When in Rome, Do As the Romans Do.

Do you remember the days when everyone was drooling over multiculturalism? Nothing seemed quite so modern as constructing a society around multiple cults to multiple deities. That its adherents did not notice that they were selling a postmodern version of pagan idolatry should not surprise us. These were not the best and the brightest.

But, you know that. 

In America the Biden administration and the academic media-driven left has been trying to ram diversity down everyone’s gullet. 

In Europe, the situation is slightly different. In the first place Europe is not a homogeneous cultural entity. In the second place, the problem in Europe is Muslim migrants. In America the problem has been, at least until recently, South and Central American migrants.

One needs to mention that the current situation in the Middle East has shown American that there is a large politically active coterie of Muslims in America and that they are not shy about showing off their intolerance, especially their anti-Semitism. Since they pay no price for their appalling behavior, they continue to attack Jews. 

Meanwhile, back in Europe, the elections for the European Parliament decisively repudiated decades of immigration policy. In France and Germany, anti-immigrant parties outpolled the more traditional political parties.

Writing in the New York Times, Roger Cohen calls it a return to nationalism and one would be hard put to disagree.

Cohen’s point is well made. It’s not just about migrants, but about migrants who refuse to assimilate, who do not adopt local customs, and who insist that everyone treat them as though they belong-- to a superior culture:

At the heart of the rapid rise of the nationalist right, with its view of immigrants as a direct threat to the essence of France, there appears to lie a growing feeling among many French people that they are no longer at home in their own country.

That feeling, a vague but potent malaise, has many elements. They include a sense of dispossession, of neighborhoods transformed in dress and habits by the arrival of mainly Muslim immigrants from North Africa, and of lost identity in a fast-changing world. 

The modern migrant wave began when German Chancellor Angela Merkel opened her country’s doors to Muslim refugees. We note in passing that she was a right of center politician, not a leftist:

Almost a decade ago, Angela Merkel, then the German chancellor, immortalized the words “Wir schaffen das,” or “we can do  this,” as she admitted more than one million Syrian refugees to Germany. 

Again, Cohen mentions that migrants are not working to belong to the local culture. As is happening in Sweden, migrants are bringing crime and chaos. And then they complain that they are not being welcomed.

Once the core theme of the xenophobic right, the push to control or stop migrants has moved toward the center of the political spectrum. The view of immigrants as diluting national identity, freeloading on social safety nets and importing violence has spread, often fed by thinly veiled bigotry.

Note the last phrase. Why is it necessary to add the notion that French citizens are bigots. When migrants import criminal violence, Cohen seems to be suggesting that they are not responsible for their behavior. As an old saying has it, certain groups are never at fault. We can add that certain groups are always at fault.

Why this shift? Western societies of ever greater inequality have left many people behind, fueling anger. In France, a social model that worked well for a long time has been unable to resolve the problems of lost hope and poor schools in suburban projects where many immigrants live. This feeds further frustration. Tensions flare regularly between Muslims and the police.

Sadly, Cohen cannot quite figure out why the police might be more suspicious of members of a group that commits a disproportionate number of crimes.

What does this have to do with growing inequality? Migrants who come to a foreign country are obliged to adopt the cultural habits of the local citizens. 

Don’t we recall the immortal words of a fourth century bishop of Milan-- that would be St. Ambrose: When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

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The Axis of Ill Will

Everyone agrees that nature abhors a vacuum. At least, I imagine that such is the case.

In the world of politics, we should also agree that weakness invites aggression. Present yourself as weak and ineffectual and someone will almost assuredly try to take advantage.

Speaking of weakness, we currently have the case of our president Joe Biden. As you know the nation is currently embroiled in an absurd debate about video tape editing. Biden’s supporters insist that the tapes showing the president as old, frail and feeble, are cheap or deep fakes. Actually, the correct phrase is “deep fakes.” Apparently, some idiot did not know it and invented the phrase “cheap fakes.”

So, the G7 leaders met in Italy and we all saw the prime minister of Italy, one Georgia Meloni gently lead Biden back into the scrum, into the group. Apparently, feeble Joe had been distracted by the presence of some  paratroopers.

Of course, we could argue that Biden was not distracted; he was just looking at the troopers who had landed to his left.

On the other side, the Italian prime minister seemed to feel that Joe had gotten lost. 

Similarly, when Biden attended a fundraising event with Barack Obama, among others, and when he froze before the audience, Obama took him by the hand and led him off the stage. Again, Obama believed that Biden needed a slight push in the right direction. You may believe that Biden was perfectly compos mentis, but Barack Obama did not think so. Surely, Obama’s views have more validity than yours.

If we are too sophisticated to ponder such presumed facts, we can turn to policy. In conducting foreign policy, has Biden shown himself to be strong and in control? Do world leaders respect him or do they think of new ways to take advantage of his weakness? 

Every time Biden declared that his message to foreign actors was “Don’t”-- they did. No one cares what Joe Biden thinks. When Putin invaded Ukraine he did not worry about Joe Biden. When Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, it did not fear the wrath of Biden.

Now the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has traveled to North Korea to forge an alliance with Kim Jong Un. Along with China and Iran, these countries are forming what Niall Ferguson calls an axis of ill will.

To me the phrasing feels infelicitous. This axis does not involve ill will. It involves taking certain actions in order to replace America and the West as world leading powers. See also the advent of the BRICS consortium.

Niall Ferguson explains his concept:

But what all four Axis members can agree on — despite their many differences — is that the era of American primacy needs to be terminated.

What’s more, they are doing a good job of persuading many developing countries in the so-called “Global South” to take their side, blaming the war in Ukraine on NATO expansion and now claiming — as Xi told European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last year — that Washington is trying to goad Beijing into attacking Taiwan.

Given the challenge of China and Co. the two political parties have staked out two different approaches. Ferguson explains:

The new Republican line — which is markedly different from the Russophile isolationism of Tucker Carlson — is that it is time for America to get tough with the Axis.

“The United States shouldn’t manage the competition with China; it should win it,” Pottinger and Gallagher opined in a recent article for Foreign Affairs.

“A cold war is already being waged against the United States by China’s leaders. . . . Victory requires openly admitting that a totalitarian regime that commits genocide, fuels conflict, and threatens war will never be a reliable partner.”

One can question this caricature, or one can ask whether it is a caricature? Besides, if we continue to talk trash about China, threatening its face, then surely it is not going to be willing to cooperate.

Life, even political life, is not a one-way street.

Ferguson argues that however much we want to improve our military readiness, we do not have the cash to do so.

While it is quite easy for Republican hawks to call for increased spending on weapons and defense research, it is much harder to say where the money will come from.

According to the latest report of the Congressional Budget Office, the US budget deficit will be around $1.9 trillion this year — a whopping 6.9% of GDP, compared with the 5.6% it forecast in February.

That’s an astounding number at a time of near-full employment, reflecting the fact that the Biden administration just keeps overspending on everything from foreign aid to student-loan forgiveness.

At this point, Ferguson tosses in a concept that he developed himself. When a nation spends more on servicing its debt than it does on its armed forces, it is not going to stay great for very long:

According to the only law of history I have ever discovered, any great power that spends more on debt service than on its armed services doesn’t stay great for long.

What is the alternative to the Republican plan to amp up defense spending? Why, it involves sanctioning Chinese business and breaking its economy. 

Now, you can believe — as Jake Sullivan evidently does — that economic measures will suffice to rein in the Axis of Ill Will, and that Americans themselves will be able to avoid fighting wars.

Protectionist tariffs and export controls have their uses, no doubt.

But — as with sanctions, which have conspicuously failed to cripple Russia’s war economy — those should not be exaggerated.

How is the sanctions regime working? Not very well, Ferguson explains:

China suffers setbacks when the US restricts its access to the most sophisticated semiconductors, but it is not clear that the setbacks are more than temporary.

As the former Google chair Eric Schmidt has said: “For now, the United States remains in the lead [in artificial intelligence]. But China is catching up in many areas and has already surged ahead in others.”

According to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s Critical Technology Tracker, “China’s global lead extends to 37 out of 44 technologies that ASPI is now tracking, covering a range of crucial technology fields spanning defense, space, robotics, energy, the environment, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, advanced materials, and key quantum technology areas.”

In the past five years, to give just one example, China generated just under half of the world’s high-impact research papers on advanced aircraft engines, including hypersonics.

This should make all sentient Americans pay attention.

For, if China is not merely catching up but has actually overtaken the United States in certain key fields of defense technology, nothing could be more dangerous than a hot war with China any time soon.

It is a harsh reality, exposed in multiple war games, that in such a war the United States would run out of key weapons, such as long-range anti-ship missiles, in about a week.

Not many wars are over in a week.

So, the Biden administration position invites more aggression, at a time and place of Xi Jinping’s wish. There is very little we can do about it, for now.

And we ought to understand that the Middle Kingdom is not taking it all passively. One might even imagine that the Chinese effort to flood our market with poison, as in, fentanyl, has something to do with the fact that we are trying to undermine its prosperity.

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Saturday Miscellany

First, from education activist Nicki Neily, an assessment of the state of American elementary school education. Consider this further evidence of the damage caused to American children when schools were shut down during the pandemic:

America faces a lost generation of students who were negatively impacted by decisions made during the pandemic. NAEP scores have shown that proficiency levels in core subjects fell precipitously due to school closures. …

2023 NAEP scores dropped across the country at all grade levels. In Vermont, 8th grade math proficiency dropped 11 points, down to 27 percent; In Pennsylvania, it dropped 12 points to 27 percent; and In Oklahoma, it dropped 10 points – only 16 percent are proficient in math. 

But that’s not all: students in America CANNOT READ. In Virginia, only 32 percent of 4th graders are proficient in reading; In Minnesota, only 30 percent of 8th graders are; In New Mexico, only 18 percent of 8th graders are. Districts are eliminating advanced classes in the name of “equity” – claiming that gifted and talented programs are racist if enrollment doesn’t mirror community demographics. In schools where AP classes have been eliminated, parents have watched their children regress to the level of their least able classmate. Brilliant students are discouraged from getting too far ahead, because “inequity” perpetuates systemic racism. 

And then there are the aberrant values taught to American children:

Hard work, objectivity, and self-reliance are traits that made the American economy the envy of the world – yet now, those characteristics are derided as “white supremacy.” Kids are in school for approximately seven hours each day – but instead of using that time to address learning loss, it’s spent on identity politics. 

In Lawrence, Kansas: elementary school students marched to celebrate Black Lives Matter at School week – at a school where only 32 percent of students are proficient in math. In Appleton, Wisconsin: teachers were given resources recommending that students do “privilege walks” – in a district where only 38 percent of middle schoolers are proficient in reading and math. 

America’s education system is failing the very students that it was designed to serve. Trust between parents and districts has shattered. For decades, public schools operated in loco parentis – and administrators worked with families in the best interest of students.

Pandemic-era closures fractured this bond; it’s hard to say districts prioritized learning when groups like the Chicago Teachers Union asserted that “the push to reopen schools [was] rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny” and the head of the LA teachers’ union said “There is no such thing as learning loss… 

Our kids didn’t lose anything. It’s OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables. They learned resilience. ... They know the words insurrection and coup.” 

Second, in the world of philanthropy, the former Mrs. Jeff Bezos, that would be one MacKenzie Scott is giving some of her fortune to a pro-Palestinian group:

MacKenzie Scott gave $2M to nonprofit tied to group that helped build pro-Palestinian UPenn encampment: report.

Now you know why he divorced her.

Third, the ladies of the View, along with an assortment of crackpots and cranks, have discovered a new principle. They are terrified that a president Trump will do unto them what they have been trying to do unto him-- that is, to silence him and to put him in jail.

As for self-awareness, they have none. Best not to belabor the point.

Fourth, from Ron Paul, on a topic we have been following, our efforts to stop the Yemeni Houthi rebels from shutting down shipping through the Red Sea:

To great fanfare, last December the Pentagon announced the launch of Operation Prosperity Guardian, a joint US/UK military operation to halt the Yemeni Houthi disruption of Israel-linked commercial shipping through the Red Sea.

 

The result:

Over the weekend the Wall Street Journal published a devastating article revealing that after spending more than one billion dollars on munitions alone, the operation had failed to deter the Houthis and failed to re-open commercial shipping in the Red Sea.

The Journal reported that Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, recently told Congress that “the U.S.-led effort has been insufficient to deter the militant group’s targeting of ships and that the threat will ‘remain active for some time.’”

Joe Biden’s military may be dysfunctional, but at least it’s diverse.

Fifth, women voters swing to the right… in France. From Politico, Europe:

Europe’s far-right voters have long been predominantly men, but French women are now bucking that trend ahead of a high-stakes election that could usher in France’s first far-right government in recent history.

Marine Le Pen’s anti-immigration National Rally is tipped to win the most votes in a two-round snap election on June 30 and July 7 that could crush the liberal centrists of President Emmanuel Macron, and women are increasingly driving her party’s surging political fortunes as it seeks to position itself in the mainstream.

On EU election day this month, the National Rally came first with a stunning 31 percent of the French vote, up from 23 percent in the 2019 EU election.

Sixth, as though that is not bad enough, French Jews are saying that they are going to vote for the right wing party of Marine Le Pen, a party that has long trafficked in anti-Semitism.

The problem is, the far left parties, led by Jean Luc Melanchon, have outdone the right in the matter of anti-Semitism. French leftists have signed on to the Palestinian cause and are blaming Israel for everything that is going wrong in the Middle East.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Serge Klarsfeld is a world-renowned Nazi hunter, a historian of the Holocaust and a moral authority in France who has pushed the country to reckon with its dark history of antisemitism.

That is why many in France were shocked this week when Klarsfeld defended the far-right party of Marine Le Pen, which counts among its founders a former Nazi paramilitary soldier. Klarsfeld, an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor, said the main threat to France’s Jews now comes from the far left and that he wouldn’t hesitate to vote for Le Pen’s party, the National Rally, in the coming parliamentary elections if the alternative were a coalition of leftist parties, the New Popular Front.

“The National Rally supports Jews, supports the state of Israel,” Klarsfeld said on national television. “When there is an anti-Jewish party and a pro-Jewish party, I will vote for the pro-Jewish party.”

Here is the story:

The Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas and the ensuing Israeli offensive in Gaza have had a profound impact in France, deepening political divisions in the home to Europe’s largest Jewish community and one of its largest Muslim communities. Leaders of the far-left party France Unbowed didn’t immediately condemn the attack and then stridently criticized Israel. Jewish groups and Macron’s government say the party’s rhetoric has fueled a surge in antisemitism in France since Oct. 7.

Seventh, on the sanctions front, the Biden administration has happily imposed sanctions on Israelis, but has failed to enforce sanctions against Iran, to say nothing of failing to sanction Hamas and Hezbollah.

The Wall Street Journal editorializes:

President Biden has been uninterested in sanctioning Iranian oil, but he keeps finding time to impose new sanctions on Israelis. Is it too much to ask him to get serious about cutting off Hamas and Hezbollah’s financial lifelines?

The latest target of U.S. sanctions is Tsav 9, an Israeli protest group that tries to stop aid trucks to Gaza because they often end up in the hands of Hamas. The State Department says Tsav 9 has been “blocking roads, sometimes violently, along their route from Jordan to Gaza, including transiting the West Bank. They also have damaged aid trucks and dumped life-saving humanitarian aid onto the road.”

The West has been wrong to keep quiet about Hamas’s theft of aid, but flooding Gaza with supplies has helped Israel dispel claims of famine and buy time for its war effort. It’s also a problem when citizens take the law into their own hands. Israel has delivered aid despite the Tsav 9 protests and has arrested a few lawbreakers, though it could do more.

But the larger point is that the Biden Administration is expanding its sanctions regime against Israel while it lets Hamas and Hezbollah off the hook. Since Mr. Biden assumed office, Iran’s oil exports have surged to $40 billion or so a year. 

This gusher’s cause is no mystery. The Biden Administration stopped most enforcement of oil sanctions to keep Iran quiet. Even after that logic blew up on Oct. 7, Biden policy didn’t change. Iran still gets the cash it needs to fund its many terrorist proxies.

Qatar and Turkey, Hamas’s other major patrons, also haven’t faced real U.S. pressure. Qatar is supposed to be a key U.S. partner and a mediator in hostage talks that never end. This buys the Qataris immunity, even as they sponsor Hamas, explains Jonathan Schanzer of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Eighth, Nellie Bowles at the Free Press keeps us up to date on the news from El Salvador. You might not have heard it, but that country, under the leadership of president Nayib Bukele, has drastically reduced the number of local homicides:

No one can believe it, but El Salvador solved their murder crisis by locking up their murderers. This is a nightmare for American reformers, who swear it’s impossible to stop crime without talk therapy.

Ninth, wasn’t it Lawrence Summers who reported an anecdote from the third world? Didn’t the people in that one world country declare, solemnly, that when China comes to visit, it builds a factory. When America comes to visit, it gives a lecture.

Now, on Twitter, David Goldman tallies it up:

The US spent $6 trillion to export democracy. China spent $2 trillion to build infrastructure. Despite many missteps, China's program broadly succeeded, while the US program has been a catastrophic failure. Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia now want to join the BRICS group. The continental plates of world power are drifting away from the US and it's our own silly fault.

Is it time for another lecture on the eventual triumph of liberal democracy? Calling Francis Fukuyama….

Tenth, Joel Kotkin reviews the damage that wokeness is doing in the media, whether in book publishing, movie making, television production or journalism. This is from Spiked!.

Similar patterns of orthodoxy can be seen in book publishing. Here radicalised editors reject books not because they won’t sell, but because they violate the favoured woke narratives or are written by straight, white males. Even books from beloved authors such as Roald Dahl and Dr Seuss are banned or bowdlerised to meet the tastes of progressives.

Now, the market is having the last word. These woke businesses are losing money. They are losing a lot of money.

One thing these shifts has not done is improve the bottom line. Roughly a quarter of newspapers in the US have gone out of business in the past 15 years. Last year, some 22,000 media jobs were lost, the worst in a generation since 2009. Industry boosters (yes, they still exist) cling to the profitability of the two elite papers, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, which for now still appear viable.

And also,

But it seems fairly clear that imposing race and gender orthodoxy on audiences is not exactly a winning strategy. Already gender, race and other identitarian obsessions appear to have weakened once strong franchises like Star Wars, the Marvel cinematic universe and the Disney classics. One top Disney executive blamed a misogynist public for declining viewership figures. A lack of customer interest in these terrible, agenda-driven movies may be more to blame. ‘The audience’, as one film historian told the Los Angeles Times, ‘has moved on’.

Eleventh, as we suspected and as we predicted, those college students who decided to embrace the Palestinian cause and Hamas have been losing job opportunities.

The College Fix has the story:

A recent survey found that 3 in 10 college students or recent graduates had job offers rescinded as a result of their “pro-Palestine” activism.

Intelligent surveyed 672 students or recent college graduates who have engaged in anti-Israel activism and found that 29% of them had a job offer rescinded in the past six months and 55% believe there was bias against them in the hiring process because of their activism.

7 in 10 pro-Palestine activists said they were asked about their protest history during the interview process, according to the survey results.

As it happens, the Columbia university activists will not be prosecuted by Alvin Bragg. They will get their comeuppance in other places.

I now have some free consultation hours in my life coaching practice. To express interest, please email me at StuartSchneiderman@gmail.com

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What Is Life Coaching?

Since no one is quite sure what it means to therapy the psyche-- there are a multitude of divergent therapies for psychic torment-- one should not expect a clear and concise definition of life coaching. 

Lately, given the failures of psycho therapy, more and more people have been trying out life coaching. We have no reason to believe that it is better or worst than other forms of therapy.

And yet, it might be worth the trouble to provide some fictional case studies, the better to show what life coaching can and cannot do. At the very least-- if therapy wants you to get out of your life and into your mind, life coaching helps you to get out of your mind and into your life.

It beats an extended and barely intelligible theoretical disquisition. If you insist on having some theory with your morning coffee, I recommend Peter Drucker’s pamphlet, “Managing Oneself.”

For my part I am going to present a series of case fictions, conducted by different fictional life coaches with different fictional clients. For today, I will begin with the case of one Clarissa, whose coach I have named Imogen.

Given the length of these fictions, I can only present half today. The rest of this case will be posted next week. In ensuing weeks I will present different case fictions with different clients and different coaches.

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As she dropped for the first time into her coach’s consultation chair, Clarissa was distraught. Imogen, her life coach, observed that the handsome young woman was well put together. Sporting a stylist maroon gabardine suit, Clariss had taken care that her hair was well-coiffed, her face carefully made up. And yet, her attractive appearance was belied by her darting eyes and her hang-dog expression.

A 39 year old wife and mother, Clarissa spent most of her time making a home for her anesthesiologist husband, Garrett, and their  8-year-old daughter, Chloe.

After graduating from Mount Holyoke College and Columbia Business School, she had joined McKinsey as a consultant, but had abandoned her career when job obligations began intruding on her private life. When she fell in love with Garrett, her work seemed less engaging. Discovering that she could not travel hither and yon while still cultivating her relationship, she sacrificed her career for domesticity. Soon after marrying Garrett she gave birth to Chloe, by all accounts a marvelous child. Clarissa wanted to have another.

Hesitantly, she presented herself to Imogen. Clarissa presented herself as a traditional woman, somewhat out of step with contemporary mores, but nonetheless comfortable with her choices. In Garrett she found an affectionate partner, a man with whom she could converse easily and love more easily still.

And he provided well for her and their child. Some of her friends were envious of her decision to abandon career for family, but she thought that the gains outweighed the losses. She had had little difficulty adopting to the role of doctor’s wife, and within a certain segment of the New York medical community, Clarissa and Garrett were a golden couple. They had everything and the future promised more of the same.

When someone who is clearly depressed and anxious still maintains the appearance of normality, she has not yet given in to despair. Thus, in her first remark to her new client, Imogen offered her explicit approval of Clarissa’s decisions. In the past a nod would have sufficed, but given the general attitude toward full-time housewives, Imogen wanted to be precise about expressing her own views. Had she done otherwise, she thought, Clarissa would not have been able to confide in her.

Hearing words of approval, Clarissa relaxed enough to explain her problem. Two months earlier she began to remark subtle, but detectable changes in her husband. At first, he appeared slightly distracted and forgetful, missing Chloe’s dance recital, almost forgetting Chloe’s birthday. Outwardly, he seemed cheerful, but he was becoming inattentive and incommunicative. Sometimes they had lively conversations over dinner, but at others he would be looking away from her, closing up, bantering less, and responding more with grunts and groans than with fleshed-out thoughts. Many evenings he would excuse himself from dinner before Chloe had finished her dessert. Then, in slow motion, he would plod toward his study, slink into his black Eames chair and stare into space. Their normally healthy sex life had vanished into the night. Clarissa started feeling that she was living with a stranger.

At first, she imagined that he was ill, but his most recent physical-- he had bragged about it-- had not revealed anything suspicious. Then she hypothesized that he was depressed, but he assured her that he was feeling fine, that he was working and sleeping well. 

When he occasionally broke out of his bad mood he would make a point of telling her that, you see, he was not depressed. Lately, these rays of sunlight had become increasingly infrequent.

And yet, at social functions, he seemed like himself, upbeat and engaged. Yet, some of his remarks were bizarre. At one point he started touting the benefits of channeling, at another, he expressed an interest in attending a seance.

When Clarissa confided in friends, they told her to forget about it. They seemed incapable of imagining that such a golden couple was having problems. And yet, she intuited that something was wrong.

Since Garrett seemed impenetrable, she chose to follow the advice her friends had been giving her-- to avoid any dramatic conversation. But, she began looking for clues. On a few occasions she had picked up the telephone only to be greeted by an immediate hang-up. Garrett began to come home late from work. And it was not because he was spending more time at the racquet club. In fact, he had stopped exercising and rarely finished his meals. He was spending more time chatting with strangers on the computer and had become less fastidious about his appearance. He started buying strange weekend wear, the kind that made him look like an overgrown teenager.

Finally, the idea that Clarissa had been fending off with all her moral strength broke through her defenses and planted itself firmly in her mind. She became convinced that her husband had fallen in love with another woman.

However much she did not wish to pry, Imogen felt that she needed to offer come conversational support:

“Do you know who this other woman might be?”

“Not really,” Clarissa answered quickly, “but I have visions of her, with bleached hair, synthetic breasts, someone who is vulgar.”

She paused for a moment: “And I see her with Garrett, sweaty and gross, in our bed…. I want to punish them both, to torture them, to hurt them for what they have done to me.”

Of course, Clarissa repudiated such thoughts. She had been well brought up and did not entertain such fantasies.

Imogen then asked a question that she knew, almost immediately, would better have been left unsaid:

 

“Can you describe some of the fantasies?”

Clarissa then confessed to seeing herself as a dominatrix caning her husband, to the point of drawing blood. She saw herself forcing his mistress to parade naked down Central Park West, her hands tied behind her back.

Imogen became increasingly uncomfortable listening to these gruesome stories. She knew intuitively that Clarissa required a benign explanation. Any interpretation that suggested that she was a repressed sadist would have alienated her. 

She said: “You have felt excluded from your husband’s world and the fantasies portray you as an active participant. Evidently, you feel that you can only participate by forcing yourself into the scene.”

Hearing this, Clarissa managed a half-grin. She said: “That makes a lot of sense.” By now, Imogen did not want to press the issue. She wanted to shift the focus.

So, she asked the obvious question: “Have you confronted your husband directly with your suspicions?”

Imogen did not think that this would have been a good thing. She feared that such a scene had already taken place.

Clarissa responded: “Not at all. I did not want to hear the answer.”

Nevertheless, she had begun her own investigation. She had scrutinized his credit card bills, tracked his comings and goings, made surprise phone calls to check up on him. She had imagined hiring a private detective to follow Garret, but she could think of no way to hide the expense.

Clarissa was not merely consumed by jealousy; she also felt like a snoop. She no longer trusted her husband and she felt that she was no longer trustworthy herself.

Imogen half agreed with this judgment, but she feared that Clarissa had been demeaning herself excessively, and thus required some support.

Imogen said: “I understand how you would have these feelings, but sometimes when a woman feels that she needs to protect her home and family she engages in activities that do not make her feel very proud.”

After saying “perhaps,” Clarissa started describing herself as a woman consumed by jealousy, increasingly distant from her husband and her child. She had concluded that Garrett’s better days were those when he saw his mistress. Thus, his wife had become an obstacle to his desire. Was he trying to drive her away so that she would grant him an easy divorce.

The more Clarissa obsessed about her husband’s infidelity, the more she imagined that there was something wrong with her. This made her increasingly disinclined to ask him anything, so for the first time she decided that she needed some coaching, some direction to help her to manage the situation.

She was not looking for a new cause, and she was not seeking the meaning of life. Such large metaphysical questions had barely pierced the carapace of her consciousness. Nor did she have any interest in going on a voyage of mystical self-discovery. Imagen judged that Clarissa was not trying to figure out that those intrusive sadistic impulses had lain dormant in her unconscious since early childhood. Such Freudian insights would have done nothing to help her to manage her current situation.

Imogen was willing to take Clarissa at her word. She was not inclined to ignore everyday crises, the better to plunge into an exploration of deeper issues. Providing Clarissa with a pile of insights into her sordid motivations would not have relieved her distress. 

Imagen knew that many traditional therapies induce their patients into ignoring everyday issues and thus induce inaction. Clarissa’s fantasies were crying out for a better way to re-engage with her current dilemma.

Imagen had suffered through psychotherapy, but she had never granted too much credence to the ancient and empty shibboleth, that it’s all in your mind. She did not accept the modern version, that it’s all in your feelings.

She saw feelings as an indication of current problems and believed that they indicated difficulty in managing them. Detaching feelings from reality was, for her, the royal road to solipsism. When therapists made a fetish of feeling, their patients became involved with their feelings, with how they felt about their feelings and with how they felt their feelings in the past. This rendered patients inactive, incapable of dealing with everyday dilemmas. 

As her first consultation ended, Clarissa pronounced herself calmed. She expressed satisfaction in her session and scheduled another one for two days later. Imagen noted that she was more composed than when she first entered the office. Doubtless, the reason was that she felt that she had found someone who could help her to manage the situation.

As the door closed Imagen indulged an extended reverie about the larger issues raised by a client like Clarissa. Her next slot was open and this offered a much-needed time for reflection, especially about the use and misuse of feelings in therapy and coaching.

Imogen recalled listening to her colleague Gus expound about feelings during a grand rounds presentation at the hospital. Gus was a man of feeling; he honed in on the patient’s feelings. No matter the patient’s real life circumstances, Gus kept saying the same thing: How did that make you feel? Had Gus been working with Clarissa he would have cared less about her husband’s depressive state and more about her feelings of jealousy.

Strangely, Gus would have provided Clarissa with a false sense of comfort. By implying that her feelings arose from childhood experience, not from actual circumstances, he would have been inducing her to believe that the problem was not with her husband, but with her. 

Gus might even have suggested that her feelings were a sign of repressed homosexual impulses. And he would have told her not to do anything until she resolves the infantile sources of this jealousy. This would induce her to withdraw from her life and to engage a passionately intense relationship with him. This relationship is called transference. It would convince Clarissa that she has as much power to manage her life as the audience in a movie theatre can modify the outcome of a film.

For her part, Imogen believed that Clarissa was suffering from inaction. Clarissa knew that she had to do something; she did not know what or how.

She believed that the therapy profession was colluding with this solipsism by placing too much emphasis on feeling. Once at a lecture, after listening to a therapist wax eloquent over the need to get in touch with one’s feelings, Imogen caused great consternation when she offered an offhand remark: If you want to get in touch with your feelings, where do you put your hands.

Imagen believed that feelings provide information, not about past feelings or even forgotten traumas, but about present circumstances. A therapist like Drusilla would have insisted on the importance of the simple fact that Clarissa first experienced jealousy when her world was disrupted by the arrival of her little sister, Georgina. And Drusilla would happy weave that into the notion that Claraissa was her mother’s rival for her father’s affection. 

In the end Clarissa and Drusilla would have agreed that Clarissa’s life had been a succession of romantic failures. The explanation is as intellectually gratifying as it is useless. Imogen reflected that if you tell a woman that she is doomed to fail you give her a stake in failure. If she succeeds she will be refuting her therapist’s belief. 

Besides, if she is as hopeless as these therapists are pretending, then her husband might have done well to stray. 

Any treatment that convinces Clarissa that she is an emotional defective will aggravate her depression.  And yet, if one looks at reality one discovers that Clarissa functioned well in a good marriage for some twelve years. She has been raising a happy and well-adjusted child. What is gained by persuading her that her life has been a series of failures punctuated by superficial successes. Will such a belief improve her chances to manage her current crisis?

To be continued… next Friday.

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