Van Gogh: Why Suicide?

~ graham best

This recent biography by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith contains a very rich reconstruction of what Vincent Van Gogh’s life was like. There is a lot of great new material about his crucial relationship with his brother Theo, who worked in an art gallery and often supported Vincent in his artistic journey. I recommend this book to any fan of the famed Dutch post-impressionist painter, especially if you are seeking inspiration about finding your calling and expressing devotion to it with your whole self.

The book became a bestseller on account of its controversial appendix, which questions whether Vincent’s death was a suicide, as critics often contend. The authors gather a lot of missing data about the final period of Vincent’s life in Auvers-sur-Oise in northern France. They flesh out Vincent’s relationships at that time and clarify that several people there targeted him as a freak, especially the older brother of a student friend of his.

In the alternate version of Vincent’s death, that brother, discovered to like playing cowboy, is the owner of a faulty gun that often misfires, and the townspeople are well aware of the situation. One day Vincent goes to paint in the fields and happens into these brothers, using the gun. The older brother teases him, as ever. The gun goes off by accident. Vincent takes a shot to the gut, stumbles home, where he lays in bed for two days, at first believing he’ll recover. Two days later it is clear he will not and he finally answers persistent questions about what happened by saying, “No one shot me.”  Ostensibly a direct quote, that remark in itself belies a certain urge in the speaker to cover something up.

I include this book in my reviews section because of this alternate ending. It raises questions about not only the facts, but human nature. Many people object to this reinterpretation of how Vincent died. There is a stubborn glamorization and romanticizing of suicides among suffering artists, as if that act is somehow a fitting end for a tortured soul. Vincent’s mental health struggles and voluntary residence in at least one asylum make him perfect fodder for that treatment. What do you think? Do you think a new vision of Vincent’s death as an accident reduces his legacy or biography?

Personally, I feel the new circumstances elevate his story. As Vincent lays in bed for two days, he comes to understand he is not going to recover. As his life concludes, he makes a choice to protect the two boys by saying he shot himself. In this light, his final earthly act is an expression of deep compassion and a wish to spare the two young men a needless criminal investigation, especially the younger brother, who was Vincent’s friend. Facing death, Vincent’s compassion also extends to the person whose hand held the weapon, a terrible accident, more mischief than malice.

To my tastes, for Vincent to claim he shot himself, when in fact he is looking out for the futures of a friend and for his misguided brother, well, the story rings true to me as what Vincent would do, much more true than a suicide does. I see the person who made all those amazing paintings and originally wanted to be a preacher until his own zeal got him canned as the same person who would cover for those boys, and his final cryptic words support the idea. I also find this version of Vincent’s death much more heroic than suicide, and therefore more pleasing. Rather than losing to despair, Vincent let go of his life with a profound and characteristic sentiment of brotherly concern.  Rest in peace, sweet soul.

Love Your Fate

~ graham best

Some very inspiring conversations lately make me want to write about Nietzsche, the 19th-century German philosopher, who declared in a famous vignette called The Parable of the Madman that “God is dead!” By leading with that reference I am not looking to conduct a big discourse on institutional religion at this time, but rather to create a context for exploring Nietzsche’s theory of Eternal Recurrence and its call to abide by an ethic of Amor Fati: love of fate. To see that all these things are completely connected in Nietzsche is to dwell very deeply in his personal vision of life and the human condition. To dwell there with him as a serious exercise about one’s own vision of life is Psychology at its best.

What was Nietzsche driving at with his assertion that God is dead? He was talking about the decline and disintegration of the moral foundations of late Western civilization. Oh, that. Stated alternately, he was calling attention to how human beings make moral claims and pointing out that people base those claims on questionable foundations. For Nietzsche, morality did not come into the world through infallible divine agency as an absolute and eternal standard to guide proper living, but rather arose out of the human agendas of the people curating the moral code, if not outright creating it in their own interest. By stating God is dead, Nietzsche was announcing about the moral climate in sway over western civilization since the rise of Christianity that humanity must move on to a new vision. He imagined that transition as a needful evolution for the species.

Such is the context for Nietzsche’s infamous portrait of the Ubermensch, a so-called over-man, who sees beyond the crumbling foundations of the morality around him and leaves them behind as useless and untenable, called instead to develop his own vision of proper living based primarily on personal truth. Taking on that challenge is the new road to authenticity and self-realization, according to Nietzsche. He preaches on its behalf through the visionary hero of his most prophetic and artistic work Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a new bible of sorts for an age losing its last one. The replacement, however, is not like for like, but a sea change of the highest order, involving maximum self-responsibility and personal reflection. That universality about truth and ethics is a fiction is only the starting point, leading powerfully inward.

It would not be a stretch to regard Nietzsche as an advance expression of many of the 20th century’s most revolutionary developments. Prepare for some bold claims in that regard. For instance, when Albert Einstein shifted Physics from its Newtonian center to a paradigm of Relativity, he was accomplishing a fundamentally Nietzschean coup, turning Time itself into something malleable. When we use the word Postmodern to capture the breakdown of any unifying structure binding culture together, we may just as plausibly say Post-Nietzschean instead, since he forged and landed that hammer. In Psychology, when we note that hierarchical models such as Freudian Analysis led to more egalitarian approaches involving client-centered emphasis, we are noting the influence of Nietzsche that authority resides within each subjective self only. Nor is there another or better home for it elsewhere.

For Nietzsche that discovery opened a thought experiment called The Eternal Recurrence of the Same. He imagined a situation in which a demon comes to you with the shocking factual pronouncement that you will live every detail of your present life over again into the future infinite times without the slightest biographical variation, and that you have already lived it that way infinite times in the past. This airtight loop has the potential drawback that whatever you lament most about your choices and destiny are indelibly written into it and any longing for one iota to be otherwise is an impossible folly. In fact, that longing is the source of all suffering. Nietzsche imagines most people will gnash their teeth and fall into abject despair at this news. On the other hand, he also offers the radical invitation that what the demon has told you is the best thing you could ever hope to hear.

At this point personal psychology enters the situation. Why is the demon’s suggestion good news? How could it be? Because it positions the listener to reorient in the direction of maximum life and vitality. If, by Nietzsche’s reckoning, someone rejoices at the prospect of living the same life repeatedly without changing anything at all, that person is saying the most categorical Yes to existence. Such was Nietzsche’s vision of the best possible life: one which looks adversity in the eye and says I know and affirm your necessity too. I say yes to you to say yes to myself. Ostensibly the benefits of this attitude are the liberation of the deepest creative powers that humans can attain and a more thoroughgoing expression of one’s potential in the world. Of course they are. Through acceptance emerges craft.

Nietzsche’s commitment to this ideal drew him to the Latin phrase Amor Fati, a love of Fate. That word has many associations for people, such as the oppressive and often painful play of circumstances. For Nietzsche it meant turning that point of view on its head so that even the hardest part of one’s experience, or especially the hardest parts, are the forge from which to shape one’s best self. Imagine doing so for a moment. Try to see yourself saying Yes to every disagreeable feeling within you and all persistent obstacles you encounter and have encountered, not because you are helpless against them, but from real appreciation of their essential role in your highest development. Become the willing and active participant in your own evolution. Love your fate, not as a verdict against you, but in order to shape it. The more you love its muck, the more influence you will gain over it into the future.

As a final consideration, think about applying this vision on a wider basis, not only as a personal psychology, but also as a worldview. Try it out. Look at the world (or the whole universe) as the operation of necessity, as Fate. See about the world that absolutely everything is interdependent to such an extent that none of what you like about it exists without what you don’t. I’m not suggesting a resignation about the undesirable parts, but rather a genuine appreciation of them that goes infinitely further in quality and integrity than a sustained aversion and lopsided disposition ever will. From this new worldview, diversity becomes clearly inevitable and, if you can see it that way, very beautiful. Even that which contradicts the beholder’s natural subjective biases gains an exhilarating attraction as the ceaseless coming forth of creativity in life, affirming all creativity, including one’s own. The agent of Amor Fati affirms the world and the self as a unity.

High Mountains: High Ratings?

~ graham best

Yann Martel is the author of Life of Pi. His latest book The High Mountains of Portugal, released in 2016, explores themes of grief and loss, faith and redemption, religious epiphany, and meaningful living. These themes and others are at work in the book at all times, but operate quietly beneath a playful surface, at times humorous, at times very gripping for its suspense and dramatic tension. For literary-minded readers, the book offers a treasure chest of sparkling wording, compelling human eccentricity, and a tasteful appreciation of the cruel hand of Fate.

The book functions on a three-part structure that engages the reader through interlocking tales. It is a common enough conceit in storytelling these days for authors to suspend the revelation of how different threads that do not seem related ultimately are. Martel’s subtle addition to this device is to match form to content, such that particular themes amplify from the treatment. In particular, a tripartite structure feeds the book’s abiding reconsideration of the Christian faith, itself a three-part illumination, consisting of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Did Martel intend this and other such parallels? Read the amusing middle pages about Agatha Christie novels and judge for yourself!

Then enjoy the book’s deep and ubiquitous symbolism, which need never fully reduce to mundane equivalences. In fact, the book’s symbolism soars for being allusive without being didactic or simplistic. What to make, for example, of the repeated references to the Iberian rhinoceros and its noble presence in Portugal before going extinct? Might it not represent a kind of lost perfection, which is a main preoccupation of the book? Yes, but it’s also a modern representation of the unicorn, the medieval animal trope for Jesus Christ, another preoccupation. Martel is a true master at handling symbolism lightly yet undeniably. He is especially good at it with animals in the mix.

One animal in particular also stands out in this novel as possibly Martel’s greatest achievement in developing a character. You will know that character once you spend time together. You may find yourself laughing a lot as you read, shaking your head with delight or bemused disbelief, wanting more, always more. There is a story about Fyodor Dostoyevsky, author of Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, that he regarded Prince Myshkin, the title character of The Idiot, as his personal favorite among his creations. Martel would have every right to hold his new character in equal esteem. He would also have similar reasons to in that both unlikely cast members manifest and evoke spiritual ideals.

The High Mountains of Portugal is another great rhapsody on life from the unique and colorful imagination of one of our most daring contemporary writers. Here, Yann Martel further carves out a literary space all his own, one that blurs and reinvents the lines between realism, fantasy, and possibility. His novels—this one heading the list—take readers into a paradoxical new understanding of what being human really means, made possible through the playful narrative foil of participating animals. The book will not disappoint if you enjoy solid character development, historical curios, intelligent and illuminating digression, and a story that rewards you for pausing now and then to do some personal reflection about its myriad implications. For better or worse, one or two of them may never resolve.

Face Value

~ graham best

Because several of his books sparkle with incandescent genius, I will read pretty much anything by Philip K. Dick and do eventually want to read everything by him. The latest addition to that pleasure in my life is his novel Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said. If I had to get literary critical about it and rate the book as a reading experience, my conscience would demand the admission that for me the book was thin in terms of commanding my attention with either plot or character development and something unusual happens in the first chapter that never integrates much later, leaving a puzzling non sequitur where a denouement ought to come. That said, I still feel great love for the book and its camp satire of celebrity worship.

Written over 40 years ago, the book rings more true today than ever. Its world is an advance vision of ours. The main character is a TV and music celebrity whose success is defined by how many million audience members he has, not unlike racking up “views” on YouTube or “likes” on Facebook and Instagram. Quantified popularity makes the man, or breaks him. But the only ones who get a shot at it in the first place have a revealing common trait: they are good looking. Dick basically calls out the heavy social bias for attractiveness and the privileges it provides in terms of access to wealth and luxurious lifestyle. Good-looking people are superior members of society and everyone worships and fawns over them. Witnessing this treatment as a fiction really brings home that in real life it isn’t one.

The book also plays with the idea that its privileged class is a political experiment gone wrong, as if by karmic necessity. Celebrities are part of a genetic engineering cycle in its sixth phase: “an elite group, bred out of aristocratic prior circles to set and maintain the mores of the world, who had in practice drizzled off into nothingness because they could not stand one another.” Apparently if you are fed with a silver spoon, that good luck makes others like you too repugnant to bear, as if Dick is noting the narcissistic pitfalls of popularity. That the original aim for his celebrity class was to set the moral compass of the world, an aspiration now lost and inoperative, makes for a rich point of reflection on the influence of celebrity in ours. At the very least, the book helps to open our eyes by holding this mirror before them.

Days later, the book has an afterglow for me that makes me grateful to have spent time with it, as if it taught me about life. How strange and fundamentally senseless it really is that my culture worships good looks, that good looks give you chances at a life other people can’t often aspire to, that attaining such a life puts you in the public eye, where inevitably you have direct and indirect influence on cultural norms and mores, despite lacking real qualifications to. The situation is alternately laughable, preposterous, and pathetic. The book stirred me to get in touch with those responses to the craziness in the world around me and I feel the better for deeper contact with them. I reflected on my own longing to be beautiful by societal standards and how I too worship those who most clearly are. I looked at that tendency as a projective response, whereby people live that longing vicariously through celebrities.

That said, the best advice in the book lands for me with a disquieting irony as a result, because the main character offers it, himself a celebrity: “If you’re afraid, you don’t commit yourself to life completely; fear makes you always, always hold something back.” On the other hand, unrecognized longing for perfection makes you do the opposite: project it onto others as false idols.

Teenage Seat Snatchers

~ graham best

Some of my therapy work with teenagers takes place at a clinic devoted to serving a younger population. That setting offers multiple offices for conducting sessions and I have used them all, owing to scheduling needs. This inevitable shuffle of rooms has put an unexpected characteristic of my teenage clients into high relief—high enough that I feel like writing about it for both its humor potential and its possible meaning as a noteworthy trend. I never anticipated it as one.

With more than negligible frequency, as I guide teenage clients from the waiting area to our assigned room and open the door to let them go in, no matter which room it is, they walk directly to the chair for the therapist and plop down into it without any compunction about relegating me to one of the couches or armchairs. They choose the big leather swivel chair in the most central location in the room and make themselves ingenuously at home in it without a pause or remark. Then they watch me sit down in the customary location for clients.

There’s a lot to enjoy about this behavior. I always appreciate unconventional moments, and I’d like to think my ego is strong enough to tolerate and savor an inadvertent affront to it now and then—especially professionally. The experience is actually healthy for me if only for shaking me out of possible counterproductive ruts about being in charge or having special status as represented by which seat I inhabit. Plus, my delight in the mix up is genuine enough, not something I’m contriving for the sake of making myself feel better. I feel fine. I want all my clients to express themselves comprehensively. I want to know their every extemporaneous flourish.

Meanwhile, it’s also my job to reflect on how that expression takes place. I therefore pause to ask myself what is it about this repeating action of seat snatching that gives it such statistical over-representation among my teenage clients? Don’t get me wrong. If the most banal explanation passes the truth test, I’m all for it. I have no special wish to make an excessive big deal of something trivial. Do the teens keep commandeering my chair because it has the most sophisticated construction? Are they drawn to it on the principle that an office recliner simply makes for the most comfortable sitting?

I have come to suspect otherwise. When Erik Erikson outlined his eight famous stages of psychosocial development, thereby mapping the major epochs of the human lifespan, he determined that adolescence mainly involves the inner task of developing an identity or else lapsing into perpetual role confusion. This mounting tension in teenagers is why they have a reputation for experimenting, often rapidly, with so many different versions of who they are. They need to try on enough self-templates to find out what fits adequately for an initial transition into adulthood. Is that why they sit in my chair? Consciously or not, are they trying my role as data?

Or what about a psychodynamic explanation? Following in Freud’s feisty footsteps, what we’re looking for here is some compelling indication that intolerable instinctive drives are emerging in secondary expression instead. Teenagers are notorious for defying authority, so maybe their nonchalant displacement of the therapist from the traditional location of power is a form of indirect aggression. If so, who can blame them? At the same time that they want some support from me, needing it must be incredibly vulnerable for them. On first installment it would therefore make sense to unseat me, letting me know with that action that power goes both ways, but making that statement in an underhanded fashion, as if getting the point across without any liability about doing anything confrontational.

From a social constructionist lens, their behavior also suggests there are discourses at work within our culture that influence how we act. In this case, the discourse would have something to do with entitlement and who really has any. Once upon a time an automatic respect for one’s elders may have been a social norm, but nowadays might the opposite be true? Might not the behavior of my younger clients demonstrate that the cultural expectation now is the dominance of youth as a coded value? It will come as no secret that our culture favors staying young and being young. Magazines and social media pump that message like crude oil. When my teenage clients claim the customary location of the therapist, perhaps they are simply expressing collective conformity to the underlying message that youth rules the day.

I like to consider all these possibilities before I take the rash action of telling my clients they are in my chair and ought to sit in another one. Sensitivity about shaming the people I work with is one important guideline in my work. Nothing good comes from correcting someone unnecessarily, while tremendous good often follows from curiosity and tolerance about the unexpected. Only then is it occasionally valid to settle into a traditional parental disposition of setting firm boundaries. In those cases, I play the role of a missing fatherly presence, establishing a moral compass for my teenage clients to experience and eventually internalize. I often find out in those moments that my client’s history with fathering has been exceedingly poor.

The profound influence of one’s upbringing is a cornerstone of much psychotherapy. Building on it is sensitive work. The therapist must perform the proper due diligence before any substitution of present adult for past adult in the client’s psychic situation is useful and integrative. I tend to feel I can wait. I can sit in the client’s position for as long as it takes to reveal the real point of it. Paradoxically, that access to patience will often help my teenage clients regress internally to wherever the real obstacles to their development took place. Once that happens, they typically choose the proper seat on their own. It becomes a soothing refuge as the next phase of healing begins and the ability to depend on someone risks a real return.

Can I Get a Witness?

Image ~ ~ graham best

One of the many functions of a therapist is to bear witness to you as a client. This function is, on the one hand, very obvious in that the therapist is clearly an audience to your self-expression, while on the other hand, the witness function is quite subtle. The subtle aspects pertain to the deeper purpose of having a witness in one’s life. Ideally, what influence can it have for a client in therapy to receive consistent and receptive witnessing from a therapist over time?

The answer I would like to suggest will benefit from a short description of one major development in the field of Clinical Psychology. In the years after World War II, a psychoanalyst named Heinz Kohut began to question his Freudian training, mostly because it wasn’t working very well with his clients. He looked for a more effective way to regard his relationships with them and eventually came up with a new model that took the name Self Psychology.

One of its key ideas is that our earliest years are naturally a time of deep narcissism and our development into mature mutual relationship with the world and others requires that our early narcissism receives a good reception from our caregivers. The best reception is for our caregivers regularly to meet our need for recognition and celebration by them. According to Kohut, when our natural narcissism receives that kind of favorable response, it later transforms into adult ambitions and ideals that align with the world. Otherwise, our development suffers.

On first blush, it is therefore often a corrective measure for a therapist to witness a client warmly and consistently. That seemingly simple action by the therapist recreates a long lost opportunity for many clients to receive the kind of good reception that inner growth originally required, but did not properly receive. Receiving it now, although belatedly, many clients will successfully reconnect to the original thread of their stunted development and move it forward into the present as rediscovered goals, dreams, and abilities. They will reclaim their aliveness.

That benefit of witnessing by the therapist would, in itself, be enough to sell me on the service, which is not actually as simple as it seems to the onlooker. It requires a deep ability from the therapist fully to be there for someone else. Therapists must have their inner world sufficiently in order such that none of the therapist’s personal baggage or bias overly interferes in the witnessing function to obscure or misdirect it. If it were easy to provide that kind of reception, original caregivers would not drop the ball so often in the first place. Nor would there be so many poor therapists.

Meanwhile, in those wonderful cases where the witnessing shines, its deeper purpose has its first fighting chance to enter the relationship also. The deepest benefit of consistent, favorable witnessing is that clients may eventually internalize that treatment as a way to treat themselves. They may take the witnessing that was originally outside them in the therapist and move it inward as a new and reliable aspect of the personal self. According to Kohut, many key advances in supporting oneself derive from this natural process of internalizing support originally provided by someone else. I am simply bumping this idea forward to include witnessing as its most refined application.

How might you benefit from an increased ability to witness your own experience with greatly reduced or even zero reactivity at times? What might you see about yourself and your life that otherwise eludes you whenever you react too strongly to connect the chief dots, not to mention the more subtle ones? Might you find out more readily how you get in your own way, especially under stress? Might you learn there are clear and consistent patterns of behavior and emotion that conspire to regular experiences of suffering in your life? The witness comes to see these connections, offering first freedom from them based on greater awareness. The witness gains choice by the very act of witnessing well and witnessing clearly. Yes, you can get a witness, and thereby become one as well.