East of Eden Reflective Function Collapse: Psychodynamic Therapy, Steinbeck, and How to Heal the Characters

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 https://www.psychiatrypodcast.com/psychiatry-psychotherapy-podcast/episode-277-east-of-eden-reflective-function-collapse-psychodynamic-therapy-steinbeck-and-how-to-heal-the-characters Link to YouTube video https://youtu.be/_EOLQwlC3i0 By listening to this episode, you can earn 1.5 Psychiatry CME Credits. https://www.psychiatrypodcast.com/cme-program

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:14David Puder?

  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, threat, and detachment. We're going to be looking

• 0:57David Puder?

  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 patients, 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,

• 1:40David Puder?

  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, Latal, would you like to start?

• 2:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're gonna go kind of character by character and go through these points that are mentioned. I get to start with the unequivocal one, the ultimate bad guy in this story. The name is Kathy. I'm going to use Steinbeck's words as we introduce her. So, he says, "I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents. Some you can see, disshaping 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 and 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,

• 2:49Speaker 01

  can there not be 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 mouth-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

• 3:31Speaker 01

  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 with the thinking about monsters, monsters have powers and strengths that come from somewhere, right? So, Frankenstein was very strong. Dracula had like psychic pulls over people. He was immortal. But Kathy, Kathy's strength was being very patient and being very beautiful.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  Early in the novel, 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, there's 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

• 4:57Speaker 01

  and kind of preparing her that 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, 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

• 5:35Speaker 01

  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 franchised them. That's kind of what I want to say. He has these groups of women that he rotates from 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

• 6:16Speaker 01

  to oblivion. He's happy to kick them to the streets. Like, this is a cold, 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 mean, a lie, that she's scared and she's running away. She's running away from

• 6:56Speaker 01

  a double murder. But all he sees is this like 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-tilter, 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 tries, he beats her and attempting and

• 7:39Speaker 01

  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 Thorndyke's 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,

• 8:17Speaker 01

  leadership, intelligence, and physique. And he thought, um, intelligence should impact leadership and maybe some other personality qualities. But he found out also physique, which he thought would be an independent variable, really played into things. And 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, veristics, biases, they're really real and bad. This is like the earliest study

• 9:00Speaker 01

  I could find about it. And I found another one from 1972, Dionne, 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 judge 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

• 9:39Speaker 01

  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 Kathy, and what happens to other characters who come across her.

• 10:02David Puder?

  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, she was described in a biography I read as very beautiful, very attractive.

• 10:20Speaker 01

  I believe it.

• 10:21David Puder?

  Charismatic.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  So, as I said, she's beat up, left for dead, and, and she crawls 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 schoolteacher had come into town and the world was upended, like, men who had not been going to church were now flooding, like, people could not get into the door. And this was so disruptive, like, the women couldn't tolerate it. So they literally chased this schoolteacher out of town simply for being beautiful. So Steinbeck

• 11:03Speaker 01

  knows about beauty and he, 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 of the desire to rescue 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 ask him, Sam Hamilton, like, he can't really consider it, right? If we are about to get married or in a serious relationships, or friends are like, oh, what's great about this guy? Or

• 11:46Speaker 01

  what's great about this girl? Like, are they funny? Are they kind? Or that, he can't do it. Like, Adam doesn't, he can't see her. Doesn't even try, really. So they spend a year together. And the majority of that year is secondary to her pregnancy. And she tells him she's gonna 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 him in the arm and leaves. And then we had 12 more years of her, um, kind of pursuing evil tasks. She commits another

• 12:27Speaker 01

  murder. She takes over a brothel. She really uses the worst of people's sexual desires against him 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 gonna let Jeanette go into details about it. But I'm gonna kind of share the, if she wants to, the Kathy bits 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

• 13:04Speaker 01

  through Kathy's body. And like, how her shoulders have hardened up during this period, how there are 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 butt and go of his wife, there 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

• 13:47Speaker 01

  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 have bent close with a glass over the small print of her and reread 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 did not like, with a man she did not

• 14:27Speaker 01

  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, "When I was half grown, I made a man kill himself. He pretended to be good, too. And all he wanted was to go with, to die 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

• 15:10Speaker 01

  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 that people tried to give her. And that was what, a lot of what Adam's intents were, were actually pretty good. And so I'm tying this back to the McWilliams and the histrionic personality and the old podcasts. And like, how, how did this happen? How could this all come together? And I'm gonna take a piece out of the Diagnosis Book. And McWilliams

• 15:52Speaker 01

  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 power as 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 her gender affords,

• 16:36Speaker 01

  along with idealization and feminine wiles, the strategies of the subjectively weak in order to access male strength. Because she uses sex defensibly rather than expressively, and because she fears men and their abuses of power, she does not fully enjoy sexual intimacy. It's out of 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 route to

• 17:14Speaker 01

  power is through her sexuality. Her only route to power is that people desire her. And this is how we end up with, like, 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, uh, he does in the end give us one hopeful connection for Kate, which is something she never wanted the whole book. At the very end, he has her

• 17:56Speaker 01

  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.

• 18:22David Puder?

  Really good. Yeah. What do you think, in the end, she, 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?

• 18:41Speaker 01

  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 weakness. 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,

• 19:21Speaker 01

  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.

• 19:37David Puder?

  What do you think, what do you think about her response to her other son, Aaron, who-

• 19:44Speaker 01

  That she idealizes him.

• 19:45David Puder?

  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?

• 20:01Speaker 01

  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 like 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.

• 20:41Speaker 02

  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 Shell 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.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  I think you're right. I think that's how he introduces her. She doesn't have the capacity to see good.

• 21:34Speaker 03

  She did not see goodness as an asset. She saw goodness as a weakness to be exploited and manipulated.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  I don't even think she saw goodness. I think she thought behind everything was a malintent.

• 21:49Speaker 03

  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.

• 22:04David Puder?

  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, 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.

• 22:50David Puder?

  And her son did, right? And that's kind of what-

• 22:54Speaker 01

  And 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.

• 23:06Speaker 03

  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?

• 23:48Speaker 03

  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. Like, 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.

• 24:31Speaker 03

  Family was pretty supportive and nurturing. And yet, they have no interest in investing in goodness or growth. I don't understand it. That's an enigma to me.

• 24:44Speaker 01

  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, whoa, Hamilton, who's kind of just a businessman and knows how to exploit people for money. And so part of it is just like being, you know, a girl in 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.

• 25:28Speaker 01

  I don't know. But I was wondering that.

• 25:32Speaker 02

  She'd be a CEO of a company and make millions.

• 25:37David Puder?

  So one thing about her sort of personality and the defenses she was 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 Lethal is like the erotization as a way to achieve that goal. Like, you know, even in the schoolyard, 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?

• 26:16David Puder?

  And then, you know, so there's like this kind of like history of utilizing sexuality to have the omnipotent control.

• 26:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I agree. And maybe that 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.

• 26:43David Puder?

  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.

• 27:01David Puder?

  So, okay, so that's Kate Cathy. 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.

• 27:14Speaker 04

  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 comparing herself to Aaron. The beauty and, oh, 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 is 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?

• 27:48Speaker 01

  I think she's right about Joe. I don't think she's paranoid.

• 27:51Speaker 04

  Well, I think there is. She has to be, right? Given her status where she is, she's in a brothel. Thank you.

• 27:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:00Speaker 04

  But there is a level of like dissociative paranoia or something.

• 28:06David Puder?

  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 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?

• 28:50David Puder?

  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 congressmen 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 Xanax, controlled substances, but they're wanting to exit out of reality

• 29:32David Puder?

  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.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think all of that is right. I think she's holding so much anger, right? She has this like self fulfilling reality. Or her brothel is kind of one of the cruelest ones. The one where, you know, she leaves cut marks, she leaves heel marks. She likes to inflict pain, but she kind of gets into this story that all ever, everybody wants is pain and to give pain. And you're 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 Cal, being a son of Kate and Adam,

• 30:30Speaker 01

  it's because he looks like her. And my father is still in love with her. And I thought that was just so heartbreaking.

• 30:40Speaker 03

  Oh, yes.

• 30:41David Puder?

  And do you know who Cal looks like?

• 30:44Speaker 01

  No, like Charles.

• 30:47David Puder?

  Cal looks like Charles, Adam's brother.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:51David Puder?

  Who has sex with Kate on Adam's wedding night with Kate. So, yeah.

• 31:01David Puder?

  Maybe there's 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?

• 31:16Speaker 01

  He couldn't, he couldn't identify it.

• 31:19David Puder?

  He, he had a hard time pointing anything bad at anything but himself. And he got, 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, if you remember the description of her.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  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, but I know what you're saying. And then it's like over weeks, so she's, she's recovering.

• 32:01David Puder?

  Yeah.

• 32:03David Puder?

  I, 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 was Adam's father?

• 32:17David Puder?

  And who's going to take away Cyrus for us?

• 32:20Speaker 05

  I'll take that one. So Cyrus, he's the powerful 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, I, it's this idealized version of himself to cope with his own feelings of inadequacy.

• 33:00Speaker 05

  And an example is, you know, he had lost, um, 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 in the book, I'm, 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

• 33:46Speaker 05

  his son to, to, 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 advice, 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.

• 34:31Speaker 05

  And he just would seek validation from others than from his sons. And he would try to get control and recognition. And that's what, and, and he would transform his personal insecurity into authority and prestige. And what am I, I'm thinking what else about him? Cyrus needs, um, 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, um, he built this external image of himself to hide his internal doubts.

• 35:16Speaker 05

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

• 35:34Speaker 05

  The other parts of Cyrus from, from, that go back from when his, from when his sons were younger, his favoritism, and he, he created this rivalry between Adam and Charles, his two sons. So he, he, he created this favoritism and expectations of, 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, the, the power imbalance and the favoritism.

• 36:14Speaker 05

  So Cyrus favors his son Adam, 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, that his Cyrus liked, his father liked Adam's gift better. And he says, you like Adam's present better. And he immediately recognizes like the, the favoritism.

• 36:52Speaker 05

  And this, these emotional, the sibling conflict and emotional wounds, it contributes to Charles's lifelong feelings of rejection, resentment and insecurity. Cause Charles resents that Adam's favored.

• 37:07David Puder?

  Murderous rage, almost murderous.

• 37:10Speaker 05

  Right, right, right. It turns into, like to rage and fighting and anger. And, um, it turns into violence and he nearly, 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 a parent's actions can create jealousy, insecurity and lasting psychological conflict. Adam admires Cyrus and follows his life path. And Cyrus becomes Adam's model for manhood, influencing his decisions and worldview.

• 37:54Speaker 05

  And Cyrus teaches Adam to trust appearances and myths, making Adam vulnerable to disappointment.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  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. And his kind of, uh, military stories are, yeah, are, 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 that he loses it later.

• 38:31Speaker 05

  But Adam also idealizes Kathy too, like how his father, you know, I think that was, that was learned from the father.

• 38:41Speaker 01

  I think his father was pretty terrible at demonstrating relationships. Kind of the way he related to, uh, Alice Trask, who is Adam's stepmom and Charles's 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 a environment where it's not demonstrated at all. And they have no idea how to relate to women.

• 39:23David Puder?

  Oh, one thing I was thinking about was just how thick Cyrus, how 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 it, I was like, you have got to be kidding me. That was my first experience of a professional, someone like my, you know, a therapist with 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?

• 40:06David Puder?

  It's, you, 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 SEAL friends and they'll like, it's almost like they enjoy in their community, shining a bright light on the, the people with 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, 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.

• 40:49Speaker 03

  And it was interesting when he went to see him in Washington DC 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 official 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.

• 41:15Speaker 01

  Adam saw his father's loneliness too. He was the only one who, who said it.

• 41:22Speaker 05

  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 was the noble thing to, you know, the noble thing to do, because that's what his father would say.

• 41:35David Puder?

  Well, he was kind of, he was forced to join.

• 41:38Speaker 03

  He didn't want to join, I mean, he was, he had been beaten to a pulp by his brother and his dad marched the, you know, they enlisted her in and signed him up.

• 41:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. He, he said, I don't want to go. He, he said it several times because it reminded, when Kathy goes with Adam to the West, she tells him several times, I don't want to go. And so like Cyrus ignores Adam, Adam ignores Kathy.

• 42:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 42:06David Puder?

  Hmm. Got him shot.

• 42:08Speaker 05

  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, and, um, 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, the two boys, the sons and the family, the rest of the family. So.

• 42:43Speaker 04

  Well, and then it's repeated. I think that's the thing is you'll see that later on is that this, this generational influence is repeated in Aaron and Cal. Adam doesn't want it, doesn't want it, pushes away Cyrus. Charles is like feening after Cyrus's attention, doesn't get it. And Adam is still thrust into this like becoming a soldier, doesn't want to do it, then reenlists. And that surprises his own father that he is re-enlisting and that's his way of avoidance. And it's, I, it was interesting to me just to see the repetition, right? That generational repetition that we see or generational trauma that can continue.

• 43:28Speaker 04

  And I'll go over that with, with Aaron.

• 43:32Speaker 02

  I, I was just going to say another thing, a, 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, his mother is or his brother. And so I think it's, 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, we all sometimes.

• 44:05David Puder?

  A younger version of myself, a younger version.

• 44:07Speaker 02

  A younger, a younger boy and expression. But, but I think it's important to, to just constantly kind of sex with ourselves, you know, and to stay curious and are we missing something? And new things will come up all the time. There, you know, I've, 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, uh, you know, it forces us to, to, to really reflect on, well, what else could be going on? And there are things that we, 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.

• 44:52Speaker 02

  But the whole time when I was reading about Kate, I was thinking, well, this girl must have, 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?

• 45:05David Puder?

  And, and maybe that's your blind spot.

• 45:08Speaker 02

  Well, 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.

• 45:15David Puder?

  Yeah. I don't know, but I, I, I think that, um, we all have blind spots and of course I have blind spots too. And, and, 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,

• 46:00David Puder?

  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 like join him, go to, you know, don't re-enlist, go to, you know, military school and become an officer and come work with me, you know? He wanted Adam to join his narcissistic quest and Adam rejects him basically.

• 46:36David Puder?

  Okay. So next, let's do Adam.

• 46:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I have some thoughts about Adam. Um, I found, I found Steinbeck's book just fascinating. And I really, really, I, I listened to it on Audible like three times. And every time I listened to it, it was like, there's so much richness in it. And I think the, 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, and then the choices that, that people make and how that influences other people's choices. It is just fascinating to me.

• 47:24Speaker 03

  A little bit of my own experience, I think that really drew me to think a lot about the arc of Adam's story. I've, 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. Um, he didn't fall in love with her as a person. He fell in love with an idealized phantom of his own creation.

• 48:06Speaker 03

  And, 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've 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 worshiped 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.

• 48:51Speaker 03

  And, uh, first of all is Cyrus, his dad. He, and as we've gone over, he was a domineering, deeply dishonest patriarch who demanded absolute military grade obedience. And he treated Adam not so much as a son, but as raw material to be broken and reshaped. And, 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, 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.

• 49:35Speaker 03

  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, that he learned there.

• 49:49Speaker 03

  When Cyrus forced Adam into the army against his will, there was, there was a, a, a, a good deal of moral injury that took place there. And he experienced a lot of shame, revulsion, even a sense of betrayal of, of being forced into violence that he had, he had no interest in. He detested vi- 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, uh, the enemy. He would shoot over their heads or shoot around them.

• 50:30Speaker 03

  He got really good at missing. And even with that, he was, he still got like Purple Hearts and, and medals for bravery. And this created a deep seated fracture in his psyche, like this desperate, unfulfilled longing for pure, unblenished innocence.

• 50:50Speaker 03

  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, 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, 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, um, in, in that.

• 51:30Speaker 03

  And so then when Kathy arrives on his doorstep, you know, beaten to a pulp by the, the pimp that had, that she had manipulated, Adam Lee, Adam instantly casts 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 not a victim or a perpetrator.

• 51:59Speaker 03

  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.

• 52:31Speaker 03

  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, so Charles is, 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

• 53:14Speaker 03

  as, as innocent and weaker and vulnerable. And he almost saw him more as a sister than a brother. And, 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, the one time Adam threw, threw something, they

• 53:55Speaker 03

  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, and took a stick or a bat and just, you know, beat him. And there was never, like, the, the parents didn't explore it or figure out what was going on or address it, it just happened. And, 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

• 54:39Speaker 03

  feelings invites catastrophic violence. And so he adopts a defense mechanism of extreme passivity and emotional numbness.

• 54:50Speaker 03

  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 homicidal 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.

• 55:30Speaker 03

  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.

• 55:44Speaker 03

  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.

• 56:31Speaker 03

  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 is dressing his wounds after Charles almost beat him to

• 57:16Speaker 03

  death, um, she attributes those gifts to Charles. So even in, 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.

• 57:47Speaker 03

  So Kathy aims, 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.

• 58:32Speaker 03

  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

• 59:13Speaker 03

  that Adam is not looking at her, but a fantasy born from his childhood trauma.

• 59:20David Puder?

  Good, yeah. Wow.

• 59:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's fantastic. I think, um, he goes beyond, though, the Alice thing, like, when he's talking to, um, 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 a great, that's great honey, right? So he's like, almost in Cyrus's land in his ability to, to make her up, right?

• 59:51Speaker 03

  Yes. And it's so interesting because Samuel Hamilton met her, and within, you know, 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. Cause he sensed something was really, really wrong. And then we confided in him, you know, kind of intimated the same thing.

• 1:00:15David Puder?

  Do you, do you remember the, the vision Samuel Hamilton has later about who she reminded him of? I think it was him.

• 1:00:23Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:00:24David Puder?

  He.

• 1:00:24Speaker 01

  It was expanding, hung, hanged.

• 1:00:26David Puder?

  He saw when he was young.

• 1:00:29Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:00:30Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:00:31David Puder?

  A criminal get hung.

• 1:00:32Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:00:34David Puder?

  And there was this, like, dead, deadness in his eyes that was reminiscent, and it kind of like, it, it sent him back to that person. And he was like, I, 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. You know, I can't really.

• 1:00:55Speaker 03

  He wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt.

• 1:00:57David Puder?

  I'm gonna give this person the benefit of the doubt.

• 1:00:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:00:59David Puder?

  Like, maybe I'm, like, what am I, what is my brain doing to itself right now? You know?

• 1:01:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:06Speaker 01

  And he said if I was a better friend, I would have told him now, but 12 years later, he finally tells him, right? He's the one who wakens Adam 12 years later.

• 1:01:14David Puder?

  Yep, 12 years later, yeah.

• 1:01:17Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:01:18David Puder?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:20Speaker 03

  And, and, and you know, there's so much to be said about then the journey that Adam took, you know, to condescend with reality.

• 1:01:29David Puder?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:01:30Speaker 03

  To become, you know, a person with substance and desire and ability and, and to deal with actual reality. And I think one thing that really, that, that really grabbed me was in his conversation with Cal, uh, after Cal had been taken to jail, you know, he was swept up with everybody else that was in the bar and, 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, and it, and it feels like that's so, so rich with meaning for what Adam's experience was.

• 1:02:14Speaker 03

  Like, he, he had to learn, when he was, when he was a kid and the way he was shaped, it's almost like he couldn't take up space. He had to be dissociated, he had to live in non-reality, he had to, to, to try to fit in with whatever forces were pushing in in different directions. And, and as he developed and, 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, and it was his redemption.

• 1:02:48David Puder?

  Partial redemption.

• 1:02:49Speaker 01

  Partial redemption, I agree with that.

• 1:02:51Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:02:52Speaker 01

  I, I feel like, it's one of the most painful parts of the book is how he treats Cal, right? Like, he does Aaron, like, as much as he's grown, he's still very much.

• 1:03:02Speaker 03

  Oh, 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.

• 1:03:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:03:25David Puder?

  Yeah, really painful, really painful.

• 1:03:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:30David Puder?

  Okay, so we could talk about Lee or we could come back to Lee at the end.

• 1:03:36Speaker 03

  Who else do we have to talk about? Who else is?

• 1:03:38David Puder?

  We got Aaron and Cal. We've talked about Cal somewhat, the brother.

• 1:03:43Speaker 04

  No, we had Abra.

• 1:03:44David Puder?

  Abra.

• 1:03:45Speaker 04

  Abra.

• 1:03:47Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:03:47David Puder?

  I put, okay, so maybe to frame this for the audience, if you're still listening.

• 1:03:55David Puder?

  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.

• 1:04:14Speaker 03

  Do you think Sam Hamilton was too?

• 1:04:16David Puder?

  Sam had his moments. Yeah.

• 1:04:18Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:04:19David Puder?

  I mean, like we were talking about how Sam woke up Adam to the reality that Adam needed to name his children.

• 1:04:29David Puder?

  Okay, so Natalie, why don't you talk about Aaron? So Adam's son, Aaron.

• 1:04:36Speaker 04

  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. I, it was painful to read the, the section where it was Cal reminiscing on how he would get attention just by like caressing. Adam's leg and Adam would kind of pat him on the shoulder.

• 1:05:21Speaker 04

  And that's the, 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 his, on him in some way, he would kind of get a pat. And that was how he, he got love from, from Adam. So. Aaron is one of the literature's cleanest portraits of what we'd now call, I'd say like a deflated narcissist or vulnerable narcissist. He, 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.

• 1:06:04Speaker 04

  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 ways, suffocating others around him.

• 1:06:50Speaker 04

  And the architecture carries him from like a narcissistic vulnerable, vulnerability to this moral injury and collapse in the book. That is essentially his death. He enters into the military after he is, after he meets his mother, working in a brothel. After Cal had introduced them and the, he, his inability to integrate that into. See that his mother was who she was, he, it was mind boggling. He couldn't do it and he escaped. He ran away.

• 1:07:25Speaker 04

  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 gonna 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.

• 1:07:53Speaker 04

  He was, 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 is, wants to escape Selena. He wants to escape Selena. 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 this sense of idealization that she must be perfect.

• 1:08:35Speaker 04

  Lee makes a comment between, or Abra and Lee that she feels like she can't even smell, that 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 like narcissistic personality disorder. I think it was more of, and you guys, please help me, but like the obsessiveness with idealized, the idealization, like he could not.

• 1:09:12David Puder?

  I, I think he had like an obsessive personality, like the 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, 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.

• 1:09:39Speaker 04

  Well, and he was afraid of vulnerability too. I think that was something that came.

• 1:09:44David Puder?

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

• 1:10:16Speaker 04

  So talking about vulnerability, that kind of distrust, he would also become very angry. So when he became vulnerable, Aaron is exquisitely sensitive, but cannot tolerate vulnerability.

• 1:10:28Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:10:48Speaker 04

  And he becomes extremely angry and threatens that if she tells anybody, he would kill her. If, that he started crying. And.

• 1:10:59Speaker 04

  It's, it's just, it's interesting because he's so sensitive. He's a very sensitive individual, but he cannot tolerate vulnerability.

• 1:11:07David Puder?

  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.

• 1:11:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:11:22David Puder?

  And so it went to kind of like, yeah, other places.

• 1:11:28Speaker 04

  Uh huh. So I'm, I'm bringing this back to, um, I want to bring this Nancy McWilliams. It was on her Nancy McWilliams 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, there, 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 starts to feel like something is amiss, like he's not enough.

• 1:12:11Speaker 04

  There's something, he's inferior. And this, um, really comes about after the experience where 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, buy Adam's love. But the two boys, the twins, um, 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.

• 1:12:56Speaker 04

  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, um, so people around him are also shaping this. Perfect self that he needs to be.

• 1:13:24Speaker 04

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

• 1:14:06Speaker 04

  And he needs this perfect, perfect woman. Similar to Adam, who also like needs, doesn't want to see Kate for.

• 1:14:18David Puder?

  Yeah. Yeah, well, he has an idea. Yeah, 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.

• 1:14:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, and he's unable to, and that's the, 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, on to the ranch.

• 1:15:06David Puder?

  Which is a potential for progress, actually, which is father rejects. His father, no, no, no, I know better. I know better.

• 1:15:14Speaker 04

  That you need to go.

• 1:15:15David Puder?

  You need to continue at Stanford. This is how I'm proud of you. I'm proud of you for this.

• 1:15:21Speaker 04

  Which is like a repeat, right? Of that, that was what Adam's father did to him.

• 1:15:26David Puder?

  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, 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?

• 1:15:47Speaker 04

  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, or 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.

• 1:16:16David Puder?

  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.

• 1:16:28Speaker 04

  No, he was hidden.

• 1:16:29David Puder?

  That the truth was hidden from him. Yeah. And everyone thought he was too fragile to hear it in a progressive, thoughtful way.

• 1:16:40Speaker 02

  This contrast between Adam and Aaron, like when Charles is setting out to kill Adam, like he reveals to Adam that, you know, his mother was crazy and she was suicidal. And he expected us to really destabilize Adam and 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. So it's interesting to see the contrast.

• 1:17:10David Puder?

  There, 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.

• 1:17:26David Puder?

  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 you wouldn't suffer, so that they wouldn't suffer if they found out.

• 1:17:55David Puder?

  There's a lot, a lot in the book about telling the truth about big things, you know? And, and maybe we'll get to that a little bit more after we talk about Abra. But let's talk about Abra. Okay.

• 1:18:10Speaker 02

  Right, so Abra is initially Aaron's girlfriend. They meet when they're very young. And I do think that she, 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 seeking truth, like David just said, and Timshell, which is our ability to, to have choice in our lives. And so when, 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.

• 1:18:55Speaker 02

  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, and, and the world. So she, I would say she grows from, from sort of a narcissistic vulnerability of, of a child to a more integrated woman. She talks about how as, as a, as a child, that, you know, you are the center of the

• 1:19:35Speaker 02

  universe, but as you grow up, then, you know, you, 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, and she says that things come in from other people is that the complexity of, of things come into, into you as you're growing from a child to an adult. And, 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, she eventually, as the book goes on, she, she kind of outgrows Aaron eventually.

• 1:20:15Speaker 02

  And eventually she, she, she and of course, Aaron's brother, Cal, hit it off. And then at one point she tells him, tells Cal, she says, 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. And she's, and, and how she's, she's arrived to that, this 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.

• 1:21:00Speaker 02

  Lee is a bit of this, to me, it's sort of a sage or, 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, and, and he just asks her questions and lets her grapple with those questions. And, and she, she actually grows as a, as a result, instead of denying some, some truths. She's also kind of a contrast to, to Kathy or Kate, because although she was kind of,

• 1:21:43Speaker 02

  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, she chooses to, to accept evil side, evil sides of herself, of, of, of the people in her life and to not really just define herself by the past, but to, to just choose who she's going to become. And she really embodies a theme that, that, that David talked about early on in, in

• 1:22:24Speaker 02

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

• 1:22:57David Puder?

  Great character, really.

• 1:22:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:23:00David Puder?

  Really appreciate Abra.

• 1:23:03Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:23:18Speaker 03

  It was also really poignant, the relationship between Abra and Lee, you know, and that that moment in the kitchen where he said he really wished that she was his daughter. And and she wished he was her father. There was just a really raw, but real seeing of each other and connecting in a in a really sweet way.

• 1:23:46Speaker 01

  I feel like Lee was like the only parent to all three of those kids, right? To Aaron, Cal, and Abra.

• 1:23:55Speaker 03

  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 and raised in a laboring camp, basically by everybody there. It's it's amazing. The qualities that he developed.

• 1:24:20Speaker 03

  Which I don't know, are you, maybe you're going there next.

• 1:24:23David Puder?

  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 of minutes. Yeah, 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.

• 1:24:53David Puder?

  Maybe a lot more critical in the era in the US, 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're kind of like, it's under your defenses, oh, he's just a servant. But he is the moral authority. He raises Aaron and Cal. He is someone who 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

• 1:25:35David Puder?

  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 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.

• 1:26:19David Puder?

  And there's a couple lines I want to read and specifically.

• 1:26:26David Puder?

  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 US to pay off the debt. And his wife basically pretended to be a man so that she could go with him. And so

• 1:26:48David Puder?

  they're treated as human cattle. And, you know, the whip, the rope, the rifle

• 1:26:57David Puder?

  are the ways of disciplining.

• 1:27:00David Puder?

  So, okay, I'm going to read this. "I could 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.

• 1:27:24David Puder?

  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.

• 1:27:47David Puder?

  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.

• 1:28:27David Puder?

  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.

• 1:29:12David Puder?

  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 a house of fur, burrows? And my father became very Chinese then.

• 1:29:52David Puder?

  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."

• 1:30:15David Puder?

  "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.

• 1:30:26David Puder?

  "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 re-broke under him.

• 1:31:10David Puder?

  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.

• 1:31:35David Puder?

  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.

• 1:31:53David Puder?

  Adam was breathing hard. Lee continued with a 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."

• 1:32:23David Puder?

  And I think this is kind of like Dostoevsky's, when he wrote Brothers Khamisov, 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.

• 1:33:08David Puder?

  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 may be 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.

• 1:33:52David Puder?

  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 it, a thing in anger, Adam. Because he thought you had rejected him.

• 1:34:36David Puder?

  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 sharply, your son is marked with guilt, Adam 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.

• 1:35:16David Puder?

  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, 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, 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.

• 1:36:01David Puder?

  He looked down and closed 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 wariness. 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. Timshell. His eyes closed and he slept.

• 1:36:43Speaker 04

  Want to explain the timshell? I don't think we got there.

• 1:36:47David Puder?

  Timshell was in the story of Cain and Abel, which is kind of a central archetypal theme of this book and of all sibling rivalry. Cain kills Abel. And there's different translations of the word that was spoken to Cain 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. Timshell, thou mayest rule over, which is a choice. It's not thou shall, which is a requirement.

• 1:37:31David Puder?

  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 Cal, it was kind of like a blessing. Because it was, you can choose. If you, you know, 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.

• 1:38:10Speaker 04

  I really think that's powerful and something that I was excited to read about was Lee's description of timshell. 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, Lee had this, his birth was like monstrous. I mean, it was, it was really aggressive. And there was beauty within that and the perspectives that we can take

• 1:38:54Speaker 04

  when we are in suffering or when our patients are in 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, what it means.

• 1:39:29David Puder?

  Yeah. And I think, I think the way that Lee communicates that is believable. Because it's, 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, you know? So he could have been resentful. He could have been bitter, but he chose to connect with people and, and love people.

• 1:40:07Speaker 04

  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 wise man.

• 1:40:33David Puder?

  Yeah. So I think this is a good place to wrap it up, actually. Any closing words, any final thoughts? Lethal, anything?

• 1:40:43Speaker 01

  I had to couple together last minute that to read this book, I think I said adolescence. It was the first time I read it. It was this revelation of reflective function. It's time back's ability to put you into every single character and to feel with them. It is what makes this fantastic. And I, I hope listeners out there get a chance to read it.

• 1:41:07David Puder?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:08Speaker 04

  Agreed.

• 1:41:09David Puder?

  Even, 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. Maybe that's my own like just appreciation of stuff like this, you know?

• 1:41:34Speaker 04

  Maybe this podcast.

• 1:41:37David Puder?

  Maybe the sum total.

• 1:41:41David Puder?

  Yeah, maybe, maybe the, the symphony for us is not in writing a book, it's in,

• 1:41:48David Puder?

  you know, helping patients through their, through their journeys. And sometimes speaking truth when it's difficult.

• 1:41:57Speaker 01

  Did you love the Marcus Aurelius piece with Lee? I was like, oh, David's gonna love this.

• 1:42:02David Puder?

  Oh, I loved that.

• 1:42:02Speaker 01

  That was what he was reading.

• 1:42:04David Puder?

  It's okay. I loved it for a couple of reasons. One, because Lee stole the book from, um, 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, um, for those of you who know, like, uh, Dr. John Tarr, who was my mentor who passed away a couple, a couple of years ago, he gave me, um, his copy of Marcus Aurelius, which is like priceless. It was like, it's like a, it's like a hundred year relic of the past and it's just beautiful. Um, and, and so I too can leaf through my Marcus Aurelius and, and, um,

• 1:42:48David Puder?

  yeah, I'm glad you, you got that.

• 1:42:52Speaker 01

  So at one point, I don't know if we, we mentioned it, but like this book, this is like how we cope with rejection, right? This is a thing within father, son. This is a thing in the romantic relationships, even like, you know, Desi dies from this. It's like, can we get our patients to

• 1:43:09Speaker 01

  kind of live through rejection or life is so much better if they are not crippled by this one phenomenon of a surgeon and.

• 1:43:18David Puder?

  Yeah, yeah. And yet it's probably, I think, a stage to be with them in that feeling that like 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's, it says something very important. It says they loved, it says they cared, it said, says there was something meaningful that they touched.

• 1:43:45Speaker 03

  And, and the whole idea of tem shul, 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.

• 1:44:03Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:44:05Speaker 01

  Oh, what we wanted for Charles and what we wanted for Aaron, right? To, to be able to live through it.

• 1:44:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. In, in some ways, I wish that you could fast forward it and see how Cal and Abra developed in the aftermath. We'll never have that rest of that story, but it's, it's fun to ponder where those two could have gone.

• 1:44:28David Puder?

  Yep. I don't think I really had an appreciation of a tragedy when I was a young man. You know, and it's like in my older age, it's like I appreciated so much more.

• 1:44:41David Puder?

  Like having tragic parts of the story that are just like, oh.

• 1:44:46Speaker 04

  I've never, and I've never read any of Steinbeck's work. This is my first read of it. And I feel like I'm, I really appreciate that I read it now versus when I, I, I wouldn't have appreciated it when I was younger. I, I likely would have stopped reading it. Um, but I just, I, 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.

• 1:45:16Speaker 01

  Like I know everything was intentional in 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, why those two?

• 1:45:31Speaker 03

  Right?

• 1:45:33Speaker 01

  I think that's like, okay, I, I, I will grapple with that as we move forward.

• 1:45:41David Puder?

  Beautiful. All right, guys, we will leave it there for today. Okay?