Yesterday I wrote about young people who will likely have difficulty making the transition into adulthood, in part because they have incorporated the narcissistic ideal of "omni-potentiality" that one can and should have whatever you desire without any hindrance. I also suggested that heightened narcissism leads to loneliness. The more investment (cathexis) one has in oneself, the less is available to invest in another person.
Adolescence is a time of heightened narcissism in the healthiest, most well balanced, youngsters. The changes taking place in their bodies and their minds tend to make them feel out of control and extremely self-conscious. It is the rare teenager that willingly defies the conventions of his particular clique. They worry about how they appear, how they dress, their hair, their acne (any pimple seems to be the size of a giant crater), their speech patterns, etc. They look for others who think the same way they do in order to feel less estranged. At a time when they are psychologically separating (partially decathecting) from their family, the peer group is all important.
In the modern industrialized high tech societies of the West, adolescence can last until quite late, after college, graduate school; sometimes adolescent conflicts are never resolved.
In therapy I occasionally am allowed the privilege of watching a child make the transition from adolescence into young adulthood. Robert Avrech, on his blog Seraphic Secret, has written a delightful, funny, and touching series of posts, How I Married Karen, one chapter of which beautifully illustrates the moment when a boy becomes a man. I use his post with his permission.
Robert's life is centered around his family. He is something that is perhaps even rarer than a conservative New York Psychoanalyst; he is a conservative, Orthodox Jewish screen writer in Hollywood. He started his blog as part of the process of dealing with a terrible loss.
Robert always loved the movies. It set him apart from many of his contemporaries at the Yeshiva where he studied. Many of his classmates took the traditional path of Law, Medicine, Accounting, but Robert wanted to be a screen writer. By his early 20's he was living in New York's Upper West Side, working for a movie magazine, when he met his future wife Karen. They had dated for a few months when a crisis occurred, as depicted in Chapter 14, Karen: Seraphic Samurai:
The time has come to introduce Karen to Akira Kurosawa. The time has come to introduce Karen to the single most important movie in my life, the film that has shaped my consciousness, the film that has turned me from a directionless yeshiva student into a rabid film fanatic, into a budding screenwriter.
Yes, The Seven Samurai is playing at The Thalia and I've invited Karen to see it with me. Keep in mind, these are ancient days, there are no videos, much less DVD's. To see a classic film, you must rush to Manhattan, to one of the revival houses and hope that the print they have is half-way decent. And with Japanese films, the biggest problem is the subtitles. Frequently, they are illegible.
With great anticipation Robert brings Karen to see the full, three hour, unexpurgated version of the Seven Samurai.
A half-hour into the film Karen is,
Oh
My
Gosh,
idly toying with her hair. I am incredulous, in shock, in a kind of numbed pain that I never knew existed. How is this possible?Slumped in her seat, Karen is the portrait of a a bored grade school student. My heart is actually pattering in my chest at twice its normal rate. I am twenty-five years old and I'm having, I'm pretty sure, a massive heart attack.
A few years ago, I told a friend that I could never love a woman who didn't love The Seven Samurai. Not only did I say it, but I believed it.
"You'll have to excuse me, " says Karen, "I need to take a break."
"There's a break at the hour-and-a-half point," I lamely point out.
"I need it now," Karen says quite evenly with no hint of rancor whatsoever. Karen exits to the lobby.I feel like committing hara-kiri.
This is the moment. Robert had treasured his own investment in the movie. The Seven Samurai was part of what made him who he was. It was an integral part of his youth. And the question arises:
In the dark, I gaze at my beloved and outnumbered Samurai warriors; even unto death they maintain their orthodox code of honor. There is something very Jewish about these men and their stubborn refusal to give up their Samurai mesorah, l'havdeel. This film has changed my life, made of me a screenwriter, a scribe with a developing vision.
What to do?
Karen walks out of the film and takes a seat in the lobby; after an internal struggle, Robert follows:
"I know how much this movie means to you," says Karen.
"It doesn't matter," I respond.
And it doesn't.
In a split second I have gone from being a boy to a man. Morally, I have matured, been forced by this honest and most un-pretentious of women, to reorder my priorities.
And there it is, the moment when Robert was able to detach a significant part (not all) of his emotional investment in a movie that he had always seen as part of him, part of his identity, and make it available to attach to Karen; if he had not made this transition, he might still have married Karen but there would have been a blockage in their relationship. (I would add that after reading the entire series and learning a bit about Karen, I doubt she would have married him. She does not seem like the kind of woman who would have tolerated a man who would have always been holding some large part of himself in reserve, unavailable for intimacy.) The movie remained important to him, it was still cathected, but never again with the same intensity as before. His youthful narcissism, which had insisted that any women he loved would have to also feel the same way he did about the movie, that she must be like him in this way, resolved in that instant. He discovered he could love someone who was different from him in an area that at one time felt so fundamental. This is maturity; to be able to love, respect, and care for someone even though they may think differently than you. As one of Robert's commenters put it, "... I have learned that soul mate doesn't mean "clone"."
Please note that most of the time we decathect our childhood relationships (to people, ideas, things) via a long process that occurs largely out of conscious awareness and is akin to mourning (which is the acute work of partially decathecting a lost loved one.) Robert was kind enough to unintentionally supply me with a beautiful vignette to illustrate how a piece of this process unfolded in his life and I appreciate his allowing me to use this post. The entire series is well worth reading as is his blog.
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