Part 29: At The Bar
“Not to sound like some spoiled prep school kid who just got pulled over for drunk driving, but do you know who my father is?” the man asked the woman across from him. “I mean literally. Do you?”
“No. Should I?”
“Not necessarily. You’re not a psychologist. But he’s actually pretty well-known in psychological circles, he made a splash with this one paper he published when he was, like, twenty-eight, and he’s been riding those coattails ever since.”
“I see.’
“No, you don’t. Not yet. The thesis of his paper was, basically, that sons always rebel against their fathers by doing the opposite of what their fathers would do. Anything they associate with their fathers becomes poison.”
“Sounds like recycled Freud.”
“Oh, exactly. It was, but nobody cared. It’s like how no one cares that every superhero movie is the exact same boring good-versus-evil trope. People just can’t get enough of it. But they’re too proud to admit they want to just watch the same movie over and over, so you have to dress it up in slightly different clothes every time. Same with my Dad.”
“So you're bothered that he’s a fraud?”
“No, not at all. What bothers me is that he published his thesis two weeks after I was born.”
“Ah, I see. So he should have been helping your mother through the pregnancy and the childbirth and changing your diapers, but instead he was holed away in his office writing.”
“No, that's not it, either. What I care about is why he did it. He did it to trap me.”
“To trap you?”
“Yeah, he was playing the long game. 'Cause think about it. How was I ever supposed to rebel against him? When his whole identity was built around the idea of sons rebelling against their fathers. I mean, he was always giving lectures, going to conferences about it. The paper was framed in our house. He monopolized the whole idea of rebellion.”
“So he compelled you to be obedient to him.”
“I wish. That would have been easy. But that would have meant following his wishes, and he needed me to rebel or else his whole career would have been built on a lie. I mean, imagine being the guy who makes a living telling everyone their sons will rebel against them, and your own son doesn’t.”
“So it’s a paradox,” the woman said, happy to have summed it up, figuring that the conversation was thus concluded.
“Sure, it’s easy to just sit here and call it a paradox when you don’t have to live it. But I had to live through it every day. It got to the point where I felt like I couldn’t do anything. When are you free from the tyranny of having to wake up early?”
“Alright, fine, I’ll play along. I'll give you the wrong answer so you can correct me. When you can sleep in.”
“Right, that’s the wrong answer. It’s when you can wake up early without it being a capitulation. When you’re free from their logic. But Dad’s logic was ironclad.”
“But aren’t there other ways to rebel? I mean, humans aren’t like physics. Our reactions aren’t always equal or opposite. Couldn’t you have just gotten really into music or sports or computer programming or something? Not the opposite of psychology, but not not the opposite of it, either. Full-color spectrum instead of black-and-white.”
“Sadly, Dad thought of that, too. His whole worldview was based on a black-and-white model, where everything was either for the father or against the father. So if I tried to reject that, I’d be rejecting him, and that would prove him right, too.”
She thought for a minute.
“But what if you just decided you didn’t care about any of it? You didn’t care if something was for your father or against your father, you would just do what you wanted to do.”
“That’s what I wanted more than anything. But he made it impossible. It’s like, have you ever tried to look at an English word and not read it, just see it as a bunch of meaningless lines and curves? Maybe some people can do it, but I can’t. Once an idea is set in my mind, I can’t escape it. And Dad knew that, too, because that’s how he is, too. That’s why he kept writing the same paper over and over. Well, that, and because he never had any other ideas.”
“So how did you get out of it?”
“You don’t get out of a paradox. You just get better at living inside it. I mean, you might as well ask how someone gets over the fear of death.”
She bristled. “I’m not afraid of death.”
“That’s what you think. That’s only because the word death doesn’t mean anything to you right now. It’s just a word. So you can think things like ‘I’m not afraid of death,’ but you’re not actually talking about death, you’re talking about the word death. The idea of death. The actual thing, you can’t help but be afraid of. That’s what fear is.”
“Are you sure you didn’t become a psychologist like your father?”
“Maybe small p. But no one pays me for it.
“Except in their reactions.”
He smiled. “Sure. If you want to think of everything in transactional terms, I won’t take that away from you.”
“But why not? If everything you do proves your father right and wrong simultaneously, why not just lean in, so to speak, and become a professional psychologist? Clearly it interests you. Clearly you’re a frustrated psychologist the way some people are frustrated artists.”
“I suppose I don’t buy into the central premise of psychology.”
“Which is . . .”
“That understanding a problem is the same as solving it.”
“I see.”
“No, you don’t. That’s precisely what you were trying to do earlier, when you called my experience with my father a paradox. You thought you were being helpful.”
“So maybe understanding isn’t sufficient, but isn’t it a necessary condition on the path to ‘living with’ something? Acceptance is the first step of recovery, sort of thing.”
“That’s exactly what I don’t believe. In my experience, the better I understand a problem - its origin, its nature, its roots - the more it lingers in my mind. So it would be irresponsible of me to assist others in understanding their problems and using that skill to enrich myself. I may have an aptitude for it. I may even find it enjoyable. And I'm sure my clients would leave thinking they had made progress, because they buy into the narrative, but they would be mistaken. You’re treating a symptom, but prolonging the disease. No doctor really wants to cure their patients, or else they put themselves out of a business.”
“But managing. Isn’t there something to be said for helping people to manage? To cope? To live with a perennial problem, as you put it?”
“Yes, but the only way to really manage is to obscure. And if you know that you’re obscuring something, then you aren’t really obscuring it, are you? I like to think that my work does help people hide from their problems, in its own way.”
“What do you do again?”
“I’m a musician. Well, sort of. I’m a bassist. For the band Our Beautiful Misery.”
“Never heard of you.”
“Good. So let’s get out of here, no?”