I was recently explaining what is “tragic” to a class of graduate students in marriage and family counseling. The context was different from any other, as I recall, in which I’ve had this conversation previously.
The noun, “tragedy”–or the adjective, “tragic”–being as mis-understood these days, as it is commonly used, likely in proportion as well to the emotional reaction such a striking term may evoke.
Here’s the context I’m referring to. In a marriage counseling video I use in the class, the late Edwin Friedman, an iconic marriage and family therapist, is offering a demonstration of “Bowen Theory and Therapy” at a national conference some years ago.
In the video, Rabbi Friedman offers an hour’s worth of marriage counseling to/with a couple who have volunteered for the demonstration. As the title of the video terms it, the husband and wife are “stuck” to and with one another in some less than optimally healthy ways.
Their “stuck-ness”–as Rabbi Friedman later explains to the large gathering of family health professionals attending the conference (who have watched the marriage counseling session on closed circuit television)– it is the result of how “emotionally reactive” to one another these people have become. The result, according to Friedman, of how poorly “self-differentiated” (a seminal Bowen concept) each, in her/his own way, is. In other words, they allow one another to “define” each other, emotionally and behaviorally, too much. As in, “I feel and behave as I do because of you,” and vice versa. Or again, “You make me the way I am”; in fact, even a “way” you don’t like.
And it is Friedman’s assessment that the wife appears to have a greater capacity to “self-differentiate” in relation to her husband than does he in relation to her. In fact, Friedman asserts: “This woman will never be able to count on this man to function as maturely and responsibly as she; she will always have to ‘define her self’ in relation to him.” (Since, because they have two children, they will always likely have some relationship to one another, whether as spouses or not.)
[Note: if in this case the “wife” seems more capable of becoming better “self-differentiated,” in other marriages the roles may be reversed.]
And Friedman adds, that in marriages such as this, he has often seen the man “evolve upward” in such a relationship; to use a biology metaphor, to emotionally “mutate”: this, in proportion to the degree to which the woman most authentically “defines her self” in relation to the man.
At this, a conference participant asks, “So she will just have to accept her circumstances?”
To which Friedman replies, “But you say that with a negative connotation. It can, instead, be a glorious thing.”
In disagreeing with Friedman’s “glorious” terminology–what strikes me as something of an over-statement, if not a mis-statement–it was then that I explained to my students my less pejorative understanding of what is “tragic.”
Most “tragic” events are “bad” (to whatever degree), but not all “bad things” are “tragic.” A child hit by a car and killed while riding her/his bicycle; a young mother dying of cancer; a devastating fire or flood or other natural disaster: these things are “terrible.” They are not–as we commonly hear it said these days–they are not, however, “tragic.”
At least as the term was classically defined by ancient Greece’s prominent philosopher and drama critic, Aristotle, over 2400 years ago. According to Aristotle, we experience or observe what is “tragic” in essentially two different ways.
One is “ironic,” as when a “strength” is also a “weakness, when a “virtue” can also be a “vice.” In ancient Greek drama, Oedipus is such a prototype. His drive, his ambition, his competitiveness–all of which are usually considered positive human qualities, at least for males–they “blind him” in such a way as to become his undoing. He, according to the legend, unwittingly murders his father and marries his mother.
A more benign example might be a person accomplished, disciplined and committed enough to become a captain or colonel in the military, or president or CEO of whatever, yet in such a highly competitive process fails as a spouse or parent. Or as someone has said, “To make straight A’s, yet somehow manage to flunk life–that is tragic!”
The other classical example of what is “tragic” is found in the circumstances of the dramatic character, Antigone, in which she faces an existential “double bind.” In her crisis, whichever decision she makes–in either alternative she faces peril. Her brother has rebelled against their uncle, the king, and has subsequently been killed. If she buries him, she is dis-loyal to the state; but if she doesn’t give him an honorable burial, she dis-honors her family.
To extrapolate the concept in its broadest, most inclusive sense, what is “tragic” has to do with circumstances–whatever or wherever–which are not necessarily “all good” (as in the “better of goods”) or “all bad” (as in the “lesser of evils”), but may include qualities of both.
Some people (likely a majority)–who are termed “dualistic, either/or thinkers”–seem to find such a “tragic” understanding more difficult to accept than do others (seemingly a minority) who are termed “non-dualistic, both/and thinkers.”
If the former seek to live in “denial” in the face of life’s “ambiguities,” the latter seem better able to embrace such “tragic” circumstances. “Dualistic thinkers” prefer what or whomever to be either “all right” or “all wrong.” And especially themselves, particularly when it comes to being totally and absolutely “right.” While “non-dualistic thinkers” tend to see most things as “some of both” (even where their own opinions or observations are concerned); such folk live, as it were, on something of a continuum where “life at its best” may also include at least some of “life at its worst.”
What I’m describing seems to apply across the whole of human activity and involvement–religion, politics, work, family life, you name it.
With respect to “marriage”: who has a “perfect” one? Some would claim so, or so it would seem. Or conversely: whose marriage is “terrible”? Others seem to embrace that interpretation.
When likely, for most married folk, the truth is somewhere in between such positive and negative extremes. Or as I’ve observed, it’s what the classical concept of “tragic” seems to suggest. “Tragic” seen–not as something necessarily “good” or “bad”–but as a reality that embraces some of both.
As in the “Friedman video” I watch with my Webster University “Marriage and Family Counseling” graduate students. Friedman claims that if the “wife” in the marriage will “define her self” more authentically, in relation to her “husband,” he will possibly “mutate” toward her higher level of “self-differentiation.” Such that their levels of “emotional functioning” will become more comparable than disparate.
When an observer reacts that what Friedman is advising strikes her as a less-than-satisfying marital arrangement–at least for the “wife”–Friedman counters that such marital circumstances might, instead, be considered “glorious”
Whereas I am parsing the nuance between such extremes by claiming that this not uncommon “marital situation”–not unlike most other circumstances in life–how it reflects some of both the “best” and “worst” in any human activity or endeavor, even that of being “married.” It’s how a classical understanding of what is “tragic,” in its broadest, most inclusive sense, informs our living.
