Book Review: Schopenhauer's Porcupines

Intimacy and Its Dilemmas

Schopenhauer's Porcupines is a memoir about psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis is a style of talk therapy that focuses on the unconscious and how it manifests as the patterns and problems in one’s life. It is renowned in pop culture for lying on the couch and talking freely about anything that comes to mind.

It once dominated the mental health field. In the 1960’s for example, the department heads of all the prestigious “who’s who” academic centers (Case Western, University of Pittsburgh, UC San Francisco, Johns Hopkins University, UPenn, Columbia, Stanford, Harvard, Yale, etc.) were analysts¹². Over the years, though, things changed. Psychopharmacology dawned, and with it came Prozac (fluoxetine) and direct-to-consumer advertising. The field of psychology began trending towards standardization of treatment protocols and diagnostics to simplify research; if there aren’t randomized controlled trials, then it doesn’t exist. Healthcare reimbursement structures were consolidated, and their bean counters were eager to adopt shorter-sighted, ‘cost-cutting, brief, solutions-based therapies.’ Psychoanalysis also shot its own foot at the time. It had a strong emphasis on topics outside the Overton window (dreams, sex, and an odd fixation on unconscious desires to kill your parent). It became jargon-laden with cryptic terms like ‘penis envy’, ‘internal sensory excitation’, ‘Laius complex’, ‘the subject-supposed-to-know’, etc. Access to the field was subject to unnecessary gatekeeping. It’s not too surprising this variant fell out of favor. All of the above led to therapies of depth and insight (such as psychoanalysis) becoming second-rate modalities.³ Within one lifetime, it went from front and center to archaic, dated, and only worthy of passing mentions in psychology textbooks.

It is in this fading glow of a once large bonfire that Luepnitz’s Schopenhauer's Porcupines is written. Times have changed, and the field of psychoanalytic thought with it. What Schopenhauer's Porcupines focuses on is mostly baby (as opposed to bath water). I imagine that the form of psychoanalysis that Luepnitz would advocate for would be in line with modern psychoanalytic theory and its relatively less antiquated and straightforward core principles:⁴

1. Mental life exists on two levels: consciousness and the unconscious. The latter often influences the former. Perhaps most importantly, these levels are often not in agreement; thus, people (and consequently a person’s relationships with others) should be expected to contain contradictory feelings. People are inherently contradicting beings.

2. We can access the unconscious indirectly. Dreams and ‘Freudian slips’ are examples of the unconscious bubbling to the surface. However, there is still a large emphasis on the relationship between the therapist and the patient. This relationship acts as a mini-world that mirrors how the patient interacts with the world. We do not meet other people as much as we construct them. Consequently, our interactions with others (through the jargony psychoanalytic term ‘transference’) act as a window into the world the patient is concurrently creating and living in.

3. These unconscious drivers of inner mental life are not random noise- quite the opposite. They are the learned schemas and social scripts that were learned as you discovered the world. To quote Twitter’s favorite psychoanalyst, Jonathan Shedler, “We learn, for example, what to expect of others, how to behave in relationships, how to elicit caring and attention, how to act when someone is angry with us, how to express ourselves when we are angry, how to make people proud of us, what it feels like to succeed, what it feels like to fail, what it means to love, and on and on. We continue to apply these templates or scripts to new situations as we proceed through life, often when they no longer apply. We view the present through the lens of past experience—and therefore tend to repeat and recreate aspects of the past.”5 In this view, it is not that one is simply ‘anxious’ or depressed’. It is not happening to them. Instead, they have sticky patterns of thinking and feeling that are woven into the very ‘I’ that is presenting with the problem. These patterns are often so deeply woven and fundamental to the way we act/react that their unconscious influence is subtle - how could it be otherwise? Of course, these types of things are not amenable to ‘quick fixes’ with a dozen encounters with a theaprist. After all, why would the sense of self and its relationship to others be anything but stable and difficult to change?

Specifically, Schopenhauer's Porcupines is a telling of five different patient stories from the author’s psychodynamically informed career. The examples cover people from very different backgrounds and very different ‘problems’. There’s 1) a stereotypical heterosexual couple, 2) an oddly studious thirteen-year-old orthodox Jewish girl with an abrupt decline in medical health, 3) a lonesome womanizer going through a midlife crisis, 4) a Jamaican immigrant who is unfulfilled after achieving her dream academic career, and 5) a homeless woman with a history of rape, abuse, and suicides in the family who is characterized as having ‘borderline character pathology’.⁵ Their problems are superficially very different, but all share a common theme: the timeless struggle of being intimate and open with others, as demonstrated in Philosopher Schopenour’s porcupine parable.

A troop of porcupines is milling about on a cold winter’s day. In order to keep from freezing, the animals move closer together. Just as they are close enough to huddle, however, they start to poke each other with their quills. In order to stop the pain, they spread out, lose the advantage of commingling, and again begin to shiver. This sends them back in search of each other, and the cycle repeats as they struggle to find a comfortable distance between entanglement and freezing….

As the reader progresses, they are brought along as the patient’s dilemmas of human desire are unraveled in ‘real' time’. Naturally, the ambiguity and uncertainty of actual practice are somewhat lost in translation because of the forced squashing of years of dyadic experience to mere pages. It’s impossible to capture fully, for example in the case of patient (5), the progress and setbacks of fifteen years of therapy in a single chapter. The inevitable masking of the slow grind of progress probably gives the reader a false impression of what the normal, seemingly futile sessions look like. It does make me wonder, how much progress the average patient makes in a psychodynamically informed approach. And also (although I think it’s a misguided and unfair question), how do we know the psychodynamically informed therapy actually made the difference, not just having any therapist for fifteen years in addition to the slow change of life? I’m hardly who I was 15 years ago, and I don’t have a psychodynamically informed therapist! For every patient that managed to keep coming for month after month, year after year, how many dropped out due to financial, time, and efficacy constraints? Picking the top five hits of a long career paints a different picture than actual practice. Ultimately, while Luepnitzs does a wonderful job at showing how things can (and do!) go right with this type of therapy, I imagine it is not a realistic demonstration of actual practice. In her defense, how could it ever be?

Aside from this technical difficulty, which Lupenitz navigated as well as anyone could, all the references to dream analysis thoroughly underwhelmed me.

Patient’s (Daphne) dream:

I am at a dentist’s office and find out I need two root canals. I had been eating a sandwich. The hygienist says, “It’s a good thing it happened here, or you would have swallowed the filling.” They pulled it out of my mouth, and I wondered.

Lupentiz commentary:

Were Daphne working with me in individual therapy, I would have asked her to tell me her associations to each element of the dream. I would have said, for example, “Tell me about the dentist’s office, about root canals, about two root canals, about the hygienist, about the sandwich,” and so on. This could have led us in any number of directions, all pertaining to Daphne as an individual and to the nature of her transference to me. I may or may not have pointed out that the hygienist/therapist in the dream could be a mother figure. For indeed, the “void” that created the panic happened just after her mother-in-law’s stroke. This surely re-evoked grief over her own mother’s death. Perhaps Daphne’s desire was for mothering. In caring for babies, she might enjoy vicariously the pleasures of being mothered.

It all seems like non-falsifiable woo-woo to me. And I love dreams - I’ve written about them. I’ve written down my dreams as I learned to lucid dream. But the dream interpretation endeavor ultimately seems more like a self-constructed Rorschach test. A normal ‘window into the unconscious’, not some special revolutionary one. If that’s their use, then fine. I’ll run with it.

But this type of therapy fell out of favor, in part, because of extravagant interpretations. If we accidentally devolve into making everything about being in love with our opposite-sex parent again- this is a ripe culprit. Dreams, like convictions, should be innocent until proven guilty with clear and convicting evidence. If these were the best examples of dream analysis available… I’m disappointed and remain skeptical.

Despite the reservations above, I liked the book. Schopenhauer's Porcupinesis well written. Throughout, Luepnitz sprinkles in related quotes and tidbits of theoretical information. You don’t need formal training to appreciate how some of the technical elements of psychotherapy (transference, boundaries, etc.) manifest in real-life practice. As someone familiar with these topics, I still found the examples clever and instructive. I would read a whole book of her tidbits alone!

…fantasies can be explored, as they inevitably say more about the imaginer than the imagined. What would incline a patient to think of a therapist as “cheating,” or gay, or married? … I suggested that Pearl make a habit of stating her questions about me regardless of their akwardness - with the understanding that the questions need not be answered. The patient’s fantasies are always more instructive than the facts.

…Obsessions are rarely about their ostensible object. An obsession with germs or food usually turns out to be not about good health but about the desire to seize control and the terror of losing it.

Everyone who seeks therapy brings a desire for and a resistance to change–a yes and a no... As much as we come to therapy in the hopes of changing, so do we also want to remain the same.

Lupentiz is clearly well-read and writes both wit and clarity. I would expect nothing less of someone who apparently hosted a local psychoanalysis reading group in her apartment for five years, holds professorship roles, and has multiple published books. Because of her expertise, she references and draws from notable historical psychoanalysts (Winnicott, Lacan, and many others I undeservingly have forgotten) to inform and illuminate her thought process. The narrative comes off as a synthesis of wisdom from multiple ideas and people, which I appreciate.

For Lacan, desire is what simultaneously defines us as human subjects and what prevents us from ever being whole or complete. To desire something, after all, is to lack something.

Winnicott compares the leaving of the “good-enough” therapist to the leaving behind of the transitional object or blanket. Once so essential to psychic safety, the blanket becomes irrelevant. It is not destroyed or eaten but, as Winnicott says, simply set aside. . . .

[Schopenour] saw unhappiness as inexorably part of our design. The existence of what he termed “will” was a permanent source of discomfort, meaning that there simply is no life without suffering. Schopenhauer’s notion of will was not a matter of personal agency–“what I want”–but almost the opposite: a blind striving that characterizes all living things.

The following quote didn’t have a snug place in this review, but I liked it so much I’m throwing it in here. It is a seventeen-word summary of one of my favorite movies: The Great Beauty (La Grande Bellezza).

The only disaster in life would be to find yourself stuck with someone you didn’t really love.

---

So, are we all doomed porcupines?

Lupenitz concludes that, yes, we are all porcupines. But no, we are not doomed.

Psychotherapy cannot make us whole…but it can help turn egregious neurotic misery into the porcupine dilemmas of everyday life. [My patients may not have solved all their problems, but they] “cultivated that elusive ‘internal warmth,’ allowing [them] both to love and to stand apart. To choose solitude freely, to love and engage fully–both are capacities to be desired. Herein lies the work of the talking cure.’

The goal of psychoanalytic therapy⁶ is to gain freedom from the repeated, self-defeating patterns that drive one’s life.⁷

Different analogies come to mind. The available state-spaces of your inner mental life can be expanded, despite it inevitably always being a finite space. Or, the pendulum of intimacy/isolation will never stop swinging, but we can learn to make it swing less erratically, come to understand why it swings when it swings, and ultimately learn to stand more comfortably on either arc of its swing.

I find this conclusion of the undoomed-porcupine-variety kind of sappy. It's reminiscent of the Buddhist concept of enlightenment in the sense that it's a goal worth pursuing but not a goal that is actually obtained. Nonetheless, once you recognize the porcupine behavior in your life and in the people around you, it's hard to unsee. With that change in perspective comes a sense of clarity at times that before just felt like chaos.⁸

Unlike my previous book review on Time Management for Mortals, I wouldn’t recommend this to everyone. In fact, I’m not sure I would recommend it to colleagues in the mental health field unanimously. But, I am naturally drawn towards the blend of psychoanalytic theory, philosophy, and clinical practice Luepnitz provides. I am glad its content has been introduced to my mind; I would encourage my past self to read it at some point but in no rush. If these topics already interest you, then put Schopenhauer's Porcupines on your to-read list, but under all the items that you can’t resist reading first.

1. The formal term for a therapist trained in psychoanalysis. The analyst meets with the analysand (one being analyzed) for therapy.

2. My unfact checked source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freud-fluoxetine/201912/the-fall-psychoanalysis-in-american-psychiatry

3. In todays positive feedback loop (research funding → more ‘evidenced based practice’ data → standardized treatment protocols → influences insurance reimbursement decisions → more commonly used in clinical practice → more research → more ‘evidece based practice’ data → …) second rate approaches might as well not exsist at all.

4. These are my interpretation of the principles. There are probably better, more concise versions. I’m out here figuring it out like the rest of us

5. PhDs have been written, formulated, and drawn the blurred lines around ‘Borderline Personality Disorder.’ But I’ll just link to the Wikipedia page for now.

6. Therapy in general? I'm sure this would spark a debate though

7. As Carl Jung is quoted: Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

8. I originally included the following sentence to conclude the paragraph: “On the brightside, you could maybe develop this insight yourself by reading this book instead of doing fifteen years of therapy.”

But I thought it was too sassy, and I was morally concerned that I would be contributing to the unfair systemic bias against this type of therapy. So instead of deleting it, I just demoted it to a footnote.