Category: Raising Children

WHY HATE FRANK SINATRA? By Art Smukler, author & psychiatrist

by artsmuklermd, posted in Psychiatry, Raising Children, Self Examination, World events, a psychological view, Writing

I just finished reading an article, Remembering Michael Kelly, by Bret Stephens, a journalist for the Wall Street Journal. Michael Kelly was a grown-up version of Holden Caulfield, a man who despised phonies, but unlike Holden, he was courageous enough to actually do something about it.

While embedded with the troops outside of Baghdad, he wrote, “To march against the war is not to give peace a chance. It is to give tyranny a chance.” Kelly died in Iraq, in 2003, a courageous man backing up his words with his actions.

When Frank Sinatra died in 1998, everyone mourned Old Blue Eyes except Michael Kelly. Kelly hated Frank because he had invented Cool and Cool had replaced Smart. “Cool said the old values were for suckers… Cool didn’t go to war; Saps went to war, and anyway, cool had no beliefs he was willing to die for. Cool never, ever, got into a fight it might lose; cool had friends who could take care of that sort of thing.”

What was Smart? “Smart was Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca: He possessed an outward cynicism, but at his core he is a square… He is willing to die for his beliefs, and his beliefs are, although he takes pains to hide it, old-fashioned. He believes in truth, justice, the American way and love… Where there is a war, he goes to it.”

Psychiatry at its core is a medical specialty that values discovering the underlying truth and freeing a person from the bondage of hidden secrets. The cool quick fix of “just take a Xanax and chill” is not what most psychiatrists believe. The work of untangling the hidden past, in the end can free us to think and make decisions based on a reasoned approach to truth rather than the way we were programmed by our parents and society. I guess Michael Kelly and psychiatry have a lot in common. Not that I don’t appreciate Frank Sinatra’s contribution, I do, but I also appreciate the way an honest man thinks.

So, as I listen to Frankie croon, My Way, I think about wearing my old Armani sports jacket and decide instead to put on a pair of jeans and a battered leather jacket. Is that cool or smart? Maybe it just doesn’t matter. Maybe what’s really important is to just be myself. We’re all works-in-progress and to develop new approaches to life and keep learning is what’s important. It’s what’s important in my office and what’s important out of the office. I toast all free thinkers who aren’t afraid to learn and apply what they’ve learned, even though it may not be PC.

Special thanks to Dr. Bernard Feldman, definitely a free thinker, who gave me a copy of Bret Stephens’ article.

Art Smukler MD is the author of Skin Dance, a mystery, Chasing Backwards, a psychological murder mystery, The Man with a Microphone in his Ear, and the blog, Inside the Mind of a Psychiatrist.

BACK STORY — THE ENGINE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS, By Art Smukler, author & psychiatrist

by artsmuklermd, posted in Childhood Trauma, Psychiatry, Raising Children, Self Examination, Writing

Remember how tasty and comforting it was to be breast fed? How you fought and yelled when you had to stop pooping in your diaper and had to use the potty?

You don’t remember?

No worries.

99.99 percent of us have no clue as to what happened before age 5. What’s left of that distant past are only shadows and vague innuendoes (psychiatrists call them screen memories), but because we’re walking the streets in our big boy pants, we can assume that toilet training was a rousing success. Also, as a well deserved aside, the male obsession with breasts is also connected with those early not-remembered experiences.

What if, like Joe Belmont, in Chasing Backwards, you had to spend a year in a pediatric hospital, or like Tom Wingo, in Prince of Tides, your father’s brutal behavior haunted you on a daily basis or like Henry Skrimshander, in The Art of Fielding, your father’s critical perfectionism almost ruined you? And what if all those traumatic experiences were only vaguely remembered or not remembered at all?

Most of us weren’t extraordinarily traumatized, but just average kids trying to survive a strange and unfamiliar world. But since all parents are imperfect, every one of us has been to some degree wounded.

Our forgotten past, the Back Story that occurred before we could think clearly, is often the real story. It is the engine that gives us passion or takes our passion away. It is the engine that drives writers to write, physicians to heal, teachers to teach, mechanics to fix and on and on and on.

Art Smukler MD is the author of Skin Dance, a mystery, Chasing Backwards, a psychological murder mystery, The Man with a Microphone in his Ear, and the blog, Inside the Mind of a Psychiatrist.