To The Best Of Our Knowledge; Life, Art, and Therapy

It's to the best of our knowledge, I'm Anne Strange -Amps, today, life, art, and therapy. Whatever happened to psychoanalysis? Once it was the most influential and fashionable science of the mind, today it's more like a cartoon stick, the board doctor sitting behind a patient lying on a couch. And the man who invented psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, has been so devalued, he seems like a sex -obsessed old man. But maybe we've gotten Freud all wrong. Adam Phillips is one of the leading defenders of psychoanalysis, and he writes brilliantly about it, and books like, on tickling, kissing, and being bored, and missing out in praise of the unlived life. He's just come out with a biography of the young Freud, which got Steve Paulson curious. Freud is, he's not the most popular guy these days anymore, he's had shinier moments in our culture, but I think one of the recurring criticism is, he's too sex -obsessed. He reduces everything to sex, do you agree with that? Well, I think in many ways, he dignifies everything by talking

about sex. I think the point is that Freud re -described sex to include many, many more things than it had previously included. And I think what Freud is really saying is something like, we are bodily creatures who begin our lives by falling in love with a beautiful body, which is our mother's, if you see what I mean. So that we're naturally, in that sense, hedonistic. We survive through our pleasurable experience of other bodies. I didn't think Freud puts sex exactly in the centre of the picture. He puts the erotic, and that means an erotic apprehension of reality. And what he means by that is, what makes staying alive a luring? It parts that out for me a little bit. How is the erotic different from sex? Well, the erotic is different because I think it's not a basic physical function to do with reproduction. It's much more about a way of seeing the world, and seeing the world in terms of what gives pleasure and what gives fear and suffering. So in Freud's talk at the unconscious, he's very often talking, I think, about what passes between people without them realising. Freud

talks about dream work, and dream work is something very, very interesting, which is this, that you and I may say interesting meaningful things to each other here and now. But we might both go off, and tonight I might dream about your glasses, say. If I go to my analyst, and we analyse this, it'll be amazing how much it can open up into both my past and the world of my present desires. In others, Freud is saying, it's as though there is an artist inside us, who is perceiving things in spite of us. So the things we're consciously struck by are as nothing compared to the things we're unconsciously struck by. It strikes me that we as a culture still really haven't come to terms with the power of the unconscious. If anything, we're kind of more in the sway of reason, more, more than ever. Absolutely. I mean, you know, everything to do with statistics, consumer satisfaction, the belief in science and neuroscience in particular. These are all old -style materialist causal accounts of who people really are, as though if one day somebody can actually explain how a brain works, we'll know everything. Well, knowing how a brain works is

not going to help somebody whose child has just died. In others, there's really a mismatch between the knowledge that we seem to be seeking as a culture, and the knowledge we need in order to survive and live and to some extent flourish. So there's sort of a fundamentalism of neuroscience, the idea that if you could just understand everything about the brain, that that would explain human nature. Well, it's as though reality can make decisions for us, that if we can get the truth about the real world, we'll be relieved of choice. It's as though nature will begin to speak on her own behalf, whereas actually science can't make decisions for us, because, apart from any of us, we have to choose to value scientists. It almost sounds like you're saying that we still haven't come to grips with how radical Freud was. I don't know. I really think, even though I know this sounds tough, that psychoanalysis has barely begun. Really? Oh, yeah. I thought it had its heyday. No, it did. No, it did. It had honeymoon period, and then it dawned on everybody. This wasn't going to work. I mean, there's no way psychoanalysis is going to work in a culture that's committed to religion, science, and consumer confidence, because it doesn't meet any of those criteria. That's the great thing about it.

So it's intrinsically countercultural. It actually is against the grain of all the things we're being sold, many of the things we're being sold. So that, actually, I think, it was inevitable that psychoanalysis would die to death, and it's a great thing that it has in many ways, because what this means now is there's no cultural prestige in psychoanalysis. No one will go into it for glamour or money. So people only go into it if they have a passion for it, and that will make it work again, because that's what it needed. It needs to lose its cultural charge, and become really something was obviously disproven. For example, it's obviously charlatan, and so we can forget about it. And then only the people are interested, it's like poetry. Only the people who are interested will do it. And no one will go into it as a good career move. So if psychoanalysis has been marginalized, no one takes it seriously anymore, what are the insights that can emerge from it then? Well, it's not the insights, it's the experience. It's doing it. It's doing it. Basically, if somebody is either curious or desperate, they should go into psychoanalysis or read some, and see if it works for them. The idea that's going to compete

with knitting, aroma, therapy, stamp collecting, et cetera, is absurd. Psychanalysis for the people who find it amusing, interesting, enlightening, comforting, reassuring, stimulating. I don't remotely want to say it to work, because it really doesn't. But for the people who it works, it really does work. And by that, I don't mean it kills them, because we're on Earth, there's no cure for that. But it can significantly improve the quality of people's lives by their own criteria. The one thing you said about Freud is that he was radical in various ways, because he was questioning religion, he was questioning science, and he also said consumer culture. How so, consumer culture? Well, I think Freud, I've recently written a book called Missing Out, which is a book about frustration. Freud has very, very interesting things to say about frustration, because love, he doesn't say this. The implication of his work is that capitalism is really for children. In others, it exploits the fact that children, of course, like adults, don't know what they want. Freud's frustration story is very interesting. Freud says, when we are frustrated, we

fantasize what we want. But of course, you notice if you fantasize a meal, it doesn't nourish you. So at a certain point, you have to engage with reality, you have to get the meal you want. What Freud says is, we are actually very frightened of being frustrated. So whenever we're frustrated, we're prone, we're tempted to fill the gap very, very quickly. So the moment I feel a bit of our knees, I buy something. I have a bath. I eat chocolate, I do whatever I do. What Freud is saying is, we need to be able to bear with our frustration, to be able to discover what it is we actually do want. Freud says a very interesting thing in a letter to fleece. He says, the reason that no adult is actually satisfied with money is because no child ever was. Children don't want money. And I think that's a very profound point, because children want affection, emotional contact, reliability, adventure, etc. And then they grow up into this world of capitalist exploitation. In which they discover there are a million things to want. In fact, we're living in a supermarket. It's great,

but actually it's terrible, because it depends upon non -satisfaction. It's not that there is satisfaction, but there are degrees of satisfaction. And Freud is saying, and again, psychoanalysis might be one of the places we might do this. If one can learn to bear one's frustration, one will not be willing to be fobbed off by substitute gratifications. And consumer capitalism is a supermarket of substitute gratifications. I'm trying to wrap my head around this idea of learning to bear frustration. In a way, it's very simple, because we've all had to do it every so often, which is it means that when you begin to feel that there's something lacking or missing, or you're feeling some sort of hunger, you don't jump to conclusions about what it is that you were hungry for, because that's what the culture does. It jumps to conclusions for you. Actually, it's extremely difficult to find out what it is one wants. So I might feel very, very, very, very hungry at a certain point of the day, but actually I may want a conversation with a certain person, but it might be very difficult in a certain culture for me to get to know that. So there might be all kinds of things that you want, but you don't actually recognize. Exactly. You are unconscious of them. So Freud is saying, it's not

a council of asceticism. It's a council of waiting. That if you can bear to wait, and if you can have certain kinds of conversation, you're more likely to discover more satisfying things for yourself. I think that's true. You have said it's a mistake to regard Freud as a scientist of human nature. Instead, we should approach him as a literary figure. I'm interested in him as a writer. I don't want to say he isn't a scientist, because obviously he wanted to be a scientist and believed he was one, but I've always read him as a writer, because there are so many other writers, it seems to me, that he's joining a conversation with a cultural conversation that begins in around the 1880s, let's say. And he's talking about the things that DH Lawrence is talking about. He's writing about the things that TSL it's writing about. He's writing about the things that Thomas Mann is talking about. In other words, that's the context in which, for me, he becomes interesting. So are you saying that we should read Freud the same way we would read? I don't know, Kafka? Yeah, I'm saying yes. Absolutely. It's not good to read Freud in order to be able to repeat in your own mind to other people what his ideas are. It's much better to read Freud as an

evocative writer, so that in a sense, in reading Freud, like reading Henry James, even lots of people, your own thoughts are evoked, because one of the most interesting things about psychoanalysis, I think, is that Freud is saying that knowledge, repeatable knowledge, is defensive, that we learn things in order to protect ourselves from the unpredictability of our own minds. So if you come out from a Freud essay knowing what he thought, there's a sense in which in Freud's terms, you haven't read it. You haven't allowed it to work on you. You're saying that the unconscious is working on you as you read Freud? Exactly. It's not all explicitly there. Yes. Freud is saying something absurd, like read with your unconscious, and everybody thinks, how do you do that? Well, in a way, you can't help but do that. But I think more interesting psychoanalysis is not the working something out, but the gradual sense of actually not knowing yourself. We, by nature, have a very limited sense of who we are and what we want and what we're doing. Thank you very much. Thank you. This is fascinating.

Psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips talking with Steve Paulson. Phillips is the general editor of Penguin's new translations of Freud and is the author of the biography Becoming Freud. So maybe it is time to rethink Old Sigmund to reconsider the whole enterprise of psychoanalysis. What would it be like to really live with Freud? Commentator Aaron Kloon has a few personal observations. Before I start expressing my feelings, here's a quick bio. I grew up in the pastoral Midwestern town of Madison, Wisconsin. I'm the second of four children. Or to put that in the psychological terms that my family would use, I was the one who dethroned my older brother. Perhaps not every family sits around the dinner table talking about Alfred Adler and his theory of individual psychology. But to this day, I feel competent to talk about myself and pretty much anyone else in psychological terms. That is not only because I have a healthy and intact ego, but also because

I was raised by a Freudian therapist. Some people will tell you that being raised by a therapist can lead to psychological deficiencies. The Taylor's kids always have holes in their clothes, that type of thing. Though I'm not sure that's the best analogy. Because in the Freudian case, the shirt would be like a kid's personality structure. The holes in the shirt would be big problems like projection, dissociation, or worse yet, repression. In that case, the proverbial shirt would look more like Swiss cheese. It would have no buttons whatsoever, and an entire sleeve would have been ripped off in a fit of self -destructive rage. If that makes no sense to you, well, I'm sorry. I'm not perfect. Like my mom always said, every relationship has breaks an empathy. And in my family, that kind of clinical conversation passed for small talk. Being raised by a shrink was great in a lot of ways. As kids, we grew up very self -aware. We were especially aware of the pathologies we would probably develop. We also knew exactly what developmental stage we were going through,

while we were going through it. That was awesome because really, what kid doesn't like to be told they're making a bad choice, because they have an immature prefrontal cortex. What teenager doesn't need to hear, that they're acting like a self -centered jerk because they're going through a normal stage of separation. Growing up in a Freudian household, didn't mean we could get away with any bad behavior under the guise of self -awareness. When I was five, I got in trouble for pushing my baby sister down the stairs. It was not clear to me that I was still learning how to self -regulate. When I was a teenager, I walked out to the backyard, where my mom and her friends were talking and drinking iced tea and told them their lives were boring. I was just individuating, though at that particular moment, it didn't seem like anyone appreciated it. Now that I'm an adult, I'm a lot more receptive to my mom's therapeutic insights. I really needed her help, for example, when my kids are potty training. Somehow, in spite of all the free therapy I received as a kid, I grew up to be a

control freak. And as we all know, getting into a power struggle with a four -year -old about when and where she should poop can have severe and lasting consequences. As a parent, I sometimes wish I'd learned more from my mom. It frustrates me that I don't always understand my kid's behavior. I am totally fluent in cocktail party Freudian. I can discuss any politician in terms of their failed or successful edible battle. But the truth is, I know very little about actual child psychology. I have heard about a concept in psychology called Good Enough Mothering. It's about trying hard and accepting your limits. I learned it from my mom. I've never read a single book about it, but in retrospect, I'm glad someone did. Aaron Clune is a writer who lives not far from our studio in Madison. Coming up, a story of mothers, daughters, and

cartooning. And I'll end the bottom, makes the case for great art as therapy. I'm Anne Strange -Champs. It's to the best of our knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRI, Public Radio International. Alison Bechtel is a pop culture icon, creator of the landmark comic strip, Dikes to Watch Out for. A while ago, she wrote a graphic memoir that's graphic as in cartoon about her closeted gay father. That later became an off -broadway musical, and now she's back with the story of her other parent. It's called Are You My Mother? A memoir and a meditation on life and psychotherapy. Steve Paulston wanted to know what it's like to write two brutally honest books about your own parents. Your previous book, Fun Home, was about your father who died years earlier. This one is about your mother who's very much alive. Was it harder to write

because of that? Yes, absolutely. It's much easier to write a memoir about someone who's not going to read the memoir. And my mother, you know, I was showing her drafts of this and preparing for her to have this book come out all along, and that was difficult. Well, yes, because you were very revealing about your mother's flaws among other things. I mean, she can come across as rather self -absorbed and oblivious to your needs. Well, I feel kind of bad about that. I mean, yes, you're right. That is part of what I'm writing about. But I'm also writing about the tremendous gift I feel my mother gave me. And part of the gift for me of learning to be an artist is, I guess there is a certain amount of self -absorption that a person has to have. So it's an ambivalent feeling. It's, yeah, I'm criticizing her, but I'm also writing a love letter to her. You know, it's a thank you.

As you were sending her the sections of the book, did she see it partly as a love letter, do you think? No, I don't think so, no. And she doesn't really talk to me much about the content of the book. Her only real response to it is one that I include in the text of the book itself. And I have a conversation with her near the end after I've shown her most of it. And she says, well, it coheres. And that's about all I got. I'm happy with that. Well, and she's a former English teacher, right? So she, I guess, is speaking not just as your mother, but as someone who knows something about literature. Well, my mother knows a lot about literature. Yeah, that's the other tricky thing. I feel like she was always the writer and the family. And I would sort of afraid to encroach on her turf. Sometimes I think I became a cartoonist, is a way of being sort of a crypto

writer, like a way to be a writer that my mother wouldn't notice or feel threatened by. Now, the other thing that you also say about your mother is that she's had trouble accepting you being a lesbian and the fact that you write and draw scenes about your own sex life. Has that been difficult to share with your mother? Well, yeah, I mean, it's a more complicated story than that really. I wrote a memoir about my father called Fun Home. And that was about my father's closeted life as a bisexual man, which I did not learn about until I came out to my family when I was in college. So my homosexuality was very complicated by that story for my mother. It wasn't just a simple matter of her disapproving it. You know, it just brought up a lot of old, difficult stuff for her. And one of the things that you do in this book, which is, which is partly what makes it so fascinating, is you have these extended discussions of your own therapy

sessions, of seminal psychoanalysts, especially the British analyst, Donald Winnacott. Why are you so interested in him? I started learning about Donald Winnacott when I read a book called The Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller when I first started doing therapy in my 20s. And she was talking about this person named Winnacott. And the idea just sounded really entrancing. He was talking about this idea about a true self that we all have. It's something that has to be hidden. We can't really always access our true self. We develop false selves to cope. Some people more than others. And I feel like I very much have struggled with a false self. You know, and it comes at a cost to the child. Yes, you make your parent happy. You often do well in the external world, but there's a part of your self that becomes lost to you. So what role do you think you played for your parents benefit? Well, both of my parents encouraged me to keep a diary as a child, which is interesting. I started writing a diary when

I was about 10 and I've pretty much done that ever since. And at one point in this memoir that I've just written, I'm talking about my childhood diary with my therapist. And she says, you know, I think your parents were asking you to hold a lot of the family's emotions, like they turned this job of diary keeping over to you as a way of making you the repository for these unspoken dramas and feelings that we're going on in the house. And I think that was to a certain extent true. But on the other hand, I feel like it was keeping a diary that was my way out, was my salvation, like learning to write, learning to keep track of the events of my life in a way that made sense to me was was salvational. Who wasn't there also a period when you were quite young, when you were unable to write in your diary because of an obsessive -compulsive disorder and your mother actually took over writing your diary? Yeah, this was this was like

sort of the pivotal, the primal scene of this book. I had obsessive -compulsive disorder as a kid and I would write in my journal, but it took me forever because I was blotting things out and making all these crazy little symbols and my mother noticed that it was taking me longer and longer to make my nightly diary entry. So she offered to take dictation for me and it was really an amazing gift. For six weeks, she sat on the edge of my bed and wrote in my diary for me and I still have that diary. It's so funny to see it go from these childish, crazy blotted out pages to her tidy adult handwriting, but in my voice and that was very pivotal for me. I feel like all the sorts of feelings that are more normal for lack of a better word family would express through touch or affection or talking got funneled for me through that that writing exchange with my mother. And so now I'm doomed forever to write memoirs about my life and my family. I have to say this is

a really unusual book because you mix all this different stuff up together. It seems from your life, from your childhood, and then you have these long extended sections on the history of psychoanalysis. You quote passage from seminal psychoanalytic books. You recount conversations whether you're on therapy sometimes about the difficulties you have writing this book. It has a very meta quality to it. To some degree, it's a book about the making of a book. It is. In many ways, this book about my mother began when I was talking to my mother about writing the book about my father. So if it works at all, which I'm not sure about, it's because it's in comics format. And there's a lot of chronological jumping around. But doing that in comics where you can show things rather than describe them, I think it just makes it more legible. You can sort of get away with doing that, with doing a couple things

at once in a way that you can't with prose. So how do you think about putting together the words with the images that you're drawing? Do you see your images as being where the emotion is mostly expressed? That's a really good question. No one's ever asked me that. I think that's probably true. You know, I do a lot with facial expressions and gestures and body language. I draw in a rather realistic style. It's not really a very cartoony style. And I actually pose for my own drawings. You pose in front of a camera, right? You take pictures of yourself? Yes. This is not unusual. A lot of cartoonists do this, but I do it, I think, a little excessively. I pose for all the characters like I'm posing as my mother. I'm posing as my therapist. I'm posing as myself a lot, which is a very strange activity. How many pictures do you take? Oh my god. I took about almost 4 ,000 for this book. Wow. As you were

telling the story, coming back to your mother, did you talk with her about this? I mean, it was part of this project to get her to tell you her story. No, that would have been great, but she is very reluctant to give me information, as you might imagine, because she does not want to be written about. I did this not expressly against her will. I didn't ask for her permission. She didn't give me permission. I just told her I was going to do this. And I know that she's a private person and doesn't like this information being revealed. I think it's a very interesting ethical question like how much of our parents' stories belong to us, belong to the children, to legitimately tell, as part of their story. And that's something I'm always struggling with. I hope I have handled that ethical boundary. Okay. Cartoonist Allison Bechtel talked with Steve Paulson about her memoir. Are you

my mother? And from art and therapy to art as therapy. That's the title of a recent book from philosopher Alanda Botan. Maybe you're familiar with the concept of art therapy, making art to deal with depression or grief or some other pain, but allow has a different idea that just looking at art can be therapeutic. And really that the starting point is so simple, what is the point of looking at art? And it's such a kind of naive question that sophisticated people like to think, well, obviously, we always knew that a long time ago. But I just go back to the beginning because I've often felt a bit puzzled in museums and in front of works of art. And I just thought, how does this fit into my life? Is there any sort of good or bad way of behaving in front of this work of art? And it's kind of my belief that at the end of the day, arts are going to matter to us. It's got to in some ways do something for us. It's a tool. Well, so for example, let's take a painting. Everyone knows the Mona Lisa. What

kind of therapeutic insights might the Mona Lisa inspire? We all know it's important, but you're talking about going a little beyond that. That's right. First of all, the Mona Lisa is such a difficult painting to have any kind of personal relationship with for the simple reason that it's so famous. It's also behind about three sheets of glass. In other words, you're going to have a very unnatural relationship with it. So the first thing to do is to remember that at the end of the day, you are not an art historical scholar. If you're not about to pass an exam, if this thing's going to matter to you, it's because you have to enjoy it. And just ask yourself a very simple question, what do I like about this painting? And one of the things that's quite nice about this painting is that the Mona Lisa looks quite nice. Now, this seems really odd and really sort of stupid thing to say. But, you know, if you wanted a friend and you were looking around, you might think, actually, this woman, this woman is quite friendly. And why do you think she looks friendly? Well, there's something about her eyes and her mouth, which seems tender, complicated. It's slightly

humorous, but indulgent. She's sort of a person that you feel like you could tell something a little bit embarrassing to. And it's such a basic thing. But you know, when people go to a cafe and they say things like, I love sitting around because I can people watch. And what is people watching? People watching is looking around at people's faces and trying to imagine who they are. We know that pleasure. It's a pleasure that we should feel entitled to take into the museum, because there too, we're surrounded by people's faces. And even though that face might have been from the 14th century or the 11th century, the same thing's going on. What kind of person would this be? But there's lovely, instead of looking at the Mona Lisa as a famous painting, you're just looking at her as a friend, an interesting person. And then she's perhaps helping you access feelings inside emotions that you might then examine in yourself. That's right. And this is very much the approach of the book. At one point we look at a mother and child, you know, beautiful, classical, bellini mother and child. You know, there are thousands of them in museums around the world. And when you used to step back and think, okay, what is going on here? Why is it

nice to look at this? This is basically a work of art that is making the idea of hanging out with your mother when you're about eight months and sitting on her lap. It's reminding you of a deep, sort of primordial joy and sense of security, which of course, as we grow up, we're not supposed to be mummies, boys and girls. We're supposed to be tough, grown -up creatures. But all of us long, particularly at moments of difficulty and things when not going right, et cetera, we long to go back to that primitive, primal cuddle. So it's almost like getting a little, a little hit of tenderness. That's right. And you know, it's interesting you mentioned the word tenderness because tenderness has got really low esteem. But I'm really interested in tenderness. I think there isn't enough tenderness in the world. It's just separate from more kissiness or sentimentality or sopiness or any of these derogatory terms. Tenderness is a, is a due recognition of the vulnerability that is in each of us. And the reason why the mother and child was such a popular kind of icon of Western art is

that it taps into something psychological, you know, that came a long way before religion did. So I'm curious, what would you change about the experience of going to a museum? Because right now, let's say, you know, we go to a famous museum, we walk through the galleries, we stop in front of paintings, we read the little tag on the next to the painting, you know, tells us the artist, the title, maybe when it was painted. Is there anything in that you would change? Look, I think that museums have unbelievable prestige in our societies, you know, in every big city in the United States, when there's some surplus wealth, what do people use that surplus wealth for? They give it to the museum. In the same way that in the middle ages in Europe, people used to give money to the cathedral. It's like it's the place of the highest repository of values. But when you go into these places, they promise, I think, to do more than they actually do, and part of the reason is that they've been hijacked by an unfair academic agenda. So just think of the way that the rooms are laid out. They're laid out by things like, you know, the Renaissance, the 19th century, you know,

Impressionism, Cubism, etc. These are the names of the rooms, but as an ordinary member of the public, I'm not interested in a room in Cubism, just like this. I carry the sort of things that we all care about, interesting work, mortality, friends, family. And if I was in charge of organizing museums, what I would do is I would give over sections and rooms to particular themes in our life. So, for example, there would be a room on love, some rooms on love, and the room on love would put before your eyes a number of works of art that aim to stimulate, provoke, reenchant, and nourish you in the areas of relationships, you know, in the National Gallery in London, there's a picture by Pizzano called Daphnis and Chloe, which shows a loving couple on the very first night that they've been together. It's incredibly tender and incredibly full of appreciation. And, you know, I would show any married couple with a couple of kids and a busy work life. I would take

them back to that Pizzano, and I'd say, that's how you guys used to be. Just remember how it used to be, and look at where you are now, and think about that level of appreciation. I would use that picture as a way of provoking those thoughts. Well, there's, in your book, another painting you'd suggest for your room on love, I think, is a painting manadeid of a bunch of asparagus. Right. You know, one of the things that people complain about in long -term relationships is things are a little boring. You know, it's always the same person, and you cease to notice anything special. And one of the things about artists, you know, it's one of the defining characteristics of artists is they spot things in places where no one has bothered to look. They take the supposedly ordinary, and they say, hang on a minute, that thing's not so ordinary. There's something pretty special going on there. So, if you think of manadeid, he did a famous painting of some asparagus in late 19th century France, and he turned these ordinary asparagus into objects of extraordinary beauty, complexity, subtlety. And when you look at them,

you think, wow, these things are great. And, you know, if you can do that with some asparagus, you can do that with an even more complicated thing called your husband. Your spouse? Your spouse. You can do it to them. You know, people's taste in art is so extremely personal. I mean, the painting I love might be something you hate. You might love minimalist architecture. I might get all excited by Byzantine mosaics. Do you think that's because subconsciously we're each actually looking for something that we need? Yes, I think that what we love in art tells us an awful lot about ourselves. But I think particularly it tells us what we're slightly missing. So, just give you personal example. What I really find beautiful in art and particularly architecture is emptiness. I love peace, harmony, calm. So, I love, I love this kind of minimalist interiors or I love fisters of the Utah desert. You know, that really gets me going. Now, what's going on there? What is it I'm missing? Truth is that day to day

I'm assaulted by a million emails, things to do, panic worries, etc. And what I long for and I find so beautiful is something that is the opposite of that. It's almost like the work of art is my true home from which I've been exiled day to day. Well, this is where we should talk about the other projects you did in conjunction with the book. You created an app, correct? Which is sort of like a first step toward having a painting playlist you can own. That's right. So, we've come up with this app. It's called artisttherapy .com. You come into it and there's a kind of little diagnostic tool which just asks, it gives you various moods. So, you know, if you click on the complainers, I find it hard to relax and I advocate looking at beautiful picture by Sujimoto, the Japanese photographer of some of the North Atlantic on a misty day. And it's just a huge horizon. And feeling small is a wonderful emotion to go for. Feeling small in a vast universe seriously calms down all the complaints of the ego, the anger, the disappointment that comes from not feeling important enough in the world of men and women.

And works of art, again, have this great ability to take us out of ourselves very valuable. So, you also created the School of Life in London, which among other things offers bibliotherapy, the concept of the novel as cure. Sounds like in the future you could imagine seeing a therapist and, you know, maybe you're suffering with work anxiety or depression. And the therapist might prescribe you a book to read and a few paintings to go see. The reason why that sounds strange is that we're used to thinking that culture, you know, the great works, the great pictures, etc., that they don't have any ability to shed light on the great dilemmas and sufferings and pains that all of us go through from the moment of birth to death. I passionately disagree in my whole professional career has been spent arguing against that, you know, a few years ago I read a book called How Proust Can Change Your Life. And a lot of Proust scholars came out and said, how do you mean Proust Can Change Your Life? And the book was utterly serious. It was an attempt to say, well, of course

he can change our life. If a book matters to us, it's because it can do something for us. And, you know, there's this word self -help, which is in serious trouble. Because when people mention the word self -help, they immediately imagine an idiotic book with a pink cover promising you unrealistic things. It doesn't have to be that way. You know, Plato's symposium is a self -help book. Emerson's essays are self -help books. Walden's The Row is a self -help book. We need to rehabilitate that word. The most serious works of culture can alleviate our day -to -day lives and situations. And that this is not any kind of disparagement or attempt to attack them. It's actually a way of doing them proper justice. Because that's what their authors and creators would have wanted. Atlanta Botan is the co -author with John Armstrong of Art as Therapy. By the way, several museums, including the Art Gallery of Ontario, have invited him to curate their galleries. And that wraps up our

discussion on Art and Therapy. Coming up, the creator of HBO's True Detective celebrates William Faulkner and National Book Award winner James McBride takes on slavery and the controversial abolitionist John Brown. I'm Anne Strange -Champs. It's to the best of our knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRI, Public Radio International. And now bookmarks, writers on books they love. Hi, this is Nick Pizzolato. I'm the creator, writer and executive producer of True Detective. And the book I would like to recommend is Absalom Absalom by William Faulkner. In our show, we deal with a lot of the contradictions and complications of the South. And my first experience with someone openly addressing those things was in this book by

Faulkner, which is a mystery story composed of narratives delivered by different characters. And ultimately, the mystery has to be resolved by an invented ending. The book details a kind of miniature family saga that in many ways is reflective of the South as a whole. And the South is a whole reflective of our country as a whole. It might be the purest articulation of Faulkner's maximum the past isn't over, it isn't even past. In the sense that throughout this book, the present is defined and motivated by the past. And it ends with the great line from Quentin Thompson, who's back up at Harvard, and his roommate, Shrieve, after hearing this long, tangled, violent family saga. He says, I can understand why you hate the South. And the last line of the book is Quentin saying, but I don't hate it, I don't, I don't hate it, I don't. And the tension and anxiety

within those two expressions, Quentin's told this terrible story and gone on and on about how oppressive where he comes from is to him as a person. And yet he can't hate it because that's where he comes from and because it lives inside of him. Spoke a great deal to me. That was one of the great weekends of my life was 19 years old reading Absalom Absalom by William Faulkner. It was a long time between reading that book and thinking to myself as a writer, I was still in the visual arts then, I was a painter and an illustrator before I turned to writing. But it was sort of an initial foray into me not rejecting these things that had formed me, but looking back on them with the intention of embracing them and understanding them, not to be an adversary to the things that formed me, but to try to understand them apart from my personal emotional reactions. Nick Pizzolato with

his recommendation Absalom Absalom by William Faulkner. You can find more bookmarks on our website at ttbook .org And now it's time for On Our Mines. James McBride's novel The Good Lord Bird is just out in paper. It's the novel that won the National Book Award this year. It's kind of a historical road trip story. A fictional account of John Brown's famous raid on Harper's Ferry told through the eyes of a young boy. John Brown was one of the most controversial Americans who ever lived. He was an abolitionist, a white man who believed slavery was wrong and that he himself was called to end it by raiding a federal arsenal. Right, Harper's Ferry was where America made all of its major weapons. They made 100 ,000 guns there. And John Brown was the guy who decided to raid the

Ferry. Take it over Steel 4. He didn't want to steal 100 ,000 guns. He just wanted to steal maybe 5 ,000 and fight a war against slavery thinking that all the blacks would come to him. The bees would hide, as he said, and that they would start this war against slavery and make it so expensive and difficult for plantation owners that they would give up the institution. I mean, thinking back on it now, looking back at it now, it's actually not as crazy an idea as it sounds. The raid didn't go well. His men were a lot of them killed and the rest rounded up, including him and he was later executed. How was he regarded at the time? He galvanized the abolitionist and he panicked the slave owners. His raid on Harper's Ferry really sent the American to a state of utter sheer panic. I'm sure it was the galvanizing event to begin the Civil War because John Brown was white and he had white men with him and he was organized and he was very eloquent in his defense of his position.

And before he was hanged, he lived for six weeks. So he wrote letters to newspapers and editorials and he wrote letters to friends and he became for the North and as he became just a gigantic hero. They worshiped him anyway because he was doing their dirty work. For Southerners, he was someone that they just despised. He was considered like a walking demon, the devil. Yeah, well, we use that phrase to describe people today that we don't like. I think one people that people don't understand about slavery, one thing is that the stereotypical viewer's slavery was getting beat all the time and the masters were stereotypical white man who was just, you know, get over here. Yeah, there was that but the web of relationships that existed during slavery was very complicated because you can love your master and your master can love you but you could also break your master. Example, you could poison his cow. I mean, that's one of the things they talked about after John Brown's raid, you know, a lot of the farms in the area that the masters were in a state of utter panic because the cows were dropping dead,

their horses were being released from the pens. I mean, slaves didn't just sit around and take this kind of stuff. They did all kinds of subterfuge and all kinds of stuff and you always had to watch them if you were the master. So the web of relationships that existed during slavery was very complicated and you mix all that business in with identity. You get, you know, you get a cauldron of material that it's just wonderful to work with. This book is so much fun to read largely because of this just unforgettable voice of your main character, onion. And maybe the best way to introduce him is to ask you to read a little bit from the book. Did you hear of your book with you? I do indeed. I just happened to have it in my pocket. Thank you. All right. This is from chapter one, page one. I was born a colored man and don't you forget it. But I lived as a colored woman for 17 years. My paw was a full -blooded negro out of Osuotomi in Kansas territory north of Fort Scott near Lawrence. Paw was a barber by trade though that never give him full satisfaction. Preaching the gospel was his

main line. He saved souls one at a time, cutting head, Dutch Henry's tavern. Dutch Henry sat right near the Missouri border. It served as a kind of post office, courthouse, rumor mill and gin house for Missouri rebels who come across the Kansas line to drink, throw cards, tell lies, frequent whores and haul to the moon about colors taken over the world and the white man's constitutional rights being thrown in the outhouse by the Yankees and so forth. I paid no attention to their talk. For my aim in them days was to shine shoes when my paw cut hair and shove as much Johnny cake and ale down my little red lane as possible. But come spring, talking duchess circled around a certain murderous white scoundrel named Old John Brown. A Yanke from back east who come to Kansas territory to stir up trouble with his gang of sons called the Poto -Atomi rifles. To hear them tell it, Old John Brown and his murderous sons planned to detonate every man, woman and child on the prairie. Old John Brown stole horses. Old John Brown brown homesteads. Old John Brown raped women

and hacked off heads. Old John Brown done this and Old John Brown done that and why by God by the time they was done with them, Old John Brown sounded like the most onerous, murderous, low -down son of a gun you ever saw. And I resolved that if I was ever to run across him why by God I would do him in myself, just on account of what he done or what's going to do to the good white people that I know. I how old is this boy at this time? Onion Shacklefoot is 10 years old when he's when this happens. He's 103 as he tells the story. And of course with an introduction like that you just know Old John Brown's going to show up and what happens then. Well the thing goes bad and John Brown shows up and he shows up in disguise and they figure out who he is and everyone draws their metal and John Brown draws his rifle and the shots of fire, the kids father, onions father's killed and John Brown snatches onion and takes him off thinking he's a girl because onion is dressed like slave boys dressed in those days with a potato sack and his hair is all wild and woolly and John Brown just thinks he's a

girl and onions so scared of this crazy white man and he just decides to just keep being a girl. And so this kid stays with John Brown through the Kansas Wars all the way to Harpers Ferry. Where did you find that voice of your narrator? Onion he's got elements of Huck Finn and I don't know I keep I kept thinking of the narrator the girl in true grit but it's a very distinctive voice. Well I grew up in a house with the old black folks in my house talk like that. My godfather talked like that my stepfather did my uncles. So I've always been real attracted to that kind of language. I remember when I was going to college I went to Oakland. I didn't think I was going to make it. I wrote my godfather let him sit. I wanted to come home and he wrote me a letter back and the letter was very short but I remember he wrote I know you can do it and he spelled no no and something that just that just touched my heart even for the rest of my life I still remember his determination to make me stay in school you know because he didn't get the kind of education that I got based on you know people before me

you know people without form education especially in the south they just have a directness to their talk and I spent I still spent a lot of time with those people I mean like those people like you know yeah I spent a lot I don't spend a lot of time with writers and artists you know I'll put it this way when I won the National Book of Wood. My phone was ringing so much that I just turned it off and I went to visit a friend of mine who has a junkyard even it deals mostly in tires and I spent part of the day towing cause with him because he pulls cause out of ditches and stuff and he doesn't read that much you know he's like a tea party guy and you know he hates Obaminal but he's a good friend and I just had I had a great day and I learned something because I'm interested in welding and he's a great welder you know. So it's interesting that within the last couple of years we had Quentin Tarantino's movie Django Unchained and 12 years of slave but do you think of those movies? I don't really like movies like that too much yeah I was with you. Movies like. Maybe that's why I wrote this book well you know I mean I read 12 years of

slave and I know the story and the the gravity of that situation for that poor fellow is something that I you know I know a lot about I'm trying to get to a different kind of way of talking about slavery which is well first of all most white people did known slaves slavery was the institution it was kind of like the institution like I don't know like the railroad like the amtrak that runs between New York and Florida I mean it was there but most people didn't use it I mean most white people their ambiguity about slavery began to grow and grow by 1850 1855 the institution had become so troublesome that a lot of white folks just wanted to get rid of it most white folks owned slaves they owned two or three and so they had a real close relationship with their slaves which meant that they weren't slaves they were more like bondage in bondage and there was a lot they could do and did do to influence how their masters dealt with them when you come at it from that perspective it humanizes a part of slavery that most of us never really deal with which is to slave him or herself

and the master him or herself and we're not talking about the evil mistress and the evil master who we're talking about the people who were just trying to make it and what their problems were and sounds like part of what you're saying is that it's terrible this service to portray the slaves just as victims that's suggesting that they weren't smart enough to be considerably more than that that's absolutely correct and it's also a terrible the service to portray all white folks as complicit in the slave business and also too stupid to realize what was going on it's a very complicated piece of business and I think it's dangerous to present it as a kind of white black kind of situation it was white and black but it was it was a lot more complicated than that these people knew each other it was sleeping together they had all kinds of things going on if you go into character deeply enough you find these kinds of stories but when you just deal with the stereotypical roots type of story that doesn't really teach us anything we know that part of it James McBride talking about his novel The Good Lord Bird which is just out in paper it won the

National Book Award this year and there's a film in the works starring leaves Schreiber and Jayden Smith James McBride is a jazz musician as well as a writer so to close this hour here's one of his pieces from his CD The Process That's all for our show today if you have comments or questions on anything you heard we always like hearing from you just go to our website at ttbook .org or find us on Facebook to the best of our knowledge is produced at Wisconsin Public Radio this hour was put together by Steve Paulson with help from Sarah Nyx, Doug Gordon, Charles Monroe Kane, Raymond Tungacar and Will Hanks our theme music was composed by Steve Mullin at Walk West Music our technical director is Carole Owen and I'm Anne Strange Shamps thanks for joining us