My Childhood in the 1970s Part Seven: Psychology

Some of my memories are quite jumbled. Indeed, some of them may not fall strictly under the province that we call the 1970s. But if we keep to historian Bruce Schulman's "long 70s", which extends until roughly 1984, we are well within appropriate boundaries. However, the concepts of both appropriateness and boundaries are thoroughly fashionable and contemporary and as such have no place in my thinking today. It is in that spirit that these blogs are written.

I went to a child psychologist for a few months. I do not remember exactly why I went, whether it was an incident on my part, a complaint from the parents of my classmates, or a note from a teacher or principal.

Reflection upon what might have motivated this rash decision makes me think of that Christian Junior High in which I did time for a year. The inciting event may very well have been my decision to beat up that boy who physically molested a girl. What disturbed people was my ruthless relish in beating the poor kid up. I really enjoyed taking out that boy: I felt as if I were stamping out evil personified. I had thought I was defending the girl's honor, (the boy, after all, had taken his hand and groped her crotch in a most untoward fashion), but in the end my "handling" of his misbehavior only made me lonely and alienated from the whole school. Other kids were sort of afraid of me, as if what I did to that boy was far worse than anything that girl might have felt in response to his predations. (It hadn't been the first time he bothered her).

The other controversy I started was when I protested the school's decision to segregate the sexes and have the boys play basketball and the girls rake leaves. Freshly inspired by my early love Carla's example, I openly proclaimed myself a "feminist" decried what I called the chauvinism of the school. Neither girls (who were just as happy to not have to play basketball) nor boys supported my "political activism".

The other memorable moment from that wretched school involved the teacher for Bible study. We had to have a whole class in which we read the entire Bible from what seemed to me to be a rather perverse perspective (talk about spoiling a good book!) The teacher in question was Mrs. Perkins and after class she requested to see me. I was at first a little nervous so you can imagine my astonishment when she revealed her real purpose in seeing me after class. It was so that she could tell me about this great television show and how important it was that I see it so that I could see "Christ at work in the most unlikely of places". Above all, she spoke to me of her "love" for southern "character" actor Joe Don Baker.

Mrs. Perkins told me in a breathless exclamation "I love that man!" "He's one of our best living actors!"

Joe Don Baker, our best living actor? Mrs. Perkins was a fan of this rather dumb and short lived cop show he was in. She could barely contain her excitement, an excitement she never seemed to bring to our study of the scriptures. Her favorite part of this series was when the Baker character, a chief of detectives in New York City (!) would say to his "boys" when they cracked the case at the end of the show: "You done good. You done REAL good boys." With her flapping jowls, her pinched mouth and this suffocating polyester "jolly green giant" plaid pantsuit, Mrs. Perkins would use this phrase in class with increasing frequency, especially when someone recited a Bible passage with a certain feeling. She certainly never told me that "I done good."

Somehow though, with all of the trouble I was immersed in, (though as you can see the adults and teachers sometimes liked me), I landed in a psychologist's office. But this wasn't just any psychologist: he was a PSYCHIATRIST, which was supposedly a more "advanced" profession, one more scientific and trustworthy. Above all, what excited me about this psychiatrist was that, according to my father, he was Burt Reynold's psychiatrist (while we are on the subject of Southern actors).

The prospect of seeing Burt Reynold's shrink excited me because, when I wasn't enjoying the French cinema of Diane Kurys ( her PEPPERMINT SODA, which was a delightful coming of age film about girls that taught me much more vividly about menstruation than even Carla's pamphlets and talks) and Francois Truffaut (The "Doinel" films with Leaud) or the Italian cinema of late Fellini (especially ROMA and THE CLOWNS), I was enjoying those commercial yet odd American "Southern" comedies with Burt Reynolds like GATOR, WHITE LIGHTNING, and HOOPER. My interest in Burt Reynolds was part of my enjoyment of such "low" cinematic fare, especially comedies, more generally.

Sometimes the theater was as much of an attraction as the movie. I saw many of the Burt Reynolds movies in a dollar movie theater, a theater whose atmosphere was as close to an adult theater as a theater could get while still showing mostly GP (as it was labelled then) fare. On one occasion I witnessed a physical riot in the theater when TIDAL WAVE was shown with Lorne Greene. The film was so ineptly made, an incoherent pastiche of Japanese monster movie stock footage, nature documentary footage of storms, with intercutting of Lorne Greene looking angry and official. Eventually the "redneck" audience began throwing beer cans at the screen and demanding their money back, and yelling at the top of their lungs "R.O. Rip Off!" Worse yet, my father had joined in with the chanting as well. However, eventually my father had the good sense to pick me up and take me out of there unscathed.

But I always did enjoy the Burt Reynolds movies even though my parents disapproved of his movies. I liked the way he handled himself in situations and his general sense of humor about life. I think they disapproved of his movies mainly because they were so macho and Southern or "unintelligent", to use my mother's word. I did not feel then and I do not feel now that there is a realm of human life unsuitable to artistic form. The only question remaining was one of interest or quality which comes down in the end to STYLE. You might say that Reynolds himself had a certain style. I was always in the unenviable position of liking movies that were either too highbrow or too lowbrow. Movies that seemed to my parents a bit too extreme for comfort in some way. I might like movies with car chases and stupid jokes and movies in which people spoke in quite intricate and subtle conversations for half an hour at a time. The question ultimately is: is there something identifiable of life in it? An even better question is: do you learn something from it. Sometimes, as in the case of Burt Reynolds, pleasure in itself can be a form of knowledge.

Thus I was hopeful I might get to see Burt Reynolds in person. Would he be in the waiting room around the time I was?

It was not to be. I never got to meet Burt Reynolds. My father gave me explicit instructions not to mention Burt Reynolds because of something called "patient confidentiality". You can imagine how hard it was not to bring up Burt's name during the few sessions we had, not to ask Dr. Anderson details of Reynold's life and loves.

There was no Burt Reynolds but there was Bob Anderson my psychiatrist. The first thing I noticed about Anderson is that, like many larger than usual men, Anderson had the unfortunate habit of wearing his trousers too tight and too low, so that his gut only appeared larger than necessary and hung above his belt like a second belt. Being perceptually driven, it was hard to ignore that for some time.

When we started our sessions I also noticed that he had a free wheeling and associative style. The subject of sex and love came up and he told me that he was sure that "Jesus had sexual fantasies and masturbated".

This statement seemed unrelated to anything in the session that had previously come up. I was quite skeptical. How did Dr. Anderson know, since he wasn't there? It just couldn't be, I reasoned, that men's desires were the same in all times and places. Surely there were men who had no sexual interest whatsoever. My own parents seemed like that: they certainly appeared to have no sexual desire at all within themselves. Maybe Jesus was like my own parents. And if Jesus did have sexual fantasies what did that mean? Would Jesus have liked Catherine Deneuve, Fanny Ardant, Farrah Fawcett Majors, and Jacklyn Smith the way that I did? (I had not yet discovered Jackie Bissett).

This was a far cry from the asexual image of Jesus that had been painted for me at the Christian Junior High. I cringed at the thought of how serious Christians may have felt in response to such an assertion, were they unlucky enough to find themselves among Anderson's patients and on his couch. I didn't really care for the sterile debates over whether Jesus was God or man or both. But I knew millions did care and that the world was not the easygoing liberal place Anderson and I wanted it to be.

I remember asking him why he bothered to marry his wife since at that time marriage seemed such an enigma to me. His answer was as puzzling as his biographical assertions about Jesus. "Well I fell in love with a few different women and decided to pick one and marry her". Of course we never got into what motivated his choice since, of course, the sessions were all about me. How many? Did he fall in love with them all at the same time, as I seemed to do with Lydia and Sally, or one after the other? And what did this falling in love mean anyhow?

I liked Dr. Anderson. I appreciated his free unorthodoxy and frankness, but I saw him more as a friend than someone who could really help me. The main reason we ended is that he didn't feel I needed his services. He arranged a session with my parents present and told them that "there was nothing wrong with me. I was an okay and bright boy."

Memories Of A 1970s Childhood Part 3

If in some ways I seemed a typical boy, I suppose, for the time period, in other ways I did not in the slightest fit into the world in which I was forced to inhabit.

For as long as I have been conscious, or, at least, remember being what we would consider conscious, I have experienced this life as perceptual and sensual one rather than as a conceptual and discursive one. At times I have been convinced this has a lot to recommend it. But it appears to have its own problems because, since my intellectual and heavily cognitive work is, as Kirkegaard wold put it a retrospective affair, I have to rely upon distanced reconstruction often with the crucial help of other parties who, alas, come with their own biases and ideologies at worst, and dreams and imaginings at best. When I tell people this they are surprised because I appear an "intellectual" person who thinks a lot. But in actuality thinking and intellectual work is a disciplined affair I make purposive time for as I do practicing piano, since I don't automatically do it throughout the day, living as I do more perceptually.

Growing up as a male and in a male body doubtless has its own characteristics as my memories of lovely Carla demonstrate. In other ways I did not fit into the identity that my biology and culture provided. Nowhere was this more the case than in my extreme detachment from the world of sports of all kinds. Recently my mother told a story of how I did not understand the joy and necessity of navigating a ball. I had little memory of this since I did not conceptualize the meaning of a ball. Thus my mother’s memory put me back in touch with my perceptual relation of the same story.

Evidently, my mother took it upon herself to try to make a normal boy out of me and teach me about the joys of the ball. To put it mildly, this was most humiliating, though at the time I was too clueless to know this. She would throw the ball and I would stand and stare and not throw it back. I tried to remember what I had been thinking or not thinking. I literally did not understand that I was supposed to make a move and throw the ball back. I have little idea of how frustrating or shameful it must be for a child to not indulge in what after all is a kind of universal dance. But from my own experience I did not understand why anyone would get fun from tossing this inanimate spherical object back and forth. When my mother tells the story now she mostly laughs about it and shrugs it off, but I do know it must have been very odd indeed.

It was little wonder that many years later in one one year of a “Christian” school in which I did time in fifth or fourth grade, my PE coach had to have a special meeting with my parents suggesting that I had some serious mental problems, maybe even some kind of mental retardation, due to my lack of interest in balls. It did not help of course that this was one of those fringe schools that could not teach English or math, but had to make it Christian English and Christian math and so on. Everything had to have Christian as a prefix, and sports was no exception. Thus my instructor went on and on at this meeting about God’s plan to have boys run around and kick balls. He never exactly made it clear what was Christian about our version of baseball and basketball except to emphasize that we would have regular prayers before every team.

Even worse, in keeping with the coach and school's views concerning Christian athletics, girls in this school were required to rake leaves and were denied any athletic opportunities. And the worst part was that I conducted a one-“man” protest against the sexism of such an arrangement (thought would never have though to use that clunky neologism), and petitioned the school to allow everybody to do sports. I wanted to rake leaves, of course, with the girls, a desire which caused considerable offense to everyone at the school: girls, boys, and teachers alike. I had no allies, but then as now, I was not one to fear risking embarrassment or worse for some principle or another.

Thus, I was in trouble both for refusing to participate in sports on grounds that they were boring and pointless and wanting to "invade" the girls' raking team, which did little to secure people's comfort with my gender identity.

Often it seemed my real allies were not peers or teacher but very young adults and late teens that would drift in and out of my life as relentlessly and casually as I was required to switch school systems.

I don't think Carla was my first crush. After all I liked Lydia, and I don't think I (yet) want to tell about meeting Lydia's mom which caused considerable emotional confusion for me. I had a crush on an English teacher from second grade and went as far as asking her to marry me, but she only rebuffed me with a lengthy disquisition on adult and child's things and the differences between them. Thus, technically speaking Carla was maybe the second adult female I felt love for.

And Carla's magazines and books like OUR BODIES OURSELVES made her all the more alluring.

 I know that Carla was not the most appropriate object of my affections given that she was about 18 0r 19, but I had little concept of that since I tended to see her as a peer. I remember I was masturbating for the first time in my life a lot at this time and had very little privacy. I had to sneak in the office or plant bathroom. One time Carla walked in on me which was one of the earliest times I remember trying that activity out. I have to confess that the intensity of her appearance and the fact she slightly smiled at me before politely leaving, and above her all her beauty, with her revealing hot pants and halter top: all of this made it more intense than the memories of THREE'S COMPANY that had originally gotten me going. About a day later she showed up at my doorstep with a basket full of articles on male and female desire and basically started discussing male and female biology albeit with a feminist slant. She was the only person I had ever met that made me feel okay about my own sexual feelings. She told me that girls did the same things to themselves as boys did, but because of social "oppression" they were made to not want to share it with others even other girls. And she was the first person to talk to me about women's rights.

to be continued