Bring me the sunset in a cup.

- Emily Dickinson

"If somebody says 'no,' you're asking the wrong person."  - Kris Jenner

"Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man."

- Rabindranath Tagore

   "She say, I know Albert and I bet he been up to something, with you looking as fine as you look.
     Us sew, I say. Make idle conversation.
     How idle? she ast.
     What do you know, I think. Shug jealous. I have a good mind to make up a story just to make her feel bad. But I don't.
     Us talk bout you, I say. How much us love you.
     She smile, come put her head on my breast. Let out a long breath."

- Alice Walker, The Color Purple

No matter how many read the writings of great humans, the wisdom of their words cannot be exhausted. No matter how many put their teachings into practice, the benefits of peaceful, contented and harmonious living will not lessen.

- I Ching,interpreted by Khigh Alx Dhiegh

This one appeared in the December 1981 issue of McCall's Magazine.

Why Grown-Ups Need Santa Claus

by Joan Gould

When I was small, I was brought up in the Germanic tradition that Santa Claus puts lovely presents under the tree for good girls and boys, but only coal and sticks for those who've been bad. Even on December 25th I had to eat breakfast before doing anything else; as I walked into the kitchen, I could see only a corner of the living room, so swathed in shadows that I could not be sure if gifts or lumps of coal were waiting for me there. Mind you, it was not the loss of presents that I dreaded. It was the disgrace of having everyone witness my shame. Somehow, even then, I felt that Santa Claus must be wiser than we are and must know enough to give us something far better than we deserve, or else he was of no more use to us than our parents.

I have not changed my view. Whenever I hear a mother say to her child, "Be good, or Santa won't bring you anything," I want to banish her forever to a land where it is always winter and never Christmas, as C.S. Lewis says--where mounds of tinsel are sprinkled on her shag rugs every day, and all the children have grown up and left home and gone to live with their in-laws. Obviously, that mother does not believe in Santa.

Often, in the past, I have been attacked for inviting Santa into my house--with a Christmas tree in the corner to greet him--because I am a Jew. Never mind, I insist. The tree and myth may have nothing to do with my religion, but they have nothing to do with anyone else's, either. That garlanded tree is much more primitive than any religion we can name, while the Santa tradition as we know it is much younger. Now that he has shed the name of old Saint Nicholas, we can see him more clearly as a figure spawned by the Industrial Revolution and its consumers, who need him more urgently with every passing year. We need him so desperately that we had to invent him.

But what a worry that jolly old elf is! Jews worry because he is not Jewish, and Christians worry because he is not religious at all. When I was little, psychologists worried that children would feel deceived when they discovered that no whiskery old gentleman had been clambering in and out of their chimney, although no child I ever met was that silly for a moment. Today, it is fashionable to worry about the opposite, that all the poetry has vanished from the holiday, along with the penwiper dolls we used to make out of yearn for Mother. Is Santa only one more peddler of high-priced baby dolls that suffer from diaper rash?

Listening to these anxieties, I realize once again what an astonishing and downright terrifying idea Christmas is--our secular Christmas, I mean: a day when all of us but the littlest are called upon to give with love and gladness and an open hand. But give what? Choices rise up in front of us and tempt us and flicker and multiply and repel us and hold our attention against our will, like late-night movies on television. There is no way to turn them off, and only one way to enjoy them: by believing in Santa Claus. That is, we grown-ups must believe in him. My children might manage without him; I know that I could not.

I discovered Santa for myself one Christmas Eve when my children were little and so was my budget. Half an hour before the stores closed, I could not stop myself from rushing downtown, in the rain and the feverish crowds, to buy one more toy that was burning a hole in my imagination: a huge plastic horse on springs. I thought I needed a single, mind-boggling gift that would transport not only my children but my husband and me out of our everyday world.

I was wrong. My children did not need a plastic horse. What they needed was a parent who could give without feeling guilty that the gifts were not enough--even if there was a whole stable full of horses on springs--or guilty because they had cost too much money, or guilty because Tommy got the horse, and what did Alice get to match it? They needed parents who did not think that gifts were a measure of love. They needed parents who did not measure their children's behavior, either, in terms of "be good, or Santa won't bring you anything."

I am not that parent--but Santa Claus is. Never is he pushed by guilt or pulled by television commercials or pinched by anxiety over money. He listens to requests but need not fill them, any more than snow has to fall when my child asks it to fall.

Dear children, now that you are older, I will tell you a secret. No matter what anyone says, Santa Claus is not your parents. He is the parent we wish we were, riding high and free above your heads, pulled by enchanted reindeer, and bringing you gifts that could never be less than perfect.

I believe in Santa, oh, yes, I believe.

Here's one I saved from The New York Times back in the 1980s. The author was an editor the The Book Review section of The New York Times at the time this was published, January 12th, 1986. (January 12th also happens to be my late dad's birthday, by coincidence.) I was a regular, twice-a-week psychoanalytic psychotherapy patient at the time, and this piece made me feel loved, appreciated, and understood. I especially loved what he wrote about the specificity of sex, the patient's voice, and incongruities. Enjoy!

Fiction That Lies About Its Dreams

By Anatole Broyard

After retiring from 27 years of psychoanalytic practice, a friend of mine became an avid reader of contemporary novels. "I've always wanted to read novels," he said. "Thirty years ago when I was in training, I studied the great novelists as well as Freud because they helped me to understand, in a different vocabulary, the vagaries of passion.

"Once I began practicing, I had to give them up. I was seeing eight patients a day and reading psychology. But now that I'm retired, I miss the close contact, the emotional splurging, all the details of being and doing, and I thought I might find this again in fiction. Of course I knew fiction had changed, that it no longer dealt in the heroic or the larger than life, as James, Tolstoy, Proust or Ford did. But that was all right. If characters in contemporary novels bore some resemblance to my patients, I'd feel right at home."

"Do they?" I asked.

"Before I answer that," he said, "I'll ask you not to use my name if you quote me. Now that I'm not working, I never know what what I might say. I feel giddy with freedom, but I mustn't forget my Hippocratic oath. As for your question about whether people in fiction are different from my former patients: Yes, they are, and in a way that took me by surprise. When I look back on them, it almost seems that my patients were more original -- I'm tempted to say more talented -- than the people in many current novels. I'm aware of the old saw that truth is stranger than fiction, but I don't see why this should be so. After all, truth is in the public domain -- a novelist can borrow anyone's truth. Since he has an infinite selection to choose from, I can only suppose it's some failure in his taste or technique that makes his fictive truths less vivid or convincing than ordinary ones."

"How do you explain this failure?"

"I think part of the difficulty lies in the relation of the writer to his characters and to his audience, which is not at all the same as a patient's relation to himself as a character and to his analyst. When someone tells me his story, he's fighting for his life, his happiness, his truth, if you like. He puts everything he has into his narrative. (This is not the case with all patients, but I try to avoid the other kinds.) Such pure need poured out of the people I saw, such beautiful sadness, such a reaching for the past or future, that I couldn't help loving them. Naturally there were patches of ugliness too, but these are the inevitable disadvantages of being born into a family and the world.

"I felt that these people loved me in return, if only because they depended on me, or because I was seriously interested in them. They may have felt that I alone understood them; I was the repository of their hopes and fears, their secrets. In a sense I was the mirror on the wall that enabled them to imagine for a moment that they were the fairest of them all, for there are times in analysis when nearly every patient takes on a great beauty, the beauty, you might say, of being the only creature who has to struggle with consciousness. Yet I don't always feel this pressing toward clarification in novels. The characters don't talk with the same urgency. It's as if they haven't much faith in whomever they're performing for. And this lack of faith may begin with the novelist, because he and his characters often strike me as resisting each other, as well as the reader. Authors who aren't faithful to their characters remind me of people who lie about their dreams.

"One lets the men and women in a novel speak or act for themselves, and the situation in analysis is similar. Much of what I do is simply sit and wait while the patient shows himself to himself. Eventually, if we're lucky, something happens -- something that he wants and needs and has been desperately waiting for. But in quite a few novels I read, I don't feel much wanting or needing, which baffles and frustrates me. And so many of the characters are depressed. At least some of my patients were manic and less depressive. When you get the right balance between them, the manic supplies a wild energy that enables the patient -- or the character -- to revenge himself on his depression, to toy with it or dance around it.

"Sex almost always disappoints me in novels. Everything can be said or done now, and that's what I often find: everything, a feeling of generality or dispersal. But in my experience, true sex is so particular, so peculiar to the person who yearns for it. Only he or she, and no one else, would desire so very much that very person under those very circumstances. In fiction, I miss that sense of terrific specificity. I miss those kinds of gratification that could arise only as an unconscious answer to a bizarre appeal.

"One of the things that has always moved me in analysis was the patient's voice. No singer or composer could express all the changes of voice that an excited, grieving or raging human being produces. But current fiction tends to be curiously dispassionate in its voice. I don't hear the break and tide of rhythm, the pulling for breath, the squawk or shriek of certain words, like bird or animal cries. And the images -- those creatures from the black lagoon that used to haunt my consultation room -- where are they?

"Then there were patients who would try to impress me with their brilliance or wit, as if to show that they didn't need me, didn't need anything. Certain authors are like that, and I want to ask them, Are you satisfied just to be amusing? What are you concealing?"

"Tell me," I said, "what do you miss most? What did your patients give you that fiction doesn't?

He thought a while, "Incongruity," he said. "Most of all I miss incongruity. A psychoanalyst, or at least this one, is constantly refreshed -- even sustained -- by the gorgeous incongruities that people produce under stress. Such a wrench of perspective is a measure of our range, our suppleness. Occasionally a patient will go through the kind of abrupt self-transcendence that's one of the glories of our species. Without transition, he'll leap from the disgusting to the sublime, from the petty or mundane to the wildest shores of human sensibility. These flashes of incongruity are like dying and going to heaven. If I wrote a novel, I would fill it with incongruities, like kisses."

"You've been pretty tough on fiction. Have you found any writers you envy because they came closer to the human soul that you did?"

"Oh, yes. Indeed yes. There are certainly exceptions, marvelous exceptions. Once in a while a novelist will raise a question and carry it to a height too exquisite to be described in any but ontological or theological terms. He'll develop his character's difficulty to a point where it dissolves into a radiance, a beatitude. It will have all the pathos of human fallibility, or original sin. It will identify our limits, and there's a consolation in this that only a few of us have the courage to appreciate. If a patient came to me with a complaint of such grandeur, I'd send him away. I'd tell him his difficulty is worth living for, suffering for, even dying for. I know this is romantic, but that's what psychoanalysis should be: a romance, or roman, an art form."