I’ve received a handful of mail and comments (via Facebook) on my last post about the way images can help us confront the contents of the unconscious, so that repressed material can emerge. Although this is sometimes painful, it almost always produces positive gains.
Most of the people who wrote asked me to write more on the subject. There is really nothing terribly mysterious about this process. The psyche itself is constructed of images, according to Jung. The encounter with interior images, like a dream’s, almost always produces unexpected information. Likewise, images in the environment, like the dying cat I saw, can have the same effect as they are interiorized.
Here’s another example, at the cultural level:
The talk around my table at Starbucks a few weeks ago was about the “It Gets Better Project” started by Dan Savage. You probably already know that, following the rash of suicides by bullied gay teenagers, Savage and his partner made a video urging gay kids not to kill themselves, because “it gets better” once you get out of high school. They invited other people to make videos sharing the same message.
The videos now number in the thousands. Among them are many by empathetic straight people, including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. But it’s the videos by gay people that most poignantly describe the pervasive agony of being bullied as a kid.
I confessed to my friends at Starbucks that I find watching the videos an almost unbearably emotional experience. I usually end up crying or tearing-up. I was surprised to hear that two other friends have the same experience. Gay people don’t talk much about the way it was when we were kids.
That’s because the experience of being bullied causes great shame, so many of us grow up keeping the profound pain of the experience walled off. The video images poke a hole in the wall and we are flooded with terrible memories. (Think post-traumatic stress disorder.)
If you watch even just a few of the videos, you will notice that some of the people telling their stories often tend to look dissociated. They look away from the camera for a moment or their voice becomes flat.
That’s about avoiding being overwhelmed by the memories. This kind of dissociation is the way many young gay people learn to deal with their feelings. It’s important to understand that a kid doesn’t have the resources to pick and choose which feelings he represses. The shutdown of feeling tends to be generalized, so that, while it does indeed “get better,” the challenge is to stop anticipating rejection and living behind the wall of shame.
There’s much more I could say about this, but the point in this context is that video (and movies and art and theater) can connect with the deep contents of the psyche. (That’s one reason fascist governments always try to control aesthetic expression.)
What is harder to explain is the way, beyond catharsis, this is helpful. The answer is, “it just is.” What is required in James Hillman’s terms is “following the image.” That means bringing intention to the images that arise and watching them move on their own autonomy. They morph continually until finally coming to rest. And that is inherently therapeutic.
In the case of these videos, the therapeutic value is in internalizing the images (compared to an already interiorized dream image). They may trigger a memory or a mysterious new image and, as we pay attention to the image associated with the exterior image, we watch it morph, moving through catharsis to a place of rest.
I stress that to receive the full “message” of the image, one must bring intention to the process. Watching an emotionally moving film will often trigger the process with or without any intention. But it usually takes a conscious decision to move beyond the emotional upheaval to learn the image’s actual significance.
“Habentibus symbolum facile est transitus.” (“To those who have a symbol, the transition is easy.”)
The day after Thanksgiving, I stopped at a service station on Hill Street in Grant Park. Between this station and I-20 is some wooded land in which homeless people live. It is also home to many feral cats.
As I was pumping my gas, I heard a cat crying. I looked across the parking lot and it was crouched by a car. I walked over to it and it didn’t take off as they usually do. The reason is that he was obviously dying. I leaned over to pet him and his appearance was so grotesque that I snatched my hand back. I noticed another cat was crouched by protectively (or so I imagined).
Suddenly, without warning, I burst into tears. I’m not talking a few tears moistening my eyes. I’m talking uncontrollable sobbing. A homeless guy asked me if he could help. I got back in my car and could not stop crying for 10 minutes.
I’m extremely sentimental about animals but I knew the force of my reaction had a lot to do with feelings I’d been repressing for two days – grief about the death of my parents, guilt that I’d not spent more time with them, the wish that things had been different between us. Also, I never experience any death without being overwhelmed by memories of the years when all my friends – and I do mean all of them – were dying from AIDS. That experience traumatized almost every gay man of my generation.
The power of images
The sentence atop this post – roughly translated as “To those who have a symbol, the transition is easy” – is a Latin motto adopted by alchemists. Carl Jung mentioned it in his work. It expresses a central principle of Imaginal Psychology too. The idea is that images have the power to transform us. It doesn’t mean that symbols make transition to a new state-of-being painless. It does mean that certain images, internalized, can easily facilitate the confrontation with unconscious contents that transformation requires.
Dreams are rife with such images. On Thanksgiving morning, I had a dream of great intensity, dense with images alluding to my dead mother and father and my relationship with my partner. I engaged in some analysis of the images but did not let their emotional content emerge. Still, they haunted me all day. Each time they recurred, I looked away.
One of depth psychology’s most useful observations is that whatever is repressed internally eventually returns to confront us on the outside. That’s what the cat was about, no doubt. Its awful suffering confronted me in a purely emotional way that caused my feelings to erupt. As a symbol of suffering it forced me to acknowledge the intense grief I was trying to avoid feeling.
But how was this transformative? It was cathartic, of course, and catharsis always helps relieve stress. It’s also true, though, that catharsis is too often the sole goal of psychotherapy. Without paying close attention to what we experience during our “venting” – especially bodily experience – our “transition” to another state of being is usually quite superficial. It’s like taking a pain killer for chronic pain or loosening a knot rather than untying it.
My sobbing stopped after about 10 minutes, but the image of the crying cat stayed in my mind’s eye all day, causing waves of sadness. But I focused my attention on the image of the cat throughout the day and as I did so, I literally felt my heart opening. I do not mean this in a metaphorical sense. I could literally feel my heart, which I regard as an organ of perception, opening. This is a bittersweet feeling. The world looks softer. The unavoidable experience of suffering seems more acceptable.
Paradoxically, then, the image heals not by anesthetizing us against pain but by making it intimate, forcing its internalization. It’s a direct expression of the Buddha’s first noble truth: “life is suffering.” And by acknowledging this, the pain of life dissolves into a bittersweet truth like the inevitable experience of heartbreak itself.
If you have any contact with psychotherapy these days, you’ve heard about mindfulness training. Adapted from Buddhist psychology, it’s a method of staying fully conscious in the present moment.
My own decision to study psychology for an MA and PhD was very much motivated by my interest in transpersonal psychology, which incorporates meditation and mindfulness in the Buddhist tradition. At the time of my initial interest, most psychologists still regarded the idea that mindfulness training could be therapeutic as New Age blather.
But now mindfulness practice is the latest fad, treated as akin to cognitive-behavioral therapy. And, believe me, it’s a lot more effective than the happily waning fad of “positive psychology.”
This book on bringing a mindful approach to eating, Savor: Mindful Eating, Mindful Life, is authored by nutritionist Lilian Cheung and zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, who has written many books and conducted many workshops over the years. I did a walking meditation workshop with him years ago in California and found it remarkably enlivening.
Cheung, who is with Harvard’s School of Public Health, summarizes the book’s approach to mindful eating in the video above. If you’ve had any training in meditation or mindfulness, you’ll undoubtedly have the experience I did reading the book. It’s nothing very new at all and, I’m sorry to say, is highly redundant.
If Vietnamese Zen Buddhist master Nhat Hanh says the same thing over and over, it could be because not enough people have heard him, and those who have need a reminder.
I found myself very annoyed reading the same-old-same-old. Plenty has been written about mindful eating, which, as my friend Andrew said, boils down to “eat, eat, chew, chew, swallow.” The idea is that bringing mindfulness to eating — and any other behavior — enhances our presence in the moment. And that means we don’t eat out of control on auto-pilot. Generally, it means a considerable reduction in the rumination that takes us out of immediate experience. When we are fully present, we have much more power over our choices, rather than behaving by force of habit.
The book offers a good many exercises to develop mindfulness and goals pertinent to eating healthily. But, generally, it reads more like a guide to overall mindfulness than a reflection on eating itself. I expected some discussion of psychology and taste, for example, but there is none, except to say we are more conscious of flavors when we pay close attention to what we are eating.
If you have no experience with mindfulness, Savor may be a good read, but, honestly, there are far better books on the subject. Then again, few consider the context of eating itself. I just wish the authors had done a better job.
UPDATE: Right after I wrote this, I opened my mail and found that the new issue of The Shambhala Sun is devoted to mindfulness. It was also accompanied by a new supplementary publication, Mindful, which includes two articles on mindful eating.
I wrote a post on CL’s “Omnivore” blog, referring people to this post and describing the magazine material. I noted that by definition mindfulness is usually regarded as a technique of developing full awareness in the moment. It’s not about “fixing” things per se. I quoted Jon Kabat-Zinn in that respect.
As I was browsing the Net about the subject, I came across this incident of mindfulness that, while compassionately motivated, definitely demonstrates the fix-it mindset. The writer is blogging after a lecture on the subject (although he doesn’t specifically call it mindfulness):
She spoke about the importance of listening, opening our ears, indeed the whole body, to awareness of what’s going on around us. Listening is the first step towards being mindful about the present. Tara’s words struck a cord with me because my father is increasingly impaired in hearing and I’ve experienced how this isolation is walling him off from his family, his community, the world around him. I came away from the session with a commitment to find a way to break through to my father so that he gives in to buying a new hearing aid.
Scott Henry has an excellent article about the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s literal flight to the suburbs in this week’s Creative Loafing. The story argues that the move from Marietta Street to Dunwoody has been occasioned by a literal shift in news content and an almost embarrassingly sycophantic effort to avoid insulting the conservative sentiments of suburban readers. In fact, the editorial page of the AJC has all but disappeared. The AJC is all about following, not leading public opinion.
The story provoked a good many memories. It doesn’t mention that Creative Loafing itself attempted to penetrate the burbs with highly unprofitable zoned editions for years. So the AJC’s effort to do that isn’t uniquely stupid, not in Atlanta or elsewhere.
Similarly, the story doesn’t mention the failed effort to publish a conservative daily here in the ‘60s, the Atlanta Times. That paper also courted suburban readership. The point is that this strategy has already been proven not to work – even well before the New York Times attempted it here with the Gwinnett Daily News. It’s a great mystery that publishers don’t stop and ask themselves why this strategy is such a predictable loser. I won’t bother to state the obvious explanation.
I’d also argue that the newspaper’s editorial content began its all-out plummet in 1988 when Ron Martin, editor of USA Today, took the editor’s job and introduced the city to highly truncated, excessively illustrated news reporting. I remember a reporter there joking to me that writing a story longer than 8 inches had become exhausting.
For the two years previous to that, the paper was run by Bill Kovach, formerly of the New York Times. Kovach hired a crew of brilliant editors and writers like Dudley Clendinen. They were unpopular with people like redneck columnist Lewis Grizzard, who engaged in a very public battle with Kovach. Grizzard and friends won and Kovach and his crew left.
Even earlier in the ‘80s, my main editorial job was as a contract writer for the AJC’s Sunday magazine, “Atlanta Weekly.” (I was hired full-time, but left after two weeks, preferring the freelancer’s status.) The management at the paper had hired a crew of smart people from Texas Monthly in Austin, including editor Nancy Smith. This was the most entertaining gig of my work as a journalist. I got to write long stories about esoteric subjects. Several of those ended up in textbooks and I still get reprint requests now and then.
But Smith’s edgy style was too much for the AJC’s conservative management. She and the rest of the Texas Monthly people fled like the Kovach crew. I followed Nancy to Houston for a few years. Atlanta Weekly, like most newspaper magazines, was killed altogether by the time I returned to Atlanta.
The point is that the paper has a long history of waxing and waning quality. It has rarely tolerated journalism of depth and, while it’s always proudly dropping the name of Ralph McGill, it was not a very good paper even in the years when he was editor. McGill had enlightened attitudes on civil rights, but the paper was still mediocre.
Still earlier, while I was a college student, I worked a year at the Associated Press as a copy boy, an occupation rendered nonexistent by the death of the typewriter and teletype. The AP was located on the top floor of the AJC’s dingey building around the corner from the Marietta Street one that the paper has vacated and donated to the City of Atlanta. (Talk about a reversal of the usual going-away gift-giving.) The paper had published an interview with me (along with a gigantic picture) a few years earlier when I was a high school student, so this helped me get the job upstairs.
Over the years, I alternated work in mainstream media (including lots of other publications besides the AJC) with work in alternative media, like the Atlanta Gazette and Creative Loafing, both of which I edited. As much as I’d like to say otherwise, neither of these publications pursued paths much different from the AJC’s.
The Gazette was owned by Larry Flynt, and he was literally shot in Lawrenceville on the day I went to work for the paper. The Gazette published a lot of biting humor and opinion, plus some investigative reporting. (I wrote a media column as well as edited the weekly.) Some of the city’s best writers had gigs with it. But as time passed and Flynt’s subsidy decreased, the paper sought to increase readership and revenues by undertaking a lot of celebrity reporting. You could hardly call this “alternative journalism,” unless you think People Magazine is alternative.
Things were much the same during my two stints as editor of Creative Loafing. An example: During my first stint in the early ‘80s, when the paper ballooned in size during the holidays, we were instructed to fill the extra space with canned stories about holiday traditions in other cultures. No, I’m not kidding.
When I returned for a five-year stint a few years later, the editorial budget was increased enough that we could do some serious reporting, but it never took priority over the Happenings section and the TV listings. My successor, CB Hackworth, managed to do more serious reporting but things didn’t really change in this respect until Ken Edelstein became editor and he was in a constant battle with the ownership to do that. Mara Shaloup, the current editor, is doing her best too.
I also freelanced for a few other local publications during the ’80s and ’90s. I wrote several controversial stories for monthly publications that took a couple months to research and both were shelved by suddenly nervous editors. The same thing happened at the AJC twice and once at Texas Monthly. I always got paid my full fee (rather than the punitive “kill fee”), but it taught me early on that journalism is a game.
The point here is that so-called alternative journalism in Atlanta has only rarely done things differently from mainstream publications. Just as Creative Loafing’s editorial board cries out for a real daily paper in the city, I think it’s fair to similarly cry out for more alternative journalism of depth.
In summary, the history of journalism in Atlanta is pretty much the same, whichever publication you choose to examine and no matter its financial resources.
Rev. Eddie Long (or “Schlong”) is the latest homophobic preacher to turn out to be having covert sex with young men.
I’ve written a lot over the years about the process behind such behavior. It’s called a reaction formation and it is extremely common. Whenever you hear someone taking a very extreme position on something, you can be sure they are trying to cover up their own impulses to do the very thing they condemn. That’s the heart of a reaction formation.
However, a reaction formation is rarely effective over the long term. The repressed, condemned desire tends to keep asserting itself. That’s why people like Long, with so much to lose, still can’t keep their desire fully repressed, no matter how much they try to keep it under control by demonizing it. And the more they demonize it and struggle to repress it, the more it asserts itself.
It’s important to understand that a reaction formation is a defense and, as such, rarely disappears simply because it’s confronted. That’s why you see people like Ted Haggard take two weeks to admit the truth and then claim to be “cured” overnight. And it’s why Bishop Long, at this writing, still denies his sexual adventures despite their documentation.
Perhaps even more interesting is the fact that Long’s 33,000-member congregation kept silent about his behavior for years. Of course, not every member knew about it, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that a lot of people did.
One of those is a friend. He doesn’t attend Long’s church, but he knows many people who do. He told me the behavior has been rumored for years “in certain circles.” I asked him why nobody has made it public before, since Long’s attacks on gay people have been so virulent — to say nothing of the fact that he was targeting young men in their late teens and 20s.
My friend shrugged and rubbed his fingers together in that gesture that means “money.”
Good Old Denial
Perhaps, but my guess is that it’s a lot about good old denial, another common, if not the most common, defense mechanism. It is often unconscious. As Wikipedia says:
Denial is a defense mechanism postulated by Sigmund Freud, in which a person is faced with a fact that is too uncomfortable to accept and rejects it instead, insisting that it is not true despite what may be overwhelming evidence.
The very nature of denial is something the unscrupulous exploit in other people. It’s the specialty of politicians, especially conservative ones. They tell outright scary lies, for example, to keep people under control with fear. That’s why so many Republican voters will support policies that are actually detrimental to themselves. The best recent example is the way so many people oppose letting Bush’s tax holiday for the very rich expire, despite the likely consequences.
Even though they are shrieking about the deficit, Republican politicians know very well that not restoring the tax on the wealthy will increase the deficit hugely and probably result in more death throes for the middle class.
But by screaming lies about the tax issue and the deficit, the Republican politicos effectively exploit the denial of many voters, who do not want to face the truth that they have been exploited since the Reagan administration, that upward economic mobility is more difficult than ever. (See the denial of Joe the Plumber.)
One of the funniest examples of how incredibly duplicitous denial can be occurred during the debate over nationalized health care. Out one side of their mouths, the Tea Party peeps shrieked about socialism….and outside the other, they screamed that it would be political death to any candidate who supported cutting back or eliminating Medicare.
That’s denial in action.
So, we’ll see whether Eddie Long’s reaction formation is affected by the public scandal. And we’ll see whether his congregation chooses to sink deeper into denial or deal with the truth that they have been royally scammed.
It would be hard to find anyone for whom the title of“Eat Pray Love” doesn’t resonate. The degree of that resonance may differ, but the three words describe activities that support the basic calls to physical, spiritual and psychological wellbeing.
Nonetheless, I have not read Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir, which became a New York Times bestseller a few years ago. I was equally reluctant to see the movie it inspired this year, starring Julia Roberts. My reason wasn’t unique. Everything I read about “Eat Pray Tell” suggested it was a superficially glamorous tale of a rich white woman’s midlife crisis. Gilbert quested for meaning by schlepping dewyy-eyed around Italy, India and Bali.
I broke down and saw the film last night. My reason was pretty singular: I wanted to see how it relates food and spirituality. Food and love are frequently associated in film. (Think “Like Water for Chocolate.”) But nothing in my film-going experience relates food and spirituality. And I have to admit I was intrigued because I’m a foodie who happens to have been on a spiritual path during long periods of my life.
My primary expectation, unfortunately, was fully realized: I’ve seldom cringed as much during a movie. It is an unbearable sequence of clichés in which the exotic “other” is romanticized as wise beyond western knowing. A palm reader in Bali, for example,is revered even though his utterances have as much depth as the Wizard of Oz’s. Iimagined him too as Eckhart Tolle without teeth in clown garb.
The movie does make some valid points, mainly by implication. It says nothing directly about a connection between food and spirituality but its inherent message is that there is nothing incompatible about seeking both pleasure and spiritual meaning. We live in a culture that has disputed that ever since our Puritan forbears executed sexually aggressive women as witches.
But “Eat Pray Love” really has very little to say about the actual pleasure or constitution of good dining. In fact, most of the dishes that Roberts devours in Rome, mainly pasta, aren’t especially tempting. And their enjoyment is repeatedly expressed in close-ups of noodles being sucked into Roberts’ mouth. In that, the film does something that drives me nuts about shows I’ve seen in my infrequent viewing of the Food Network.
I’m talking about intentional, exaggerated smacking and talking while eating (often initially accompanied by eyes rolling heavenward). It’s true that I suffer Virginia Woolf’s condition: Since childhood, I have been unable to bear the sounds of people eating. I have no idea where or why this arose and neither has any therapist I’ve ever seen. Then again, it is traditionally considered bad manners to smack your food and talk with your mouth full., so I presume the disgust it can cause is fairly widespread.
This is an inconvenient phobia for a dining critic but most restaurants are too noisy for it to become an issue. Still, even putting my phobic intensity aside, it’s a huge trivialization of the pleasure of taste to reduce it to sounds of pigging out. Perhaps it’s become a statement of a dish’s utterly transcendental taste that it compels the diner, lovingly, to crash the constraints of etiquette. You know – it’s like screaming while fucking your mate when you’re a guest in someone’s home. Your host knows it had to be good.
More to the point, I think the focus on literal orality to indicate pleasure is a failure of the imagination – and that’s what generally characterizes “Eat Pray Love.” (I’m going to spare you a Freudian analysis of orality right now.)
CHANT, PRAY, SHUT UP
The second part of the movie, recounting Gilbert’s stay at an ashram in India, is even more revolting. There’s not much over-enthused dining, just the over-enthused utterance of New Agey clichés. Gilbert traveled to the ashram to check out her post-divorce boyfriend’s guru, who, it turns out wasn’t there. She was visiting her ashram in New York. Doh! Any teaching that Gilbert receives is from an unbearably simplistic fellow pilgrim from Texas. His crotchety manner, including his criticism of Gilbert’s comparatively gluttonous eating, is meant to give his simple-minded advice an edge, I suppose, like one of those lovably profound but assholesque Irish priests in old movies.
Naturally, I recalled my own pilgrimages to see a guru, Mother Meera, during this part of the film. I still recollect those visits with awe, mainly because ofthe remarkable activation of my imagination during Mother Meera’s silent darshan. (“Eat Pray Love” toys with the virtue of silence but never depicts it as more than silly.) This experience really did assure me that religion is about mythic imagination. It is ruined when it is literalized. In fact it was Mother Meera’s own literalizations of herself that eventually caused me to turn away.
I can’t deny that during this period of my life I fell prey to the same idealization of the exotic other that I now question. But I do think, as Gilbert implicitly argues, there is a value in journeying to the radically other. In that space, we can become outsiders and glimpse ourselves with more clarity. That Gilbert’s guru wasn’t present is a nice metaphor for the way any good teacher instructs us that the quest for meaning is ultimately our own responsibility. The problem with “Eat Pray Love” is that meaning never becomes more articulated than a bromide. You may argue, as the cliché goes, that clichés become clichés because they contain truth, But that assumes the way you express something doesn’t affect or reveal your perception of its meaning. Wrong.
LOVE, GET LAID, GET BORED
The final section of the film is set in Bali and is about love. It relates most strongly to the divorce that initiated Gilbert’s journey. After ending her marriage, she instantly acquires a new boyfriend. When that goes sour too, Gilbert complains to her best friend that she has never spent more than two weeks without a boyfriend. So off she goes to find herself.
Gilbert’s treatment of love is the most baffling of her subjects to me, probably because it relates most strongly to the experience of being a woman. Gilbert spent years trying to be the “perfect wife,” her friend says. I doubt that most women equate being the perfect wife with writing books and travel articles for the New York Times, plus being rich.But let’s put that aside. What does it say that Gilbert’s problems are grounded in her relationship with a man she loves and the resolution of those problems comes in the form of another man?
I have utterly no idea whether Gilbert ended with a better quality of man. It’s certainly not evident from the movie. But it’s the arrival of Prince Charming that provides the happy end of the story. True, she almost rejects him. But another man, the toothless palm reader, tells her to reel him in.
This is a real-life fairy tale that doesn’t address the real agony of spiritual seeking, divorce without expensive distraction or even overeating. There’s a sort of funny section in which Gilbert and a friend buy new pants to accommodate their weight gain from eating in Rome, but we never see any actual weight gain at all.
We don’t see much of anything consequential in the film. What we get is Julia Roberts tearing-up in scene after scene until, literally on the day she is scheduled to return to the States, she decides to “cross over” with Prince Charming. She can love without losing herself, after all! And she went nearly a whole year without hooking up with a dude! And the payoff is….a dude!
“Eat Pray Tell” is enough to make you want to pig out on thedurian fruit Roberts squeals about in a Bali market. Unlike this movie, durian — disgusting to some, sublime to others — reeks of real life. This movie reeks of prosaic BS.
The New York Times has been publishing a blog, “All-Nighters,” which it describes as “an exploration of insomnia, sleep and the nocturnal life.” It’s of personal interest to me since I’ve suffered insomnia ever since my mother’s death four years ago.
I found the March 19 entry, “Why We Need to Dream” by Jonah Lehrer, especially interesting because it dispatches with the argument of recent years that dreams are erratic firings of the brain’s components — sound and fury representing nothing.
Lehrer cites plenty of recent research demonstrating that not to be so at all. Researchers now say dreams are likely efforts to discover associations between all events and images. In other words, they assist problem solving and leave no ostensibly unrelated material unexamined (and thus their weirdness). Indeed, dreams are important to the creative process generally:
In recent years, scientists have discovered that R.E.M. sleep isn’t just essential for the formation of long-term memories: it might also be an essential component of creativity.
In a 2004 paper published in Nature, Jan Born, a neuroscientist at the University of Lübeck, described the following experiment: a group of students was given a tedious task that involved transforming a long list of number strings into a new set of number strings. This required the subjects to apply a painstaking set of algorithms. However, Born had designed the task so that there was an elegant shortcut, which could only be uncovered if the subjects saw the subtle links between the different number sets. When left to their own devices, less than 25 percent of people found the shortcut, even when given several hours to mull over the task. However, when Born allowed people to sleep between experimental trials, they suddenly became much more clever: 59 percent of all participants were able to find the shortcut. Born argues that deep sleep and dreaming “set the stage for the emergence of insight” by allowing us to mentally represent old ideas in new ways.
This is certainly no surprise to me. I’ve told clients for years that when they find themselves blocked in a creative project, to “sleep on it.” It’s old advice, but I long ago learned that if I write the first two paragraphs of a column before going to bed, the column virtually writes itself the next morning.
It’s a great feeling to see this confirmed by neuroscience. It also validates Freud’s position that dreams are intimately connected to real-life events, no matter how other-worldly their narrative is, and have important information to impart. In my experience, dreams not only reveal the positive unseen associations the personal psyche makes. They also reveal the unhelpful associations that may, for example, underlie a repetition compulsion.
Dismissed in recent years as some sort of quackery, much of Freud’s and Jung’s depth psychology is increasingly reiterated by brain science. Depth psychology was the subject of my PhD studies and it’s quite gratifying to see its fascinations, like dream imagery, regain the attention they deserve.
(Of course, in another Times blog post, a contributor reports that sleep deprivation eases depression, leaving the question of what a depressed artist should do!)
I woke up this morning to an NPR piece about self-publishing. Like most writers of my generation, I still tend to think of such publishers as “the vanity press.” That’s why I was surprised to hear that Mark Morford, a popular columnist on the San Francisco Chronicle website, decided to go the self-publishing route:
[Morford] has a forthcoming book, The Daring Spectacle, a collection of his columns. Initially, Morford did meet with agents, and he had a lot of interest from traditional publishers.
“I encountered a lot of excitement for the book,” he says, “agents and publishers alike said, ‘Yes this is a great idea. We like it.'”
But the book deals they offered were not what they once were. There were no more big advances, and national book reading tours with stays in swanky hotels. Morford says he was told, “that whole idea has sort of vanished, has sort of gone away. There is no more marketing money.”
Morford began to wonder if he even needed a big publishing house. He looked around and discovered a burgeoning industry of companies that help authors publish their own books in any format they like, from the traditional printed book to e-books and the Kindle, and now for the iPad. Morford decided to publish with a company called Bookmaster.
Part of what surprised me about this piece was the statement about money and book deals. In the ’80s, I received a contract from Harper Collins to write a book, Good Country People, about what remained of Flannery O’Connor’s world in the rural South. For several reasons I’ve recounted elsewhere, I never finished the book. One of those reasons was utter depression over the matter of marketing. I was paid a $10,000 advance fully up front — considered generous for a new author in those days — but I was told that I should expect to make no more money.
“It’s all controlled by marketing,” my editor at Harper Collins told me. “They won’t be willing to spend a lot of money promoting this book, but they might for your second or third book. But don’t think that you’re going to live entirely off royalties and an advance while you write your next book.”
I did not find the process of writing a book at all pleasurable, so knowing that I wasn’t going to make any money — while I probably offended my family with the book’s sexual contents — resulted in a creative block and I never finished the book. As I often tell people, “I wish I had finished it, but, as an occupation, writing books seems very overrated to me.”
In subsequent years, I received three inquiries about compiling my magazine stories or the “Headcase” columns I wrote for Creative Loafing for 20-odd years in book format. This sounded like a tedious editing job to me and the inquiries were during the years I was studying for my PhD. I didn’t want to spend my little spare time doing that. (And I’ve made a vow to myself never to undertake a book with an advance again.)
In recent years, several of my clients and friends have successfully self-published their books. Unlike me, though, they are very self-promotional types. Despite my longtime work in media, I do not enjoy public attention. That’s part of the appeal of being a dining critic to me. The effort to maintain anonymity is a great excuse for avoiding the direct public gaze.
There’s also the question of publishing in digital format — for the Kindle or the new iPad. People I know have stuck to self-publishing physical books. Personally, I read more online than I do in print now, so I wonder if my brain isn’t better programmed for digital books. I’m also personally fascinated with the mixed-media capabilities that the iPad offers.
It’s interesting to consider how the literary establishment itself could be affected by this change. Call me crazy, but I’m guessing the folks at the New York Review of Books don’t routinely pick up self-published or digital-only books. How will the literary hierarchy preserve itself if publishing is radically democratized?
The New York Times has been publishing a blog, 
I woke up this morning to