THE PRICE OF SELF-DECEPTION

(Published as a review of Arthur Miller's play "The Price" in the East Bay Psychiatric Association Newsletter, October, 2005)


I recently saw Arthur Miller’s play "The Price" at the Aurora Theatre in Berkeley. This is another one of Miller’s incisive and insightful dramas, like his Death of a Salesman, that cuts to the quick regarding the failure of families to face their own reality. This play was written in 1968 as a metaphor for our own government’s lack of honesty in facing up to its failed policy in Vietnam. As Miller himself said then, “50,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese paid with their lives to support a myth and bellicose denial.”

The struggle for many families to deal honestly with their lives probably lies in their attempt to maintain a fragile balance between practicing a certain amount of self-deception versus risking the total breakdown of the family unit. Many families have an “elephant” that sits at the dinner table every night that is never mentioned, so that the family can survive, albeit dysfunctionally.

Sometimes this fragile balance breaks down in unanticipated ways. Recently I saw the mother of a 21 year-old son who had bipolar illness and alcoholism. For years the family had not been strong enough to confront this child’s chaotic, dysfunctional behavior, which escalated at times to physical assaults and death threats on the part of the son within the home. The family remained largely codependent, choosing to avoid confronting the son and practicing self-deception, until one day they finally called the police. The son was then in turn jailed and hospitalized, but tragically took his own life while in confinement—not exactly the kind of resolution the family had wished to accomplish.

Miller’s "The Price" is an attempt to show “that through the mists of denial, the bow of the ancient ship of reality could emerge.” His metaphorical use of family self-deception to reveal the nation’s problem confronting the Vietnam War in 1968 holds true today as well. We as a nation are now facing a similar dilemma as our administration explains its rationale for the war in Iraq in varying ways depending on how events unfold. Most recently we were told that the reason to “stay the course” is not to dishonor those brave soldiers who have already died in the conflict, as if simply sacrificing more troops will do more good. (We were also told that in the Vietnam War era when only 100 soldiers had perished). A more honest approach, a la Arthur Miller, would be to come clean as to why we are in Iraq in the first place—why we are building the biggest American Embassy building that exists anywhere in the world, and why we are establishing Air Force bases around that country. But to do that would risk the already eroding public support for the war, and throw the “family’ into chaos. Better to practice deception, it seems our administration has concluded. But this also robs the nation of a chance to change course correctively.

People (and nations) will pay “the price” in the present for dysfunctional decisions they have made in the past, and then take no corrective action in the present. As an individual, for instance, one may be overly attached to a parent, or manipulated by that parent, to make a choice of a career or spouse that is not really one’s own. The price paid can be a lifetime of unhappiness if self-deception is practiced. Similarly, Miller tells us, we pay a price as a nation when we make choices and then do not deal with the reality of the consequences.

Whether one is running a government, a company, or just helping a family or individual to cope, denial and self-deception can get you only so far. At some point you will pay “the price.”