I watched Lost Highway last weekend and Wild at Heart yesterday. I have mixed feelings about David Lynch. It is odd to me that as a vegetarian practitioner of TM that his films are so reliably pornographic and over the top violent. He has a rape scene in Blue Velvet, a rape scene in Wild at Heart, a sexualized murder in Wild at Heart, and a dismemberment and borderline rape in Lost Highway.
Looking at this sort of art, one part of me is strongly tempted to condemn it. But another part of me benefits from it. In a sense, and I think this was one of his intentions, he shows the stresses and violence that men direct towards women. As one example, the scene in Wild at Heart where Laura Dern is crying after Willem Defoe does to her what Joe Biden did to Tara Reade. She hates life. Everything and everyone is fucked up. It is horrifying. She is alone.
When Nicholas Cage finally shows up, she has cried herself out and is relatively calm, and tells him nothing. I think patterns like this in women are common enough. Horrifying things happen that they process as best they can, then move on as best they can. And men down the road wonder why they are “crazy”.
And her mother in that movie, Dianne Ladd (who I read is her actual mother in real life), must in my view have been acting from something she knew personally, and her character of course had been broken by something long ago. Since her daughter was raped, it is likely her character had been as well. This is a common pattern. As I understand it, it is reasonably well established that women who are sexually abused are 2-3 times more likely to be raped than women who are not, and I will speculate that the daughters of women who have been abused or raped are also vastly more likely to undergo the same trauma. Something is missing. Some circuit is not closed.
And you see this in Dern’s inability to effectively resist Willem Dafoe’s well played, extraordinarily creepy character, or to say anything to Nicholas Cage. Some boundary is broken or missing.
And I will no doubt have more to say about this in coming days, but I continue to read papers from Murray Bowen’s truly amazing “Family in Clinical Practice” (he has much to say about our current regression socially), but will excerpt one comment from his paper “Societal Regression as viewed through Family Systems Therapy” (find it and read it if you want a better understanding of how we got here).
In speaking about individuation or differentiation or emotional maturity (synonyms), he says: “One of the best indices has been the type and quality of the mother’s relationship with her mother, and the maternal grandmother’s relationship with her mother.”
As I say, I feel real trauma in Dianne Ladd. I don’t think she was or is JUST an outstanding actress, although of course she is that. She spoke, in that role, things she had seen and felt. Her manipulativeness and rage were things I think I can say she must have processed, to have the distance to put them on the screen that well, but I will wonder aloud if she was playing her own mother or some other strong female in her life, like a grandmother.
As I have said before, although it has been I would suppose 5 years or more, I like the basic ideas that Tav Sparks put out in Movie Yoga. That is why I watched a film I knew would be disturbing. Life is what it is, and one thing it is is banal, and another thing it is is horrifying. There is no point hiding or pretending otherwise. Happiness that is safe can only be found within Truth writ large. Lynch points directly at that in the scene where the radio will not stop telling horrifying stories; and in the next, where they come across an awful car accident.
It seems to me that Tantra, writ large, is spirituality that includes trauma by including horror. One of the key spiritual tasks is learning to reduce vulnerability to trauma by consciously learning to process horror.
Tav Sparks himself, who I worked with personally in a very useful but difficult Breathwork session, killed himself, after he came down with Alzheimers. I won’t speak to this decision, but it seems to me he most likely never fully processed all of his own trauma, of which I have no doubt there was a lot. Altered states of consciousness–or what I think Stan Grof likes to call Transpersonal States–in and of themselves, are not sufficient for full healing, in my view.
Another person I knew and worked with closely in Breathwork also killed himself. He took all the psychedelic drugs, and was a member of whatever Indian church it is which in some cases provides a superficial patina of legality to certain types of drugs, like peyote and ayahuasca. But it wasn’t enough.
I watched a documentary on Esalen and their use of drugs some years ago, I think at a Holotropic Breathwork retreat. One of the main participants commented that in the decades since they were all doing monthlong retreats where they took acid repeatedly, the most useful thing for him had been daily meditation. This is what I believe, and will continue to insist that at least up a point few of us are destined to reach, Kum Nye is the best method of which I know. It includes and surpasses Vipassana, in my own view, and certainly TM, although all such disciplines are good for emotional health in the long run.
The proper goal of psychological work, for most of our lives, is individuation. Bowen in my view makes this point clearly, well, and empirically. Properly mature people are resilient, able to manage conflict in peaceful and appropriate ways, and more prone to happiness, even if there is no if/then there. Certainly, they are more capable of goal directed activity, and seeking out calm and contentment and satisfaction are attainable goals.
And as he says, regression is fast and easy. He makes the point in the paper mentioned above that the “sexual revolution” could not have been “progress” because it happened so quickly. True progress NEVER happens quickly. And even if some specific problems were solved, like alleged “sexual repression”, can anyone say we are happier now that Pornhub is readily accessible to 8 year olds?
Individuation comes in two stages. One you are more or less born into. Your set point, coming into biological adulthood, will be that of your family. It really can’t be any other way. It is never any other way.
Now, having an extended family in play helps to mute the natural fusion that man and wife tend towards. I have intuited that one of our main problems as a society is the loss–in the cities and suburbs at least–of extended family, at least for far too many of us. This is much less common in small towns and more rural settings, which in my view is why so many of them seem to be emotionally healthier, even if the overall building national psychosis is clearly present there too, not least as an artifact of Big City media playing on loop in most homes. This is why drug abuse in small towns has become endemic. Heroin, meth, pills, over and above old school alcoholism.
But what I might call Second Wave Differentiation, or the Work of Life Building, can be done consciously. It is a long, difficult, somewhat heroic process that requires determination, the ability to manage anxiety, and the ability to exist within sick systems without participating.
And he says that when one person actually makes it to a higher level of differentiation within a system, if they maintain contact with the system, they CHANGE the system. The system fights back hard, throws everything at the “traitor” to the sick and unstable “equilibrium”, but in the end they accept it, and are better for it.
This is of course ammunition and motivation for me and my own work. I come from a sick system, but what I see in the world around me is countless similar sick systems.
And it is obvious beyond the possibility of rational disputation to me that MOTHERS MATTER. Femininity, as it has existed for all of human history, as rooted in biology, matters.
My personal objection to gay marriage was always rooted in this concern. I have no issue with gay men and women choosing to try and build something long term and meaningfully committed, and doing so within a legal framework which carries with it all the advantage of marriage, like filing jointly, getting family health insurance, and the joint ownership of property.
But when we get to raising children, there is something inherently dangerous about pretending a father can be a mother, as our Transportation Secretary is doing. This is an experiment that in my view can only end well if we redefine “well” by meaning “whatever happens”.
It is a sick society indeed that has no standards, and which assumes that what is expedient, or what we REALLY WANT is what is best. There is no historical or biological or common sense reason to assume this is true. In fact, it is NOT true.
As I say, Bowen discusses this at length in his paper, which I will excerpt at length at some point.
For now, I will make one or two points, then close.
First, childbirth, especially as it existed before epidurals and other effective analgesics, is a form of torture. All women know that they may undergo this torture at some point, and this has to color in some way who and how they are as people. If there is a feminine masochism, as Freud claimed, it is both preparatory and reactive. Childbirth is the ultimate rite of passage, and arguably worse than the worst rites of passage I have read about in supposedly “primitive” cultures, those which have retained some sense of the importance of differentiation, which is retained in the sense of becoming a Man rather than a boy; someone able to act from principle, from an urge for protection, and able to act coherently over time.
Secondly, I will comment that films such as those Lynch made are a sort of Rorschach test. It is obvious to me that highly undifferentiated people might view all the blood and sex and gore with delight, as something different, as an experience that is wild, that takes them out of their ordinary day, that have an almost ritual aspect, as did the murder of Harry Dean Stanton.
And Lynch does a good job of portraying the latent violence in American life. What I will assert, though, is that this violence stems from poor differentiation. This is what Bowen claimed and what has seemed intuitively obvious to me since I first encountered Rene Girard in a course on Greek myth at Berkeley.
For example, as one reviewer said somewhere (my pattern is to watch a movie, then read reviews, and usually a biography of the director and some of the actors; I do the same thing with books, and often find that “fictional” novels are often remarkably autobiographical, even with fantastic substitutions that can be seen as inversions of reality) that it was harder to tell if the stuckness of suburban home life was not more horrific than the rest. It’s hard to know what “really” happened in that movie–the murder of Patricia Arquette may have been a fantasy–but the vibe, the Zeitgeist, was there.
So many couples are stuck in homes, aren’t they? They are stuck with their children, and fusion becomes nearly inevitable. This is a horror of how we live. We get stuck and we can’t leave. Bowen talks about this. Adolescent rebellion is really a failed effort at individuation. It doesn’t work. You don’t grow up as a rebel. You become soft and stupid as a rebel. Evidence of that is everywhere now.
Here is a short version of Bowen’s Differentiation of Self Inventory
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232605289_The_Differentiation_of_Self_Inventory
You have to sign up for the thing to print it, but you can cancel (or so they say). As he mentions, this is a proposed alternative to Bowen’s own longer test, and seems to reasonably approximate it. That is the core contention of his thesis.
I scored a 90, which if I do say so is on Bowen’s account exceptional. In his book he says that 80 is really very unusual, and that most Americans are a 50 or lower. He also says that by his reckoning America dropped a full 20 points or so from 1950 to 1975 or so. I would suppose we have dropped another 20 points since then. Most of the I-Generation probably are in the 20’s or so if that.
And this is the problem, isn’t it? I have said before and truly believe that when I am right I would rather die than change my mind. Period. This was a necessary psychological adaptation to an enmeshed family. But I am extremely unusual. Even people who should know better often back down when they should stand up.
So often, on so many topics, I find myself the only person saying things; or at least saying them before I read them anywhere else. Why is no one else saying them? Many of my claims in my view are obvious.
COVID was real but our response was rooted in the OPPOSITE of the science as it existed at the time, and we now know THEY KNEW THAT. Every expert, or most of them, knew it then and knows it now. But they are afraid, for a variety of reasons. The NIH basically seems to extort compliance with its grants, as does Big Pharma. And they weaponized the AMA to bully doctors, in ways never seen before. We have never told doctors they would lose their licenses for prescribing an FDA approved drug off label for one use, but not for another, PARTICULARLY in the middle of a completely unmanaged pandemic. You could prescribe HCQ–an anti-malarial–for Lupus or Rheumatoid Arthritis all day long, but would lose your license for using this completely safe drug for COVID, EVEN THOUGH NO OTHER TREATMENTS EXISTED.
Unfuckingbelievable. But I was getting yelled at by people with reasonably high IQ’s and what I would have thought was a reasonable level of social and psychological maturity.
Tens of millions of people in the poor world will die of hunger and disease and stress and many other things unnecessarily. Harvey Risch–who is certainly a qualified expert–said that our elimination of HCQ to help Big Pharma make Big Money probably caused the deaths from COVID of 500,000 people in AMERICA ALONE.
How does that happen? Again: poorly individuated people, which means lacking principle and the guts to insist on it, going along to get along. Nobody wanting to make waves.
Poor differentiation. Lack of integrity.
And what is integrity? Not falling apart under stress. Thinking clearly when the whole fucking world is losing its goddamned mind. I can do that. I can do that because I am extremely highly differentiated.
And I’m not happy. I’m tormented. It is fucking hard doing what I do. But I respect myself. I am in the fight. I am doing my best both to grow as a person, and to fight the generalized meltdown. I can succeed in the first fight. The second is not up to me, but I will stay in the ring to the end. This is how I maintain my personal integrity, my being of one piece.
And part of this growth process has been me realizing that I should make at least some effort to monetize my work. My income earning activity is fucking difficult. Not one person in 1,000 could pull off what I do. And it’s tiring and painful work. It’s stressful. I’m the lone soldier doing enormous projects without any assistance or backup. I can deal with that stress. I go on. But it’s not unreasonable to suppose that people might pay a nominal fee to read what I write. And if they don’t, then I haven’t lost anything. I’ve been writing for free, by and large with no comments, no feedback, no likes or dislikes, for 14 years. I’m just throwing it out in the wind.
So one of my projects for today is moving over to Substack. I will make that post a separate post, and that will likely be the last one I make here. I am thinking $2/month, and if no one finds my work worth that, well that is worth knowing. I’m not afraid any more.