Reflections on Books: The Catcher in the Rye
I’ve read The Catcher in the Rye four times now, each in a different phase of my life. With each re-reading, I am more and more convinced Jerome David Salinger was either trained in psychoanalysis or he himself had gone through it. All of his work screams psychoanalysis to me. Among other works I’ve read, “For Esme” and “Franny and Zooey” stand out to me as well. What I appreciate most is how delicately Salinger crafts his characters into beautifully flawed, loveably hateable (and vice versa) human beings in the throes of deep suffering.
When I first read The Catcher in the Rye, I was an edgy teenager, and I found a kindred spirit in Holden Caulfield. His vapid rants were “deep” insights (Movies are phony! Books are where it’s at! Yeah! So profound!). I thought his frequent swearing and acting out behaviors were “cool.” I wrote a lot of stories back then, so I was drawn to his powerful voice. Holden felt like a friend writing a letter to me about his travails at boarding school. The whirling nightlife of New York City was exotic to me, a lad trapped in a sleepy suburb like a damsel in a doorless tower. Overall, Holden was a hero, held down by the system. And looking back, I realize now that I missed the whole point of the story in the first read-through.
The story is a frame narrative - an AP Lit term meaning the novel is the process of a story being told to characters outside the story itself but also not in real life. Examples of this are The Scarlet Letter, which is about a guy who finds a manuscript of the story of Hester Prynne and that whole affair, as well as The Life of Pi, which is about a survivor of a shipwreck telling the story about his journey on the sea. Very meta.
In Catcher, Holden is telling the story of his expulsion from the latest boarding school and subsequent misadventures through New York City to doctors in a psychiatric hospital. I had completely missed this because 1.) There were only a few sentences in the beginning of the book and a short epilogue paragraph to denote this, and his angry voice jolted me into just listening to his wild retelling; and 2.) I had no idea what psychiatry was. I grew up in a household that was 100% blind to mental health and illness. Psychosis was explained away as spiritual visitations. Depression and anxiety were merely ill-wanted guests in one’s life. It’s wild where life takes you sometimes.
On second re-reading in college, I hated Holden and myself for liking him. What a prick Holden was! He had peers around him trying to befriend him and mentor figures around trying to help him, and he shot them all down. I started to sympathize with the characters around Holden. His poor sister, Phoebe, who wanted to run away with her brother, I particularly marked as someone who bent over backwards to try to help. His rants about society seemed to me short-sighted. The vulgarity became repugnant to me as well: his blatant disrespect for women and his swaggering attitude were disgusting. “The guy needs to get his shit together,” I thought. In fact, I felt a bit embarrassed for liking him as much as I did. The thing is, it may have been developmentally appropriate for me to do so. Teenage times were tough times indeed. There was a lot of pent up emotions and the frontal lobe, our self-regulation system, is actually not fully operational until around age 25.
At around that age, I was in medical school. I re-read the book for a third time, this time with a fully-maturated frontal lobe and knowledge about psychiatry as a field of medicine. I was floored. Holden was someone who was in desperate need of help. “This guy is going through a manic episode,” I diagnosed arm-charily! The emotional lability (the guy was crying every other chapter), the suicidality, the long twisting paragraphs of all-or-nothing thinking, the grandiosity, the lack of sleep, the increased risky behaviors and goal-directed activity - I saw it all as pathology, symptoms that needed to be eradicated. Reading this story through a clinical lens, I noted important bits of history I had glided over before: Holden’s brother Allie died of leukemia, a disease which was apparently very stigmatized back in the 50s and 60s. Furthermore, Holden didn’t get to go to Allie’s funeral. I had learned in Palliative Care how important it is for people to appropriately mourn their loved ones, especially children. The whole situation read as a long patient interview with a lot of embellishment.
Then I experienced a decade more of life. I got married, had a child of my own, finished training, and practiced psychiatry in a psychology program. On fourth read-through, I found myself playing in the psychic playground built meticulously by Salinger. Every “Digression!” held rich insights into what the teenager was envying or wishing for, which provided the coherence to the narrative. The specter of death and narcissistic defense mechanisms were alternating dance partners for Holden. It was as sure as traffic lights. Red light: Holden was narrating about his dismissal from school. Green light: he then was psychologically clutching onto Allie’s baseball mitt as a transitional object. (For added psychodynamic richness, Holden broke his hand in his anger after finding out about Allie’s death, and the mitt became his replacement hand. Salinger is a genius.)
Other obsession-digressions that hooked Holden: he fixated on the human dioramas in the Natural History Museum, finding solace in their unchanging presentation. He asked taxi drivers about where the ducks go in the winter. The detail that “kills him” about his love interest was how Jane kept all of her kings on the back rank in checkers, a stasis resembling death, the end of a journey. And what about the specific term he used to indicate he’s being pleased - “That KILLS me.” It was no coincidence. His psyche was steeped in themes of death. (Green light:) When Phoebe asked him to name one thing he likes, (Red light:) Holden’s free association took him to the boy who killed himself in his previous boarding school.
The other big Freudian concept infused in Catcher is that of misplaced libido. In children with traumatic upbringings, oftentimes the expression of all types of love is under-exercised, which leads to problematic expressions of love when feelings get overwhelming like in teenage times. I found Holden highly awkward around his peers (never calling Jane, ranting at Sally) while self-confident around older women like Mrs. Morrow on the train to NYC and the three visitors from Washington. His (potential?) misinterpretation of Mr. Antolini’s caresses and his homophobia were other examples of his insecurity.
When I got to the end of the book, I couldn’t help but smack myself on the forehead and say “D’OH.” I had missed the incestuous feelings Holden has toward his sister (and that are possibly reciprocated). The bedroom scene at the Caulfield’s residence read many shades darker when juxtaposed with the prostitute, Sunny, in the hotel. In contrast, Holden’s appetite for goodwill is actually sated by Phoebe, who even gave him money in the exchange. The next day, she tried to satisfy Holden’s fantasy of running away, the same one Holden pitched to Sally in that manic rant at Rockefeller ice skating rink. And of course, the final scene at the carousel in Central Park with the kiss and the rain and the blue coat felt like the end of a romance movie. I felt simultaneously intrigued and creeped out, which if you think about it, is the goal of all great art.
What I did not feel was sympathy or camaraderie or hatred toward Holden. I didn’t feel an urge to help him either. I felt like Salinger’s brilliant, sleight-of-hand storytelling merely alluded to a deep aquifer of suffering, but the actual words were all dirt above the water table. It’s like Hitchcock’s line “There’s nothing more scary than a closed door” - each person’s reading (or re-reading) of Catcher has their own interpretation. Humbly, I realized I could only peer through the keyhole of the door into Holden’s mind, and I was already stunned by the sublime experience of trying to understand another human being.
