by Danni Biondini, LMFT

I ended the decade reading what was introduced to me as the great social novel of 2019, a work of auto-fiction which explores the crisis of language and masculinity at the root of today’s political landscape. The book: The Topeka School by Ben Lerner. 

It’s a novel that suggests we stop reading theory as evidence of white men’s universal subject position and instead read it as evidence of white men’s pathology. It proffers that psychoanalysis is a language game which ‒ like politics ‒ is played by men who control reality with the words they use to shape it. 

At the center of the novel is Adam, a high school senior and debate star. Although a budding poet and son of psychoanalysts, when angry he’s reduced to what his mom describes as, “ventriloquizing some kind of mash-up of masculine gibberish.” 

His parents, both psychoanalysts at the Menninger-style clinic that Lerner pseudonymously refers to as The Foundation, each have their own chapters. In one, Jane, the mother ‒ a thinly-veiled Harriet Lerner ‒ writes of her training as a psychoanalyst:

"Once at a staff meeting I brought up the issue of salary differentials between men and women and later that day, when I was on Caplan’s couch, he encouraged me to think about how my concerns about being paid less than men might relate to penis envy. He saw evidence of ‘phallic strivings.’ Once I asked another senior analyst why he referred to male postdocs as ‘Doctor’ and female postdocs by their first names and there I was, on the couch again, getting the penis envy lecture. Objecting to the diagnosis of penis envy was a sure sign of penis envy." 

In this example, and throughout, Lerner makes it clear that language has a toxic masculinity problem. In this world, people ‒ Men-people, Policy-people, but also Psychoanalyst-people ‒ use language more to obfuscate the truth than to elucidate it. 

While Lerner doesn’t address the cause of this masculinity crisis, the book does center around its consequences: namely, an act of violence by one of the father’s patients, one of the so-called “lost boys.” The father is an expert in the treatment of these boys, meaning he knows how to listen to them. In his chapter, he says:

"What I knew as much by instinct as by training was that when a boy like Jacob shows up in your cramped but light-filled office, you should not under any circumstances ask him to account for his behavior. Jacob would be the last person capable of such an account; if he had the language he wouldn’t express himself with symptoms." 

Writers, like psychoanalysts, recognize the need for language as a substitute for symptoms. Of course I believe this; I’ve got a lingering loyalty to Lacan. But Lerner’s novel problematizes this notion: what use is psychoanalysis when the language available to us is hardly better than the symptom? 

Language gives shape to our interiority, but that shape is, in turn, contoured by the shape of the society it exists in. Under these conditions ‒ in which our speech always constrains us to ventriloquize some kind of mash-up of the culture ‒ what are the limits to how language can do its work?