First off, I can relate to this kid. He’s a dick, but only because he is absolutely fucking miserable.
Here is the thing: he doesn’t feel loved, other than by his little sister. And he apparently loved his brother who died. His father and mother live in distant worlds, and it seems likely his mother was not an attentive mother and that his bonding is ambivalent or avoidant.
Here is the solution: love. Kids like that need to feel loved, valued and understood.
But standard therapy does not have that as a goal, does it? It’s rejected in principle and at the ethical level, as inappropriate to a therapist/patient relationship. So both are reduced, in the end, to dancing around the real issue, aren’t they?
And the patient learns all these stories about “why” they are the way they are, which are really untrue. They just need to feel loved. They don’t need to undo something that happened 25 years ago.
And the therapists get to keep their own emotional content at arms length. Here is another thing: many therapists are themselves “catchers in the rye”. They deal with their own insufferable emotions by acting like they are saving others. The whole analogy is a good one for the emotional basis of virtue signalling and what I recently saw called moral narcissism. The things they do for “good” are really stage acting intended to convince themselves and ideally others that they are the sorts of people they really aren’t.
I think Holden is obsessed with phonies because he is clever enough to have seen how often people play act their own lives, but he is not able to create something of his own. He’s lost, utterly and completely. And I think he became famous because he was an early form of a type which later became very common, the dropout. In his own way, it would not be overstating the case, probably, to see him as a proto-hippy.
I’ve pondered this whole thing. This book created quite a stir in 1952. It was not long before the time of the Beatniks (as Herb Cain eventually termed them). “On the Road” came out in 1957. Howl was first howled in 1955. But already in 1952 Ginsberg, Kerouc, and Burroughs knew each other, and were preparing the foundations.
I’m not the historian I would like to be, but I’m not ignorant. Here are a few elements I will introduce as potentially relevant.
Firstly, the success of “capitalism” created degrees of freedom, education, and opportunity which were really quite new to middle class Americans. Freedom can bring with it both fear and hope.
Fear, if you do not love yourself, and are filled with self loathing, as Holden plainly is. He is afraid of the future.
And I wonder to what extent various attempted molestations affected him. He said it must have happened to him 20 times. Scared kids lacking in confidence are the standard targets of these horrific and emotionally abusive men.
Secondly, anyone who was 40 in 1952–a good guess as to the age of his father in the novel–would have been 30 in 1942. They would have lived through both the Great Depression and the Second World War. There is a good chance they would have served.
What hard living, hard experience, difficult, traumatic experience does, is it makes you emotionally unavailable. You are not as kind as you otherwise might have been, at least most people. You become hard.
Holden is obviously very sensitive, and he must have picked up on all this.
Oh, I’ll leave all this there. I’ve had a long day. No doubt a lot of ink has been spilled on all this. I’ll need to read some tomorrow or the next day.