The Soul of Care
A conversation with Dr. Arthur Kleinman about care in both medical and personal contexts. Listen today at 2 pm or anytime at our website.
Dr. Arthur Kleinman, psychiatrist and anthropologist at Harvard, is the author of 40 books, including, most recently, The Soul of Care, which is about lessons he learned while caring for his wife during her struggle with Alzheimer’s disease. It’s clear on our show that Kleinman’s a soulful doctor, concerned with moral exploration of experience. He’s a medical thinker in the tradition of William James, a believer in the necessity of first-person experience for advancing our understanding, often in the most profound ways:
It was only when we get to my shattering remaking experience of caring for my wife that I realized I was just touching the experience of others and not really getting to its core. And that’s why I use the term soul.
Kleinman describes a range of recognitions and realizations he’s come to in his work and in his experience of care-giving, especially recognition of the basic fact “that we’re different from each other.”
Your inner life and my inner life—if we could if we could expose them, get at them—would teach us that there are different things at stake even for people who look on the surface pretty similar.
Read: Pragmatism
Caring for somebody offers so much, in Kleinman’s view, because it’s such an immediate and intense experience of connection across vast differences. William James articulated similar meanings and uses of experience as opposed to classroom-philosophy in, among other texts, Pragmatism:
The world of concrete personal experiences to which the street belongs is multitudinous beyond imagination, tangled, muddy, painful and perplexed. The world to which your philosophy-professor introduces you is simple, clean and noble. The contradictions of real life are absent from it. Its architecture is classic. Principles of reason trace its outlines, logical necessities cement its parts. Purity and dignity are what it most expresses. It is a kind of marble temple shining on a hill.
Watch: Good Time
We’re taught that all stories are about conflict, but it’s true that they’re just as often about care. Think of almost any novel or film. In basically every case, you could frame that novel’s/that film’s story around some kind of care. See, for instance, the film Good Time, newly on Netflix, which is 1) absolutely a story of conflict, fear, heists, and chases AND 2) a story of a Queens desperado caring—inadequately, unsuccessfully, often selfishly—for his brother.
Boston University’s own Safdie brothers made probably the best movie of 2019, Uncut Gems, and Good Time set them down the path toward that Diamond District thriller. It’s nearly as adrenalized as Uncut Gems, but without the newer film’s glee.
Good Time, instead, is about desperation rerouting care. Robert Pattinson plays a bank-robber looking after both himself and his disabled brother (played by Benny Safdie). Pattinson’s character is a terrible sibling—capable of stunningly bad decisions; manipulative and immoral; self-absorbed—yet, to some extent, he’s apparently really concerned for his brother. He seems never to clarify for himself the need for care above his other (often criminal) concerns. Chaos ensues.
Listen: The Curbsiders
What do doctors talk about with each other? This is unclear, but The Curbsiders podcast at least lets you hear what doctors talk about with each other when they’re on a podcast. The focus is on internal medicine, which sounds like an especially adventurous pursuit, covering a Borgesian cascade of problems. Care and catastrophe, once again entwined.
Get Reading: The Plot Against America
David Simon’s HBO series starring Winona Ryder, Zoe Kazan, and John Turturro premieres March 16th. Get the book by Philip Roth and get reading this grim and relevant counter history, an eerie novel of hate’s amplification in American politics. It’s about what might have happened had the Nazi-sympathizing anti-interventionist mega-celebrity, Charles Lindbergh—spokesman of the America First Committee—won the presidency around the start of World War II. The narrator tells us that Lindbergh’s
nomination by the Republicans to run against Roosevelt in 1940 assaulted, as nothing ever had before, that huge endowment of personal security that I had taken for granted as an American child of American parents in an American school in an American city in an America at peace with the world.
We’re planning to have conversations about the show and the novel, so stay tuned, and in the meantime listen to our archived conversation between Philip Roth and Christopher Lydon.
Chris and Jeff Sharlet at CitySpace Tomorrow Night
Boston fans: come see Chris live with the author Jeff Sharlet, who you might have heard on our recent New Hampshire show. The event is at WBUR’s CitySpace (890 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston) at 6:30 PM on February 24th.
Next Week: What’s So Scary About Bernie Sanders?
We caught up with some Sanders supporters at yesterday’s march and Rally in Boston. Is he stoppable? Who would you like to hear from?
This Week’s Ephemeral Library
A videogame lets you make videogames. On the similarities between Bloomberg and Trump. Life in a plague year. It’s biblical: Locust Swarms in Kenya. A primer on the De-Growth movement. Joe O’Neill on How Milwaukee Could Decide the Next President.
Have a great week folks.
The OS Caregivers
