Yes, I said it before. No more Donald posts. As a psychoanalyst both love and hate are in my purview, but I admit I’m not neutral on the question of which is better sustenance for living. There is a long tradition of applying psycho-analysis outside of the consulting room. Freud set a mind expanding precedent. He drew his inspiration from science, religion, history, mythology, society and the arts as well as his practice, and he gave back to all these sources of knowledge and energy. His application of understanding was boundless. So no apology for more on Trump. Well, just a little. Violence, hatred, sadism: they fascinated Freud and still fascinate us. When unchecked, however, they should frighten us and call us to employ psychoanalytic understanding in the defense of tolerance and peaceful co-existence.  Elvin Semrad, a beloved teacher of psychoanalysis at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center in the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s, famously said the goal of therapy is to help people “Acknowledge, bear and put in perspective” their struggles and their pain. In this respect the music of good poetry is often psychoanalytic and the feeling experience of a good analysis is often poetic.
 
                                                                   Allmerica’s Song
  
        I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters.
                                -- Donald Trump, rally. Sioux City Iowa, January 23, 2016
 
        Donald Trump retweets neo-Nazi sympathizer who says he lives in “Jewmerica.”
                                -- New York Daily News, January 22, 2016
 
C’mon proud citizens of
Christ Muslim Jewmerica
Gay Straight Transmerica
Asian Latinomerica
BlackandWhitemerica,
 
Who don’t even pack heat
In the middle of the street
In schools or museums
Except in bad dreams
Cuz I got a short story
Not pistol pumped or gory
An Allmerican anthem
That refuses to grant them
The tolerance despisers
The bigotry deniers
Any role in our soul
Any place for love’s misers
 
We’re on the beat in the street
Where white supremacists meet
In the dead of the night
Pardon me now it’s alright
In the light of the day
Where crime really pays
Don’t give lip
Want to be stranded on a ship
Like the St. Louis of Misery
Turned away by U.S. history
In advance of Trump’s profanity
Refugees from Nazi Germany
Whose bodies dropped
Below ground
With the guns’ staccato sound
Like TV shows and movies
Where murders and assaults
Are makin’ money filling vaults
 
Donald shines, brightly washed
Doing deals, living posh
First a bore and a scamp
But rich men have a stamp
That declares that we oughta
Have a cleansing new order
Forgetting gold from mouths removed
When desecration found its groove
How much more must I prove
That it can happen here
Everything we built
Slides away in the silt
Not really made
For a grade this steep it’s
Our republic, can we keep it?
I hope we own the third
House of the Pigs; Ain’t it big!
When the wolf man shoots his breath
Like a Trekkie Borg on meth
Ain’t it strong, ain’t it tall
Are you sure it won’t fall
Could there be a bit of danger
For the one born in a manger
Said to turn the other cheek
Don’t stop at being meek
Like the unrobed Polish pope
Don’t bend to fashion, just say Nope
 
Look, if you had one shot
One opportunity
(thanks again, Eminem)
To save your land from hatred
Would you take it
Would you make it
Embrace a position
Straight spined opposition
Fight the urge to appease
To genuflect and please
Quick make a decision! Join the mission
Before it’s too late you lost your state
Wake up you can’t find it
You left it behind it’s
What your forefathers fought for
Resist the onslaught for
The heart of our land
Not an option a demand
You’re afraid?  So am I
Unleash a sweet and tender cry
 
While the pundits are snoozing
Smiling smugly and boozing
Sometimes the paranoid see farther
Than most of us would bother
We say their brain’s sick with bad biology
They’ve mixed up their chronology
It’s not couth, it’s not fair
When the there is right here
Aren’t zombies now the rage
In our gilded civil age
Rising up from the offal
With our thrill and approval
 
Come on Blacks, come on Jews
Cmon Whites and Latinos
From Philadelphia to Reno
Gandhi never ate the candy
MLK drew his arc
With permanent marker
Away from the darker
Oppression’s a non-starter
 
Like the followers of Abe
Who didn’t see their graves
In the sunsets of Vienna
Don’t be dumb and senseless when a
Virus of contempt with infectious titillation
Sweeps across the nation
Stand up for loving kindness
Tolerance cooperation
Not deaf, dumb and blindness
The poster on your wall makes the call
Says it all
Heed your heart, hear my rhyme
The winner is a loser
Who spoke up one more time

Warning: This post contains tongue in cheek material.  Future posts under this category will be marked TIC.
 
PUE occasionally provides updates for members of the general public trying to keep up with the latest developments in the worlds of animate and inanimate objects. You may wonder why this kind of aid falls under the purview of a psychoanalytically oriented blog.  First, we find that lack of up-to-date information often acts as a trigger for what is known as "Insufficient Knowledge Anxiety,” or IKA. The condition of IKA may lead to frank Panic Attacks when sufferers are trying to meet production deadlines and to states of Depression when untreated for periods longer than six weeks.  Second, passivity with regard to updating knowledge may in itself a symptom of a serious condition, e.g. narcissistic personality disorder marked by delusions of omniscience.

PUE's first ever update is on the subject of a sub-disorder of IKA known as Insufficient Digital Knowledge Anxiety, or IDKA. Armed with the following reprint from the DSM-PUE (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Pyschiatry, PUE edition) you should be able to diagnose yourself and take remedial action if necessary:

Insufficient Digital Knowledge Anxiety
Five or more of the following symptoms have been present during the same three month period.

1.  You spend hours scouring your shelves for books you stored on the Kindle app of your ipad.
2.  You don’t know the difference between Snapchat and Instagram.
3.  You’re still using the previous model of your iphone.
4.  You believe the Help menu on your computer program lists the item you need help with
5.  You think new operating systems improve surgical outcome
6.  You’re looking for the instruction booklet packed with your new digital gadget
7.  You don’t know the difference between a “meme” and a “trope”
8.  Your children laugh at your digital technology questions
9.  Your friends laugh at your digital technology questions
10.You think “user interface” is a meet-up group for drug addicts

I promised myself (and you) that I would not write anything more on The Donald.  One post (see August 25, 2015) is more than enough. Every additional word written about Trump wastes a moment of time on an attention whore who thrives on self-glorification. Elementary psychology tells us that the best way to extinguish a phenomenon is not to reinforce it. 

On the other hand, what might have happened if the Allies had not banded together to fight the Axis powers? As veterans of  “the Greatest Generation” would be quick to point out, inaction may equate to appeasement. 

This is a good example of the general principal that one cannot live by the conflicting dictates of quotable wisdom alone.  Nor of behavioral psychology.

In the face of such contradictions and conundrums, I have often found it useful to read selected portions of the New York Times with some regularity. After a while, the articles seem to free associate with one another in productive ways, much like my patients and I do in a psychoanalytic session.

So it was when I noticed the following: “Tourists Have Landed in Queens. They’re Staying”. (August 25, Kirk Semple), and ”Donald Trump’s Old Queens Neighborhood Contrasts with the Diverse Areas Around It.” (September 22, Jason Horowitz.)

  Donald Trump's unexpected success in rousing Republican voters this early primary season has made for the political story of the year.  A front page New York Times article today attributes his success to a cult of personality.  By brute force of person he has gained a large following despite taking positions that blatantly contradict the views of many current adherents. They appear drawn to his financial independence, contempt for probity and political correctness, and his swaggering, chauvinistic, nativist approach to just about everything.  Psychoanalysis has a lot to say about phenomena like this.  So why a poem today instead of an essay on the application of psychoanalytic thinking to politics? Because in the first instance, psychoanalysis is all about the feeling, i.e. the nature of the feeling-experience that shapes and structures us, that underlies all of our behavior, motivation and relating to self and others.

The Donalds in Our Closet

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
                  -Edmund Burke

The Arrogance of Ignorance is bumptiously hilarious
We laugh so hard we can't believe it's frightfully nefarious
Piously presented as genius great and glorious
We're lending notoriety to something most notorious

The melting pot's no problem when compassion is gratuitous
ISIS falls before our eyes, be-headings are no threat to us
The market's always rising, financials are salubrious
America is great again!  Down with the lugubrious!

So tempting are the Donalds with accoutrements so glamorous
Doubt drops into disarray and leaves us blindly amorous
Drunk on toxic fumes of fuel that energize and motor us
We find the scent sublimely grand that's dark and most malodorous

Could it be me so logical and liberal and wondrous
Who harkens to that confidence so sure and tintinnabulous
A musical rendition so fetching, fun and fabulous
Words don't even matter when his upper cut's that jabulous

When lazily we set aside a task that is laborious
We've only got ourselves to blame when darkness reigns victorious

I’m sure there has been a great deal written about the wonderful French movie Amour, (2012), the story of an old man taking care of his wife whose function deteriorates after a series of strokes. The film impressed critics and audiences alike (Rotten Tomatoes: critics 92; audience 83) and won the 2013 Academy Award for best foreign language film. Having not read any commentary, I feel free to respond without being inhibited by those with more authorial cachet. This is something like succeeding in avoiding any news about a Packer game that has already been played so that I can enjoy watching it play out through my DVR as if it were all happening in my own real time. So herewith, my response to the film recently seen on the small screen at home:

First: No American would make a movie like this. It is too focused on the ordinary, on conversation. It is the anti-Silver Linings Playbook (which I enjoyed in a wholly different way), another movie about a problem-ridden family, with a literally manic protagonist driving a manically melodramatic story to an improbable and sensational conclusion. Amour slows down to look carefully at the commerce of everyday experience and lets the drama reside there. It reveals that experience in a leisurely yet serious way, with scenes of people just talking and brief close-ups of parts of paintings in the couple’s apartment that convey visually a deeper look into the scenery of the heart, the picture within the picture that emerges through the patience of focusing in on detail. In fact these close-ups for me are one of the most memorable parts of the movie.

(Note: there is an important investment advisory hidden deep within this post)

Everyone I know seems to be learning about Buddhism, and most of them are reading Thich Nhat Hanh, a celebrated monk, teacher, author and peace activist. His voluminous works have struck a cord with Western audiences. A recent book, You Are Here, seemed like a good place to start.  What stuck in my mind after the first chapter was what stuckin my mind at the end of the book:

“Breath In: I know I am breathing in

Breathe Out: I know I am breathing out”