1: M has contempt for her daughter-in-law, D.
“The mother-in-law is always perfectly polite to D, but inside, she looks down on her,” Iris Murdoch states in her celebrated lecture “The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts,” as shared by David Brooks in his book How to Know a Person.
“But M is aware that she can be a bit superior, conventional, and old-fashioned,” Iris notes. “M is also aware that she probably harbors some sense of rivalry with D; they’re competing for her son’s time and affections, after all.”
It occurs to M that perhaps she is seeing D in an unbecoming way.
“So one day, as an act of intellectual charity and moral self-improvement, she decides she’s going to change the way she sees D,” Iris relays.
While before, M saw D as “coarse,” she now decides to see her as “spontaneous.” Previously, she thought D was “common.” But now she will view her as “fresh.”
“M is trying to purge herself of her snobbery and become a better person,” Iris shares. “This has nothing to do with her outer behavior, which has remained exemplary. It has to do with the purification of who she is inside.
“Good and evil,” Iris believes, “begin in the inner life, and M wants her inner life to be a little nicer and a little less mean.”
David finds Iris’s philosophy of moral development to be “tremendously attractive and compelling” because it is tangible and actionable.
“Nothing in life is of any value except to be virtuous,” Iris writes. We can “grow by looking.”
2: Mary Pipher is a real-life example of Iris’s philosophy in action, David believes. He has interviewed her several times about how she gets to know people.
Mary “has had professional training, of course, but she told me that her trick when doing therapy is to have no tricks, to just engage in a conversation with the patient.
Being a therapist, she suggests, is less about providing answers and more “a way of paying attention,” David writes, “which is the purest form of love.”
Mary lived in a small town on the Nebraska prairie as a child. She was surrounded by conflicting perspectives.
“She had a rich aunt who was a liberal and a farmer uncle who was a conservative,” David notes. “Her family members ran the gamut from the emotional to the reserved, the travelers to the stay-putters, the sophisticates to the provincials.”
“In therapy, as in life, point of view is everything,” she writes in her book Letters to a Young Therapist.
3: As a therapist, Mary attempts to embody a happy realism. “The old grand masters of her field, like Freud, saw people driven by dark drives, repressions, and competitive instincts,” David observes.
But Mary, who began her career as a waitress, “sees vulnerable, love-seeking people sometimes caught in bad situations,” he notes.
“She tries to inhabit each person’s point of view and see them, sympathetically, as those who are doing the best they can,” he writes. “Her basic viewpoint is charitable to all comers.”
Some therapists “are quick to see the problems in a family, give it a label—dysfunctional—and then blame the family for whatever is afflicting the patient,” David observes.
“And, of course, in many cases, families really are abusive and the victims need to break free.”
Mary, however, looks for the good in people and situations. “While families are imperfect institutions, they are also our greatest source of meaning, connection, and joy,” she writes. “All families are a little crazy, but that is because all humans are a little crazy.”
Once, after a hard session involving a family, Mary overheard the father offering to take his family out for ice cream. She “called them back into her office to congratulate him on being so generous and kind and watched his eyes well up with tears,” David notes.
Mary asks questions that lead people toward the positive: “Isn’t it time you forgave yourself for that?” And, “when you and your parents are close again, what will you want them to understand about this time in your life?”
When she was starting out, Mary sought to understand people by asking how others treated or mistreated them.
“As she matured, she found it more useful to ask, ‘How do you treat others?’ ‘How do you make them feel?’ “
This type of attention can bring about real transformation.
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: How do I treat others? ‘How do I make them feel?
Action: Journal about my answers to the questions above.