The Insane Look of the Bewildered Half-Broken Animal

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Donald Moss

To have attacks . . . that are of a sexual nature perpetrated by men ostensibly of Muslim origin is symbolically devastating for a public commitment to asylum.

We are alive at a very dark time. We have good reason to doubt the inevitability of historical progress, of civilizations holding together, of thought maintaining its relevance. We can sense the reemergence of the Crusader mentality, the increased and terrifying presence of both organized and lone-wolf predators. Ours is a time of desperate people, desperate cities, and a ravaged planet, of madmen and of dragons. Yet somehow, it might also be a time for psychoanalysis. But how? How can we locate ourselves here and now? How can we legitimate our claim to still belong?

Here is Freud in 1927, grounded in drive theory and clinical experience, making his case for the relevance of psychoanalytic thought: “an internalization of the cultural prohibitions among the suppressed people is not to be expected. On the contrary, they are not prepared to acknowledge the prohibitions, they are intent on destroying the culture itself, and possibly even on doing away with the postulates on which it is based. The hostility of these classes to civilization is so obvious that it has caused the more latent hostility of the social strata that are better provided for to be overlooked. It goes without saying that a civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence” (p. 12).

Ninety years later, faced, as he was, with “so large a number of unsatisfied participants,” I think our case for relevance will have to be grounded, as his was, in clinical experience. But instead of raw drive theory, our current case, I think, would best rely on our emerging theories of boundaries and borders. Building on Freud’s original theorization of the porous boundary both separating and binding mind and body, our discipline has, in the past century, conceptualized a widening series of other porous boundaries: those linking inside to out, individual to group, perversion to neurosis, self to other, thought to action, animate to inanimate, first person singular to first person plural. These emerging conceptualizations, and their deep applicability across enormous swatches of the contemporary world, seem to me to sufficiently warrant our still claiming a seat at the table.

On June 17, 2015, the killer of nine people at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church was quoted as saying: “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.”

The next day a patient of mine, speaking of the murders, said: “It was sad. I was sad. So sad. And then I got worried. Maybe I wasn’t just sad. Maybe I was being sanctimonious. And now I’m afraid I am talking about it here to avoid talking about myself. On the train I was wondering if someone had a gun and how many of us could he kill. Two, three, maybe, but not nine. And me, what if it were me he killed? Who would miss me? How would they mourn me? And then something else. It got bigger. Sixty million refugees on the planet. And I want to buy a twenty-thousand-dollar wedding ring. And then, all of a sudden, it’s too much, and it’s like everything’s on a screen: iPad, phone, internet, screens inside of screens. But yes, I’m sad. I know I’m sad. And then I’m something else. I can’t name what I am. How do you know when to stop? What counts as you?”

In both of these examples, the first person singular voice of a white man contending with racial difference vanishes.

The killer’s vanishes into compliant identification with a righteous and murderous first person plurality whose “you” has to be killed for what it is doing to “our” women and “our” country. “I” here simply gives voice to an ancient, malignant, and still rock-solid “we.”

The patient’s “I” simply vanishes. Overwhelmed by quantity—how much and how many: sixty million, twenty thousand; nine, two—it itself becomes quantity: all parts, nothing whole, a disembodied ghostly voice exuding a wan and ill-formed sadness.

And then there was me—the third case. Who was “I” here, hours after the murders? I called a black colleague, hoping for solidarity. When she immediately spoke of how unsafe the killings made her feel, she illuminated a fundamental difference between us. I was safe; she was endangered. This irreducible difference left me confused and dislodged, my wish for solidarity exposed as a futile flight from aloneness.

Thrown back, trying now for self-definition, refusing to accept the simple and dumb category “white man,” I looked for facts and impersonal structures—things I’d done, feelings I’d had, values I’d transmitted—but found only partial truths and private intentions: what I wanted to be, what I feared I was. Construction indistinguishable from fact, no axis sturdy enough to withstand scrutiny, no “I” was firm enough to hold me. Unsupported and uncertain, I could only grab at fragments. Having written things mingled with not having done things. Having said things mingled with having been silent. Racialized sexual fantasy mingled with racialized civic decency. Nothing of my adult life could eradicate the impact of “schwartzes” from my childhood. Such contradictions braided together inseparably, making impossible anything resembling clarity.

The killer’s “I” dissolved into an ancient and malignant “we.” The patient’s “I” simply dissolved. And mine, well mine, unable to find reliable support, wobbled, and still does. What follows is written under the auspices of that permanently wobbly “I.”

The ego “hates, abhors and pursues with intent to destroy all objects which are a source of unpleasurable feeling for it” (Freud 1915, p. 138). Its aim—our aim, then—is to keep those objects outside and away if possible, to annihilate them if necessary. We need some kind of map if we are to designate what is “outside and away.” Racism, misogyny, and rigid sexual normophilias offer systemic, efficient, and effective means for naming, mapping, and segregating these unpleasurable objects, both inside and out. Offering ease and certainty, these systems name and locate their objects with a logic as unambiguous as the logic of an atlas naming and locating Chicago.

Assuming I, and we, can muster substantial resistance to the appeal of these malign mapping systems, how, then, will we all do it—name, map, and locate our own objects—the sources of pleasure here, of unpleasure there? We can be certain that no such object maps will be neutral, none of their resulting borders “natural.” After all, our private interests are involved—our appetites, desires, and defenses—and it is these private interests that will generate the lines of both our individual and our collective object maps. Object maps delineate zones of safety and zones of danger. They provide each of us—individually and collectively—not only with a sense of what we can safely do, think, and bear; but also, and most important, a sense of who we can safely be.

Transferences and projections—directed outward—bind our internal objects to our external worlds. Identifications—directed inward—bind our external worlds to our internal objects. When these internal and external objects are linked—even snapped—together, we can, derivatively, locate ourselves: “the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes” (Freud 1923, p. 29).

The ego’s objects, once mapped, provide us with an identity—offering continuity, structure, and permanence. The monad, the dyad, the family, the group, the organization, the culture, the nation, the planet—mapped objects function to hold us together at every level of complexity. And at every level of complexity, these maps organize and protect us—they especially protect our soft parts. Keeping us intact, though, our object maps also demand our protection. How will we secure, define, and manage our maps? What kinds of language will we use? What kinds of laws? What sorts of police? What kinds of force? What will we do in an emergency? What will we do under threat?

They’ve been barrel-bombed in Aleppo by their own regime, they’ve been tortured, kidnapped and massacred by miscellaneous jihadis and opposition militias. They’ve been in refugee camps for years, waiting for that cruelly deceiving fiction ‘the international community’ to come to their aid. Now, when they take to the roads, to the boats and to the trains, all our political leaders can think of is fences, barbed wire and more police.

What must Syrians, camped on the street outside the Budapest railway station, be thinking of all that fine rhetoric of ours about human rights and refugee protection? If we fail, once again, to show that we mean what we say, we will be creating a generation with abiding hatred in its heart.

So if compassion won’t do it, maybe prudence and fear might. God help us if these Syrians do not forgive us our indifference [Glass 2015].

This is a vivid picture of a border problem, of external objects suddenly on the move, the lines on a map challenged, and of the laws and forces working to determine how open the borders might be, which external objects might be allowed in and which kept out. The unit in this catastrophe is the nation, the continent even, but the same formal problem—objects encountering borders; borders threatened by objects—is also perceptible in everyday clinical practice.

Here, for example: “There’s no room for me and you in here. You say a sentence and I panic. I can’t speak. It’s over before I say it. What I just said is dead now, about no room for me. That sentence is just a log now, sitting there. Now I’m calm. I’m somewhere else” For this patient, object maps are brittle and rigid—nothing can be let in, nothing let out. Pure walls and a barren interior. The map delineates a bunkered mind and body, surrounded by toxic objects. The analyst, one of those objects, is an intruder, an unbearable threat. Penetrate the bunker and its lone occupant vanishes, leaving barely a trace. The externalized violence of “you have to go” has here been transformed into the internalized violence of “I have to go.”

Or this: “The worst is when I’m alone and working. Things are going well. And then he comes home. He comes upstairs and wants to talk. It doesn’t matter what he wants. It can be anything. Seeing him want is disgusting. Especially sex. Leave me alone. That’s how to take care of me. Just leave me alone.” In sessions, this patient is fluent, spontaneous, easygoing, except for one glaring fact: she cannot make eye contact with me. She explains: “Something can happen. I don’t know what. I can fall apart. It will be too much. Words are easy. Seeing is too much.”

My patient is a discerning listener. I’m therefore pleased when what I say seems generative, productive, a rewarding back-and-forth. And yet, after years of speaking well and receiving my reward, I have begun to feel diminished and reduced, dismissed and done with. I slowly realize that I am colliding with an unwanted limit. Talented with words, I now feel more performer than person. Steady clinical progress is no longer enough for me. And yet, my wishes for contact, meaning, connection, gratitude, and love all seem both gross and wrong. Stay where you are and want nothing, I tell myself. The result is a “hat in hand,” a refugee, state of mind—stupidly hopeful and imploring on some days, exasperated or indifferent on others. The only way to pass through the border would be to violate it. So, unwilling to risk transgression, I tell myself we’re making progress. No need to push it. Things are fine exactly as they are.

Or this: “I’m not the man here, you are. I’m number two, your sidekick. That’s what I want. You be in front. You do it. And I’ll be there, getting my share, nothing more, though, just my share. I’m on the sideline. You’re in the game.” Here the map positions interior and exterior object as a saprophytic pair. Each object, on either side of the border, is meant to enliven and maintain the other. Exterior strength, yoked to interior submission, undergirds the promise of eternal harmony. The law is clear, though: there is to be no separation, no development. Safety and order demand stasis and union.

And finally, again outside the clinical setting, but bearing a clinically familiar form: “So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth” (Genesis 1:27–28; Jewish Publication Society translation).

The resulting object map—one that has touched and influenced us all—sanctions man’s perfect and eternal dominion over the world. But now the external object in this, our own, object map has become restive. Dominion “over every living thing” suddenly seems coupled with the possible destruction of every living thing. The very premise of inside and out is dissolving before our eyes.

The threat of dissolution haunts all fixed object maps. Perverse impulse permanently rattles neurotic structure. Projections return. Wishing is voracious. We all want everything. The expelled, the excluded, the dominated do not stay still. They arise and return, disrupting the borders that once placed and defined them. And in the resulting crises, even if compassion won’t do it, maybe prudence and fear will.

I turn now to a mapping parable. In the parable, as in our lives, object maps are constructed by the interplay of “fact” and “desire.” I mean to examine this interplay. Common sense presumes facts and desires as separate categories, mapped as separate and meant to be kept permanently separate. When intermingled, they are said to generate the unwanted distortions of “wishful thinking.” The parable calls into question our confidence in every element of this commonsensical picture. Like the strongest clinical work, this parable leaves us undermined and disoriented, in doubt about both the validity and the reliability of our grounding maps. No matter how often we’ve heard the contrary—the parable seems to say—a cigar may never be just a cigar.

In Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy” (1917) an ape, long ago captured in Africa but now a civilized and learned international figure, has been invited to the academy to report on his remarkable life. The ape begins with the story of his terrifying voyage:

Hopelessly sobbing, painfully hunting for fleas, apathetically licking a cocoanut, beating my skull against the locker, sticking out my tongue at anyone who came near me—that was how I filled in time at first in my new life. But over and above it all only the one feeling: no way out [p. 198].

Bereft and despairing, torn away from everything he has known, the ape realizes:

I had to stop being an ape. . . . Freedom was not what I wanted. Only a way out; right or left, or in any direction; I made no other demand; even should the way out prove to be an illusion; the demand was a small one, the disappointment could be no bigger. To get out somewhere, to get out! [pp. 198, 199].

I . . . called a brief and unmistakable “Hallo,” breaking into human speech, and with this outburst broke into the human community, and felt its echo: ‘Listen, he’s talking!’ like a caress over the whole of my sweat-drenched body. I repeat: there was no attraction for me in imitating human beings; I imitated them because I needed a way out, and for no other reason [p. 203].

And with this “Hallo” the ape’s melancholy life as no-longer-an-ape begins.

If I look back over my development and survey what I have achieved so far, I do not complain, but I am not complacent either. With my hands in my trouser pockets, my bottle of wine on the table, I half lie and half sit in my rocking chair and gaze out of the window. If a visitor arrives, I welcome him with propriety. My manager sits in the anteroom; when I ring, he comes and listens to what I have to say. Nearly every evening I give a performance, and my success could hardly be increased. When I come home late at night from banquets, from scientific receptions, from social gatherings, there sits waiting for me a half-trained little chimpanzee and I take comfort from her as apes do. By day I cannot bear to see her; for she has the insane look of the bewildered half-broken animal in her eye; no one else sees it, but I do, and I cannot bear it [p. 204].

Here he is, then, this magnificent ape, this astonishment and spectacle, addressing us, the members of the academy. We who have both captured him and let him go are gathered to celebrate the convergence of our compassion with his genius. For the moment, we are one—ape and human—joined together to celebrate the reconciliation of the bestial and the sublime. His achievement is also ours. As he has risen, so have we.

But later, we will again separate, ape and human, us to our rooms, and he to his, where, with his acute and pitying gaze, he will spot and register “the insane look of the bewildered half-broken animal” in the eyes of the servile little chimpanzee from whom he deservedly “takes comfort, as apes do.” We sense his anguish and his attempt at empathy as he encounters her—scruffy and unkempt, unmannered and illiterate—brought in and taken out, night after night, with no sign, really, of even a rudimentary consciousness, to perform her natural chore: the provision of comfort. Amazed, admiring, astonished, moved—we almost identify with him and we almost love him.

“Almost”—because when it comes down to it, we cannot really identify with this ape and, failing identification, of course, neither can we really love him. That almost—neither identification nor love—is grounded in the apparently irreducible gap, the mapped boundary, separating the body of that ape from the bodies of us humans.

A second gap separates ape and chimpanzee. This second gap is psychic, not biological. It’s not the chimp’s body, but rather her “look”—and behind the look, her mind—that marks her, maps her, as irreversibly other to our ape. The ape cannot bear to either identify with or love an animal whose mind can generate that “insane look.” All he can do is fuck her.

The melancholy ape lives as a category of one, unbridgeably separated from us on one side, from the chimpanzee on the other. As we members of the academy listen to the report, we empathize with the ape, “understand” his anguish; “see” what he “sees.” We’re with him, sharing in his language and thought, yes, and in the pathos of his minimal reward. He has been let out of his steel cage, but the mapping laws that allowed for his capture in the first place remain. Biology now does the dirty work once done by steel. What makes the work dirty, I think, is that at evening’s end, regardless of what we have just heard, we do not want the ape to become one with us. We are suddenly grateful to biology for taking care of our patrolling, our police work. The once firm line separating “biological fact” from biological “wish” has at least temporarily vanished. Now what?

Now we must ask: What are we doing when we employ biology to map the ape? What do we want from him when we not only put him there but also aim to keep him there? What do we want for ourselves when we put and keep ourselves here? With desire infiltrating the picture, our excitement, our confidence, our applause—all of these elements—might get hollowed out and, like all of our finery that evening, exposed, perhaps, as features of a manic kind of costume.

Biology, infiltrated with wish, has lost its credibility. So we will look elsewhere to map the fundamental difference—the basic fact of life—that must separate us from the ape. We will look for it in his eyes and we will succeed. We will find that “insane” look, that marker of excess—excess loss coupled with excess appetite. This is the combination that simultaneously reassures and alarms us. It calls into question the half-broken animal’s capacity for self-control. Too much taken away, too much wanted: the ape, in spite of himself, will reveal his baseline primitivity. We too have lost, of course, and we too are wanting, but neither our loss nor our wanting is excessive, insane. We whose comforts are sufficient will do our best to map excess, bewilderment, and primitivity—on just the other side of our borders. Sadly, we will conclude, at the end of our visit, that the ape belongs there. We will suffer the pathos of this unbearable-yet-wished-for “fact.”

And here I return to Freud, to what he called “bitter experience” (1900, p. 566). For Freud, it is bitter experience that drives us away from our initial reliance on a self-sufficient interior. We turn outward to find in the world what we have lost in ourselves. And in this outward turning, we must figure out our own version of the ape’s foundational “Hallo,” our own way to make contact with our handlers, and to solicit from them satisfying substitutes for the sense of sovereignty and perfection that we will never again have. It is this necessity to turn outward that leaves us, like him, forever vulnerable to both melancholy and rage. Each of these—melancholy and rage—can be kept at bay only by finding sufficient sources of comfort, only when the outward turning feels worth its cost. Both are stoked, though, when the outward turn brings too little, when we are caught, against our will, between an irrecoverable past and a depriving future. And it is here, at this moment, caught like that—with no way back and no way forward, trapped, without the possibility of reconciliation—that we, all of us, I think, will stare out, insane now: bewildered, half-broken, animal.

The insane look, then, is a voracious look, one marking an embittered appetite aiming to restore a half-remembered, half-imagined, moment of sovereignty. “You rape our women and have taken over our country.” We mapmakers live vigilant lives. The maps we draw—biological and psychic—are drawn up to affirm that our satisfactions are both deserved and protected, natural and earned. Our borders mark as outside those whose unextinguished urge to restore themselves to sovereignty might turn excessive, might lead them to break through and not only take what we have, but also, even more disturbingly, take comfort from us—fuck us, that is—as the ape does his half-broken chimp.

For, as the director of Homeland Security recently said, “Our borders are not open to illegal migration. If you come here illegally, we will send you back consistent with our laws and values.” He added: “This should come as no surprise. I have said publicly for months that individuals who constitute enforcement priorities, including families and unaccompanied children, will be removed” (New York Times, January 8, 2016).

Here is a clinical example of mapmaking run amok. The map seems intact and stable until, suddenly, the insane primitive breaks out, disrupts its integrity, and generates a short-term panicked chaos. That chaos fades; thought intercedes; the map seems restored.

Mr. X is seeking treatment for a “violent temper,” a long history of “scaring people,” sometimes “beating them.” Shortly before our first session, he had struck a lover in the face. We have had three consultations so far. The patient has seemed thoughtful, considerate, self-conscious, and eager to gain control over a lifetime of explosively violent outbursts. I am considering whether to recommend psychotherapy or psychoanalysis.

The patient comes in a few minutes late to his fourth consultation session. He says he is upset and angry. It has something to do with my telling him in our third consultation session that I thought his good feelings from the first two sessions would likely be transitory. He leans forward, professorial, even condescending, and tells me that therapists often don’t know what they’ve done to make patients feel better—or worse, for that matter. He’s therefore not sure what grounds I might have for making this judgment.

I’m thinking here that my remarks from the previous session had in fact taken me by surprise. I wasn’t sure, either then or now, what had led me to speak so authoritatively. I’m also thinking that he, somewhat correctly, had sensed them as presumptuous and overreaching. I’m listening, waiting to hear more, a bit puzzled, feeling confronted, anxious, challenged a bit, but not at all alarmed. I’m wondering what he means to be getting at, what’s upsetting him.

At this point, though, the patient abruptly changes course.

He says: “You can take your hand away from your mouth.”

The remark seems strange. My hand is indeed where it often is: near my mouth, kind of supporting my chin. My first sense of what the patient might be meaning is that he is trying to reassure me. I think that maybe with my hand there I look anxious or concerned or worried. Maybe my hand at my mouth is a marker of feelings like that. Maybe he wants to let me know that I have nothing, really, to be concerned about, as though he were saying, “You can relax.” Thinking this, and thinking that I am, in fact, already fairly relaxed, I say nothing and don’t move my hand.

The patient then repeats himself, more forcefully: “You can move your hand from your mouth.”

Here I become alarmed. He is obviously not trying to reassure me. I don’t know what he’s meaning or what he’s trying to do. I still don’t move, but am very self-conscious and uncertain about what to do with my hand.

Then, suddenly, furiously, the patient screams at me: “I said, take your fucking hand away from your fucking mouth!” Immediately, he’s standing next to me, one fist raised and cocked, the other holding a briefcase, also raised and cocked, both aimed at my face.

I’m terrified. I feel like a hostage, a kidnapped person, or a helpless child. The patient’s power is unlimited. The situation is sinister and deadly. Take your fucking hand from your fucking mouth! Do everything I say, or else. I put my hands in front of my face. I imagine my mouth split open, my teeth broken, my eyes damaged, orbits fractured, nose fractured, blood all over, how will I get out.

I say, softly I think, “Don’t hit me.”

The patient walks away from me, toward the door. He stands still in the door, turns, stares at me, his face communicating fury and hatred.

“Faggot!” he says to me. He screams it out and leaves.

I hear him walk the corridor and exit the building. I am in tears. My heart is pounding. My first thought is that he could have killed me.

Then I feel stupid, taken in by his false reassurance, unable to have predicted the violence I have just experienced. Only by a contingency that my patient was in charge of does my face remain intact. I feel furious. I want to beat him, punish him, show him who the “faggot” is. I notice this primitive wish to retaliate, to turn the epithet outward, and I inwardly cringe. I am surprised and embarrassed that my thinking has taken this turn. Moments later, I notice something else—also surprising, also embarrassing.

Weirdly, I catch myself wondering how I had given myself away—weird because the entire line of thought, both its retaliatory and its confessional endpoints—depends on a belief in the word faggot and in its mapping power. “Confessing,” then, at least to myself, I wondered what signs of my being a “faggot” were visible? Was it the shirt? Maybe it was the way I had my hands up in front of my face—a sissy. Was there something unconsciously seductive in having my hand near my mouth? Were my clothes excessively fashionable? Did I convey signs of retreat from standard forms of tough heterosexual masculinity?

The best I could do was to notice how my patient’s outrageous violence had resonated with ancient personal vulnerabilities. I had been left emotionally uncertain about where on the “masculine” ground I was standing. But whether retaliating or confessing, I was also certain, yet again, of the ferocity with which masculinities are mapped and patrolled.

My most shocking reaction occurred that night, coming home in the subway. Near me, waiting for the same train I was, stood a man I was certain was gay. He was small and delicate. I looked closely at him, more closely than I usually would. I then felt the force of the word faggot practically roaring in my mind. The word that had just that morning targeted me was this time targeting him. I was possessed by the word. For a moment, I wanted to really hurt this man—to hit him, scare him, get rid of him, to get rid of all of them.

I realized on the platform how slight the difference was between Mr. X and myself—how, if he belonged in a cage, so might I, the man who on that platform could find no comfort other than in violence, the man who for a moment targeted another and in fact felt toward that other the same elemental “you have to go” that always provides the fuel for the ego at war. On the platform, for a moment, spotting and targeting this other man seemed to restore an ancient, and primitive, sense of sovereignty. I the hunter “took my comfort” from him, my prey.

In All Quiet on the Western Front, the narrator Paul, anguished after stabbing a man to death, is told by his comrades: “You can’t do anything about it. What else could you have done? That is what you are here for” (Remarque 1928, p. 226). Reflecting on this, he thinks: “I am no longer a shuddering speck of existence, alone in the darkness—I belong to them and they to me; we all share the same fear and the same life, we are nearer than lovers, in a simpler, a harder way; I could bury my face in them, in these voices, these words that have saved me and will stand by me” (p. 212).

In telling you what happened in me on the platform, I also hope to find comrades, “voices . . . that . . . will stand by me,” will feel with me that my temporary and regrettable fall into hatred was understandable. I appeal to you to identify with me, to recall your own aberrant moments, your own encounters with that “insane look” in some other, your violent impulses to eliminate it, to get it away and keep it away, and then to return home, to re-find your proper place on your well-guarded and proper map.

If I can find comrades, I can move my experience from first person singular to first person plural. If I succeed, “I” wasn’t alone on the platform. In effect, you were with me and “we” felt the impulse. The forgiving power of camaraderie, of course, can also be dangerous, even deadly. Turn “me” on the platform into a beleaguered cop, turn the young man into a black kid in a hoodie, turn inhibiting forces into triggered ones, and we might have a dead boy instead of an untouched one, and a different search for different comrades: “voices . . . that . . . will stand by me.”

Shun us, though, me or the cop, expose each of us as singularly responsible, and we both might shrivel under the weight of what we’ve done—reduced, as Paul was, to a “shuddering speck of existence.” Such shunning would occur under the auspices of an object map. I, having done that, am no longer one of you; I am expelled. The resulting punishment would be severe, of course, precisely the kind of severity pursued when we Americans stuff our prisons with the excluded. Prisons, of course, function to concretely map the line between the included and the excluded, to put literal walls between “us,” say, and “our” others, the ones who, having done that, whatever it was, now “have to go.”

I used to go to a gym that had many ex-felons as members. These tough guys, mostly black, were always nice to me—calling me “Doc,” going out of their way to compliment me when, for instance, I could bench press about half what they could. One afternoon we were together as the TV announced the conviction of the cop who had sodomized Abner Louima with a toilet plunger. I asked them how much prison time the cop should get. One guy answered: “None. No one should have to spend one day in prison. No one deserves that.” The others agreed. This mapping move took me by surprise. The once-excluded here were neither triumphant nor vengeful. Instead, they called for a radical revamping of one of our baseline mapping impulses. Strangely, they, and not I, gave voice to the optimal psychoanalytic perspective on mapping. I think they might well spot the insane look not only in the mapped population but also, and perhaps more importantly, in the mapping one.

I think of my recent work with a patient for whom averting his eyes has been a psychic necessity since he was a boy. “When I make eye contact, I immediately start to feel judged. With you it’s about masculinity. I am a masculine failure. I am weak, indecisive. I can’t think. It’s not about being gay. It’s being sick or crazy. I’m something too small and at the same time excessive. You are a man. I am an animal.” Since he was a child, he has felt like an “alien,” at home only in interplanetary fantasies.

“The Earth is not safe. There’s danger everywhere. How can anyone be calm?” As for me, I too cannot be relied upon. “Nothing connects us. You listen. You’re attentive. You remember. None of that makes any difference. I don’t know you. You don’t know me. I once saw a lonely girl at a bus stop. She knew I could tell. She also knew I was lonely. We didn’t have to say much. That’s what I mean by connection.”

Unlike his experience with the girl, nothing I do or say seems effective. I contend with a continuous hum of exasperated indifference, my patient’s to me and mine back to him. There seems something impossible about communication, about the very possibility of connection.

All the usual modalities flop. He is perpetually grim, determined, honest, laboring. So am I. Nothing works, though. Two guys slogging away, not quite giving up, yet never actually hopeful.

A very sophisticated reader, my patient was recently given a “cheesy and embarrassing” book by his young nephew—How to Pick Up Women. Telling me about the book, he was overwhelmed with emotion, barely able to speak. “It’s the first time,” he said, “that I feel invited to actually make contact with them, the first time that someone seems willing to show me how.” Particularly moving to him was the section on flirting. “I don’t know how to flirt. I don’t know what it is. Women have always told me that.” He then began to speak about wanting to learn how to draw, about how terrible he is at it. “I can do abstract things, but I can’t really get at what’s in front of me. I’m terrible.” I said, “In order to draw something, you have to flirt with it, don’t you?” Both the thought—which I felt was right—and my expressing it surprised me. My patient smiled—a rarity—and, turning his head toward me, said he knew what I meant but couldn’t explain what it was. He became silent, apparently trying to figure out what had just happened. I said, “I think I just flirted with you a bit, didn’t I?” He smiled again and so did I. It seemed we had made contact in a way that hadn’t happened in the treatment for the past eight years. For the moment, we were in it together, whatever “it” was—neither of us bewildered, neither of us insane, neither of us half-broken. Flirting had done the trick. I felt enormously satisfied with this session—the little flirtation, my patient’s smile and mine.

I think that since childhood this man’s brilliance, scientific aptitude, and extraordinary capacity for logic had functioned as his version of the ape’s momentous “Hallo.” They had won him his release from monadic exile but had never won him a welcome.

It’s not enough, then, I thought, for either the ape or for him, to open their cages, to encourage their performances, to applaud their successes, and to take comfort from the talents of our freed captives. Maybe the psychoanalytic and personal interventions and interpretations that count, the ones that happen clinically at Strachey’s “point of urgency” (1934, p. 150), must in fact contain an element of flirtation, a wink of complicity, the kind of complicit flirtation we do so easily with our babies. And yes, I thought, we do it, and do it easily, but only with our babies—ours.

The problem comes with the ones—babies or not—on the far side of the border, the ones pressing for entry now, with their insane looks, their ungoverned appetites, their unwillingness to delay. Here they are singing in Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade (1964):

We’ve got nothing always had nothing

Nothing but holes and millions of them

Living in holes

Dying in holes

Holes in our bellies and

Holes in our clothes

We want our rights and we don’t care how

We want a revolution now.

That “now” is the killer. It is the fundamental, and terrifying, marker of difference—their insane “now,” our reasonable “later”—a difference detectable in their bodies, their eyes, their speech. And finally, when reasonable talk, charitable gestures, and difficult negotiations don’t click, when, in fact, nothing seems to click, at that moment, when we tire of them, when in spite of ourselves we start to feel that yes, perhaps it’s better, perhaps it’s how things ought to be, that they stay there and us here, that the maps map facts and that the facts, after all, are, really, facts—it’s at that moment, just when we’re ready to close the gates, to keep things as they are, that we could, if we looked closely, spot the insane look, of the bewildered half broken animal, that nonnegotiable look of “now,” in ourselves.