Shrinking the Great Man

Death of the Great Man, a novel by Peter D Kramer, Post Hill Press, 2023

Dr Peter Kramer is a Jewish psychiatrist from Rhode Island who writes engagingly for the public. When he writes about encounters in the therapy room, he is not content to change names, but changes details and circumstances to be sure that his patients cannot be identified. He fictionalizes their lives and their struggles, but does so in a way that is emotionally true to all persons involved, including himself. This requires not just a broad imagination and gift for writing dialog, but also a multi-dimensional familiarity with the emotions that he seeks to recreate in all their complexity.

Dr Henry Farber is a Jewish psychiatrist from Rhode Island who writes engagingly for the public. He is a fictional creation of Dr Peter Kramer, and he is Dr Kramer himself. We depend on Dr Farber for our account of the sick, pathetic, highly destructive President who has transformed himself into a fascist dictator. The book is Dr Kramer’s fiction, but within the story is the fictionalizing of Dr Farber, constantly changing details to avoid any danger of implicating real people. He tells us as much, and, of course, the more he warns us that he is fictionalizing, the more we want to know what really happened.

“This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, events, and
businesses are fictitious products of the author’s imagination.” 

In other words, this is a book about Peter Kramer and Donald Trump.

This ambiguity, the growing sense though the book that we can’t know what really happened and the implicit admonition that we need always to live with uncertainty — this is the second best thing about Dr Kramer’s novel.

The best thing is Peter’s deep and heartwarming humanity. 

I’ll call him Peter from here forward, because that’s how I knew him when we were undergraduates at Harvard more than half a century ago.

Somewhere inside, we know that all persons deserve our love, and that we ourselves would be better off for carrying love in our hearts and in every interaction. We give lip service to the ideal that there is no person who is only an oppressor or only a victim. We understand that those who commit the most unforgivable acts frequently suffer from an unrelenting and impenetrable isolation. Most probably, they were victims of unspeakable cruelty as children. No soul is beyond redemption, and there is no relationship from which we cannot learn and grow.

We know this, but how rarely do we inhabit it? How rarely do we overcome our disgust with a person’s actions by offering the patient attention he needs to sing for us his heart’s song? 

This, then, is the best thing about Peter’s book. Dr Farber embodies this commitment to see the soft heart in every tough skin. He shows us how to do it. To Dr Farber, every encounter is an opportunity to serve, to probe for what his interlocutor might be straining to express, to help him to the next step, without judgment about what that step might be. Dr Farber has an exquisite sensitivity to the emotional message in every word, every inflection, every gesture. He makes guesses about what his patient needs. He turns ambiguity into a fine art in order to cover what he does not know, while still offering acceptance and encouragement at every step of the interaction. He does not pretend to know what the patient needs, but he trusts that the patient himself knows, if only he can feel fully seen and accepted for who he is in the moment.  Dr Farber keeps his own motives out of the interaction and tries to help the other. He listens to himself, he receives feedback from his patient and re-evaluates in real time to make minute course corrections. 

And yet, even for a doctor who has worked in prisons and led groups for men with paranoid personality disorders, the Great Man is a challenge. The Great Man is more grotesque, more evil, more comical than Donald Trump. (I’m not sure on the last score. Is it possible to be more comical than Donald Trump?) Dr Farber would never presume to take on the Great Man as a patient, but the Great Man’s goon makes him an offer he can’t refuse.

Peter gives us Dr Farber as a believable human, and Dr Farber gives us the Great Man as believable, sympathetic in all his callousness, a tragic figure even as he destroys the American legal system, relegates millions to poverty, divides the people and isolates us among nations of the world. Peter’s gift to us is Dr Farber, the empath. 

Dr Farber is not insensitive to the moral implications of his position in helping the Great Man. The Great Man has wrecked the world. The Great Man is dysfunctional. What if his psychotherapy succeeds in helping him regain his competence before he is able to regain his moral sensibility? Surely there are situations in which the psychiatrist’s responsibility to the community overrides his duty to his patient.

Dr Farber comes down on the side of Kantian morality. That is, he follows clear, simple rules of behavior without weighing individual circumstances or projecting consequences. The Doctor’s loyalty is to his patient, and everything he says in his capacity as Court Physician must be guided by that role. But that doesn’t mean that Peter is a Kantian. Other characters in the book, portrayed just as sympathetically, have a more practical sense of morality. We must look at the probable consequences of every action and judge its merit based on our best analysis of its future results. There is no shortage of charcters in this novel for whom murdering the Great Man is the only ethical choice. 

Peter’s book is rich with love of humanity, rich with psychological insight and a wise self-awareness. As Dr Farber has counseled me to be meticulous about the possibility of misimpressions by omission, I also must tell you the worst thing about the book. Its political reality is rooted in a US government narrative that is approaching its expiration date.

The last time that Peter crafted a clever and edgy novel, it was the summer of 2001, and the story — superbly told — was of a quiet young man with a quiet inner rage at the arrogance of the uber-rich, in particular their depredation of the natural beauty and fragile ecology of his native Cape Cod. That book was published at the cusp of a sea change in our feelings about “terrorism” and, indeed, its very definition. Peter’s delicately nuanced story was drowned in the “with us or against us” rhetoric that saturated the press after September 11th. 

I fear that in the present day, the conventional, liberal political reality from which Peter’s book is written is crumbling for more and more people in the US, led by peers in Europe and around the world. Many of us have come to regard the mainstream American press as captured by government and industry, parroting their narrative. Even our medical research is tainted by Pharma profits. The mantle of “progressive” politics has been usurped by an agenda that progressives of a bygone era would scarcely recognize, while evergreen values like peace and freedom of expression have been abandoned by politicians who claim to represent today’s left wing of the Democratic party.

Some concrete examples illustrate perspectives from Death of the Great Man that jarred me from my pleasant absorption in the story. 

• In the novel, fascism comes to America through a faux-populist demagogue who is both evil and pathetic. In real life, fascism comes to America through Deep State operatives, working behind the scenes to control events no matter who is President.

• In the novel, Dr Farber’s entrée to the public stage came from the surprise result of a clinical trial in which his idiosyncratic style of psychotherapy proved more effective than the newly-patented drugs that were the focus of the industry-funded trial. Insiders have told us that such a finding could never be published because our most influential journals have become subservient to Big Pharma. In real life, Dr Kramer rose to prominence through a wise and nuanced book about depression which was caricatured in the press to create a launching pad for the SSRI mania that has gradually pathologized a large portion of American adults. 

• In the novel, there is (oblique) reference to the killing of President John Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald. “Political advancement through assassination [is] something we have never seen before.“ In real life, Lyndon Johnson was complicit in the CIA’s assassination of President Kennedy (according to his paramour, Madeline Brown) and every President since him has been subordinate to the Deep State.

• In the novel, American death rates from the Pandemic are among the highest in the world because the Great Man would not listen to his own scientists. In real life, American death rates from the Pandemic were among the highest in the world because President Trump went along with the disastrous advice of Dr Fauci and Dr Collins. 

• The novel holds hope for a return to the normal balance of ideals and corruption in our fallible democracy. In the real world, global capitalism has reached a terminal metastasis from which there is no return. We must transcend to a new relationship to one another and to Mother Earth or face extinction.

• In the novel, the Great Man has rigged elections to keep himself in power, with an implication that this was a shocking anomaly. In actual America, both political parties have engaged (recently) in electronic vote theft and (historically) have used every imaginable trick to distort the will of the people. 

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I see my book review is morphing to a political broadside. Rather than continue here, I will write up further political thoughts in this space next week.

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This novel will hold your interest on every page, even if you are not fortunate enough to have fond feelings for Peter that go back to your formative years. You will find wisdom to inspire your self-awareness and to guide in every kind of relationship. You will be lifted into greater empathy in your every interaction. But in the end, from this political naïf comes exactly the deep and eternal message that we need in this era of political tribalism: 

Every foe deserves your understanding. The more he disagrees with you, the more you have to learn. Get to know him. Ask what history has made him who he is. Walk a mile in his shoes, and you may be persuaded to change your mind. But whether or not he changes your political opinions, you will come to love the person, and you will be richer for that love.