{"id":6778,"date":"2023-07-14T21:48:40","date_gmt":"2023-07-14T21:48:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ronniestanglermd.com\/?p=6778"},"modified":"2023-07-17T14:57:15","modified_gmt":"2023-07-17T14:57:15","slug":"to-converse-well","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ronniestanglermd.com\/index.php\/2023\/07\/14\/to-converse-well\/","title":{"rendered":"To Converse Well"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

n.b. Movement, nutrition, sleep, stress management and such are well known pillars of health and longevity. But thriving requires social connectedness and emotional well being. Social media has made many of us strangers to the art of conversation, a critical component to communication and relationships. Paula Marantz Cohen offers us a luscious guide to this increasingly imperiled art and skill. She cites the Roman orator Cicero in the first century B.C.: “How can life be worth living \u2026 which lacks that repose which is to be found in the mutual good will of a friend?<\/em>“ How, indeed?<\/em> rss<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

the article below is adapted from <\/em>Talking Cure: An Essay on the Civilizing Power of Conversation<\/em><\/a> by Paula Marantz Cohen, published by Princeton University Press, 2023.<\/em> Excerpt published in Aeon Newsletter<\/a> on 13 July, 2023<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Good conversation mixes opinions, feelings, facts and ideas in an improvisational exchange with one or more individuals in an atmosphere of goodwill. It inspires mutual insight, respect and, most of all, joy. It is a way of relaxing the mind, opening the heart and connecting, authentically, with others. To converse well is surprising, humanising and fu<\/em>n.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Above is my definition of an activity central to my wellbeing. I trace my penchant for good conversation to my family of origin. My parents were loud and opinionated people who interrupted and quarrelled boisterously with each other. I realise that such an environment could give rise to taciturn children who seek quiet above all else. But, for me, this atmosphere was stimulating and joyful. It made my childhood home a place I loved to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The bright, ongoing talk that pervaded my growing up was overseen by my mother, a woman of great charm and energy. She was the maestro of the dinner table, unfailingly entertaining and fun. We loved to listen to her tell stories about what happened to her at work. She was a high-school French teacher, a position that afforded a wealth of anecdotes about her students\u2019 misbehaviour, eccentric wardrobe choices, and mistakes in the conjugation of verbs. There were also the intrigues among her colleagues \u2013 how I loved being privy to my teachers\u2019 peccadillos and romantic misadventures, an experience that sowed a lifelong scepticism of authority. My mother had the gift of making even the smallest detail of her day vivid and amusing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My father, by contrast, was a very different kind of talker. A scientist by training and vocation, he had a logical, detached sort of mind, and he liked to discuss ideas. He had theories about things: why people believed in God, the role of advertising in modern life, why women liked jewellery, and so on. I recall how he would clear his throat as a prelude to launching into a new idea: \u2018I\u2019ve been thinking about why we eat foods like oysters and lobster, which aren\u2019t very appealing. There must be an evolutionary aspect to why we have learned to like these things.\u2019 Being included in the development of an idea with my father was a deeply bonding experience. The idea<\/em> of ideas became enormously appealing as a result. And though my father was not an emotional person \u2013 and, indeed, because he was not \u2013 I associated ideas with our relationship, and they became imbued with feeling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps my family was exceptional in its love of conversation, but all families are, to some extent, learning spaces for how to talk. This is the paradox of growing up. Language is learned in the family; it solidifies our place within it, but it also allows us to move beyond it, giving us the tools to widen our experience with people very different from ourselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My family inculcated in me a life-long love of conversation \u2013 of sprightly, sometimes contentious, but always interesting talk that allowed me to lose myself for the space of that engagement. My pleasure in conversation has led me to think about the activity at length, from both a psychological and philosophical perspective: what makes a good conversation? What role has conversation served in history? What does talk do for us, and how can it ameliorate aspects of our current, divided society, if pursued with vigour and goodwill?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sigmund Freud began his groundbreaking work as the father of psychoanalysis by postulating that his patients\u2019 symptoms were physical responses to traumatic events or taboo desires dating from childhood. He found that if these people could be encouraged to talk without inhibition \u2013 to free-associate on what they were feeling \u2013 they would eventually find the source of their problems and the cure for what ailed them. With this in view, he made talk central to his therapeutic method \u2013 hence, the \u2018talking cure\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although many of Freud\u2019s theories<\/a> have since been refuted, the talking cure has endured. Clinical psychologists still recommend talk therapy as a treatment for both generalised anxiety as well as more severe mental health issues. And though Freud\u2019s talking cure is not, by any stretch, a real conversation \u2013 the patient talks, the analyst listens and strategically intervenes \u2013 the phrase \u2018talking cure\u2019 strikes me as a useful one in referring to the nature and use of conversation in our lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The need for conversation is one that many people have not fully acknowledged, perhaps because they have not had occasion to do enough of it or to do it well. I am not suggesting that, in conversing, we serve as each other\u2019s therapists, but I do believe that good talk, when carried on with the right degree of openness, can not only be a great pleasure but also do us a great deal of good, both individually and collectively as members of society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For me, one particularly useful concept derived from Freud\u2019s talking cure is the idea of transference<\/em>. In the course of therapy, Freud found that some patients felt that they had fallen in love with their therapists. Since he believed that all love relationships recapitulate what occurs within one\u2019s family of origin, he saw these patients\u2019 infatuation as a repetition of earlier, intense feelings for a parent that could now be analysed and controlled \u2013 directed toward more productive and transparent ends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think this idea is relevant to our understanding of conversation as an important activity in connecting with others. Putting aside the familial baggage that Freud saw as accompanying transference, a deep sense of affection seems to be, always, part of good conversation. Surely readers can identify with that welling up of positive feeling \u2013 that almost-falling-in-love with someone that we engage with in an authentic way. I have felt this not only for friends and even strangers with whom I\u2019ve had probing conversations but also for whole classes of students where it can seem that the group has merged into one deeply lovable and loving body.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If love can be understood as important in conversation, so can desire, another element central to Freud\u2019s thought. Sexual desire has its consummation in the sex act (a form of closure that accounts for why a poet like John Donne, among others, used \u2018death\u2019 to refer to sexual climax). Conversation, by contrast, does not consummate; it merely stops by arbitrary necessity. One may have to get across town for a meeting, pick up a child from school, or generally get on with the business of life. Such endings are in medias res<\/em>, so to speak, or mid-narrative. I find it interesting that a relationship can sometimes be over once the partners have consummated it in sex. But friendships are never over after a good conversation; they are sustained and bolstered by it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The search for satisfaction by our desiring self seems to me at the heart of good conversation. We seek to fill the lack in ourselves by engaging with someone who is Other \u2013 who comes from another position, another background, another set of experiences. Everyone, when taken in a certain light, is an Other by virtue, if nothing else, of having different DNA. To recognise this difference and welcome it is the premise upon which good conversation is built.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conversation also helps us deal with the human fear of the unexpected and the changeable. Talk with others allows us to practise uncertainty and open-endedness in a safe environment. It offers exercise in extemporaneity and experiment; it de<\/em>converts us from rigid and established forms of belief. There is no better antidote for certainty than ongoing conversation with a friend who disagrees<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Good conversation is an art that can be perfected, and the best way to do this is to converse regularly with a variety of people. As the fat man says to Sam Spade in Dashiell Hammett\u2019s novel The Maltese Falcon<\/em> (1930): \u2018Talking\u2019s something you can\u2019t do judiciously unless you keep in practice.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The next best thing to practising conversation is reading those authors whose writing seems to channel the spirit<\/em> of good conversation or give insight into its mechanics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018How can life be worth living \u2026 which lacks that repose which is to be found in the mutual good will of a friend? What can be more delightful than to have someone to whom you can say everything with the same absolute confidence as yourself\u2019? wrote the lawyer and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero, who lived in ancient Rome in the 1st century BCE.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Expanding on the subject hundreds of years later, in the 16th century, was Michel de Montaigne<\/a>, whose pioneering work in the personal essay form is, in its intimate and meandering style, a tribute to his love of conversation<\/a>. \u2018[I]f I were now compelled to choose,\u2019 he writes in the essay \u2018On the Art of Conversation\u2019, which addresses the subject directly, \u2018I should sooner, I think, consent to lose my sight, than my hearing and speech\u2019. One feels the pathos of this statement, given that Montaigne lost his most cherished friend, \u00c9tienne de la Bo\u00e9tie, at an early age and never ceased to mourn that loss. Indeed, some feel that the loss of La Bo\u00e9tie, by depriving Montaigne of his companion in conversation, accounts for the Essays<\/em>, written to fill that void.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The 18th century was a great age of conversation; Samuel Johnson, Jonathan Swift, Oliver Goldsmith, David Hume<\/a>, Joseph Addison and Henry Fielding are among the venerable authors of the period to provide commentary on what they considered to be important for good talk. The Literary Club in London, frequented by many of these luminaries, is said to have been organised in 1764 to help Johnson from succumbing to depression \u2013 through conversation, among other things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book<\/a> The Words That Made Us<\/em> (2021) by Akhil Reed Amar, on the founders of the American Republic, makes the point that the American Revolution was successful in mobilising disparate people to its cause as a result of long and probing conversations among constituents across the colonies. The British were fated to lose the war, Amar argues, because George III refused to listen, let alone converse with his American subjects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the 19th century, especially in the United States where shaping the self alongside shaping the country became something of a national obsession, conversation was one of the activities that an aspiring gentleman was expected to learn. We see publication of numerous etiquette books during this period, with titles like Manners for Men<\/em> (1897); The Gentleman\u2019s Book of Etiquette and Manual of Politeness<\/em> (1860); and Hints on Etiquette and the<\/em>Usages of Society: With a Glance at Bad Habits<\/em> (1834) \u2013 all of which give guidance on conversation, though mostly of a utilitarian kind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the 20th century, the most notable figure in conversational self-help was Dale Carnegie, who created an entire industry<\/a> out of teaching aspiring social and business climbers based on his most famous book, How to Win Friends and Influence People<\/em> (1936). Carnegie began writing and giving courses in the 1910s, and his business survived him to grow into an empire (\u2018over 200 offices in 86 countries\u2019, according to Forbes<\/em> magazine in 2020) with supporting textbooks, online resources, newsletters and blogs that boast the tag line: \u2018Training options that transform your impact.\u2019 The message dovetails with the US myth of upward mobility and getting ahead. Carnegie\u2019s self-improvement programmes have an offshoot in the self-realisation<\/a> movements of the past few decades. A deluge of books in recent years link conversational skills to creative and relationship goals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Having surveyed the abundant literature on conversation over the past two centuries, I find myself particularly charmed by a short but entertaining work, The Art of Conversation<\/em>(1936) by Milton Wright. The book is full of citations from philosophy and literature, with thumbnail sketches of the ancient symposia and the \u2018talkers of Old England\u2019 while also exhaustively outlining conversational scenarios. In one case, the author describes a wife explaining to her husband how he should converse over dinner with his boss about his love of fishing and pipe smoking (Wright gives a verbatim account of the wife practising the conversation in advance of the dinner). In a chapter on \u2018developing repartee\u2019, Wright gives minute instruction on how to come up with a clever thought and insert it into conversation, advising:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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