Who Loves Ya, Baby?

Reading about other people’s therapy sessions is even more boring than having to listen to your friends’ long and moronic dreams. In a dream narrative there’s usually a bit of comic phantasmagoria to mull over for a second or two. (“And then I saw my cat wearing underpants! Then he turned into Calista Flockhart--with polka-dot fur! Then there was an avalanche and my father--no, it was really George Bush!--made me do a nude hip-hop dance in the snow!”) You muster the requisite po-face and nod politely, even as the dreamer blathers on, agog over the Deep Symbolic Meaning of It All.

The therapy narrative, however, would seem to be inherently stupefying. Here’s feminist psychologist Carol Gilligan, former professor of gender studies at Harvard and author of the influential “In a Different Voice” (1982), describing (in “The Birth of Pleasure”) a session with “Dan,” a hopelessly dreary computer scientist who comes with his wife “Jude” for couples counseling at the Cambridge Family Institute:

“Looking at the sullen man sitting across from me, I think of a child who feels unseen and unappreciated. He’s holding out, I suspect, and I wonder why. Dan loved his mother as a young boy. He saw the human face behind the mask she wore and also her wish not to be seen. I find myself wondering whether out of love for her, he moved away from her so as not to see her. Did he sacrifice his relationship with his mother out of his love for her? And was he waiting for someone to see his sacrifice and appreciate his love?”

Gee, professor Gilligan, you may be right! But let’s hear more:

“In moving away from his mother, he was protecting himself from her abandonment of him (putting on her mask, hiding her face) and also from her anger and her sadness. But in closing himself off from her, he was also protecting her by not seeing what she did not want people to see (her anger, her sadness, her imperfection), distancing himself from her so as not to blow her cover. In this, he had been a loving son. I say this to Dan, and Jude’s face changes, softens; she moves closer to him and starts to cry. Dan feels present for the first time.”

Dan may be present, but the intelligent reader is half asleep. Who cares about this stone-faced nincompoop? “Sons and Lovers” this ain’t.

There are many such vignettes in “The Birth of Pleasure,” Gilligan’s new study of “love and the forces that stand in the way of pleasure.” The vignettes all seem to involve uptight upper-middle-class “couples in crisis” and their offspring. The kids have fashionable Baby Gap names such as Zoe, Gabe, Emma and Jake. (No one is ever called Myrtle, Ty-Ree, Devonne or Spud in these kinds of books.) The adults are all deeply mopey, having fallen prey--husbands and wives alike--to what Gilligan calls the “trauma of patriarchy.” The trauma of patriarchy--a term she never explains--is what makes little boys of 5 or 6 reject their mothers, hanker after AK-47s and “conceal those parts of themselves that are not considered to be manly or heroic.” In girls, says Gilligan, the trauma hits later, at adolescence, when they realize--ka-boing!--that the world is ruled by “the law of the Father.” The law of the Father, in a nutshell, says that girls are not allowed to do fun things, like have wild sex or eat a lot. So girls learn to hide their desires for pleasure and intimacy--for the “full openness and vulnerability of relationship”--and then get hitched up to dopey emotionally stunted men. Everyone ends up “dissociated” and boy, is that bad.

Yet Gilligan sees a way out of the “parched desert” of human relationships under patriarchy. The key to psychic health is internalizing a new “myth of love”--one that undoes the hoary old structures of “male domination” and repairs “longstanding ruptures between people and between nations.” Gilligan’s already got the perfect one picked out for us: the fable of Cupid and Psyche from “The Golden Ass,” a 2nd century work by the Latin writer Apuleius.

The myth, for those whose Apuleius may have temporarily deserted them, has to do with Psyche, a beautiful young Greek babe who arouses the jealousy of the goddess Venus. To punish her, Venus orders her son Cupid to make Psyche fall in love with some ugly guy. But Cupid falls for her himself and whisks her off to a secret palace, where he makes love to her every night, though without ever letting her see his face. Eager to know the identity of her new boyfriend, with whom she’s, like, totally in love, Psyche (whose name means “soul”) peeks at him while he’s sleeping and discovers he’s a good-looking god. He wakes up, however, and is upset about being seen. He flies back up to Olympus, leaving her to the persecutions of Venus. When Psyche says he’ll never stop loving Cupid, Venus, in a rage, sets her a bunch of loathsome tasks that make her go catatonic. All seems lost, but Cupid, feeling remorseful, flies back down, snaps Psyche out of her stupor and gets Jupiter, the boss god, to shut Venus up. With Jupiter’s blessing, Cupid and Psyche get married and Psyche gives birth to a baby named Pleasure.

Now this is a nice myth. Nobody murders his father by mistake or beds his old mom; nobody has his eyes put out. (Gilligan dislikes Freud’s favorite story--the gory tale of Oedipus--because it replicates the tragic “wounds of patriarchy.”) The thing that’s so great about the Cupid-and-Psyche story is that Psyche is a really righteous gal, kind of like Kate Winslett in “Titanic.” She’s feisty and curious and she loves Cupe, even after he dumps her and Venus gets on her case. She’d be happy to stand up on the prow of a ship and dangle out over the waves. In fact she’s a lot like the adolescent girls whom Gilligan sees in her therapy work before, that is, they get brainwashed by patriarchy. Before they squelch their “real feelings” and turn into zombie-wives and zombie-mothers, they are regular emotional geniuses. They are always “speaking truth to power.” They see everything that’s going down--far more than boys do--and they know that love conquers all. If we would only “listen to their voices,” we would all be a lot happier.

Am I being harsh? Sarcastic? Possibly. But I can’t be getting on with the cartoonish psycho-twaddle that passes for argument in this deeply confused book. Gilligan has been much praised--and rightly so--for her clinical research on female adolescents. “The Birth of Pleasure,” however, is mere hodgepodge: a tedious concatenation of feminist temporizing, cliched anecdotes from the consulting room, maudlin personal reminiscences (we hear a lot about Gilligan’s darling Grandpa Poppy), random myth-weaving and lit-crit (there are disjointed rambles on Shakespeare, Euripides and “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl”) and numerous pawky-sibylline utterances. “Maybe love is like rain,” intones Gilligan. “Sometimes gentle, sometimes torrential, flooding, eroding, quiet, steady, filling the earth, collecting in hidden springs. When it rains, when we love, new life grows.” Maybe it is .... Or maybe not!

I have the highest regard for psychotherapy. I’d be dead without it. I also like Greek and Roman myths, in part because they point up, with a startling lack of sentiment, just how complex--both hideous and joyful, malign and cherishable--human experience really is. Now Freud, it’s true, was a fairly bleak fellow; it’s not so strange that he would make the terrible legend of Oedipus into the foundational story of psychoanalysis. Freud had a tragic view of life. (With good reason: Though he didn’t live to see it, four of his five elderly sisters died, like Anne Frank did, in Nazi concentration camps.) Undoubtedly he underemphasized the comic side of things and the fact that in spite of grief, misfortune, sickness and death, some lucky people figure out a way of whistling in the dark. But Gilligan thinks she can do better than Freud simply by giving us a cheery new “emotional script.” If we can just let go of whatever “tragic” myth is holding us in its sway (Oedipus, Patriarchy, Original Sin, Global Warming, the Curse of the Bambino) and start grooving with Cupid and Psyche, the darkness will start to lift.

Yet if classic myths teach us anything, it is that you can’t just pick out one you like and ignore the rest. It’s a package deal: You take one Greek god or goddess, you’ve got to take them all: lustful Zeus, wise Athena, drunken Dionysus, frigid Diana, fruitful Ceres, angry Mars, even ghastly Kronos devouring his children. Each one of these disparate symbolic figments represents a different aspect of the extraordinarily fluid human psyche and, depending on moral luck and circumstance, any one of us can turn into any one of them at any time. (In Rwanda and Bosnia, seemingly inoffensive neighbors suddenly metamorphosed into monstrous assassins.) Oedipus and Psyche live on in each of us simultaneously, along with all the rest of the crazy pantheon. It’s worth trying to remember this (possibly depressing) fact, just as it’s worth trying to remember that the world we live in contains both Kauai and Mogadishu, Manila and the Cotswolds, Winnipeg and Hanoi, Copenhagen and Kabul. Gilligan’s pleasant nostrums notwithstanding, the map of life is not simple, and it’s best to plan accordingly.