Ambivalence Is Cancelled!

Jerry Seinfeld gave a commencement speech on May 12th  at Duke with these words of wisdom:

I will give you my three real keys to life. No jokes in this part, okay? They are number one. Bust your ass. Number two. Pay attention. Number three. Fall in love.

Number one. You obviously already know. Whatever you're doing, I don't care if it's your job, your hobby, your relationship. Getting a reservation at M Sushi. Make an effort. Just pure stupid. No real idea what I'm doing here effort. Effort always yields a positive value. Even if the outcome of the effort is absolute failure of the desired result. This is a rule of life. Just swing the bat and pray is not a bad approach to a lot of things. 

Number two. Pay attention. If you're in a small submersible that looks like a giant kazoo and going to visit the Titanic seven miles down at the bottom of the ocean, and the captain of the vessel is using a Gameboy controller. Pay attention to that. What are you checking out down there? Oh, I see what happened. This ship sank. Now I understand why it never made it into port. If the fish where you are have eyes like Shelley Duvall and a bendy straw with a work blade hanging off their head, you do not belong there. If the fish are going, I can't see a goddamn thing. You won't either. 

Number three, fall in love. It's easy to fall in love with people. I suggest falling in love with anything and everything. Every chance you get. Fall in love with your coffee, your sneakers, your blue zone parking space. I've had a lot of fun in life. Falling in love with stupid, meaningless physical objects. But the object I love the most is the clear barrel BIC pen, $1.29 for a box of ten. I can fall in love with a car turn signal switch that has a nice feel to it. A pizza crust that collapses with just the right amount of pressure. I have truly spent my life focusing on the smallest things imaginable, completely oblivious to all the big issues of living. Find something where you love the good parts and don't mind the bad parts too much. The torture you're comfortable with. This is the golden path to victory in life.

Wonderful words of advice, right? Not every graduate chose to listen. Because Jerry Seinfeld supports Israel, many booed him when he came onto the podium, and dozens of students walked out of the ceremony when Seinfeld received his honorary degree. 

Gone, I fear, are the days when we could think, "Well, I don't like his stance on X, but I do want to know what he has to say about Y."

I'm worried that an essential facet of the human psyche seems to be increasingly ignored in the world—ambivalence. 

Ambivalence occurs when we have conflicting feelings, like love and hate, toward the same object or person. When we can't tolerate our ambivalence, we often double down on one side of our internal conflict. 

This primitive tactic is the opposite of integration. It's polarization. We go all in: "I hate what Jerry Seinfeld thinks about Israel, so I reject him altogether. "The word for this kind of primitive defense is "splitting."  

By neatly splitting the good from the bad, we tidy things up in our minds, but at a great cost. The ability to hold competing thoughts and feelings side by side is actually a psychological achievement!

Psychoanalyst Melanie Klein explored ambivalence in the mid-twentieth century, and her work is still revered. Klein talked about the primitive defenses of an infant who cannot integrate the "good" and "bad" aspects of their mother and instead sees her as two separate objects—the gratifying "good" mother and the frustrating "bad" mother. The infant directs love towards the good mother and hatred/aggression towards the bad mother. 

According to Klein, over time, the infant starts to realize that their mother is the same person with good and bad traits or emotions. By bringing together the many sides of the mother, the infant resolves their ambivalence and doesn't need to flip from all good to all bad feelings. 

Embracing ambivalence is nuanced and leads to more rational thoughts and decisions. Rejecting ambivalence in favor of the extremes means living in a black-and-white world with no room for nuance—in other words, living in a world of an infant—good mommy vs. bad mommy.

But let's be honest. There's security in primitive thinking and feeling.  It's a false sense of security, but it feels good to know, without doubt, who is evil and who is good, what is wrong and what is right.  It's a tidy world.  But to maintain this rigid thinking, we must avoid imagining what it feels like to stand in someone else's shoes, and this limits our perspective.

In psychotherapy, our goal is to help people become more psychologically flexible rather than rigid.  As people become less black and white and, instead, tune into the shades of gray that are part of a rich life, their world opens up. 

But, sadly, this journey is not happening for many younger generations like these college graduates who are becoming increasingly afraid of standing in the nuanced place of "On the one hand, I see/think/feel X, but on the other hand, I see/think/feel Y."  Standing in the middle of any conflict has become all but criminalized. 

Bringing Back Complexity

Here's what I never say to a patient: "You should be more primitive, less flexible—you know, more like an infant." 

I don't say that because that would be going in the wrong direction. Therapy is about integrating all of ourselves, all of our experiences, and all of our emotions. This is how we grow.  But it feels like we're going in the wrong direction – towards a more primitive way of being in the world.

In an earlier blog, I wrote about our need to complexify (yes, I'm using it as a verb) and find the layers of nuance.  In thinking back to a marriage therapy concept, I described the importance of:

… figuratively, "putting something on the table and looking at it together." When we put something (a problem, big or small) on the table and look at it together, we are joined in our problem-solving. So, instead of focusing on the other, we look at what's on the table. We have many problems to put on our national and global "table" to look at together. The marriage of this country and the vows we've taken to democracy and freedom depend on learning this skill.

We need to reclaim our ambivalence. Statements like "I'm not sure how I feel," "I feel many conflicting emotions about this," or "I could argue both sides of this" give voice to our ambivalence.

The events of October 7th, the Israeli hostages, and the ongoing war in Gaza are horrific and the source of real anguish. So many of us are trying to make sense of our conflicted feelings that can't be reduced to a single slogan on a poster board. But the news coverage we see all day is about simple slogans. 

In his closing remarks, Seinfeld told Duke's class of '24:  "Just don't lose your humor. It's not an accessory. It's your Stanley Cup water bottle on the brutal long hike of life. And humor is not just for the stress relief or even just a simple fun of laughing, but for the true perspective of the silliness of all humans and all existence. That's why you don't want to lose it."

When you think about it, the funniest people are the ones who appreciate the complexity and messiness of it all and can laugh at it.  They can roll around in the ambivalence that's part of life.  

"Find something where you love the good parts and don't mind the bad parts too much. The torture you're comfortable with. This is the golden path to victory in life."  Seinfeld was referring to acceptance of ambivalence as a part of life, and he's right.

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