In the wake of the world financial crisis, both unemployment and the wiping out of pension funds returns most of us to the existential conditions of late middle age before the expectation of retirement: those who “have” will continue in a combination of work and leisure, and those who do not will struggle to make ends meet as each copes with aging and its diminution of physical capabilities.

Three discernable cohorts emerge. The first, like Tolstoy’s happy families, will be fine. The others face a choice of diminished and disappointed expectation against the hard work and imperative of creative adaptation. To date, my experiences in New York and Dublin suggest that success will depend on the martialing of personal resources and grit. Expectations of societal beneficence will be disappointing.

For five years, I have worked both with individuals and with groups in the development of new opportunities at mid-life for reluctant entrepreneurs to develop productive income streams through the leveraging of their implicit, professional procedural knowledge. I have discovered that neither government nor educational organizations are interested in the development of programs oriented to this “old wine in new bottles” approach.  Why bother with older learners when it is easier to catch the attention of those younger and less, well, battle-hardened?

Similarly, community recruitment for groups aimed at developing new entrepreneurial business has been good when the services have been without charge. Once a fee is attached, as it is in executive coaching or in psychotherapy, participant interest diminishes.

The central question, both in the government and university sphere and in the fee-paying groups, has been: is there a guarantee? Unfortunately, it is exactly because there are no guarantees any longer, no expectations of dependency upon societal or corporate benevolence, that such open-ended collaborative self-help efforts are offered.

The expectation of guarantee, of course, is the extension of an earlier expectation, that of a funded retirement, itself.  What appears to be a cautious consideration of monetary allocation or funding against the probability of an impoverished future is also a strident demand for a new, different form of social dependency.

I believe that this displacement of retirement expectation for funding expectation, heightened by a growing fear that “I cannot” and “I have not” is a critical crossroad for those who at midlife weather this unanticipated catastrophe and move forward to thrive.

Perhaps not so oddly, individuals willing to take a risk in collaborative work with others, are the same individuals willing to risk exploration of their psychological concerns in psychotherapy. Though too, like all of us, they wish guarantees, they recognize that only through their own efforts and resources, will new patterns of adaptive behavior emerge.

My own began simply. Whether for affairs conducted in Ireland or for affairs conducted abroad, I required a local bank account. Nothing fancy: deposits in, checks out. So, after amassing the requisite tokens of identity- passport, residency card, utility bill, promise of first-born- and making an appointment for 4 days later at a bank (obviously overcome with the demands for their services!), I spent an hour in the office of a “qualified financial advisor”.  She dutifully took down my details and photocopied my supporting documents.

But then, I found myself rejected. Having moved into a new apartment and waited a month for my utility bill, it seems that my name was written in a typeface unacceptable to the bank. Rather than call the local utility, it was easier to reject my application under demand that I bring new evidence of my existence. Protesting, I was assured that this situation would be rectified the following week. So I waited.

Hearing nothing, I called the bank again and was told that they were waiting for new corroborating evidence. This was an oblique notice of rejection (a native Irish speaker has since informed me that the old language does not have a word for “no”, hence this example of a positive masquerading as a negative: beats the old English double negative any day!!)

The upshot? I wait for my utility to send a new bill. I wait for them to change their typeface. The latter may never happen. Meantime, no banking in this inter-connected world which from this vantage point, seems a vast and unattainable idea whatever Tyler Brule might say in the Financial Times!

Haslet addresses identity politics. And more profoundly, points to the historical action of group psychology both as it coheres more or less soundly in its sub-groupings and as it splits apart, with new categories and alignments. The current “sky is falling” moment pits the waning of a privileged, white America, the post robber baron big shouldered pork butcher to the world, now threatened in its sovereignty by a more pluralistic, globalized, American majority, headed into a multi-hued future. Haslet rightly recognizes the conflict in the Obama-Romney race.

We live in interesting times for identity politics: as globalizing, pluralizing shifts shake up the religious, political, sociological and wealth alignments around the world, zealots of all kinds agitate for their past (imagined) glories and their future (imagined) glories. As well as for the exclusion, extrusion, or at least deprivation, of everyone else. Religious fundamentalists, political fundamentalists, seem to seize the moment as the more or less quiescent folk—my reference group at the 105^th Street dog-run— wonder what is to be, when Yeats’ “center cannot hold” amid passionate convictions in large group and social re-alignments, slouching  toward our new Byzantium.

I decided on an old favorite. Casablanca is the ultimate lonely guy film.

Rick, an enterprising if dodgy American expatriot with a tarnished heart of gold, falls heavy for Ilsa, a Norwegian princess, who  withholds that she is the widow of European superpatriot and Resistance King, Victor Laszlo. But Victor isn’t dead.

Laszlo and Ilsa exist in a world of soft focus and cooing words. Despite hideous suffering and travail, their aspiration DeGaulle-like, is to lead the Resistance; but from America. And therein is the dramatic twist: Rick has the valued letters of transit, stolen by an associate who had killed to obtain them.

The backstory of their brief, idealized sojourn together in Paris on the eve of the Nazi invasion, powers the film. Rick bears the loss as unresolved mourning. Its key is a song, “As Time Goes By”, played by Sam, Rick’s sidekick. But for Rick, the song endures as an absence. It is the tune that Sam is prohibited from playing. Rick is agonized when he hears Sam play the tune one night— and then sees Ilsa.

We know that Rick does the right thing just as we know that he and his comrade in contingent action, ultimately head out, like Tom and Huck, for the Territories— this time, Brazzaville and the Free French Garrison.

As the credits roll, the viewer does not ask himself, “hey, what happens to Sam?” He knows about Rick, he knows about Ilsa, but what about Sam? Sam has effectively been passed to the next owner of Rick’s bar. The viewer has no idea whether there was any talk between them. Having furnished a link to Ilsa through his piano playing, a link now broken with Rick’s resolution of his prolonged mourning, Sam’s loyalty has been rewarded with a salary raise; and Rick turns from him as he picks up another contingent chum, Louis Renault.

In the end, it is two lonely guys, paired. For Rick, it is his second chumship— thin and based in action. He is free to congratulate himself on doing the right thing and on sacrificing his relationship with Ilsa, a relationship that could never be.

Rick is off to new adventures. I think about Sam, traded to the unctuous Sidney Greenstreet character, Ferrari, and languishing without a friend in Casablanca. He’d hitched his star to the wrong wagon. Sam is the fall guy. For Ferarri, it is business as usual. For Rick and Louis, it is the “beginning of a wonderful friendship”, just as idealized as with Ilsa.  Rick is absorbed in his adolescent fantasies of bravery and nobility. Ilsa and Victor, of course, either save the world or, in achieving America, wind up in Levittown.

Back at the Campaign, I fear that whatever the outcome, we Americans hope only that there is a good ending to the current mess; and that the Lisbon plane flies like a precious Ark holding our gilded fantasies of the future. But then I think of Sam.  Seems to me that we’re all Sam, loyal during the primary, and left in the end, in a desert we’d come to, misinformed about the waters.

In Dublin, there is still the wincing smart of that world-shaking dichotomy: Catholic or Protestant?  And that (now quaintly rural-seeming) Protestant fortress was built on a street called by the name of a church dedicated to a medieval Catholic saint who’d founded an order in Brittany.

Making sense of the cultures we imbibe, which determine us and our attitudes, is a full time job. At a conference last week on the work of Samuel Beckett, I heard discussed (pro and con…) the work of Elizabeth Bowen: and today, reading “The Last September”, feel a yawning emptiness and negation that no biographer of Beckett can begin to approach— yet that atmospheres the young writer’s upbringing in a way no historical reference to “the Ascendancy” can make palpable.

It is not only the catching of others’ projections we marinate in, identifying and living out the mirrored images of our cultures, shaping our images of self. No, it is also our appreciative or perceptive identifications, of those we see: mindful of their struggles to emerge as “self” from the encasing histories, ghosts, and presences of history and culture.

It comes down to this in human affairs:  we know that on the way to dying, we live and experience. Obviously, not only good times, but the odd “peak” experiences, fade: sometimes quietly fragmenting, sometimes catastrophically. We know too that, given the psychological heuristics by which we live, loss figures more greatly than gain. Even in resolving loss, we gravitate to disappointment rather than to learning. Perhaps the smarting is its own reward?

We must work to hold onto the good. It is worth it. Creativity and new forms of play emerge from this. Beckett had a secret. His characters tramped stoically forward, failing better. But he himself was able to consolidate and work through the difficulties and challenges of early adulthood; and further able to channel energies into the triumph of work upon which he built and through which he consistently created. If that is not life lived in implicit optimism, I don’t know what is.

For the elderly and underemployed in the building, it was another confrontation with the nonhuman environment. Not the financial markets this time, but the rational decision of their duly elected fiduciary agents. The decision meant personal hurt without personal redress. The board passed on the city’s mandate; and while its officers were jointly and individually responsible, there was nothing to be done. It was the human rubber-stamping of a nonhuman decision. One board member, realizing that he would be unable to pay the extra charge and might be required, in time, to sell his holding in the building, refused to vote. He was too busy managing his panic.

When he leaves, he will fall off the map. Another will take his place, more capable of paying the necessary surcharges. But the fact of his falling, along with many others, highlights the increasing prevalence for each of us of managing the conduct of our lives not through interpersonal concert with others, in the face-to-face engagements of daily life, but facelessly, anonymously, in response to our hitherto unrecognized environmental relations to the nonhuman.

Operationally, nothing has changed. Where once, the board was able to float a loan to sustain such work, both cumulative debt and the city’s relentless generation of new ordinances, make such action impossible. Where once, denial of the nonhuman environment was possible for the building’s residents, denial itself has become impossible. Where shall they go? Because the human map extends only to their decision to stay or go, it doesn’t matter to the building or its governance team.

But of course, it does. Maps, in this case, are a fiction. As  are our conventions of socio-economic class and standards of living. Someplace cheaper, we are told. That is where they shall go. Wherever that might be—- until it is our turn (when it really matters).

And then, bowing to the contingencies of the nonhuman environment, there will, again, be no one to address. The fiduciary responsibilities of the decision makers will be true and sure. Yet , again, unresponsive to the human need, they will be made in congruence with submission to the dominance of the nonhuman environment.

We might argue that the “task” of financial markets is to ensure economic stability; and so, financial markets themselves call into question the classic psychodynamic assumption that task is somehow stable, while dysfunctional behavioral patterns typify task avoidance. Task, as it were, represents the Oedipal “flag” in an otherwise pre-Oedipal model of group understanding. Once task is dismantled, it opens up the psychoanalytic study of organizations to the confusing, often incoherent behaviors we see in financial markets: with evidence of hate, envy, murderous competition, the predominance of concretism over verbal symbol, and the psychosis-inducing patterning of fear-related-need.

Financial markets represent a new paradigm for organizational study, measured in the insufficient solvencies of nation states, economic unions, and individuals. The consulting model must similarly accommodate the same broader spectrum of organizational presentation that psychoanalysis, itself, recognized by the mid 20th century. Madness is in us all. And may be a singular organizational residue of our postmodern, globalized time. We’ve all drunk the Kool-Aid

One way to think about this is as a protected and protective form of love, directed meaningfully, toward the transformation of a passionate object such as painting, jogging, or meditating—- wherein all manner of internal and external preparations are oriented to a single purpose.

Another way to think about this is in the productive use of hate— in that the withdrawal from other, perhaps less satisfying life activities that might otherwise have been one’s focus— suggest a repudiation of something—- minimally, the creative destruction of a worldview that existed at an earlier moment. It becomes necessary to overturn this view, this allocation of resources, in order to reallocate them to another purpose.

The engagement of competence poses no problem (at least conceptually) for most of us. But then, in the passionate engagement of flow, the experience itself and not its product, is the joyous outcome. Where most of us have difficulty is in the engagement of productive hate— in that moment where the hard-won, if currently dysfunctional structures of the past must be deconstructed. First, there is no guarantee of future success. Even if there are no productive outcomes in the holding-on to earlier viewpoints, at least earlier viewpoints provide a known structure or security. Second, perhaps flow will not come; nothing is guaranteed.

Certainly, it cannot, if productive hate is not utilized to reconstruct resources toward personally meaningful ends. But then, the frustration of continued non-productivity means that sooner or later, the individual will turn frustration into self-hatred, which undermines successful longevity.

Like it or not, this is our common lot. And individual decision.

That’s where Christopher Bollas’ The Infinite Question opened the door: rather lyrically, he traces an unconscious beyond the limiting bounds of the repressed, to that, which is well, just unconscious— and potentially deeply significant. Bollas’ notion of multiple unconscious categories like the bodily, relational, vocal, and visual—- greatly expand popular understanding of dynamic psychotherapy.

My own association, given my tracing of Kleinian thought recently, and the transition from what has been called the “Teutonic” to the “Britannic” moment in psychoanalysis, is that despite his location, Bollas has let the California sunshine in—- in an expansive and generous act of American pluralism.  Jolly good? Far out!