Author Archives: Jane Freese

The Parable of the Seawall – Essays is a collection of writings by Matt. Some essays were written very recently, others many years ago. In the course of organizing the themes within the book, questions came to my mind.  The interview is a clarification of his thoughts and ideas. The entire interview will appear in three parts.  –– Jane

Part I

JF:You’ve seen changes and developments in the world generally and in the United States specifically over the span of 70 years. Your opinion of humanity remains bleak despite progress in civil rights, feminism, medicine, et al. Given what you know and what you’ve witnessed, why such a negative assessment of humanity’s progress?

I will respond to your question, although a host of questions come to mind more about your thinking process than mine. And that can be deferred for pillow talk in our marital bower. When I taught high school sociology I came across a term coined by Robert Bierstedt, a famous American sociologist, called “temporocentrism,” which he defined as an inclination or tendency to judge or evaluate other people in terms of “one’s own century, one’s own era or one’s own lifetime.” I use that here because your question latently smacks of this often unconscious or quite natural bias.

When I look at history I do not see a straight line of progress. Americans, unfortunately, think that we are continually progressing down the road (Manifest Destiny) which is a labile fantasy that I reject. In my readings as a young history major I came across several theories of history and one I dimly recall is that of the ever upward moving spiral, as if different ages, eras, reigns, empires brushed across the outward spiral, leaving both good and bad historical “residues,” the invention of the cotton gin or the Inquisition. Culminatively the spiral moves upward and mankind progresses or “improves,” whatever word you choose. I believe this is a delightful myth, good for historians, bad for living one’s life. I dismiss all theories of historical development. I view mankind as an evolutionary misfit – or anomaly, doing its haphazardly and slovenly best or worst throughout the eons.

I see no Newtonian force here – gods, civilizations, cultures, religions, great minds or masters influencing mankind for an eternal purpose. I do not believe in destiny. I do not believe in the future. It is all random happenstance in my world. Believe it or not, chance ain’t a bad game to play. When I am faced with this question which implies the improvement of the species in some ways, I merely respond it is luck or random event. I take no pleasure in the belief system that all will come out right in the end. That is pure rot. It is pablum, a self-fed nurturance to mask the real anxiety which is that there is no intention or purpose in this world unless you choose, existentially, let us say, to determine that for yourself.

Man does not improve; he hasn’t done so in 50 centuries. What may or may not improve is his physical environment, his societal, economic, sociological, psychological milieu.

As I mentally peruse the eons of evolutionary time and what man has done or is doing, I can agree that a flushing toilet and paper is far superior than one’s hand and a frond. I enjoy the present “evolutionary” gifts of the moment, of this time, but I also fully realize that Cro-Magnon man had the same cranium and brain power we have except for the mechanical and digital techniques we now own. Man has not changed but his petri dish has. He is the same creature acculturated into this milieu, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.

Given my thinking on this, I see no significant difference in the instinctual traits man has had from the beginning. Think of Freud who I believe announced – thus so feared and despised — this clearly, and in this announcement was the real fact that civilization and its discontents would be an ongoing situation; that we need to examine our animal selves for what we can tame or domesticate and to learn what we cannotsafely harness, such as war. Freud’s repetition compulsion, which I subscribe to, informs me that we will repeat forever the horrors of war until evolution in its own good millennial time will mutate us into a different creature.

I see the darkness in the world, in man, in particular, and I have spent my later years trying to deal with it in myself and especially in others. No outstretched hand by God to Adam on the Sistine Chapel for me.

After all my years of writing about the Holocaust, the one great learning for me is that it is repeatable; that we may learn a little from it, but it will be massagedinto a softer, better to “sweeten” it historical lesson and not much metabolized by future generations who I couldn’t give a fuck about. “Never Again” is an inept, inane and useless slogan, representing more of the ache and agony of the generations after the Holocaust. The Holocaust will be mostly forgotten centuries hence and will be so attenuated that in American textbooks it will take its place along the genocide of the American Indian, a paragraph or two or three. If you want a measure of life in this existence, find love, find meaningful work; the rest is illusion…Gather thee rosebuds while ye may.

Having said all of the above, what is missing here is the non-rational response. And this requires a psychological or therapeutic response explaining why I may or may not have a dour sense of the present and of the species.Granted, I have supplied my rationale, but there are nether areas in me that, quite frankly, I choose not to share. Perhaps. I am a product of many lacquers and veneers laid down upon me over the years from childhood to adulthood. I am conditioned man. I will defer here, but my original thinking still stands.

JF: Could you, for a moment, explore somewhat you refer to as the “non-rational response”? Speculate, given your past experiences, why you have c hosen to have such a “dour sense of the present and of the species.” Is there something you gain from adopting this attitude?

Ah, the knife is not only put in but also turned. I am challenged. All kinds of associations come to mind because of this invasive question. Is my rage at the species masking a disappointment as well? Do I get off on secondary gain, deriving covert pleasure by constructing such a defense that is purely rational? We shall see.

Allow me to surf my wave-like feelings and associations. I am horn. I am nail. All this comes to mind. Have I been so hurt or ravished that I’ve allowed myself to grow horn over the wound, hard nail? Very much so – that is an admission. I see that. Was I so abraded as a child that to ease the wound I needed to grow armor? I think so. I know so. It is more than a belief. Particulars will follow but the associations keenly assault me.

Indulge the thought that we give ourselves self-lies, the rational KY gel that keeps us and our lives lubricated so that we can fit into all the vaginas of everyday living and life. We fear irritation. Moreover, self-lies can morph into full blown myths, completely grandiose constellations to explain purpose and intent, the meaning of this world, of our place in it. Often, I, you, confabulate these fables of self not in a conniving, smirking way but as the daily inhalation of breathing – like oxygen, we take it for granted. So, I have my myths and my self-lies. Like the skirl of bagpipes in the distance, I announce my distaste of this world and the species, part lie, part truth, no doubt, and part self-myth.

Religion is a deranged myth that bathes the illusionist in unguents and emollients. That a Jewish putz who most likely never existed – there is a well-known study made of the meticulous records kept by the Romans, much like the Nazis and their paper work about the Holocaust that reveal no mention of a Jew being crucified at that time and date, etc – is said to have risen and returned takes your breath away until you realize billions on this planet give it more than credence; the heirarchies; the abstruse philosophies; the anti-Semitism; the Inquisition; witch trials; pedophilia; thegenocidal behaviors of the Conquistadores; the endless horrors perpetuated by religion and its practitioners reveal the ornately baroque nature of myths and men. Radical Islamists and their perverted laws juiced in testosterone and mind-blowing rigidity all support my dim view of mankind as well as the inordinate power we all give our self-myths.

An anecdote from my childhood before 1950 may serve to reveal something. I recall at that young age before 10, I believe, that I had this habit of bringing my shoulders up, as if it was cold outside; it may have served as a self-protective haunch. Noticing this behavior, my father asked me to stop it. I became aware of the unaware. As I think back it is emblematic of anxiety. In my short story, “Down to a Sunless Sea, “ I wrote of my habit of rubbing the backs of feetwith the sides of my shoes, to such a degree, it hampered my walking at times. I attributed that to sexual anxiety, perhaps most likely masturbation. I am not here trying to be reductive, just go with it for a while. If you blow it off, think Jesus as he rises, for that may end your being dismissive. Something in my home and family at that time was stressing me and I expressed that by the haunching of the shoulders.I have no answer nor can I attribute what had caused that anxiety, but it was there. And as of this writing, I still have a hard time with mastering my anxiety.

What I am teasing out for you is that such anxiety most likely, and other stressors as well, to use the jargon, have helped me create a myth, that the world out there is the cause for my miseries; that “bad” people have always meant me harm — even my parents, they most of all, if I resort to a child-like cry. I have the astounding association at this moment that if we closely watch our children in their first 10 years we can see a kind of mimicry of the adult to be; how the child deals with stress, how the child views work, how the child handles absence or abandonment or how the child, like me, deals with benign neglect, the lack of cradling, of being read to, of hugs and embraces, of feelings well said and bravely acted upon.

As I look back, which is the obligation I feel, for someone my age, I assess my life story. However, as a writer, I have been assessing my life for many years now and I can only offer up the latest edition. I look at the world with a jaundiced point of view; I see that. I look at the species as a cynic. I use the term, a pesso-optimist, for I do relish the inherent beauties of nature and the joyous fact that I experience the day. I feel the inherent seething rage I have for what was not done with me or to me in a healthy or constructive way; that rage still broils and simmers and what better way than to discharge this, like an infant swipe at a miscreant toy, thanto strike out and look for the chinks in humanity’s armor.

Sadly, this insight or observation only compounds the validity of my original take on humanity which is that it is its own worst enemy; how ironic, that my microscopic shout at the gods among billions actually does validate something about the species. After the Holocaust, do I have to add my complaint? The Holocaust, that event which we run from like a leper, says more and more about mankind than ever needs saying. I run to that event to examine its scraps, its bones, its fetid history. I dig archaeologically as a writer within its ashes because it calms me, reassures and reaffirms me, tells me that I was inherently right. Being right does not give me any pleasure. Unlike Robert Frost’s epitaph, I do not have a lover’s quarrel with the world. Perhaps my stone shall read: “Torn.”

JF: You mention in your essays several men you admire, namely, Orson Welles, Nikos Kazantzakis, Krishnamurti, Peter Lorre, Daniel Day-Lewis, Sigmund Freud and your friend and therapeutic supervisor, Ben Rapoport. What traits do you perceive that these men have in common that you find especially compelling or admirable?

What they all have in common is that they are artists. And what is it about artists that I am so smitten with? A rejection of all tyranny over the minds of man (Jefferson), enemies of authority, especially of the state and of the culture they swim in as well, a lifelong struggle to see, that is, to decondition themselves, a passion of the mind, a feeling to or for a spiritual value in one’s own living free of cant and religion, an effort to realize themselves as much as they can, to experience life from moment to moment, and an enduring effort to rid themselves of fear, especially the fear of death, is the powerful glue that they all have in common.

I do not speak of Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark here; he is that writer’s pimple of what is the creative soul. Of all of them, Ben is the one I know in personal relationship. Often he speaks of himself as a life merchant, meaning that he sees his task as blowing oxygen into the lost souls who see him, to share with them the daily natural wonder of life. Ben is a kind of life force. Those around him feel it. Wouldn’t it be loverly if we all could attain that? Oh, we can. Life is art and we can become artists of that phenomenon. It is not for nothing that artists are not very valued in society for they remind the uninformed – oh, why pull punches here – the herd – of what they are not. Artists show life in process, in action and in deed and this is always threatening. I will venture an association here. Most of us identify with death, as a species, than with living. Nazi “culture” reeked of death and dying.

I am particularly attracted to transcendence, thinking here of Kazantzakis. Call it characterological if you will, but it has attenuated; often I take a nap when I feel its opalescence come over my spirit. Men like Camus and his Sisyphus do appeal to me, for I admire struggle, the bettering of one’s own self, perhaps the need to go beyond what one is. In his book about Saint Francis Kazantzakis stripped away all the namby- pamby gloss about the man and revealed in exquisite prose the agony he endured to transcend or to be cleansed. I am always moved by the desire to become better, although the desire to be takes priority with me at this point in life.

JF: With the exception of the fictional character, Babette, you do not discuss any women in your essays as either personal or artistic people that you admire. Are there any women who you do admire?

Yes. No.I’ve written about the death of my mother and my relationship to her in short stories, especially in “Down to a Sunless Sea.” I’ve written about my wife and my daughter in separate essays (passim ).However, I must admit that it became apparent in my own treatment that I have an ongoingstruggle with women. In a Rorschach Test I took in my forties, one interpretation of an inkblot I associated to involved my attempt to free myself of the “claw” or “crablike” image of my mother . My mother did not castrate me but her control over me was immense. “In the Parable of the Sea Wall” which opens this book, you can see the relationship undergoing tidal shifts. If she had not died early on, I probably would have had a hell of a time separating out from her which I never did as an adolescent. Her death freed me to go on as a child, but alone nevertheless. Of course, indeed I mention “Herbie,” that very significant short story in which I wrestled with my father Oedipally and with my mother, the all powerful She, for she controlled my father and myself. In “Mortise and Tenon” about a controlling mother I laid out all the psychic costs. Both stories appeared in Down to a Sunless Sea.

You may make the case that a significant theme of my writing is the attempt to be free of my mother among others.

So, on latent and manifest levels, I struggle with women, particularly those who control while ascribing nether characteristic to those who do not control.The wide Mississippi of my life has probably a great deal to say about my relationship to women. In short, I give wives and daughters a hard time. Given that, allow me to consider what women, literary or not, political or not, who I am respectful and admiring of. Ironically, as you can attest, I am not a sexist, enjoy the variety of behaviors which women evince but that may very well be a charming defense.

Mary Renault was the only woman writer who I felt had a commanding control of her art. She wrote two wonderful historical fiction books, The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea. I recall her description of a jewel-encrusted saddle that is remarkable for its detail, a model of the writer writing as a lapidarist. Renault imagined the world of ancient Crete, her sentences declarative in nature and quarried from Attic stone. In terms of movies, I was impressed by Bette Davis, for her ferocity and all out commitment to her art. I admire Hedy Lamarr, an amazing beauty, but whose greatest contribution was the invention, with a colleague, of a coding device during W.W.II that was so advanced and secretive she was not awarded a medal for this until decades later.

I wish I had more to say about women; apparently my interests did not bring me into that direction, so my limitations in the field are quite haphazard and happenstance. As I remember, I think of the writer Tillie Olsen who had to defer writing for almost 20 years until her children grew up; I think of my grandmothers, both bizarre in their own ways – one a bag woman, the other a blunderbuss of a person, an old vaudevillian; I flashback to my mother who was a major depressive and unconsciously required that I “hold” her misfortunes and be so kind as to metabolize them for her. It is hard to cast this thought into words but I probably own a meanness or vindictiveness for the fair sex; perhaps I am being too hard on myself but women have defeated me here and there in my relationships, my mother being the prime culprit. I find this difficult to express here. I really wonder, at 70, whether these are mental constructs, of long standing, or are they reflections of what was and what has been attenuated by age and growing wiser. I don’t know, dear Jane.

The Parable of the Seawall – Essaysis a collection of writings by Matt. Some essays were written very recently, others many years ago.Inthe course of organizing the themes within the book, questions came to my mind.  The interview is a clarification of his thoughts and ideas. This is the second installment in a three part series.  – Jane

JF:What is your definition of success? Who do you consider successful? Do you consider yourself a success?

What comes quickly to mind is that it is all in the eyes of the beholder. The entire series of questions rest on the values I own. If the values are those of society, which I recognize, for I swim daily in its broth, then even the word “success” is loaded with all kinds of valences.According to society, which is mercantile and capitalistic, I am not a success. If, however, I define myself according to my own personal and idiosyncratic values, I have a measure of self-worth, for I choose not to use the word “success,” as it smacks of Americana. If I say to myself how are you as an artist, I can say that I have achieved some measure of artistic intention and that pleases me very much.

An anecdote by Herbert Gold, novelist, comes to mind. Many years ago I read an interview in which he was stupidly asked how he compares himself to other contemporary writers (the interviewer trapped in his own morass).He tells of a time when much younger he had a small shabby city apartment which had flimsy walls so that one could hear into the other apartment. Gold tells the interviewer he would have sex with his girl at the time and often he might hear the other guy having sex with his girl as well. The story’s point, for Gold, that while he was enjoying himself he had no need to compare himself to the other man for he was too busy having a great moment with his lover.

To compare, like the Oscars, is to lose personal meaning.

I work hard, rationalize as we all do, to fend off conditioning and mind-polluting aspects of this culture which knead us into rating ourselves, that part of this culture which is atrocious. I work continually on fighting off that plague. I fall prey at times to comparison but not for long. I will go to my grave unrewarded for my writing. I will never be interviewed by Oprah. I am free of all that dross.

All of the above might be labeled a terrific psychological defense against not having been “successful.” I say fuck that. I know who I am.

The second part asks me who I think is successful. I can give names of artists, I imagine, but allow me to approach it differently.Again I bridle at “successful” as it connotes and denotes capitalism. In a non capitalistic way those of us who have deconditionedourselves, who see the malignant aspects of any culture, who share Krishnamurti’s observation that all societies are essentially corrupt,who live his or her life in freedom, who raise children to be free of their parents as well, who live within the curve of a question mark and refuse to live with answers are individuals who I admire.

The free human being asks exacting free questions. A free person is a threat to his society and will always be. As you look over the ages of history, often the individual is in conflict with his society. In the 20th century the state won out. In feudal Europe state and church won out. The individual soared during the Renaissance.Consider what the Renaissance gave us. Jefferson said it best, “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal enmity against all tyranny over the mind of man.” Ah, the Enlightenment.

The third part of your question is hard to get at. I am not the writer I would like to be. And I don’t think I will become that. However, I dwell in the personal fat of my own ego and sense of self in that as a person, regardless of labels I have had –therapist, teacher, writer, parent and spouse – I have not been unnecessarily cruel or mean-spirited to my fellow man, although many do deserve that. I have been unfeeling, heartless to those around me, my family, in ways I deeply regret and in one case I cannot make recompense for my child is dead. I have been not been admirable or sensitive at moments in my parade to the cemetery, but I see most of all that, and rather than feel depressed about it, I truly roll it over in mind, almost on a daily basis, in the desire that I do no further damage and that I reconcile myself – if one ever can – to the insensitive man that I was. If you feel this is in some way “successful,” so be it. For me it is apparently the task of each one of us to consider who we are, what we have done in life as a human being and what we are about to do in the present and future.

Finally, a grace note – to be free of the illusions of religion, in my eyes, makes you a free individual, one who has accomplished much in life by divesting him or herself of this rigid societal plaque and therefore is a mature member of the human species.

JF:What is the purpose of writing The Parable of the Sea Wall, Essays? At the risk of sounding like a marketer, to who is it targeted? What do you hope readers will gain from reading it?

This present book of essays which includes and encompasses my thinking, feelings, cultural and psychological observations throughout the decades of my writing life is my summing up, the Hansel and Gretel trail of crumbs I have strewn about. When you and David Herrle suggested that I consider collecting my short essays and articles from my blog and other writings over the years, I thought the suggestion delightful for several reasons. I had to have my final say, for I see this book to be as a statement of who I am. I would like to fantasize that kith and kin in the years ahead might skim its pages and determine or decipher what I was saying or what I was croaking about at this and that age. I recall writing essays about my children and dating the time, day and year, for apparently I was then, I am now, concerned with keeping a record or establishing a tradition, it is the Jew in me, to foment memories. (see my essays on cameras; I record).

In about a year or less I may have in my hand a book that says as much as I can say about me. I am very eager to arrive at that, for it is consistent with who I am as an individual. Although we are all passing, ephemera, human lint on this planet in transit, it is a powerful and nourishing feeling for me to have paused long enough to have observed the passages of time and my place in it. Having shared this feeling with you, this now no longer private feeling, any question of pushing the book, marketing the book has no appeal to me, much like seltzer gone flat. I write not for you but for me, I write for dear ones and not the world out there. I don’t delude myself. Recognition is sweet but is only the gravy of “success.”

Gain? What is to be gained?When I read a book I don’t necessarily “gain” anything from it? I remember reading The Red and the Black by Stendahl. I was sixteen and didn’t understand much of it. However, I remember memorizing the definition of “parvenu,” as applied to the main character, Julien Sorel, and that word has stayed with me up to this paragraph.I learned a new word. I think books leave deposits, small and large, and very few transform our lives – other scribblers might strongly disagree. I believe that daily experience, living life is what make the difference (think Krishnamurti). Books are dead matter. If they produce ideas often these ideas become calcified and petrified into stone, such as religious works. If you like the book I am working on read it and put it away; if it serves as one worthy of discussion, so be it. I did not write the book for you to gain anything. I wrote the book for my own secondary gain, which is none of your business.

By the way, after a book is published the owner gives up all rights to his readership. I no longer own it, for it suffers from the virus of interpretation.

JF:You read the daily newspaper, keeping up with politics and world events.You have a degree and teaching experience in American history and yet I detect you are not terribly fond of the United States. Is that true?

In world history haven’t we suffered enough from that phenomenon we call Nationalism?I view myself born into a place and time by random happenstance; that I live in an organized and structured enclave called the United States of America in the Western Hemisphere. What ordains this place and this form of government as superior to all else?To argue, as Churchill did, that of all the systems of government this one is imperfect but is the best of the lot does not satisfy me at all. In the Sixties often car owners put decals on their windows showing a donkey rearing its hind legs with the injunction that if you don’t love America, get the hell out of it, a precursor to the Palinesque Rex. I also recall that a gas jockey got upset with my bumper sticker because it read “Question Authority.”

All societies are essentially corrupt (Krishnamurti) and I wholeheartedly subscribe to that. It gives me freedom, it allows me the capacity to scan with my inner crap detec tor all the illusions and delusions that this country experiences; it helps me to fend off the indoctrination and pollution that TV gives us. I identify with three things and in this order: I am a human being first; I am a Jew next; I am an American fourth or fifth. I have no third. I have more in common with men and women everywhere than I have with the countries they live in; I share the same biology and instinctual make-up. I am a man above all else. As a Jew I am a secular atheist but own an atavistic regard to the heritage I come from. I have gotten much more from that tradition than I have gotten from 300 years of Americana. It has a powerful “hold” on me which I wrestle with but do revel in. Fifty six centuries leave an impact! And the memories, particularly for the Jewish people, are important gifts to those who follow.

I will be critical of America, especially its culture, until I end my travail, for in many ways we are hypocrites, preaching nation-building and all the artifacts of Orwellian psycho-speak – “Mission Accomplished.” Whose mission? What mission? Why the connotation to the word “mission”? And so on. We are a country in decline, just look about yourself, with a remarkable tradition of know-nothingness throughout our political history. We are anti-intellectual, cannot abide creativity, abhor the learned in many aspects, an ambitious nation whose major contribution to the whole world, alas, has been marketing.To argue with this is to deny my very first statement about being a human being first, for this is my loyalty above all, the rest is politics and self-serving interests. Francis Bacon referred to the”idols” of the mind; America is one of them.

JF:You refused to pledge allegiance to the flag as a teacher. Why?

My mistake as a teacher, my naivete was to believe that teachers and administrators were serious about education. They were serious about indoctrination. Given that, in homeroom I’d ask students to rise and I did not allow speaking during the pledge, for there were those who took it seriously. I was subversive about my questioning authority (see “The Americanization of Emily”).Often the flag was above the blackboard in a device that held its stick and off to the left. Students, I noticed, would turn left and pledge. I recall at times that if there was no flag in the room they still assumed the position and pledged to the inanimate flag holder!

Once I asked a class to explore their response. I went to the flag and purposely examined it and found a label that said it was made in New Jersey, imagine Hecho en Mejico.I touched the flag in front of them as if examining a jacket in a men’s store, feeling it and so on. I asked them if they knew that there must be tens of thousands of these flags all over the state and nearby states. I asked them what made this flag so special that they rose and pledged to what clearly was an inanimate and dead thing.

To the point, I stressed that men die for other men, and if they died for symbols, how sad and how potent is conditioning. I choose not to die for a symbol. I’ll die for kith and kin. A flag is an idol of the mind, and to give it magical powers is as much as to see the picture of Jesus on a water tower in Iowa.

We are grossly conditioned as we grow up; society uses schools for that indoctrination; all religions do that, superbly well – Hannity, O’Reilly, Ingraham, Beck are really conditioned slaves.Although an old or traditional definition of psychotherapy is to make the unconscious conscious, consequently to deal with it, to observe its hold, as atherapist I found the greater part of my task was to help the client decondition him or herself. Jesus, they say, was a deprogrammer; good and fine and Paul reprogrammed right after that, the real founder of Christianity. Celibacy is conditioning and the consequence for women, to wit, is immense and ongoing.

In short, my stay on this planet is to be in insurrection, that is why I am an artist. The conditioned slobs rule. Am I conditioned”? You betcha. But I can pose the question…and you? …Are you even awake or just lint in your own pocket?

The Parable of the Seawall – Essaysis a collection of writings by Matt. Some essays were written very recently, others many years ago.Inthe course of organizing the themes within the book, questions came to my mind.  The interview is a clarification of his thoughts and ideas. This is the final installment in a three part series.  –Jane

JF: George Bernard Shaw said, “patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.” Could the same also be true of one’s religion or ethnicity? In one of George Carlin’s comedy routines he pointed out the ridiculousness of the slogan – “Proud to be Irish.” The slogan implies that being Irish is some sort of accomplishment. I could well argue that pride in being an American is not so different from pride in being Jewish. Neither is an accomplishment. One’s nationality, religion, race, ethnicity, height, IQ, etc is dependent on genetic probabilities and circumstances. Beyond what we do with the circumstances we are born into, what is to be proud of?

The anthropologist Ashley Montagu long ago suggested, given the hard evidence we have, that it would be preferable – and much more accurate — to say that human beings are one race and all the other sub-divisions are merely ethnic groups of one kind or another. But we are not up to that as yet.

To the point, I agree! But we humans are slovenly creatures in our thinking and in our responses. I am conditioned byJudaism, but what this particular conditioning has given me is the remarkable aspect of questioning, challenging what I read, to act upon unjust measures, to resist, to question authority – think of the prophet Nathan castigating David about what he had done to Uriah, all part of Jewish conditioning. So, I agree and ask for a dispensation on that. Americans do things that appall but I haven’t forgotten those GIs in World War II with their open smiles, Hershey bars and sticks of gum for the children.

Jews have been hunted for 2000 years because of anti-Semitic traditions directly flowing from Christianity as if we were a different “race” (Montagu). Often I think of myself as prey!I think you can cut me some slack if I take pride in what we have accomplished and what we have endured. In an admittedly chauvinistic history of Jews, in which he wrote that the history of the world is the history of the Jew, Max Dimont once saidthat if you look over recorded history you see the impact of certain great minds (all Jews)onmankind, to wit: Jesus…Moses…Spinoza…Einstein…Marx…Freud… You have to explain how such a small group, what Arnold Toynbee, “historian,” called a “fossil,” had such an enormous impact on the minds of men. Imagine what other great minds died during the Holocaust!

So, I agree, but with this tradition behind me, I cannot give it completely up, “Lord, whatfools these mortals be!”

JF:I have observed the insights you have with respect to our relationship, myself and you, as well as the world at large and what you are sharing in this interview. You practiced as a therapist for over two decades. Personally, can you share what psychotherapy has accomplished with you?

The initial response is I can do all that if you have a week to spare. The question, of course, not only makes me think at once but gets at some core issues within myself. So what I can share here, being as open as I can, reserving a measure of privacy, for my life is not an open book to anyone except you and here I draw lines as well, for I subscribe to the belief that we need to be our own best confidant. I am a private person and in this polluted culture this is very critical as I see it.

When I entered treatment with what later proved an incompetent therapist, I was in the midst of a surly divorce and a disastrous affair as it later proved to be. I came to treatment as a croaking frog, unaware, bereft of self-insight, non-reflective, lost, depressed, childish, angry and raging. Add a few more dour adjectives and that was the kettle of fish. I could not present to the shrink what it was I was suffering from. In short, I presented to her a child-man, a product of very poor parenting. How best can I say it, as I look back now? I was the end product of decades of rearing that did not leave a psychological deposit within myself. I simply had no ideawho I was or any sense of the history of my family or the patterns of the parenting I had lived with. I was numb, a psychological and emotional dolt. Consequently all decisions that flowed from that were not rational, immature and off the map. I acted not from within a core self; I acted, acted out, acted in, completely bamboozled by the very same events I set into motion.

Having said all this, allow me to cinematically cut to another image. Years later when I had become a therapist, I volunteered to be interviewed by a very wellknown psychiatrist, Robert Langs, who had a cork-lined office in Lenox Hillhospital in Manhattan. He interviewed me for about three hours.The book he wrote from all his interviews was called Madness and Cure, his thesis being that often clients are manipulated if not abused and destroyed by therapists, well-intended or not. It was my misfortune that I had a terrible therapist but in the condition I was at the time I had no idea of her expertise or lack thereof. In short, if you are hanging off the roof of a burning building, you don’t ask your rescuer if he is Jewish?

One salient example speaks volumes. I was broke, child support and alimony crippling me as well as the therapist’s fee. She offered me a way out. Telling me she was a doctoral student and that with her heavy client load she had a measure of difficulty in writing all her papers, she asked if I would write two papers for her and that she would reduce or absolve some of the debt. So, in effect, she was colluding with me. She broke every rule I hold dear as a therapist. I argue now that she was not only inept but a damaged human being and a damaging therapist. I believe she withheld what she did with me from her supervisor. You betcha!

The two papers were philosophical.I went at them furiously; you can imagine the intent – free of debt for a while and the unconscious one of pleasing my shrink. Clearly she submitted these papers under her name. Time went by and I became curious. I finally asked her what grades she got. She told me that they were two A’s. It took me some time to realize that I could do what she was doing, that I could do post-graduate work in a doctoral program in psychology. Serendipitously, my ghosting her papers had a salutary impact upon me. I, too, could be a shrink and I went out and did that.

I did not realize at the time I had willingly submitted myself to be used, to be colluded with, although in her eyes she was helping me out, a benumbing rationalization on her part. So, as Langs showed me, she was, in effect, burying me, my own treatment shunted aside for her gain. If you get his book, I am “Mr.Edwards.”

Clearly when I came to practice I avoided all these negative experienceswith my clients; I’ve made mistakes but I don’t collude, use the client for my own personal ends and other miscreants deeds this incompetent tried out on me unknowingly. Langs felt that I was that kind of client who fought back unconsciously at this rape and attempted to cure the shrink. A remarkable thesis then, but commonplace now, for sure.

I need to get to the heart of all this. Therapy became an amalgam for me, composed of working on myself, of seeing to use Krishnamurti’s terms, of working from within to outside, of perceiving,observing, of saying less but hearing with the third ear, as Reik termed it. At a jury duty request I recall an attorney who clearly did not like the response he saw on my face and confronted me about that. I told him that it was my face and I was glad that he could see my dislike upon it, for I had spent thousands of dollars for my feelings to finally appear on my countenance. The jurors roared and he was squelched. Therapy can help do that for you.

The critical issue here is that who I am I can see much better now but that does not mean, reader, that who I am has changed. I have attained a measure of awareness, but that is all. Think of the analogy of the salad dressing cruet we buy in a supermarket, the one that gives you spices in a separate packet to add to the olive oil. And so we do so. What we observe is a layer of olive oil now beneath a layer of spices. Still no dressing until we vigorously shake the cruet and all evidence of the spices disappear into the solution. For me treatment is like that; we learn to integrate ourselves but we do not add nor detract from the original self-substances.

As a therapist I helped the Other discover his compass, to label and demark his points of direction. He was not to be my disciple; it was his task at the end to be free of me, as all disciples suck – think of Jesus’s happy dozen, what a fucked up crew. I got a compass and I sailed with it, my compass rose. I think that is sufficient to help anyone to become aware.

Now I occasionally shake the cruet. That is enough for one lifetime. If you want proof of what the compass and my use of it has accomplished, you are reading it now.

JF:Psychotherapy played a significant role in your life. You were in therapy yourself, and later became a therapist. Given the unprofessional behavior of the therapist you endured, why did psychotherapy still appeal to you?

The practitioner was insidiously destructive and ineffectual, but the process intrigued me and worked for me regardless of her harmful interventions. The bottom line was that I had a paid friend, as they say, and the attention paid offered me much, tainted that it was. I was very needy at the time and it took another therapist to correct my thinking of what I had received, an emotional corrective, is the psych-speak for that. When Langs interviewed me it was several years after I had been in treatment and the revelations he provided disturbed me. In fact, I began to somatize and after a visit to my physician who could find no reason for my stomach pains asked me if I was under stress and gave me Librax. I put two and two together, for what occurred was that I took what Langs had interpreted to my gut, her malignancy. I felt validated.

On the surface I felt that psychotherapy had provided me with a way to and a way out, with a way in as well. It did make me aware – remember I was a willing and intelligent client willing to grow and learn and be helped with an inept therapist. As Langs suggested in his book and what I later learned as a therapist, I supervised her. A sharp therapist is always attuned to how his client offers supervision. Schizophrenics are not to be humored for they can read you in minutes, sense insincerity, pity and whatever is inappropriate in the client-therapist relationship.When I brought Rochelle to see Natalie, my therapist, to share my happiness with her Langs wrote, in effect, that I was telling my therapist that here is Rochelle, a healthy and effective woman, one who does not collude, and you are the ill one here in this relationship. I will accept this interpretation until the day I die, it rings so true.

Psychotherapy did not have to contaminate. It offered me tremendous insight because I owned it. I began to become more open and true, to experience myself authentically and most of all, which I still do at moments, not lie to myself, for if I do that I am lost. A therapist, a decent or good one, has to be alert, always, to deceiving himself. I like the self-imposed restrictions therapists need in the impossible profession if they are to be good at their work. I like the high standards. As my mentor said to me once, we take to it very well because it is Talmudic. All therapy is a DNA chain of questions. So, Sol, what’s nu with you?…Abe, what’s nu with you? In that is everything.

JF:What is the connection between psychotherapy and writing?

That is an immense question. I’ll just free associate which I often do when I go about writing, hint, hint. The capacity to be open, to allow thoughts, ideas, feelings to infiltrate your mind without raising defenses, calling the mind police, shutting down the base of behaviors, I feel, is the aorta of all my writing, the major arterial passageway. I do not fear my id, that seething cauldron, to use the old term. In fact, I like to huddle close to its sulphurous contents. I could not write about Gunther, that vile, vicious and demented Nazi in The i Tetralogy or compose Nazi “poetry” for that novel if I feared to approach Satan.

All my writing, I think, is a call to a powerfully intense need to be personally free, to lose stricture and restrictions upon myself, for I was a very controlled child (see The Parable of the Sea Wall). I was shut down! I was closed down! Arms, legs cut off, cock thrown away – I was a stump of residual feelings and hurts. I am lucky I survived. All my life has been to express the unheard scream. Consequently, other than techniques, psychotherapy and writing are a self-contained double helix, forever doing a genetic dance within myself.

JF:What would you like to write that you haven’t written yet?

A novel about transcendence. A spiritual work of a kind. Wouldn’t that be loverly?I have this transcendent urge-shit in me.