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A review of Night Vision: Seeing Ourselves Through Dark Moods. By Mariana Alessandri. Princeton University Press.
Mariana Alessandri ends her Introduction to Night Vision with a quotation from a poem by Wendell Berry: “To get in the dark with a light is to know the light. / To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight, / and find the dark, too, blossoms and sings, / and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.”
In Night Vision, Alessandri, a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, provides a vigorous, deeply personal, and provocative critique of ancient philosophers (“the first therapists”), present-day positive thinkers, cognitive behavioral therapists, physicians, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and America’s pop psychology self-help industry, who pair light with clarity and good health and advocate suppressing or overcoming feelings of anger, emotional and physical pain, grief, depression, and anxiety. Because “the world is overwhelmingly tragic, with just a few rays of sunshine poking through every now and then,” Alessandri, an existentialist, believes we must stop lying to ourselves and each other, acknowledge a “racial bias against darkness,” and learn how “to see in the dark.”
The book is not without flaws. Alessandri’s claims that Americans “are stuck in the Light Metaphor” that stimulates shame and self-blame, are, at times, overstated. She doesn’t adequately address the immensely varied impact of emotional disorders on the lives of individuals experiencing them or treatments, including medications, for them. She doesn’t entertain the possibility that night vision and the worship of light can productively co-exist.
Because she was raised in the United States, Alessandri indicates, “I was taught to think that feeling anger meant I was broken, PMS-ing, sick,” not because, as a woman of color, she routinely faces epistemic injustice. “Perhaps one day,” she hopes, we will realize that grief won’t go away by stifling it, cry openly and without apology, and learn that tears are not more inappropriate, embarrassing, or contagious than laughter. Depression as well as grief, Alessandri asserts, is “vilified in the extreme.” Individuals experiencing these emotions are pitied as “broken.” In the United States, “any amount of anxiety is dysfunctional.” Defining anxiety as “only painful, difficult, or undesirable,” rather than “thoroughly human,” society expects us to keep calm and carry on “100% of the time.”
All that said, at its best Night Vision supplies a useful corrective to the “Light Metaphor,” which, though contested, does remain an unquestioned credo for many Americans.
Anger, Alessandri points out, can keep us focused on unjust realities, be they political, racial, or medical. According to one study, breast cancer patients who express anger survive twice as long as those who didn’t. Platitudes, toughing it out, and returning to work do not immunize us from emotional or physical pain, she reminds us, and can plunge us into loneliness. At bottom, grief is not a problem to be fixed. By “bowing to the yoke of a common grief,” following the death of his son, Miguel de Unamuno, the Spanish philosopher, and his wife, uncovered new dimensions in their marriage. Through a “darker lens,” Alessandri emphasizes, happiness sometimes looks like “a brazen refusal” to recognize a broken world, while depression can be a symptom of a legitimate concern about a social illness. Anxiety is a normal, logical, and at times beneficial reaction to stress in a toxic age. Sedating it often prevents us from entering “the arena” to fight for what we believe in. “Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way,” by grasping the finiteness of the human condition, Soren Kierkegaard once wrote, “has learned the ultimate.”
Night Vision concludes with Alessandri’s partly tongue-in-cheek hope that her readers will never again refer to a light at the end of the tunnel without asking whether someone is stuck there; or tell anyone, including themselves, to look on the bright side.
Instead, they should internalize the idea that “darkness is a reality to acclimate to, feel your way around, and see yourself in.” And that emotional pain can be a “conduit to community, connection, self-knowledge, accuracy, wisdom, empathy, and intelligence.”
If her claims about “the wicked sprawl of the Light Metaphor” resonate with her readers, Alessandri asks them to practice night vision and see for themselves.
