Our Quest For Effective Living
How We Cope In Social Space/ A Window To A New ScienceBy Fred Emil Katz AuthorHouse
Copyright © 2009 Fred Emil Katz
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4389-8565-7Contents
Dedication.....................................................................................................................................vAcknowledgments................................................................................................................................ixOur Quest for Effective Living: How We Cope in Social Space....................................................................................xiBook One We Divide Ourselves The Second Path Phenomenon Manages our Unmentionables...........................................................1Book Two We Build Moral Walls Around Us The Closed Worlds Phenomenon: We Are Often Wrapped in Moral Communities..............................25Book Three We Transcend The Access-to-the-Ultimate Phenomenon................................................................................51Book Four We Become Connected The Link Phenomenon: It Gives Meaning to Our Lives.............................................................79Conclusions: Looking Through the Window into a New Science.....................................................................................105Addendum Applying This Book's Vision to Understanding and Treating Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome among Iraq War Veterans.....................109Notes..........................................................................................................................................111Index..........................................................................................................................................115
Chapter One
The Second Path Phenomenon Manages our Unmentionables
Even in the best of times there are apt to be annoyances in daily life. How do we cope with annoyances?
We divide ourselves.
Most of the time, we more or less know what we are doing. As we go about our daily work, as we follow some sort of a career, we show ourselves to be reasonably confident and self-assured. Yet behind that public posture, our career can hide a dimension - a Second Path - that is quite different. That Second Path grows out of our career's daily Unmentionables - our uncertainties, fears, rages, inappropriate honesty, and more. These Unmentionables may exist, persist, and even continue to grow in subterranean ways. They can occasionally erupt into the open, unpredictably and destructively transforming one's life. They can also contain some of what is best in us: our uncompromising sense of decency.
My first clue to the concepts of Unmentionables and a Second Path came when I learned about the suicides of a number of Holocaust survivors after they became highly successful writers. Among these were Primo Levi, Jerzy Kosinski, Tadeusz Borowski, Paul Celan, Jean Amery, and Bruno Bettelheim.
These persons had evidently found ways to lead meaningful and productive lives after surviving the horrors of the Holocaust. Yet eventually, after apparently successful, productive, rewarding, and meaningful lives, they each committed suicide.
After surviving the Auschwitz concentration camp, Primo Levi briefly resumed his career as a chemist. But he soon turned to writing - and what a writer he became! He wrote about his experiences in the concentration camp. He was not a survivor who wallowed in suffering, who reiterated the horror of the horrors. He wrote as a participant and as a scientist who observed and reflected. He shared poignancy about specific events and transcending insights that went beyond the individual events. He showed us the unique and the universal. He created balance between acknowledging the life-denying horrors and asserting life-affirming human dignity amid the horrors. His discernment seemed to lift him above the seductions of evil.
Beyond his writings about Auschwitz, Primo Levi turned to topics that had little to do with the woes of human existence and much to do with celebrating life. He wrote of the joys to be discovered in nature and the inner world of science. In both, his fine-tuned spirituality softened the harsh impersonality of scientific reasoning. It seemed that Levi had found a way to celebrate the vibrancy of life. He had discovered for himself - and shared with those of us who read his writings - fresh ways to enjoy and celebrate membership in the human community. He had done so through the healthy process of becoming a creative and active contributor to that community's zest for life.
Yet this man committed suicide. And he was not alone. As I began to investigate, it became disconcertingly clear that a number of Holocaust survivors who had become highly successful people committed suicide. What was going on? Perhaps, as my friend, the writer Henryk Grynberg, states, these individuals had not truly "survived" the horrors. To be sure, they survived physically. But emotionally and psychically, they had not survived; their early pain remained. The life-negations lived within them. They could never cleanse themselves of the poison planted in their souls.
It may be that among these individuals was an internal, escalating process, the very obverse of their public careers. Despite their outward successes and apparently successful and satisfying lives, their subconscious senses of vulnerability, fear, and terror, as well as guilt for having survived - what we generally classify as survivor guilt - had never been resolved, but instead actually grew. This hidden subterranean path had a life of its own. Over time, this Second Path became so volatile that it eventually erupted, dominating the individual's psyche and was expressed in the final act of total despair: suicide.
Sigmund Freud saw the unconscious as being a part of one's personality that is largely hidden from conscious awareness, usually a result, in Freud's view, of very early life experiences. The task of psychoanalysis, Freud said, is to retrace and rediscover these early, damaging experiences. I suggest that the second part of this formulation may need to be amended.
I am suggesting that there is also a subconscious - the hidden part of one's personality - that may be fed continually by one's ongoing life. It is made up of characteristics that are currently disagreeable and frightening. As part of our daily lives, we are continually shunting new awarenesses into a hidden niche - the subconscious - because we perceive them as unacceptable and dangerous to ourselves. In the case of the Holocaust survivors who became successful, it is surely an error to assume that all facets of their post-Holocaust lives were comfortable, cozy, and satisfying. Instead, being nuanced and sensitive people, they could perceive many fearsome elements in their present lives. It is conceivable that their survivor guilt actually kept on growing while worldly success emphasized their increasing feeling of accountability to those who did not survive. Were their post-Holocaust successes - the awards they were receiving, their new financial affluence - were these telling them that they were dancing on the graves of their loved ones? Was each award, each new acclaim for their writings, each "success" regarded as more failure? As their success increased, so may their sense of dissonant linkage to those who were left to die, increasing their stored anguish and fragility.
A Primo Levi biographer, Myriam Anissimor documents his route to suicide. She writes, "Forty years after his return (from Auschwitz) Levi was writing in torment about the fact that he had survived when most of his comrades had died ..." She relates that a few days before his death in 1987, Levi telephoned the Chief Rabbi of Rome, saying "I don't know how to go on. I can't stand this life any longer." Two months before, he had written to a friend that what he was now experiencing was worse than Auschwitz. (I would ask: What was worse than Auschwitz? Had he won another award?)
There were other factors in Levi's life that augmented his assertive Second Path. He had suffered from depression and had been on anti-depressant medication. But after a difficult prostate surgery in March, 1987, he had stopped taking the medication, surely adding to the fragility of his condition.
Fragility is not unique to survivors of horrors. It also exists in the careers of highly successful persons, where we least expect it. John Adams, Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein: their private lives suggest that, even at the height of their successful careers - their public First Paths - they acutely felt many hurts they had to absorb within themselves. To my knowledge, Einstein did not die a happy man.
I am reminded of a televised interview with Walter Cronkite, the retired television news anchorman. During his tenure as the premier CBS news anchorman, he was by far the most respected of newscasters. For about two decades, millions of viewers routinely turned on their television to receive news whose reliability they felt they could trust, because it was brought by a man they trusted. To say that Walter Cronkite was respected is an understatement. For millions of people he was-and still is, long after his retirement- deeply venerated.
Yet in the interview, conducted during his eightieth year, Cronkite expressed open hurt about being slighted by the television network he had served so long. Nowadays, he said, they did not invite him to their receptions and parties. He was made to feel unwelcome when he visited the newsroom where he used to work. This revered man expressed discomfort that is truly astounding. Here was a man who had earned the highest respect from millions of people. Yet he now felt terribly hurt when a few people - people of infinitely less accomplishment than his - did not show him respect. How could such a man - a man of such poise, sobriety, and strength - be so vulnerable?
As a rule, highly respected people do not acknowledge their fears and vulnerabilities in public. Not, at least, during their tenure in highly esteemed roles, where protective walls insulate the occupant from confronting their personal vulnerabilities. In the case of the interview with Mr. Cronkite, we saw him during retirement from the esteemed role, no longer insulated by a protective wall. Furthermore, the interview itself was conducted by a tabloid-type of program - the sort of program that Cronkite would have shunned during his tenure as esteemed journalist. In the course of the interview, his emotional vulnerabilities were deliberately milked. There, his discomfort was exploited. The interviewer claimed to show the "human" side of this noble man while, in fact, stripping him of his humanity by displaying to all of us that he, too, had a fearful inner side; at the age of eighty, he may have been more raw and vulnerable than ever.
Look at the life of any adult - ordinary people, not just famous people such as Mr. Cronkite: is there not diminished freedom to admit weakness, to express fears and uncertainties, compared to a child? Might these uncertainties and fears be safeguarded within a subconscious vault, from which they may inadvertently and unexpectedly erupt? When and how are they likely to erupt? When and how are they likely to be stored safely? When and how are they routinely dissipated and not stored at all? In the life of leaders and persons of high status generally, are these individuals not limited in their ability to admit weakness and uncertainty - even to themselves, but more so to those around them? What happens to their Unmentionables?
In former times, within the traditional one-career family, the spouse, usually the wife, sometimes served as the receptacle for the male careerist's work-related Unmentionables. He might bring home and there express the frustrations, fears, and rage he experienced in the course of his work. Onto his wife he could safely dump these career negatives without worry that they would be communicated to his career peers. It was safe to do so. (It was safe for the male careerist, but not so safe for the wife when the husband might come home in a state of fury.) With the advent of two-career families, this safety valve has largely disappeared. The wife is no longer shut off from the world of work contacts. And she has work frustrations of her own that require attention outside the work context. There is rarely room for two sets of career frustrations to be vented and to receive nurturing. Unmentionables remain dangerously repressed, awaiting explosive eruption or, at least, a change of spouse.
Return to the Freudian notion of the unconscious, where the unconscious component of the individual's psyche is largely rooted in very early experiences in life that have never been resolved and, consequently, raise their ugly head occasionally. The unconscious can be aroused - usually in destructive ways - by current events in the individual's life, but basically it is made up of long-buried experiences. How realistic is this? Can one reduce the discomfort of eighty-year-old Walter Cronkite to unresolved early childhood experiences that remained buried inside? Surely, this is stretching credulity.
By contrast, I suggest that in the ongoing life of adults a subconscious can be created and continually nurtured. The individual's present life, the here and now, can contain elements that are continually shunted aside into a place hidden from the individual's current public posture. It can contain elements of discomfort that an apparently self-confident individual would be loath to admit, even to his or her self. This discomfort may not be a childhood discomfort, as the Freudians might picture it, but an entirely adult discomfort, based on real - but Unmentionable - interpretations of circumstances in the individual's present life. In the case of Walter Cronkite, the insults to his person were perpetrated after the zenith of his career. There was vulnerability. The dagger hit its mark. It had spotted a current weakness.
What is unusual about the Walter Cronkite case is that the discomfort's impact was revealed in full public view. Ordinarily such discomfort is carefully hidden. It is shunted into a siding where neither the public nor the self is allowed to be fully aware of what is happening. Only in dreams does one occasionally dare to confront such discomfort. In dreams, too, it tends to arrive in veiled forms that make it difficult to understand the source and its precise intrusion into our current ways of living.
As Freud taught many of us, the world of dreams is often the actively displayed version of the unconscious. One might call it a display of the Second Path of our existence. Dreams give a full view of our Unmentionables. When we read the biblical story of Jacob wrestling with God's representative during the night, we are shown the unsettling restlessness that can gain the upper hand during the night. The theologian Walter Bruegeman tells us that we may experience night's limitless, wondrous side as well as its unconstrained, fearsome side. What Bruegeman calls "nighttime work" - with its profound wrestling with one's conscience, its occasional eruptions of total terror - contrasts sharply with "daytime work," where humans may seem to have control over their destiny. "During the day, [Jacob] is able to manage and take initiative. But at night, as for all of us, Jacob turns out to be vulnerable, and things rush powerfully beyond his control. His night is peopled by those uninvited and unwelcome in his life. But they are the very ones with whom he has to come to terms, if he is to go home peaceably." In dreams, the Unmentionables are openly at work. They are in full view.
Speaking of the Unmentionables in full view, perhaps the most pitiful current examples exist among mentally impaired individuals who are outside the mental illness support system. Large long-term psychiatric hospitals have been closed, sending many patients out into the community, in the hope that medications plus community support will take care of their needs. Instead, we find many severely ill individuals trapped without family or other community support, without their needed medication, living on the street, engaged in petty crime that lands them in prisons that are entirely unsuited to treating mental patients. There, in the prisons, their raw Unmentionables - their fears, their phobias, their hallucinations - are on full display in the form of crude ways of acting out. These are sometimes met with brutal punishment instead of medical treatment. The mentally impaired entirely lack a First Path that might hide their illness. Instead, the raw presence of their Unmentionables, their Second Path, can elicit ever more brutal responses from prison personnel who operate under the mandate of prisons: to punish, to secure order, to protect society against individuals under their control.
Another manifestation of Unmentionables and a Second Path showed up in relations between blacks and whites in America of the 1990s. Glenn Loury, a distinguished black economist, writes: "Arguably, the most race-obsessed people in America today are not Southern rednecks but rather the well-educated and prosperous black elites."
This bears out my own impression - unscientifically gathered, but convincing to me - that some blacks who, by general American standards, are highly successful seem to be the most despairing. These are persons who, in their personal careers, in their standards of living, in both economic and educational terms, are highly successful. Yet they seem to feel fiercely that they are being denied their full and rightful place by the white race - a race with whose members they now have the closest of contact.
Loury's explanation is that such members of the black middle class are finally having a chance to express themselves and be heard by their former oppressors - who are now "not strangers, but ... neighbors and coworkers ... For the first time, they engage their oppressors in moral discourse as political equals." It gives such blacks "a greater opportunity to express the racial injustices they still feel."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Our Quest For Effective Livingby Fred Emil Katz Copyright © 2009 by Fred Emil Katz. Excerpted by permission.
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