Monthly Archive for January, 2012

Freudians are sexy; Jungians are not ( at least not this last weekend)

Published on January 17, 2012 in Belette in Psychotherapy, Meaning Making and Quotidien. 24 Comments

I spent Friday night with Jung and Saturday morning with Freud. That sounds kind of bad. It sounds like I get around, at lease theoretically speaking. Doesn’t it? And the truth is, I do. I am a bit of a psycho-dynamic polyamorist, meaning I love Freud and Jung and Lacan and Winnicott andFairbairn and Bion and… But I am not writing today about my theoretical polyamory. Today I am talking about sexy. Sexy isn’t something you think a lot about when you think about psychology but it was something I have been thinking a lot about.

Friday night I attended a documentary about Sabina Speirlein and the audience was heavily weighted with Jungians. And the look of the attendees was decidedly “not sexy”. Most of the attendees were over-50 woman who rejected hair color with the same vehemence they might reject a prescription for Prozac or a cognitive intervention. The room was so gray that I felt like I was attending an AARP convention in the midst of hippy-dippy-granola-town-goat’s-milk, USA. Then there was the matter of their clothing: again with the gray. And with the gray there were the ubiquitous shawls and the ethnic inspired jewelry, a’la Chico’s, and the VERY comfortable shoes. I have never seen so many comfortable shoes in one place—there was not a single pair of platforms in the entire pavilion. The lady in gray who sat next to me during the screening was so comfortable in her Mephistos that she took them off. She sat next to me in a public place in her bare feet. I was aghast at her barefooted boldness. I sat there in my red J Crew suede pointed-toe penny loafers and silently judged her for exposing her feet in a public place( yes, I have some naked feet issues and these issues are amplified if the naked foot in question has never been pedicured) and scanned my mind for the appropriate DSM-IV diagnosis that would fit such shocking lack of public decency.

Beyond the drab clothes, gray hair and comfortable shoes there was just a general vibe of croniness(The crone is the archetype of the the old wise woman), haginess and witchypoo-ness to the event. These Jungian women seemed to actively embrace these archetypes and I don’t think they would in any way bristle at me describing them as a crone or a hag. As I am a gal who loves her chemically assisted hair colour, Botox, fashionable attire and heels high enough to enter the realm of Icarus, I felt very out of place and, to tell you the truth, in such crone-filled environments I often feel more than a little unwelcome. I sometimes get the feeling that if you look like you make too much effort on your appearance that the Jungian crone women will decide that you are lacking in depth. That may not be the case but I can tell you that it certainly feels that way.

When I was working on my graduate thesis “The genesis of shame: The fig leaf of fashion and its place in psychotherapy” and I would tell women analysts in the Jungian community in which I trained that I was writing on the topic of clothing I received some pretty harsh judgements. Clothing was looked at as immaterial to the field of psychology and judged as a surface interest and not one that should be given serious academic consideration. It’s interesting to note that five years after completing my thesis that the very same institute offered the course, “Clothes in the Analytic Relationship: Not For Women Only”. It was bittersweet to see that the topic was finally being considered. I attended the nearly sold out event and was somewhat pleased to see that the women who did the presentation had not approached the topic with the depth of analysis that I had. I was also amused and somewhat irritated by the participants cooing question to the presenters, “This is such a rich therapeutic topic. Why hasn’t anyone written on it before?” Grrr!!!!

Okay, sorry for the tangent, back to sexy. So Friday night was extremely un-sexy. That’s not entirely true. The documentary on Sabina Spielrein was kind of sexy in that she was an amazing women who contributed much the the field of psychoanalysis and she slept with Jung and she had the balls to call him out on his bad behavior and then spilled the beans to Freud and went onto become a psychoanalyst. Sabina was sexy. Jung not so much and the attendees of the documentary were definitely not sexy.

Saturday morning I attended a lecture on the Greek Philosophical Roots of Psychoanalysis. I was expecting for the class to be fascinating and insightful and it was. What I had not expected was that the teacher was going to be so sexy. She really was. She had long hair that she tossed back away from her face to great effect. She wore an amazing and figure flattering dress that I would have loved to have. She gesticulated passionately with her long and manicured talons. Peep toe platform pumps revealed red pedicured toes. She was undeniably sexy and super smart. As I sat in the audience discovering how Freud had likely been influenced by Aristotle, I found my mind reviewing some of the female Freudian and Post-Freudian professors I’ve had and how most of them looked extremely embodied, sensual and as if they probably had a pretty amazing sex life( that could just be my projection however there has been a kind of wildness to their hair, some serious heels and a leather skirt or two that all seem to say that their knowledge of sex is more than just clinical).

As Dr. Sexy Freudian lectured I found myself comparing and contrasting the differing representations of femininity that I experienced at both events and I felt MUCH more at home at the second. As I contemplated the differences I imagined that the gray/drab/Mephisto wearing women were a kind of asensual-intellectual that rejected sexuality and embodiment in favor of the world of the mind. and that the wild-haired and skirt and heel wearing Freudian’s clearly had a life in which they managed to be embodied, sexy and smart(Dr. Sexy has a PhD and a PsyD and is a psychoanalyst and an artist and she speaks Latin and she has crazy-sexy style and she is funny).

When the lecture was over I went up and thanked Dr. Sexy for her lecture. What I didn’t thank her for was her willingness to be feminine and sexy and smart(not choosing one at the expense of the other) nor did I tell her how personally meaningful it was to discover such a well-dressed role model. I really wished I had thanked her for being who she is as witnessing her being herself was even more awesome than anything I learned about Aristotle ( and I did learn some good stuff about Mr. Golden Mean). I am sure she over the years she has received some guff for being so glamorous but she didn’t let the guff stop her. She could quote Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle with ease, all while looking like a Russian Jaquelyn Bissett and that is seriously impressive. And no woman, no matter how high her IQ, wouldn’t like to hear that she inspires and looks great while doing it—at least no woman I know of.

Labels that lower your worth or J Crew as Bad Faith

Published on January 11, 2012 in Belette in Psychotherapy and Meaning Making. 40 Comments

Okay, so here’s the deal, most of us…me included….like our labels. No, I am not talking about Gucci, Pucci and Fiorucci–although those are some nice labels. Actually my labels of choice are more likely to be JCrew, Kate Spade, Diane Von Furtstenburg and Tory Burch. But those are not the labels I am talking about. I am talking about identity labels—-labels such as “mother’, “daughter”, “therapist”, “wife”, etc. We work hard to achieve those labels. We go to school for some of them. We go to counseling to maintain others. We pay $100,000 for a party that announces we are now a “Mrs.”. These labels define us and when we lose them we can feel like we have lost our purpose in life.
This last year I lost some labels and gained some new ones. Being someone’s wife give me some social cache and comfort. And as I was no one’s mother, being someone’s wife made me feel like I had at least achieved one developmental milestone that made me seem like I was on the adult-who-plays-by-the-rules track. And in losing the label of ‘wife’ I had some undeniable existential angst, ennui and meaningless. However, ultimately in losing the label I gained more freedom to be who I really am.

Jean Paul Sartre, the father of Existential philosophy and the only philosopher to ever admit being chased by a crustacean( a bad mescalin trip), and the other fab four of the existential philosopher club ( Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Camus and Heidegger) ask their readers to dump these labels(being-in-itself) faster than you might ditch a questionable Prada knock off. But why do they want you to ditch them? They think it’s bad faith. What’s “bad faith”? “Bad faith, according to Sartre, is “the phenomenon where a human being under pressure from societal forces adopts false values and disowns their innate freedom to act authentically.”

Let me have Sartre explain bad faith in his own words: “Consider this waiter in the cafe. His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer. Finally there he returns, trying to imitate in his walk the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton while carrying his tray with the recklessness of a tight-rope-walker by putting it in a perpetually unstable, perpetually broken equilibrium which he perpetually re-establishes by a light movement of the arm and hand.” Sartre is not singling out waiters, it’s just likely the example that came to mind as he spent so much time hanging at out Parisian cafes. Sartre is using them to attack the notion of over-identifying with a role( what Jung might call Persona identification) and how that over-identification with a role limits our freedom.

Satre expands his analysis to those who work at the Piggly Wiggly: “A grocer who dreams is offensive to the buyer, because such a grocer is not wholly a grocer, ” Sartre continues. “Society demands that he limit himself to his function as a grocer, just as the soldier at attention makes himself into a soldier-thing with a direct regard which does not see at all, which is no longer meant to see, since it is the rule and not the interest of the moment which determines the point he must fix his eyes on (the sight “fixed at ten paces”). There are indeed many precautions to imprison a man in what he is, as if we lived in perpetual fear that he might escape from it, that he might break away and suddenly elude his condition.”

Did you read the fantastic book, The Elegance of the Hedgehog? If not, you should. In it there is a character, Renée, who is the concierge of an upscale Parisian apartment. She works to conform to the expectations people have of a concierge. She is fat, cantankerous, and is seemingly addicted to TV. She hides the parts of her that do not conform to the cliche of concierge. Renée is secretly a cultured autodidact who adores art, philosophy, music, and Japanese culture. Renée is a perfect example of Bad Faith.

When I started my blog I wanted a place to talk about things that I couldn’t talk about as a therapist. I had interests and passions that were not considered “depthful” or appropriate interests for one who was working on accessing the unconscious. My interest in shoes, clothing, skincare, and aesthetics were considered surface and not part of the expected interests of one who was a depth psychotherapist. La Belette Rouge gave me a place for me to break from the role of therapist and in having a place for that part of myself I began to value it more and was able to incorporate more of myself. I found that the more I wrote about these interests the more authentic I became and less and less felt the need to act out of an expectation of the role of therapist. I am a therapist who loves depth and discourse and philosophy and I also love skincare and shoes and leopard print and being girly. Sartre would like that about me, I think.

Sartre was so committed to this notion that one shouldn’t be identified by labels, and that to do so is to treat yourself as an object and not as a being, that he refused to accept the Nobel prize. He knew if that he accepted the prize that was accepting a label and to accept a label is to limit your freedom. That is putting your money where your mouth is. I think if I was JPS, I might have tried to write a book of philosophy that argued it isn’t bad faith to accept a Nobel prize.

So what labels are you over-identified with? Do you find that these labels impinge your freedom? Oh, and just to bring about of whimsy to this post and negate the entire premise of this thesis, what clothing label do you most identify with and why? For me, JCrew continues to be the brand that I most identify with. Why? I suppose they are about classics with a twist. That’s me. I like things that endure and yet aren’t stuffy. I’m Episcopalian ( definitely classic with a twist). I prefer classical literature to modern novels—-mostly. I like designs that promise to be in style in twenty years and that don’t take themselves too seriously. That said, I also buy clothes from unexpected places (Target, etc)—which I think means I am not so over-identifed with a label that I am committing sartorial Sartrian bad faith.

Not sure where to start

Published on January 9, 2012 in Quotidien. 40 Comments

So much time has passed since I last wrote that I don’t know where to start. Weekly I think of two or three topics that I could write about and then don’t. The longer I don’t write the more I feel that the first post back has to be super-special and somehow encapsulate in some witty and wise way all that I have learned in my absence—-and that creates a lot of pressure which then prevents me from posting. So I am taking the pressure off. This post will not be witty, wise or insightful, I promise. What it will be will a list of events that I planned on turning into posts and didn’t. Here I go.

1. I learned how to use cruise control.

This blog post was going to be a wonderful and insightful exploration of “cruise control” as a metaphor and how I am no longer afraid to use cruise control in my car or in my life. It would have been chock-full-of-insight. However as I never wrote it I forget the insights.

2. Beauty may only be skin deep but that is exactly why I want the CO2 laser.

In this post I was going to write about my inner conflict about being a person of depth who is choosing to have a painful and costly cosmetic procedure. As I have already had the procedure and recovered from the horrible pain, swelling and orange glow that came post-procedure, I am not at all conflicted. My skin looks MUCH better. It was totally worth all of the peeling, swelling, and scabbing. And I am still deep even after lasering off a layer or two of skin.

3. I went to Morrissey and I didn’t buy a stupid tee shirt.

This post would have been one in which I raved and raved about how much I love Morrissey and what a great time I had when I went to see him in concert and how awesome Morrissey is. For self-serving reasons, I also would have a included a picture that a friend took of me that night in which I look like a 40-something Barbie, thanks to my friend’s camera skills and the makeup artistry skills of the girl at MAC Beverly Hills. The picture is included in this post. The post, however, still remains unwritten.

4. I found a house.

In this landmark post I would have raved excitedly about the house and I would have looked back at the time when house hunting used to make me sick and scared with a terror that required extra sessions with Igor. The theme of the post would have been ‘I can’t believe what a difference a year makes’. That is a theme that I continue to explore.

5. We moved into the house.

This post would have likely been short. It would have had pictures of boxes. I would have complained about the mess. I would have shared with unbridled excitement the joys of a dishwasher, washer/dryer, bathtub and having a home office. I would have told you how cute my house it and how happy I am. I am sure you would have written some lovely comments and wished me well in my new home. Thanks for that.

6. Merry Christmas.

On the 25th I could have just posted a picture of Lily sitting by our Christmas tree, but I didn’t. That said, I hope you had a Merry Christmas. I did. It was a pretty low key Christmas for me. I was in the middle of the move. I was also recovering from the C02 laser procedure. But I was with my guy and my mom and my friend and Lily and it was great.

7. 2011 a year in review.

This post would have been epic if I would have written. 2011 has been huge for me. I can’t think of a year in my life that was more filled with change. I hope 2012 is a bit calmer. I hope your 2012 is whatever you want it to be.

8. The post in which I admit to having bought clothing at Forever 21.

I shop at Forever 21. I’m not proud of it but I do. I buy jewelry there. They have great jewelry. I love their jewelry. I know the quality is crap. It is essentially temporary jewelry, single wearing on some occasions( Forever 15 minutes is what they should call it)—but it is fun jewelry. I stick mostly with necklaces. I occasionally get a pair of earrings.
When I go there I construct a narrative in my head that allows me to shop there without too much shame or fear of looking like mutton shopping for lamb skins. I tell myself that I am there shopping for my imaginary teenage daughter. That narrative protects me from the glances of seventeen-year-olds who see me as an old bat and wonder what I am doing in their territory. I repel their looks by telling myself, “I’m shopping for my daughter.” On a recent trip for “my daughter”,I found my way out of the jewelry section and into the clothing section. A 46-year-old shopping at a clothing store meant for 21 year old girls. But there I found it, in spite of my shame. I found a perfect trench coat for $25. Or should I say, I found a perfect trench coat for my daughter.

9. Perfect day.

I could have written this post almost any day the last four months. Ever since I met “him”, most days feel perfect. We had one on Saturday. I feel sure we’ll have another one today. This post likely would have been sappy and sounded overly sentimental. I wouldn’t care. I’m happy and in love and I don’t care who knows it.

10. Humanistic Existential Philosophy and its Impact on Psychoanalysis

On Saturday I went to a lecture on this topic. I would love to write about it. It was an incredible class—two of my favorite topics in one lecture. I learned about death anxiety, existential dread, the danger of being in itself and the archetypal outfit of middle-aged and older male-psychoanalysts. That last one was not listed on the learning objectives and yet I learned it just the same. ALL the men there, in the over 40-age-range, at the New Center for Psychoanalysis, had on the same outfit as if a uniform: 1990′s leather jacket; pleated trousers; and Rockport shoes. I think Sartre might say that this outfit is a “Being for others” move and hence one of “bad faith”. At some point this became the look for this group as a way of identifying as part of the psychoanalytic club membership and it seems like a variant on this look is as welcome as a cognitive-behavioral intervention or a suggestion of a self-help book over psychoanalysis. I also noticed that beige is THE colour among the female attendees. I would have analyzed that as well. I would have had to do some self-analysis too as I was wearing a camel sweater. Perhaps I too have some “bad faith”. I think it’s unlikely as my beige was actually more caramel and not the “beige of belonging”. I don’t know why I put that in quotes and yet it feels like that is exactly where it belongs.

Monthly Archive for January, 2012

Freudians are sexy; Jungians are not ( at least not this last weekend)

Labels that lower your worth or J Crew as Bad Faith

Not sure where to start

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