Dr. Stein will be presenting this material with film excerpts on Friday night, April 23 at 7:30 at NYU Langone Medical Center (Smilow Seminar Room). For further information call the Psychoanalytic Institute office at 212 263-6243.
There is a fundamental paradox which we each must bear alone. We experience the world through our personal consciousness in a manner that puts us perpetually at the center; yet, we know that we are not at the center. It is only in the quiet of our minds that the contradiction can be resolved. For those who are creative, all of us, more or less, there are quiet moments when we enjoy the solitude—alone with beautiful music, a work of art, a daydream, swinging on a hammock, reading a book, losing ourselves in an idea or other creative work, enjoying the pleasure of ourselves. The creators of the film, A Beautiful Mind, have captured that human quality in John Nash. This is a man who can who can immerse himself in the patterns of mathematics. They have found a link between the solitariness of genius and psychosis and a need that we all share, quietly.
These private moments are particularly treasured when we find ourselves in a harsh environment, when the world around us is not so beautiful as the inner world, when “The truth is that I don’t like people much and they don’t much like me.“ We are introduced to Nash as he meets his fellow aspiring mathematicians around a punchbowl in a Princeton courtyard. The others seem to know each other, while Nash is a stranger to them. A confident young man named Martin Hanson joins the group. After greeting the others, he turns to Nash,who is standing by the punchbowl, and says,
“I’ll take another.”
“Excuse me?”
“A thousand pardons. I simply assumed you were the waiter. … An honest mistake.”
“Well, Martin Hanson. It is Martin, isn’t it?”
“Well, yes, John it is.”
“I imagine you’re getting quite used to miscalculations. I’ve read your preprints, both of them, one on Nazi scientists and the other on non-linear equations, and I am supremely confident that there is not a single seminal or innovative idea in either one of them. Enjoy your punch.” (Nash walks off.)
“Gentleman meet John Nash, that mysterious West Virginia genius, the other winner of the distinguished Carnegie scholarship.”
Through Nash, we experience the pleasure of genius, strength and physical beauty along with qualities that we experience at our most uncomfortable moments, the social ineptness and defensive sarcasm of the outsider, an inability to relate to those around us, a facility for saying the wrong thing, particularly to those we most want to please and attract.
A pretty girl at a Princeton bar is drawn to Nash’s good looks, but he doesn’t know what to say. She suggests he buy her a drink and gets his reply.
“I don’t exactly know what I’m required to say in order for you to have intercourse with me, but could we assume that I’ve said all that. Essentially we’re talking about fluid exchange, all right, so could we just go to the sex?”
“Oh, that was sweet.” She slaps him. “Have a nice night, asshole.”
One price of too much self indulgence is loneliness. We see Nash staring out his window at the students in the courtyard. At our loneliest, we hope to have one friend, a “secret sharer,” who can appreciate the splendid isolation. Small children sometimes have imaginary friends, using their minds to create what the world does not provide. Others find a kindred soul. Nash has his roommate, Charles Herman, a brash English major with a British accent to boot, to whom he can unburden himself in a rooftop discussion over a whiskey flask.
“My first grade teacher told me that I was born with two helpings of brain and only half a helping of heart.”
“Wow, she sounds lovely.”
“The truth is that I don’t like people much and they don’t much like me. “
“But why, with all your obvious wit and charm. Seriously John, mathematics is never going to lead you to a higher truth. And you know why? Because it’s boring.”
“You know half these schoolboys are already published. I can’t waste time with these classes, these books, memorizing the weaker substance of LESSER MORTALS. I need to work through to the governing dynamics, find a truly original idea. That’s the only way that I’ll ever distinguish myself, that’s the only way that I’ll …”
“Matter!”
Charles is in tune with Nash’s needs and his pain, but others are not. Hanson goads him, asking him what he’ll do if he never makes his original discovery. While Nash works on his bargaining equilibrium, he is irked by Hanson’s successes.
Those of us who, like Nash, depend upon the pleasure of ourselves become prisoners to the need to have the world appreciate our qualities. The more we come to depend upon our personal skills and achievements to establish our place, the more vulnerable we are to failure. Again, I speak of all of us, at times. We can feel the ache when we see the young graduate student, Nash, supplicating with a professor, who tells him, “The faculty is completing mid-year reviews. We’re deciding which placement applications to support.”
Nash mumbles rapidly about his first and second choices, but the professor interrupts him.
“Your fellows have attended classes. They’ve written papers and published.”
“Oh, I’m still searching sir.”
“Your original idea.”
“Governing dynamics, sir.”
“It’s very clever, John, but I’m afraid it’s just not nearly good enough.”
The professor enters the faculty dining hall, with Nash in pursuit. Nash beseeches him about projects he has been working on, still speaking very rapidly, interspersing a request for a meeting with Einstein. Once again the professor interrupts him to point out what is going on in the dining hall.
A white haired man is seated at a table in the forefront while colleagues come to his table and one by one lay their fountain pens in front of him. The professor tells us,
“It’s the pens, reserved for a member of the department that makes the achievement of a lifetime. Now what do you see John?”
“Greatness.”
“Well, try seeing accomplishment.”
“Is there a difference?”
“John, you haven’t focused. I’m sorry, but up to this point your record doesn’t warrant any placement at all. Good day.”
Nash looks on as the great man continues to receive congratulatory handshakes. The camera pans away from him as he stares as if to make us feel small with him and distant from the group he is watching. As the scene fades out, it fades into mathematical formulas scrawled on Nash’s window. We see a sad and frustrated John Nash bang his head against that window. His roomate Charles tries first to console him, then joins him in venting his anger and frustration by pushing his desk out of the window.
You don’t have to be a mathematician to feel the ache of ambition. I doubt that there is a member of the audience who has not at some point experienced the frustration of one’s failures alongside the dreams of accomplishment and recognition.
But through Nash, we can gratify that fantasy. Sitting in a college bar with his half mocking colleagues, Nash consolidates the idea for his “bargaining theory.” A group of pretty girls enter the bar and all the young men have their eyes on the beautiful blonde in the middle. Nash, who has never had any success with women, uses his mind to develop a strategy that will make them all winners. Interestingly it involves the very cooperation and taming of individual ambition that Nash lacks.
“Adam Smith needs revision. If we all go for the blonde, we block each other, not a single one of us is going to get her. So then we go for her friends, but they will give us the cold shoulder because no one likes to be second choice. What if no one goes for the blonde? We don’t get in each other’s way and we don’t insult the other girls. Soon we’ll win, that ‘s the only way we all get laid. Adam Smith said the best result comes from everyone in the group doing what’s best for himself. Right? That’s what he said. Incomplete, incomplete, because the best result would come from everyone in the group doing what’s best for himself and the group.”
His mathematical solution to the problem of “governing dynamics” for cooperative bargaining is hailed as brilliant by his professors and wins him a coveted position with the defense contractor, Wheeler Labs, and a beer toast from his rivals, especially Hanson. For the moment, we can share his elation. But such a fire needs constant stoking.
His office in Wheeler Lab at MIT is small and hot. Nash has only been called to visit the Pentagon twice in years. The job includes teaching graduate students whom he knows will never understand mathematics as he does. Even being featured with others on the cover of Fortune Magazine is not enough. He sees his duties as a grind that keeps him from his true love, relieved only by secret victories. He later tells Charles that at first he thought his work was trivial until something came up.
Nash is introduced into the pentagon as “the analyst from Wheeler Lab.” He looks confident now as a group of military men speak to him.
“We’ve been intercepting radio transmissions from Moscow. The computer can’t detect a pattern, but I’m sure it’s code.”
“Why is that, General?”
“Ever just know something, Dr. Nash?”
“Constantly.”
Nash looks up at a screen with seemingly random numbers and appears to be calculating, reading patterns in the chaos. We see different sets of numbers lighting up, completing some form of pattern.
“I need a map.”
He tells them, “These are lattitudes and longitudes” across the U.S. Map.
As Nash walks out he sees a mysterious man in civilian dress looking on. His visit to the Pentagon is followed up by a secret visit from the mysterious observer, Colonel Parcher. Like Charles, he appreciates Nash’s abilities and can draw him out on his loneliness, although in a less friendly way.
“So, John, no family, no close friends, why is that?
“I like to think it’s because I’m a lone wolf, but mainly it’s because people don’t like me.”
“Well there are certain endeavors where your lack of personal connections would be considered an advantage. … You see John, what distinguishes you is that you are, quite simply, the best natural code breaker that I have ever seen.”
Parcher recruits Nash for a top secret project to track the movements of Soviet agents through their hidden messages in newspapers and periodicals. Nash becomes deeply involved in deciphering messages—we see him frantically, obsessively, marking items from newspapers and magazines, the evidence of his efforts pasted on the walls of his office. He is drawn even further into a secret inner world.
But nature provides a counterweight to these solitary pleasures; Freud called it “object love.” A beautiful young woman, Alicea, is drawn to Nash’s raw beauty of body and mind. She ignores his social awkwardness.
“I’m wondering, professor Nash if I can ask you to dinner. You do eat?”
He answers awkwardly, but agrees. She manages him in social situations, and unlike the other women is not put off by his odd speech. As they sit by a river bank on a summer day, Nash tells her,
“I find you attractive. Your aggressive moves towards me indicate that you feel the same way, but still ritual requires that we continue with a number of platonic activities before we have sex. I’m proceeding with those activities, but in point of actual fact all I really want to do is have intercourse with you as soon as possible.”
He expects a slap, but gets a passionate kiss.
The solitary Nash needs help deciding what to do about Alicia when Charles arrives for a visit, his orphaned niece, Marcy, in tow. Charles responds with enthusiasm and wisdom upon hearing of the relationship. “God that’s wonderful!” Nash tells him things are going well enough and he’s thinking of asking her to marry him, but he can’t be sure. Charles tells him, “Nothing’s ever for sure, that’s the only sure thing I know.”
Alicia is at her persevering best when John makes his awkward attempt at a proposal.
“Alicia, does our relationship warrant a long term committal? I need some kind of proof, some kind of verifiable data.”
“I’m sorry, give me a moment to redefine my girlish notions of romance.” She asks him how he knows the size of the universe is infinite without proof.
“I don’t. I just believe it.”
“It’s the same with love, I guess.”
And so the battle lines are drawn between the lure of narcissistic perfection and the pleasures of loving and relating. It is because we all have these competing urges that we, the audience are lured by Nash’s struggle. It is because we can all at some level empathize with his ambitions that we can readily accept his psychosis.
The film makers have been clever. The film deliberately does not follow the usual conventions for depicting psychosis. We do not see jangling images intruding upon John Nash’s sanity, nor whispering voices or discordant music plaguing the mind of the character and the audience. Instead, we merely enter into a man’s life as he experiences it with no conventional cues about what is real and what is madness. We experience Nash’s delusions as part of his reality. If we can be fooled by the delusional material, accepting it as reality in the context of the film, then we can easily empathize with John Nash believing the same.
The psychosis is an extension of Nash’s inner world. The secret work for Parcher takes on a cloak and dagger quality as Nash leaves packets at a secret drop. He and Parcher are chased in a car by two foreign agents in a scene out of James Bond. Nash becomes afraid for his life. His wife becomes alarmed at his growing paranoia. By this time, the viewer, knowing in advance the theme of the film, is suspicious that we are entering the area of psychosis, but not sure just where it began or what it entailed. The answer is a surprise.
We see Nash going to give a lecture at a mathematics convention. His friend Charles arrives to attend, saying that he was in town and thought he’d hear his friend speak. Nash is upset and becomes more upset when he sees strange men entering the lecture hall. He obviously thinks they are agents bent on attacking him. He begins to run. By this point, we suspect that they may be part of his delusional system, but when they catch up with him, we discover that they are flesh and blood. They are led by a man who introduces himself as a psychiatrist. Eventually, they are forced to subdue and medicate Nash with his friend, Charles, looking on worriedly from the crowd.
I don’t know what each viewer’s reaction to this scene is, but the ambiguity, the fact that we cannot be certain if the men chasing Nash are real or imagined, demonstrates the film’s success in getting the audience to share in Nash’s confusion of reality and delusion. A moment later, we realize that our sharing of the delusion has gone further. The men chasing Nash at the lecture were real, but Charles was not! Charles is not a secret sharer, but an imaginary friend. Charles and Colonel Parcher are both part of Nash’s delusional world. Even Alicia, who has never actually met Charles, cannot believe that Nash did not have a roommate at Princeton.
The delusions are particularly believable because they have been part of the needed resolution to the narcissistic wound. Having been made to feel his wounded narcissism earlier, we can easily identify with Nash’s satisfaction at being recognized by Parcher as the world’s greatest genius at seeing patterns. In an earlier scene, we have seen Nash demonstrating this ability by playing a game with Alicia in which she named any shape and he would find it in the stars. In retrospect, that scene is a caution, reminding us that the ability to find patterns does not necessarily mean that the patterns are anything but random. Similarly, we feel the loss of the always helpful and much needed Charles. Charles appeared to represent a better side to Nash, more in tune with the real world and people, someone we might well have counted on to help him cope with his mental illness.
From this point on, the lines are clearer for us. We are no longer inside Nash’s delusional world. Nevertheless, we remain sympathetic to his narcissistic needs. When Nash complains that the thorazine he is being given interferes with his ability to do his work, I, for one, was sympathetic to the dilemma. It is not surprising that faced with the loss of his work and his position, he is drawn back to the gratifying delusions.
The film makers keep us focused on the underlying conflict that is closest to our own, the struggle between narcissistic ambition and object love. Nash’s preoccupation with his delusions becomes a danger to his wife and baby. It comes to a head in the dramatic form that comes naturally to film as the externalized inner world fights for its life. Nash has left the baby in the bath with the running water about to drown him. He tells Alicia that Charles was watching the baby. As Alicia tries to call the hospital, we see Parcher approaching her with a gun. Nash rushes at him, knocking down a frightened Alicia with the baby. As she runs out, Nash’s thoughts become confused, with Parcher and Charles telling him to do away with Alicia.
Nash is forced to make a choice, but his solution is a compromise. He uses his “beautiful mind” to solve the dilemma of distinguishing reality from fantasy, providing himself with the narcissistic pleasure of solving a problem while choosing object love.
“She never gets old. Marcy (Charles’s niece) can’t be real. She never gets old.”
He has figured out a means to reality testing, much as he had solved mathematical puzzles that defied other men. He is warned that without medication the fantasies may take over, but he decides to fight the illness, with Alicia’s help. Their love for each other will pull him from his narcissism. He tells her to leave for her safety, but she returns. Facing him, she says,
“You want to know what’s real? This.” (She touches her hand to his face.) “This.” (She brings his hand to her face.) “This.” (She brings his hand to her breast.) “This is real. Maybe the part that knows the waking from the dream, maybe it isn’t here.” (She touches her hand to his head.) “Maybe it’s here.” (She touches her hand to his heart.) Finally, she enlists his narcissism as an ally. “I need to know that something extraordinary is possible.” He nods agreement and they embrace, sealing the compact.
Nash returns to Princeton, where he is taken back with open arms by his old rival, Hanson. He is still haunted by his hallucinations, but he can share his experience with Alicia. He tells Charles that he has been a good friend, but he will no longer talk with him. We see him gradually return to a semblance of the academic life moving from campus oddity to involvement with students, and, eventually, teaching.
Finally, the narcissistic wound we experienced with Nash early in the film is healed in symbolic and dramatic fashion. He receives a visit from a man he does not know and asks one of his students to verify that she is seeing him—he is real. They walk towards the faculty dining hall, but Nash is not sure he is welcome. The visitor lets Nash know that his bargaining theory has become a staple of modern economics and has even been used in fields that Nash had never dreamed of. They sit in the dining room for tea, and the visitor explains that Nash has been selected to receive the Nobel Prize for his work. As they sit, other men get up from their tables one by one and in a re-creation of the ceremony we witnessed earlier with Nash as a small, distant, envious observer, they leave their fountain pens lined up in front of him, completing the gratification and healing the wound.
Nash’s Nobel acceptance speech is again a gratifying compromise, declaring the victory of object love over narcissism while solidifying narcissistic gratification. Looking at Alicia in the audience, he says,
“I have always believed in numbers, in the equations and logics that lead to reason. But after a lifetime of such pursuits, I ask, what truly is logic? Who decides reason? My quest has taken me from the physical, metaphysical, the delusional and back, and I have made the most important discovery of my career, the most important discovery of my life. It is only in the mysterious equations of love that any logic or reasons can be found. I’m only here tonight because of you. You are the reason I am. You are all my reasons. Thank you.”
What began as a quest for perfection has ended as a love story.