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Interview: Mathias B. Freese by Vibha Sharma

Interview : Mathias B. Freese

fiction

by | on April 30th, 2012 | 1 comment

Mathias B. Freese is a multifaceted personality who is a teacher, a psychotherapist and an author. I got a chance to read and review(here) one of his books – ’This Mobius Strip of Ifs’ and was quite impressed by his writing style and the sincere way in which he has shared his life with his readers.
It was a pleasure to conduct an e-interview with him for our readers here.
1. When did you start writing your experiences in the book form ? How has been the writing experience so far?
I have been writing since 1968, although at age eighteen my high school yearbook published a poem by me which was so misunderstood and so savagely edited that I didn’t recognize it when it was in print. An English teacher got carried away and omitted the underlying theme of depression which I was experiencing when I wrote it. Unknowingly she compounded my resentment. It was the repressed Fifties, so what else is new? The next effort was ten years later in a short piece for an education journal which revealed or uncorked my disenchantment with teaching content in the classroom. After that my full-blown neurosis composed of despair, depression and rage revealed itself in 1974 when I had “Herbie” published, my first major short story. (See my first short story collection, Down to a Sunless See.) As you know the first essay in This Mobius Strip of Ifs , explores my serendipitous and synchronous adventure with that particular story. In any case after being listed with Mailer, Oates, Singer and other greats, I felt very encouraged and continued to write.
Rejections cooled my ardor but I never quit. Indeed, I promised myself that I would set out to write the best stories I could and at a later date have them published. This self-promise took thirty or so years. Characterologically this effort says so much more about me than as a writer. So as Spencer Tracy once said about Kathryn Hepburn in one of their collaborations, what there is of her is “cherce.” Consequently I don’t quit. I persevere. The only audience I write for is me and if you like what I have written, so be it.
My writing experience can be extracted in a sense from Kazantzakis’s epitaph: “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.”
2. What has this literary journey taught you and enriched you with?
Vibha, this question is the equivalent, as I think about it, of assessing my very life which by the way is what I have done on a regular basis over the years and decades, in short, pungent, I hope, open and feeling essays. We are all born to be done away with. Again I go to an epitaph to help reflect, this time Epicurus: “I was not; I have been; I am not; I do not mind.” Much wisdom and therapy in that remark, for Epicurus, rightly so, believed that philosophy should be a kind of therapy.
But readers of this interview want something else, don’t they, Vibha? (Happy talk?) An aspect of myself is not to please others but that while I write I share my experience with you, with me first. I have enriched my literary journey, not the other way around. I give to my writing and I learn in that way to write better. Krishnamurti famously said in one of his dialogues, “The word is not the thing itself.” So all my writing is just an approximation of what turmoil, tumult and insight I have about my human condition. As we all should know, to cite Christopher Hitchens, we are only partially rational, animal, and often savage at that, and our human genome controls the robot that we are.
3. Which has been your most satisfying writing experience so far?
The i Tetralogy, my extensive take on the Holocaust, represented much of who I am as a Jew and human being, of my growing up Jewish in America. In that novel I put all the skills, imagination and heartfelt renderings I could about man. I have gone beyond Wiesel’s affirmation that indifference is not tolerable any longer. I have arrived at a different assessment based on my reading, psychotherapeutic experience, my atheism – free of religious conditioning, the bane of civilization, and I have gone into the unexplored country. Man is out of control, always has been, genetically so! In a few years we all will be reading about evolutionary psychology, the additional scientific work based on Darwin’s theories which have emerged in the 90s. Dawkins, Dennett, Ridley, Wright will become well-known names, and what they have to report based on immense scientific studies can be summed up in Richard Dawkins words: “We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecule known as genes. This is a truth that still fills me with astonishment.” The Selfish Gene Consequently writing about the Holocaust allowed me to examine the nature of man so genetically far beyond Hobbes’s “short, nasty and brutish” assessment.
This Mobius Strip of Ifs, I believe, has given me the most pleasure because I was freewheeling in my approach and many essays were written over four decades and reflected the thinking I had at different stages of my adult life. Upon reflection, the book is about the emergence of a self. It was an assessment of myself and now at 71 I see where I had trod and what lay before me. Ironically it was you or someone else who wrote that the book was a profound self help one which, I feel, is an oxymoron.
Nevertheless, this made me think and if it is so, that I have made others go back to my book, chew and digest it, that is a delightful gift to this writer’s life. My working hypothesis is that this book is from an inner directed person, and that is uncommon. Recently the American Psychiatric Association deleted Narcissism from its manual of disorders, DSM IV or V. That is, most Americans are now narcissistic and what was formerly a disorder is now the norm. All those learned interventions I had acquired for dealing with this disorder goes out the window. So when an American goes overseas and wants a house and insists that it have an American bathroom, that kitchentop counters be made of granite, that all appliances be stainless steel only testifies to our lunacy, not our so-called normalcy. By the way, the essential trait of a narcissist is his or her emptiness, the rest is all bluff.
4. Are all the essays in ‘Mobius Strip of Ifs’ taken truthfully from your own life or do they have some fictional elements
too? How comfortable do you feel opening your feelings in front of the world?
Easy to answer. My life is non-fiction. I will not play shrink here, but I gather individuals are uncomfortable with my openness. An English Academic, who I have 50 years on, cited this difference between English and American writers. Americans are into Whitman, Thoreau, Ginsburg and British writers, except for Hitchens and a few others, are constipated, to be blunt. Brits, unlike Ginsburg, cannot howl. I can’t think of an English equivalent to Hart Crane. To make my point, this academic was displeased with my plumage. Oh I couldn’t care less because she cannot see through her own conditioning.
Having spent years in treatment and working on myself by reading Krishnamurti, I have no qualms about expressing my feelings openly, not disguised as in novels and short stories. The personal essay fits my personality and I use it as best I
can. Think about this: the real task of a good shrink is to make the unconscious conscious and human beings have a terrible time arriving at revealing themselves. We really do not communicate well as a species. We are gelatinous vats of suppressed and repressed feelings and awarenesses. When you can break through, you are free.
I struggle to be psychologically free. I can say that all my writing is about my need to be psychologically free, of myself, especially you, and of the world which conditions 24/7. And the worst felon in all this is the monolithic and mammoth conditioning of religion which is the dragon at the gate. Freud argued (The Future of an Illusion) that to become free of this conditioning brings you into full adult maturity as a human being. Religion is man -made. (Pause.) Consequently it is corruptive.
5. What do you intend to write next? When is it expected to be published?
The next book is already finished and I am thinking of how to go about getting it published. I have submitted it to several online magazine contests, but most likely I will have to self-publish it myself.I will not engage agents on this because it is so time intensive to acquire one I’d rather go the other alternative routes. After all, I do not have a vast readership nor do I devote many hours to promoting the book. I try to do what I can but I refuse to be sucked into rampaging capitalism which is all the rage across the internet, the hustling, self-promoting, the slobber at some writers’ mouths as they urge you to read this or that.
So here is a synopsis of my next book. No one who encounters the Holocaust seriously is ever done with it.
I Truly Lament, is a varied collection of stories, inmates in death camps, survivors of these camps, disenchanted Golems complaining about their tasks, Holocaust deniers and their ravings, and collectors of Hitler curiosa (only recently a few linens from Hitler’s bedroom suite went up for sale!) as well as an imagined interview with Eva Braun during her last days in the bunker. The intent is to perceive the Holocaust from several points of view.
An astute historian of the Holocaust has observed that it is much like a train wreck, survivors wandering about in a daze, sense and understanding, for the moment, absent. No comprehensive rational order in sight.
In my award-winning Holocaust novel, The i Tetralogy, considered by some an important contribution to Holocaust literature as well as a work of “undying artistic integrity” (Arizona Daily Sun) I could not imagine it all, and this book of
stories completes my personal struggle. Within the past year 10 stories have been published online and in print from this collection, the most recent “Slave” published in Del Sol Review in December 2011.
I will promote my present book and by year’s end publish the new one.
6. What were your thoughts when you started writing iTetralogy ? What unique thing did you want to convey on the Holocaust that has not been done before?
Allow me to depart a little from the question and express my thoughts in this fashion To have survived the Holocaust is to have been gutted as a human being. The inner self is ravished. Whether or not one recovers from that is beyond comprehension.
All literary depictions of the Holocaust end as failures, perhaps revealing shards of understanding. And is understanding ever enough? Writing about the Holocaust is a ghastly grandiosity.The enduring mystery of the Holocaust is that memory must metabolize it endlessly and so we must try to describe it, for it goes beyond all imaginable boundaries. One soon realizes the fundamental understanding that the species is wildly damaged, for only a damaged species could have committed the Holocaust.
No great piece of art, no technological achievement or other historical creation of mankind can ever expunge the Holocaust.
Human beings are so much less than we give them credit for. If we begin here perhaps books can be written about the Holocaust – without blinders or eyelids, although by definition they will fail. Every artist who struggles with the Holocaust must begin with an acceptance of failure and that must be worked through before art begins.
I have come up short here. I must say what I have to say as a man, as a Jew, and be done with it. I feel deeply the flaw within as part of this species. I am ashamed.
By name and nomenclature, the Holocaust is but an approximation of what happened. The species cannot grasp its nature. The artist will only succeed marginally if he or she manages to drive that home.
The eternal perseveration of the species has become the Holocaust. We will never be done with it. We will never work it through.
7. You are a teacher and a psychotherapist – which of these two vocations excite you more or is more satisfying, other than writing. While working in the capacity of a psychotherapist, which do you think are the most common human frailties and strengths?
As a psychotherapist I can engage human beings, at times, at very profound levels, not in the classroom. Most schools condition human beings, that is their real task – to indoctrinate, to be an American or to be French. By working with my fellow human beings I began to grow as well, and as you know, Vibha, in This Mobius Strip of ifs I write about the telling
consequences of being a client and a practitioner. For me treatment helped this soul to become much more free, more open, more expressive, although I still work on those potholes we all have.
I am not an expert on human happiness, frailties and strengths. No one is an expert. As I age I realize I know shit. Perhaps other than techniques, therapists should keep that in mind, all “professionals.” Look at the world about – it is in chaos, those in charge are not in charge themselves, think of Clinton’s errant penis, Cheney’s need to devour human beings by sending them off to war, Sarah Palin who did not know that there was a North Korea and a South Korea.
I’d pose your question another way. What can I do to become aware, and what can I do to decondition myself so that I can see clearly”? In that is hope.
8. Could you please give suggestions to budding authors on how to make their writing more effective and meaningful?
Advice sucks. Whatever advice I have received I had to process through my own machinery. So if you want to lick at the waters of advice-givers, make sure that your machinery is working real well and that you can discern good from bad.
Let me specify. It is an old cliché to writers that they should write between 500 to 1000 words a day over years. And what if you cannot?
Well, I had to work and feed the family. I wrote in study halls while I taught; I wrote late into the night when I could. I fought off despair all those years through sheer grit and bullheadedness. I just wanted to write to exorcise my dybbuks. I never thought of myself as a writer. I was an auto-didact. What I have concluded is that you do your best, learn what you can, use what seems useful and forget all the bullshit – you know, 10 ways to have your book reviewed, how to write a query letter to a blogger, how to get an editor, and how to promote you work before you even write it (book as package). I don’t know about you but I am fatigued. We do all this fussing as each day we move closer to our end. Ecce Homo.

Freud’s Cheerful Pessimism

Peter Gay’s biography of Freud (Freud  A Life for Our Time) has provided me with the sweeping arc of the man’s life and especially articulated his often abstract if not abstruse theories in lucid prose. I was a mere lad in my twenties when I picked up Beyond the Pleasure Principle; I don’t recall much of anything about the book except that it did excite my intellectual interest, that life is an elliptical journey back to the womb, that the organic returns to the inorganic, the death wish, etc (leave it to me to pick one of his most dense works). Over the years I went on to read Moses and Monotheism, The Interpretation of Dreams, and Leonard da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood. In any case I nibbled at Freud  by reading his most accessible books first, although the pleasure principle was like chewing through teflon. On some level I was hooked. Years later I went on to become a therapist. Perhaps serendipity is a kind of repetition compulsion (huh?).

I entered a psychoanalytic institute  in my 40s. I recall a young woman student having a conniption about Freud — mind you, this was a course and school that focused on psychoanlytic psychotherapy — going after his attitudes on woman. What was interesting to observe was the dismissal of what he had written as if his sole life was dedicated to writing about women. The telling thing to mention here was when the instructor asked her if she could share with the class what books she had read that provided this information, she was stopped dead in her tracks. (She never read Freud!) She was sharing partial truths, and “truth”s about Freud without really having read what he did say. The instructor was also bemused by the fact she entered a school that had to focus on Freud to accomplish its end. The point here is that we often share our ignorances about Freud without having read him (think Sarah Palin).

One can dismiss Freud, and one can accurately portray his Victorian and bourgeois attitudes but like Darwin he will not go away. I tend to favor the old man. What I find, rather what I identify with, is his take on people in general, his atheistic approach to Christianity and Judaism, his stoicism — 15 years of cancer in his mouth and the use of an often ill-fitting prosthesis to keep his jaw in place, his relentless pursuit of the truth no matter how it might hurt or repel, his cheerful pessimism on life which is dead on and his scholarship. His knowing and being a Jew in  anti-semitic Vienna yet celebrating Easter and Christmas in secular fashion in his household; however, mind you, he didn’t go and get himself baptized so that he could make his way in the world. (And what can you say about a man who mastered 7 languages by the age of 17.)

As a student I found his theoretical works difficult to absorb; he constantly, I recall, had to be reread; his prose is a series of tied together firecrackers and his writing clear but in some fashion so knotty and intense with such far-seeing complications that I had to work on not being frustrated. His works on theory and technique fit  into a small paperback yet they have to be studied more than read for their implications. And yet he can write terrific prose. He is the first one to use psychoanalytic techniques in assessing art. His take on Michelangelo’s Moses is fascinating and riveting yet accomplished in a short essay. Sir Kenneth Clark shared Freud’s insights about the idealzed women in Leonardo’s paintings. I just had a wild association to Pollack’s painting style as he shits all over the canvas. I am not being reductive here, but it is a kind of intellectual delight, a madeleine, if you will, to apply Freud’s precepts to the world at large and especially to the human race. It is a worldview (Weltanschauung) and one needn’t be rigid about it. It is a context from which to see, such as one’s ethnicity or nation. It is a kind of truth, a kind of seeing, if one keeps one’s eye on not being conditioned. We live in an age and time, Auden called,  “a climate of opinion” which is esssentially Freud-driven and we take his early truths for granted and oedipally attack big daddy when we can. But he will not go away.

Enthused by Gay’s biography which I highly recommend, I went to EBay and scouted for hardback editions of particular works. I no longer can abide paperback print especially when you are reading Freud. Since I was in therapy between 1968 to 1972 I recall the complete standard edition of Freud’s works in my shrink’s office. At that time all 25 volumes cost about $500. On EBay used and beaten versions can be as high as $1700. There are some individuals no doubt who have read the edition more than once, bless their souls. I decided to select hardback versions put out by decent presses, what else do I have to do as I age into molecular dust. I bought Civilization and Its Discontents, Moses and Monotheism and Totem and Taboo, books that would stoke the bonfires of the Nazis. (The Future of an Illusion and The Interpretation of Dreams are next. )Two of these I have read, two I look forward to. The books he wrote in his last ten years are a summing up, applying the tenets of psychoanalytic thought to group behavior, mass psychology, religion (a favorite of his) — his Moses book which posits that he was an Egyptian, that there were two Moses, one murdered by the tribes of Israel (are you hooked?) and gives a superior spanking to Christianity on levels it does not want to examine — the Oedipal struggle between the father religion (Judaism) and the son religion (guess who) and what the son needs to do unconsciously. Does anti-Semitism stem from all this?You betcha.

Since the state of Nevada will not allow me to practice my craft without taking state tests and being supervised by those with fewer years of experience than myself, I decided to take a nap and just let it pass me by; America, I love thee. How many times do you have to prove you’re not a virgin? So I will revisit the realms of the master and have masturbatory fantasies. While on the subject if you want a tiny sip of the analytic approach (couch free) I will share an anecdote from my training. An experienced therapist juiced in Freud encounters a young male adult who proceeds to remove his penis from his fly and begins to masturbate; the therapist is a woman if that makes any difference. I heard the tale from her. In any case as he works himself up, she says to him: “Can you try to put that into words?” Words! Yes and yes and yes again. One more anecdote to die for: In a kind of halfway house for “wayward” youth as the old term states it, one of the young teenagers decided to visit the school therapist at her campus home. He knocks on the door and he is invited in; he is asked if he would care for some tea and cookies. He is invited to sit down and talk. All the while he is agitated and unnerved, for it is a response he is totally unprepared for. For, you see, he is as naked as a jay bird. He makes his excuses and leaves. Like Adam with hand over crotch, he exits Eden. Agreed, of course, not all shrinks would handle things this way — nor I. However, there is much to be said for the analytic approach. All of life is an expression, our expression, to put things into words or to act upon the world. Choose your flavor; I became a writer, others harpoon whales. We all need to make the unconscious conscious, a working definition of psychotherapy that has Freudian salt in it, like a good lox.

Since I am beginning to have medical issues, I am working on my fears, my anxieties. Freud provides me with some courage and substance. He had a dark view of humanity, yet he enjoyed life; he did say once that life is essentially two themes — work and love: not a bad assessment.  In fantasy I can only imagine what telling, riveting and perspicacious essays he would have written about the Holocaust — he lost several sisters in the concentration camps. He was not jaded about men and women, nor did violence in the Great War take him back; nor did the Nazis surprise him with their barbaric viciousness. He had learned all he needed about humanity with an analysand and a couch, quite remarkable.You can make the case that his pessimism was a defense, if you choose to; be reductive if you wish. I believe he was, like Darwin, a great observer and humanity reveals itself very well if you are silent and look as if for the first time. After all, as he states in his autobiographical study  childhood sexuality has been around since Cro-Magnon but no one took a real look ( except, as he would grant, the exceptional artists)– human beings do not want to know! Given what he has taught, our inhibitions may very well fray and there goes the planet. I remember a cartoon that has stayed with me for decades. An infant is in a crib with a mobile hanging over his mattress, and In his chubby little hand he has nuclear missiles and he is waving them to and fro. The species is in arrested childhood. Good luck!

His pessimism took no prisoners, no expectations were made and especially no judgments on behavior were given — his theories were not religions. I like his pessimism  because it makes me aware as Freud rubs my eyeballs with sandpaper. I’d rather be shaken into awareness.

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