Leonard Cohen: Healing the Divided Self, Healing a Divided Nation

We lost the great poet Leonard Cohen and elected a new president last last week. Elections, so often, highlight our brokenness, our tribalism, and the differences between us, more than they illuminate our similarities, and this election showed this divisiveness writ large.

I’m just a workaday shrink, so I’ll leave the task of analyzing the body politic to those better equipped than me. But Cohen, like a therapist, did a yeoman’s job of exploring the depths of the human psyche, and I admire the comforting wisdom he offers in troubled times. It’s through his words that I seek to understand the conflicts that are within my wheelhouse.

Cohen, in addition to being a musician and a poet, was also an ordained Zen Buddhist monk, and his songs often spoke to the suffering the “self” creates by making an “other” out of those parts of ourselves and those parts of the world that we don’t understand. More so than any other time I can remember, this election leveraged the tendency of the human ego to create the “other” as a way of separating and defining the “self.” But this division is a fallacy. As one of our sages of psychiatry, Glen Gabbard recently said, “Them is us.”

As any student of psychotherapy knows, when we split off unwanted parts of ourselves, they become shadow, the dark material which we project onto others who we don’t understand, people who we assume are different. Our ugliest tendency is to project those parts of us onto others, vilify those who we see as other, and seek to reject or even destroy them.  Cohen saw this tendency for us to seek repetition of our past mistakes in his composition “Anthem,” when he penned “The birds they sang/at the break of day/Start again/I heard them say/Don’t dwell on what has passed away/or what is yet to be./Ah the wars they will/be fought again/The holy dove/She will be caught again/bought and sold/and bought again/the dove is never free.”

Cohen, like a good psychotherapist, called his epitaph album You Want It Darker, recognizing that to free ourselves from our compulsive repetitions, we have to revisit the old wounds and to go into the darkness to seek understanding. This understanding may be of parts of ourselves that we’d rather not know about, but in resisting knowing them, they persist. Only by looking at that which frightens us might we have a chance of freeing ourselves from its power.

Cohen understood that dealing with these unresolved parts of ourselves required more than just their destruction, but rather, an embracing of all of our parts in order to find peace with ourselves, writing in the 2012 song “Going Home,” “He wants to write a love song/An anthem of forgiving/a manual for living with defeat/a cry above the suffering/a sacrifice recovering/but that isn’t what I need him to complete.” In attempting this reconciliation, we are almost always destined to fail; yet we are called upon to continue to try in spite of our failings.

But he also knew that understanding these parts of ourselves does not come easily and required a kind of grace that comes with the dialectic of both change and acceptance when he penned these lyrics in his 2012 song “Come Healing,” “O see the darkness yielding/That tore the light apart/Come healing of the reason/Come healing of the heart./  O troubled dust concealing/An undivided love/The heart beneath is teaching/to the broken heart above.”

The days following the election were just as fractious, if not more so, than the days leading up to last Tuesday. There have been calls for unity and cries for resistance. We in psychiatry will have lost our moral compass if we stand by idly and accept people being traumatized. This much is clear.

Cohen knew that it is from the broken parts of ourselves that we often find redemption and wisdom, writing in “Anthem,” “Ring the bells that still can ring/Forget your perfect offering/There’s a crack in everything/ It’s how the light gets in.” I am calling for a willingness to be curious about the cracks, to seek to understand others that do not think as we do, and to examine the parts of ourselves and all the parts of our country that remain conflicted and broken, remaining resistant to the temptation to make “other” from what we don’t understand. Perhaps, through this recursive and iterative process, we may find the light.