The other half of the story

2/15/2025

Occasionally, an author does it for me.
   A fictional character going through a particular set of circumstances, is … well… that’s me! Certainly, the objective details are different. And perhaps I wouldn’t have done what the character did. But I too had lived through that self-same perplexity of the human condition. Once I recognize it, the entire novel takes on a deeply personal meaning. And my own life story makes more sense, too.
   I’ve just finished a novel about the early life of a person growing up in the 1950s as an Hasidic Jew in Brooklyn. The dramatic tension throughout the novel is one that I’ve lived my entire life. And while the author’s skill is clearly evident from a writerly point of view, there’s something else there ... something that transcends effective storytelling. It’s the author’s grasp of human nature.
   This subjective identification also comes to me with classical music. Often while listening I’m overtaken by a nexus of sound that exemplifies what I feel inside. Hearing it outside of me, I feel it more strongly within me. A friend recently asked me to recommend a piece of classical music, something moody and dark. Immediately, the Mozart Requiem came to mind, a go-to of mine. Even though I typically eschew music with words (thankfully, the text of the Requiem is in Latin so I don’t get distracted by it), and I’m not much for doctrine and churchiness (as a Mass, it’s not a church practice I grew up with) that piece of music expresses my own sense of moody-and-dark in a deeply moving way.

On the Wilton’s Reads page of this website you’ll notice I alternate reading fiction and non-fiction. Trained in science, I have a head for numbers. I really enjoy books that tell me something about the world in that way. There’s something to be said about the value of an objective analysis.
   But within fiction a different, more intimately valuable, something emerges. I connect to the subjective me, my intentions, values, awe and perplexity. It is there, written by authors skillful in conveying the human condition through their characters and plots. In reading it I’m not so alone (or weird). Or maybe I am, that weird part, but it’s more okay.
   Non-fiction tells me about the nature of the world. Fiction tells me about what it means to be in that world.

I was embedded in the field of professional psychology for four decades. Doing that work I had direct engagement with the human condition. Confusions, frustrations, sad stories and celebrations walked into the office every hour on the hour, spoken into the intersubjective space of our conversation. I often subjectively experienced my client’s emotion as their story was told. It felt magical: my mind and brain in a dynamic, sensing connection with my client. Their stories also invited me to reflect back on times in my life when I faced a similar circumstance or emotion. In the therapy office I had my own subjective humanity as did the client.
   Unfortunately psychology, as a science and a profession, has chosen to focus on the human condition as it can be objectively known. Research turns behaviour into numbers and runs those numbers through sophisticated mathematics. In doing so, it claims to know what really is real about the human mind. Transposed into the clinical office, objectification rewrites struggles and suffering into symptoms, counts them up and targets them with treatment procedures.
   The objectification focus ramped up over the course of my career. Diagnosis has elaborated itself to fill a 1000 page tome of criteria and process. Therapy has become about enacting protocols, more and more of them. Ethics has become about compliance to a burgeoning collection of codes, standards and guidelines.
   But this approach to human distress and adaptive difficulties comes with a price. With the focus on objectification, professionalism replaces compassion, knowledge and skills replace wisdom and intuition, ethical rules define, regulate and limit how respect and dignity are to be shown. Certainly, I’ve known many individual psychologists who are compassionate, wise and intuitive. However, the institutions of the profession have chosen not to nurture those qualities in their practitioners nor value them in their model of competence.
   Think about it: what happens within you when you’re treated as a number or an object? Are we not apt to become less healthy, less sane, less happy, less well-adapted when we are treated that way?

And so, I’ve retired. I made a clean break from professional practice to take up creative pursuits: composing and intentionally listening to music, writing fiction and reading it. In reading fiction I get the other half of the story, the subjective half. I read for when an author whispers to me this is the dilemma of it all, this is the perplexity of human nature, and you are not alone in experiencing this. Once I no longer listen to music as background or entertainment, I’m able to hear myself within it.
   Many would look at my career as a psychologist as a great success. Objectively, it was. Over and over folk gave me feedback that I had helped them. I was respected by my peers, well, some of my peers anyway. For twenty-five years I was tolerated as a columnist in a newsletter for psychologists. I made enough money in the private sector that I could retire to enjoy a comfortable and creative life for the remainder of my years.
   But of course, that’s only half the story.
   My career was riddled with all those times I was so completely engaged with a client that psychological thinking disappeared from my mind. What remained was my heart and soul in relationship with another human being. I believe those were the moments I did the most good, moments when I brought to therapy my subjective self as well as the objectivity of the profession.
   As deeply satisfying as is that book about the Hasidic Jewish boy or loosing myself in Mozart’s Requiem, those moments in the therapy room were even more so.

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The other half of the story

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