Hattie's Web

Childhood, the forgotten years

 

Childhood has been on my mind. Psychohistorian Lloyd DeMause makes pronouncements on child rearing that are too far out for him ever to be accepted into the mainstream.  Why does he seem so convincing to me, then?

He claims childrearing advances in Western civilization, beginning with the Enlightenment, led to the freeing of some minds for science and technology and caused other dynamic changes. Much of the ethnographic material he provides leaves him open to accusations of prejudice against non-western societies.  I know at least one academic, Dean McCannell,  who says that reports of certain sexual practices between men and boys in New Guinea tribes are really the product of dirty minds and have never taken place.*

But no one can dispute the almost universal practice of female castration in Egypt. De Mause blames this practice for what he sees as the backwardness of Egypt and the Middle East in general. What he says that I find shocking is that the women carry out this mutilation in order to keep the males in the family from sexually using the girls. And he also considers circumcision to be a highly sexualized attack on the infant body.

One thing beyond doubt is that it's a big world and all kinds of things go on, so who can say who does not have the actual facts, someone who has observed these things or participated in them, or who has been unable to find any evidence of them? Looking at our own civilization, a few years ago it would not have been possible to get people in general to acknowledge the widespread pedophilia among priests.

Alice Miller, the Swiss psychoanalyist who died recently, is more acceptable. She steps away from the sexual material and looks more at corporal punishment.

These are hard things to read about and think about. We have abandoned the attempt to understand childhood at these deep levels and have descended (or ascended) into a kind of superficial rationality about the vicissitudes of childhood.  We tout family values to a high degree, but what do we really mean by this? What families and what values?  What was Cheney's childhood like, I wonder? Did his parents torture him? Is this where he developed the taste for shooting helpless animals and friends?

* MacCannell claimed, in his book Empty Meeting Grounds, that western tourists were metaphorically cannibalizing foreign places in an act of appropriation and internalization of other places and peoples. He felt that the claim of oral sex practices among boys and men in New Guinea was a projection of touristic consumption. That is, that westerners want to believe non-westerners engage in unspeakable yet exciting practices.

From Cloudia, who grew up there and now lives on a boat at Waikiki. Of course one could object, and rightly, that this is the comfortable white person's approach to a place that people are trapped in, but the vid gives the impression that a person is walking through, saddened but untouched by the desperation of the people he passes by.  He is walking freely, they are confined behind fences.

The two people I know who lived there were both assaulted, one robbed the other threatened with rape at knifepoint. And The Field Negro calls it "Killadelphia."

 

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/aug/31/hurricane-irene-reunion-with-boredom/

The best thing I have ever written

http://hattie.typepad.com/hatties_web/the-madwoman-flies-dry.html

Rainy day

Rainy a.m. in Hilo. My little old dog is not well and I'm debating whether or not to call the vet. Buddy just seems to want to rest, and I hate to disturb him. On the other hand, he has taken a real downturn in the past few days. I guess I had better take him in.

Erica Heller's book really rocked me. As I read it, I was thinking, "How do we find the courage to live, people like us? It isn't as if  the world gave us a warm welcome. Not obviously smart or talented, not cute, not even driven,  we are in no way favored, never (or not to exaggerate, seldom) the apple of anyone's eye, and yet we grasp at whatever we can to survive.

I was thinking of the extreme importance in my life of my mother's psychoanalyst, a woman who injected sanity into our crazy family, and am still wondering how and why my mother knew she needed help and was able to find it. This was in the early 40's, when psychoanalysis was practically unknown (kind of the way it is again as drugs replace talk therapy). But we were in Berkeley.

My mother once said to my sister, "I can't figure out how your father and I could have brought up two sane and stable daughters." She was a depressive and an alcoholic, and my father was a narcissistic neurotic. They both had terrible childhoods that they never got over and my mother literally almost died of hunger during the Depression.

I am living proof that psychoanalysis can save people. If my mother had not had the self insight gained through analysis my sister and I might not have made it. When the family script, which dictated chaos and failure, threw us into crisis, she would pull herself together and make life saving decisions, but the problem was that things had to get very bad before she could act.

I am going to visit the library today to see whether they have any of Judith Rossner's   psychological novels. Rossner's most famous book is Looking for Mr. Goodbar, which was made into a movie.  I loved Attachments, which is a totally weird book about a set of Siamese twins, and August, which concerns itself with what happens when the analyst goes on vacation.*

* There was a funny take on the theme of patients falling to pieces when the analyst goes on vacation in the film,  What About Bob? Bill Murray and Richard Dreyfuss were insanely funny and played off so well against each other. And  Julie Hagerty  as the sweet little wifey with the baby-doll voice was also pitch-perfect.

 

jeremyscahill jeremy scahill
Yes! Finally found where they keep the Dick Cheney book!: http://lockerz.com/s/134351150

Kvetch

What woman, daughter of a famous novelist, when she asks him whether she was one of the characters in his novel and he says, "What makes you think you're interesting enough to write about?" still loves him above all other men? Erica Heller, that's who. 

She has just written one of those daughter of a famous father memoirs, Yossarian Slept Here.  This is the NYT article about it.

Joseph Heller belonged to that ridiculously spoiled cohort of WW II vets now referred to as "the greatest generation." He's best known for Catch 22, which was made into a movie that everyone saw. I think, however, as does his daughter, as did Heller himself, that his best work was the novel, Something Happened. Which, for some reason, has never been made into a film.  I read it when it came out and said, "That was my adolescence." I could never read it again, because it would be too painful. In fact, the whole family dynamic was quite familiar to me. The setting was different, but the play was the same. What was different was me. I chose not to become an emotional basket case over my family and moved on instead.

When it's all about Dad and the others are bit players, well that's miserable.  I'm glad Erica Heller wrote this book, but it won't change things. It won't change the way we look at men like Heller, who  used everything and everyone around him. The  world will still say that Heller was a hell of a fellow.

alaindebotton Alain de Botton
As the lamb is to christianity, so the fig is to my (imaginary) religion.
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Lovely weekend

This is my office, where the unfrozen cavewomen blogger spends much of her time.

 

 

Even wonks like me need time off from the Sturm und Drang.  We just shopped for food, did things around the house, read, relaxed, and on Sunday evening had our next door neighbors and their 18 month old daughter over for dinner. The little girl passed out around 7, so we had a couple of hours of lovely adult conversation with these very pleasant young people. I'm hoping they can stick around. He's working very hard to make that possible.

And this a.m I took some pix of the latest blooms. They are so rewarding. (Click for enlargements.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

          

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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