POWER AND SURRENDER

Kenneth Torquil MacLean

January 13, 2008

Judith Viorst is a writer who grew up and went to college in New Jersey, went to work in Greenwich Village, New York, and married a journalist, Milton Viorst. The have lived in Washington, D.C. for a good many years, and Milton has pursued his writing career, producing books about the Middle East and race relations in the U.S., as well as many articles and op-ed pieces. Judith has written one children’s book a year for a number of years, as well as books of poetry for adults, and a number of serious books, like Necessary Losses and Imperfect Control.

Imperfect Control is her most recent book, and it deals with all the questions around a basic human dilemma: how much are we in control of our own lives? She starts out by parsing the old nature-nurture debate. You know about the boy who comes home with a bum report card and asks his father, “What do you think it is, Dad: heredity or environment?” Whatever the problem or behavior, whether it is gaining weight, or putting off work, or being late, or being happy and optimistic or fearful and pessimistic, the answer seems to be the same: it is both. Of course the research in this area is highly dependent on studies of identical twins who were reared apart. When they are brought together, everybody is amazed at how much alike they are in all sorts of minor ways: like how they take their coffee, and how they do their studies, and what games they play. At the same time, it is clear that what happens to them, especially as very young children, has its own effect in shaping their personalities and lives.

Judith Viorst goes on to affirm that each of us lives our lives as though we were perfectly free to do whatever we wish, free to decide and act and think and react. We have to, whatever limits our inherited genes set, and however our early days with mother and father shaped our reactions, we have to go ahead and act like free persons. And to some extent, we are. That is what she means by Imperfect Control.

Her education and training have been greatly influenced by psycho-analysis; she is a graduate of the Washington School of Psychoanalysis. And that, of course, is based on the work of Sigmund Freud, beginning over a century ago. In the beginning, psychoanalysis, indeed most of American psychiatry, was totally based on the theories of Freud and his followers. A lot has happened to psychiatry in the last fifty years, especially the greater emphasis on using drugs to treat psychiatric problems. But there are two contributions from Freud, I think, that are still crucial in our understanding of the human mind.

The first is the idea of the unconscious. Before Freud, it was pretty well assumed that all the workings of the mind were there for us to see in our conscious thoughts. With the idea that there was a whole different layer of feelings and motives, of which the person was not aware, came a new and much more subtle understanding of the human mind. We have lived through half a century in which this concept has been totally accepted, and it is hard to realize that a mere hundred years ago this was a radical new notion which had a hard time being accepted. One of the ways in which psychiatrists tried to reach the unconscious, to see what was going on down there, was to have the patient tell his or her dreams. Classical psychoanalysis was often an hour a day for five days a week, uncovering layer after layer of repressed feelings and reactions to experience.

That leads to the second important idea from Freud: he assumed that if the psychiatrist was able to help the patient to uncover what was going on in the unconscious, that is, bring it to consciousness, then the patient would be more in control of his or her life. Although very few people today go through classical analysis, with five hours a week on the couch, it is still assumed that the more we bring our unconscious thoughts into consciousness, the more power we have in managing our lives. This leads to the idea that we have a right to our feelings; we just don’t have a right to act on all our feelings. And we go to great lengths to hide and disguise and supress the unacceptable feelings:

I love love love my brand-new baby sister.

I’d never feed her to a hungry bear.

I’d never (no! no! no!)

Put her outside in the snow

And by mistake forget I put her there.

I’d never want to flush her down the toilet.

I’d never want to drop her on her head.

I’m only asking if

She by mistake fell off a cliff

The next time we could get a dog instead.

Let us go back to the central dilemma: how much are we in control of our own lives? Control is partly a matter of constraint. The psychologist Daniel Goleman carried on an experiment: “four-year olds are offered this deal. They may, if they wish, eat a marshmallow immediately. Or, if they can restrain themselves until the tester returns, they will be permitted to eat two. Some four-year olds, not surprisingly, grabbed the single marshmallow almost as soon as the tester left the room, while others, valiantly fighting off temptation, held out for the fifteen or twenty minutes until the tester returned, winning their well-deserved two-marshmallow prize.”

Ten years or so later, all the chldren were tested and evaluated, the two marshmallow kids and the one-marshmallow kids. What do you know, the two-marshmallow kids were found to be more competent, more assertive, more confident, more reliable, and less likely to quit when faced with difficulties. They were also more eager to learn. So one of the elements of control over our lives is clearly some ability to put off gratification. I remember one of the girls who was at the home for emotionally disturbed teen-age girls where my wife was director while I was in divinity school. Connie was a beautiful and intelligent seventeen-year-old who had no ability to put off anything she wanted: it had to be right now. It was very hard for us to accept the evaluation that Connie was beyond our help, that she would, in all likelihood, spend most of her life in mental or penal institutions.

We all face the situations in which we struggle for greater control of our own lives in issues in which it seems to be a matter off holding off for a greater reward, but we have difficulty doing it. I think of my attempts, sometimes successful, to lose weight. I guess I keep losing that same twenty pounds and then finding it again. But that is only the most obvious sort of example. There are many ways in which we lose little battles for control and easily end up feeling helpless instead of in charge of who we are.

The psychological battles take place at one level, but I would suggest that there is another level at which the outcome is determined: a spiritual or religious awareness and deciding who we are and who we want to be. This is a lifetime journey, but it is pretty much a one-way trip, and the destination is simply what we have done with this one life. There are all sorts of byways and detours and cul-de-sacs, but the extent to which we know where we want to be going is, I believe, still one of the most powerful determinants of where we will end up.

One useful question may be: how do I define myself? Some people have to spend a lot of their lives fighting off a definition, like the computer science professor at Yale who opened up the package sent by the Unabomber and lost two fingers off one hand, and came out with damaged eyesight and scars all over his body. He refuses to be a victim. He gives no interviews, refuses offers of television specials, is not going to settle for the rest of his life being seen as “the victim.” He believes that “to be a victim is a choice you make. He chooses not to.”

We can define ourselves in other ways that give up control over life, like being helpless, or being unlucky, or being swept along by circumstances over which we have no control. Some adults are still defining themselves in terms of living out what somebody else, usually a parent, wanted them to be. Some people define themselves so totally in terms of their work, that when they retire they experience it as loss of identity, like the man who told me, “I was managing a budget of a million dollars a day. Then I retired, and the next day I was nobody!”

It is good and important for us to define ourselves, to know who we are. The trick is to expand the definition, to look at all the facets of being a person that we have managed to find and to live, and not to settle for anything less. I love being a minister, and that may be the first response that springs to mind when I am asked, “And what do you do in real life?” But there is more to my life than being a minister, and it is important for me to nourish and explore all those other ways of being human which are part of my life.

How much control do you have over your own life? On your good days? Is it what you want it to be? In a realistic way are your days adding up to something that gives you some satisfaction, some feelings of value, some of the exhiliration that comes from being in charge, as much as anyone is? If not, then maybe you still have some spiritual work to do, to figure out what it is that you want out of this one life we have all been given. By being here, you are part of a do-it-yourself religion, and nobody else can do that work for you. But remember, as Judith Viorst reminds us, the best we are ever likely to achieve is Imperfect Control. And that is probably enough.