In 1953, my then 29 year old grandfather, John Paterson, published a small article called "A Cosmic View of the Private Eye" in a magazine called The Saturday Review.
I read that article, in print, this morning, Sunday January 14th, 2024. I drank too much coffee while I read it and I was psychologically distressed over the malfunctioning heater in my apartment unit that has been making my space uncomfortably hot. It is a complaint I am unhappy to make, as these are the coldest days of the year, and I have been aware of people who do not have the luxury of heated spaces and have to persist outside at all times. And yet it is still a significant problem for me. The right side of my body is hot, as the broken heater is four feet to my right, constantly putting out hot air.
The essence of my grandfather's article is a comparison of the detective story genre before and after 1914, that is, before and after The Great War (WWI, for us). I'll just say 'pre-war' and 'post-war' here, but I mean WWI, not WWII, as is commonly meant by those phrases.
The difference, in short, is between a world in which "beams don't just suddenly fall on you" and a world in which beams, well, just might. Indeed, he writes of a post-war detective story in which the main character is nearly crushed by a beam falling from a 10 story building. In the pre-war period one could walk down the street and not look up, not look over one's shoulder. There was confidence, at least for the wealthy and privileged groups, that society was safe and sound, and that laws did indeed maintain order. My grandfather points to the PI's changing relationship with official law enforcement. The pre-war PI has unproblematic relationships with the police, confident in their role in preserving and maintaining order. The post-war PI, however, has no such assurance. Rather, the post-war PI is "spiritually brutalized," feeling the "inability to find grounds for action," basically "not sure what his motives are."
In concluding the essay, he says that the post-war PI is "par excellence the creature of crisis..." He closes with a confession: "I am an inveterate Sam Spade [post-war PI] myself."
This concluding reference to 'crisis' is striking because I have become preoccupied with a body of writings that I've come to call the 'crisis literature'. Indeed, in late 2023 I presented a paper at the Gendlin symposium precisely on this question of 'crises' in modernity.
The crisis literature is diffuse, having no definite beginning or ending. It seems that all serious human writing is responding to something like a 'crisis'. Being human seems to be its own sort of crisis.
But I want to use the term to designate a precise period of time and a specific set of problems. For my purposes now, I will say that the crisis literature begins with Hegel's response to the French revolution. Human beings had, for the first time, attempted to destroy their theocratic shackles and usher in a period of government both for and by human beings. This led to a crisis in the meaning of the divine, spiritual, or religious.
Hegel was seemingly confident, or at least hopeful: The French Revolution instantiated the divinization of the human being; we no longer needed to tell stories about God or gods in the beyond. Spirit had come to earth, first in the form of the French Revolution, and second in the form of Hegel's systematic philosophy of spirit. Voegelin claims that Hegel and his ilk believed that the German philosophical revolution was a deepening and furthering of what had begun in the French Revolution.
By the time we get to Nietzsche, however, things look a little more grim. Indeed, I am reading The Gay Science, where Nietzsche discusses the 'death of god' for the first time. Nietzsche knew, like Hegel, that the de-divinization of the terrestrial realm was irreversibly underway. God or the gods were receding. But the sufficiently divine human being had not yet appeared. Where is our ubermensch or super-human? Not here, yet, apparently. Nietzsche's writings constitute a bizarre love letter to this person of the future. His level of sincerity feels impossible for me to evaluate.
The crises continue up to the present, and the crisis literature continues to iterate itself. In my lifetime, I have witnessed 9/11, the 2008 housing collapse, worsening weather events, the Trump years, the pandemic... The list goes on. All of these are related crises, concerning the intense intertwining of political, economic, theological, and philosophical dimensions of our lives and societies.
How shocking for me, then, to see my grandfather working out his own version of the crisis literature, claiming that it can be found, of all places, in the crime novel. He published two monographs in his life: a study of 7 great English novelists called The Novel as Faith, and another book about the Edwardian period of English literature, The Edwardians.
Clearly the crisis replicates itself all over. And clearly my grandfather had a pulse on this, somehow, to some extent. My aunt Mary often tells me that he used to say "Its the system, Mary!" He knew it was bigger than us.
All of this points me to the next project I hope to undertake, that I have begun to do the reading for. I intend to go through the varied documents my ancestors have left behind in the hopes of producing a narrative that can generate some experiential continuity for me. My family life has been deeply fractured and fracturing. My parents always spoke of our closeness, our love for one another. But those stories have unraveled for me. The self-interpretation that my parents impose on the family has not resonated with the interpretation I have developed in my own personal, therapeutic, and scholarly work.
The conflict of these two interpretations have been devastating, leading to an almost complete breakdown in my familial relationships. My body has ached with the ongoingness of the problems for years. Worse, I have been punished by every member of my immediate family for attempting to speak my own narrative aloud.
The documents I have on hand are: My great-grandfather's (Arthur Bromage) letters from WWII, when he was in England, France, and Germany participating in the reconstruction effort. He ultimately had a nervous breakdown and was sent home on medical leave of some kind. He was apparently changed by the experience in deep, painful ways. His wife, Mary Cogan Bromage, produced a memoir, dictated while she recovered from cataracts surgery on both eyes, intended as a gift for her grandchildren (my father and his sisters). She was also a respected historian of Ireland and an expert in writing in business contexts. I have her book Churchill and Ireland as well as a technical manual called Writing for Business. Additionally, my grandmother, their daughter, left a brief memoir, consisting mainly of short vignettes. Her husband, John Paterson, left his 2 books, a number of articles I will have to track down, and, most interestingly, an unfinished play depicting his childhood in Montreal, CA, after his parents left Scotland when he was 2.
I will be aided in my study of these documents by a theoretical apparatus I have produced for myself over the last several years. Between April of 2022 and March of 2023 I wrote a 391 page document in which I tried to explain to myself how I understand the politics of psychotherapy, and the role of therapy in our larger political-institutional context. Several of my friends have been reading the manuscript, and we will be discussing the last chapter on Saturday.
The book tries to outline the relationship between three factors that all contribute to the political meaning of psychotherapy. The three factors are 1. Experiential-lingustic factors; 2. Political-institutional factors; and 3. Scientific-philosophical factors.
The three themes can be rendered as questions:
1. Why is talking in the right way to the right people such a big deal? When people come to therapy, they mainly talk. But this sort of talking can help people heal, become less sick. People have fewer panic attacks, gain energy, heal in peculiar and mysterious ways. How the hell is this happening? Why is speech so powerful and why do we have this specialized form of speech called psychotherapy? (therapy, of course, is about more than speaking. I'm a somatic therapist. But therapy could go nowhere without some speaking).
2. What is the quality of our political-instituional situation that so many people are unable to speak in the ways they need to to feel well? Because that is the implication of psychotherapy: people have to go to a special place to speak in specific ways because they are, somehow, denied this opportunity in their daily lives in the institutions.
3. What is up with our sciences, specifically psychology and the social sciences, that our political-institutional situation is such?
All three themes culminate in a series of hypotheses: Psychotherapy exists as a space in which people can speak safely of things that are normally not safe to speak about. Whether or not we can speak of the most important things in safe ways is a serious matter to our health. Not speaking of the most important things in safe ways makes people sick. People are unable to speak of the most important things in safe ways because most of our institutional spaces are manipulative in character; they value people not for their personal uniqueness but their capacity to fill generic roles. The manipulative quality of our institutions, and the incumbent suppression of significant speech, is directly connected to the pseudo-scientific orientations of most contemporary psychology, which has bought into the bogus prestige of quantification and the impulse to control and mastery.
I will be going through my family members documents with these themes in mind. How was their speaking in relation to their embodied experience? Were they saying the important things to one another? Or were they forced to hold too much, made sick by their secrets? What sort of institutional settings were they in and how did this affect their ability to speak of significant things? And lastly, what was their sense of the social sciences? Were they hopeful about or skeptical of positivism, behaviorism, etc?
I am certain that the encounter with the documents will generate themes that I cannot yet imagine.
But I find myself in 'possession' of a robust set of theoretical concepts that I have clarified for my own purposes. I now find myself ready to approach a significant and personal set of documents in light of those theoretical concepts.
I suspect the product will be rich, and I know that I will cry often as I read and write.
