Psychiatry & Psychotherapy Podcast - East of Eden Reflective Function Collapse: Psychodynamic Therapy, Steinbeck, and How to Heal the Characters

Episode Date: August 28, 2026

In this episode, Dr. David Puder and his psychodynamic psychotherapy training cohort apply reflective function (RF) and mentalization concepts to John Steinbeck's masterpiece East of Eden. They examine how Reflective Function collapses under shame, rejection, threat, and attachment arousal across key characters. The discussion highlights that true personality health is not the absence of aggression, dependency, or guilt but the growing capacity to recognize conflicting self-parts, stay in contact with reality, and remain related to imperfect people. Link to blog Link to YouTube video

All right, welcome back to the podcast. I am joined with a cohort group that went through my psychotherapy, psychodynamic psychotherapy training. And we are going to be talking about East of Eden. It is a book by John Steinbeck. Tons of spoilers. If you haven't read it, there may be some wisdom you can still gain from this episode. We're going to be putting reflective function in action. Specifically, I was thinking about this book in terms of reflective function collapses, collapses of the ability to see reality, to see truth in the face of rejection, shame, threatened attachment. We're going to be looking at how this kind of perspective taking disappears in the midst of shame, fear, rejection, attachment, arousal. A lot of what we see in ourselves, and our patience, we're going to be talking about how good

reflective function is improved in different characters through some of the secret heroes of the book. We're going to be talking about this kind of like merging together of all good, all bad, contradictory parts of ourself with a key theme that may be illuminated that personality, health is not the disappearance of aggression, dependency, narcissism, withdrawal, guilt, or control, it is the growing ability to recognize conflicting parts of the self, using a wider array of defenses, remain in contact with reality, and stay related to people who cannot be made perfect. So, Littal, would you like to start? Yeah, we're going to go kind of character by character and go through these points data mentioned.

I get to start with the unequivocal one, the ultimate bad guy in this story. Her name is Kathy. I'm going to use Steinbeck's words as we introduced her. So he says, I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents. Some you can see the shaping and horrible with huge heads or tiny bodies. Some are born with no arms, no legs,

some with three arms, some with tails or mouths in odd places. They are accidents in no one's fault, as used to be thought. Once they were considered the visible punishments for concealed sins, and just as there are physical monsters, can they're not the mental or psychic monsters born? The face and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or mouth-formed egg can produce physical monsters,

may not the same process produce a mild-formed soul. monsters are variations from the accepted normal to a greater or less degree as a child may be born without an arm so one may be born without kindness or the potential for conscience and so in this book where there's so much choice between good and bad and so much temptation Steinbeck allows us this one character without even the potential for kindness she is a monster. So much suffering is going to come at her hands.

Some of it calculated and malicious. Some of it secondary to people's difficulty in coping with rejection or because of their vulnerabilities. But he tells us that she's a monster right from the start. And we have to thinking about monsters. Monsters have powers and strengths that come from somewhere, right? So Frankenstein was very strong. Dracula had the psychic pulls over people.

He was immortal. But Kathy, Kathy's strength was being very patient and being very beautiful early in the novel. And Steinbeck repeatedly tells us what a beautiful child she is and what a beautiful adolescent. And it's really there in the story. And she also understands attraction. She understands people's sexual desires that they want something from her and that with sexual desire comes a lot of shame, a lot of obsessionality, a lot of guilt, a lot of hope. And she being the bad guy, is able to use this to manipulate attachments, to explore relationships, to seduce other people. And so I'm saying this and kind of preparing for this, I was going over the old female psychopathy episode, which I found hard to listen to at the time because I was like, oh, man, the female psychopaths underneath are narcissistic, not of histrionic or borderline. And I was like, okay, I want my female heroes to be just as just and just as powerful and my female villains to be just as evil as the bad guys.

So it was something to reconcile. And through Kathy, I'm able to reconcile because she really does use seduction as a weapon. And so one of her kind of like first real conflicts is with the probably biggest male psychopath of the book. This guy is like three times her age. He runs brothels. He's like a brothel entrepreneur.

He basically like has franchise. That's kind of what I want to say. He has these groups of women that he rotates from sight to site to site, like calculating how long before STDs will surface to make sure the women are out of town so the men don't get upset. He's a male psychopath. He can use strength, so he's happy to beat these women into oblivion. He's happy to kick them to the streets. Like, this is a cold, a callous man.

But when he comes across, Kathy as a late adolescent, we hear this line from Steinbeck. He began and fell right into the oldest conviction in the world that the girl you're in love with can't possibly be anything but honest and true. Like hear that, right? The girl you're in love with can't possibly be anything but honest and true. So everything goes out the window. She just tells one little lie about, I'm not going to lie,

that she's scared and she's running away. She's running away from a double murder. But all he sees is this beautiful damsel in distress, and this hardened man kind of is reduced to a love-struck adolescent. He gives her anything she wants, an apartment, jewels, money, and she just keeps him off tilt her, just never feeling, making sure he never feels that he's enough. And so we see the power of just,

letting him fall into his idealized version of her. And this really goes on for a couple of years, I believe, before he figures her out. And he beats her and attempting and actually tries to kill her. He doesn't succeed. But that's our introduction, right? She is so powerful and just so incredibly seductive. So how did this happen, right?

How did a man so powerful? like lose all control. And I want to put a little bit of studies in here that I thought were pretty interesting. I don't know if you guys are familiar with Edward Thorndykes, a constant error in psychological ratings from 1920. Anyone hear of that one?

So he had military officers rate enlisted men on categories of character, leadership, intelligence, and physique. And he thought, intelligence should impact leadership and maybe some other personality qualities. But he found that

also physique, which he thought would be an independent variable, really played into things. So the takeaway is that we kind of just like make an impression of who someone is. And if they seem strong, if they seem like they have really good hygiene, if they're really well put

together, we can just substitute their appearance for the rest of them, right? Like, heuristics, biases, they're really real and bad. This is like the earliest study I could find about it. And I found another one from 1972,

Dion. What is beautiful is good. So they had participants look at pictures previously rated of both men and women, rated as unattractive, attractive, normal and attractive, average and attractive. And they were asked to,

on personality traits, like, how trustworthy they were, like, would they be a good partner? Are they intelligent? Are they socially skilled? And there was actually a linear effect from unattractive to average to attractive that the biases existed. So if you were beautiful, all these other things were true about you as well. And so I think that is a big piece of what happened. to this male psychopath when he comes across caffeine. And what happens to other characters who come across her? And interestingly, I think that is where Steinbeck's pain comes from his second wife, who he had an affair with, from his first wife,

and kind of she was described in a biography I read as very beautiful, very attractive. I believe it. charismatic. So as I said, she's beat up, left for dead, and she crawled to the door of our protagonist, Adam, that I think Jeanette will be discussing shortly. But the conversation before the doors opened to her is Adam sitting with his brother, Charles. And Charles is sharing how a beautiful school teacher had come into town, and the world was upended. Like, men who had not been going to church, we're now flooding. Like, people couldn't. not get into the door. And this was so disruptive, like, the women couldn't tolerate it.

So they literally chased this school teacher out of town, simply for being beautiful. So Steinbeck knows about beauty. He's priming the readers for her to be introduced to our hero with this little story. And so she comes nearly beaten. So kind of all the desire to rest who comes in. And as we learn more about Adam, like it will make more sense. So Adam is hit with this beautiful woman who's super vulnerable and needs a lot of help. And he is like head over heels in love with her, basically. But I don't think you could ever explain what he loved about her. And when other characters asking San Hamilton, like, he can't really consider it, right?

If we are about to get married or in a serious relationship or friends are like, oh, what's great about this guy? or what's great about this girl? Like, are they funny? Are they kind? Or they can't do it. Like, Adam doesn't, he can't see her. He doesn't even fry, really.

So they spend a year together. The majority of that year is secondary to her pregnancy. And she tells them she's going to leave. And she leaves. He really doesn't want her to go, so much so he tries to lock her in a room. and she responds by shooting in the arm and leaves. And then we had 12 more years of her kind of pursuing evil tasks.

She commits another murder. She takes over a brothel. She really uses the worst of people's sexual desires against it in that setting. And then we have Adam returning after 12 years, which is something that we hope for this whole book, right? We want Adam to be free. And I'm going to let Jeanette go into details about it. I'm going to kind of share the, if she wants to do, the Kathy Dits that really stuck out to me.

As Adam is realizing that he's no longer bound to his, like, obsessional love, Steinbeck has us go piece by piece through Kathy's body, and like how her shoulders have attened up during this period, how there now creases on her neck. how her ankles are no longer slim, her belly is protruding, her hands have aged. And I think it's true. And if we're thinking about Steinbeck as the man, like really kind of budding goat of his wife, but probably is a piece of it that is being able to do the work and move forward.

And I think that's helped by this power of beauty being taken away from Kathy, who's known as Kate at this point in time. And she really does lose a lot of power by this point in the book. The other point that was really interesting in there is Steinbeck revisits his monster. He said, when I said Kathy was a monster, it seemed to me that it was so.

I'll have bent close with a glass over the small print of her and re-read the footnotes. And I wonder if it was true. The trouble is that, since we cannot know what she wanted. We will never know whether or not she got it. I built the image in my mind

of Kathy, sitting quietly waiting for her pregnancy to be over. Living on a farm she'd not like with a man she did not love. So Steinbeck is not giving her the potential for good, but he's giving her the potential to be suffering. And if there's something

Kathy suffers from, it's from feeling trapped. And the other thing she says right here is what I was half grown, I made a man kill himself. He pretended to be good, too. And all he wanted was to go with, who died with me, a little girl.

So there's this potential for suffering that existed when she was with Adam, but then we're going back to this potential for suffering that she experienced as a little girl when people saw her for her beauty and became obsessed with her and wanted sexual relationships with her. So she's able to see the bad, she's able to see the negative things people want out of her. The one thing she can never see is the good people tried to give her.

And that was what a lot of what Adams and tents were were actually pretty good. And so I'm tying this back to the Nick Williams and the histrionic personality and the old podcast. And like, how did this happen? How can this all come together? And I'm going to take a piece out of the diagnosis book. And McWilliams is discussing a case with a college student who seduces her professors, but she really doesn't want to be with them. So what is going on?

So she continues to see males as strong and exciting. And females, herself included as weak and insignificant, because she regards powers inherently a male attribute. She looks up to men, but she also, unconsciously for the most part, hates and envies them. She tries to increase her sense of adequacy and self-esteem by attaching to males. And she also subtly punishes them for their assumed superiority. She uses her sexuality, the one kind of power she feels for gender affords, along with idealization and feminine wiles, the strategies of the subjectively weak.

in order to access male strength. Because she uses sex defensively rather than expressively, and because she fears men and their abuses of power, she does not fully enjoy sexual intimacy. It's not a one-to-one with Kate, Kathy, by any stretch of the imagination.

But we can see someone who is only seeing the negative in the world, someone who is feeling trapped, someone who is kind of born without conscience, And her only root to power is through her sexuality. Her only root to power is that people desire her. And this is how we end up with a psychopath with some hysterical tendencies because we do kind of pull those things together, right?

Being hysterical with things being sexualized. So that kind of helped me to reconcile that old episode. Yeah, and I think the last thing I want to say is he does and end give us one hope for connection for Kate, which is something she never wanted the whole book at the very end. He has her wishing for a friend, and that friend is Alice, from Alice in Wonderland. And Alice is a girl who was in a world where no one said what they meant and everything was some sort of deception. And I think that's how Kathy went through the world. Like so many people wanted things from her. And she just felt the burden of that.

And I could see why she would want a friend in Alice. Really good. Yeah. What do you think, in the end, she commits suicide. What do you think pushed her over the edge towards that? What do you think about her personality? What do you think about her? like the series of events. Series of events, right?

She was losing power both over others and she was using physical power. So we see her in increasing physical pain and she realizes the medications are only temporizing measures and that her disease will spread. It seems like it's some kind of maybe rheumatoid arthritis and she doesn't want to live in the weak.

But before that, she does have this connection, not connection, encounters with her sons. And Caleb actually is the only person who can really read her. And he will say to her, like, you don't see that you're missing something. He's with her understanding that she can only see the bad and that she doesn't even realize that she's missing the good. So that was an interesting soul read, I thought, from Caleb to his mother. What do you think about her response to her other son, Erin, who... And she idealizes him? There's some idealization.

He's his final, you know, awareness of who his mother is, right, precipitates the death soon after. So, yeah, any thoughts on that? I didn't know that she knows that piece. I do know that she's trying to build a relationship with him. She is going to the church where he is studying to see the sermons. She's fantasizing a life where she can live with him in New York, but that is very narcissistic and based on how people will view her. And so she in her age has lost this power of being young and beautiful,

but now Aaron has it. And so I think she wants to connect with him in part for that reason. I was thinking about the suicide that maybe it's, you know, when she meets her son, Caleb, that she loses a sense of choice. And the book talks a lot about Tim Schell or that we all have a choice in being good or bad. And that she actually doesn't think she has a choice in how she lives. that she actually is all evil and all bad. And now, like Lethal is saying,

she's lost the power of her beauty and her youth. And so she doesn't see that there's also the power to make decisions and choices in how to relate with people. And so the only choice that she has is to end her life. I think you're right. I think that's how we introduces her. She doesn't have the capacity to see good. she did not see goodness as an asset she saw goodness as a weakness to be exploited and manipulated

i don't even think she saw goodness i think he thought behind everything um was a malintent i think you're right i think you're right yeah and it's hard for me to conceive what produces that psyche that cannot see good. I spent some time thinking about this. I went back through genetic studies, heritability studies, and it doesn't seem like it's pure nature or nurture. You know, like there is some linkage between maltreatment and callousness at a young age, but it's not very, it's not always there. It's not deterministic. And I think, I think, think actually the more I read about environment and genes, the more I came to think, like, you know,

I think that there is a choice to some degree, right? And I think that there is this kind of like, unfortunately, she never came to the knowledge of the choice. And her son did, right? And that's kind of, I wonder if she's part allegory that she needed to be that, or the story to make sense. right? As opposed to a fully formed character. Yeah, and the way Steinbeck portrayed her was that she was born a monster without a conscience like some people are born without arms or legs or physical deformities, that she was born with a moral deformity or an inability to know good.

And a very keen ability, even from a young age, to read people. well and know how to manipulate them very patiently over a long period of time to their undoing. And I don't know how Steinbeck portrays that, how much of that is literary license, and how much of that reflects an actual reality. Are there people who are born without a conscience or the ability to form a conscience? I don't know. That takes me into territory I've wrestled with before, like what makes the difference between people who choose to invest in making their lives better and the lives of other people better who come from really difficult circumstances sometimes and really difficult backgrounds and didn't get a lot of nurturing or support? And yet they make a choice to do as much good as they can in the world. And then there are other people that seemingly had, you know, a pretty good background.

Family was pretty supportive and nurturing, and yet they had no interest in investing in goodness or growth. I don't understand it. That's an enigma to me. Yeah, I was bringing things back to our old episode when we did defenses, and I'm like, what if she had a better way to sublimate? So we have kind of a male psychopath I was talking about before. he can run this business and still he had a family he wasn't good to them but he had them and then we have like O Hamilton who's kind of just a businessman and there was how to exploit people for money and so part of it is just like being you know a girl on the late 1800s maybe you don't

have the sublimation options maybe had she been given the option to go into banking she wouldn't have been a killer I don't know But I was wondering that. She'd be a CEO of a company and make millions. So one thing about her sort of personality and the defense issues, highly organized around was omnipotent control comes back over and over again of like this kind of desire to control aspects of her environment. And then, yeah, I agree with you that LaTAL is like the erotization.

as a way to achieve that goal. Like, you know, even in the school yard, she's, I think, giving sexual favors or doing sexual things with different boys to, you know, oh, where did this watch come from? Or where did this piece of jewelry come from? Or where did this thing come from? And then, you know, so there's like this kind of, like,

history of utilizing sexuality to have the omnipotent control. Yeah. I agree and maybe I was Steinbeck's experience with his wife he was totally out of sorts with somebody who had kind of a sexual hold on him

I don't know but maybe and I think maybe the feeling was there but maybe it was you know two to tango because she wrote a biography of her side of the story and

if you believe her side then you will not enjoy reading Steinbeck anymore is whatever. So, okay. So that's Kate, Kathy. Anything else you guys want to sort of bring up before we move on to the next character? And I'm sure Kate will come back into the story

as we go through different people. I'm wondering if you guys picked up like her level of organization because towards the end too, as she was losing her beauty and she was aging, that she started to compare herself to Aaron, the beauty and, oh, if,

If people were to compare us, could they see that we are, would they say that we're siblings or we're mother and son? And also there was a level of paranoia is what I picked up on, that she was paranoid with different characters in the book like Joe and, is it Esther? I think she's right about Joe. I don't think she's paranoid. Well, I think there is that she has to be, right? Given her status where she is, she's going to be. Bethel. Thank you.

Yeah. Yeah. There is a level of like dissociate, like dissociated paranoia or something. The paranoia, I think, is most seen on Adam when Adam comes in. Like, oh, are you trying to trick me? How are you trying to trick me? I'm going to figure out how you're trying to trick me. And Adam's like, I'm not trying to trick you.

You know. Yeah, so there's some of that paranoia there. I think also her hands and her body starts to bear the burden. of, I think, a lot of the repressed, like, hostility and anger and resentfulness. You know, so she's carrying pictures of all these men that she's done these sort of lewd sexual things with. We're not given all the descriptions, but, you know, she could destroy them with one picture, right? And she's going to release all the pictures, even if, you know, she's going to just do it to

hurt them, right? So she's harboring all of this desire to wreak havoc on thousands, you know, on very, very powerful, important people, like the senators and the congressman and, you know, and she's carrying all of that. And she starts using the opiate more and more, right? Morphine, right, which is what I've seen with a lot of people who come to me, maybe for different reasons. maybe they're wanting more sannics, controlled substances, but they're wanting to exit out of reality more and more consistently. And they don't want to do the deeper work.

They don't want to look at their shadow. They don't want to grow in any way. They just want to exit. Yeah, I think all that is right. I think she's holding so much anger, right? She has this self-fulfilling reality. or her brothels kind of the one of the cruelest ones, the one where she leaves cut marks, she leaves heel marks,

she likes inflict pain, but she kind of gets into this story that all everybody wants is pain and to give pain and be right, like it brings her tighter and tighter. One other thing about the appearance, I thought it was so sad at the end where Cal's like, I understand why my father loves my brother more and it's because the cow being a son of Kate and Adam,

it's because he looks like her. Then my father is still in love with her. And I thought that was just so heartbreaking. Oh, yes. And do you know who cow looks like? No, like Charles. Kyle looks like Charles Adam's brother. Yeah.

Who has sex with Kate. on Adam's wedding night with Kate. So, yeah, maybe there's a good reason why Adam was struggling with that. Because he took all the bad of Kate and he put it on to other people. It was hard for him to hold that, right? He couldn't. He couldn't identify it. He had a hard time pointing anything bad at anything but himself.

and he kind of got in this spiral of depression. You know, and the one thing I was thinking about was Adam, when he fell in love with her, her face was so bruised and puffy, right? So she became beautiful, but that's not really where Adam fell in love with her. He fell in love with, like, this kind of weak sparrow, if you remember the description of her.

Yeah, I was back and forth on this. I was like, oh, her face is half beaten and she still has her body. So I'm like, I was back and forth on this. so I know what you're saying. And then it's like over weeks, so she's recovering. Yeah. Yeah, okay.

Well, to understand Adam, I think we need to go back to, you know, to Adam's childhood. To Cyrus. So why don't we talk about Cyrus, who is Adam's father, and who's going to take away Cyrus for us? I'll take that one. So Cyrus, he's the powerful person. patriarch of the Trask family, and he has this morally questionable, he has morally questionable behaviors that really set the precedent for the struggles that his children and

the grandchildren through the family encounter. And Cyrus, just to talk about some of the things that are specific from the book that he has done, is that he constructs this false identity. And it's this idealized version of himself to cope with his own feelings of inadequacy. And an example is, you know, he had lost, he makes himself into a military expert. And it's an exaggerated story of himself. And he had lost a leg. And he said he had lost a leg in combat. But he lost his leg shortly after enlisting in the army. And he only served for a very short time and experienced very little combat. And he says, the book, I guess I'm a natural born soldier. That's how he thinks of himself and talks of himself.

And it's despite of his questionable past. And he also wants to, you know, encouraged, despite his limited experience, he wants to, you know, he's an expert in the military. And he wants to encourage his son to join the, you know, to join the military. And an example of how he's a, how he develops his reputation as a military expert, he says, the war department seemed to know this and sought his advice, meaning Cyrus's vice in military matters. And people would respect him as he would, you know, he felt respected as he would embellish his military experiences. Another quote regarding the loss of his leg, he had lost his leg, not in battle, but by a friendly shell. Something with his leg was an accident. And he thought with the military, you know, with his military

experience and how he would talk about it, that he would have more respect. So Cyrus struggled with, you know, self-worth and his identity, and he just would seek validation from others and from his sons. And he would try to get control and recognition. And that's what, and he would transform his personal insecurity into authority and prestige. And, I'm thinking what else about him. Cyrus needs, he illustrates how insecurity and fragile sense of self can shape behaviors and relationships

because his relationships were, it was fraudulent. He was not telling the truth about his military experience. And he had, he built this external image of himself to hide his internal doubts. And he created this identity,

protect himself from shame and failure. So he had this, you know, need for validation, craved admiration from others, especially his two sons, and again, depended on his external approval and admiration for a sense of worth,

self-worth. The other parts of Cyrus that go back from when his sons were younger, his favoritism, and he created this rivalry between Adam and Charles, his two sons. So he created this favoritism

and expectations of the boys that would shape their lives, even that would go on even past their death. So his death, excuse me. So even when he, and I'll give examples of that later on, but even after he's no longer alive, the boys are still affected by his impact and the power imbalance and the favoritism.

So Cyrus favors his son, which fuels jealousy, resentment, and insecurity and anger in Charles. and he projects, it's thought that maybe Cyrus is projecting his ideals into Adam and rejects them to Charles. Charles gives his father an expensive pocket knife, and Adam gives his father a stray puppy. And Charles sees that his father liked Adam's gift better. And he says you like Adam's present better. And he immediately recognizes like the favoritism.

And these emotional, the sibling conflict and emotional wounds, it contributes to Charles's lifelong feelings of rejection, resentment, and insecurity. Because Charles resents that Adams favored. Murderous rage, almost murders of that. Right, right, right. It turns into rage and fighting and anger. And it turns into violence. and Charles nearly beats Adam to death.

Another example is Charles works harder than Adam on the farm, like hoping to get his father's acknowledgement. And it doesn't work. Adam remains the favorite. So Steinbeck really shows how apparent actions can create jealousy, insecurity, and lasting psychological conflict. Adam admires Cyrus and follows his life. life path, and Cyrus becomes Adam's model for manhood, influencing his decisions and worldview.

Cyrus teaches Adam to trust appearances and myths making Adam vulnerable to disappointment. Well, Adam realizes that Cyrus is a liar. Like, Adam from a young age, he's like, my father's methods of disciplining are based in nothing. His kind of military stories are nothing. So it's, you know, it's Adam has all the insight that his father is a fraud and Charles sees none of it. So Adam at a young age actually can realize when someone is a fraud. It's interesting what he loses it later. But Adam also idealizes Kathy, too. Like how his father, you know, I think that was learned from the father.

I think his father was pretty terrible at demonstrating relationships. Yeah. Kind of the way he really. to Alice Trask, who is Adam's stepmom and Charles' biological mom. I think the introduction was like, well, she's great because she's not attractive, so I don't have to worry about her cheating. But her even better quality is that she's always silent and will kind of go along nodding with whatever a man is saying while cleaning in the background, right? So he has no love for this woman.

And so the boys grew up in the environment where it's not demonstrated at all. and they have no idea how to relate to women. Oh, one thing I was thinking about was just how thick Cyrus has stolen valor, right? Which is actually pretty common. I once knew a therapist who told me he was a Navy SEAL. And in front of patients, I would sometimes introduce him as a Navy SEAL. And then years later, I found out he wasn't a Navy SEAL. He had lied to me.

And I was like, you have got to be. kidding me. That was my first experience of a professional, someone like myself, you know, a therapist was stolen valor, right? This happens. This happens. And if you treat VA patients, you probably have heard some stories that are not real. They're not real stories. You've heard some, okay? It's hard to discern what's real and what's not real sometimes. You know, people will lie about being Navy SEALs. I have some real Navy SEALs and they'll, like, it's almost like they enjoy in their community shining a bright light on the people of the stolen valor. But Cyrus was a convincing liar. He was a convincing liar because he was able to trick people to the point that he ended up as a wealthy man and had these like incredible accolades and you know the vice president or some president or something came to his funeral and Adam really didn't care.

Adam was like, yeah, I don't really care. Yeah, maybe he was. Maybe it wasn't. I don't know. And it was interesting when he went to see him in Washington, D.C., and he saw his dad, and he knew, yeah, you're a fraud. And he was surprised that other people didn't get it. Like, why doesn't this, you know, other officials see my dad's a fraud? Why doesn't the hotel clerk recognize my dad's a fraud? Like, he was mystified that other people couldn't see through it. You know. Adam saw his father's loneliness, too. He was the only one who said it. Oh. Yeah, but even when he learned that about his father's, you know, military experience

was exaggerated, he still was very much so influenced by him, you know, like joining the army, he was the noble thing to, you know, the noble thing to do, because that's what his father would say. Well, he was kind of, he was forced to join. He was, he didn't have a choice. I mean, he was, yeah, but. He had been to be told by his brother and his brother and his. dad marched the you know they enlist her in and signed him up yeah he said i don't want to go he

he said it several times because it reminded you when kathy goes with adam for the west she tells him several times i don't want to go and so like cyrus ignores adam adams ignores kathy yeah got him shot yeah and then the um the mysterious wealth at the end um cyrus when he dies um His sons are left this inheritance. And it's not known where the inheritance exactly came from. And it just created this conflict between the brothers, big kind of tension between them. And that really kind of, it symbolizes how, you know, even this is where even after someone's passing, like the influence continues on the two boys, who's the sons and the family, the rest of the family. so. Well, and then it's repeated. I think that's the thing is you'll see that later on is that this

generational influence is repeated in Aaron and Cal. Adam doesn't want it, doesn't want it, pushes away Cyrus. Charles is like fiending after Cyrus's attention. Doesn't get it. And Adam is still thrust into this like becoming a soldier that doesn't want to do it. Then we enlists and that surprises his own father that he is reenlisting and that's his way of avoidance. And it's, it was interesting to me just to feed the repetition, right? That generational repetition that we see or generational trauma that can continue. And I'll go over that with Aaron. I was just going to say another thing.

A theme that seems to go through the book is one that we all have our blind spots. and how, you know, Adam sees the reality of Cyrus. But then later he fails to see the reality of who his mother is or his brother. And so I think it's humbling, you know, that we all have our blind spots. I mean, even David can be fooled by a Navy seal, you know. So we all sometimes don't see. A younger version of myself, a younger version. A younger, a boy, an expression.

But I think it's important to. to just constantly kind of second ourselves, you know, and to stay curious and are we missing something? And new things will come up all the time. You know, sometimes I have worked with a patient for years. And then something will happen and I think, have I been missing something? Is there something there that I haven't seen for years? And, you know, it forces us to really reflect on,

well, what else could be going on? And there are things that we just might not see. Even just to go back to Kate, you know, the book starts with she's a monster. And we all have to assume that. But the whole time when I was reading about Kate, I was thinking, well, this gal must have suffered some kind of trauma. Because for her to become a monster like that, there has to be more to it. That Steinbeck's just not getting into, you know. And maybe that's your blind spot.

Well, right? Right? My blind spot is that I'm always assuming that there's something more to it and that I can't just accept that somebody's a monster. Yeah. I don't know. But I think that we all have blind spots. And of course I have blind spots too. And yeah, it's Cyrus had his. And Adam and, you know, his mom killed herself.

And I was thinking about how that impacted Adam as well and his brother. You know, she drowned herself essentially, and she was kind of masochistically predisposed. Oh, and the one thing about Cyrus, before we move on from Cyrus, he was a successful, grandiose narcissist in his personality style. And so he never succumbed to being exposed as a fraud, which would have led him to be a deflated narcissist, right? So the grandiose, he won, he was able to convince everyone. The only people he wasn't able to convince was, of course, Adam. He wanted Adam to join him. Go to, you know, don't re-enlist. Go to, you know, the military school and become a officer and come work with me, you know. He wanted Adam to join his narcissistic quest and Adam rejects him,

basically. Okay. So next, let's do Adam. Yeah, so I have some thoughts about Adam. I found, I found Steinbeck's book just fascinating. And I really, really, I listened to it on Audible like three times. And every time I listen to it, it was like, there's so much richness in it. And I think What appealed to me about it is that it is so reflective of life. You know, life as we experience it. There are so many different things that shape people and influence people and then the choices that people make and how that influences other people's choices. It's just fascinating to me. A little bit of my own experience, I think that really drew me to think a lot about the arc of advertising.

I've been in association with some psychopaths in my own experience and been deeply damaged by them. And it's been quite a process to understand what made me vulnerable, what created those blind spots, to idealize someone that actually was out to harm me. And that really speaks through the tragedy of, you know, the tragedy of Adam's life was that he didn't fall in love with the real Kathy Ames. He didn't fall in love with her as a person. He fell in love with an idealized phantom of his own creation. And yet that extreme vulnerability to delusion was not of his own making. It was something that was meticulously engineered during his childhood. The psychological environment of his childhood was created by his father, Cyrus, who we just talked about, his brother Charles and his stepmother, Alice. And He learned that love was synonymous with fear, that survival required total emotional withdrawal, and that goodness was something to be worshipped from afar rather than experienced.

I thought I would go through a little bit of the various dynamics of those three individuals and the effect that they had on Adam. And first of all, was Cyrus, his dad. And as we've gone over, he was a domineering, deeply dishonest patriarch who demanded absolute military great obedience. And he treated Adam not so much as a son, but as raw material to be broken and reshaped. And in a lot of ways, Adam was a narcissistic extension of Cyrus. He wanted Adam to fulfill the military career that he never actually did. did, even though he spun it that he did. And he would punish Adam severely, not for actual

wrongdoing, but in order to, you know, build character. And so Adam learned that authority figures, and by extension, the universe are unpredictable, harsh, and impossible to truly please. So there's this sense of helplessness that he learned there. When Cyrus forced Adam into the army against his will, there was a good deal of moral injury that took place there. And he experienced a lot of shame, revulsion, even a sense of betrayal of being forced into violence that he had no interest in. He detested violence, and yet he's forced to participate in it. And in that, he learns to completely detach from his environment, like he had to dissociate. just to try to get through it.

He would find ways to avoid shooting the enemy. He would shoot over their heads or shoot around them. He got really good at missing. And even with that, he still got like purple hearts and medals for bravery. And this created a deep-seated fracture in his psyche, like this desperate, unfulfilled longing for pure, unblenished innocence. It also developed in him the need to be a savior. Like, he had to do something to atone for all of this violence and carnage.

And he was, you know, the thought of all these bodies just piled up on top of each other, haunted him throughout his life. So he desperately needed a way like this, you know, to compensate for that. And so even in the army, he had this compulsion to go and, and, and, and help with the first aid and the medics and pulling people off the battlefield and trying to treat them and trying to help them. He went way above what the army expected him in that. And so then when Kathy arrives on his doorstep, you know, beaten to a pult by the pimp that had, that she had manipulated, Adam instantly cast himself as her savior.

and that looks like a subconscious attempt to rewrite his childhood trauma and finally prove that he's a protector and a victim or a perpetrator. He also learned kind of a predisposition to idealization. Because Adam's actual father is a terrifying tyrant, Adam grows up with a psychological void where a loving, protective figure should be. When he later encounters Kathy, his mind desperately seeks a clean slate. And he projects all of his repressed longings for peace, beauty, and absolute purity onto her, entirely blinding himself to her reality because his psyche needs her to be a saving angel. So that's Cyrus. That was one influence, the forced identity that he had to deal with.

And then the second influence was his brother. So Charles is Adam's, younger brother, as we've talked about. He wasn't much younger, maybe, you know, less than a year younger than Adam. And he was, he had a different mother. Alice was his mother. And his relationship with Adam was defined by a terrifying duality of intense brotherly love and homicidal rage. The Steinbeck describes how Charles felt quite protective of Adam. Like he saw Adam as, as innocent, and weaker and vulnerable, and he almost saw him more as a sister than a brother. And so he wanted to be, you know, very protective of him.

If bullies at school would beat up on him, Charles would take them to task and defend Adam. But he also was extremely jealous. if he saw that his dad preferred Adam over him, he would go into this homicidal rage. And there was twice that he, like the one time Adam threw something, they were playing a game. And he threw this thing farther than Charles could throw it. And he would, that didn't happen very often. And he was kind of excited about it. And he turned and looked at Charles.

And Charles just had this murderous rage in his eyes. and took a stick or a bat and just, you know, beat him. And there was never, like, the parents didn't explore it or figure out what was going on or address it. It just happened. And things went on. And then over the birthday gift, when dad was more excited about the stray puppy than he was about the expensive knife, then Charles beat him almost to death. And so Adam learned that asserting himself, fighting back, or even expressing his true feelings,

invites catastrophic violence, and so he adopts a defense mechanism of extreme passivity and emotional numbness. Living under the constant threat of Charles' volatile temper creates profound psychological exhaustion for Adam. He spends his youth walking on eggshells. I mean, on the one hand, his dad is going to discipline him so that he becomes a good soldier. On the other hand, he never knows when Charles is going to protect him or he's going to flip into homicide rage. So as an adult, he's willing to overlook massive glaring red flags in Kathy because his primary psychological driver is the avoidance of conflict. He mistakes Kathy's cold, calculated quietness for the serene domestic peace he was denied as a child. Adam carries a subconscious

belief that he is somehow responsible for provoking Charles' wrath, and this lingering sense of inherent defectiveness makes him incredibly vulnerable to a manipulator. So then we have the third major influence on Adam's character development, which was his stepmother, Alice, Alice Trask, who was Cyrus's second wife. She was this silent phantom of a mother. She was like a ghostly, intensely submissive presence in the household. She is a woman who survives by becoming entirely invisible, hiding her thoughts and emotions behind a mask of quiet domestic duty. Alice never openly expresses affection, warmth, or validation to Adam. So Adam's emotional baseline for a mother figure or a wife is a woman who is silent,

distant, and completely unreadable. The only real connection that Adam forms with Alice is through this silent game, like he happened upon her sitting by herself one day and she was smiling. And it was so, so like he almost felt like he was seeing her without clothes on. To see her smile was like just this phenomenal experience. And he thought, it's not right for me to just, you know, watch and take that in. Like I need to give her some gift. And so he started leaving small gifts around for her, like a pretty stone or a piece of ribbon on her sewing.

table and she secretly accepts them without ever speaking of it. But then later on, when she's dressing his wounds after Charles almost beat him to death, she attributes those gifts to Charles. So even in that, even in Adam giving her those gifts, he's invisible. She doesn't see him. She attributes them to Charles. And this teaches Adam a toxic lesson about intimacy, that love is a one-sided silent projection. You give, the other person receives in total silence, and you fill in the blanks with your own imagination. So Kathy Ames in a lot of ways is a psychological mirror of Alice Trask, but weaponized. When Kathy arrives on the Trask farm, she mimics the exact traits Adam associated with his stepmother. She is quiet, guarded, and completely unreadable.

Because Adam was conditioned by Alice to believe that a woman's silence hides a gentle suffering soul, he assumes Kathy's silence means the same thing. He doesn't realize that while Alice's silence was a shield to protect her goodness, Kathy's silence is a cloak to hide her malice. And so when Kathy crawls to Adam's doorstep, there's this perfect storm. she finds a man perfectly primed for destruction. Cyrus made him crave an escape into pure innocence. Charles made him too passive to question or confront her,

and Alice taught him that a silent cold woman is someone to be gently protected and secretly loved. Adam does not see Kathy for who she is because he is trapped in the theater of his own childhood trauma, casting her in the role of the savior he so desperately needed. And once Kathy embeds herself into Adam's life, she doesn't just stumble into his vulnerabilities. She actively assesses, tests, and weaponizes them. Her psychopathy makes her a master of reading human weakness, and she quickly realizes that Adam is not looking at her, but a fantasy born from his childhood trauma. Good.

Yeah. Wow. Awesome. Yeah. It's fantastic. I think he goes beyond, though, the Alice thing. Like when he's talking to Sam Hamilton, he's talking about how great Kathy is

and how supportive she is and how she's so excited about the house, which she doesn't really do. She just says, oh, that's great, that's great, honey, right? So he's like almost in Cyrus, and his ability to make her up, right? Yes. And it's so interesting because Sam Hamilton

met her and within the first meal that they shared together he was really creeped out by her like there is something really off like he couldn't get out of there fast enough because he sensed something was really, really wrong and then

we confided him, you know, kind of intimated the same thing. Do you remember the vision Samuel Hamilton has later about who she reminded him of? I think it was him. Oh yeah. He He was expanding hung, hanged.

He saw when he was young. Yes. Oh, yeah. A criminal get hung. Yes. And there was this like deadness in his eyes that was reminiscent. And it kind of like it sent him back to that person. And he was like, but then his like his bias starts to leak in.

And he's like, ah, I can't, I can't really link those people together. Right. I can't really. He wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt. I'm going to give her the benefit of the doubt. Yeah. Like maybe I'm like, what am I, what is my brain doing to itself right now? You know?

Yeah. Yeah. And he said if I was a better friend, I would have told him now, but 12 years later, who finally tells him. Right. He's the one who awakens Adam 12 years later. Yep. 12 years later, yeah. Yes.

Yeah. And, you know, there's so much to be said about then the journey that Adam took, you know, to come to grips with reality, to become, you know, a person with substance and desire and ability and to deal with actual reality. And I think one thing that really, that really grabbed me was in his conversation with Cal, after Cal had been taken to jail, you know, he was swept up with everybody else that was in the bar and, and as they're talking, Adam says, you see, there's responsibility in being a person. It's more than just taking up space where air would be. And it feels like that's so, so rich with meaning for what Adam's experience was.

Like he had to learn when he was a kid and the way he was shaped, it's almost like, like he couldn't take up space. He had to be dissociated. He had to live in non-reality. He had to try to fit in with whatever forces were pushing in in different directions. And as he developed and grew as a person, he found out that there was something more solid to it. And there was a responsibility in it that he really sunk his teeth into and it was his redemption. Partial redemption. partial redemption i agree with that i feel like one of the most painful parts of the bloc is how he treats cow right like he does parent like as much as he's grown he's still very much yeah yes

yes and there are moments that are so redemptive with cal where he actually you know and cal just eats it up but then he slips back into you know too bad you can't be like your brother and make something of his life instead of going out and making so much money like oh at that moment i just wanted to shake him yeah yeah really painful really painful yeah okay so we could talk about lee or we could come back to lee at the end who else do we have to talk about who else is we got erin and cow we've talked about cal somewhat the brother no we have abra abra yes i put okay so Maybe to frame this for the audience, if you're still listening, if you haven't stopped the episode and started listening to the book, and maybe you've come back to this episode after you read the book.

Okay, so Lee and Abra are kind of like the highest reflective function people, I think, in the story. And so I think we should end with them. Do you think Sam Hamilton was too? Sam had his moments. Yeah. I mean, like, when we were talking about how Sam woke up Adam to the reality that Adam needed to name his children. Okay, so Natalie, why don't you talk about Aaron? So Adam's son, Aaron. Okay. Yes. So Aaron was like Adam, in the sense that he was favored by Adam. And it is interesting to see the dynamic that is,

shaped just given how Adam felt during his upbringing and then how that was repeated, you know, as he was a father. And then he was unaware of Cal and Cal's like need to want need for attention. It was painful to read the section where it was Cal reminiscing on how he would get attention just by like caressing Adam's leg. And Adam was. Adam was. would kind of pat him on the shoulder. And that's the way that Cal kind of held on to his love was when he needed some sort of comforting, he knew that if he were to kind of just brush up on him in some way, he would kind of get a pat. And that was how he got love from Adam. So Aaron is one of the literature's cleanest portraits of what we now call, I'd say like a deflated

narcissist or vulnerable narcissist. It was not vanity, but more of a fragile self that Aaron can't survive contact with an imperfect world. He was almost obsessed. It was like an extreme idealization. And his inability to integrate that good and evil exist in the world and that humans are imperfect. It was, he was unable to do so.

Aaron is beautiful, adored and devout, and he's destroyed not by an enemy, but by a single fact that he can't metabolize, that a good person can also lie. His inner world is organized around idealized objects and an idealized self, defended by splitting, denial, and repression. With strikingly low reflective function, he was extremely rigid, extremely set in his, his ways, suffocating others around him. And the architecture carries him from like a narcissistic vulnerability to this moral injury and collapse in the book that is essentially his deaths. He enters into the military after he meets his mother, working in a brothel after Cal had introduced them.

And his inability to integrate that into see the, the, the, he, his inability to integrate that into see that his mother was who she was, it was mind-boggling. He couldn't do it. And he escaped. He ran away. He was afraid. So, Aaron had this idealized self.

It was something that he, that's something that's brought up in the book is, I'm going to read this excerpt from it. Aaron is serene, but the structure, but the structure he can't tolerate is a single crack. So he set up rules and he required that the world conform. He had a rigid identity and the world around him was required to conform.

And he really projects us onto and idealizes like Abra. And when he goes away to Stanford, he wants to escape Salinas. He wants to escape Salinas. He no longer wants to live in his hometown. and goes to Stanford, and then he's completely alone. He feels just really homesick and writes to Abra and writes these letters that are not even related to her.

And she feels that. She feels the sense of idealization that she must be perfect. Lee makes a comment between, or, Abra and Lee, that she feels like she can't even smell. Humans can't smell. And then if she did, then Aaron would reject her. So others around him in the relationships with him felt that purity, that sense that need to conform. He engaged in defenses.

So I don't think he truly had narcissistic personality disorder. I think it was more of, and you guys, please help me, but like the obsessiveness with idealization. He could not I think he had like an obsessive personality Like they're obsessive compulsive But more of the obsessive right With the scrupulosity Yeah but I agree the idealized self

He idealized Abra And Abra commented He writes more and more about me In a way that is less and less like me He doesn't see me And it didn't feel vulnerable or connecting to her Well and he was afraid of vulnerability too. I think that was something that came

he lost interest in sex, he lost interest in getting married, he wanted to be celibate. A lot of this was this kind of like extreme religious you know, zealotry, you know, maybe become a monk which was a form of pushing down his, you know, some of his desires. He had a lack of contact with his desires for for things that we all desire. Okay, keep going.

So talking about vulnerability that kind of distra... He would also become very angry. So when he became vulnerable, Aaron is explicitly sensitive, but cannot tolerate vulnerability. When he asks Abra to practice being his mother, I think they're like 15 or around that age, he breaks down and cries.

And he doesn't stay with the grief. he can't tolerate it he can't he doesn't understand why he's crying he can't i mean he's 15 but there is no no reflection and he becomes extremely angry and threatens that if she tells anybody he would kill her if that he started crying and it's it's just it's interesting because he's so sensitive he's a very sensitive individual but he cannot tolerate vulnerability well i think he he never had a mother you know and so he was he was accessing the deep sorrow but then also the deep shame that came with the sorrow but then he wasn't able to like sit in that vulnerability like you're saying yeah and so it went to kind of like yeah other places so i bring this back to um

i want to bring this nancy mcmilliams it was on her nancy mcwilliams it was on her nancy mcwilliams it was on her Nancy McWilliam's book in her chapter of narcissism, she frames it as narcissistic people carry deep shame about needing anything. And very deep shame about needing anything because to admit a need exposes a deficiency in the self. And you see this like deficiency in self and even with Kate. Like she, people feel it. She may not feel it. But she, people feel that there's something missing from her. And I think you start to see this with Aaron that he started to start.

to feel like something is amiss. Like he's not enough. There's something that he's inferior. And this really comes about after the experience for Adam, his father, creates a scheme to refrigerate lettuce and ship it across the states. And this fails publicly. And he loses a ton of money. And this then sets up Cal to try to gain back or buy.

by Adam's love, but the two boys, the twins, they start to get mocked by their peers, by town, the town, and they're called lettuce heads. The lettuce head boys. And Aaron internalizes this as like a status wound. Like, oh, I just can't be that lettuce head boy. And he tells Abra, I don't think I'm good enough for you anymore. I'm that lettuce head boy. I'm not good enough. And his, her father, also, like, starts to say, you should, you need to date somebody else, right? That he is no good for you anymore because, so people around him are also shaping this perfect self that he needs to be. He enters in the Episcopal ministry. He reads as goodness, but this is self-serving.

It's an obsession with purity that builds a world with no room for imperfection. or complexity. In the book, it says, he made a picture of me, and it was like a saint. This is a letter from Aaron to Aura. He made a picture of me, and it was like a saint.

He didn't want me. He wanted that. Letters from Stanford, idealized a fantasy of Abra. The real, imperfect Abra, threatens his self-cohesion. And so he, and she's afraid of that.

and he needs this perfect, perfect woman. Similar to Adam who also needs, doesn't want to see Kate for... Yeah. Yeah, well, he has an idea. It's like this ideal, right? He's addicted to this ideal, which is why when he does meet his mom, it shatters him in a way that he was not prepared for. Yeah, and he's unable to, and that's the kind of culmination. up to the end is that, you know, he is so unhappy at Stanford.

He wants to come back and it's at Thanksgiving dinner. And Cal is preparing to, you know, give his father a gift, money that he's gotten through this business adventure with Will Hamilton. Aaron wants to tell his father that he no longer wants to go back to Stanford and that he's going to go on to the ranch. which is a potential for progress, actually, which is father rejects. His father, no, no, no, I know better. I know better. You need to go.

You need to continue at Stanford. This is how I'm proud of you. I'm proud of you for this. Which is like a repeat, right, of that. That was what Adam's father did to him. And his brother kind of rejects him too. His brother's like, no, you're going to be this. I'll be the business guy.

You be the really smart person. and we're going to do great things together. That's initially what he sort of like is trying to convince his brother to keep going to Stanford. Any other thing before we get into Abra? Anything else you want to, should we say? No, I just think that it was that this,

I think this, he was the perfect character to be, just show the rigidity that can happen when we are unable to, when we stick to one perspective, when we don't, when we can't see other perspectives, that we can we don't see our blind spots we can miss so much

and that can lead to like our own demise and that's what happened literally for Aaron in the book and I have a lot of compassion for for Aaron though because Aaron and we'll get to it Aaron was not given the truth in a way that was progressive

and helpful Aaron no he was hidden the truth was hidden from him yeah and everyone thought he was too fragile to hear it in a progressive thought way. This contrast between Adam and Aaron,

when Charles is setting out to kill Adam, he reveals to Adam that his mother was crazy and she was suicidal and he expected us to really destabilize Adam. Adam doesn't seem to care. And then we have Cal basically doing the same thing to Aaron, but Aaron cares deeply about who his mother is. It's interesting to see the contrast. There's a large portion earlier in the book that is talking,

that Lee is trying to convince Adam, Aaron's father, to tell the boys some of the truth. He says, it's the lie that I'm thinking of. It might infect everything. if they ever found out you lied to them about this, the true things would suffer. They would not believe anything then. Maybe you could tell them a part truth enough

so that they wouldn't suffer if they found out. There's a lot, a lot in the book about telling the truth, about big things. And maybe we'll get to that. that a little bit more after we talk about Abra. Well, let's talk about Abra. Okay. Right. So Abra is initially Aaron's girlfriend. They meet when they're very young. And I do think that she is an example in the book of somebody who personifies Lee, who is this very dignified, wise character in the book and really talks a lot about things like, secret.

truth like David just said and Tim Schell, which is our ability to have choice in our lives. So when we meet Abra, she's actually kind of mischievous. She clearly has a bit of a dark side. But she and Aaron hit it off. The difference is, though, that she grows and Aaron doesn't. And as she grows, you see that she becomes more integrated in that when she sees complexities, she doesn't just deny those realities. She's interested in the truth and in trying to understand people and the world. So I would say she grows from sort of a narcissistic vulnerability of a child to a more integrated woman.

She talks about how as a child that, you know, you are the center of the universe. But as you grow up, then, you know, things go out of you and come from other people. She says it's worse, but it's much better too. And I think what she's talking about when she says that things come in from other people is that the complexity of things come into you as you. as you're growing from a child to an adult. And what's good about that is that it forces you to think and it forces you to grow if you're willing to grow.

So she eventually, as the book goes on, she kind of outgrows Aaron eventually. And eventually she, of course, Aaron's a brother, Cal hit it off. And then at one point she tells him, tells him, tells, Cal. She says about Aaron, and this is a quote on Chapter 44, he's made someone up, and it's like he put my skin on her. I'm not like that, not like the made up one, pure, just absolutely pure. I'm not like that. And Lee says, nobody is. She's, and how she's, she's arrived to that as complexity is that during the whole book, she's very curious and she really reflects about

relationships. And she has lots of conversations with Lee. Lee is a bit of this, to me, it's sort of a sage or a wise therapist, the kind of therapist you'd want to have. And he asks some very good questions. He sort of sits there, often kind of smiling, nodding, making a quiet humming sound. he sounds like a therapist to me. And he just asks her questions and lets her grapple with those questions. And she actually grows as a result instead of denying some truths. She's also kind of a contrast to Kathy or Kate. Because although she was kind of, at least early on,

She's got some dark characteristics. And, you know, we later learned that Abra's father was stealing. You know, I mean, nobody's perfect, right? Anyway, she has some, let's say, inherited flaws. But she chooses to be good as she grows up. But she chooses to accept evil side, evil sides of herself, of the people in her life, and to not really just define herself by the past, but to just choose who she's going to become.

And she really embodies the theme that David talked about early on in this podcast, which is that, you know, and I'll paraphrase it, but it's that psychological health is not the disappearance of aggression, the penise of narcissism with all guilt or control. It's more the growing ability to recognize conflicting parts of ourselves. and to remain in contact with that reality in that struggle and to stay related with people who are imperfect, and that includes ourselves and our own imperfections.

Great character. Really. Yeah. Really appreciate Abra. I think that's the one relationship where we kind of get a sense of like romantic love where partners really try to see each other between Cal and Abra.

It's till the end, but it's the first time we'll see that happen. It was also really poignant the relationship between Abra and Lee, you know, and that moment in the kitchen where he said he really wished that she was his daughter. And she wished he was her father. There was just a really raw but real seeing of each other. connecting in a really sweet way. I feel like Lee was like the only parent to all three of those kids, right, to Aaron. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Which is really amazing considering what his own childhood was like, the story he had and his mother dying as he was, his father clawed him out of her belly and raised in a laboring camp basically by everybody there. it's amazing the qualities that he developed. Which I don't know, maybe you're going there next. There's a part of me that wants to read that whole section, but there's also a part of me that realizes it would take a couple minutes. Okay, so, yeah, I'll talk about Lee now.

I think, you know, he is born in California. He's, his parents, you know, grew up in China. And you have to realize, like, Steinbeck wrote this at a time in which the Asian population was a minority, maybe a lot more critical in the air in the U.S., right? And so he is the secret hero, right? He's kind of like the, it's like if there's a nice secret message that this book gives. It's like, here's a guy who's a servant to Aaron. So you kind of like gets under your defense is always just a servant. But he is the moral authority. He raises Aaron and Cal. He is

someone who listens and listens and listens and listens. And just at the right moment gives a truth bomb in just the right way so that someone has the potential for growth and increased ability. to make a true choice, right? So yeah, in this, in this kind of peak moment when he's talking about not lying to the kids, he shares the story of his own childhood and the moment when his father told him this story. And it's not a fun story to read.

And I actually one time read it to a patient. And I read it because a lot of the things in my patient's stories are also very hard. And it's like, how can anything good come from this awfulness, right? It's like, and there's so much shame. And there's a couple lines I want to read specifically. Okay, so his father is describing this journey that he took with his wife. So his father had to pay off a debt, so came to the U.S. to pay off the debt.

his wife basically pretended to be a man so that she could go with him. And so they're treated as human cattle. And, you know, the whip, the rope, the rifle are the ways of disciplining. So, okay, I'm going to read this. I can see my father's face when he told me. An old misery comes back, raw and full of pain, telling it my father had to stop and gain possession of himself. And when he continued, he spoke sternly and used hard, sharp words almost as though he wanted to cut himself with them. These two managed to stay close together by claiming she was my father's nephew.

The months went by, unfortunately, for them, there was little abdominal swelling. and she worked in pain and out of it my father could only help a little apologizing. My nephew is young and his bones are brittle. They had no plan, but they did not know what, they had a plan, but they did not know what to do. Then my father figured out the plan. They would run into the high mountains to one of the high meadows, and there beside a lake, they would make a burrow for the birthing. and when my mother was safe and the baby born,

my father would come back and take his punishment. He would sign up for an extra five years to pay for his delinquent nephew. Pitiful as their escape was, it was all they had, and it seemed a brightness. The plan had two requirements. The timing had to be right, and a supply of food was necessary. Lee said, my parents, and he stopped smiling over his use of the word. and it felt so good that he warmed it up. My dear parents began to make their preparations.

They saved part of their daily rice and hid it under their sleeping mats. My father found a length of string and filled out a hook and a piece of wire, for there were trout to be caught in the mountain lakes. He stopped smoking to save the matches issued, and my mother collected every tattered scrap of cloth she could find, and unraveled edges to make the thread and sewed the rag bag together with splinters to make swaddling clothes for me. I wish I had known her. So do I, said Adam. Do you ever tell this to Sam Hamilton? No, I didn't. But I wish I had. He loved a celebration of the human soul. Such things were like

a personal triumph to him. I hope they got there, said Adam. I know. And when my Adam would tell me, I would say to him, get to the lake, get to my mother there. Don't let it happen again, not this time. Just once, let's tell it how you got to the lake and built the house of fir, burrows. And my father became very Chinese then. He said, there's more beauty in the truth, even if it's a dreadful beauty. The storytellers at the city gate twist life so that it looks sweet to the lazy and stupid and weak. And this only strengthens their infirmities and teaches nothing, cures nothing, nor does it let the heart soar.

Get on with it, Adam, said irritably. Lee got up and went to the window and finished the story looking out of the stars that winked and blew in the march wind. A little boulder jumped down the hill and broke my father's leg. They set the leg and gave him cripple's work, straightening used arrows and a hammer on a rock. And whether with worry or work, it didn't matter. My mother went into early labor. And then the half-mad men knew they were all mad.

One hunger sharpened another hunger, and one crime blotted out the one before it. And the little crimes committed against those starving men flared into one gigantic manic crime. My father heard the shout, woman, and he knew. He tried to run, and his leg rebroke under him. And he crawled up the ragged slope to the roadbed where it was happening. When he got there, a kind of sorrow had come over the sky. And the Canton men were creeping away.

to hide and to forget that men could be like this. My father came to her on the pile of shale. She had not even eyes to see out of, but her mouth was still moved, and she gave him his instructions. My father crawled me out of the tattered meat of my mother with his fingernails. She died on the shale in the afternoon.

Adam was breathing hard, Lee continued with the sing-song cadence. Before you hate these men, you must know this. My father always told it at the last. No child had ever been cared. No child ever had so much care as I. The whole camp became my mother.

It is a beauty, a dreadful kind of beauty. And now good night. I can't talk anymore. And I think this is kind of like Dostoevsky's, when he wrote Brothers Karamazov, the Grand Inquisitor, it's like the middle of the book,

this like story, which kind of gives this ethic that you can hold two things at once, right? A horrific, horrific act and also the redemption of like these men becoming the mother of himself and the love that he received. And I think it's this story

that then allows, and gets transmuted to Cal. And in the final sequence, I also wanted to read that because I feel like it's so powerful. It's like, here we have Cal torn apart with guilt. We have Adam on his deathbed. Having had a stroke,

can barely, cannot talk, cannot move, cannot do anything. And Lee understands there maybe nothing, going on inside of Adam. So he starts, there's damage in your brain, and it may be that you are a new thing in the world. Your kindness may be meanness now, your bleak, honesty, fretful, and conniving. No one knows these things except you.

Adam, can you hear me? The blue eyes wavered, closed, slowly, then opened. Lee said, thank you, Adam. I know how hard it is. I'm going to ask you to do a much harder thing. Here's your son, Caleb, your only son. Look at him, Adam. And the pale eyes looked until they found Cal.

Cal's mouth moved dryly and made no sound. Lee's voice cut in. I don't know how long you will live, Adam. Maybe a long time, maybe an hour. But your son will live. He will marry and his children will be the only remnant left to you. Lee wiped his eyes. with his fingers.

He did a thing in anger at him. Because he thought you had rejected him, the result of his anger is that his brother and your son is dead. Cal said, Lee, you can't. I have to, said Lee. If it kills him, I have to. I have the choice.

And he smiled, sadly, and quoted. If there's blame, it's my blame. Lee's shoulders straightened. He said, sharp, your son is marked with guilt out of himself almost more than he can bear don't crush him with rejection don't crush him adam lee's breath whistled in his throat adam give him your blessing don't leave him alone with his guilt adam do you hear me give him your blessing a terrible brightness shone in adam's eyes and he closed them and kept them closed a wrinkle formed between his brows

Lee said, help him Adam, help him. Give him his chance. Let him be free. That's all a man has over the beasts. Free him. Bless him. The whole bed seemed to shake under the concentration. Adam's breath came quickly with his effort and then slowly.

His right hand lifted an inch and then fell back. Lee's face was haggard. He moved to the head of the bed and wiped. the sick man's damp face with the edge of the sheet. He looked down at close his eyes. Lee whispered, thank you. Adam, thank you. Thank you, my friend. Can you move your lips?

Make your lips form his name. Adam looked up with sick weariness. His lips parted and failed and tried again. Then his lungs filled. He expelled the air And his lips combed the rushing sigh He whispered the words Seemed to hang in the air

Timshel His eyes closed and he slept You want to explain to Timshall I don't think we got there Timshel was In the story of Canaan Abel Which is kind of a central archetypal theme of this book

And of all sibling rivalry Kane kills Abel And There's different translations of the word That was spoken to Kane by God It's like sin crouches at the door And thou shalt rule over him

And Lee finds a translation With his scholars that thou mayest Timshall Thou mayest rule over Which is a choice It's not thou shalt which is a requirement, it's thou mayest.

So it gives choice. So it's like sin is crouching at the door and like you can do this evil act or you can choose not to. And so for for cow, it was kind of like a blessing because it was you can choose if you you don't have to be like Kathy you're not destined to be your mother

you're not destined to be evil you can choose I really think that's powerful and something that I was excited to read about was Lee's description of Tim Schell and it brought me back to just

training in like meaning-centered psychotherapy and how we can describe suffering or how we experience suffering, our perspective around suffering, whatever that might be. And the beauty that can be from something so ugly, right, that there was, we had this, his birth was not like monstrous. I mean, it was really aggressive. And there was beauty within that. And the perspectives that we can take when we are in suffering or when our paper.

patients for suffering and how can we help? How can we help within that space? Like, what choice do they want to make? We can't make the choice for them. Sometimes I really want to make the choice for my patients, but I think there is, like, it's empowering and it's, it's, yeah, I just really love this part of the book because it resonated with me with Victor Frankl and his, like, existential look at suffering and what it means.

Yeah, and I think the way that Lee communicates that is believable because it's like you can't say that without having made the choice yourself. Lee could have become the most resentful person for what happened to his mother, what happened to his childhood, what happened at the hands of the people that were basically enslaving him. So he could have been resentful. He could have been bitter, but he chose to. connect with people and love people. And that's questioning like the determinism, right?

Like determinism is that like this is, this is, you don't have a choice. Your upbringing, the actions that have happened that determines what you're, you know,

how you're going to be, how you're going to act, whereas we have that free will or that freedom of choice to become Lee, who was like this really, lives, man. Yeah.

So I think this is a good place to wrap it up, actually. Any closing words, any final thoughts, Letal, anything? Archie copled together last minute. To read this book, I think as an adolescent it was the first time I read it. It was this revelation of reflective function, Steinbeck's ability, to put you into every single character

and to feel with them. It is what makes us fantastic. And I hope listeners out there get a chance to read it. Yeah. Agreed. Even if the characters had low reflective function, the way he wrote about them was very reflective. Which I think is why this book is so timeless. And it was his like masterpiece, you know?

It's like I hope in my life I can have something resembling that. If that's my own like just appreciation. of stuff like this, you know. Maybe this podcast. Maybe the sum total. Yeah, maybe the symphony for us is not in writing a book. It's in, you know, helping patience through their journeys. And sometimes speaking truth when it's difficult.

Did you love the Marcus Aurelius piece with me? I was like, oh, David's going to love this. Oh, I loved it. That was what he was reading. It's okay. I loved it for a couple reasons. One, because Lee stole the book from Sam, right? So he steals this like really nice version of Marcus Aurelius,

and then he's kind of like leafing through it, you know, in this moment. And for those of you who know, like Dr. John Tar, who was my mentor who passed away a couple years ago, he gave me his copy of Marcus Aurelius, which is like, priceless. It was like a, it's like a, it's like a hundred year relic of the past and it's just beautiful. That's cool. And so

I too can leaf through my Marcus Aurelius and and, um, yeah, I'm glad you, you got that. So it's at one point. I don't know if we, we mentioned it, but like this book, this is like, how do we cook with rejection, right? This is a thing with father's time. This is a thing with the romantic

relationships, even like, you know, Desi dies from this. It's like, can we get our patients to kind of live through rejection or life is so much better if they are not crippled by this one phenomenon that is soging? Yeah, yeah. And yet it's probably, I think,

a stage to be with them in that feeling that they're not going to move out of that place either. You know, like that torturousness of the rejection if they felt that. It's like, it says something very important. It says they loved. It says they cared. It says there was something meaningful that they touched.

And the whole idea of Temshul, like, I've never used that word with my patients, but to help them get in touch with the fact that they have agency, they have options, they have choices for how they want to move forward with that. and that's what we wanted for Charles and what we wanted for Aaron to be able to live through it. In some ways I wish that you could

fast forward and see how Cal and Abra developed in the aftermath will never have that rest of that story but it's fun to ponder where those two could have gone. Yeah. I don't think I really had an appreciation of a tragedy when I was a young man. And it's like in my older age, it's like I appreciate it so much more.

Like having tragic parts of the story that are just like, oh. And I've never read any of Steinbeck's work. This is my first dream of it. And I feel like I'm, I really appreciate that I read it now versus when I would, I wouldn't have appreciated it when I was younger. I likely would have stopped reading it. But I just, yeah, just the tragedy and how he talks about it, it's so beautiful. Like he's, he normalizes, right, the suffering and he normalizes some of these, I mean, terrible acts that people engage in.

Like, I know everything was intentional to this book. And so, Kathy has this love of Alice in Wonderland. And, like, he names Charles' mother, Alice. and I'm just like still like bye those two. Right. I think that's like, okay. I will grapple with that as we move. Beautiful.

All right, guys. We will leave it there for today, okay?