Reflections on Flat Mountain

Publisher: Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Volume 15, Issue 2 | Author: Anthony Bass, Ph.D. | Genre: Non-Fiction | Publication Date: July 3, 2008 | Publication Type: Print, Online Journal | Content Type: Essay

Psychoanalytic Dialogues 15 (2): 159-168, 2005

Reflections on Flat Mountain

Anthony Bass, Ph.D.

This is a reflection on the story which was told by Nadia Ghent at the funeral service for her father, Emmanuel Ghent, on April 7, 2003, New York City.

Nadia Ghent painted a stunningly vivid portrait of her father Emmanuel when, at his funeral service last April, she told the story of their day together on Flat Mountain. The story captured a moment in Nadia’s life with her father that distilled into a single enduring image much of what those of us who knew Mannie recognized as essential to his nature.

It is a story of what began as an ordinary summer outing, likely one of countless similar excursions that blend together in memory, comprising the endless summers of childhood. But along the way, this particular journey veered off the familiar route toward a different destination, bypassing the standard landmarks. The experience retains, even so many decades later, a dreamlike sense of wonder, mystery, and poignancy generated, I suspect, in that realm of experience that is a complex blend of objective reality and private, subjective experience. It is that personal dimension that Winnicott, one of Emmanuel’s most significant forebears, discovered and constructed, referring to it as “transitional experience.” It was a day in which a certain illusion, a loving and playful sleight of hand made possible by Mannie’s gentle, creative, unobstrusive responsiveness to Nadia’s need, became to point of departure for an experience that, paradoxically perhaps, contained lasting truths that would sponsor solace and wisdom to his daughter and the rest of us so many years later.

If there were indeed a paradox to be found in the riddle of how the illusion of Flat Mountain conjured such enchantment, bringing the little girl on the cusp of a fever to surrender so perfectly to the delights of the late-day sun and the loving care of her parents, that paradox would not have troubled Mannie in the least. No stranger to the wondrous potentials that riddles hold, Mannie was a connoisseur of paradox and illusion. His Flat Mountain was a perfect oxymoron, rooted in a deep personal grasp of and intimate familiarity with the potential for. creative living. His own extraordinary creative gifts were prodigious and found ample if astonishing expression in his roles as a psychoanalytic practitioner, teacher, and theoretician; physician; writer; composer; inventor; computer scientist; pioneer of computer-synthesized music; student and teacher of Buddhist meditation; and parent.

In his inspiring and groundbreaking psychoanalytic papers “Credo” (1989), “Masochism, Submission, Surrender” (1990), and “Paradox and Process” (1992), Mannie sought to explore realms of experience enriched by paradox and illusion as sources of creative living as well as emotional growth, both acknowledging and extending Winnicott’s radical contributions to fostering a creative, vital psychoanalysis. In “Paradox and Process,” Mannie observed that by “introducing paradox into the dry sobriety of psychoanalysis, Winnicott made room for spontaneity, ambiguity, illusion and creativity as features that are essential to real living” (p. 136). Mannie further reflected on something of the lesson that we take from Flat Mountain when he observed how “often it happens that the route to truth is through the intensity of illusion” (p. 136). And, relating the observation to the psychoanalytic process itself, he asked, rhetorically, “Is not analysis a veritable playpen for transference and countertransference, and what are these if not vehicles for finding truth by knocking on the walls of illusion?” (p. 139).

We see in Nadia’s tale that what began as a little girl’s day trip to the country in search of a strange, exciting (maybe even a little scary) place called Bear Mountain turned—with the help of a late start, the discomfort of an incipient fever, and the dysphoria of early-stage chicken pox—into an experience that had all the earmarks of something far less propitious. We probably all know something abut days like these, retain some residue in our bones of those impossibly long car rides when we were small, doing our best to control our despair about the discomfort of such journeys without end. And if we have survived these travails to bear and raise children of our own, we may suffer even more distinct recollections of that sinking sense of helplessness and frustration as things seem to be going from bad to worse on an adventure with our children that was conceived with good, loving, and hopeful intentions, but which in the harsh light of day falls far short of the mark, to everyone’s chagrin.

Nadia’s recollection of Flat Mountain is not a story about a day marred by frustrations or the vagaries of ordinary childhood misery and disappointment. Rather, like many of his Zen stories with which Mannie spiced his teaching and his papers, integrating two of his passions, Nadia’s story is in part about personal transformation, and the central role played by paradox and illusion. It is about the contributions of spontaneity, ambiguity, and responsiveness to need in the transformation of potentially disruptive experience toward healthy development and growth. In a sense, it is a kind of touchstone of Mannie’s spirit.

Nadia noted that it took many and whining years to figure out that Flat Mountain “wasn’t a real place at all, that it was only a stop made necessary by a hot, tired, cranky and whining four-year-old.” The stop had indeed been necessary, and it was just Mannie’s recognition of that necessity, and his lovingly playful and attuned response to Nadia’s need, that made the day one that she would carry with her forever. And now we can all hold it as a perfect reflection of something that we knew about Mannie, but perhaps had not thought in so many words. Flat Mountain was, after all (at least in one sense), “just a small patch of grass” along the parkway. But Mannie and Nadia had found in it a route to an alternate and sustaining reality.

The story of Flat Mountain is a remarkable testament to the creative way Mannie lived his life from moment to moment, whether on a day trip with his family or in a psychoanalytic session with a patient, reflecting the values and understandings consistent with the creative leaps that enlivened his musical compositions and fueled his computer inventions. Had Nadia discovered this place along the highway with Mannie’s help, or did she create it? Winnicott understood, in his landmark concept of transitional experience, that such creative leaps are marked by their ability to sustain a quality of both creation and discovery at once. A crucial ingredient in making this kind of leap possible is that the question never be called. A good-enough parent, Winnicott (1955) noted, knows not to ask the child whether the transitional object is something he or she found or something imaginatively created. “Of the transitional object it can be said that it is a matter of agreement between us and the baby that we will never ask the question: ‘Did you conceive of this or was it presented to you from without?...The question is not to be formulated” (p. 95). It took Nadia until she was well into adulthood to figure out that Flat Mountain wasn’t a real place at all, because Mannie would never question her childhood experience as she told the story over and over again. Nadia needed a perfect place to stop right then and there. Bear Mountain many miles later, as much as it was the real destination, would not have done at all. Mannie understood the reality of Flat Mountain implicitly, and in that sense, their day’s sojourn on its nonexistent summit was both illusory and as real as can be.