unlike the past, inhabit a wide range, from 90 to the max. - there are lots of law schools looking for paying customers. As people enter the high end, over 140, they often seem a bit eccentric or awkward, because they are experiencing the world a little differently and their range of interests can be wide and unusual.

Quick IQ tests, and further comments, on continuation page below:

Moms at War

Auster is right to point out to what extent our PC machine in America is able to "normalize" the grossly abnormal and nonsensical (while simultaneously trying to "abnormalize" the normal).

His case in point concerns "coping groups" for military Moms in Iraq who miss their kids. There is a craziness to letting Moms go to war which mocks common sense, emotional sense, family sense, cultural sense, and psychological sense, and would only make sense if our shores were invaded by barbarian hordes. How did we get to this, unless we are psychotically imagining that Moms are Dads, and men are women, and black is white? Auster here.

Yes, Dear

A couple celebrating their 80th wedding anniversary shares their secrets with the world. Humility and moderate alcohol use seem to be part of the picture. Plus true love, of course.

One of the ugliest diseases ever. In Western Civilization, we want childbirth to be a time of joy and contentment and fulfillment. That's a happy semi-myth, but it sure did happen for me. Breast-feeding a new baby makes "the world go away" in the most pleasant way.

PPD, though rare, as contrasted with "baby blues," which is common, can be devastating. Brooke Shields did a book about her PPD. Get the word out, Brooke. It is easily cured.

Curt Jester has a clever twist on the RC Church and gays, and it appears that he doesn't care for the aggressive variety of gay advocacy.

In my opinion, even if homosexuality is a sin (which I very much doubt, but who am I to say?), the fact remains that those felt to be sinners must be welcomed in church - not protested. If you have no sinners in church, churches would be empty, plus only sinners need Christ's redemption anyway. The implicit sign in front of every Christian church is "Sinners Only, Please." That's the meaning of the cross. The perfect folks can stay home, or golf, or just gaze at themselves in the mirror. Every human who wants to connect with God through Christ is welcome in our church. Period.

Jester has a voluminous list of RC bloggers including, I was interested to see, a nunsblog.

The Penis Monologues

Apropos my recent post about humorless, bitter feminists: Let those penises speak! Even though we women already know what they're going to say, and it is neither intelligent nor inspiring due to the absence of cortical matter in those cute little happy heads. But have no fear - we normal ladies do enjoy them quite a bit, anyway, despite their low IQs. Especially when they are attached to an interestingly complex, intelligent, quirky, or entertaining human being, preferably tall, dark and handsome.  Read Christina Hoff Summer's amusing piece. Free Testaclese! Thanks, View from 1776.

Female Midlife "Crisis"

No, this isn't going to be one more estrogen-intoxicated "poor women with all their problems" whines. I'll approach it differently, because I feel that this subject is about being human, not about being female.

Sure, men and women are different animals, hard-wired in different ways (You are right, Larry Summers! Don't let those nasty Harvard bitches slap you around. Be a man. I know those women, and they will never be happy - their identity is about being aggrieved victims, as are their careers. Small souls who will never find any happiness). Still, Life is Life for all of us.

The developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst Erik Erikson cleverly and wisely outlined the stages of the healthy human life cycle, or at least of the Western Civilization life cycle, based on observation. Once he did it, it all seemed self-evident. At each turn in the road, people are confonted with new challenges and opportunities (Oh, man, does this sound trite.).

At these turning points, the person either faces the demand for emotional growth, or they don't. For many, the life span is relatively smooth (except for life's unavoidable external bumps in the road). For others, depending on a multitude of internal factors including genetic and personality factors, the changes can present big problems and disruption.

We've all known people whose emotional lives never quite seemed to pass childhood, or, more commonly, get stuck in adolescence. We call these things "developmental arrest". These tragic happenings require years of difficult psychotherapy, but are a different subject for another day.

Erikson describes a Middle Adulthood (roughly age 40-65), which presents challenges of "Generativity vs. Stagnation", and a Late Adulthood, dealing with "Integrity vs. Depair."

The stages are not hard and fast, and the issues do smudge all over, but they are good rules of thumb. During statistically-typical Middle Adulthood, families are completing their mission to raise their chicks. Kids are leaving home for college or to take on the Big World, marriages are no longer fresh, many people feel less ambitious and inspired about work, women become menopausal and men become less virile and physically strong. And most become more reflective and gain perspective on life and on themselves.

So it’s no wonder some people ask themselves “What is my life about now?”

Some will claim that anyone who asks that question is self-obsessed; that you just keep on keepin’ on. Maybe so. Maybe it’s like late teenagers worrying about self-fulfillment. Still, many ask the question, and how they answer it is important in shaping the final phase of life.

 Sue Shellenbarger, the popular WSJ Family columnist, has written a book about this: The Breaking Point: How Female Midlife Crisis is Transforming Today’s Women. Despite the hysterical title, the fact that this is nothing new and definitely no “new paradigm,” it’s interesting to get inside the heads of middle-aged and late middle-aged women to see what is on their minds. 

A New Member of The Farm

In his misguided, deeply neurotic determination to develop Maggie's Farm as an essential general-interest blog with tens of thousands of hits per day, Bird Dog persuaded me to give this a try. He and my husband have hunted the Maine marshes together each fall for over twenty years. His advice: "Occasional posts, mostly shrink-related but anything that interests you is fair game. Keep it short and sweet with max one or two ideas per post, but you can let it rip once in a while if the spirit moves you."  I'll try to stick to that, but I don't take direction well.  

I am a native Bostonian, a mother of four, a New York-trained Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst working at a teaching hospital in Boston. We have a fourth-generation country place in New Hampshire where we now just raise Black Angus and keep a couple of riding horses and a couple of aged, useless but loveable retired horses and, yes, you are quite perceptive - Dr. Joy Bliss isn't my real name. Thank God. But I was born cheerful, despite being a life-long Red Sox fan. I can ride and jump and I can shoot and fish; I can sail and I can handle any boat up to 50 feet - sail or power; my golf handicap is lower than yours but it's a boring addiction for bored people; I can serve a tennis ball that will wipe the snot off your nose; I can smack the hell out of a softball or out of any little creep that bothers me. I am a Yankee gal. But piano is my main love, second only to my anonymous hubbie and our granite-ribbed Yankee Congregationalist family heritage. The big fella makes the big bucks and I get to follow my heart in the world of medicine. A good deal. And that's enough about me. Woops- I forgot - Bird Dog wants me to list my favorite adult beverage: Laphroaig up, with two Prozacs ...just kidding about the Prozacs...a double Laphroaig with the hubbie while the kids are away at boarding school.