My experience of the journey of self-knowledge is that every time you turn the corner, there's a new issue. That is, if you're conscious and engaged in that process; and not everyone is. The poet Robert Bly once said (at a men's group I went to) that you don't become conscious till you're 35. When I was younger, the issues I struggled with were my Mother issues, my power issues, my anger issues, and my weird personality/socialization issues. I feel as if I've gotten my arms around the anger and the personality/socialization issues. I don't begin conversations with rebarbative questions, I seek to be more straightforward, I try to listen. Not a very good listener. But I don't destroy dinner parties at nearly the rate I did when I was younger.
So having made this progress, my wife has informed me lately that I have entitlement issues. I agree with her, and without getting into it too intimately (I'm embarrassed by them; and they involve the fact that I make little money), I wonder whether there isn't a Jewish component to these issues. My mother issues. When I was in college, my girlfriend said I was a Jewish prince. My sisters said the same thing. Certainly there is a Jewish prince tradition in my culture. The mother lavishes praise on the Jewish prince, and contributes to his lack of engagement with the real world, to his becoming a luftmensch. My mother is street-smart, I'm not; she instilled that quality in her daughters. When I was in college, my best friends gently suggested I was a flake. I think Allen Ginsberg suffered from the same syndrome, and he had mommy issues. Mailer's mommy issues are discernible in his youthful letters lately published in the New York "Gaza's Not on Our Mind" Review of Books.
My wife's concern with my lack of straightforwardness also seems to me to have a cultural element. There's a Jewish love of unstraightforwardness, of irony. You can see it in the great Jewish jokes about Minsk/Pinsk and "Look who thinks he's a nobody!" (which I can relate some other time). Speaking in riddles. My wife's tradition is to be more quiet and if you speak at all, do so honestly, sincerely. "Simplicity, sincerity and service" are the values inscribed on a plaque at the Quaker camp she went to as a child. I never had those values myself.
All these issues can be related to power, too. My wife comes from the power group. I came from an outsider group. Now we're merging. Gonna be some collisions, and a lot of beep-beeping on the way. (Phil Weiss)
