Psychiatric Help 5¢: Psychoanalysis and the Psychotherapies of Liberation

Brevity is the one thing all the new therapies have in common. They arrive fully formed, easily managed, and ready for use. They require no laborious drawn-out process. And the new therapist feels no need to account for this because he does not see therapy as a process of internal transformation so much as the learning of a new persona which is to be a replacement for the old personality. The patient is not encouraged to learn methods of investigation with which to understand his particular history and his view of the world, but to learn a dazzlingly simplified rationale, an order and a complete language to impose upon his own experience and to interpose between himself and the larger world. The new therapies each create a demarcated territory of discourse, a playing field of talk on which the patient and the therapist agree to stay within bounds. Confront the inadequacy of the language, and you can expect to be called out of bounds. If we ask our friends what is the difference between “dialoguing” and just talking, they will tell us that we would have to go on a weekend encounter session in order to understand; and if after that weekend we are still unimpressed, it is because we have failed, we have been unwilling to take the therapy seriously. Like a game, the therapy cannot matter for us until we are willing to submit to its rules, adopt it wholesale, live in its territory, use its demarcating language. Otherwise it can have no power as a controlling vision of our world. It offers us, otherwise, no refuge and no revelation.

For all the contempt with which psychoanalysis was received in its early days by the medical profession, and for all the moral outrage that was publicly voiced against it, neither Freud nor his followers ever found themselves wanting for willing patients. However, Freud, in Talmudic fashion, was eager to discourage people from psychoanalysis. He emphasized the difficulty of the treatment, its long course, and its modest aims. And although he wanted to establish psychoanalysis into an ongoing institution, he consistently disclaimed any suggestion that psychoanalysis could transform society or liberate men from their condition of unfulfillment in society. Yet despite the modesty of Freud’s claims, that psychoanalysis offered only to reconcile the individual to his imperfect civilized condition, inherently repressive, the demand for therapy grew; and despite his disclaimers, there were those even from Freud’s inner circle who, from the outset, were to attempt to transform psychoanalysis into an ideology of liberation.

The Psychoanalytic Institutes which would accredit practitioners of psychoanalysis, and sanction or reject changes in theory and practice, were intended to protect psychoanalysis more from these too ardent believers than from the also ardent critics. And indeed, the graduates of these institutes today still practice psychoanalysis in a perhaps more sophisticated but an essentially unchanged form. Outside these carefully apostolically controlled and still very modest institutes, a few other psychotherapies and treatments have been developed by psychiatrists and psychologists who are intellectually and temperamentally within the tradition of orthodox psychoanalysis. With the emergence of the non-Freudians—behaviorism, gestalt, transactional analysis—however, there has sprung up a forest of therapies, inspired by the spirit rather than the letter of Freud. The plethora of alternative theories and psychotherapies is so numerous and so varied that they have recently been catalogued like commodities so that the potential patient may better pick out what suits him and his ills. And the very thing that Freud insisted psychoanalysis could not do—change society—is readily undertaken by its successor therapies which aspire to become the paradigm for the institutions of society, not only in the mental health industry, but in government, church, school, and family. Doctors, teachers, nurses, social workers, police and correctional officers, ministers, priests, parents, lovers—all of society’s caretakers—see themselves increasingly in the image of the therapist.

All this activity suggests an innocent shortsightedness in Freud, otherwise master calculator. He appears now to have underestimated several things: one, the coming universality of suffering; second, the almost total collapse of the culture in whose context and protection he practiced; third, the immensely expanded definition, in our time, of what constitutes a condition of pain and alienation; fourth, the rapid dissemination of the language he used in a limited clinical context but which has now been popularized to the point that it is the major organizing descriptive vocabulary of our daily lives; and last, the airy ease with which the strictly unqualified thousands could become self-assured dispensers of “therapy.”

We are all sick, now; and we are all healers. A democracy of pain and cure has supplanted the old apostolic descent of the analytic institutes. The great caretaking institutions of our culture, the schools, the universities, the churches, have abandoned teaching for healing. No matter how irrelevant to our needs, no matter how dehumanizing the assumptions, everywhere we now go we are subjected to “cure.”

We could become thus dominated by the idea of therapy only with the simultaneous abandonment of the older moral culture which not only repressed, after all, but also governed our lives; which not only limited our lives but described them to us, ameliorated our merely personal conditions and ignorances by providing us with a long, living reference: with a history of human joys and suffering, with an abstract but powerfully uniting community to which we belonged through knowing—being taught, that is—old definitions of mind, of pain, of sin, of virtue, of right, of wrong, of responsibility, of felicity, and of the probable extent of worldly expectation.

One might assume that psychoanalysis would gain in credibility and prestige because of the current infusion of the psychotherapeutic rationale into our institutions and our social relationships, but the opposite has happened. Classical psychoanalysis, in contrast to the newer therapies, has fallen into the background, like the occasional corner grocery that survives crouched in the midst of shopping malls. At a cost of $8,000 to $12,000 a year for an average of three to five years, there was never much hope that psychoanalysis could become generally available to the neurotic masses wanting treatment. But now, seventy-five years after the invention of the psychoanalytic method, the potential patient is more likely to reject psychoanalysis himself in favor of one of the competing therapies. Psychoanalysis is scorned as inefficient, expensive, elitist, time-consuming, unscientific; but the real reason psychoanalysis loses prestige is that by its nature it demands trust in what are now very unpopular, even arcane notions: a trust in history, for instance; in language to reveal and describe human life with some dependable degree of accuracy; in the long organic disclosures of time, and the willingness to suffer, in the cause of truth, a painful scrutiny of one’s self. Given our particular culture, which clearly prefers magical deliverance in all matters to any long task of disciplined inquiry, the task undertaken by psychoanalysis seems like that of medieval scholasticism, irrelevant and superseded.

In every culture the arts of healing derive from that culture’s definition of what it is to be human and thereby what it is to be in a state of health or a state of sickness. Medicine has always attempted to provide the means—whether they take the form of incantation or injection of antibiotics—of reconnecting the fallen-away patient to a state of mental and physical wholeness. In this process of healing, the traditional healer was only the middleman, the agent of reconciliation. And in every culture until our own, reconciliation to the community, as well as to the state of one’s own personal health, was an object of the cure.

Psychoanalysis revived an old idea, that the mind itself was an appropriate object of healing; it thus renewed for the alienated industrial man the vivid sense of an enemy to be found within, the sense that one can come to life with the wrong mind and thus lose or miss out on health. In this and other matters, psychoanalysis is part of an ancient tradition of healing. It undertakes to educate the patient to his best self, to his true adult form, which means that it defines its task as agent to deliver the patient into the hands of his moral culture. It is the new therapies that make the radical and apparently desperate break with this ancient lineage, and the new therapies that redefine the role of healer: in contrast to psychoanalysis, the new therapists educate the patient only to the rationale of the therapy itself, delivering the patient into the hands of the therapist and his theory, “liberating” the patient from his own mind and his own language, and thus from his moral culture, which is taken to be the agency of repression, the agency of the sickness; or else just felt to be dead.

We speak of “fanaticism” when a person has cut himself off from the universe of discourse that is familiar and native in order to embrace some single-minded rationale. He then has become inaccessible to the appeal through which the community holds the individual in membership. He is more than a committed believer: he uses belief to achieve inaccessibility. Belief becomes his refuge from himself and from his community so that his only society is the fellowship of other true believers and his only identity is his belief itself. He needs nothing more from himself or from us. And so long as his resolve holds firm, he has the illusion of completeness and containment. And if he has an evangelistic bent, today everywhere recommended, he shortly becomes a shameless proselytizer.

“The Invasion of the Body Snatchers” is a nightmare of society infiltrated and overrun by a fanatical movement of irresistible appeal: who does not, at times, think he would rather live without pain, without consciousness? The pod people have forgotten what it was that they once wanted from themselves, and from their human community. We look to community, to moral culture, to keep before us, to remind us of what we most want, of the best that life can be, of the capacity of human consciousness. That knowledge is carried in the artifacts and rituals of culture itself, in art, in poetry, religion, in the language. It is this accumulated communal knowledge of ourselves and our passions that the fanatic must turn against.

In his rejection of this knowledge, the modern therapeutic man is like a fanatic, but he lacks the traditional commitment of the fanatic. The modern devotee is capricious: he may try Zen, organic food, Scientology, macrobiotics, weight lifting, yoga, downers, uppers, gestalt, TA, reality therapy, primal scream, Rolfing, Jesus, the devil, astrology, I Ching, EST, ESP. He is used to taking up and leaving off these various callings. How many roads does Jerry Rubin travel in his search for adulthood? We no longer think of it as fanatical to speak in strange devotional tongues, but merely as being “into” something, a transient obsession, soon to be abandoned. We become fanatics without a cause. Or at least the cause that we find fails to hold us (and we expect that), to really win us (and so we incessantly look elsewhere).

In contrast to the therapies which teach a comprehensive rationale of life which permits those who adopt it the free display of intimate, if unexamined, feeling and the free discharge of duly rationalized impulse, the old therapy—psychoanalysis—which teaches no rationale except that the patient speak freely, that everything that comes to the mind be said just as it comes, exacts a self-examination from the patient which is deeply inhibitory. As the patient in the analysis begins to see the meanness, the pettiness, and the self-deception of which he is capable, he becomes inspired with a pervasive self-doubt. He learns that his life is a tangle of mixed motives and hidden meanings, and that his ordinary justifications often mask neurotic self-indulgence. What sustains the patient through this pain, and what drives him on into this ever-increasing vulnerability, is a passion for a truth in which he can root a more valid life. Like Oedipus, he is driven to the painful truth by a passion for a life in that truth, whatever that may exact.

The patient in psychoanalysis endures his disillusionment only because he can believe that a more valid life will emerge from the suffering of the treatment; and in the daily analytic effort to render a scrupulously honest account of his inner experience, he finds a model of integrity for that future life. The guiding principle of the analytic work cannot simply be discarded when the analysis is terminated. It is rather in the developing possibility for personal integrity that the patient finds the basis for the valid life he seeks. The therapy itself is a moral discipline, a preparation for moral life after therapy.

The view inward that the analytic experience has provided remains a part of how the patient views the world, and, like any experience of illumination, it carries with itself something in the nature of a moral commitment. That commitment is to live in the reality that was revealed. The inevitable injunction implicit in any experience of enlightenment is not to go back on that experience. There is a common ground between what the psychologist calls “insight,” what the epistemologist calls “truth,” and what the mystic calls “revelation.” In each sphere and on its own terms, a convincing experience of the truth will always carry with it the knowledge that one’s task is to live in the reality revealed.

Truth is what gives the world to us. The world of power, certainly, but also the world of sensuality: the world in which there are real fulfillments of our real needs. The true therapeutic experience is not one of being given a formula for coping, but literally that of being given one’s life, in the sense of getting “the real thing,” real gratifications but also real suffering and real tragedy.

In this fundamental way the task of psychoanalysis derives from the developmental task to which any society submits its members and the means for which all cultures provide—in the symbolism, the ritual, and the transformative relationships between the elder and the young, aspirant members; in psychoanalysis, as in older forms of moral education, the task is realized in the commitment of the initiated adult to live out the truth he has seen, to become a moral agent himself. The traditional cultural vehicle through which this sense of commitment is transferred is the ordeal of discipline and denial of self to which the aspirant submits in search of illumination, a heavenly visitation, a power vision, a spiritual gift, or a personal magic song. It is often in the temporary, intensely intimate and demanding relationship between the master and the initiate that illumination is sought. Psychoanalysis has ties to those traditional methods of preparation and purification. The unique character of the commitment that comes with an experience of illumination is that it is not deniable, no matter what it demands and no matter what ordeal or responsibility it exacts. It is thus something to which one becomes obedient. One feels oneself to be within the vision just as one is within one’s experience. It is the sense of being within truth that allows for the awareness of an external moral presence.

Psychological liberation is thus achieved through commitment rather than through “freedom.” When Jesus said, “I am the truth, and the truth shall make you free,” He obviously did not mean that if you accept Jesus you can then do anything you want. He meant that freedom was only to be found in obedience, if you understand obedience to be not to the external demand of some oppressor, but to what is most objectively true, what is most to be believed. For Jesus, as for any Christian, moral law is not a set of arbitrary rules and regulations, but the final reality of an objective universe. Obedience, then, means living in the world as it most fundamentally is. Liberation has never been more than the opportunity to live one’s life with real conviction.

When Lenin says that “freedom is the recognition of necessity,” he is closer to Jesus than to the new therapies which offer freedom from inhibition and liberation from guilt. Freedom to act, as opposed to paralysis in ambivalence or self-absorption, even if the action opposes social convention or social reality, derives from the firm knowledge of historical necessity, which is to say, the way the world really is. And conviction, which derives from a commitment to live in the world without delusion, sham, or fanaticism, is the best freedom we have in a non-utopian political world. The knowledge from which we derive our freedom to act is also a covenant, a relation of subservience to moral law. Preparation of the self for subservience has no meaning, however, if there is no law to receive; this is psychoanalysis in the absence of moral culture. For the individual, the task is to prepare oneself to receive the law; for the culture, the task is to prepare the gift. When the culture can no longer provide, we enter times which are both pathological and revolutionary.

There are afflictions of the moral sense as well as of the heart. There are passions for the ties to duty and honor that are as basic to human nature as sexuality. If Freud did not dwell on these it was not because he was unaware of them, but because he lived in a culture in which they were well known. It would have come as no surprise to the Victorian that the personality finds deep satisfaction in the bonds of loyalty, or in the exhilaration of integrity and a high moral life. What did surprise the Victorian was that the same personality also requires the heady delights of the senses. The death instinct, Freud’s attempt, late in life, to include a second principle, something in addition to sexuality at the origin of the passions, was in an oblique way to the point. But it was not so much the desire for death as the desire for closure of another kind that he actually observed and described.

Freud revised his whole theory of the psychic machinery because of his reflections on the war, precisely the most apparent and catastrophic manifestation of the pathology of the moral sense. He was amazed to see the civilized world take to that enterprise with the particular glee that is reserved for moral crusades. Perhaps the quasi-physiological concept of a death instinct was more acceptable to Freud than would have been the idea of a moral passion, because in his theory morality had always been assigned to the superego where its main function was to stand guard over sexuality, and in that position it would have no energy of its own. It was only a derivative of eros, only its regulatory agency. In Freud’s neurotic patients, the repression of sexuality was perhaps the most pathological, and therefore for him the most apparent, manifestation of morality in psychic life; but Freud saw in the war a pathology of a different kind. He could not imagine the passion for the war to be a derivative of eros—a displacement, a negation, or a repression of sexual energy. So he proposed a separate energy, a death instinct, opposite to the life instinct.

The particular pathology of the superego that Freud found in his sexually repressed and guilty patient tended to shape the psychoanalytic view of morality: to see it too much as a regulator of energy through the agency of guilt, and not enough as a source of energy through the agency of inspiration. It is the more modern patient, the chronically discontent, aimless, and apathetic character, unable to find meaning in experience, who causes the psychoanalyst to think again about the function of morality in psychic life. In this patient, the failure of fulfillment and the failure of energy coexist with great sexual freedom, and often with voracious sexual activity. One begins to recognize in him a different pathology, one more characteristic of our time, in which the patient’s need is not so much to love his analyst as to idealize him, to see in him the fulfillment of the denied need for moral authority, a kind of godhead. This patient reveals an affliction of the moral sense more than of the heart. He is sexually liberated but morally unbound.

Morality now appears as a requirement of therapy, in which case it cannot exist. The therapist cannot invent a moral culture for his patient. To do this he would have to establish for his therapy the moral authority of religion, but with no symbol other than the self for a godhead. Yet, it is precisely this elevation of the self to the status of a moral principle that characterizes the modern therapies of self-actualization, self-direction, or self-realization.

A psychotic patient recently reported, “everything is going just fine. The only problem is that I don’t get my mail, that’s all.” He was asked how he knew that he wasn’t getting his mail and he answered, “Well, I was expecting a check for $80,000 there just before Christmas, and it never came.” The delusion of this penniless indigent man that he would receive an $80,000 Christmas present exposes the denial implicit in his opening remark: his assertion that everything is “just fine” reveals an unwillingness or inability to experience reality widely enough to encompass the gap between what he wishes for and his actual lot. He collapses the vision of that gap by positing his $80,000 in the real world; it’s just “lost in the mail.” He thus denies his experience of the difference between reality and fantasy, which in emotional terms is a denial of deprivation. Thus he does not deny the need itself; he still knows that he wants $80,000. But he denies the gap, his knowledge of his real unfulfillment and the real possibility of fulfillment of needs; for a real gift, of real money.

He does not repress his feelings, as the new therapists are always accusing us of doing. He is so naked about what he wants that it is touching. What he represses is not so much his feelings as his truth. The delusion of the lost check is a bromide which obliterates for him the realization of his deprivation; but the bromide also denies him the vision of a realized gratification. His gift must remain forever “lost in the mail.” The new therapies offer as a bromide for our sense of deprivation the promises of gratification in the illusion of the unrestrained self, free behind the mask of the therapeutic rationalization of life to satisfy itself with no guiding vision beyond its own career, beyond doing its own thing. Only the absolute idealization of this utterly petty project could inure us to the deprivation of our actual condition. Morality gives form to the self if morality is external, if it is that within which we live. The self seeking realization from itself alone achieves only a nightmarish escalation of excitement that finds no boundaries and no culmination. It is a crowded and expensive after-hours bar in which naked bodies swing from trapezes and dance on the bar while gargantuan genitalia are cinematically manipulated on the walls. This is all a bromide to distract us from what we really want and cannot have: the immersion in a community informed and formed by a moral vision of life and creation. The gift that we seek remains lost in the mail.

As a society, we succumb as our deprivation becomes unbearable, as the fabric of culture loses its hold on us. It is the lost souls who are the more comfortable, the better adjusted, while those who remain behind, with the vision of their own needs and their own nature still intact, suffer bitterly and in isolation.

Comfort and adjustment were never in any case the criteria of mental health. It has always been the ability to appreciate the disparity between the real and the ideal that we strove after. The deepening capacity for a tragic view of life should be our normative standard of health. In his modern version, the free man has lost the capacity for suffering. He has a therapy for everything that ails him. Dostoyevsky, in the figure of the underground man, saw this free man as a degenerate. The psychoanalyst sees him only as a pathological personality, aimless, capricious, chronically discontent, addiction-prone, polysexual, and unformed. For the new therapists, he is a culture hero.

This unburdened soul, who suppresses his impulse to submit, to be taught, and to honor his grandfathers, this monument to individuality, is only an aimless narcissist, deprived and isolated, uncontained and unfulfilled. There is no experience of community which is not an affirmation of moral authority, so there is no basis of communion between people who do not worship the same gods; except for sex, of course, which now must serve for everything. People are neither healthy nor free when they cannot live within culture, and within the authority of culture. The democracy of individuals, each calculating his own advantage, is no more a normal human community than are the men lined up at a row of pinball machines in a penny arcade, each throwing in his own nickels and taking his own chances.

One grandmother in our family was born into an intact orthodox Jewish life, a total fabric of culture that looked back on 5000 years of continuity of symbols and meanings. When she was displaced from her village in Poland to St. Louis, Missouri, she lost a basic connection to life and she never regained it. In forty years the only movie she saw was “Gone with the Wind,” and although she watched the television when it came in, she would walk away from any program that had “shooting.” With her sisters she watched “Liberace” and said he was a bralant, a brilliant one. But she acted like someone who was just waiting. Nothing in the new world ever really caught her attention or drew her in. Nothing really held any meaning except that everyone be safe and well, as though she and her family were all marooned and waiting to be rescued. The world after the DP camps was all a DP camp. Mourning, which always seemed to be for the dead relatives in Europe, the ones who weren’t so lucky to come to America, was actually for the loss of her own true life, no matter how much suffering it had caused her. She looked back on a memory of what life used to mean. That life was the one she longed to live; and that longing was on her face all the years that she aged and brooded in her daughter’s suburban kitchen; all through the years that her grandchildren were going to mental hospitals and medical schools, she was oblivious to America.

Her daughter was seven years old when she walked into a grammar school on Stoddard Street in St. Louis, a Yiddish-speaking child just off the boat, and began a lifetime of looking for something proud to which she could be connected. Abandoned by her mother, who was hopelessly lost in her obsessions, dropped into an alien world which spoke a foreign language, the only way she could be proud was to will it to be so. With nothing to show her the history from which she came, she stayed strange to herself. Later, in 1940, going to work as a bookkeeper for a jewelry company, in high heels and suits with padded shoulders, the little Yiddish refugee she once had been would seem to her like a child’s fantasy, as though she had made it up. Her understanding of it would be only sentimental. The living connection was broken.

We stand now between one generation of psychiatrists who looked for meaning in everything, who were obsessed with meaning, who found meanings behind meanings; and a generation of psychiatrists who abhor meaning and flee from it with the same energy with which it was previously sought. Psychiatry is now passed from the hands of neurotics into the hands of zealots. Nothing can stop this unless we can find a way to again free our common mind for its age-old concerns.

Our romantic culture finds sex at the bottom of all attraction between adults. It seems closer to the unromantic truth, however, to see that sex is often, in our culture, the only available path to the mind. Men often do, or fear that they will, look for sexual connection with one another, when actually they are much more interested in what they can do for each other’s minds. Given the chance, people will instinctively seek out in the minds of one another the idea that will allow them to coalesce again into the old tribal unit. We have lost our knowledge of the power of the group to contain us. It is not the capacity to affirm individual identity that our present competitive group life provides for us that we most want, but the potential in a group to lose that individuality, to forget self-consciousness and the pathetic need to feel pride.

In order for the group to provide this substantive freedom, it must be more than a collection of individuals. It must be individuals who are, in a sense, of one mind, a mind which the individual enters in order to feel naked, refreshed, and invigorated. The oldest and most perfected ritual form of this immersion, according to poet Gary Snyder and others, is the tribal dance of late paleolithic communal society. When that was lost, men turned to more and more reified religious observance to hold together the unity and continuity of what by then would have been called “moral consciousness”; by then, something differentiated from total consciousness, a special consideration, whereas moral vision for the tribesman was continuous with conscious knowledge itself. The tribesman seeks vision to learn simply what it means to be a man. As we lose now the sense even of moral consciousness, our search for form and boundaries becomes more desperate and we resort to more and more fanatical and monolithic systems of persuasion.

A Huichol Indian must confess all sexual transgressions of the year past before his annual peyote pilgrimage. He confesses openly, to all members of the pilgrimage, each and every sexual incident, even something so minor as a casual touch or an improper look. With each confession he ties a knot in a cord which, at the end of the confession, he ritually burns.

In a ritual of purification of this kind, confession does not serve to absolve sins, but simply to announce them in order to renew a common mind and common spirit of the group, and to reconfirm for the individual his responsibility to the social principle and the religious purpose of the group. To hold his transgressions a secret would only serve to glorify the mask of righteousness that the individual holds up before the group. The essential religious truth demonstrated here is not that saving face hides a terrible evil, but that the mask itself is a terrible evil because it preoccupies and distracts the mind from the religious purpose carried in the communal, social space.

In order for the Huichol to stop the daily petty calculating and conniving of his mind in preparation for the trip which he calls “finding his life,” he must be able to stand naked before his fellow pilgrims. Hiding his guilty secrets to maintain the illusion of blamelessness is simply a futile and unnecessary distraction. Even the old shaman confesses publicly in his turn. They come clean as an act of allegiance, and responsibility, and humility.

If today’s patient no longer wants to know what it is to be human and has instead chosen one or another dream of therapy, there is no way to argue with him without becoming a huckster of goods rather than the keeper of a trust. And the harder this battle is fought with the hucksters and the zealots in the profession, the more the fighters become like the thing they abhor: doctrinaire, insistent, distracted, busy. With its old heart, psychoanalysis could contain multitudes. Now it guards its precious territory against all comers.

On what ground does one fight? With what authority does psychiatry reject the new therapies? Logic is against us if the new marriage therapist can show that husband and wife have achieved “coupleness,” and we cannot show in turn the deeper mind within. We have now to invoke the passional mind directly. We must point to it. We should not be ashamed to know that it is there. The Freudian tradition on which we stand will not hold, it will not stand true for us, if we forget that there is a communal passional soul. This, and not the rational intellect, is the essential core of psychoanalysis. The heart of the analytical mind is that latent and essential passional being. Who most are we? What most do we need? Psychoanalysis will have to come out of the closet and into the universe of moral discourse. It is responsible ultimately to that being within who will seek out his best ecstasies, and his truest devotions.

The announcer of this morning’s news tells us that for the first time a killer whale is born in captivity at Marineland, in a tank, the birth labor preserved on videotape as cameramen were at the time on location shooting a television commercial; while, in the ocean, the killer whale may well face extinction in this decade.

The announcer is touched that this whale accomplished her task under the TV lights in that tank; he praises her for it, for bearing up. And yet, as we drive to work to face a day under neon lights that cast no shadows, we resent, a little, the testimonial the newscaster gave her. We refuse to be so moved by her courage in the tank that we run the risk of forgetting that her real life is in the sea. Sentiment for her cannot obliterate the knowledge of the emptiness of her triumph.

We must not forget the price that we have paid for our soft life. We instinctively know that what we have to do is wrong for us, that there is a profound death in this that makes us pitiful and perhaps also grotesque.

It is no great credit to us that we bear up no matter how bad things get. When did we have to start devoting our lives only to making preparations for disaster? When, that is, were we first distracted from our real business?

One imagines that the poor whale in her prison can think of nothing but her pride. She can never quite still her indignation. She must always think, “How can this be done to me?” “Where is my honor?” “Where to hide my face?” whereas her real life is in the empty reaches of the sea, forgetful, where she would have no face. There she would have her birth labors accomplished with a sustained and abandoned groan into the enveloping space.

Our lives are now always conscious, on camera, always vulnerable, always on the brink of humiliation, while we are at the same time, like the whale, over-secure and too comfortable. And diminished; we are overpraised for coping, and in the effects of the bromide of that praise we cease to see the walks of our tank. May the killer whale hold on to a memory of the open sea and teach that to her young. May we find teachers for ourselves who will continue to point to that sea.

The final criterion of psychotherapy must always be its potency to engage us in our common passional business. The pod people terrify us because they can no longer enter that old reverie. We know that they are lost even though they are happy and unperturbed, and we fear that capitulation. There have always been openings in the routine business of daily life out into the deeper gratifications, the more worthy life. We were each at some point called for, shown a deeper mind. This is a common feature of religious, aesthetic, and therapeutic experience, when it occurs. The worst cultural deprivation is to be denied that deeper mind. Psychotherapy can be a means to learn this or a chance to hide from that knowledge and to renounce that community; either to remain with our own kind, or to go with “them.”

There is no protection from “them.” They cannot be outlawed; we cannot be too vigilant; “they” are everywhere; they are our best friends. Where will we go then to practice our more and more arcane observances out of sight of neon lights and little yellow smiling buttons?