The Body Keeps the Score (Bessel van der Kolk, 2014)

Bessel van de Kolk once received a request to help me find an internship. Or at least, that’s what I was told. No internship came of it, in the end. This was around 2014, and I guess one reason for not responding was that he was busy finishing this book – which bears the title of his pathbreaking article on his trauma research from 1996. What happened to the term trauma between those years to bring it in to such prime focus? Initially, van der Kolk pursued the field because of his own sense of traumatization during the WW2, as a boy in occupied Amsterdam. Later, as a young MD in the US, he began observing Vietnam veterans and their inability to recover from wartime experiences. van der Kolk outlines his own interest in the field in the beginning of the book, and his own story mirrors the evolution of the term from world wars to its current status as a word that has enjoyed exponentially increased dissemination the last ten years.

The book refers to a lot of studies of trauma, PTSD and dedicated a lot of pages to describing different modalities of treatment. He tells of CBT, EMDR, “bodywork” but also of drumming, theatre and song.

I recently partook in a four day course on a trauma treatment method called PE, where I asked the instructor what she thought about Bessel van der Kolk’s work. She scoffed at the mention of his book, which surprised me. My understanding was that he might be controversial, but still a respected authority on trauma. This proved to no longer be the case, at least for this particular instructor.

Later I found out that van der Kolk has been attacked by various journalists and writers for making the word trauma popular, and thereby twisting its meaning. It has become chic to refer to something awful that happened in the past as a trauma, and what once was only associated with the terrors of war, torture and assault now encompassed lighter problems like squabbles, neglect and other such slights. The death of a pet goes from being a sad event to being seen as an insurmountable emotional hurdle. This change has also fueled a movement that sees a system of generational trauma connected to historical racial injustice.

I am particularly invested in the idea of generational trauma since I am two generations down from holocaust victims, which is a fact that informs my self-identity (rightly or wrongly). My father’s life and upbringing was seriously stumped because of his parents had spent time in what is called concentration camps, a term I have a hard time with. His life informed my life. And my life informs my children’s lives.

My grandmother knew Bessel and used to attend his conferences. She even took to habitually carrying the little black and red bag from the conference as her usual carry-all. In big red letters on black background it said “TRAUMA STUDIES CONFERENCE”, which I guess gave her some kind of thrill to parade around with. She was herself a victim of trauma – and a wounded healer later helping other survivors.

Back to Bessel – he has recently also been accused of acting uncavalier at his workplace, which lead to his termination. This in addition to the claim that he has blurred the notion of trauma currently puts him in a somewhat disgraced position. One might say that van der Kolk has misshaped modern perceptions of trauma, but I believe that this tendency was evident in the zeitgeist regardless of his particular efforts. We are now in a moment where a countervailing force is emerging. This is represented by people who rather emphasise words like grit, resilience, robustness, and antifragility, to use a coinage by Nicholas Nassim Taleb. Another writer, Abigail Shrier, argues that “therapy culture” has made a whole generation into wimpy snowflakes, in her new book Bad Therapy. As usual, I think the truth lies somewhere in between these extremes. I took offense at reading Shrier’s ranty prose dismissing a lot of research findings. Sadly this is not unusual when a non-expert reviews psychological concepts. She pisses on epigenetics, on generationally inherited trauma research (conducted by Rachel Yehuda et al) on Bessel’s whole life’s work.

I am beginning to think there are two types of trauma researchers; those who’ve experienced trauma themselves and want to understand it, and those who want to make a career and happened to choose trauma as a specialty – and therefore don’t possess enough of an understanding of the phenomenon to really grasp what it is. I’m not arguing that one needs to suffer from the particular ailment one treats or does research on as a professional – that would be absurd – but I think in this particular case it might help.

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone (Lori Gottlieb, 2019)

A therapist memoir where we get to follow the therapist as practitioner, but also as a client in therapy herself – which is an unusual setup for this kind of book. The subtitle is “a therapist, her therapist and our lives revealed”. It seems to me that the book does a pretty good job of conveying the ins and outs of being a therapist. We also get a lot of backstory on Gottlieb’s career before becoming a therapist, which she seems to want to integrate in the story. She started in TV production, working on shows like E.R, then went to medical school, dropped out, started working in journalism. It was when she had some regrets about having dropped out of med school that someone suggested she might consider becoming a therapist. I know this because she tells the story in the book. She also tells the story of a few of her patients, and unlike other books of this kind, she includes precious vignettes that bring up various embarrassing or awkward moments that come with the job of a therapist. What happens when you bump into a client unexpectedly at the store? And what are the downsides of using Google to learn about your therapist’s private life? Interwoven is also the story of how she got pregnant, and the devastating breakup that leads her to seek out her own therapist. She tells us about her weekly collegial meetings where they discuss difficult current cases, and use insider slang about video sessions.
It is all very well crafted and it shows that Gottlieb is a writer, because even though some scenes come across as a bit unbelievable, she does a good job putting it all together; story, suspense, a bit of educative content about therapy all tied together with a human interest angle. Sometimes it’s a bit heavy on the fluff, but, hey, I guess that’s because it’s aiming for a large audience. It is very readable, and the chapters are just right in length for it to feel like you should read just one more.
All in all, a triumph of a book, which probably does a lot for spreading the gospel on the benefits of therapy. As a therapist, I found it pretty funny.

Stand Firm (Svend Brinkmann, 2015)

Contrarian Danish psychology professor Svend Brinkmann goes against the grain. The idea of the book came from his observation that positive psychology had become near-dogma, and Brinkmann started imagining a negative psychology as a counterpoint. The result is this “anti-self help book”, to use Brinkmann’s own appelation. One might as well call it an inverted self-help book – inverted in the sense that he attempts to clarify our current zeitgeist by reversing common tropes (think negatively, supress your feelings, dwell on the past). He comes up with seven of these “reverse” rules, and discusses them in order:

Cut out the navel-gazing
Focus on the negative in your life
Put on the No hat
Suppress your feelings
Sack your coach
Read a novel – not a self-help book or biography
Dwell on the Past

He latches on to the trend of neo-stoicism and urges the readers to suppress their feelings. He takes a cognitive approach in his argumentation that the self doesn’t exist, and is of the opinion that there’s no use wasting time thinking about it. The book is a strange brew of different currents in the broad field of psychology and self-help. Brinkmann gets it slightly confused when he advises against self-help books (in his own self-help book…). He means to say that novels are so much better than rulebooks and guides. This is also a 2010s trend in counselling, called bibliotherapy.

The anti-positive track is trodden by forerunners like Barbara Ehrenreich (“Smile or Die” was the UK title) and Oliver Burkeman (“Happiness for people who can’t stand positive thinking”). In my native Sweden we’ve been exposed to the same idea by Gothenburg-based thinker Ida Hallgren.

The title Stand Firm seems to suggest the opposite of movement and self-development. The text is at its most interesting when it gets political and mentions a shift in mental healthcare from community-based interventions towards individualized treatment. He mentions work in this area by Ole Jacob Madsen and Rasmus Willig.

I am reminded by the unspoken expectation of constant development and expansion, which must come from some innate competitive drive and probably spurred on even more by an economic system which rewards competition. What would happen if more people would say no to the constant grind? One trend among artists is to complain by protesting asleep, so-called lie-ins. Somehow, that would be the ultimate refusal of work.

My long interest in the dilemma of self-help is again awakened by this book. It is at the intersection of self-determination, epistemology, health, and sociological themes. Brinkmann stands on two sides of the fence, it seems to me. I guess he sees it as both ineffective and effective, depending on the intervention. There’s a lot more to say on this topic, so here are some keywords:

“life is speeding up” (Hartmut Rosa), “don’t believe in the gut feeling, it’s often wrong” (Gerd Gigerenzer), “Being ‘positive’ and saying yes to everything is dangerous” (conformism, consensus-seeking), “emotional culture” and “therapeutic culture” (Eva Illouz, Zygmunt Bauman, Arlie Hochschild), “coachification leads to passivization”.

Leaving the Atocha Station (Ben Lerner, 2011)

Breakthrough book by the now fêted writer Benjamin Lerner. The story is an young unnamed writer on scholarship to Madrid where he spends his time avoiding to write, going to museums, and ingesting various drugs. The thing about Lerner is his artful prose and the observations. There is not much by way of plot. The end of the book involves a portrayal of the events of the Madrid Metro bombings of 2004, as seen by a 20-something American abroad. It’s a little bit cringeworthy, but most likely based on Lerner’s real experiences.

The book is full of poetry-like observations and prevarications, most of which are interesting. I have read Lerner’s books in the wrong order, so I started with the one called “11:14” which involves the Hurricane Sandy and the title refers to the exact time when a borough-wide blackout occurred in Manhattan. This means I recognized Lerner’s predilection for incorporating recent catastrophies or news events and giving them a literary treatment. Apart from that, it’s pretty straightforward autofiction. A lot of the story is about courting Teresa and Isabel, and their various travels to Toledo, Granada or the Madrid Hilton.

I could sympathize with the portrayal of what it’s like to be an exchange student in a foreign country. Language problems, certain “paralinguistic” forms of communication, cultural differences – it’s not always a smooth ride. All things said, Lerner is pretty good with words. Here is a representative sample:

When I awoke it was a little after three in the morning and I was perhaps hungrier than I had ever been. I’d been eating very little for two weeks, and the turn of my appetite, I assumed, represented a shift in my body’s relation to the white pills. I ate an entire two-day-old baguette and as I ate I checked my e-mail and there was a message in English from Teresa, who had only e-mailed me once or twice in the past, saying that she had heard I was back from “traveling with Isabel” and that she missed me.

or this weird drug-induced parataxis:

My mouth was dry and I poured myself a glass of white wine and said I didn’t care which poems I read but that I would only read one or two. Teresa said to read the one about seeing myself on the ground from the plane and in the plane from the ground and I said, in my first expression of frustration in Spanish, that the poem wasn’t about that, that poems aren’t about anything, and the three of them stared at me, stunned. I said I was sorry, drained and refilled my glass, noting that Teresa seemed genuinely hurt; I found that to be a greater indication of her affection for me than the fact that she had favorites among my poems. We’ll read it, I said.

Lerner is the son of a feminist psychologist who wrote a noted book in the field in the mid 80s. I see it in second-hand bookstores all the time – it’s called The Dance of Anger.
















***

Berezina (Sylvain Tesson, 2015)

A wild-eyed Frenchman comes up with the idea of traveling from Moscow to Paris, retracing the steps of the Napoleonic army as they retreat from the failed invasion of Russia in 1812 – 200 years later to the day, on a motorbike with a sidecar.

This is exactly the kind of idea that appeals to me, although I’m not sure why that is. I guess I have an adventurous streak that is fed somewhat by imbibing travel writing of trips done by others. I also like it when there are references to history mixed with current development – which is exactly what Tesson does in this short book. It retells the 13 days it took him and his friends to traverse a big stretch of continental Europe in old Soviet-era motorcycles (called Urals..).

Tesson, ever the adventurer, had ten years prior to this trip undertaken a ride on horseback from Kazakhstan to Uzbekistan, and on foot from Yakutsk to Calcutta, so he is well acquianted with Russian and Russian-adjacent milieux. He is accompanied by Cédric, Thomas and two Russian guys, Vassily and Vitaly. There are some monuments for the fallen French along the way, but not much. The names of the towns they passed reminded me of the ravages of King Charles XII in the roughly the same area about a century before Napoleon. There is yet another connection between the two kings, or at least their countries, as strange coincidence had it that Napoleon’s brother-in-law became the king of Sweden in the early 19th century. The original wish of the Swedish ruling class was that Napoleon’s own brother would be sworn in, but he was deemed unfit. By the perspicacious efforts of a single Swedish nobleman, who nominated one of Napoleon’s generals, Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte – who in the Swedish succession became king Charles XIV John. This idea was of course a move to geopolitically safeguard Sweden from invasion, and to proffer allegiance to the mighty Napoleon. Funnily enough, his great-grandchildren are at the top of Swedish nobility to this day, and Jean-Baptiste’s great-great-grandson has held the title of King of Sweden for nearly fifty years.

Digressions to questions of royal lineage in the Nordics aside, this little adventure was a fun read. Tesson muses on Russian customs, memorial culture, European road infrastructure. One of his companions is a geologist and mentions a theory of black soil that is interesting.

What if someone would do a similar journey following in the footsteps of the Carolingian army? It would probably be accused of being xenophobic, somehow. Or maybe it has already been done, in a way, by historian Peter Englund, I don’t know.

Fragments of an Infinite Memory (Maël Renouard, 2016, transl. 2021)

Recent years has seen the advent of a particular book, that we might call “the tech memoir”. These range from being somewhat alarmist (How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell), nerdy (Bitwise by David Auerbach) and critical of corporations (Uncanny Valley by Anna Weiner). Mael Renouard contributed to the genre in 2016 in French, an effort that last year was translated into English. 

What separates Renouard from most other tech memoirs is that he comes to these issues from a more literary viewpoint, as he spends his days translating and writing novels (as well as teaching philosophy). I enjoyed his circuitous reminiscences of the intersections of his literary life and his internet use.

Reading the book made me realise that the web has (incredibly enough) been part of mainstream life for going on 25 years now and it’s no longer just computer world insiders who write about it anymore. The literary sensibility that Renouard uses gives rehashed arguments a new spin. Like this little aphorism:

”Who hasn’t gone on the internet looking for past loves and friends not seen for years? Time lost in search of lost time.”

He also is no stranger to coining neologisms, like “Googlemancy”, a kind of supernatural divination with the aid of the today ubiquitous Internet search engine Google. He notices how his Internet use changes his relationship to memory, and how he discovers in himself a new “impulse to share” which he didn’t have before the advent of the share button.

The Internet and its accompanying technologies (cellphones, laptop computers) have changed the playing field for literature, argues Renouard. He notes that a writer like Patrick Modiano “has become impossible since the coming of the the Internet”. Technological change also affects our relationship to images, text messages, paper books, scrolls, libraries. Renouard experiences new situations like hard drive failures (“as I am writing this book my computer broke down”) and how they play into the literary process.

The essays are peppered with lots of references to philosophy (a selection: Derrida Deleuze Bergson Hegel Badiou Malebranche Leibniz Debord Duns Scotus Nietzsche) as well as a fair share of Greek mythology. Particularly notable is a chapter of inspired imaginary meetings of figures from antiquity which conjured up possible internet logs of Augustus Caesar and others (it sounds hokey, but it is well written). A related ploy is the recurring “psychopathology of digital life”, a play on Freud‘s Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Other thinkers he plays with are Ray Kurzweil, Chateaubriand and Proust. Just try this little madeleine on for size:

The recollection machine has strange effects. I don’t know why each time I listen to excerpts from Einstein on the Beach on YouTube, and in particular “Knee Play No. 2,” I remember an evening I spent with my father at the Comédie Française in November 1996—I had never heard Philip Glass and Bob Wilson’s opera until I saw it staged in Paris in January 2014. Similarly, I ask myself why it is that whenever I listen to the instrumental version of “Last Dance in Copacabana” by Superfunk, I am beset by images of my first trip to Greece, in 2000—maybe I heard it in a bar at the time without paying it any attention, or maybe it was part of the distant sounds echoing from the island’s only nightclub, now shut down. But I do know that I can retrieve voluntarily, with infallible efficacy, these involuntary associations that have the strength and charm of Proustian recollections.

page 23

Renouard gets into a lot of stuff in this book, and I’ve only mentioned a few of them. Most of it is in the interesting category of things you’ve experienced yourself, but haven’t yet really recognized the noteworthiness of. An example of this is his excursus on the phenomenon of autocorrect when texting. Pretty brilliant.

Summing up, I’ll leave you with my favorite passage of the book. This is where Renouard describes meeting an old man who has become addicted to the attention of Internet platforms. He had previously spent ten years “deciphering the manuscripts of Husserl”, and now he is haggard-looking on Boulevard Saint-Michel constantly checking for notifications and “likes”. It’s written as a 19th century short story, but it very much describes our current situation. It ends thusly:

My presence no longer interested him very much. I watched him take the photograph and post it. He worked at incredible speed. The first likes appeared at once; his eyes lit up. For an instant, he ceased to be the lost man whose silhouette had startled me on the boulevard Saint-Michel. I pretended to have an appointment and got up to leave; he silently bade me goodbye with a wave of his hand.

page 114

The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media (Nathan Jurgenson, 2019)

Nathan Jurgenson is a sociologist who made a name for himself as head writer on the site Cyborgology. He carved out a niche writing critically about technology while simultaneously embracing the always-online lifestyle. His angle is an insider view, and he goes full force characterizing the criticism of say, Sherry Turkle, as moralistic and complacent. To me, that seems wholly unhelpful. He also has a rather unusual idea of humans – as if the normal person is a Californian who checks Instagram every five minutes. These silicon valley rules only applies to a very limited set of people, but the sense one gets from these essays is that Jurgenson thinks these rules are human universals. This is really quite narrow-minded. 

He also tries to update to the digital era cultural theories of photography by the likes of Barthes and Sontag. Attempting to outline a framework where the social photography is a language of its own, he gets lost in his axe-grinding attitude to ”boomer” tech critics. His critical writing is even more compromised by the fact that shortly after the publication of this book he accepted a position at social app company Snapchat as an ”in-house media theorist”.

What Language Do I Dream In? (Elena Lappin, 2016)

A memoir that seems to revolve around reinvention through languages. Lappin has a somewhat unusual family history. Late in life, she received an anonymous phone call informing her that her father was not her biological father. The book sees her tackling this fact and tracks her new relationship with the previously unknown original father. It also traces the many movements of her family. They move from country to country, adopting a new language every couple of years, ending up with as she herself says ”five languages in search of an author”. These are (in order of appearance): Russian, Czech, German, English, French. She is also surrounded at various points in life by Armenian, Hebrew and Welsh. The title refers to a question this often leads to as she recounts all the languages the commands: what language does she dreams in? No language at all, is the disappointing response… with a reference to fellow polyglot auto-reinventor Vladimir Nabokov. She also manages to mention her stint as editor for the London-based magazine Jewish Quarterly and her ambulatory life married to a research linguist. She is very straight-forward in the telling of her story, with lots of run-of-the-mill detail, but it manages to engage throughout. Her parents died shortly after this book was published. I was drawn to Lappin’s book because of its purported focus on multilinguality and identity, because I am a polyglot myself. I soon found that the book was not really that much about languages at all, and I need to keep looking for a worthy example of the elusive ”language memoir” (some candidates: Eva Hoffman, Heinz Wissmann, Nathalie Sarraute). Lappin also writes a little about her younger brother, infamous German novelist Maxim Biller.

My language chain starts with Hungarian, Romanian, Hebrew, German (the languages spoken by my grandparents (my grandfather also learned Polish in the camps, but died before ever getting to use it)). My own linguistic journey is marked, just as for Lappin, by different periods living in different countries. Swedish, English, French. Norwegian. I studied Latin as well. Icelandic. Later I picked up German, some Spanish. I studied Russian, dabbled in Italian, Polish. Ah, so many languages, but the proficiency varies greatly. 

A Horse Walks in to a Bar (David Grossman, 2017)

The Venn diagram that pinpoints potential readers of this novel ought to be the intersection of “people who like stand up comedy” and “people who like reading fiction”. In any case, an interest in jokes would help any reader of this book, set up as a 200-page description of a stand up comedy show gone awry.
The performer of this show is 57-year old Dov Greenstein, psychologically frail and at the end of his tether. His unusual standup routine in a bar in the seaside town of Netanya, seems improvised and jittery. It begins with comedy material, then transforms into therapy session, wobbles back to jokes and then some more confession. This dance of puns and pain permeate the story, which is narrated from the point of view of Dov’s estranged childhood friend, the courtroom judge, whom Dovaleh G invited to the show in order to get a judgment of his show, and ultimately, his life.

Grossman does a good job of portraying this neurotic jokefest, and along the way manages to psychoanalyse middle aged men, comedians and even the Israeli psyche. It’s not a book with much in the way of conclusion, but just like a comedy show it is fun while it lasts. I haven’t read anything else by Grossman, but I imagine that this is an unusual offering in his oeuvre. The short timespan of the book reminds me of a book that impressed me in my 20s, Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, a whole novel taking place inside a man’s head during his lunch break. This also takes place mostly inside one man’s head and it makes me wonder whether there are any novels specifically about a person in psychotherapy – because this comedy show felt very much like a man on the couch spilling his mind.

La Paria (Claude Kayat, 2019)

Some writers fall in love with the French language to the point that they make it their primary language of expression. It happened to fêted dramatist Samuel Beckett, and later also to Czech existentialist Milan Kundera. Both Beckett and Kundera moved to France. Claude Kayat is a unique writer in that he writes award-winning novels in French, even though he never lived in France. He learned French as a boy in Tunisia (then a French protectorate) and maintained his love affair with the language all his life. He has lived in Sweden since 1958 and has written 9 books, this being the latest.

La Paria is the story of two lovers, but also the story of people, of getting along, of enmity and strife. The inevitable comparison here is Romeo & Juliet, and la Paria really does feel Shakespearean in tone at times. In Tiberias, northern Israel, a young boy and a young girl notice each other on a plantation. The boy, Yoram, is the son of the owner, and the girl, Fatima, is employed to pick the fruit. Yoram is blonde and Jewish, Fatima is dark-haired and Bedouin. They start to meet clandestinely at late hours and fall in love, much to the disapproval of their respective families. A big confrontation amounts and this leaves Fatima with the choice of what to do with her life… and how to foster the coming generation.

The book deals with how difficult it is to be alive and to live up to familial duties and follow one’s own heart. It is also about going against societal pressures, and respecting tradition, and standing up for one’s views and thoughts. It was an affecting read for me, as I think these questions are more important than ever in today’s mixed and globalised world. What started out as kind of a soap-opera set-up transcended its own structure and managed to really say something profound about humanity. The genius conceit of having the fruit of the lovers’ dalliance become a plot point was a master stroke, a classic Kayat touch. Some of the themes of this book might remind the attentive reader of earlier Kayat novels, like his Prix Afrique Meditérannéenne award-winning debut novel Mohammed Cohen (about a boy growing up navigating identity issues, having a Jewish father and an Arab mother, feeling fully part of both traditions). It also puts one’s mind to his later “Les cyprès de Tiberiade” which is based on his own experiences living in Israel in the mid-1950’s.

He even gets to squeeze in a little of his own Tunisian heritage in the character of Bar-Gil, a Tunisian-Jewish police investigator. One of the joys of Kayat’s writing is his effortless blending of genres, which really comes of a nothing short of virtuositic. The narrative is sometimes comic, sometimes dark, sometimes it nears being a detective novel and towards the end it veers into bildungsroman territory.

The virtuoso prose is also very poignant, such effervescence and fluidity! It is impressive to be able to have such an effortless command of the French language after over 50 years in the Nordic darkness of Stockholm. Unfortunately, it is as yet only available in French, but I would urge translators and publishers to spread this book outside of the francophonic sphere, it is really quite the gem.

three other books on the theme of Jewish-Arab love:
Waguih Ghali – Beer in the Snooker Club (1964)
Dorit Rabinyan – All the Rivers (2014)
Kamal Ruhayyim – Menorahs and Minarets (2017)