|
| Yalom: |
I appreciate you fitting
this time into your busy schedule at the Evolution of Psychotherapy
Conference (2000) for this interview. |
| Pittman: |
I love
being interviewed. |
| Yalom: |
Really?
Why? |
| Pittman: |
Because I
like to get that much attention from somebody,especially somebody who may ask me something that hasn’t been
asked before,and stimulate some thought. |
| Yalom: |
I like to
stimulate people. |
| Pittman: |
Great. |
|
| Yalom: |
Your book
has a bold title. It’s called Grow Up! How’d you come up with that
title? |
| Pittman: |
My first
book, Turning Points, was about
treating families in transitions and crises. The original title was Shit Happens, and they changed it. |
| Yalom: |
They? |
| Pittman: |
Frank Pittman
My publisher. I wrote another book, about infidelity, entitled Screwing Around, and they changed the
title to Private Lies: Infidelity and
the Betrayal of Intimacy. So I
wrote a book about men and masculinity, about fathers and sons and the search
for masculinity. And the title was Balls. They changed it to Man Enough. So I figured I could write
a book called Grow Up about—really
it’s about the happiness that comes from joining the adult generation, rather
than sticking with the narcissism of being in the child generation, the
generation to whom much is owed and who feels picked on allthe time. So I
called it Grow Up! I never thought for a moment they’d keep
that title, but they did. And then the day the book came out the publisher
went bankrupt. And has not been heard from since! |
| Yalom: |
So maybe
they should have changed that title? |
| Pittman: |
Maybe
they should have changed the title. The book’s doing okay; it’s just that the
publisher is not. They sold the paperback rights to St.Martin’s Press, which
is doing pretty well with it. |
| Yalom: |
Can you
summarize the thesis of Grow Up? |
| Pittman: |
... we’ve got a society full of good people who somehow get stuck
in adolescence.
The thesis is that people who feel like victims (people who feel that they’re
helpless and they need other people to do for them) are not going to be as
happy as people who see themselves as competent adults. And we’ve got a society full of good people who somehow get stuck
in adolescence. And I think we have that because we haven’t really seen
much in the way of adults making marriages work, making life work. Kids instead grow up seeing adults complaining
because the adults aren’t children. So the children can fight like hell to
make sure they don’t have to become adults. |
| Yalom: |
What do
you mean, "adults aren’t children?" |
| Pittman: |
People wear baseball caps now, trying to look as if they’re 12-year
old children, so nobody will expect them to be grown up. We’ve got a world
full of people who are trying to do that because they’re terrified of moving
into adulthood.
These adults are behaving like children. They screw around on their marriage, they
pout, they refuse to parent their children and instead complain to their
children because the children aren’t performing better for the glory of the
parent. We’ve got a society in which adulthood is not valued. And as a
result, we wind up with very unhappy people. See, if you find yourself in the
child generation, you really have a choice: you can declare whether you’re
going to be an adult or a child. You know you’re declaring that you’re going
to be a child when you go around blaming your life choices on your parents,
when you go around avoiding getting stuck in adult positions, getting stuck
in adult jobs, adult professions, and try to maintain the child’s position.
You’re being a child if you go around trying to get everyone to see you as a
child, by dressing yourself up as a child. People wear baseball caps now, trying to look as if they’re 12-year
old children, so nobody will expect them to be grown up. We’ve got a world
full of people who are trying to do that because they’re terrified of moving
into adulthood. And what they don’t realize is that if they felt
empowered enough to be adults, their ability to achieve happiness would be
enormously enhanced. |
| Yalom: |
I’ve been
struck by your bold and repeated use of the word "happy." In fact,
the subtitle of your book is How Taking
Responsibility Can Make You a Happy Adult. People don’t talk much about the actuality, or even the
possibility, of being happy. |
| Pittman: |
There’s this great belief that if you are
not getting everything your heart desires, you will be miserable. This is a
dangerous belief. The failure to be
blessed with a life that is a constant state of ecstatic wonder becomes a
psychiatric emergency.
They don’t talk about being happy. What they talk about is not being happy. What they talk about is that if
they don’t get their heart’s desire, they will surely be miserable. If
they’re not so crazily in love—with their job, with their wife, with their
child—that they just perform their responsibilities automatically, out of
overwhelming passion, then they will surely be miserable. There’s this great belief that if you are not getting everything your heart desires, you will be miserable. This is a
dangerous belief. The failure to be
blessed with a life that is a constant state of ecstatic wonder becomes a
psychiatric emergency. All the mental health people jump in and say,
"Oh, my God. They're not happy. Call the fire department. Maybe these
people shouldn’t have gotten married.
Sorry about the six kids and all.
But maybe they shouldn’t have gotten married. Maybe we’ll have to get
them divorced so maybe they can be happy with the 2nd, the 3rd, the 4th, the
5th, or the 6th husband or wife." I look at these people who
aremiserable in their marriages and their lives, and I think, I have the
responsibility to them, to make them aware that they have the capacity to
bring about their adult selves—that they have aresponsibility to their
children that’s going to affect the second half oftheir life enormously if
they don’t fulfill it. Maybe I’ve got
aresponsibility to the two other people that these folks would marry next if
they don’t learn how to be married the first time around. |
| Yalom: |
You have
previously mentioned your marriage as being a big source of happiness for
you. |
| Pittman: |
It’s been
a big source of reality for me. Some
days it’s kind of irritating. There’s a wonderful line at the end of American
Beauty when Kevin Spacey has been shot, is dying. His wife has been messing around onhim, can’t stand him. He’s looking at the pictures of his family
as he dies. He says it’s all coming
to him, as if all of it’s happening at the same time. "And the only
thing we can feel is grateful."
Now, to have somebody who’s willing to put up with you for forty
years, to have somebody who knows you‹it makes you so appreciative. Somebody else may have a better turned
elbow, cuter toes, or something like that.
Somebody else might tell jokes better or cook better or do better
carpentry, or some such thing. But
that seems so unimportant compared with having somebody really care about
you. Somebody who knows you. |
| James Dean and Modern Malaise | [top] |
|
| Yalom: |
How did
you personally come into adulthood.
When did you grow up? And what helped you to grow up? |
| Pittman: |
I grew up
in the 1950s. At that time, adulthood was popular. We aspired to it. It was
the pre-James Dean era. See, in 1955, James Dean came along. Elvis Presley
came in the same year. But James Dean appeared in three movies, in all of
which he sat around and whimpered and suffered because his father, or
father-figure, was not loving him enough. And then he sullenly collapsed on
some woman, taking like a child and giving nothing back. |
| Yalom: |
For the
benefit of those of us in the next generation trying to grow up, could you
remind us what these three movies are? |
| Pittman: |
The first
was East of Eden, then Rebel Without A Cause and Giant. The plot was the same in all
three of them. The guy who could not grow up because he had not received his
father’s approval, and trying to geta woman to take care of him. These were
the children of what Tom Brokaw calls "The Greatest Generation,"
the generation that fought World War II.
The men were the heroes that saved the world. All they had to do was risk
their lives. They came back home to be worshipped by women and be taken care
of and granted all manner of privileges. Only their sons didn’t want to go
risk their lives. They didn’t want to run the risk of dying. |
| Yalom: |
You’re
talking about Vietnam? |
| Pittman: |
Well, the
world was changing before Vietnam. Remember, there was Korea before Vietnam.
The world changed a lot between ‘45
and ‘68. The boys of that generation were expected to grow up to be
little soldiers. And they began to resist that effort. They began to refuse.
In many ways this was a good thing; in many other ways, it was a very bad
thing. Because while we ended up having a generation that produced social
change, we also had a generation that was highly resistant to the idea of
growing up. |
| Yalom: |
So it’s a
good thing if growing up doesn’t necessarily mean being soldiers and going out to kill people. |
| Pittman: |
... growing up does mean that
while your feelings are very interesting, they’re not the only thing that’s
going on in the universe today.
But growing up does mean that
while your feelings are very interesting, they’re not the only thing that’s
going on in the universe today. And however lovely your feelings
are, and however fascinating your complicated state of mind, there are things
that need to be done. And if you’re going to take on a partner, there are
responsibilities there. If you’re going to have children, there are
responsibilities there. And you can’t really run out on those
responsibilities and maintain much of a senseof honor and integrity. You
can’t run out on those responsibilities and really grow up in a way that
makes you proud of your life’s choices in the second half of your life. |
| Yalom: |
So I hear
you saying that one thing that helped you grow up was the historical times
that you lived in. Growing up was
expected; it wasn’t really a question. |
| Pittman: |
I was
never given a choice. I went to
college in four years. I was not given a choice of taking six or seven or
eight years because I wanted to "experience" myself. Nobody in my
generation was. |
| Yalom: |
But what
personally helped you to grow up? To
really grow up, not just to fulfill those roles. |
| Pittman: |
By the
time I was 25, I was a doctor, a husband, and a father. I might very well
have wanted to go off to Tahiti and paint.
But that just didn’t seem like much of an option! If you don’t consider it an option, then
you don’t go through the rest of your life pouting because you didn’t get to
do it. I mean, at a certain age, I
wanted to run off with the circus! At
another age, I would have liked to have been a cowboy. By the time I was moving toward adulthood,
certainly by the time I got out of college, it became apparent that hey, I’ve
got the abilities that are required to become an adult. If I become an adult, then I will have all
of these rights and privileges. I
will have honor and integrity, and I
will be respected by all sorts of people.
There will be all manner of good things that will happen to me. |
| Who the Hell is Frank Pittman to Tell Me Anything? | [top] |
|
| Yalom: |
So you
became a psychiatrist, and you noticed that a lot of your patients haven’t
grown up. They come into your office,
and some of them know some things about you and what your values are. I can
imagine them are thinking, "Who the hell is Frank Pittman to tell me
anything? To tell me how I should
grow up?" |
| Pittman: |
"What
an ass! How dare he tell me anything.
He’s just like my daddy; he’s just like my mamma; he’s just like the
assistant principal. How can anybody
tell me what to do? I want what I
want when I want it. I’m not going to
grow up and you can’t make me!" |
| Yalom: |
So
whatever they know about you beforehand , probably within the first five
minutes that you open your mouth, they’re going to get a strong sense of what
your values are. |
| Pittman: |
Most of
my patients have heard about me before they come in. |
| Yalom: |
I don’t
believe in pure therapeutic neutrality per se, but itseems to me that you’re
on the very opposite end of that spectrum.
So if people get such a clear sense of what your values are, how does
that impact your work with them? |
| Pittman: |
I am
empowering. I’m making them aware
that they have the power to do things they didn’t know they could do. They
really do not know that they can act contrary to their emotions. When they
feel mad, they react mad. When they feel sad, they act sad. When they feel bored, they act bored. They
are not aware that if they behave differently from the way they feel, in some
sort of thought-out way, they may very well achieve exactly what they’re
seeking. |
| Yalom: |
According
to Frank Pittman? |
| Pittman: |
I don’t
have control over them. I can’t make
them do what they don’t want to do. I
can just make them aware that they can do things differently from the way
they’re doing them. |
| Yalom: |
What you
bring to the work, your values, your views—it has got to have a big impact
on your relationships with your clients.
You bring a lot of yourself into the room. |
| Pittman: |
A lot of
myself is in the whole office. My
wife runs the office. Until recently, my daughter was working with us. |
| Yalom: |
She’s a
psychologist? |
| Pittman: |
Both of
my daughters are psychologists. One
of them I write with, and one of them I do therapy with. But when people come in, they really enter
my life. Much more than I enter
theirs. They’re in my space; they’re
in my milieu. They’re experiencing me
and how I think and how I evaluate things and how I make decisions. |
| Yalom: |
Again,
how does that impact the type of therapy you do? |
| Pittman: |
They’re
perfectly capable of saying, "I’m not going to do it and you can’t make
me." They’re perfectly free to
not come back. When I make people
aware that they don’t have to break off contact with their families, they
don’t have to quit their job, they don’t have to leave their marriage, they
don’t have to put their children up for adoption. That they really could do something different. Despite the fact that they’re doing
exactlywhat they’re feeling, they
could do something different that might produce a different outcome. And while I might offer one possibility or
two or seventeen possibilities about something they might do differently,
they cancome up with a whole lot of possibilities on their own. Many more than I can come up with.
My
contribution is my optimism that they have the power to do things differently
from the way they have been taught to do things. From the way they have been accustomed to doing things. I see people who areviolent; I see a lot
of people who are screwing around; I
see people who are kicking and hollering at their kids all the time; I see people who jump from job to job to
job, finding something to be displeased with in all ofthem. These people don’t have to do that. It’s self-defeating for them to do it, and
I can make them aware. |
| The Movies and the Psychotherapeutic | [top] |
|
| Yalom: |
How do you make them aware? What do you do? |
| Pittman: |
Send them
to the movies. Send them out reading
novels. The novels and the movies are
opportunities to examine people making decisions. Feeling what they’re
feeling, thinking it out, taking action of one sort or another. They get to
spend a few hours in somebody else’s head, in somebody else’s life. I tell them stories. I tell them stories from my own life; I tell them stories from other people’s
lives. I just go through the process
with them of how they make the decisions that they’re making. That just because they’re mad at somebody
doesn’t mean they have to hit them. Just because somebody cuts them off in
traffic, they don’t have to shoot them. They don’t have to do just what they
feel like doing. If they see somebody
who turns them on, they don’t have to jump them. If the kids get to them, they don’t have to kick them. But there are people who don’t know that. |
| Yalom: |
You have
a love of the movies. |
| Pittman: |
I have a
love of the movies. I do. I want my
myths to come at me bigger than life. I want big myths. I want John Wayne-,
Katherine Hepburn-size myths. I have
this great love for the movies that I guess comes from growing up in rural
Georgia and Alabama and thinking that happiness was elsewhere. That there must be great excitement
elsewhere. It took me coming into
adulthood to appreciate what we had in those little towns. Because at the
time I wanted to get to the big city.
I wanted to get to Atlanta. |
| No Neutralily and No Pussyfooting Around | [top] |
|
| Yalom: |
I can
imagine someone reading this interview might think, "Frank Pittman’s in
there kind of sermonizing, telling people what to do," rather than
helping people explore and come up with their own solutions. Can you try and give a picture of how you
help them reach these decisions? |
| Pittman: |
I was
looking at a tape I made about ten years ago, interviewing a couple. The man
had been screwing around for 20 years.
His wife found out about it.
And in talking with him about it, he just assumed that all the other
men were doing the same sort of thing that he was doing. And the magic moment in all of this was
when he said, "I must have been the only man who was feeling what I was
feeling." I said, "No,
no. I think we all feel that way. I think we all enjoy looking. But it feels safer if you know you’re not
going to act on it. What did you
think everybody else was doing?"
He said, "I thought everybody else was messing around just the
way I was." I said,
"No. Some people were and some
people weren’t and things generally went better for the ones who
weren’t."
Now, I’m
not shoving anything down his throat.
If you’re being honest with your partner, then you have this magical
thing of knowing that there’s somebody who knows you, warts and all, who
knows you in all your foolishness, and puts up with you anyway. And there can be no more wonderful feeling
in life than that. Whereas, if somebody thinks you’re perfect and you’ve
faked them out into thinking that, the fact that that person loves you
doesn’t mean shit. Because they don’t know you. |
| Yalom: |
If you
don’t mind, I’d like to back up and get a sense of how you evolved into the
kind of active, perhaps moralistic kind of therapist that you are. |
| Pittman: |
They were never able to convince me
that I was supposed to sit there like a stuffed teddy bear after a stroke and
pretend not to understand anything that was going on and not have any
thoughts about it.
Well,
unfortunately I didn’t get trained very well in psychiatric residency. They were never able to convince me
that I was supposed to sit there like a stuffed teddy bear after a stroke and
pretend not to understand anything that was going on and not have any
thoughts about it. So I got involved in working with families. I grew up in a family where everything,
all explanations, were 3-generational.
Everything was connected with Grandma. That was my growing up in Alabama and Georgia. They brought Nathan Ackerman and Margaret
Mead and whoever I needed to teach me. |
| Yalom: |
Who’s
"they"? |
| Pittman: |
... we were going through a
period of assuming that what therapists did was being neutral and assuring
everybody that whatever damn fool thing they wanted to do was perfectly okay.
The
Department of Psychiatry at Emory.
They were just getting started; they had lots of money and very few
residents. It was wonderful. A great
experience. It’s just that they didn’t teach me how to be psychoanalytic. I became a family therapist instead. I hooked up with some people who had
gotten a grant from NIMH, and went out to Denver and spent four years
researching community mental health, learning how to keep people out of
psychiatric hospitals by doing family therapy at home. It worked well, we got great results, we
won awards--it was all fabulous. I
became head of psychiatry at the local, great big charity hospital back in
Atlanta, and was teaching at Emory. I
did that for about four years and then went into private practice.
Finally I
decided to write the book about family crises. The first step in writing the
book about family crises was to write achapter on infidelity, because that
was the major crisis that was coming to my attention. In my family, people didn’t screw around. The ones who did, we talked about it. We used them as object lessons. So I had a pretty clear idea that this
was irregular behavior. People had
agreed not to do that and they were doing it, and sure enough all hell was
breaking loose. Sometimes all hell
was breaking loose in that they were people mad, and sometimes they had even
bigger problems: they were falling in love with the people they screwed
around with! God knows, this is
theroad to unhappiness and instability. So I wrote this book about family
crises, including the chapter about infidelity. The publisher said, "You can’t write about infidelity;
that’s a moral issue." It’s
like, "Here, I’ll show you all these wonderful textbooks on marriage
that go on for 400, 800 pages without ever mentioning infidelity. You can do that, if you set your mind to
it."
So I took
it to another publisher. Then I wrote
Private Lies, the one on
infidelity, which was more or less for a popular audience. I had written Turning Points,the first one, the one on family crisis, with the
idea that therapists could give it to their patients. I wrote
Private Lies with the idea that patients would bring this to their
therapists. |
| Yalom: |
Why? |
| Pittman: |
Because we were going through a
period of assuming that what therapists did was being neutral and assuring
everybody that whatever damn fool thing they wanted to do was perfectly okay.
That they didn’t have to give any thought to the impact of their
actions on anybody else. |
| Yalom: |
You tend
to make (in your books and right now) some pretty strong and provocative
generalizations about all sorts of people, including therapists. |
| Pittman: |
Well,
pussyfooting around is time-consuming. |
| Yalom: |
I think a
lot of therapists reading this interview are going to think, "Hey, I
don’t do that!" |
| Pittman: |
Good for
them! If they don’t do that, then
they should send me their card and I’ll send them referrals. If they are willing to take strong
values, if they are willing to use their experience as therapists to mold
their own values, to make sense out of life, to make sense out of the human
condition and how to live it and how to make it work, then they’re developing
wisdom. And if they’re developing
wisdom by really challenging the cultural norms, challenging the social customs,
and trying to figure out how things connect with one another, what actions
will cause what reactions, then they’re going to get wise. I’ve noticed that therapists who have been
practicing for 10 or 15 years get over their fear of hurting people. And they begin to realize that this is a
human encounter between them and somebody else. And if they can convey their experience of life, their
experience of the sort of dilemmas, the sort of life stages that their
patients are going through, as well as hearing what their patients have to
say, then it’s a collaborative effort for coming to an understanding of life. |
| Yalom: |
It’s
great when that happens. |
It’s marvelous. And if therapists are being honest, rather
than being neutral, if they’re really having fun, if they’re finding the
humor in the human condition, then therapists can help people go from the tragic position that their feelings
must be all determining, to the comic position of believing that their
survival is crucial. |
| Pittman: |
It’s marvelous. And if therapists are being honest, rather
than being neutral, if they’re really having fun, if they’re finding the
humor in the human condition, then therapists can help people go from the tragic position that their feelings
must be all determining, to the comic position of believing that their
survival is crucial. If we can get people to
change in order to protect themselves from the certain disaster that will
come from continuing the patterns that they’re in, it becomes a dance that is
marvelously celebratory. Therapy must be fun. If it’s not fun, you’re not
doing it right. |
| Yalom: |
It’s not
always fun. |
| Pittman: |
Sometimes
people have to go through periods of convincing you that they feel bad. Once you can convince them that you are
convinced that they feel bad, then you can start talking about life and about
how to make choices and what to do about the fact that they’re feeling
bad. What sort of action they can
take, what sort of choices they can make, what sort of things they can do
that can enable them to live with themselves despite the fact that their life
isn’t perfect, that the world isn’t perfect, and they’re feeling something
they don't want to feel. |
| Therapy is No Place for Handholding | [top] |
|
| Yalom: |
You are
quite critical of traditional
therapists--that they are hand-holders and don't take tough positions. |
| Pittman: |
I think
we went through a period in which this passive, neutral approach was
encouraged. My experience is that the
longer therapists practice, the more comfortable they get as therapists, the
less likely they are to be neutral. The less likely therapists are to be hand-holders, and the more
likely they are to make this a human encounter between more or less equals,
or at least equal in the sense that we’re all mortal and we’re all idiots and
none of us is quite what we’d like to be. |
| Yalom: |
How long
have you been practicing as a therapist? |
| Pittman: |
Forty
years. I started my psychiatric residency forty years ago. |
| Yalom: |
You said
a few minutes ago that you think it takes 10-15 years for a therapist to come
into their own, to not be afraid. |
| Pittman: |
It takes
10-15 years to reach the point that they are not thinking of people in terms
of their pathology. And they’re not being protective of people, trying to
keep them from living their lives. |
| Yalom: |
They’re
going to lead their lives anyway. |
| Pittman: |
Coming to
the rescue is not what makes them therapeutic. It’s the human encounter.
It’s the exploration of the movies and the novels and the life going
on, the history going on. That’s
what’s empowering. |
| Yalom: |
But
you’ve got to find their language.
You may love movies; that may be a great medium for you, so you’d love
to send your clients out to see movies, but they may need something very
different. |
| Pittman: |
I have
clients who bring me rap music that expresses what they feel. Country music, with all those lessons in
low rent reality, is full of wisdom, and opera, with all those out of shape,
not very bright characters feeling everything so desperately, is full of bad
examples of crisis management. I love
it. |
| Yalom: |
So you
put on the rap CD in your office and listen to it? |
| Pittman: |
I have
dutifully listened to a whole lot of very bad music that sounds like
industrial noise to me, but tells me what they feel—and what it must sound like to filter reality through
their brains. But in my office I
generally keep Mozart or Haydn or Beethoven playing. It keeps my brain organized, it keeps me
at peace. It makes me smart. |
| Yalom: |
So, I’m
in the 10-15 year category. You’re in
the 40 year category. What would you
want to tell people like me and my colleagues about what you’ve learned? |
| Pittman: |
Read
novels, go to movies, and normalize what you’re seeing in your office. Turn it into the human condition. Turn the crises of life into stages of
development. |
| Yalom: |
You
talked about the old generation of men: that you had to fit into certain
roles. |
| Pittman: |
I don’t
know if I had to. I had the opportunity to. |
| Yalom: |
But there
weren’t a lot of choices in that regard. |
| Pittman: |
No. |
| Yalom: |
So now we
do live in a different world. And
you’re saying, "There’s some great value in these obligations. These expectations that you’ll grow up and
be a man, and a woman, and accept that responsibility." |
| Pittman: |
The
beauty of it is that it’s now possible.
Because we’ve largely done away with gender. Gender no longer has to be determining.
That helps enormously. |
| Yalom: |
I think
we also have a greater opportunity that we can do that: that we can be men
and women and yet have a much fuller, broader definition of what masculinity
or femininity is. |
| Pittman: |
Life is fun, therapy is fun!
But only if you’re not feeling like a victim.
What
people don’t understand—and this is the reason I keep talking about it—is how much happier they’d
become if they’d accept the responsibility for the
give and take of their relationships. If they accept the responsibility for
parenting or marriage or careers or their social responsibilities— picking
up the trash on the highway, or whatever it is. If they see that they’re privileged to live with these people
who are willing to put up with them, they’re privileged to live in this
society, on this planet and that they owe something back, they’ll end up
feeling very good about themselves. |
| Yalom: |
That sounds like a good place for us to stop. |
| Pittman: |
It’s
fun. Life is fun, therapy is fun!
But only if you’re not feeling like a victim. |
If you have comments on this interview, please send them to the Psychotherapy.net editor, or submit your comments in our Guestbook.
