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The 54-year-old woman presented as burrowed into some unhappiness while having achieved a good deal of professional success. The mother of two and the husband of one, she was the main source of financial support. They lived in a slightly decrepit midcentury modern house near the university where she worked. Years into her analysis she would say, repeatedly, that she loved her backyard more than she hated her husband. So, ergo, she could tolerate an unhappy marriage. This was a marriage where she continuously subordinated her own desires and instincts to those of her husband’s, who didn’t seem the least bit inclined to offer any love or support. Mostly he was a mean and selfish son of a bitch. The woman was always doubting herself, having a hard time seeing reality for all her attention to how things must really be according to some other people’s, any other people’s, perceptions. Early, that is two years, into the analysis, she abruptly terminated it. Two years later she came back having lost a lot of weight and gained a good measure of insight into herself. But she still repeated the mantra of loving her backyard more than hating her husband. She complained that she could not figure out how to parent her children. On the cusp of adulthood, they were indeed challenging. She never knew where she stood with them, how to mother them, what it was to be a good mother. In fact, this drew us back to an early recurrent theme: that in her childhood her parents had treated her as a little adult, a source for advice, approval, even sexual arousal. To compensate for her precociously adultified early experience, even as a small child she identified as an adult. She could handle whatever. She could take care of anyone and everyone. Whatever they needed, she could attend to it. However they saw things, she‘d see to things. So maybe you see where I am going. Or maybe you don’t. She thought she understood and could take care of other people’s needs and desires, but she had little clue about her own. It’s like she could not hear them.
This clinical vignette brings to mind the much beloved little essay, Ghosts in the Nursery, which describes a treatment decades ago of an infant boy who had a mother so traumatized that she could not hear her baby’s cries. Not just metaphorically but literally, she did not hear them. The social workers were in the room, the baby was wailing, and the mother was oblivious. It took everything they had for the social workers not to pick up and soothe the baby, but not wanting to embarrass the mother they let him cry for an unbearable five minutes or so. Why, they later wondered, does the mother seem to actually not hear her baby’s cries? What happened to her? So when they returned they began to ask and they began to unearth all the trauma the mother had endured in her own childhood. She could speak of the neglect and trauma matter-of-factly, but there was no affect attached. So they proceeded to return to it often and remark, “that must have been awful” or sad or painful or whatever in order to get her to connect what happened to her and how it had actually been for her. And as they did so in their sessions with mother and baby, the women began, spontaneously, to start hearing her baby’s cries and pick him up and soothe him.
Since reading this essay for the first time in my own psychoanalytic training, I have been gripped by it. How concretely it connects the divorce between traumatic experience and affect. Indeed, the divorce is not incidental. It is integral. Some experiences elicit feelings that are too hard to bear, that are, in fact, impossible to bear. As libidinal little creatures who cannot bear pain, we find ways to split it off. Surely all the defense mechanisms that have been chronicled in the psychoanalytic literature are testaments of this basic phenomenon. When something hurts, we do whatever we can to keep form hurting. Call it what you will: regression, repression, reaction formation, isolation, undoing, projection, introjection, turning against the self, and reversal. All these are vicissitudes against anything experienced as intolerable. The mother who as a child was neglected, the woman who as a child was deprived of her childhood, anyone who suffered anything that was simply too much to bear, may well turn to these defenses.
The mother of the baby had found life bearable through isolating the affect of her own trauma. The other mother found solace in tending to other people’s needs and disavowing any of her own. But one day, each woke up, the first through the gentle awakening by the social workers. The second was more complicated. That mother who had assiduously split off her own desires on to the needs of others, even through years of analysis, woke up one day to find her daughter being denigrated and manipulated by the father. Suddenly, this reality was too much. It slapped her in the face. She could no longer think that she could let it abide and take care of or clean up the toll. What was tolerable one day, was suddenly impossible.
Funny how I am using the same words to describe two different realities: the traumatized one and the current one. The one that the small child must defend against to stay lucid. The one the adult must grapple with to move ahead. The small child can well cower beneath the covers. The person trying to make her way in the world needs to look outside and see reality. Where the child has few if any means to change reality, the adult can get a divorce.
And so she did.
Noelle McAfee
There’s an old civil rights slogan: We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. The slogan of the Trump base might be: He is the one we were waiting for. And they will continue to wait, now even after he has left office, even after a second impeachment, and even if the Senate votes to convict and prevent him from office again. They will continue to wait and clamor for someone who will restore what was supposed to be theirs: the American dream promised to descendants of the Europeans who came to America, white America.
The Trump base is not going away. In psychoanalytic terms, it remains gripped by a fantasy of white entitlement, an identity of being those who are truly deserving. They are beset by paranoia that enemies have stolen what they deserve.
This identity is largely unconscious, anxious, and unstable, a defense against a more primordial anxiety of having no real or rightful place in the world. One need not be a member of a white supremacist organizations to have an identification with whiteness and all its connotations. But most of those enticed by it are white.
Unlike historically rich ethnic or religious identities—whether Italian or Nigerian, Jewish or Muslim, whiteness is not really an identity at all. It is an epiphenomenon and legacy of colonialism, something shared by colonialists and constructed in opposition to those colonized.
White identity is guilt-ridden and fragile to its core; but it has through American history been the ticket to membership, inclusion, and citizenship. And now in the second decade of the twenty-first century, that ticket is being called out for being a fraud. It will no longer get you to the front of the line. You will need to wait your turn like everyone else.
Many in the Trump base deny they are racists, but there is ample evidence of their unconscious belief and primordial anxieties. Look at the symptoms.
During the election season, every single time Trump or one of his surrogates was asked about racial injustice, they immediately associated to Antifa. This is a symptom of the large-group identification and its childish defenses, including a paranoia that someone is out to destroy them.
Other symptoms need no psychoanalytic interpretation: the gallows at the morning rally on January 6, the Confederate Flag brought in to the US Capitol, the t-shirts emblazoned with racist and genocidal slogans.
Those enticed by a fantasy of white identity, whether consciously or not, are enraged at being denied the entitlement that should come from being the ones who made America great. For the fantasy of entitlement to stay alive, it needs someone who might fulfill the fantasy. Trump was their man. But without him they will find someone or something else.
A fantasy of white entitlement also thrives by identifying enemies to blame for robbing them of what they deserve. Conspiracy theories readily supply these, from the Deep State trying to undermine Trump to those largely black urban populations stealing the election.
What is to be done? Certainly, closing down online venues for conspiracy theories and misinformation helps. But so long as the root of the problem persists, no amount of “fact-checkers” will set things straight. No account of Trump’s tens of thousands of lies will unsettle his followers’ certitude that Trump (or whoever comes next) is their savior. Those caught up in these extreme defenses will find whatever “facts” fit their delusions.
To get to the root of the problem, we need to address the fundamental anxieties at work. For those white folks who have been left out of the global neoliberal economy, there is the anxiety of being in unmoored in the world. For those white folks who are profiting from neoliberal economies, there is an unconscious anxiety that whatever place they have was ill-gotten.
We need to embark a new collective founding of our country. This will include public policies that address the ways in which a neoliberal global economy is in fact robbing many of a decent life. A new founding will also include what each of us can do in our day-to-day lives, asking our neighbors and kin caught up in conspiracy theories, rage, and paranoia: How are you doing? Is everything alright? We can and should create spaces for everyone to reckon with guilt and responsibility, build relationships across differences, and share their grief and worry about the country.
In the end, we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.
Noelle McAfee
Governments and their institutions can do a lot of things. But one thing they cannot do is create their own legitimacy. That’s the brilliant thing about politics, no matter how fascistic it might be: institutions want to be seen as legitimate. But only the people themselves can bequeath legitimacy on their institutions.
What we are witnessing across the world in the #blacklivesmatter protests following the murder of George Floyd is a massive withdrawal of legitimacy from the police.
An op-ed in today’s New York Times makes this point perfectly. Hahrie Han writes, “Something unthinkable happened in Minneapolis over the past two weeks: The Police Department lost its legitimacy.”
It did not happen overnight, nor just over the past two weeks. “This work was possible only because organizers could build on years of organizing that connected people and built the skills they needed to mobilize a rapid response. As Ms. Fairbanks said: ‘No single person or organization made this happen. It took years of people, especially black women, doing the groundwork of building trust and accountability. It takes years of conversations about what it means to be community. That is what gave us the opportunity to align when we needed to.'”
Noelle McAfee
Sitting in front of a fire, wearing a cardigan sweater, in February 1977 President Jimmy Carter addressed the nation about the energy crisis that had punched the country in the gut. Clearly the White House’s thermostat must have been turned down. The fire crackled, making the living room warm and toasty. Carter spoke of national policies but also what citizens could do, uttering the words “conservation” and “sacrifice.” The message was clear: turn off unnecessary lights, turn down the thermostat, put on a goddamned sweater.
I remember clearly the contrast from the December before, when every house in my neighborhood was decked out in holiday lights, to the following December when there were no holiday lights to be seen. Everyone took to heart the message of conservation, and also perhaps the message that the annual rite of hauling out ladders to string the lights was no longer necessary. And ever since, the rite is no longer obligatory but voluntary. Now I marvel when I see a house strung out in lights.
I wonder what social distancing — what the mandate to work at home, what the elbow bump (that now is even too close) — will do to our social practices. I can teach class from my living room. Maybe I could teach it from across the world? Why risk running into a student or colleague in the hallway?
Jimmy Carter was absolutely correct about what we needed then and still need to do now about our energy habits. He discussed not just conservation but renewables and a comprehensive national policy.
Now in the face of a viral pandemic, it is absolutely right for us to stay as far away from each other as we can. But not forever, I hope. Not for long.
Conservation is key for energy policy or what we now think of as climate change policy. Social distancing is necessary to stave off the coronavirus. But these are ways of addressing symptoms, not getting at underlying and systemic processes. Addressing climate change means developing renewable sources of energy, just as Carter anticipated over forty years ago but which has yet to be carried through. In fact, under the cover of the coronavirus pandemic, Trump has been busy rolling back Obama’s climate change measures.
Likewise, preventing pandemics requires robust public health policies. But instead of these, the United States’ health care system is geared to addressing individual’s needs (or at least those with decent health insurance) not the systems that allow for the proliferation of illness in the first place.
If we address the roots of these problems, maybe the future could hold holiday cheer and lots of hugs and kisses from all our friends.
Noelle McAfee
I am uninspired,
a little broken, a little sad, and
trepidatious, undone by my mother
wondering if I can write poetry,
but I suppose I already am. This
is a long poem,
interrupted by news flashes and news holes.
Barrenness. Grape purpleness, a virus
ravaging people all over the
Earth,
and there’s not much I can do. The
best I can do is nothing.
Don’t leave the house. Maybe
stay in this little nook of the
house, with my microwave and
big white fridge, with my French
press and small jar of sweetener.
Maybe doing nothing is the
best revenge
against a microbial virus with
the fucking gall
to do this to us all
and a moronic president
hoping for full pews on Easter.
That’s not my Easter
you son of a bitch
Take that in your eye, in your
orange morass of hair and
white-rimmed eyeballs.
Noelle McAfee
Not so long ago, epidemiologists said of a new deadly virus, “not if, but when.” Now the answer is “now.” I read all the news all day long, and it seems there is nothing left to say. Then today a friend wrote me with a “chain mail” poetry letter. So I sent a poem to a stranger, one of my favorite Robert Creeley poems, I Know a Man.
So there are words after all. I will start by digging up some poems I wrote half a lifetime ago. And maybe I will start writing some new ones.
Cactus Leaves
I’m getting
used to the idea
of death
he said to her
while she lay
sucking cactus
leaves, occasionally
sitting upright
to pull a thorn
from her teeth,
and later, when
the glare gave
way, they made
love in the sand
seeking redemption
then talked
smoking about the
lack of things
to dwell on ever
since abandoning
the Cutlass on the
side of I-91
having assumed
it wasn’t carrying
them anywhere
anyhow,
but still neither
of them mentioned
their visions:
the well and the
swelling tide and
drowning
Noelle McAfee
How could it get worse. A president found guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors by the US House of Representatives let off the hook by a Senate more willing to look after their own future than the present and future of the country they are supposed to serve.
In my piece last summer for the Los Angeles Review of Books, “The Public Sphere in Dark Times,” I argued that thanks to the robust role of the informal public sphere even Trump could not turn this country into a dictatorship. The events of this past week are put these ideas to the test.
In that piece I distinguish three realms of the public sphere: 1) the formal one of elected bodies, 2) the elite one of leading news media and “opinion leaders,” and 3) the informal one of the street, social media, informal conversations that radiate and connect with each other all over the country and around the world. I argue that all three realms intersect and bounce around and test each others’ ideas.
At this point in time, the formal realm of the public sphere is deeply divided, but enought of it has gained power to legally, if not in any other respect, exonerate Trump. The elite opinion realm is also divided but for the most part highly critical of trump. The informal public sphere, at least as far as Twitter shows, also really critical. The rest of the public sphere, slumbering away in the hinterlands, a sleeping polar bear of apathy? It’s hard to say. Will the informal realms of the public sphere be able to hold the more formal and conservative ones accountable?
My theory is not a crystal ball. Time will tell.
Noelle McAfee
forlorn bridge
I just quit Facebook today. It wasn’t that big a part of my life but now that I’ve quit it I realize how much of my cyborg life it was. Just like my phone. I might not use it that much but it is always there. And now FB no longer is, not the scores of people from my adolescent years, not the students and colleagues from my 30s, not my more recent friends from greater DC and Boston, not my current philosophy colleagues from all over the world. Facebook made it possible for me to have all these great connections, just as it made it possible for it to scoop up private data from 31 percent of the global population. Yes, 31 percent. And then monetize us, harvest us, market to us, capture us for whatever they want. So I decided finally, after much prodding from a few friends, to say, no. No more. I have found an alternative to Facebook that promises not to sell my data, not to algorithmize my content, to just let me share my news with people I like. Maybe this is a fantasy that somehow I can keep my personal stuff to myself. But I’m okay with better being a good alternative to unacceptable.
What is so curious is that so many of my otherwise principled friends and colleagues are willing to scoop up the benefits of Facebook and turn a blind eye to the harm it is doing.
Noelle McAfee
Screenshot 2019-11-22 at 9.17.49 PM
I just finished watching Ken Burns’ two episodes on Frank Lloyd Wright. I’m left with where I was at the start, with mixed feelings. Yes, Falling Water is one of the most stunning architectural masterpieces of the past century, but for the most part Wright’s architecture focused on creating inner sanctums, not windows to the world. And most of it leaves me cold.
He was a philanderer and a charlatan and a narcissist and an egoist. And there is no “however” to follow to make up for his personality flaws. The man seems to have been totally unbearable.
But there was genius. He knew how architecture could create a richer internal world.
Which makes me think about his mother.
Ken Burns’ documentary makes clear that Wright’s first and ever love was his mother, and he was hers. His father abandoned them, just as he later abandoned his own first family. The man never negotiated the Oedipus complex, because he didn’t have to. So throughout his life he remained the narcissistic omnipotent childish overlord, and demanded that everyone treat him as king.
But maybe in that pre-oedipal refusal of oedipus, in that refusal to succumb to a superego (the heir of the oedipus complex), he was able to retain an inner magical world that could create Falling Water? What does that say about the tradeoffs we all make every day, trading away creativity for civilization?
Noelle McAfee
Screenshot 2019-08-30 at 8.19.18 PM
I’m planning to run a workshop for graduate students on how to manage time, both the time when there’s never enough time and the stretches of time when there is all the time in the world (like a sabbatical). I’m still working on this, so let me run it by you all. Maybe you have some ideas? Please post them in the comments.
Time Management Workshop
Introduction
Plot out your work.
Tools:
Tips for how to manage time when you are over-extended.
Tips for how to manage when you have big stretches of unstructured time.
No matter your style or how much or little time you have, forget about multitasking. Studies show that no one can multitask. Aim for serial monotasking, whether a day at a time or even just 15 minutes at a time. One can get an astonishing amount done in 15 minutes when monotasking. As a piece of this process – but not the whole thing — look up the pomodoro method. Feel free to adapt this for what works best for you.
Noelle McAfee
Screenshot 2018-06-15 09.59.34
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