Dr. X's Free Associations

Butting Out

I stopped by a local Radio Shack last night to pick up a small gizmo for my thingamabob.  As I was sorting through the display rack looking for the right model number, I heard a woman asking a clerk a rather complicated technical question about a piece of electronic equipment.  Instantly, I recognized the voice as someone I've known very well for years.  But when I turned to look at her, it wasn't her; it was her niece (I'll call the niece Martha, not her real name).  Obviously unaware of my presence, Martha continued a complicated conversation with the clerk for several minutes.

What is so remarkable about this?  I know Martha and Martha's entire family very well, but this was the first time I'd ever heard Martha's voice.

No one in Martha's family ever uses the term selective mutism to describe the young woman's condition.  The family seems at a complete loss for explanations whenever they comment on Martha's situation.  She does speak with her mother and father regularly, but I've been told by her aunt that she doesn't speak with anyone else.  At social gatherings, Martha might pull one of her parents aside to speak or she might whisper in her mother's ear.

I've also been under the impression that Martha has some cognitive impairments.  Martha was a special education student until age 21.  Now in her late twenties, she lives at home and continues to work in a marginal job that was part of the occupational preparation offered in her special education program.  The job doesn't require speaking and Martha is, by all accounts, a valued, reliable employee.

Needless to say, I was startled last night when I heard this very self-confident, intelligent-sounding young woman engage in a complicated discussion with a clerk in a public place.

Martha's aunt and I once had a candid discussion about her niece's situation (initiated by the aunt).  At the time, I resisted her plea to get involved by sharing my thoughts on treatment options with the young woman's mother and father.  I NEVER stick my professional nose into a situation like this.  Family dynamics are complicated and, most of the time, it's abundantly clear that getting involved will only stir up distress without helping.   Martha needs professional treatment.  Her parents are highly educated and aware that professional treatment options exist.  Whatever it is that has prevented treatment (I think I know what that is), will not be overcome by an informal "educational" intervention.

When you're a shrink, people sometimes try to pull you into situations like this, often as a surrogate playing their part in a complicated family system.  I'm not sure anyone but a shrink fully comprehends the utter fruitlessness and potential destructiveness of butting in, even when invited.  Psychological resistances are not overcome with informal educational interventions, especially when there is a family system supporting those resistances.  Naive informational interventions just set a game of psychological whack-a-mole in motion.

The problem is not that Martha's parents aren't sufficiently educated or worldly.  The problem is that Martha's condition works well for her family.  In a sense, her condition is not a problem;  it is a solution to a family problem.  A complex of interlocking family fears and family needs sustains her mutism.  Martha cannot get better without putting her family at serious risk of disintegration.

Some family systems theorists might call Martha a family hero.  That characterization is a bit too romantic for my tastes, but I do think Martha knows, implicitly, if not explicitly, that it is her job to be disabled.  She could talk without any difficulty at Radio Shack because, she assumed, no one that mattered would know.

I think I should keep her secret.

A strenuous caveat for readers: I am not even remotely suggesting children's psychological problems are always, or even typically, a solution to family problems.  I am not a systems theory purist.  I am saying that it seems abundantly clear based on historical facts I know and what I've observed that, in this particular family, the young woman's condition is actually a solution to a serious family problem.

Vintage Photos: 1920

Oldsmobile in Rock Creek Park (Washington, D.C.). Left-click photo to enlarge.

Santa Cruz City Council Meeting 5-13-8

Did you ever feel like you've got something to say, but you just can't figure out how to say it?

Vintage Photos: 1939

Children of migrant workers (Yakima, WA, Dorothea Lange).  Left-click photo to enlarge.

Mississippi Looks Like Bart Simpson

It really does.

Wednesday Loose Associations

Well, nothing published yesterday and no photo today.  Sometimes I have to work on my side jobs--making a living and tending to the people in my life.  They don't understand that I've got a blog to get out and deadlines to meet.   If I'm not careful, some ambitious whipper-snapper like Andrew Sullivan will blow right by me and take all of my readers with him.

Speaking of Andrew Sullivan, at the top of his front page there is a post about bombings at the opening of the Out Games in Copenhagen.  Is it reasonable to assume that the perpetrators are Muslims or skinheads?  Maybe.  It could also be the work of freelance hooligans.  Sullivan wrote just a few days ago about some P-town locals beating the tar out of a friend of his shortly after the friend left a bar to walk home.

That, by the way, is what the term "gay bashing" means.  It refers to literally beating someone up because they're gay.   Regrettably, the word "bashing" has been co-opted by a subset of Christians who describe any verbal denigration of Christians or Christianity as "Christian bashing."

I don't believe that the sliding of meaning is accidental in this case.

A few years ago, when people like Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly began to routinely refer to criticism of Christians as "Christian bashing," they fully intended to suggest moral equivalence between verbal criticism of Christians and (sometimes fatal) beatings of gays.  It is a despicable comparison.  There is neither legal nor moral equivalence between gay bashing and so-called Christian bashing.  Moreover, this is exactly the sort of nonsense that invites the very ridicule that is falsely labeled as Christian bashing.

Brayton on Gates

As the furor over the arrest of Henry Louis Gates has grown, I have repeatedly offered one simple opinion: it is no more illegal to yell at and insult a police officer than it is to yell at or insult any other citizen. The mere fact that they have the power to arrest you does not mean they can legitimately arrest you for doing something that is legal if done to anyone else. That's why I don't really care what Gates may have said to the cop at his house.

Brayton goes on to quote from a relevant legal opinion written by conservative federal jurist Alex Kozinski.  There is nothing equivocal about this:  insulting, swearing at or otherwise raving critically at a cop is legally protected speech--it is not disturbing the peace.  Inflicting narcissistic injury on a police officer or anyone else is not a crime in America.  Even Judge Andrew Napolitano of Fox News fame agrees on this.

Okay, time for your Dutch uncle to go back to his room so that Dr. X can reclaim his blog and finish this posting.

I'm actually writing from a local cafe.  Today, Bill Savage (an elder brother of Dan) is holding office hours at a nearby table--a summer class, I guess.  Bill is an English professor at NU and an expert in many things including, but not limited to, baseball and Chicago writers.

Loads of interesting people frequent this place.  It's a great spot to work on reports (or the blog) or have a good conversation with someone who knows much more than I know about some interesting subject.  There is almost always someone here who writes guest editorials for the Times, or someone who has appeared on Nightline, Charlie Rose or some PBS program.  Garry Wills was a regular here for years, but he moved down the street to a Starbucks.

Yes, I am name-dropping.  I was thinking I might turn this blog into a Kup's column or a Sneedlings (Page Six in New York-ese).  I read that Gawker has become a money machine, but I'm afraid we don't see the right kind of celebrity around this cafe.  Now, there is a bar down the road where I once shot some 8-ball with John Cusack.  Sister Joan was there, too.  She seemed a bit sulky that evening, but I still don't think that's the kind of scandalous material required for a money-making, celebrity gossip blog.

Well, we're just about out of free time here, so I bid you farewell.

Update:

Kathleen Parker with some grown up thoughts about Gates and Crowley--why it matters, why we're still talking about it and why a round of beers is the right thing to do.

Vintage Photos: 1924

Pulling monkey teeth (Washington, D.C.). Left-click image to enlarge.

Gates 4: Perception, Memory and Tidy Narrative Construction

The Gates 911 and dispatch tapes have been released.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – The 911 caller who reported two men possibly breaking into the home of black Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. did not describe their race, acknowledged they might just be having a hard time with the door and said she saw two suitcases on the porch.

Actually, she said that one of the men might be Hispanic.

A Few Monday Associations and Links

I'm spending a little extra time at the keyboard today, tuning up and breaking in my new netbook--a Toshiba NB205.  The keyboard was cramped at first, but now that I've got a feel for the reduced size, typing is no problem.  I suppose the regular laptop will look like a giant screen TV when I return to it.  The desktop will feel like an amphitheater.

I'm not used to all this miniaturization.  I dislike cell phones and rely on a cheap Cricket phone plan without all those Blackberry-like features.  Texting is included, but I don't text and everyone who knows me just accepts that.

But I actually sent my first text ever late last night.  It was a reply to a woman in the western suburbs who had been texting me all weekend.

I gathered from her messages that she met some fellow at a bar on Friday night and she hoped there could be something more between them.  Anyway, she kept texting me about it and finally, last night, I replied:

i m not the guy u r lkg 4.

The texts have stopped.

Interpreting Texts

No, not text messages; I'm talking about how we process meanings.  I was thinking about how one big idea can serve as a cognitive processor that generates attributions to explain almost everything.  Sometimes that one big idea is an ideology and sometimes it's a psychic idea--like the narcissist's grandiosity.  The latter (the psychic idea) and the former (the ideology) are not totally unrelated.

Some (like me, for instance) would argue that ideologies serve multiple purposes.  They are intellectual formulations that help us organize and understand underlying principles behind events in the world, but they are also derivative expressions of unconscious psychic conundra.

One big political idea can be so powerful that it functions very much like a core pathological idea--stretched to an absurd degree to color a person's observations of almost everything.  Such a person cannot read or listen to anything without hearing a political dimension to the subject.  Occasionally, you find these folks commenting in blogs that aren't posting anything manifestly political, but these commenters jump in with some absurd political observation that bends the subject almost beyond recognition.

My suspicion is that the more an individual leans toward applying political interpretations to everything, the more likely it is that we're seeing a derivative expression of a core pathological idea.  These core intrapsychic ideas represent areas of continuous internal tension.  They are always being worked over in search of a solution, not necessarily in direct and conscious ways, but in indirect ways--as displaced, symbolic representations of the core unresolved tension.  You might say that a character disorder refers to a personality that revolves around the management of one big troubling idea that is worked on, 24/7, in various disguised forms.

Singular Obsessions

One political blogger (who shall remain nameless) used to regularly recount his political discussions at cocktail parties from the previous weekend.  He would, inevitably, describe how he'd confronted some other guest with some brilliant political question or observation.  The guest would always mutter something unintelligible, change the subject or walk away.  Said blogger presented these vignettes as evidence of the brilliance of his political formulations, but I guess you had to be there.  As my late analyst friend once summed up his reaction to posts by this blogger: Oh no, here comes Mr. A.  Don't look!  Don't look!  Maybe he'll go bother someone else.

Change of Subject

Perhaps there is a latent connection between the previous subject and this one, but nothing immediately comes to mind.  I wanted to post a link to an interesting story from Dinah (Shrink Rap).  She discusses a relative's experience with an insurance company's handling of a claim for medication to treat a fingernail infection.  What happened vividly illustrates how, in order to save a few bucks, insurance companies sometimes engage in questionable practices that add enormously to the actual cost of health care delivery.  There can be a certain larger madness to a system that is relentlessly focused on profit.  Whether this is reason enough for a public health care option, I don't know.  But as someone who,as a provider, used to regularly deal with insurers, I can easily relate to Dinah's post.  That's why I run a mostly insurance-free practice these days.  I can generally deliver better care more cheaply if insurers aren't involved.

Oh, I just this moment identified the latent connection between the two previous subjects.  Not something I can share, but it is a reminder to me that the unconscious processor is far more creative than the conscious, deliberative mind.

Human Bone Found In Another Chicago Area Cemetery

A human bone was found on the ground at a second Chicago area cemetery raising new concerns about grave tampering.  Earlier in July, investigators discovered that hundreds of bodies were disinterred at Burr Oak cemetery in a scheme to illegally resell grave sites.

Something I learned that I hadn't known: graves in Illinois are sometimes leased for periods as short as 30 years. After that time, cemetery owners have the right to re-lease or sell the plots.  There are no regulations outlining requirements to notify relatives when the lease has expired and no regulations on how any disinterred remains should be handled by cemetery owners.  I could imagine that in many cases, cemetery owners might not be able to locate relatives even if they tried to do so.