Oedipus Schmoedipus

A memoir of my father, a Freudian analyst

Oedipus Schmoedipus

 

Our father didn’t bring his work home with him. He was proud of the fact that he didn’t analyze himself or his family. As he was training to be an analyst, he had had to undergo extensive analysis and he thought that in that process he had learned everything there was to learn about himself so there was no need to think about it further. He was “enlightened” and he had that smug vacuity that enlightened people have. He listened to patients from eight in the morning to six in the evening, with one hour off for lunch, so why would he want to listen to us at home.

We knew little about his work but over the years I gleamed some things. I learned that the hour of analysis was actually fifty minutes, which struck me as cheating, (later shortened to forty-five). I knew that the analyst sat at the head of the couch where the analysand couldn’t see him, so he was free to doodle or write his shopping list. There is a persistent but unsubstantiated rumor that Freud sometimes fell asleep, but it is well known that Freud wasn’t a very proper Freudian; he spoke his mind and banged his fist down when he didn’t agree with a patient. I was aware that the cost of psychoanalyst was high, but our father didn’t tell us how much he made and I never knew, and still do not know, what his income was. In my thirties, I did the math, multiplying $100 by nine hours, coming up with $900 a day. Subtracting days at the veterans’ hospital and the Los Angeles County psychiatric ward, and vacations,  he may have been paid for four days a week for forty-six weeks a year, totaling about $165,000 a year. This seems too high, but maybe not. No matter, it put us in the top 10% of American households and the top 1% in the world.  In our minds, however, this did not make us wealthy; we were “upper middle class.” Although we lacked nothing, we didn’t think of ourselves as privileged.

 

Freudianism, which one could say was our parents’ religion, crept into everything. We were not angry at each other; we were hostile. We were not confused, but ambivalent. And above all, we were not funny. Humor contained a seed of cruelty, my father disclosed to me when I was thirteen, in his bathroom. All humor, he said, is based on overt or subconscious cruelty. This concept itself seemed like some cruel joke to me. I could not grasp it and tried to give him examples of humor that were just plain funny, but he was always able to find the underlying cruelty. I came to accept his version but when I tried to explain it to my friends, they just laughed.

 

Some psychological theories made a big impression on me. We learned to distinguish between the subconscious and the unconscious and I thought myself clever in later years by asking, if it is unconscious, how can we be sure it is there? Work, Dad explained, was what one did to achieve an end, such as working at a job to put food on the table, while play was what one did for its own sake, like dancing and building sand castles. Although I was skeptical about who this “one” was, I drew a lesson from work vs. play that I don’t think he had in mind. It occurred to me that spending “one’s” life playing was better than spending “one’s” life working.

 

Father was logical, a logic that he expressed with his hands. When he tried to clarify an idea, he chopped his hands down in parallel motions, as if physically cutting it into separate pieces in order to examine the parts more carefully. Expressing an absolute (which he would have denied was an absolute, for he didn’t believe in absolutes), he spread his hands open to show how big the absolute was. His hands displayed his thinking, the way some readers move their lips when reading.

          

If I had to say what his philosophy was, I would say materialism that slid into reductionism. According to Freud, money is really s**t, art is really sublimation, love is really oedipal. Of course they are these things, just as a fine wine is really chemicals and a giraffe is really atoms, and it took me quite a while to come to the realization that atoms are really a giraffe.

 

I went to Dad with my take on things, but as with boxing, he didn’t let me hit him very often. He used a slippery logic that I couldn’t quite follow. If I expressed a thought, he countered with a more sophisticated one and with what he called “findings.” A finding was something which can’t quite be called a fact but was out there, real, that scientists and psychologists have stumbled across and could almost verify. Findings were more fluid than facts, but in reality, findings were facts, softened for consumption.

“In reality” was a phrase he often employed. He didn’t believe in God but he believed in a higher principle, one that he worshipped, that he (and Freud) called Reality. He used it as a proper noun: “Reality shows us that  . . .” so that to my ears, Reality sounded like a god. And this god was accompanied by an entourage of angels, the aforementioned findings.

           If Reality was a god, it was a whimsical god, but inexorable for all that, in the end a fearsome god which made us do things we didn’t want to do, face things we didn’t want to face; a god who made us succumb.

           There was another being, one opposed to Reality, almost a god in itself, called Belief. A Belief, in the divine for example or in an afterlife, was a delusion manufactured by the self to escape Reality. Beliefs were powerful beings, essentially abominations, who ruled much of humanity.

           Of course the higher god was my father sitting in his office every day for nine hours listening to his patients reveal their weaknesses and fears and then recommending to them that they accept the situation, that they face Reality, Reality being a force of nature as personified by my father.

 

It didn’t seem to occur to my father that Reality might be only his reality, but it occurred to me, and I have led my life in defiance of it, for reasons made clear in a monograph my father published at the end of World War II.

           While in the service, Major Levy wrote an eighty-nine page monograph called Personality Disturbances in Combat Fliers which was printed in 1945 for the use of the Army-Air Force in general and Flight Surgeons in particular. Flight Surgeon was the name of squadron psychiatrists.

           After a description of the risks entailed in high altitude flying, (which he notes was about 20,000 feet), with an emphasis on the problems associated with the oxygen mask, he writes, “In many cases the high altitude is blamed, but this is often a rationalization for unconscious conflict related to the combat situation.”

           A few pages later, speaking of flyers who failed after ten or less missions, he writes, “Passive dependent tendencies are often present. The character traits of cautiousness, avoidance of physical risks, and dislike of and avoidance of aggressive hostile situations and of the sight of death and injury, indicate the presence of unconscious anxiety, fear of and expectation of injury.”

           “In some instances,” he continues, “feelings of resentment and hostility sometimes due to current situations in the Squadron, but not infrequently associated with chronic deeply-rooted aggressions, may be contributing to the tensions and anxiety.”

           Of the rapport between himself and the men who fly, he writes:     “Psychotherapy consists fundamentally of the relationship between the Flight Surgeon and the combat crew member and includes everything that takes place between them, whether it be in the form of medical treatment, casual friendly conversations, reassurance and encouragement, sympathetic listening to complaints, gripes and anxieties, or in the form of uncovering therapy aimed at the psychodynamically important emotional disturbance.”

           I recognized the tone and rationale of his observations from my boyhood. Nothing is as it seems; people are unaware of their own feelings and motivations. Flyers may blame the high altitude and shoddy oxygen masks for their discomfort, but the real reason is ambivalence about flying. Flyers who fail to fly do so not because of their cautiousness and avoidance of physical risk but because of unconscious inner conflict. Specifically, the sight of death arouses feelings that betray the presence of unconscious aggression.

Underlying the feelings of resentment and hostility, feelings which my father was quick to attribute to his wife, children, patients and friends, were chronic deeply-rooted aggressions. These formed the bedrock of personality, unless one had undergone intensive psychoanalysis of the Freudian school.   About himself, he wrote, “The personality of the Flight Surgeon, is of fundamental importance. It is vital that he be a stable, mature, conscientious, effective and fairly aggressive person, free of anxiety and feelings of insecurity.”

 

           Did my father really believe that the anxiety of flyers came from their neurosis? Did he believe that flyers were not aware of their own anxiety and fear? If so, a rejoinder came a few years after the war, when Joseph Heller published Catch 22. The novel takes place in Italy from 1942 to 1944 and records the wisdom of Major Sanderson, the flight psychiatrist. Speaking to Yossarian, a bombardier, he says:

           “You’re immature. You’ve been unable to adjust to the idea of war.”

           “Yes, sir.”

           “You have a morbid aversion to dying. You probably resent the fact that you’re at war and might get your head blown off any second.”

           “I more than resent it, sir. I’m absolutely incensed.”

           “You have deep-seated survival anxieties. And you don’t like bigots, bullies, snobs or hypocrites. Subconsciously there are many people you hate.”

           “Consciously, sir, consciously.”

 

 

          

Author's Note

am I too harsh on Dad?

Reviews

[Samuel Dickens]

I enjoyed reading this. I think only you can say for sure if it's too hard on your father, but it does seem to me that he was too rigid and short on love.
I love that movie, "Catch 22" and saw it in a theater when it first came out. Most of it's message went over my head at the time, me being about 20-ish.