I’ve always been fascinated by how the various disciplines of art and science influence each other. Throughout history advancements in the sciences have informed the way artists look at how the world works. In return the imagination of artists has helped scientists see possibilities for research and investigation.
One of the most profound connections, I believe, is the growth of psychoanalysis in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and how its accepted wisdom affected the way novelists presented their characters. Sigmund Freud explained human behavior primarily through the effects of conflicting environmental (including parental) forces that acted on the human psyche, sometimes resulting in pathologies caused by repressed desires, particularly sexual ones. When you think about some of the great stories you have read, it’s easy to make that link. From Oedipus to Gatsby to Arthur Less, it’s mostly about the struggles of the ego, id, and superego.[1]
But what if that’s not quite right? What if human behavior is motivated more by a person’s genetic makeup? And if that’s true what does it mean for us fiction writers?
In a recent article for aeon.co, titled “Psychodynamic nonsense,” Niklas Serning, a chartered psychologist and registered psychotherapist in the UK, who specializes in existential and child psychotherapy, questioned the scientific basis for his field. His research and observations from twenty years in practice have led him to believe that treating adult problems as grounded in childhood trauma is often unproductive, rarely resulting in a cure. The best most patients can hope for is to be able to manage their condition. The number of people who remain in therapy for many years seems to bear this out. He also cites studies of twins growing up apart who developed the same character traits, and adopted children in a single family who turn out very different.
What’s most interesting in Serning’s article is that he notices some other cultures have a very different view about childhood events:
Historically, in many cultures around the world, from Nigeria to Malaysia, or the West more than fifty years ago, childhood has been seen as just one of the stages we move through, with no sacred status. We learn all the time, but suffering stems from how we now, at this time, relate to the world and what our current circumstances are. Isn’t it a bit arrogant that so many in the West assume that this new, unevidenced theory—that suffering stems from childhood—should be universally true, or even true for us? How does the psychodynamic therapist, faced with their suffering client, feel resolute that they should dredge up the past, when philosophical traditions from across the world say the answer lies in the here and now? The Buddha, Lao Tzu, Aristotle and Jesus didn’t mention a word about childhood’s irreversible stain on the human condition—they saw us as individuals living through choices in the now. A millennium later, Al-Ghazali and Thomas Aquinas still worked on the here and now. Even two centuries ago, G W F Hegel, Søren Kierkegaard and William James didn’t obsess about childhood.
If Serning and his sources are correct, then how fiction writers often portray characters is subject to question. This is interesting to me because I have always been an anti-backstory reader and editor. I find stories in which writers simply report the past in order to set up the present to be simplistic, formulaic, didactic to the point of lecturing, and often downright boring. Now, if there is indeed less connection between a character’s past history and the current situations they face, then childhood backstory becomes even more superfluous.
Psychologically, we live in the now, not the past. We learn from the past (or at least we ought to), but it does not necessarily dictate how we will act in the present. In fact recalling the past while in a present crisis, a favorite technique of many fiction writers, can seem ridiculous. I remember a submission I received at a literary journal in which a young boxer was in the middle of a bout and stopped to remember his father’s words of wisdom. If that had really happened he would have been knocked out in a few more seconds.
The issue, I think, is that many writers crave absolute causality in their characters. They want character action to be neat and predictable. They want to keep things as simple as possible, to make the writing as easy as possible. But life, and therefore fiction, isn’t really like that. There is an element of randomness that means events may turn out differently from how we have imagined, which is actually more interesting to readers. What they want is not so much answers as unpredictable answers that still make sense.
If genetics and evolution are more powerful forces in character development, then adding that factor could create far greater possibility in our storytelling.
What does such a story look like? The first example that pops into my mind is Rachel Cusk’s Outline, the first book in her trilogy. Instead of relying on the past to explain the present, she simply dives into her story, starting in the middle and moving forward from there with extraordinarily little reference to past events. Her protagonist mostly reacts to the actions and speech of others. As Serning said, “…the answer lies in the here and now.” I found Cusk’s writing in this book refreshing and intriguing, and so much more challenging than most of what I see in current fiction.
Jack, the wayward son of Boughton in Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize winner, Gilead, is another. Raised by a preacher in the mid-20th century Midwest, surrounded by examples of piety and manners, he grows up exhibiting very different traits, and by doing so becomes the focal point of Reverend John Ames’s jealousy and existential questions.
And now that I think of it, James Joyce’s stories were populated with plenty of self-determinant characters who didn’t necessarily comply with their environmental influences.
I can’t help thinking that reducing our reliance on childhood trauma and past events as explanations for present action would help writers get away from the blame game, in which everything bad that happens to a character is someone else’s fault, another issue that plagues modern fiction. Maybe instead those bad things are the result of evolutionary preferences, people acting as millennia of development has influenced them to do.
I’m not saying we should replace one character motivation with another. Certainly both play a part in the directions characters take as their stories play out. But adding nature to the traditional nurture could provide a spark of creativity that would result in more intriguing and realistic fiction.
Image by Ian Lindsay from Pixabay
[1] I am not particularly knocking Freud here. He may not have been right about everything, but if it wasn’t for him we might not have psychotherapy at all.
In A Course In Miracles, which is a long, difficult to understand tome claimed by its publishers to have been channeled by JC (that God dude) himself (disclaimer: I'm not asking anyone to believe this), JC says that Sigmund Freud is full of shit.
I bring this up not to evangelize, but to point out the obvious. This is not to suggest that family abuse victims (for example) don't carry their history and scars with them. But they don't need to be trapped by them, either. The whole recovery process for these folks requires that to be so.
However, we don't need Freud to tell us about the damage it causes, nor its possible relevance to our character's story.
It's a question of balance. The nature of childhood trauma is in the very title of a Russell Banks novel turned into a movie: "Affliction." But he avoids preaching about it. He lets his story divulge their secrets.
It's really **how** we explore the issues of the past, not *if,* in my opinion. If anything, my writing's weakest aspect is that I often don't go into the past enough.
A character of mine may never stop in the middle of a boxing match to think about what his father once said. But that's more because I try to think about reality, too. He'd be pummelled, yes, but anyone who has been involved in an intense athletic match knows we aren't thinking about what mom or dad said while we're trying to clear a hurdle.
But if I wrote it, you might also never find out that his dad hit him every night, which isn't much better.
Great post, made me think.
You ask: What if human behavior is motivated more by a person’s genetic makeup?
Yet we know that a genetic mutation which later in life causes harm can leave one man devastated and another a proven victor. But could we believe in the existence of the one who succeeds or the one who failed if we were not given their backstory? We would have to take the author at his word.
At the risk of being preachy: We need a fascinating backstory to overcome our bias. We'll read it if it's fascinating and we won't question what the author implies if he provides it.
You mentioned Henry James, but he never seems to prove what he says (he may be a pleasure to read, but he feels like a poet).
In "Cider House Rules" John Irving provides "story" about the main character's childhood, the creation of his hometown, and how he got his name. These disclosures were studied, but they did not tax the reader's patience. They were practical and done artfully, and they build a foundation for what will come later.
We know they are practical because they fulfill the obligation writers have to create a world in which a main character can do things like get into a fist fight or comfort someone who has been injured.
Books I like to read incorporate backstory into the whole moving structure, making it part of the flow (probably placing most of that backstory in chapter one). And writers who do this are more likely to create something which feels whole and complete.
Yet I think there's a place for stories like those by Henry James. They build a certain skill of making impressionistic images that can be very useful. And the stories themselves have a passion that cannot be easily replicated by the types of novels I often think of as being successful.
I'll have to re-read some of his work.