My father in law is half Jewish, half Italian. If he can’t get it wholesale, he steals it.

• I think you are spot on in your views. There is a nice ambience between the groups. But the antagonism against Italians pales of that against that of Jews. I personally have never felt threatened or anxious that my ancestry would in any way put me at risk, nor did I sense that any great historical misdeeds had been done Italians. In fact, I hardly thought of my background growing up—though once in a while there would be reminders. Why, for example, were my elders rooting for boxer Nino Benvenuti in the Olympics.
  I grew up amidst Catholics at parochial school, fifty or more in a class. Italians were second in the hierarchy, with most of the popular kids, team coaches, and local politicians Irish. On my Little League Team, every name was Irish except mine and another. We might have been played in Dublin. Catholics from other than Ireland or Italy were lower on the implicit caste system. German, Polish, and Hispanic Catholics seemed to have less clout within that particular New York dioceses. The Jewish kids were in the public school system, so there was not much interaction.
  Yes, Catholics are too numerous for any tyrant to exterminate, and one can’t be too naïve to believe it would otherwise be imaginable,  given genocides elsewhere and with the American Indian.
  You cite that Judaism in various epochs presented a challenge to the prevailing religious orthodoxy which created conflict. I assume this is true, but one of many factors. Also, you note that Jews in Germany trusted they were secure. “The Berlin Stories”, by Christopher Isherwood, describes the protagonist’s relationship with a refined German Jewish businessman (Isherwood was gay), and gives a vignette of German Jewish family life, and the increasing alarming depradations made against that society, with the family eventually arrested. I have heard arguments (and counterarguments)that Jews were too passive during the holocaust. Is this another reason for ongoing watchfulness?
  I can see the obsessive compulsive formulation you describe as profoundly descriptive of ongoing antisemitism.  But isn’t the term you use associated with Jonathan Swift—"filthy lucre”. Also the histrionic underpinnings against blacks and Catholics make sense.  A Lutheran once gave me the stereotype on Catholics--partying and carousing all the time. 
  Catholicism does indeed have a hierarchical structure. There is a layered hierarchy with a priest as intermediary with God. However, my perception is somewhat different from yours, John. My perception is that this hierarchy is not a source of misdirection and conservatism. For one, there is going to be more emphasis on established authority, which includes a belief in science. Hence you are going to get less of the freewheeling antiscientism that is part of the conservative oppositional style. And if you want to look at the fruits of the hierarchy, say, in France, with the Jesuits at the top, you have the formulation of nearly ever modern philosophy—rationalism, structuralism (Piaget, Lacan, Levi Straus), contractarianism, existentialism (Camus, Sartre), Voltaire and the ideas of the enlightenment, and so forth.  All those formulations are coming out of a society where a structured hierarchy was in place.
  Your view, though, that Italians are pulled various directions politically is correct. Given the emphasis on family life (la via vechia) of Italians there is a chosen preference for safety—more conservative politics, involvement with established institutions (e.g., high rates of military service), and fewer of the riskier pursuits that might lead to scapegoating. "Blood of my Blood" is a book that describes this phenomena. Its been a possibly limiting strategy but safer. On the other hand, some well known socialists have been Italian—e.g., Ignazio Silone, etc. There has been a drift rightward over time, however.
  
  
  As for "Immigration Act of 1924", that is a nice little bit of arcania.  The Sacco and Vanzetti case comes to mind as an example of prejudice against Italians a little before. 
  
  
  Enjoy reading your opinions John--always so erudite. Also, isn't Auerbach a German name.
  
  
  Damon L
• 
  
• 
  

Dear John,

At the risk of venturing onto pseudoscientific terrain and boring others...

We talked about the relationship amongst Jews, Italians and more broadly Catholicism, and the history of prejudice against Jews, as well as the relative strategies of these groups in the wider culture. 

Its true that Jews predominate in western thought (Freud, Einstein, Marx, I guess Jesus, and the pantheon of Nobel Prize winners). Meanwhile, it has been a Catholic country (e.g., France) that has produced the philosophic systems--structuralism, existentialism, rationalism (e.g., the Enlightenment), and the philosophy (I forget the name) associated with Rousseau. Why France has produced these philosophies is unclear--possibly associated with the Jesuit hierarchical or educational system or some other idiosyncrasy of time, place, opportunity, or chance.

But there is another, to me strange, bifurcation between the two groups in terms of output. That concerns art. The heralded art from the last few centuries has been Christian--not only from Florence, but also in the US. Pollack, Georgia O'Keefe, Van Gogh, Dali, DeKoonig, Jasper Johns, Picasso, Miro, and even the lowly Leroy Nieman are, as far as I can tell, Catholic.  Essentially the fifth floor of MOMA is Catholic. Photography seems to be the one American art dominated by Jews, and much photography can be considered really a variant of journalism.  

Is there a cognitive style difference between the two groups, an emphasis, a difference in patronage systems or education that differentially encourage one or another endeavor.  

And might some related quality enhance the prejudice against Jews. Does scholarship, financial acumen, and verbal facility raise questions of sophistry, trickery or manipulation? Is there a more linguistic, as opposed to perceptual style of thinking that is encouraged. Is there some lesson in the Zohar about the importance of language. Also, why so few Jewish athletes-a more visual spatial activity. Just dumb questions I have thinking about...

Damon

On ‎Saturday‎, ‎December‎ ‎15‎, ‎2018‎ ‎07‎:‎11‎:‎54‎ ‎PM‎ ‎CST, Damon LaBarbera <dglabarbera@yahoo.com> wrote:

Following this thread--one novelization of that is Mr. Sammler's Planet. Sammler is an emigree--a somewhat aristocratic and educated person who spent time in the concentration camp and lost an eye when hit, in a trench full of cadavers, with the butt of gun. I think the original cover art had a pair of glasses with one cracked. He lives in New York, reliant on the graces of his relatives who brought him over. His old world manner contrasts with the tawdriness of everyday life in the city. There are some comic intersections. A local radical--somewhat stereotypically Jewish invites him to a rally at Columbia (the year is 68 or so). Sammler's old world genteel socialism is violently attacked and harassed. There is also a subplot involving HG Wells, whom Sammler cultivated back in Europe. Anyway, the story is what happens AFTER the arrival--the modest, somewhat alienated life of Jews displaced in middle age or older, worrying about whether they will have enough money for their morning tea. The novel was criticized some because of a dubious description of a black pickpocket which some averred was racist.

A question that you might know, John, is the effect on the incoming Jews on American psychology. At that point, behaviorism reigned, with names like Watson, Hull, Skinner, Spence, Guthrie, and Tolman out in California. The humanists were also an Anglo bunch--Carl Rogers, Rollo May, etc. But within a decade or so, psychoanalysts had a very strong foothold in the US. Somehow there was a transformation at that time. What happened. Was it at the New School in New York. Festinger, I believe, was American. How did that transformation occur. How were Jews relieved in Academia. I was looking at an old antique Columbia University yearbook from the teens and not a Jew to be seen. Within a couple of decades they seemed to have penetrated and then proliferated. How did that occur in psychology? What departments were instrumental? Or was it via the public rather than academia that this "Jewish Science" began to predominate--with popular books. Also, when in school, did you notice any bifurcation between what was perceived as Anglo or Jewish. Was behaviorism considered a sterile Anglo product like economics.  Or at that point did things seem more homegenized in the field. 

Damon 

From: Florida All Members list [mailto:FLPAMEMBERS@LISTS.APAPRACTICE.ORG] On Behalf Of John Auerbach
Sent: Sunday, December 09, 2018 9:16 AM
To: FLPAMEMBERS@LISTS.APAPRACTICE.ORG
Subject: Re: [FLPAMEMBERS] The CONNPSYCH listserve and a case of bigotry.

And a final last thought. In French psychoanalysis, there are Rudolf Löwenstein, who was the analyst of Jacques Lacan, and André Green, among many others.

Sent from my iPhone

On Dec 9, 2018, at 9:04 AM, John Auerbach <auerbachjohn231@yahoo.com> wrote:

Damon,

One remaining thought on French education and thought:  Of all the figures you mentioned, one does not quite belong to the Catholic tradition.  That of course would be Claude Lévi-Strauss, the father of structural anthropology and the son of Alsatian Jews. There are several other important Jewish contributors to French intellectual life, among them Émile Durkheim, Henri Bergson, Roman Jakobson, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida, but I am sure you are correct that the predominant historical lineage in French intellectual life is Catholic and heavily Jesuit.

John

Sent from my iPhone

On Dec 8, 2018, at 7:04 PM, John Auerbach <00000224c9c1aebb-dmarc-request@LISTS.APAPRACTICE.ORG> wrote:

Damon,

Thanks for these thoughts, especially on the hierarchy of Catholic ethnicities in the United States—among American Jews, the hierarchy is Sephardic (meaning in this context the ethnicity, Iberian, not the adherence to Sephardic Jewish practice), then German, then Eastern European, on the basis of the order of arrival on these shores—and on the role of Jesuitism in French intellectual life.  I had not considered that idea, but I think it makes sense that Jesuitism would create an openness within hierarchy because of its Pelagian and Erasmian theology, hence its emphasis on free will and reason within spirituality.  Within French Catholicism, there is the counterexample of Pascal’s Jansenist, hence Augustinian and  quasi-Calvinist views, but I suspect that you are correct that the Jesuit view predominated, given the historical importance of Descartes, who had a Jesuit education.  One of the great myths of history is that the Catholic Church always opposed scientific and rational progress.  We can find many such currents in Catholic Church history, but we can find many important countercurrents.  

The phrase “filthy lucre” comes from 1 Timothy 3:3.  I did not know that until I looked it up.  As an Anglican clergyman, Jonathan Swift was of course familiar with the phrase, and Norman O. Brown, in his brilliant psychoanalytic classic, Life Against Death, has a fascinating study of Swift’s preoccupations with scatology.  However, Brown’s chapter, “Filthy Lucre,” is an analysis of the rise of capitalism that is highly congruent with the Frankfurt School’s synthesis of Freud, Marx, Weber, Nietzsche, and Hegel that constitutes my intellectual background.  

As for the Holocaust, which means “burnt offering," or as Jews now increasingly call it, the Shoah, which is Hebrew for “annihilation,” nothing satisfactory can ever be said.  I do want to clarify, for all who do not routinely think about such things, that the Nazi genocide of the Jewish population of Europe was a far broader event than its persecution of the German-Jewish community of about 500,000.  I would write more about this, but then we would be moving from a discussion of the psychology of prejudice, antisemitism, and racism to the actual implementation of these ideas, something to which I do not want to expose this listserve, even though many of us on this listserve are Jews. I merely want to point out that the historical experience of German Jews, who had been emancipated early (1812), was very different from that of the approximately 6 million or so Russian and Polish Jews, who were emancipated much later (1917) and who were under no illusions as to what their neighbors thought of them.  I also do want to point out that more than half of Germany’s Jewish population managed to leave that country prior to the start of World War II in 1939 but that this escape would have proved fruitless unless emigration was to Great Britain or the United States.

As for my German last name, here is a Wikipedia link:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auerbach_(surname)

As you can see, it is commonly a Jewish last name.  I personally know no Auerbachs who are not Jewish, although I recently found a pocket of Auerbachs in Eastern Iowa who clearly are not Members of the Tribe.  German colleagues in my psychoanalytic world have commented on my name because there is an Auerbachs Keller, a restaurant in Leipzig that is mentioned in Goethe’s Faust, but when I ask them whether they know any Auerbachs in Germany, they usually tell me that they do not.  They get my point rather quickly. Jews of Central and Eastern European origin tend to have German or Slavic last names because our ancestors were Yiddish speakers but, more important, because the countries of Central and Eastern Europe (i.e., Prussia, the Hapsburg Empire, Russia, etc.) in the 1700s and 1800s began requiring their subjects to have last names.  My family would like to think that we truly are German, not East European, Jews—it’s a status thing—but no one can trace my family past the Ukraine.  When Americans comment on my German last name, I start a personality assessment.  I say, “It’s German, but I am not.”  Very few ask further about it, and most who do are satisfied with my explanation that Prussia and Austria owned much of Eastern Europe until World War I.  The few who ask questions after that, especially when I was in East Tennessee, are fellow Members of the Tribe hoping to identify other Jews.  

Finally, no fair that your father is half-Jewish and half-Italian.  He gets to tell ethnic jokes about two groups, not just one, with impunity.

John

On Dec 8, 2018, at 5:30 PM, Damon LaBarbera <00000773cca468bb-dmarc-request@LISTS.APAPRACTICE.ORG> wrote:

My father in law is half Jewish, half Italian. If he can’t get it wholesale, he steals it.

I think you are spot on in your views. There is a nice ambience between the groups. But the antagonism against Italians pales of that against that of Jews. I personally have never felt threatened or anxious that my ancestry would in any way put me at risk, nor did I sense that any great historical misdeeds had been done Italians. In fact, I hardly thought of my background growing up—though once in a while there would be reminders. Why, for example, were my elders rooting for boxer Nino Benvenuti in the Olympics.

I grew up amidst Catholics at parochial school, fifty or more in a class. Italians were second in the hierarchy, with most of the popular kids, team coaches, and local politicians Irish. On my Little League Team, every name was Irish except mine and another. We might have been played in Dublin. Catholics from other than Ireland or Italy were lower on the implicit caste system. German, Polish, and Hispanic Catholics seemed to have less clout within that particular New York dioceses. The Jewish kids were in the public school system, so there was not much interaction.

Yes, Catholics are too numerous for any tyrant to exterminate, and one can’t be too naïve to believe it would otherwise be imaginable,  given genocides elsewhere and with the American Indian.

You cite that Judaism in various epochs presented a challenge to the prevailing religious orthodoxy which created conflict. I assume this is true, but one of many factors. Also, you note that Jews in Germany trusted they were secure. “The Berlin Stories”, by Christopher Isherwood, describes the protagonist’s relationship with a refined German Jewish businessman (Isherwood was gay), and gives a vignette of German Jewish family life, and the increasing alarming depradations made against that society, with the family eventually arrested. I have heard arguments (and counterarguments)that Jews were too passive during the holocaust. Is this another reason for ongoing watchfulness?

I can see the obsessive compulsive formulation you describe as profoundly descriptive of ongoing antisemitism.  But isn’t the term you use associated with Jonathan Swift—"filthy lucre”. Also the histrionic underpinnings against blacks and Catholics make sense.  A Lutheran once gave me the stereotype on Catholics--partying and carousing all the time. 

Catholicism does indeed have a hierarchical structure. There is a layered hierarchy with a priest as intermediary with God. However, my perception is somewhat different from yours, John. My perception is that this hierarchy is not a source of misdirection and conservatism. For one, there is going to be more emphasis on established authority, which includes a belief in science. Hence you are going to get less of the freewheeling antiscientism that is part of the conservative oppositional style. And if you want to look at the fruits of the hierarchy, say, in France, with the Jesuits at the top, you have the formulation of nearly ever modern philosophy—rationalism, structuralism (Piaget, Lacan, Levi Straus), contractarianism, existentialism (Camus, Sartre), Voltaire and the ideas of the enlightenment, and so forth.  All those formulations are coming out of a society where a structured hierarchy was in place.

Your view, though, that Italians are pulled various directions politically is correct. Given the emphasis on family life (la via vechia) of Italians there is a chosen preference for safety—more conservative politics, involvement with established institutions (e.g., high rates of military service), and fewer of the riskier pursuits that might lead to scapegoating. "Blood of my Blood" is a book that describes this phenomena. Its been a possibly limiting strategy but safer. On the other hand, some well known socialists have been Italian—e.g., Ignazio Silone, etc. There has been a drift rightward over time, however.

As for "Immigration Act of 1924", that is a nice little bit of arcania.  The Sacco and Vanzetti case comes to mind as an example of prejudice against Italians a little before. 

Enjoy reading your opinions John--always so erudite. Also, isn't Auerbach a German name.

Damon L

On Saturday, December 8, 2018, 6:37:11 AM CST, John Auerbach <00000224c9c1aebb-dmarc-request@LISTS.APAPRACTICE.ORG> wrote:

Damon,

Thanks for your thoughts here.  Bigotry against Italian-Americans is also a complex topic and of course one about which I know fairly little, at least compared to my knowledge of antisemitism, but then this would depend on whose ox is being gored.  It is true that both Italians and Jews were targets of the Immigration Act of 1924, a law motivated by the racist and nativist tenor of the time, with its second rising of the Ku Klux Klan, and intended to stop the influx of immigrants from non-English-speaking and non-Protestant lands into the United States, but despite the obvious cultural similarities between Italians and Jews (e.g., focus on family and food, such that we used to say in New York that Italians are just Catholic Jews and Jews are just non-Catholic Italians), there are important reasons for their diverging social, cultural, and historical paths in the United States.  

First, it must be understood that antisemitism is history’s oldest hatred, predating the Christian Era but changing greatly with the divergence of Judaism and Christianity in the First Century CE.  The psychology of antisemitism is complex but in my opinion has always involved the dominant religious culture’s need to exterminate a religious minority that, by its very existence, poses a threat to the dominant religious culture.  In the pagan world, Judaism presented the threat of monotheism.  In the Christian World, Judaism presents a threat because it is an older monotheism, one that denies the need for salvation through Jesus.  OTOH, Italians, as Catholics, can be excluded from Protestant America, it being understood that there are many Protestants whose faith would lead them to reject any form of social exclusion, but Italians, as Catholics, do not pose a threat to Christian dominance and are also too numerous to be exterminated.  In consequence, no matter where we go and no matter how successful we might become, Jews always carry with us a sense of persecution, a belief that safety and security can vanish at a moment’s notice. The last group of Jews who seem not to have understood this were the Jews of Germany, who were perhaps the most assimilated Jews in Europe prior to the rise of Hitler and many of whom paid with their lives because they could not believe that the German populace would turn against them. I can readily see how a fear of exclusion might figure prominently in the cultural psychology of Italian Americans, but I doubt that a sense of persecution or a fear of extermination would be present. Damon, if you can enlighten me here, I would be indebted.

Second, as to the character of hatred directed against Jews, it involves mostly obsessional preoccupations, and here I am indebted to the work of Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, historian, psychoanalyst, and biographer of Hannah Arendt and Anna Freud.  She notes that Jews are regarded  as dirty and as vermin, prejudices consistent with obsessional needs for cleanliness and with the need to exterminate carriers of disease, or else are considered the miserly and concerned with money, prejudices that are reaction formations against fears of dirt and contamination.  If anyone thinks this latter point is a stretch, please consider the underlying meaning of the phrase “filthy lucre” and also the way that the obsessional character structure links cleanliness and miserliness.  This particular understanding of antisemitism also derives from the psychoanalytic Marxism of the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Fromm), which focuses on the obsessional structure of capitalism.  Meanwhile, per Young-Bruehl, prejudice against Catholics might include some of these more obsessional elements but are more likely to resemble prejudices against Blacks in the use of hysterical-histrionic defenses against fears of “excessive” sexuality and disorderly behavior.  Here, the relevant factor is that, in White Protestant America, it again being noted that numerous Protestants have a faith that could never allow such bigotry, certain groups are too numerous to be exterminated, the other group in our society that was subject to extermination being Native Americans, but are useful as a source of labor.  Here there is a need for society’s “lower orders” to breed in order to create this plentiful and therefore cheap labor, combined with a fear that these groups will breed too much, such that they will swamp the dominant group demographically.  This was one of the motive factors behind the eugenics of movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and I believe this same fear underlies the rise of prejudice against Latinos, who are in the main also Catholics, and other large immigrant groups.

Third, as to the political divergence between Italians and Jews since the end of World War II, it is not surprising that until recently, when the politics of ethnocultural exclusion reawakened, pitting monocultural rural areas against diverse cities, White groups became more conservative as they rose economically and moved to the suburbs to create White enclaves that, like the various Levittowns, were made possible through federal housing laws that made permissible, until the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the exclusion of African-Americans.  The one exception to this trend would be Jews.  This is not to say that there is no racism among Jews, for surely there is, but rather that Jews hold onto their liberal to left politics despite their economic success, such that about 70 to 75 percent of the Jewish vote went to Barack Obama, down from the 90 percent of the Jewish vote that went for FDR in the 1930s but very different from the rest of the present-day White vote, which has been majority Republican for some time now, especially among men.

So what are the causes of this divergence? I think the main sources would be the Jewish sense of persecution, which creates our natural sympathy or identification with all marginalized groups, combined with the Jewish emphasis on justice, which is the main value taught in the Hebrew Scriptures, and the lack of a central authority in Judaism, such that there is no one running the show, except maybe our mothers.  By contrast, in Catholic ethnic groups, there is always a strong potential for social justice values, as captured in Liberation Theology, and in John Kerry’s frequent statement, “Faith without Works is dead,” but Catholic culture is much more hierarchical than Jewish culture by virtue of the priesthood and the Papacy, and in the matter of feminism, Jewish and Catholic teaching on abortion simply are different.  Thus, the dominant political pulls in Jewish culture are leftward, with the exception of pro-Israeli nationalism, but among Catholic ethnic groups, there appear to be multiple political pulls in diverging directions, sometimes in the direction of justice and equality, sometimes in the direction of order and hierarchy.

If I have gotten any of this wrong, or if I have offended anyone through my ideas, I apologize for my insensitivity. I also stand willing to be corrected and to learn.

John S. Auerbach, PhD

On Dec 7, 2018, at 10:05 PM, A l <alstampa@LIVE.COM> wrote:

Thanks Damon. Thoughtful as always.

On 12/7/18 6:11 PM, Damon LaBarbera wrote:

I guess I am from that same era. I would look at noxious political or personal beliefs along the same lines I would look at other oddities of thought. I am not going to challenge outlandish or excessive (to me) religious beliefs, belief in urban legends, comments about the New World Order, perceptions that hurricanes or the World Trade Center were planned, certainty that the Illuminati run the world, or moral lacunae the person may have. If they have clinical relevance, of course, it may be useful to approach very cautiously in a manner that does not set off defenses. Occasionally, a client will have systematized thoughts acquired during a previous psychotic episode that are resistant to change. Bigotry might be seen as one of many peculiarities of thinking that are unproductive and personally jarring, but not the immediate material of treatment.

Personally, I sometimes hear a remark stereotyping Italians. I missed the era in the US where Italians were highly denigrated. If a client makes a remark associating Italians with the mafia, it is annoying, but hardly at a level that would prompt me to react. Also, Italians are partly to blame for romanticizing this particular aspect of their new world history. I react more strongly when I hear a client denigrating, without knowing it, people with mental health problems. My wife is "crazy". You must deal with a lot of "crazy" people. I may point out that crazy is not a particularly useful term, and also note that my clientele is not, on the whole, less successful than me in life. If I hear a racial mark, I may make a note that this individual may come from a retrograde culture, or one where such comments occur. The admissibility of airing such obnoxious comments likely limit that culture's ability to move ahead in the modern world. Also, some innocent ageism occurs when teens think I am likely to be computer illiterate.

One stereotype that I have is that there is a regional difference in how prejudicial comments are reacted to. This may be my own prejudice. I tend to think that Northerners are less likely to confront bigoted attitudes, contrary to expectation. There is more exposure to different subgroups, more of a history of having to accommodate to otherness,  and a strategy of minimizing/avoiding rather than maximizing conflict in the melting pot. My perception is that Southerners on the whole are likely to be more confrontive about differing attitudes and beliefs. It seems that some of the most vociferous arguments against prejudice come from the South. I don't know, just an impression.

Its curious how Jews time and again get targeted, and I've wondered why. Traditionally the negative view is a sort of Merchant of Venice caricature--a Rothschild facility with money and language. Whether it got worse post war is a good question, though my impression is that that is when the Jewish voice first began to be heard (Mailer, Roth, Bellow), including description that of soldiering in the war. That also seems to be a time when Jews began to dominate comedy.

Jews and Italians have much in common, including family structure, and DNA. Possibly the Italian tendency towards conservatism (in politics, for example) has removed them from some of the prejudice associated with the Jews, seen as more incendiary intellectually. And even the intellectual bent associated with Jews is probably somewhat threatening. Possibly the venturing of Jews into foreign lands (the Diaspora?)also has exposed them to more bigotry. 

Damon L

On Tuesday, December 4, 2018, 7:44:31 PM CST, A l <alstampa@LIVE.COM> wrote:

I come from a different era. Work with them as they present to you. Not up to us as psychologists to judge. Emphasize psychologist. If the patient were an ax murderer or a mob hit man would you decline to see that person?

 August 17, 2021

Eyeless in Gaza

Damon LaBarbera

 Eyeless in Gaza is a novel written by Aldous Huxley in 1936 and describes, in achronological order, the lives of a group of acquaintances and consorts in the first five decades of the 21st century.  Though Eyeless in Gaza is not one of Huxley's most popular or well known books, it may be -his finest, surpassing in-depth and literary innovation, so some opine, and I am inclined to agree, his better known 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. I first read the book about forty years ago, just out of college and in psychology graduate school.

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