During the week, we wrapped up Winesburg, Ohio by reading the final stories of the novel.  To my surprise, the ending of the book was relatively happy, as this novel, which almost entirely consists of depressing stories, ends as the beginning of George's journey towards manhood.  Within the story, Sophistication, George meets Helen for the first time in a while when she comes home for the weekend from her college in Cleveland, and they go for a walk down to the edges of the fair ground, where they sit on a decayed grandstand as night settles in.  They kiss briefly, but that impulse gives away to a sudden desire to run about in the darkness, regressing to the level of children at play.  Without the society pressuring the couple to act a certain way, they are able to regress and find themselves while in the moment of playtime.  When the two return from the their privacy, they walk back to town with a dignified fashion, very satisfied with how they spent the night.

By using George's and Helen's regression to innocence as a means of finding themselves as mature adults, Anderson is demonstrating a valuable lesson that adulthood does not always need to be serious. I find this to be a very important lesson because living with the right ratio of seriousness to silliness is a crucial factor to the wellbeing of most people. As high school is nearing an end, we are beginning to prepare ourselves for our lives as adults in the real world, where you need to work hard to be successful and where you are forced to endure social pressures to act a certain way. Many people obesess over these two aspects of adulthood and run themselves into the ground. Although it is important to work hard and act in the right manner, it is essential to not take everything so seriously and assign a certain amount of time to relax and enjoy life, so that life is more entertaining and less stressful.

Enoch Anderson

During the past couple weeks in class, we have been reading and analyzing the book, Winesburg Ohio by Sherwood Anderson.  Within this book, Anderson uses many stories to describe the feelings and thoughts of characters that are ugly in a way that represents society's ugliness.  A few days ago, we were assigned to read the chapter, "Loneliness," in which Enoch Robinson, the main character of the chapter, describes the story of his life, which results in complete isolation and loneliness.  As a young man, Enoch leaves Winesburg for New York City, where he studies to become and painter and joins a circle of artists.  However, he can not tolerate people and decides it is better to just interact with imaginary people, who always agree with him and never threaten his self-image.  Enoch ends up marrying a woman, and has two children, but he faces the same problem with his family as with the circle of artists, and ends up leaving them to live in his old apartment, where he generates more imaginary friends.  Again, Enoch meets a woman in his apartment and she comes over to visit him.  After telling her about the people who live in the room with him, and she seems to understand, however when she leaves, the imaginary people follow her out the door and never return.  Enoch Robinson then moves to Winesburg and has been alone ever since.

This story is very interesting to me because Enoch Robinson seems to parallel Sherwood Anderson, the author of the novel.  The most obvious similarity between Robinson and Anderson is that they both left their wives and children so that they could play with the ideas in their heads.  I find it shocking that Anderson would include a grotesque that walks away from his wife and kids, as those details must have been extremely painful to include into one of his greatest works.  As someone who does not have a degree in psycology, I cannot fully explain why Anderson would include such a detail, but I know it can explain a lot about his personality.  One possibility that I found interesting was that Anderson included the story of Enoch Robinson as a defense mechanism to cope with the fact that he actually left his family behind.  Another idea that is interesting is that Anderson could be explaining why he left his family.  In the story, Enoch is described as a "boy-man" because children are more sensitive and imaginative than adults.  The woman who drove Enoch back to Winesburg is described as being very grown up,the personification of adulthoood, and took all of his imaginary friends away.  By implying that regression can improve imagination, Anderson could be justifying the abandonment of his family because it would have improved his imagination.

Grotesque

For the psychoanalytic unit, we have been reading the book Winesburg, Ohio.  Written by Sherwood Anderson in the 1919, this book portrays certain figures from his unusual life.  Growing up in a small rural town, the Anderson family was began well off financially, but the father began drinking and they were forced to move from town to town.  The family finally settled in Clyde, Ohio, the town which Winesburg is based off of, where Sherwood Anderson left school at age 14 to take on odd jobs so he could help his family.  After returning to school and finishing his education, Anderson became a traveling salesman and married the daughter of a wealthy businessman.  The couple had three kids together before Anderson experienced a nervous breakdown and eventually walked away from his family and everything he had known to become a novelist.  Anderson utilized experiences from his unique life to write stories using Freudian theory describing the stories behind grotesques, characters that are ugly in a way that represent society's ugliness.

Each grotesque displays is characterized by a truth, which is the flaw that troubles the grotesque.  In Hands, the grotesque, Wing Biddlebaum, is a man that lives on the outside of town and is well known for his exceptional berry picking skills.  Wing Biddlebaum lives in Winesburg for 20 years in isolation for an incident that scarred him forever.  Before he moved to Winesburg, Wing was a school teacher in a town in Pennsylvania, who went by the name Adolph Myers.  Described as a man who "was meant by nature to be a teacher of youth," Adolph Myers was beloved by all of his students for his gentle and loving charisma.  After school, Adolph would caress his touch his students so that he could manifest dreams inside of them.  One night, a student had a nightmare where the teacher did "unspeakable things" to the student, and the town evantually formed a mob against the teacher.  Adolph Myers managed to escape the mob, however, when he came to Winesburg, he formed a complete disassociation with his hands.  For the next twenty years, Adolph Myers lived in isolation in Winesburg and was afraid out his hands.  At the end of the story, Adolph eats a few bread crumbs in a manner that could be mistaken for someone praying the rosary.  This implies that he feels like he has sinned and has subconscious guilt for the wrong reason.  From his traumatic experience, Adolph Myers forms a truth of the idea that trying to foster the learning of others is somehow wrong, and that drives him to isolation from society.

Which Defense Mechanisms Do You Use?

During the past week, we dove deep into each other's mind by starting the psychoanalysis unit.  To start the unit, we learned about the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, who specialized in hysteria and hypnosis, and eventually began his own practice in hysteria.  As a pioneer in his field, Freud created the theory of the three levels in the mind.  In this theory, the mind is broken into the id (primal drives), the ego (sense of personality) and the superego (morality).  These three levels of the mind are in a constant battle with eachother, but they work together to produce defense mechanisms, which determine how one functions in society.  In 1977, these defense mechanisms were classified into four categories: pathological, immature, neurotic and mature.  The defense mechanisms are ranked from functionability in society and they were so interesting that it took us nearly two classes to go over the four mechanisms

The first mechanism, pathological, has attributes that would make life miserable.  The traits of the pathological category include: delusional projection, conversion/hysteria, denial, and distortion.  All of these traits seem miserable to possess and I am glad that I do not have to live with them.  The second mechanism, immature, makes it difficult to get around in society, but still possible.  An immature person would display traits such as: idealization, passive aggression, projection, and somatization.  Although they are better than pathological traits, they still seem horrible to possess.  The third mechanism is neurotic, which will allow somebody to funtion, however they will seem a little bit odd.  Traits in this category include: displacement, dossociation, intellectualization, rationalization, regression and repression.  It is better not to have these traits, but I think we all show these traits every once in a while.  The final mechanism is mature, which is the ideal to live by.  People who show mature traits display: humility, mindfulness, acceptance, gratitude, altruism, mercy, humor, thought suppression, self regulation and sublimation.  These are the traits that I hope I live by.

Learning about these traits was very interesting, but it spawned the question, "Under what category do I fall in?"  I strive to fulfill the qualities of the mature defense mechanisms, but I'm sure immature and neurotic mechanisms can show up, especially the traits that isolate the subconscious.  As the schoolyear progesses, I will take more notice upon how I act and try even harder to fall under the mature category, and I will try to find some defense mechanism traits in my friends, and see what category they might fit in.