Sometime during the day, at odd and peculiar moments, I experience memories and reminiscences. I associate to the old blinds with “pulls.” As I pull down the blind one more day is gone. And in the morning I raise the blind as if I have another day given to me as I inexorably march off to my end. At 71 I am saturated with all kinds of reflections of my childhood and all the concomitant cliches that come with that. I am drawn back in time like a receding tide and reminisce mostly of my dull relationship with my mother, a classic depressive. While I ponder about our interactons, I am drawn to a series of observations of myself as a child, unpleasant, unhappy ones. And then I extrapolate from who I was then and cast this pall over all the decades since and consider how the cards given me then have turned into the hands I’ve played. In short, for a large measure of my beginning years as a child, toddler and teenager I was incorporative as a human being. I had not acquired, nor was I shown, the tools of exchange, of embrace and engagement. I was not open to the world. Subterranean, I was all aquifer.
I will get to it quickly for after that it is mostly commentary. I feel I was not cared for by my mother nor did she engage me as her son. I could say I was abandoned by her but caring holds a greater valence for me. You need not consider my father, who virtually did not exist, either for himself or for me. The real measure of my humanity would be tied up with my mother and it is here that she failed me miserably. This is the wound.
I will cut deeper into the feeling. I experience myself then as devoid of emotional supplies, self-nutrients, the classic givens from which to thrive as a young human being. She never read to me, a childplacid and gentle in nature. I do so see myself as I look back. I was unobtrusive, a mother’s dream, especially for a depressive. I babysat myself. I had nothing to incorporate from my world with my mother, she was my moon, not my sun. I incorporated my environmental world as a child from friends and neighborhood, but I really cannot feel or sense that I received much in terms of parental affection, love or caring from my mother.
Only of late as I reconsider my life and the travail I have endured do I examine a little more deeply the lack of impact my mother had on me, and that very lack of impact has made all the diference in my life. After all, to age, by definition, is to recollect. Lucky is the mature human being who does this moment to moment, for he or she is express and in the world, an awakening of intelligence.
I will digress for a moment. The kind of wound I speak of here is the kind that defines us for the rest of our lives. [Have you asked that of yourself?] A wound that by definition changes everything that follows in our life. It is beyond being indelible, for it becomes the matrix from which the fabrics of your life are woven. To understand the wound intelligibly, thoroughly and with intense empathy and feeling is to give you a measure of understanding that explains most of the calamitous misfortunes of your experience. The wound is forever; however, it does become much less inflamed and after a while, amenable to consideration and thought. Growing old can help somewhat. I cannot imagine a human being extant who has not been wounded in such a way. Unfortunately we often come to our end avoiding the wound and its circumstances. I choose not to do so. As Nietzsche said, “knowledge is death.” It also sets you psychologically free. And in a special way, it may give you a compassionate stoicism to get on with the rest of your days.
In fact, as I see how I have lived as a passive-aggressive in my life, not sustaining relationships with men and women, too self-contained, private and self-sufficient if you will, not reaching out to others in communicable and feeling ways I realize that I was protecting what little nutrients I had for myself. It was an enforced self-sufficiency and that has proven most fatiguing as a human being. And the psychological and emotional costs are significant. And that is why I write, and that is why I became a therapist and teacher (unconsciously so) — to know, learn, reap and garner so as too fill in the gaping holes, the empty aquifer. I dreaded engaging the other, for the responses were unknown to me. I dared not risk, for I had no inner resolve for that. My negative perceptions of my fellow man and of others close to me have been shaped and configured by my first impressions and experiences of how I was related to by my mother, a maternal indifference. I have self-crucified myself on a cross of distrust. Benign neglect is ultimately malignant.
I imagine that I am in a morgue, an apt metaphor, and the doctor has spread open my rib cage with retractors, delving into my organs for a look see. The clamps attached to bone, sinew and flesh expose a gaping wound. It is here that he takes, in my mind, a measuring cup and dips it into my abdominal cavity and ladles out what liquids he can access. I associate to these liquids as an immense splash across my existence as I paraded through the decades. Ain’t much there to spread about and not wholesome at all.
As I age all is pattern. I am not into blame at this point. It is a special sadness for what could have been and what was not done. I see all the lost opportunities between myself and my mother, of books, ideas, understandings between parent and child that were not openly said and not surmised or thought of, guesswork that is not good for the young person. A child needs to know through word and touch that he is seen, that a measure of who he is becomes important to mother and child; that an exchange of affection creates that irritant from which a pearl is formed. I lacked such an irritant, and what is grievous here is that I sought it out at some primitive level or need. And when I look back which is my task as a human being at 71, when I assess my pilgrimage to nowhere in particular, for I am not on a mission , I am intensely saddened. I am just merely engaging and experiencing as the blinds go up and down every day.
I believe my mother to have been vastly deprived as a child herself, for she could not engage me as her son, nor read to me, or play board games with me, or discuss my daily life with me. Although she never did go to work throughout my childhood and youth, I was home with her and played alone, as I recall. The more I reflect about it the more it exhausts and appalls me, the waste, the lack of attention to a child who would have touched the stars with the palms of his hands if he had been encouraged. I know now I was a gifted child left outdoors to rust. And I did rust well. I feel that I had so much more in me throughout my life that had gone unexpressed. I had been stymied early and being stymied is an unusually agonizing, frustrating feeling — at least it is so for me. I remember years in adolescence afraid to initiate or touch young girls of my age as if I was a crystal that might shatter. All my rearing led to an immature adulthood. The larger part of my life has been in restoration, planting trees in the forest, grading the soil, weeding, breaking new paths, using quarried stones for walks.
A few unexplained and nagging doubts, perplexities, come to mind when I remember the years from birth to about 10 years old, 1950, to be exact, on Brighton Second Street, in Brooklyn, Brighton Beach Avenue and the cranky el at the end of the block. I could go back to that place tomorrow and trace out the courtyards, lanes and hidden places I frequented as a young boy. On the avenue was the Lakeland movie house, a run down and seedy theater we all called the “Dumps.” Often I was sent to the movies here, admission a mere $.18 cents. When I recollect the pictures I saw on the screen, really conscious dreams, if you think about it, I wonder why my mother so often sent me to the movies. It was safe back then for a young boy to go to the movies alone. She didn’t have to work. I wonder today what she did with all her time. Was she having an affair? And that is a loaded supposition, is it not? That thought comes before the regret — the resentment of this moment — that she could have spent more time with me.
I recall seeing Citizen Kane and The Search, both films dealing with mothers essentially. In one the mother sells the son, in the other a GI helps a waif try to find his mother after the war has separated them. Of special note is a scene involving a park and swings. The camera comes behind the boy when he sees his mother but the swings, moved by the wind, befuddle him, he can’t get to her. The children swings moved sideways as the boy moved longitudinally, struggling to get at the mother who is awaiting him after all these weeks and months. A caring mother seeking her son, a despairing mother abandoning him for money, I had neither. In one a mother is invested in her child, and in the other the mother sees her son as an investment for twisted capitalistic needs, unthought out actions on her part. Perhaps his middle name, “Foster,” was more than apt.
My wound is one of indifference, a failure of my mother to mirror back my very existence. We all need to be mirrored. A horror of a kind as I think of it, quite chilling if I allow myself, after all these decades, to feel it. I was shut down so early. And I still feel it all now.
Mothers. It is here within the uterine, incorporative recesses of the maternal “hold” that the child is formed. Blame, anger, rage, resentment, surly, and incendiary feelings at 71 come nowhere near to what I feel. Allow me a reversal to get at what I am dimly feeling but wish to see so vividly in the light, blinds pulled up. I lost a daughter at age 34 by her own hand. Doubtless, what she felt from me was an absence of caring. And she would have been correct. I didn’t have the werewithal to express that, to give it, understand what she needed at the time. I know that. And so she experienced loss as I experience her loss today, for a suicide really kills two. No, I don’t blame my mother for that! I am responsible for my own grave limitations. And so I am beyond giving blame. And I am not in the psychobabble game of coming to terms, reconciliation or redemption. What I need I cannot even say, but I feel. I struggle with that inexact feeling each and every day, whether tomorrow sees the blinds never pulled up or not. I go to my demise troubled, hurting and beyond sadness. That is enough for one life.
I find solace in Epicurus’s epitaph: “I was not; I have been; I am not; I do not mind.”
Anne Baxter in DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments”: “Moses…Moses.”
I just finished Freud’s Moses and Monotheism for about the third or fourth time in my life. At times it is like cracking walnuts in your mouth; it is the kind of book that tells you how uninformed you are are about most things, including yourself; of course, that is the part of us we know the least. The skinny on the book is that considering it was written about 72 years ago –it was published in 1939, Freud having published sections earlier — is that the archaeological and sociological information Freud drew upon is no longer valid as good science. However, it is a fabulous psychoanalytic ride. Even with my background, there are paragraphs beyond my brainpan’s capacity to fathom, or else I am drawing very old and my cerebrum has puckered here and there. Instinctual renunciation, return of the repressed, latency, obsessional neurosis are but a few of the concepts Freud delves into with the hand of the master trying to express what is second nature to him but conceptually difficult to us mere students. It is a most challenging book but worth each page. You don’t read Freud, you examine each sentence as if part of the Talmud.
Essentially he writes in his last years in a comprehensive way about how behaviors in each of us can be applied to the species collectively. He applies his psychoanalytic processes to society at large and it is fascinating to observe how a significant amount of what he shares does seem applicable if not basically true. I am always injudicious with my “idol,” giving him a wide berth to do his thing, enjoying how he messes with our minds. I root for Siggy. I was trained in analytic psychotherapy but my personality was ill-equipped to deal with or master the Newtonian concepts of Freud, the 19th century model of how energy, drive (instinct), and cathexis (attachment) work. I moved more into an expressive and interpersonal way of dealing with clients; however, the training was in analytic thinking and that has proven very worthwhile. In fact, centuries hence Freud might be remembered more for his critique and observation(s) about mankind as a whole, and perhaps being honored more as a philosopher than a healer. Indeed, most of his cases were not successful. Like or dislike him, like Darwin, he will not go away. His Moses book guts religion, Judaism and Christianity, for what it is– illusion. Man needs his myths, his gods, for he is damaged in that way. Freud thought that a man or woman were not fully developed or matured until they had given up the obsessional neurosis of a god in the sky (see his The Future of an Illusion).
I am psychologically free in ways I can not even describe as an atheist. The believers of late smack their smarmy lips as they go on to prattle about how poor Christopher Hitchens will now see their reality. Garbage in, garbage out!
Buy it or don’t buy it, Freud occasionally stops to patiently inform the reader, urging him to go along for a while with his suppositions and hypotheticals and before you know it he has surrounded you with his wagons. He posits, to wit, that there were two Moses’ and that one was murdered by the early tribes under his control; he argues that this primordial deed was repressed, an unconscious act, for suppression is a conscious choice; that centuries later that which was denied returned, much as each of us for several years after age five or so experience a latency period which later erupts as we move into our adolescence. In short, sexual features and feelings are repressed and reemerge years later. So an analytic concept long verified by therapists with clients and over the decades is applied to an entire Jewish people’s traditional history. It works. And if it does not work, at least you begin to fathom an important analytic concept or two about each one of us. Freud’s ability to apply individual behavior to the species at large is most telling, instructive and makes you think in global terms.
In the last few weeks or months, I can not say, I have had reminiscences about the years before I was ten, places I played in, streets I rode my bike on, early childhood chums, neighborhoods I prowled about, very dim and early relationships with young people who came and went, flitted about me and then were gone — in one case, a young girl I played with and then I realized she had moved away. Some of these memories can not be confirmed by the person who experienced them. I am simply not sure they were events. I am sure that my level of awareness was dim as I could not survey all about me in ways that ended in conclusions or observations, as if I was some primordial sea creature swimming onto the beach, looking about, sensing, but not realizing or seeing in a profound way. I could not explain my world. I was in it but not fully aware. I mildly experienced who I was. I take that back. I did not experience myself. I only sensed, as if I was being jabbed by the needles of everyday occurrences. You understand, don’t you? Think back.
When Kane on his deathbed says “Rosebud,” I can grasp that so much better now at this age. The sled had so much meaning for him, condensed meaning — the time in which he enjoyed his sled, the time in which he is sold by his mother; his ineffective father and the capitalistic banker Thatcher, all conspiring to bring about a personal abandonment he would he feel all his life. In one of the most often misheard lines in Citizen Kane, Susan Alexander mentions her mother and Kane responds in so many words, sotto voce, that he knows about mothers. I gag when I write that, for I remembr seeing the movie as a young child, all alone in the local theater, and I wonder today if I was not touched by my own feelings of being abandoned on levels I could not possibly articulate but that I felt. I must have incorporated the lonelinesss and the abandonment of Kane for there were such feelings, I hesitate here, in my own family, especially from my mother. In all my childhood my mother never read a fairy tale to me, any book at all. A puzzlement. Why? That is the rub, and the “enchantment” about the memory.
And so of late I am reflecting and trying to re-empathize with a host of significant memories, trying to string them on a necklace of affect and effect. I am imagining and reimagining the meanings they have for me, for it is an old cliche that as we near our end we turn back to our beginnings — what observation might Freud interject here! And so of late I have come up with a few sentences that might begin my very next book.
I was fucking abandoned when born. So what! And who cares? I am unfinished man…Dive Delve Descend.
And a happy Hanukah to my brethren.
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Tagged Freud, Moses and Monotheism