August 17, 2021

Eyeless in Gaza

Damon LaBarbera

 Eyeless in Gaza was written by Aldous Huxley in 1936 and describes, in achronological order, the lives of well heeled characters over the first decades of the 20th century.  Eyeless in Gaza is not one of Huxley's best-known books, but is his finest, surpassing in-depth and literary innovation, so some opine, and I am inclined to agree, his more famous books, including Brave New World. Brave . Eyeless in Gaza  is a more substantial novel, and has that particular style of which Huxley is so adept, allowing us to enter the inner monologue, acutely and sometimes humorously depicted, of his protagonists (assuming a book can have more than one protagonist), and in his process of developing the story allowing us a glimpse into Huxley's massive intelligence.

The mood of this book differs from Huxley's earlier oeuvre, the latter being "smart" and "modern and in line with the depressed hedonism after WWI that pervaded English culturati . Huxley had earlier gained quite a reputation for his outspoken and modern opinions, so scandalous to the Victorian ear.  ."Huxley wrote Eyeless in Gaza at a time in his life when less interested in being  the iconoclastic wit, and was not experimenting with more humanistic and spiritual themes.  The book is of a period that also precedes Huxley’s involvement the psychedelic culture—an odd end to the Odyssey of this English elite from postwar art society to Southern California Culture.  Eyeless in Gaza does not contain any of the new age quality of Huxley's latter period, and is still firmly ensconced in respectable English society.

 Meanwhile, the plot is complex, Events are described out of order, a jumble of events that reflect  the an essential assumption of the book, the haphazardness of recollection. Memory is a tyranny--as Anthony Beavis, describes, in middle age sorting through photographs,  crazily disordered like teh chapters in the book, while speaking with his paramour Helen. While sifting through the photos in an early chapter he provides a memorable description of Marcel Proust, bathing in a tub of the dirty water of his own memories. 

Helen, the daughter of a previous lover, permeates the book from beginning to end. She may have been based on the 20s personage Nancy Cunard.  She appears as a young girl, and in the last chapter, engages Anthony as he reaps some insight from his various adventures.  She has suffered from a series of relationships with him, with her mother's manipulative friend, with a detached curator of assyriology at a museum, and with a German socialist, all the while pining for meaning, dissatisfied in her quest for connection with others. Anthony suffers, meanwhile from his lack of feeling and alienation. 

 Anthony struggles with his alienation from feeling, and Helen, sensitive to the void between them, verges on leaving. However, an absurd event occurs. As they sun on an Italian rooftop, a dog splatters on the veranda, dropped from a helicopter--a morbid event reverberating throughout the story. 

After the photo sorting chapter,  the chronology shifts to Anthony’s childhood. Anthony’s mother (Maise) has died. A student at Balustrade, Anthony travels by train to the funeral, passing billboards depicting a cow, obsessively counting billboards. The motto on the billboards repeats in his mind, along with the drumming from the tracks. Sitting with him is his father and uncle. His father is a dry, pedantic philologist with an uncomprehending attitude about his son. His conversation consists of etymology puns, and the character has similarities with Huxley's real life father, the son of TE Huxley, Darwin's bulldog. Nearby ion the train s his Uncle James, an accountant, a convert to Catholicism, and we later see, troubled by homosexuality in an unaccepting world, who finds, during WWI some solace tending to the young injured men from trenches. James frets about timetables and, later,  experiences anguished feelings about the handsome men in the funeral entourage. 

One of the women at the funeral is Mary Amberly, recently widowed, the bride of a WWI casualty (and actually Helen's mother eventually). In the next segment of this plot, Anthony, who just turned an adult a few years after his mother's death, has an affair with Mary. Mary provides him with a thrilling sense of adulthood, exciting vice, and superiority. But she also taunts him into betraying his gentle and true friend Brian--taunting him into seducing Brian’s ingenue girlfriend. Brian Foxe is a virtuous, self-effacing youngster who is highly moral but enmeshed with a self-structured, overly honorable mother who overvalues self-denial. Also a widow, she consumes Brian with all-encompassing attentiveness. This is a wonderful description of what Orwell said about saints—often, they are saints because real human relations are impossible. This enormity of the betrayal causes Brian to kill himself by hurtling himself off a cliff.   

The book incidentally has one of the best descriptions of borderline personality in the person of Mary Amberly, a character whose malicious, impulsive, and seductive antics damage others and, ultimately, herself. The character may have some similarities to Nancy Cunard, wife of the shipping magnate, who took little interest in motherhood. Mary later descends into opiate (“morphia”) addiction. Anthony becomes involved with Helen, Mary's daughter. 

 At a later age, Anthony recognizes his deficiencies. He is passive and detached and tries with varied adventures, some comically dangerous, to achieve engagement. Traveling to South America with the sadistic Mark Staithes, a bully in his early years now grown into a masochistic loner, they entangle themselves in a revolution for the sake of changing themselves. Mark loses a leg when his donkey collapses onto him on a mountain path, but in the process, Anthony meets a missionary doctor who profoundly influences him. With this mentor, amid the saber-rattling in England, he embraces pacifism. He learns to public speak, something he has always avoided. 

A didactic undertone always exists in Huxley’s later fiction, with a pull towards pacifism and spiritualism that, for some, may spoil the literary excellence but are also part of Huxley’s endearing value. At root, the story describes that almost comic discord between what we are and what we would ideally like to be and the false attempts people make to overcome that incapacity, moving sideways into pseudo-solutions.  The writing though is acute and accurate, so accurate it sometimes verges on comic.

 From the archives

 

"Time Must Have A Stop"

Psychology, Philosophy, Literature all in One 

Sebastian Barnack is a baby-faced prodigy and the protagonist of Aldous Huxley’s novel, "Time Must Have a Stop." Written in 1944, this novel follows Sebastion from adolescence to adulthood. Misunderstood and underestimated, he winds his way through events i England and Italy, discovering much about himself, about others, and about life. The events during the 1930s add political atmosphere as a character.  Huxley, in restrospect, thought this was his best effort melding his ideas onto a good novel.

The names of the characters are carefully chosen. "Sebastian" is shot through with the arrows of misfortunate, per his namesake St. Sebastian of the famous painting. The title "Time must have a Stop"  is drawn from Huxley’s vast storage of associations. The words are Hotspur’s—-the hothead from "King Henry the Fourth". This is a challenging  book but beneath the surface of incredible erudition, it is actually humerous and hopeful. 

The storyline starts as Sebastian emerges from a library reading room and a middle aged woman accosts him, "trying to detain this phantom." He is used to this-with his cherubic looks. The dowager, Daisy Ockham, has lost her son to drowning, and Sebastian with his curly hair, and look of a Rubens angel, seems to her the incarnation of her son, Frankie. He appraises her class quickly by registering the accent, and the quality of her clothes and takes the chocolates she offers.  Then he feels guilty that a boy had to die for him to have these chocolates. 

We later meet Sebastian’s father, a socialist lawyer who espouses causes throughout the world—-high-minded but stingy and remote. Ever without funds, Sebastian endure not 

only his prepubescent appearance but wearing hand-me-downs. His mother, a more appealing person than his father, has died. Sebastian lives amongst rich kids and consorts with them in his worn out clothes, ever feekubg humiliation. His father on the road, he spends much time with his cousin Suzan who has a crush on him. Together, they take piano lessons with an old asthmatic German piano teacher who wheezes through cigar smoke and constantly chides Sebastian, the “liddle genius.” Sebastion takes his revenge revenge on the unfriendly world by teasing the ever admiring Susan. He entertains her with made-up horror stories, and fabricated romances with elegant ladies, which she believes and her indignation grows. He particularly develops the theme of a fictional Mrs. Esdaile, and their romance, which Suzan enviously listens to, believing her to be real. 

 In one unusual chapter in this part of the book, the act of verbal composition in Sebastion's mind is described, the searching for words and the right nuances. Sebastian's father, John Barnack, rigid and sacrosanct, secretly resents Sebastion's resemblance to his late wife, a Sebastian exults when he is sent to Italy to visit Uncle Eustace, a worldly man who shows him life's finer things. Hedonistic and overweight, Uncle Eustace also can’t stand his over idealistic brother John. While visiting Eustace, Sebastion also falls in love with an earthy but conniving caretaker at Eustace's mansion and is seduced. Life is very different here in affluent Italy. Uncle Eustace, an art collector, even gives Sebastian a Degas, an apt representation of his earthy nature. Better yet, he promises Sebastian new evening clothes (a tux) so he can go out with his well heeled friends. But before the evening clothes are bought, Uncle Eustace dies. Sebastian, suddenly realizing he will not get his evening clothes, decides to swap the Degas for a new tuxedo, being greatly cheated. An auditor of the late uncle's estate notes the missing Degas and accusations of theft against innocent employees multiply. Sebastian remains silent, while the falsely implicated suffer. 

Finally, he knows he must get the Degas back. Unable to do so himself, he enlists the help of Uncle Bruno, a dotty, religious zealot. Uncle Bruno is able to retrieve the painting but at great cost--calling on compromised friends that inadvertently make him, Bruno, an enemy of the Italian Fascisti. The Fascist police imprison and mistreat Bruno and hasten his declining health. Sebastian undertakes the care of the dying uncle, and while doing is profoundly altered by the old man's kindness and spirituality. Bruno's effects a transformation in Sebastian, helping him achieve vision, awareness, maturity, love, and compassion for others.

 

A not unusual clinical presentation is of an adolescent female who voices self-destructive sentiments, is angry, oppositional, and at odds with her parents. Cutting, suicidal or parasuicidal (suicidal like) behavior are often very alarming and the presenting problem. Oftentimes, the client has replaced family relationships with peer relations or a boyfriend. The boyfriend may be older, slightly delinquent and introducing the teen too early to adult vices. Such teens may have an oppositional or depressed tone. Oftentimes they are diagnosed as borderline, depressed, or  having a cyclothymic or bipolar disorder and medicated as such by medical providers. There is often a developmental aspect to it. They may seem prematurely pseudo-mature, or have come to loggerheads with parents, often interpreting discipline as punishment or criticism. An essential goal is to re-establish positive relations with the parents, and encourage discipline that does not appear punitive.  Generally, these teens have good prognosis. They have a sociable quality, tend to be open to therapy, and, once the depression and mood is regulated do well. I have seen hundreds of this prototype. A first goal is evaluating for suicide or self-destructive thoughts, and providing some outlet for their feelings which are often experienced as toxic and mixed. Repairing the relationships with parents is essential. Helping find ways to de-escalate toxic emotions other than unwise relationships and self-mutilation is another goal.

 

thoughts by John Auerbach

John Auerbach <000009eba1592f75-dmarc-request@listserv.icors.org>	9:41 AM (13 hours ago)
to PSY-FL

~Psychology Practice in Florida

I am retransmitting the lengthy post below because it appears not to have been transmitted to the listserv.  That is, I can find it in my Sent box but not my Inbox.

On Aug 7, 2020, at 6:51 AM, John Auerbach <auerbachjohn231@yahoo.com> wrote:

I have finally had some time to think through the respective posts of Drs. Friedman and Levy regarding Albert Ellis and humanistic psychology.  I find it fascinating that such very different views of Ellis are proposed.  Mind you, I believe that both Dr. Friedman and Dr. Levy know way more about Ellis than I do, so either of them can correct me any time they want.

But before I get to my thoughts on these contrasting portraits of Ellis, I want to thank Dr. Friedman for his willingness to keep raising the banner high for humanistic psychology, especially in the face of the dismissive assault he describes from purveyors of positive psychology.  My views are relational-intersubjectivist-psychoanalytic, not humanistic, because I am a believer in conflict theory, in that which is difficult or not easily resolvable in human life, even if I also believe that the central conflicts in our lives are more likely to be relational, rather than, in Freud’s theory, sexual, and to involve the basic issue of how we come to understand each other, hence intersubjective.  But I also believe that my view shares, with humanistic psychology, a focus on the primacy of affects and meanings, so I have always recognized a kinship with the founders of that tradition, a kinship about which I will say more in a bit.

For this first moment, however, I am noting that I have trouble squaring Ellis as a humanistic psychologist, presumably interested, like Rogers and Perls, in the primacy of affect, and Ellis the Stoic, even Western  Buddhist, who wants to renounce desire, to subordinate emotions to reason.  Maybe somebody wiser than I can put those two things together, but I cannot.  Dr. Levy’s version of Ellis sounds truer to me, or at least truer to the vision of him that I received, but I must respect that Dr. Friedman knew Ellis personally and knew him as a humanistic psychologist.

And now getting back to my original points, my view is one of skepticism toward views that seek renunciation of desires and emotions.  Although I lost much my adolescent Nietzscheanism when I came to realize that his world really was a world of power only, a world without love in it, and I think that love is just as instinctual a force as power is.  Also, to quote the great theorists Peter and Gordon, I don’t care what they say, I won’t stay in a world without love.  (Actually,  John and Paul wrote that, but I digress . . . . ).   I still am down with Nietzsche in his attack on all those who would despise the body.  And I am still with him when he says that one must have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.  And so I turn out to be good with, for example, the first two of the Buddha’s Noble Truths, the two about suffering and desire, but not the third one, about ending suffering through ending desire; the fourth Noble Truth might work for me if the third were amended.  I do not have much firsthand knowledge of Marcus Aurelius and the other Stoics, but I doubt I would agree.

As for my own intellectual lineage, I started reading 20th century existentialism, then Nietzsche, then Freud, as an adolescent—okay, this was not a normal adolescence, and I had to make sense of the world somehow—because these are views that deal with the difficult, the tragic, the ironic, the conflicted in human life.  Fortunately, an undergraduate education that I share with our listserv moderator (that would be Dr. LaBarbera) taught me the importance of integrating these ideas with a scientific perspective, and my two main graduate school mentors, Joe Masling at SUNY/Buffalo and Sid Blatt at Yale, were psychoanalytic researchers who were interested in how we might test psychoanalytic theories and modify them in terms of evidence, the proper scientific attitude as I see it.  Equally important here is that both of them had been trained clinically by Carl Rogers, and Sid frequently told me that he had never stopped being a Rogerian—that he was interested in seeing things from the patient’s perspective (Sid preferred “patient” over Rogers’s “client”) and helping the patient to capture, in the spirit of Rogers, emotions that were just on the edge of awareness.  

Now on the matter of the relationships between psychoanalysis, humanistic psychology, and cognitive psychotherapy, I think it is well to remember, first, that the founding generations of both humanistic theory and cognitive theory had significant psychoanalytic lineages.  I will not go into a thorough documentation of this, except to say that many people forget that both Beck and Ellis had been analysts before they each justifiably decided, given the rigidities of the psychoanalytic world of the late 1950s and early 1960s, that there had to be a better way.  Carl Rogers had not been an analyst, but he had been trained by a social worker, Jessica Taft, who herself was a Rankian.  Otto Rank, who had started as one of Freud’s closest disciples, might be considered an attachment theorist  avant la lettre.  Although there are many problems with Rank’s ideas about birth trauma, he developed a theory that the main dynamic in human life involved separation anxiety and the tension between separation (or individuation) and reunion (or connection).  These views of course underlie Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death, but it is also not far from here to Rogers’s ideas about self-actualization. And Rank, like Ferenczi, who is also foundational to relational views in psychoanalysis, also focused on the here-and-now emotional transaction in psychotherapy.  That is not so far from Rogers’s clinical perspective either.  A psychoanalytic perspective holds that there is also an unconscious dimension to these things, but a modern relational perspective puts present relational experience in the foreground; it holds that the past is found in the present, that the unconscious (or implicit) is found in the conscious (or explicit), that the depth is found in the surface, and the reincorporation of Rogers into psychoanalysis via Heinz Kohut’s views on empathy and emotion is part of what made this theoretical and clinical evolution possible.  

One more thought as to why I am psychoanalytically and existentially, not humanistically, inclined when it comes to theoretical allegiance.  I think a very good case can be made that existential theory is much more closely aligned with psychoanalytic theory than with humanistic theory.  Superficially, humanistic theory and existential theory resemble each other in that both stress free will and present lived experience.  Classical psychoanalysis, at least Freud’s system, is deterministic and stresses the past and the unconscious.  But consider this:  psychoanalysis and existentialism are both Central European theories with a surprisingly similar emotional outlook, one that stresses conflict and limitation, tragedy and irony, whereas humanistic theory, a largely American project, is much more optimistic in outlook, often sees us as more easily perfectible. Martin Heidegger and Carl Rogers would not be readily confused for each other intellectually, and the French inheritors of Heidegger (e.g.,, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, de Beauvoir) share a similar interest in that which is difficult in human experience, just as Freud did.  More important, both Sigmund Freud, the creator of psychoanalysis, and Edmund Husserl, the creator of phenomenology and Martin Heidegger’s main teacher, share an important intellectual lineage:  Both of them were students of philosopher and psychologist Franz Brentano, and Brentano gives us the theory of philosophical intentionality—the idea that mental states are always directed toward objects.  This idea is manifest in Husserl’s phenomenology, which is about the manifold ways that objects appear to us, and is carried over, existentially, to Heidegger’s being-in-the-world.  This idea is also present in Freud’s understanding that drives (or wishes) always have objects.  Accordingly, the main difference between phenomenology (and hence existentialism) and psychoanalysis is that the former deals with that which appears to us presently and is conscious while the latter deals with what is hidden from us and is therefore unconscious.  But the role of philosophical intentionality in both perspectives is essential.   And both, in proper Central European tradition, valorize lived experience, a term we get from philosopher, historian, psychologist, and sociologist Wilhelm Dilthey, even in the face of that which is difficult—e.g., loss, finitude, mortality—in our lives.

I like that Stoicism seems also to be about these themes as well, but I disagree with the Stoic and Buddhist solutions to these problems, however much similarity there is between the Buddhist focus on impermanence, the existential focus on mortality, and the psychoanalytic focus on loss.  I prefer Nietzsche, for all his many flaws, to the Buddha here.  Alternatively, I struggle with Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer because I simply do not want to be serene.  Maybe this perspective is adolescent and shallow, maybe I should learn more about acceptance so that I might achieve Enlightenment or Buddhahood, but I think of my views as keeping me young, even into my 60s.

John S. Auerbach, PhD

Statute 490.02

In Florida, only a licensed psychologist can use certain words or terms in their advertisements or business materials. . Terms like "psychological," and "psychotherapy," are protected. The law is meant to prevent unlicensed activity. If these words appear in the add of an individual not licensed as a psychologist, there is a violation subject to complaint. The statue (490.012) is reproduced below.

Why do practitioners do this. I'd like to assume that is that they just do not happen to know the statute.  But even if inadvertent, it does misrepresent. Also, people who are specifically seeking psychological help or psychological testing, are misled.  Such providers may call their reports "mental health tests" or the like, to provide the service but avoid the term. 

If you see an advertisement that contains the protected words or psychological, you can as a courtesy call and ask if they are licensed psychologists. It may be an awkward conversation, but allows them to correct the mistake, rather than just making a complaint to the department of health. The problem tends to be worse when there are few licensed psychologists around. In a bigger city, the ads would be called out more quickly.

A tip is to look at license rather than degree when assessing a provider.  A marketing trick by some providers is to get a cheesy PhD from a low rated school with very easy admissions, that allows you to call yourself "Doctor."  Check the quality of the degree and the accreditation. For a psychologist, the preferred degree is an APA approved program in clinical psychology, and then an APA approved internship. From a group of advertised providers who look about the same on paper, you are going to get very widely divergent levels of credentials. Clinical skill is not always reliant on degree, but it is not a good sign if there is an attempt to blur one's professional credentials by using disallowed terms in an ad or report. If such a document appears in a forensic setting with unauthorized use of protected terms, or originating with an ad that use them, it could raise attention.

Finally, Psychologists sometimes are confused with psychiatrists many times. The latter are medical doctors, with an MD like a surgeon, urologist, or cardiologist. Licensed Psychologists in Florida have PhD's from a specific type of program with a particular credentialing, have an array of internships to complete, and a licensing exam. The two degrees are derived from very different academic traditions. Personally I enjoy working with psychiatrists because they know the medical aspects of behavioral problems and the way medication and therapy can complement each other. 

Finally, something should be said about another group, those with doctorates in social work. 

The statute is below: