結果

結果最想要的面試機會沒有得到
越意外得到邀請去沒有花什麼心思的公司
心中帶著失落 但還是得打起精神來準備一番
想一想
第一份工作
又是個外國人
有拿到就要偷笑吧
要修正心態!!


久不寫東西
竟然都只能打出這些流水帳
無聊透頂耶我
從前的感性與文字欲跑去那兒啦??

[轉貼] 如果讓我重做一次研究生

如果讓我重做一次研究生

王汎森院士
中央研究院歷史語言研究所
（花蓮教育大學國民教育研究所演講2005.10.29）


這個題目我非常喜歡，因為這個題目，對大家多少都有實際的幫助。如果下次我必須再登台演講，我覺得這個題目還可以再發揮一兩次。我是台大歷史研究所畢業的，所以我的碩士是在台大歷史研究所，我的博士是在美國普林斯頓大學取得的。我想在座的各位有碩士、有博士，因此我以這兩個階段為主，把我的經驗呈現給各位。

我從來不認為我是位有成就的學者，我也必須跟各位坦白，我為了要來做這場演講，在所裡碰到剛從美國讀完博士回來的同事，因為他們剛離開博士生的階段，比較有一些自己較獨特的想法，我就問他：「如果你講這個問題，準備要貢獻什麼？」結合了他們的意見，共同醞釀了今天的演講內容，因此這裡面不全是我一個人的觀點。雖然我的碩士論文和博士論文都出版了，但不表示我就是一個成功的研究生，因為我也總還有其他方面仍是懵懵懂懂。我的碩士論文是二十年前時報出版公司出版的，我的博士論文是英國劍橋大學出版的。你說有特別好嗎？我不敢亂說。我今天只是綜合一些經驗，提供大家參考。

一、研究生與大學生的區別

首先跟大家說明一下研究生和大學生的區別。大學生基本上是來接受學問、接受知識的，然而不管是對於碩士時期或是博士時期的研究而言，都應該準備要開始製造新的知識，我們在美國得到博士學位時都會領到看不懂的畢業證書，在一個偶然的機會下，我問了一位懂拉丁文的人，上面的內容為何？他告訴我：「裡頭寫的是恭喜你對人類的知識有所創新，因此授予你這個學位。」在中國原本並沒有博碩士的學歷，但是在西方他們原來的用意是，恭賀你已經對人類普遍的知識有所創新，這個創新或大或小，都是對於普遍的知識有所貢獻。這個創新不會因為你做本土與否而有所不同，所以第一個我們必須要很用心、很深刻的思考，大學生和研究生是不同的。

（一）選擇自己的問題取向，學會創新

你一旦是研究生，你就已經進入另一個階段，不只是要完全樂在其中，更要從而接受各種有趣的知識，進入製造知識的階段，也就是說你的論文應該有所創新。由接受知識到創造知識，是身為一個研究生最大的特色，不僅如此，還要體認自己不再是個容器，等著老師把某些東西倒在茶杯裡，而是要開始逐步發展和開發自己。做為研究生不再是對於各種新奇的課照單全收，而是要重視問題取向的安排，就是在碩士或博士的階段裡面，所有的精力、所有修課以及讀的書裡面都應該要有一個關注的焦點，而不能像大學那般漫無目標。大學生時代是因為你要盡量開創自己接受任何東西，但是到了碩士生和博士生，有一個最終的目的，就是要完成論文，那篇論文是你個人所有武功的總集合，所以這時候必須要有個問題取向的學習。

（二）嘗試跨領域研究，主動學習

提出一個重要的問題，跨越一個重要的領域，將決定你未來的成敗。我也在台大和清華教了十幾年的課，我常常跟學生講，選對一個領域和選對一個問題是成敗的關鍵，而你自己本身必須是帶著問題來探究無限的學問世界，因為你不再像大學時代一樣氾濫無所歸。所以這段時間內，必須選定一個有興趣與關注的主題為出發點，來探究這些知識，產生有機的循環。由於你是自發性的對這個問題產生好奇和興趣，所以你的態度和大學部的學生是截然不同的，你慢慢從被動的接受者變成是一個主動的探索者，並學會悠游在這學術的領域。我舉一個例子，我們的中央研究院院長李遠哲先生，得了諾貝爾獎。他曾經在中研院的週報寫過幾篇文章，在他的言論集裡面，或許各位也可以看到，他反覆提到他的故事。他是因為讀了一個叫做馬亨教授的教科書而去美國柏克萊大學唸書，去了以後才發現，這個老師只給他一張支票，跟他說你要花錢你盡量用，但是從來不教他任何東西。可是隔壁那個教授，老師教很多，而且每天學生都是跟著老師學習。他有一次就跟那個老師抱怨：「那你為什麼不教我點東西呢？」那個老師就說：「如果我知道結果，那我要你來這邊唸書做什麼？我就是因為不知道，所以要我們共同探索一個問題、一個未知的領域。」他說其實這兩種教法都有用處，但是他自己從這個什麼都不教他，永遠碰到他只問他「有沒有什麼新發現」的老師身上，得到很大的成長。所以這兩方面都各自蘊含深層的道理，沒有所謂的好壞，但是最好的方式就是將這兩個方式結合起來。我為什麼講這個故事呢？就是強調在這個階段，學習是一種「self-help」，並且是在老師的引導下學習「self-help」，而不能再像大學時代般，都是純粹用聽的，這個階段的學習要基於對研究問題的好奇和興趣，要帶著一顆熱忱的心來探索這個領域。然而研究生另外一個重要的階段就是Learn how to learn，不只是學習而已，
而是學習如何學習，不再是要去買一件很漂亮的衣服，而是要學習拿起那一根針，學會繡出一件漂亮的衣服，慢慢學習把目標放在一個標準上，而這一個標準就是你將來要完成碩士或博士論文。如果你到西方一流的大學去讀書，你會覺得我這一篇論文可能要和全世界做同一件問題的人相比較。我想即使在台灣也應該要有這樣的心情，你的標準不能單單只是放在旁邊幾個人而已，而應該是要放在領域的普遍人裡面。你這篇文章要有新的東西，才算達到的標準，也才符合到我們剛剛講到那張拉丁文的博士證書上面所講的，有所貢獻與創新。

二、一個老師怎麼訓練研究生
第二個，身為老師你要怎麼訓練研究生。我認為人文科學和社會科學的訓練，哪怕是自然科學的訓練，到研究生階段應該更像師徒制，所以來自個人和老師、個人和同儕間密切的互動和學習是非常重要的，跟大學部坐在那邊單純聽課，聽完就走人是不一樣的，相較之下你的生活應該要和你所追求的知識與解答相結合，並且你往後的生活應該或多或少都和這個探索有相關。

（一）善用與老師的夥伴關係，不斷Research
我常說英文research 這個字非常有意義，search 是尋找，而research 是再尋找，所以每個人都要research，不斷的一遍一遍再尋找，並進而使你的生活和學習成為一體。中國近代兵學大師蔣百里在他的兵學書中曾說：「生活條件要跟戰鬥條件一致，近代歐洲凡生活與戰鬥條件一致者強，凡生活與戰鬥條件不一致者弱。」我就是藉由這個來說明研究生的生活，你的生活條件與你的戰鬥條件要一致，你的生活是跟著老師與同學共同成長的，當中你所聽到的每一句話，都可能帶給你無限的啟發。

回想當時我在美國唸書的研究生生活，只要隨便在樓梯口碰到任何一個人，他都有辦法幫忙解答你語言上的困難，不管是英文、拉丁文、德文、希臘文……等。所以能幫助解決問題的不單只是你的老師，還包括所有同學以及學習團體。你的學習是跟生活合在一起的。當我看到有學生呈現被動或是懈怠的時候，我就會用毛澤東的「革命不是請客吃飯！」來跟他講：「作研究生不是請客吃飯。」

（二）藉由大量閱讀和老師提點，進入研究領域
怎樣進入一個領域最好，我個人覺得只有兩條路，其中一條就是讓他不停的唸書、不停的報告，這是進入一個陌生的領域最快，又最方便的方法，到最後不知不覺學生就會知道這個領域有些什麼，我們在不停唸書的時候常常可能會沉溺在細節裡不能自拔，進而失去全景，導致見樹不見林，或是被那幾句英文困住，而忘記全局在講什麼。藉由學生的報告，老師可以講述或是釐清其中的精華內容，經由老師幾句提點，就會慢慢打通任督二脈，逐漸發展一種自發學習的能力，同時也知道碰到問題可以看哪些東西。就像是我在美國唸書的時候，我修過一些我完全沒有背景知識的國家的歷史，所以我就不停的唸書、不停的逼著自己吸收，而老師也只是不停的開書目，運用這樣的方式慢慢訓練，有一天我不再研究它時，我發現自己仍然有自我生產及蓄發的能力，因為我知道這個學問大概是什麼樣的輪廓，碰到問題也有能力可以去查詢相關的資料。所以努力讓自己的學習產生自發的延展性是很重要的。

（三）循序漸進地練習論文寫作
到了碩士或博士最重要的一件事，是完成一篇學位論文，而不管是碩士或博士論文，其規模都遠比你從小學以來所受的教育、所要寫的東西都還要長得多，雖然我不知道教育方面的論文情況是如何，但是史學的論文都要寫二、三十萬字，不然就是十幾二十萬字。寫這麼大的一個篇幅，如何才能有條不紊、條理清楚，並把整體架構組織得通暢可讀？首先，必須要從一千字、五千字、一萬字循序漸進的訓練，先從少的慢慢寫成多的，而且要在很短的時間內訓練到可以從一萬字寫到十萬字。這麼大規模的論文誰都寫得出來，問題是寫得好不好，因為這麼大規模的寫作，有這麼許多的註腳，還要注意首尾相映，使論述一體成型，而不是散落一地的銅錢；是一間大禮堂，而不是一間小小分割的閣樓。為了完成一個大的、完整的、有機的架構模型，必須要從小規模的篇幅慢慢練習，這是一個最有效的辦法。

因為受電腦的影響，我發現很多學生寫文章能力都大幅下降。寫論文時很重要的一點是，文筆一定要清楚，不要花俏、不必漂亮，「清楚」是最高指導原則，經過慢慢練習會使你的文筆跟思考產生一致的連貫性。我常跟學生講不必寫的花俏，不必展現你散文的才能，因為這是學術論文，所以關鍵在於要寫得非常清楚，如果有好的文筆當然更棒，但那是可遇不可求的，文彩像個人的生命一樣，英文叫style，style 本身就像個人一樣帶有一點點天生。因此最重要的還是把內容陳
述清楚，從一萬字到最後十萬字的東西，都要架構井然、論述清楚、文筆清晰。我在唸書的時候，有一位歐洲史、英國史的大師Lawrence Stone，他目前已經過世了，曾經有一本書訪問十位最了不起的史學家，我記得他在訪問中說了一句非常吸引人注意的話，他說他英文文筆相當好，所以他一輩子沒有被退過稿。因此文筆清楚或是文筆好，對於將來文章可被接受的程度有舉足輕重的地位。內容非常重要，有好的表達工具更是具有加分的作用，但是這裡不是講究漂亮的style，而是論述清楚。

三、研究生如何訓練自己

（一）嘗試接受挑戰，勇於克服
研究生如何訓練自己？就是每天、每週或每個月給自己一個挑戰，要每隔一段時間就給自己一個挑戰，挑戰一個你做不到的東西，你不一定要求自己每次都能順利克服那個挑戰，但是要努力去嘗試。我在我求學的生涯中，碰到太多聰明但卻一無所成的人，因為他們很容易困在自己的障礙裡面，舉例來說，我在普林斯頓大學碰到一個很聰明的人，他就是沒辦法克服他給自己的挑戰，他就總是東看西看，雖然我也有這個毛病，可是我會定期給我自己一個挑戰，例如：我會告訴自
己，在某一個期限內，無論如何一定要把這三行字改掉，或是這個禮拜一定要把這篇草稿寫完，雖然我仍然常常寫不完，但是有這個挑戰跟沒這個挑戰是不一樣的，因為我挑戰三次總會完成一次，完成一次就夠了，就足以表示克服了自己，如果覺得每一個禮拜的挑戰，可行性太低，可以把時間延長為一個月的挑戰，去挑戰原來的你，不一定能做到的事情。不過也要切記，碩士生是剛開始進入這一個領域的新手，如果一開始問題太小，或是問題大到不能控制，都會造成以後研
究的困難。

（二）論文的寫作是個訓練過程，不能苛求完成精典之作
各位要記得我以前的老師所說的一句話：「碩士跟博士是一個訓練的過程，碩士跟博士不是寫經典之作的過程。」我看過很多人，包括我的親戚朋友們，他之所以沒有辦法好好的完成碩士論文，或是博士論文，就是因為他把它當成在寫經典之作的過程，雖然事實上，很多人一生最好的作品就是碩士論文或博士論文，因為之後的時間很難再有三年或六年的時間，沉浸在一個主題裡反覆的耕耘，當你做教授的時候，像我今天被行政纏身，你不再有充裕的時間好好探究一個問題，尤其做教授還要指導學生、上課，因此非常的忙碌，所以他一生最集中又精華的時間，當然就是他寫博士、或是碩士論文的時候，而那一本成為他一生中最重要的著作也就一點都不奇怪了。

但不一定要刻意強求，要有這是一個訓練過程的信念，應該清楚知道從哪裡開始，也要知道從哪裡放手，不要無限的追下去。當然我不是否認這個過程的重要性，只是要調整自己的心態，把論文的完成當成一個目標，不要成為是一種的心理障礙或是心理負擔。這方面有太多的例子了，我在普林斯頓大學唸書的時候，那邊舊書攤有一位非常博學多文的舊書店老闆，我常常讚嘆的對他說：「你為什麼不要在大學做教授。」他說：「因為那篇博士論文沒有寫完。」原因在於他把那個博士論文當成要寫一本經典，那當然永遠寫不完。如果真能寫成經典那是最好，就像美麗新境界那部電影的男主角John Nash 一樣，一生最大的貢獻就是博士那二十幾頁的論文，不過切記不要把那個當作是目標，因為那是自然而然形成的，應該要堅定的告訴自己，所要完成的是一份結構嚴謹、論述清楚與言之有物的論文，不要一開始就期待它是經典之作。如果你期待它是經典之作，你可能會變成我所看到的那位舊書攤的老闆，至於我為什麼知道他有那麼多學問，是因為那時候我在找一本書，但它並沒有在舊書店裡面，不過他告訴我：「還有很多本都跟他不相上下。」後來我對那個領域稍稍懂了之後，證明確實如他所建議的那般。一個舊書店的老闆精熟每一本書，可是他就是永遠無法完成，他夢幻般的學位論文，因為他不知道要在哪裡放手，這一切都只成為空談。

（三）論文的正式寫作
1.學習有所取捨
到了寫論文的時候，要能取也要能捨，因為現在資訊爆炸，可以看的書太多，所以一定要建構一個屬於自己的知識樹，首先，要有一棵自己的知識樹，才能在那棵樹掛相關的東西，但千萬不要不斷的掛不相關的東西，而且要慢慢的捨掉一些掛不上去的東西，再隨著你的問題跟關心的領域，讓這棵知識樹有主幹和枝葉。然而這棵知識樹要如何形成？第一步你必須對所關心的領域中，有用的書籍或是資料非常熟悉。

2.形成你的知識樹
我昨天還請教林毓生院士，他今年已經七十幾歲了，我告訴他我今天要來作演講，就問他：「你如果講這個題目你要怎麼講？」他說：「只有一點，就是那重要的五、六本書要讀好幾遍。」因為林毓生先生是海耶克，還有幾位近代思想大師在芝加哥大學的學生，他們受的訓練中很重要的一部份是精讀原典。這句話很有道理，雖然你不可能只讀那幾本重要的書，但是那五、六本書將逐漸形成你知識樹的主幹，此後的東西要掛在上面，都可以參照這一個架構，然後把不相干的東西暫放一邊。生也有涯，知也無涯，你不可能讀遍天下所有的好書，所以要學習取捨，了解自己無法看遍所有有興趣的書，而且一但看遍所有有興趣的書，很可能就會落得普林斯頓街上的那位舊書店的老闆一般，因為閱讀太多不是自己所關心的領域的知識，它對於你來說只是一地的散錢。

3.掌握工具
在這個階段一定要掌握語文與合適的工具。要有一個外語可以非常流暢的閱讀，要有另外一個語文至少可以看得懂文章的標題，能學更多當然更好，但是至少要有一個語文，不管是英文、日文、法文……等，一定要有一個語文能夠非常流暢的閱讀相關書籍，這是起碼的前提。一旦這個工具沒有了，你的視野就會因此大受限制，因為語文就如同是一扇天窗，沒有這個天窗你這房間就封閉住了。為什麼你要看得懂標題？因為這樣才不會有重要的文章而你不知道，如果你連標題都看不懂，你就不知道如何找人來幫你或是自己查相關的資料。其他的工具，不管是統計或是其他的任何工具，你也一定要多掌握，因為你將來沒有時間再把這樣的工具學會。

4.突破學科間的界線
應該要把跨學科的學習當作是一件很重要的事，但是跨學科涉及到的東西必須要對你這棵知識樹有助益，要學會到別的領域稍微偷打幾槍，到別的領域去攝取一些概念，對於本身關心的問題產生另一種不同的啟發，可是不要氾濫無所歸。為什麼要去偷打那幾槍？近幾十年來，人們發現不管是科學或人文，最有創新的部份是發生在學科交會的地方。為什麼會如此？因為我們現在的所有學科大部分都在西方十九世紀形成的，而中國再把它轉借過來。十九世紀形成這些知識學科的劃分的時候，很多都帶有那個時代的思想跟學術背景，比如說，中研院的李院長的專長就是物理化學，他之所以得諾貝爾獎就是他在物理和化學的交界處做工作。像諾貝爾經濟獎，這二十年來所頒的獎，如果在傳統的經濟學獎來看就是旁門走道，古典經濟學豈會有這些東西，甚至心理學家也得諾貝爾經濟獎，連John Nash 這位數學家也得諾貝爾經濟獎，為什麼？因為他們都在學科的交界上，學科跟學科、平台跟平台的交界之處有所突破。在平台本身、在學科原本最核心的地方已經search 太多次了，因此不一定能有很大的創新，所以為什麼跨領域學習是一件很重要的事情。

常常一篇碩士論文或博士論文最重要、最關鍵的，是那一個統攝性的重要概念，而通常你在本學科裡面抓不到，是因為你已經泡在這個學科裡面太久了，你已經拿著手電筒在這個小倉庫裡面照來照去照太久了，而忘了還有別的東西可以更好解釋你這些材料的現象，不過這些東西可遇而不可求。John Nash 這一位數學家為什麼會得諾貝爾數學獎？為什麼他在賽局理論的博士論文，會在數十年之後得諾貝爾經濟獎？因為他在大學時代上經濟學導論的課，所以他認為數學可以用在經濟方面來思考，而這個東西在一開始，他也沒有想到會有這麼大的用處。他是在數學和經濟學的知識交界之處做突破。有時候在經濟學這一個部分沒有大關係，在數學的這一個部分也沒有大關係，不過兩個加在一起，火花就會蹦出來。

5.論文題目要有延展性
對一個碩士生或博士生來說，如果選錯了題目，就是失敗，題目選對了，還有百分之七十勝利的機會。這個問題值得研一、博一的學生好好思考。你的第一年其實就是要花在這上面，你要不斷的跟老師商量尋找一個有意義、有延展性的問題，而且不要太難。我在國科會當過人文處長，當我離開的時候，每次就有七千件申請案，就有一萬四千個袋子，就要送給一萬四千個教授審查。我當然不可能看那麼多，可是我有個重要的任務，就是要看申訴。有些申訴者認為：「我的研究計畫很好，我的著作很好，所以我來申訴。」申訴通過的大概只有百分之十，那麼我的責任就是在百分之九十未通過的案子正式判決前，再拿來看一看。有幾個印象最深常常被拿出來討論的，就是這個題目不必再做了、這個題目本身沒有發展性，所以使我更加確認選對一個有意義、有延展性、可控制、可以經營的題目是非常重要的。

我的學生常常選非常難的題目，我說你千萬不要這樣，因為沒有人會仔細去看你研究的困難度，對於難的題目你要花更多的時間閱讀史料，才能得到一點點東西；要擠很多東西，才能篩選出一點點內容，所以你最好選擇一個難易適中的題目。

我寫過好幾本書，我認為我對每一本書的花的心力都是一樣，雖然我寫任何東西我都不滿意，但是在過程中我都絞盡腦汁希望把他寫好。目前為止很多人認為我最好的書，是我二十幾歲剛到史語所那一年所寫的那本書。我在那本書花的時間並不長，那本書的大部分的稿子，是我和許添明老師同時在當兵的軍營裡面寫的，而且還是用我以前舊的筆記寫的。大陸這些年有許多出版社，反覆要求出版我以前的書，尤其是這一本，我說：「不行。」因為我用的是我以前的讀書筆記，我怕引文有錯字，因為在軍隊營區裡面隨時都要出操、隨時就要集合，手邊又沒有書，怎麼可能好好的去核對呢？而如果要我重新校正一遍，又因為引用太多書，實在沒有力氣校正。

為什麼舉這個例子呢？我後來想一想，那本書之所以比較好，可能是因為那個題目可延展性大，那個題目波瀾起伏的可能性大。很多人都認為，我最好的書應該是劍橋大學出的那一本，不過我認為我最好的書一定是用中文寫的，因為這個語文我能掌握，英文我沒辦法掌握得出神入化。讀、寫任何語文一定要練習到你能帶著三分隨意，那時候你才可以說對於這一個語文完全理解與精熟，如果你還無法達到三分的隨意，就表示你還在摸索。

回到我剛剛講的，其實每一本書、每一篇論文我都很想把它寫好。但是有些東西沒辦法寫好，為什麼？因為一開始選擇的題目不夠好。因此唯有選定題目以後，你的所有訓練跟努力才有價值。我在這裡建議大家，選題的工作要儘早做，所選的題目所要處理的材料最好要集中，不要太分散，因為碩士生可能只有三年、博士生可能只有五年，如果你的材料太不集中，讀書或看資料可能就要花掉你大部分的時間，讓你沒有餘力思考。而且這個題目要適合你的性向，如果你不會統計學或討厭數字，但卻選了一個全都要靠統計的論文，那是不可能做得好。

6.養成遵照學術格式的寫作習慣
另一個最基本的訓練，就是平時不管你寫一萬字、三萬字、五萬字都要養成遵照學術規範的習慣，要讓他自然天成，就是說你論文的註腳、格式，在一開始進入研究生的階段就要培養成為你生命中的一個部份，如果這個習慣沒有養成，人家就會覺得這個論文不嚴謹，之後修改也要花很多時間，因為你的論文規模很大，可能幾百頁，如果一開始弄錯了，後來再重頭改到尾，一定很耗時費力，因此要在一開始就養成習慣，因為我們是在寫論文而不是在寫散文，哪一個逗點應該在哪裡、哪一個書名號該在哪裡、哪一個地方要用引號、哪一個要什麼標點符號，都有一定的規定，用中文寫還好，用英文有一大堆簡稱。在1960 年代台灣知識還很封閉的時候，有一個人從美國回來就說：「美國有個不得了的情形，因為有一個人非常不得了。」有人問他為什麼不得了，他說：「因為這個人的作品到處被引用。」他的名字就叫ibid。所謂ibid 就是同前作者，這個字是從拉丁文發展出來的，拉丁文有一大堆簡稱，像et. al.就是兩人共同編的。英文有一本The Chicago Manual of Style 就是專門說明這一些寫作規範。各位要儘早學會中英文 \的寫作規範，慢慢練習，最後隨性下筆，就能寫出符合規範的文章。

7.善用圖書館
圖書館應該是研究生階段最重要的地方，不必讀每一本書，可是要知道有哪些書。我記得我做學生時，新進的書都會放在圖書館的牆上，而身為學生最重要的事情，就是要把書名看一看。在某些程度上知道書皮就夠了，但是這仍和打電腦是不一樣的，你要實際上熟悉一下那本書，摸一下，看一眼目錄。我知道現在從電腦就可以查到書名，可是我還是非常珍惜這種定期去browse 新到的書的感覺，或去看看相關領域的書長成什麼樣子。中研院有一位院士是哈佛大學資訊教授，他告訴我他在創造力最高峰的時候，每個禮拜都到他們資訊系圖書室裡，翻閱重要的資訊期刊。所以圖書館應該是身為研究生的人們，最熟悉的地方。不過切記不重要的不要花時間去看，你們生活在資訊氾濫的時代，跟我生長在資訊貧乏的時代是不同的，所以生長在這一個時代的你，要能有所取捨。我常常看我的學生引用一些三流的論文，卻引得津津有味，我都替他感到難過，因為我強調要讀有用、有價值的東西。

8.留下時間，精緻思考
還要記得給自己保留一些思考的時間。一篇論文能不能出神入化、能不能引人入勝，很重要的是在現象之上作概念性的思考，但我不是說一定要走理論的路線，而是提醒大家要在一般的層次再提升兩三步，conceptualize 你所看到的東西。真切去了解，你所看到的東西是什麼？整體意義是什麼？整體的輪廓是什麼？千萬不要被枝節淹沒，雖然枝節是你最重要的開始，但是你一天總也要留一些時間好好思考、慢慢沉澱。conceptualize 是一種非常難教的東西，我記得我唸書時，有位老師信誓旦旦說要開一門課，教學生如何conceptualize，可是從來都沒開成，因為這非常難教。我要提醒的是，在被很多材料和枝節淹沒的時候，要適時跳出來想一想，所看到的東西有哪些意義？這個意義有沒有廣泛連結到更大層面的知識價值。

傅斯年先生來到台灣以後，同時擔任中央研究院歷史語言研究所的所長及台大的校長。台大有個傅鐘每小時鐘聲有二十一響、敲二十一次。以前有一個人，寫了一本書叫《鐘聲二十一響》，當時很轟動。他當時對這二十一響解釋是說：因為台大的學生都很好，所以二十一響是歡迎國家元首二十一響的禮炮。不久前我發現台大在每一個重要的古蹟下面豎一個銅牌，我仔細看看傅鐘下的解釋，才知道原來是因為傅斯年當台大校長的時候，曾經說過一句話：「人一天只有二十一個小時，另外三小時是要思考的。」所以才叫二十一響。我覺得這句話大有道理，可是我覺得三小時可能太多，因為研究生是非常忙的，但至少每天要留個三十分鐘、一小時思考，想一想你看到了什麼？學習跳到比你所看到的東西更高一點的層次去思考。

9.找到學習的楷模
我剛到美國唸書的時候，每次寫報告頭皮就重的不得了，因為我們的英文報告三、四十頁，一個學期有四門課的話就有一百六十頁，可是你連註腳都要從頭學習。後來我找到一個好辦法，就是我每次要寫的時候，把一篇我最喜歡的論文放在旁邊，雖然他寫的題目跟我寫的都沒關係，不過我每次都看他如何寫，看看他的注腳、讀幾行，然後我就開始寫。就像最有名的男高音Pavarotti 唱歌劇的時候都會捏著一條手帕，因為他說：「上舞台就像下地獄，太緊張了。」他為了克服緊張，他有習慣性的動作，就是捏著白手帕。我想當年那一篇論文抽印本就像是我的白手帕一樣，能讓我開始好好寫這篇報告，我學習它裡面如何思考、如何構思、如何照顧全體、如何用英文作註腳。好好的把一位大師的作品讀完，開始模仿和學習他，是入門最好的方法，逐步的，你也開始寫出自己的東西。我也常常鼓勵我的學生，出國半年或是一年到國外看看。像現在國科會有各式各樣的機會，可以增長眼界，可以知道現在的餐館正在賣些什麼菜，回來後自己要作菜
也才知道要如何著手。


四、用兩條腿走路，練習培養自己的興趣
最後還有一點很重要的，就是我們的人生是兩隻腳，我們不是靠一隻腳走路。做研究生的時代，固然應該把所有的心思都放在學業上，探索你所要探索的那些問題，可是那只是你的一隻腳，另外還有一隻腳是要學習培養一、兩種興趣。很多人後來會發現他的右腳特別肥重（包括我自己在內），也就是因為忘了培養左腳。很多很有名的大學者最後都陷入極度的精神困擾之中，就是因為他只是培養他的右腳，他忘了培養他的左腳，他忘了人生用兩隻腳走路，他少了一個小小的興趣或嗜好，用來好好的調解或是排遣自己。

去年夏天，香港《亞洲週刊》要訪問我，我說：「我不想接受訪問，我不是重要的人。」可是後來他們還是把一個簡單的對話刊出來了，裡面我只記得講了一段話：做一個研究生或一個學者，有兩個感覺最重要--責任感與罪惡感。你一定要有很大的責任感，去寫出好的東西，如果責任感還不夠強，還要有一個罪惡感，你會覺得如果今天沒有好好做幾個小時的工作的話，會有很大的罪惡感。除非是了不得的天才，不然即使愛因斯坦也是需要很努力的。很多很了不得的人，他只是把所有的努力集中在一百頁裡面，他花了一千小時和另外一個人只花了十個小時，相對於來說，當然是那花一千個小時所寫出來的文章較好。所以為什麼說要趕快選定題目？因為如果太晚選定一個題目，只有一年的時間可以好好耕耘那個題目，早點選定可以有二、三年耕耘那個題目，是三年做出的東西好，還是一年的東西好？如果我們的才智都一樣的話，將三年的努力與思考都灌在上面，當然比一年還要好。


五、營造卓越的大學，分享學術的氛圍
現在很多人都在討論，何謂卓越的大學？我認為一個好的大學，學校生活的一大部份，以及校園的許多活動，直接或間接都與學問有關，同學在咖啡廳裡面談論的，直接或間接也都會是學術相關的議題。教授們在餐廳裡面吃飯，談的是「有沒有新的發現」？或是哪個人那天演講到底講了什麼重要的想法？一定是沉浸在這種氛圍中的大學，才有可能成為卓越大學。那種交換思想學識、那種互相教育的氣氛不是花錢就有辦法獲得的。我知道錢固然重要，但不是唯一的東西。一個卓越的大學、一個好的大學、一個好的學習環境，表示裡面有一個共同關心
的焦點，如果沒有的話，這個學校就不可能成為好的大學。

紀念

和老闆做的cancer screening做了快三年
成果終於發表在Archive of Internal Medicine
雖然只是research letter
可也是這些年的心血
更棒的是LA Times還登了相關報導
有幸身為"The trio"中的一人
今天高興了一天 :)

感謝我的強者老闆!

風波

一場賭氣而起的風波
真的是因為經期將屆導致的情緒起伏嗎?

覺得該做的溝通還是沒有做好
我以為我可以的
結果我都只是用想的
在腦海裡無數想法盤據
但最後說出口的卻仍難以表達萬分之一

而
原來隨便丟出幾句話
就能讓人淚流不止

Nothing I can respect

幼稚
沒禮貌
不求上進
不懂得尊重別人
不懂得體貼別人
不知道自我反省
出言不遜

你就去過你自以為是的人生吧
我不需要你

[The New York Times] Married (Happily) with issues

December 6, 2009

By ELIZABETH WEIL

I.

I have a pretty good marriage. It could be better. There are things about my husband that drive me crazy. Last spring he cut apart a frozen pig’s head with his compound miter saw in our basement. He needed the head to fit into a pot so that he could make pork stock. I’m no saint of a spouse, either. I hate French kissing, compulsively disagree and fake sleep when Dan vomits in the middle of the night. Dan also once threatened to punch my brother at a family reunion at a lodge in Maine. But in general we do O.K.

The idea of trying to improve our union came to me one night in bed. I’ve never really believed that you just marry one day at the altar or before a justice of the peace. I believe that you become married — truly married — slowly, over time, through all the road-rage incidents and precolonoscopy enemas, all the small and large moments that you never expected to happen and certainly didn’t plan to endure. But then you do: you endure. And as I lay there, I started wondering why I wasn’t applying myself to the project of being a spouse. My marriage was good, utterly central to my existence, yet in no other important aspect of my life was I so laissez-faire. Like most of my peers, I applied myself to school, friendship, work, health and, ad nauseam, raising my children. But in this critical area, marriage, we had all turned away. I wanted to understand why. I wanted not to accept this. Dan, too, had worked tirelessly — some might say obsessively — at skill acquisition. Over the nine years of our marriage, he taught himself to be a master carpenter and a master chef. He was now reading Soviet-era weight-training manuals in order to transform his 41-year-old body into that of a Marine. Yet he shared the seemingly widespread aversion to the very idea of marriage improvement. Why such passivity? What did we all fear?

That night, the image that came to mind, which I shared with Dan, was that I had been viewing our marriage like the waves on the ocean, a fact of life, determined by the sandbars below, shaped by fate and the universe, not by me. And this, suddenly, seemed ridiculous. I am not a fatalistic person. In my 20s I even believed that people made their own luck. Part of the luck I believed I made arrived in the form of Dan himself, a charming, handsome surfer and writer I met three days after I moved to San Francisco. Eleven years later we had two kids, two jobs, a house, a tenant, a huge extended family — what Nikos Kazantzakis described in “Zorba the Greek” as “the full catastrophe.” We were going to be careless about how our union worked out?

So I decided to apply myself to my marriage, to work at improving ours now, while it felt strong. Our children, two girls who are now 4 and 7, were no longer desperately needy; our careers had stabilized; we had survived gutting our own house. Viewed darkly, you could say that I feared stasis; more positively, that I had energy for Dan once again. From the myriad psychology books that quickly stacked up on my desk, I learned that my concept was sound, if a bit unusual. The average couple is unhappy six years before first attending therapy, at which point, according to “The Science of Clinical Psychology,” the marital therapist’s job is “less like an emergency-room physician who is called upon to set a fracture that happened a few hours ago and more like a general practitioner who is asked to treat a patient who broke his or her leg several months ago and then continued to hobble around on it; we have to attend not only to the broken bone but also to the swelling and bruising, the sore hip and foot and the infection that ensued.”

Still, Dan was not 100 percent enthusiastic, at least at first. He feared — not mistakenly, it turns out — that marriage is not great terrain for overachievers. He met my ocean analogy with the veiled threat of California ranch-hand wisdom: if you’re going to poke around the bushes, you’d best be prepared to scare out some snakes.

II.

A quick bit of background: Dan and I married on July 1, 2000, in Olema, Calif. I wore a white dress. Dan was 32; I was 30. We vowed to have and to hold, to love and to cherish in sickness and in health, etc. We were optimistic, cocky and vague about the concept of marriage. We never discussed, or considered discussing, why we were getting married or what a good marriage would mean. It all seemed obvious. I loved Dan; I loved how I felt with him. Ergo I wanted to be his wife.

During the first nine years of our marriage — that is, until we tried to improve it — Dan and I thought little about our expectations and even less about our parents’ marriages, both of which have lasted more than 40 years. Our families had set very different examples of how a marriage could be good. Dan was raised in Berkeley, Calif., by VW-bus-driving lefties who were so utterly committed to their own romance that Dan sometimes felt left out. Each meal and each sunset was the most exquisite. When girls refused to talk to Dan in high school, his mother told him they were just too intimidated by his incredible good looks. My parents’ marriage, meanwhile, resembled nothing so much as a small business. They raised their three children in Wellesley, Mass., where civic life was so tidy that kids held bake sales at the town dump. All conjugal affection took place out of sight. “You’re a good Do Bee” was considered high praise.

After our wedding, with some money from a boom-time book advance, we bought a run-down house in San Francisco. We assumed that our big problems would be money (or lack thereof; we’re both freelance writers) and religion (I’m Jewish; Dan’s Christian). Neither turned out to be true. We built — or more accurately fell — into a 21st-century companionate marriage. But Dan and I were not just economic partners, lovers, (soon enough) co-parents and best friends. We were also each other’s co-workers, editors and primary readers. Both working from home, our lives resembled a D-list version of Joan Didion’s and John Gregory Dunne’s, whose days, according to Didion, “were filled with the sound of each other’s voices” — except with what I can only assume is a much more egregious lack of boundaries. We lost steam 95 percent of the way through our D.I.Y. home remodeling and, as a result, have no master-bathroom door.

III.

But how to start? What would a better marriage look like? More happiness? Intimacy? Stability? Laughter? Fewer fights? A smoother partnership? More intriguing conversation? More excellent sex? Our goal and how to reach it were strangely unclear. We all know what marriage is: a legal commitment between two people. But a good marriage? For guidance I turned to the standard assessments. The Locke-Wallace Marital Adjustment Test instructs spouses, among other things, to rank themselves along the “always agree” to “always disagree” continuum on matters ranging from recreation to in-laws. This struck me as scattershot and beside the point. For all the endless talk about marriage — who should have the right to be in one, whether the declining numbers of married-parent households are hurting America’s children — we don’t know much about what makes a marriage satisfying or how to keep one that way. John Gottman, in his Love Lab in Seattle, claims that he can analyze a conversation between spouses and predict with 94 percent accuracy whether that couple will divorce over the course of six years. But many academics say that Gottman’s powers of prophecy are overblown, that he can’t truly predict if a couple will split. Those not selling books, workshops or counseling admit to knowing surprisingly little. Harry Reis, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester, likens our current understanding of “relationship science” to the Buddhist parable of the blind men and the elephant. One blind man “feels the tusk, inferring that elephants are hard and sharp-edged, like a blade. Another touches the soft, flexible ear, concluding that elephants are supple, resembling felt. A third imagines massive strength from grasping the pillar-like structure of the leg. The perspective of each person touching the elephant is valid, as far as it goes. . . .” But no one understands the whole beast.

Dan and I decided to dive in, trusting that the terms of our better marriage and the yardstick by which to measure those terms would emerge along the way. It seemed safest to start in private, so we began our putative improving with Harville Hendrix’s Oprah-sanctioned self-help best seller, “Getting the Love You Want.” I let Dan pick the first exercise. It seemed only sporting. I assumed he would choose “positive flooding,” which includes making a list of all the qualities you wish your partner would praise you for but never does and then sitting in a chair as your spouse walks circles around you, reading that list in an increasingly loud and emphatic voice. (I was terrible at giving Dan compliments, even though he craved them; I sided with the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, who writes that in marriage “the long applause becomes baffling.”) But instead Dan chose “reromanticizing.” In hindsight, no surprise — Dan’s parents were dreamy and passionate.

Step 1: Complete this sentence in as many ways as possible: “I feel loved and cared about when you. . . .”

Dan quickly jotted down “submit to kissing, clean the kitchen, tell me I look studly.”

“Let’s try for 10,” I said.

“Ten!” Dan said, teasing but serious, one of our most common modes of conversation. “You can think of 10?”

In “Intimate Terrorism: The Crisis of Love in an Age of Disillusion,” the psychologist Michael Vincent Miller describes marriage as mocking our “fondest dreams,” because the institution is not the wellspring of love we imagine it to be. Instead it’s an environment of scarcity, it’s “a barbaric competition over whose needs get met”; it’s “two people trying to make a go of it on emotional and psychological supplies that are only sufficient for one.” And true enough, with “Getting the Love You Want” splayed on our bed, I began seeing Dan as my adversary, the person against whom I was negotiating the terms of our lives. I remembered well, but not fondly, this feeling from early in our marriage, when nearly everything was still up for grabs: Where would we live? How much money was enough? What algorithm would determine who would watch the baby and who would go to the gym? Recently those questions had settled, and our marriage felt better for it. But now the competitive mind-set came roaring back, as I reasoned, unconsciously anyway, that any changes we made would either be toward Dan’s vision of marriage and away from mine or the other way around. Admitting too much satisfaction seemed tantamount to ceding the upper hand. So I held my ground. I, too, failed to think of 10 things Dan did that made me feel loved. “O.K.,” I said, “let’s quit after 8.”

Step 2: Recall the romantic stage of your relationship. Complete this sentence: “I used to feel loved and cared about when you. . . .”

Dan made one of those circles with a line through it on his paper, symbolizing, he ribbed, “the null set.” Then he grabbed my list. “ ‘Looked giddy to come through the door and see me,’ ” Dan read. “Are you kidding me? You don’t even see me when you come through the door. It’s like you’re blind and deaf to everyone but the kids.”

I thought I had avoided becoming one of those mothers who transferred all of her romantic energy from her husband to her children. Apparently I failed. But Dan, in my view, hadn’t mastered the spouse-parent balance, either, only his problem was the opposite: at times he ignored the kids. While reromanticizing, I asked him, testily, “Do you really think a 6-2, 200-pound man who works at home with his wife needs to compete with his small children for their mother’s attention before those children leave for school?” Great. Now we were having a fight. Dan retreated to the bathroom to check his progress on his six-pack. My doubts set in. This was the fear, right? You set out to improve your marriage; it implodes. What if my good marriage was not floating atop a sea of goodness, adrift but fairly stable when pushed? What if my good marriage was teetering on a precipice and any change would mean a toppling, a crashing down?

Much of the commentary on modern marriage is frankly terrifying. Miller describes “the marital ghetto” — the marital ghetto? — as “the human equivalent of a balanced aquarium, where the fish and the plants manage to live indefinitely off each other’s waste products.” Perhaps we’d been striving in raising children and not in marriage because child-rearing is a dictatorship and marriage is a democracy. The children do not get to vote on the direction of the relationship, on which sleep-training or discipline philosophy they like best. But with a spouse, particularly a contemporary American spouse, equality is foundational, assumed. A friend had recently told me that he thought I was the boss in my marriage. Did I really want to negotiate my marriage anew and risk losing that power? From the bathroom, Dan asked, “Do you really think this project is a good idea?”

I realized that my favorite books about marriage — Calvin Trillin’s “About Alice” and Joan Didion’s “Year of Magical Thinking” — included one spouse who was dead.

Still, one Saturday last spring, we drove across the Golden Gate Bridge to Mill Valley to attend a marriage-education class. In academic circles, marriage education is known as a “prevention” program, an implicit admission that by the time most couples get to the subsequent program — therapy — it’s too late. The classes, sadly, have all the intellectual glamour of driver’s ed. But they’re based on the optimistic idea that you can learn to be better at marriage. As Bernard G. Guerney Jr., a clinical psychologist, family therapist and the godfather of the marriage-education movement, wrote in his 1977 book “Relationship Enhancement,” unless an unhappily married spouse “is suffering a biochemical deficiency or imbalance, he is no more sick than someone who wants to play tennis and does not know how, and the professional is no more providing ‘therapy’ or ‘curing’ his or her client than a tennis coach is ‘curing’ his clients.”

We enrolled in a 16-hour, two-Saturday course called “Mastering the Mysteries of Love.” The classes teach students how to have “skilled conversations” or rather, I should say, how to stop having the let’s-see-who-rhetorically-wins skirmishes that were standard in our house. A skilled conversation is an exercise in forced empathy. One person starts by describing his or her feelings. The other person then validates those feelings, repeating them back nearly verbatim.

Midmorning, with the gongs of the supposedly soothing spa music crashing in the background, Dan and I retreated to a couch with a template for having a skilled conversation about a “small disagreement.” Among our most longstanding fights was how much energy and money should go into Dan’s cooking. Shortly after our first child, Hannah, was born, Dan and I started having the same conversation every night: do you want to cook dinner or look after the kid? He always picked cook, I always picked kid, and now, seven years later, Dan was an excellent, compulsive and profligate chef. We spent far more money on food than we did on our mortgage. Sure, we ate well. Very well. Our refrigerator held, depending on the season: homemade gravlax, Strauss organic milk, salt-packed anchovies, little gem lettuces, preserved Meyer lemons, imported Parmesan, mozzarella and goat cheese, baby leeks, green garlic, Blue Bottle coffee ($18 a pound), supergroovy pastured eggs. On a ho-hum weeknight Dan might make me pan-roasted salmon with truffled polenta in a Madeira shallot reduction. But this was only a partial joy. Dan’s cooking enabled him to hide out in plain sight; he was home but busy — What? I’m cooking dinner! — for hours every evening. During this time I was left to attend to our increasingly hungry, tired and frantic children and to worry about money. That was our division of labor: Dan cooked, I tended finances. Because of the cooking, in part, we saved little for retirement and nothing for our children’s college educations.

I garnered no sympathy from our friends. Still, Dan’s cooking and the chaos it created drove me mad, a position I expressed by leaving whole pigeons untouched on my plate. Dan, meanwhile, entrenched and retaliated, slipping crispy fried pigs’ ears into my salads and making preposterously indulgent weekday breakfasts, the girls upending flour bowls and competing for Dad’s attention as he made them crepes with grapes and Champagne sauce at 6:45 a.m. I knew Dan’s cooking and his obsessions in general were mechanisms to bind his anxiety, attempts to bring order to an unruly mind. Without an outlet, Dan tended toward depression, and his depression vented as anger. In his early 20s, he learned the trick of focusing and applying himself, at nearly all times, so his energy would not, as he put it, “turn bad.” I respected this, even appreciated it, in theory. But I struggled with the specifics. Dan cooked, because he needed to cook, blitzing through one cookbook after another, putting little check marks next to every recipe. He was not cooking for me, not for the girls. Yet now in our marriage class, following the skilled-conversation template, the emotional distance between us on this issue seemed to collapse. I said, then Dan mirrored back to me, “The chaos is really upsetting, and you’d like to find a way to maintain more peace and calm in our home.” Then Dan said, and I mirrored to him: “Food is a truly important part of family. For you it’s health and pleasure bound together, and it lets you express and pursue the life you want to live three times a day.”

That afternoon, as we talked in this stilted, earnest style — covering such esteemed topics as backrubs and stray socks, the utter banalities of married life — I felt a trapdoor crack open in our marriage. According to a widely accepted model, intimacy begins when one person expresses revealing feelings, builds when the listener responds with support and empathy and is achieved when the discloser hears these things and feels understood, validated and cared for. This is not news. It’s not even advice. Offering a married couple this model is like informing an obese person that he should eat less and move more. But in the days and nights that followed that course, our intimacy grew. We had never considered our verbal jousting to be protecting uncomfortable feelings. Clearly it was. Back home, that first irony-free evening, I found myself telling Dan a raft of antiheroic stories about my childhood, stories I’d never told him, I realized, because I felt insecure. They were tales about suburban bat mitzvahs and the pedal pushers I wore to them, anecdotes from a conventional East Coast world our marriage eschewed. Without the ironclad guarantee of empathy, I had felt that they might go over poorly, especially alongside Dan’s epics of a glorious youth spent playing Frisbee in Berkeley’s Tilden Park.

For the next few weeks, even our sex was more intimate, more open and trusting. Then I found myself recoiling. As if I were obeying Newton’s third law of motion, I had an innate equal and opposite reaction to our newfound intimacy, to living our lives, as the saccharine marriage-improvement phrase goes, as we instead of as me. I loved the idea of digging out of my emotional bunker and going over to Dan’s to live with him. And I liked being there, for a while. But Dan has a bigger, flashier personality than I do. I feared, in our intimacy, I might be subsumed. As many women had, I read in fascinated horror, a few years back, about a Buddhist couple who took vows never to be parted by more than 15 feet. They inhaled and exhaled in unison while doing yoga, walked each other to writing desks when inspiration struck in the middle of the night. “It is very intimate,” the male partner explained. That vision of intimacy as a chain-link leash filled me with dread. Yes, I loved the emotional security of knowing that if I said, “I’m upset,” Dan would repeat back, “You’re upset.” But while such command empathy was comforting to a point, it felt unsustainable, even cloying.

Some days, following intimate nights, I’d walk up to our kitchen from our bedroom below and want to pretend it didn’t happen. Dan would caress the small of my back. I’d squirm away. I knew older couples who slept in separate bedrooms, an arrangement that unsettled me as a newlywed but now struck me as a sound approach to running the chute between intimacy and autonomy over the course of 50 years. Yet Dan and I weren’t going to stop sharing a room — for one thing, we lacked the space. So while working to improve our marriage, I found myself pushing my husband away. I had started our project assuming the more closeness, the better. But that wasn’t turning out to be true, at least for me.

A few weeks later we drove through San Francisco to the tony Laurel Village neighborhood from our house in Bernal Heights for some psychoanalytic couple’s therapy. En route we discussed not shaking the bushes of our union too hard. Dan had just flown home from London where he was working on a story about Fergus Henderson, a chef who defines half a pig’s head as “a perfect romantic supper for two.” Henderson has Parkinson’s but told Dan he stopped reading about the disease, because in his experience “the more I know, the more symptoms I have.” Following suit, we thought it best to stick to dissecting the good parts of our marriage and how to improve them, as marriage can bring out people’s worst. Even those who are tolerant, wise and giving are often short and rude to their mates. I had always winced at the opening of Chekov’s “Lady With the Dog.” The narrator describes the protagonist’s wife as “a tall, erect woman with dark eyebrows, staid and dignified.” Then he gives us her husband’s view: “he secretly considered her unintelligent, narrow, inelegant, was afraid of her and did not like to be at home.” How much did we really want to share?

A word here about psychoanalytic reasoning: I’ve never been a big fan. I’ve long favored the fake-it-till-you-make-it approach to life. Why turn over the rocks of your history just to see what’s underneath? In marriage therapy, this fear makes particular sense, because the therapy carries not only the threat of learning things about yourself that you might prefer not to know but also the hazard of saying things to your spouse that are better left unsaid, as well as hearing things from your spouse that you might prefer not to hear. Some in the field are outwardly critical of most marriage therapy; among them is William J. Doherty, a psychologist and the director of the Marriage and Family Therapy Program at the University of Minnesota, who writes, “If you talk to a therapist in the United States about problems in your marriage, I believe that you stand a good risk of harming your marriage.” The science behind marital counseling is also less precise than you might imagine. In clinical trials, among the most effective protocols is Integrative Behavioral Couple Therapy, an unabashed mash-up of two schools of thought. Couples work on “change-oriented strategies,” trying to find ways to remedy each other’s complaints. They also do “acceptance work,” trying to learn to love the relationships as is.

Holly Gordon, our reed-thin psychoanalyst, did not think much of our plan. “To get the most out of your time here we need to talk about some dissatisfaction or problem, something you’re trying to improve,” she instructed, closing a double set of soundproof doors. So we settled into airing some well-rehearsed gripes — the time Dan came to the hospital to visit me and four-pound, premature Hannah, and all he could talk about was the San Francisco building code. (He’d torn the front stairs off our house and kept rebuilding them and ripping them off again, fearing they were imperfect.) The time Dan proposed a trade: he would clean up more, he swore he would, if I would just French-kiss him spontaneously once a day; I gave up first. (I found the forced affection claustrophobic. I was also still stung, I later realized, by critical comments Dan had made about my kissing style before we were engaged.) These were many-times-told tales, and as such we both felt inured to their dark content. We used them to avoid committing what Doherty calls “therapist-induced marital suicide.” We did not want therapy to set a pick for our divorce.

So instead of speaking our harshest truths, for six weeks running Dan and I pursued the lesser offense of making the other sound crazy. Holly cooperated, too, offering feedback that we used to confirm our sense that the other was neurotic. Some weeks Dan took it in the teeth; others, I did. At home, Dan and I had been following a de facto acceptance strategy. He even convinced me that the best response to his lecturing me, again, about conjugate-periodization strength training was for me to say, “Oh, you lovable, obsessive man, you!” and walk away. But Holly took a fix-it, or at least diagnose-it, approach. This is another major complaint about marital therapy: mental-health professionals find mental-health problems. All of a sudden you’re married to a narcissistic personality disorder; who wants to stick around for that? One day Holly ended our session with this synopsis: “On the first count, you find Dan unavailable because he’s not relating to you. He’s just using you as a sounding board. But on the other hand he feels he can’t reach you either. He wants you to accept his affection and praise, but those attentions make you feel smothered, and that makes him feel alone.” I still believed our marriage was good. But I felt that Holly had reduced it to an unappealing, perhaps unfixable conundrum. Would her vote of little confidence hurt or help?

I did start watching my reactions when Dan told me that I looked beautiful. Did he mean it? What did he want from me? I would try to accept the compliment graciously, even offer one in return. But the endless therapy required to become less neurotic generally seemed outside the scope of this project. I felt confident we could build a better marriage, less so that our individual personalities would change. Marital therapy, to me, seemed akin to chemo: helpful but toxic. Leaving Holly’s office one day, Dan, ever valiant, made a strong play to titrate how much negative feedback we let in. “Do they spray shrink powder in these places,” he asked, “to make them extra depressing?”

IV.

Monogamy is one of the most basic concepts of modern marriage. It is also its most confounding. In psychoanalytic thought, the template for monogamy is forged in infancy, a baby with its mother. Marriage is considered to be a mainline back to this relationship, its direct heir. But there is a crucial problem: as infants we are monogamous with our mothers, but our mothers are not monogamous with us. That first monogamy — that template — is much less pure than we allow. “So when we think about monogamy, we think about it as though we are still children and not adults as well,” Adam Phillips notes. This was true for us. On our wedding day, Dan and I performed that elaborate charade: I walked down the aisle with my father. I left him to join my husband. We all shed what we told ourselves were tears of joy. Dan and I promised to forsake all others, and sexually we had. But we had not shed all attachments, naturally, and as we waded further into our project the question of allegiances became more pressing. Was our monogamy from the child’s or the mother’s perspective? Did my love for Dan — must my love for Dan — always come first?

This all came pouring out last summer in the worst fight of our marriage. At the time, we were at my parents’ house, an hour northeast of San Francisco. More than food, more than child-rearing, we fought about weekends — in particular, how many summer weekends to spend up there. I liked the place: out of the fog, free grandparental day care; the kids could swim. Dan loathed it, describing the locale as “that totally sterile golf community in which your mother feeds our kids popsicles for breakfast and I’m forbidden to cook.”

For the past few years I dismissed Dan’s complaints by saying, “Fine, don’t go.” I told myself this was justified, if not altruistic: I was taking our girls; Dan could do what he wanted with his free time. But underneath lay a tangle of subtext. Dan wished he spent even more time with his own parents, who were quite private. I felt an outsize obligation toward mine, because they moved to the Bay Area to be closer to us. We’d had some skilled conversations, which helped a bit, as I now knew those weekends with his in-laws made Dan feel alienated and left out of our family decision-making. Yet at root we fought because the issue rubbed a weak point in our marriage, in our monogamy: I didn’t want to see my devotion to my parents as an infidelity to Dan. To him, it was.

That June weekend my folks weren’t home, we’d gone up with friends, but Dan hated the place more than ever. Saturday morning I woke up early, went for a run and came back to find Dan on a small AstroTurf putting green with the girls, ranting about how he hated all the houses that looked the same, with tinted windows blocking the natural light; the golf course that obliterated the landscape and all the jerks that played golf on it. The next day was Father’s Day. I took the girls to do errands with what I thought were the best of intentions, but I was so angered by Dan’s relentless crabbiness that I failed to buy a gift. The final insult came Sunday afternoon as we packed to go home. I informed Dan that I told my mother that she could bring the girls back up the following weekend. Dan erupted in rage. “Those are my actual children. Why do you insist on treating me like I’m some potted plant? I, too, get to decide what happens in this family. Do I need to tell you to tell your mother, ‘O.K., Mom, I’m not allowed to make any plans for our children without getting permission from my husband?’ Do I need to be telling you, ‘I’m sorry, little girl, I make the plans in this family, and I’ll tell you what to tell your mother about where my children are going?’ ”

I stiffened and said, “Of course not.”

“How far are you going to let this go?” Dan kept screaming. “Are you willing to get divorced so you can keep spending weekends with your mom?”

This was the first time in our marriage either of us had ever invoked divorce.

The following Thursday, as we entered Holly’s office, I still felt certain she would side with me: Dan needed to get over his holier-than-thou Berkeley hang-ups. Sure, golf communities are snobbish, but family is much more important. Especially my family, right now — my parents had moved from Massachusetts to California to be near their grandchildren, for God’s sake. And besides, I dealt more with the kids, and I let Dan run amok in the kitchen. So I got this.

Holly, who’d thrown out her back and was reclining in a lawn chair in front of the couch she used for psychoanalytic clients, did not think much of my reasoning. “It sounds like you’ve created these little enclaves of rationalizations: ‘I give on all these other fronts, so I’m entitled not to give on this one.’ ”

She was right. I felt entitled.

“But that does pose a problem — for Dan. Because he feels he’s really not taken into account.”

Dan brightened. “Just as you were talking there, I was having all these fears come up again. I have a real fear of being an appendage in that family, and that Liz’s real family is her and her mother, and I was just a sperm donor. That it would be really fine if I disappeared. Nothing much would change.”

“Really?” I asked. I knew some of the ways I betrayed Dan with the girls. As they grew older we found ourselves forming cross-generation allegiances. Hannah, our elder, and I would wish Dan wasn’t so chronically messy and emotionally florid. Audrey, our younger, would promise to be Dan’s perfect companion; she would do the things I wouldn’t do: climb huge overhanging rock crags, eat whole fried smelt. But I understood less well why there was a conflict with my parents. I often spent 21 hours a day with Dan. When my mother called, I frequently didn’t answer the phone.

I could not believe Dan thought my primary relationship was with my mother. I needed to know if he felt that way generally or just on these weekends. Dan declared the distinction moot: any rupture in our monogamy weakened the whole. I wondered if improving my marriage had to mean cutting myself off from the world? I wanted to gain strength from my marriage — that was increasingly clear. In many ways I did. Dan had faith in me, and that helped me have faith in myself. But clearly I owed Dan a debt of constancy and consideration. Our marriage needed to be a place to gain strength for him too.

Near the end of our session, Holly asked what I thought would happen if I let go of my rationalizations, if I accepted a fuller monogamy. I said I would feel vulnerable, “like a beating heart with no rib cage.”

“So there’s a feeling that if you take Dan into account, he’s going to take it all away, or you’re going to have to give yourself over to him?”

“Yes,” I said. “I imagine I’m going to be squashed.”

Holly sat up in her lawn chair. “We’re going to have to stop for the day.”

V.

Since the beginning of this project, Dan had been waiting for one thing: sex therapy. And I have good and bad news on this front: improving the sex in our marriage was much easier than you might guess, and the process of doing so made us want to throw up.

Here again we began with books. In “Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance Over Time,” Stephen A. Mitchell, a psychoanalyst, presents a strong case for the idea that those thoughts you might have about your spouse or your sex life being predictable or boring — that’s just an “elaborate fantasy,” a reflection of your need to see your partner as safe and knowable, so you don’t have to freak out over the possibility that he could veer off in an unforeseen direction, away from you.

Inspired by Mitchell, I decided to try a thought exercise: to think, while we were making love, that Dan was not predictable in the least. Before this, Dan and I were having regular sex, in every sense: a couple of times a week, not terribly inventive. As in many areas of our lives, we’d found a stable point that well enough satisfied our desires, and we just stayed there. But now I imagined Dan as a free actor, capable of doing anything at any time and paradoxically, by telling myself I did not know what to expect, I wanted to move toward him, to uncover the mystery. For years, of course, I felt I knew Dan well, worried that lessening the little distance between us could lead to collapse. Now I was having the same sweaty feelings I had in my 20s, when I would let my psyche ooze into that of a new lover at the start of an affair.

This was great, right? A better marriage meant more passionate sex, this went without saying. But by now I noticed a pattern: improving my marriage in one area often caused problems in another. More intimacy meant less autonomy. More passion meant less stability. I spent a lot of time feeling bad about this, particularly the fact that better sex made me retreat. There’s a school of thought that views sex as a metaphor for marriage. Its proponents write rational-minded books like Patricia Love and Jo Robinson’s “Hot Monogamy,” in which they argue, “When couples share their thoughts and emotions freely throughout the day, they create between them a high degree of trust and emotional connection, which gives them the freedom to explore their sexuality more fully.” But there’s this opposing school: sex — even sex in marriage — requires barriers and uncertainty, and we are fools to imagine otherwise. “Romantic love, at the start of this century, is cause for embarrassment,” Cristina Nehring moans in “A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-First Century.” She berates the conventional marital set-up: two spouses, one house, one bedroom. She’s aghast at those who strive for equality. “It is precisely equality that destroys our libidos, equality that bores men and women alike.” I can only imagine what scorn she’d feel for hypercompanionate idiots like us.

Still, I agreed with Nehring’s argument that we need “to rediscover the right to impose distances, the right to remain strangers.” Could my postcoital flitting away be a means to re-establish erotic distance? An appealing thought but not the whole truth. My relationship with Dan started on rocky footing. When we met, Dan was working through the aftershocks of a torrid affair with an emotionally sadistic, sexually self-aggrandizing woman. She said mean things to him; he said mean things to me (“Why do you kiss like that?”). Not a perfect foundation for a marriage. Nor was the fact that Dan spent the early years of ours writing an erotic bildungsroman about this nightmare ex-girlfriend, the novel at one point ballooning to 500 pages and including references to everyone he’d ever slept with. Even after the book was published, I never quite shook the feeling that my role in Dan’s life was to be the steady, vanilla lay. We never discussed this. We just had a strenuously normal sex, year after year after year.

Then one day at my desk I started reading “The Multi-Orgasmic Couple: Sexual Secrets Every Couple Should Know.” I sent Dan an e-mail message entitled “Nine Taoists Thrusts.”

Page 123, from the seventh-century physician Li T’ung-hsuan Tzu:

1. Strike left and right as a brave general breaking through the enemy ranks.

2. Rise and suddenly plunge like a wild horse bucking through a mountain stream.

3. Push and pull out like a flock of seagulls playing on the waves.

4. Use deep thrusts and shallow teasing strokes, like a sparrow plucking pieces of rice.

5. Make shallow and then deeper thrusts in steady succession.

6. Push in slowly as a snake entering its hole.

7. Charge quickly like a frightened mouse running into its hole.

8. Hover and then strike like an eagle catching an elusive hare.

9. Rise up and then plunge down low like a great sailboat in a wild wind.

This e-mail was partly in response to one Dan sent me a few months earlier, just to see how much he could tweak my type-A sensibility. It was entitled “Strength Benchmarks for Women” and indicated that I should be able to do 10 pull-ups, 20 bar dips, front squat and bench press my body weight and dead lift one and a half times my body weight. Upon receiving the thrust e-mail, Dan ran up to my office in the attic from his in the basement and asked which thrust sounded best. This was a departure for us — after I felt rebuffed in some early attempts to make use of some kitschy erotic wedding presents, we settled into our safe, narrow little bowling alley of a sex life.

Now, high above noisy Franklin Street, in the office of our therapist, Betsy Kassoff, our issues came pouring out. (We chose to see a psychologist who worked on sexuality, because we weren’t contending with physical dysfunction.) Dan began with an exhaustive history. “When I was 15 years old I was dating a girl. . . .” I can’t tell you how monumentally tired I was of hearing about Dan’s ex-girlfriends. Could we please never discuss this again? “We had this completely psychologically sadistic thing that was incredibly disturbing to me. . . . Every few years I’d have a relationship that mirrored that one, and then I had the bull moose of these relationships. It was like sticking my finger in the electrical socket of my own unconscious.”

Betsy, who had a touch as deft as Bill Clinton at a barbecue, just said, “Wow.”

Dan and I had talked around the edges of this before — the trauma of the bull moose, our romance’s unpleasant start. But by the time either of us had any clarity on the matter, we were desperate to pack it away. Strange, now, what relief we felt in opening that rank old hamper. Betsy could not have said more than 50 words before Dan paused, and I jumped in.

Remember that searing detail from the Eliot Spitzer scandal: that he had sex in his socks? Way worse stuff came out. Like how Dan and I hadn’t been talking to each other while having sex. And not making eye contact either. “And what about the darker, more aggressive side of sexuality you talked about in your earlier relationships?” Betsy asked Dan. “Would you say it’s been more difficult to bring those parts of yourself to this relationship?”

Betsy worked gently and efficiently, a nurse undressing a wound. I confessed my craving but also my worry that we could not be sexually aggressive without conjuring the bull moose. Dan swore — eagerly — that this was not the case. The layers of our erotic life kept pulling back. I allowed that I felt hemmed in by our excessively regular sex life and annoyed that, in the context of our marriage, Dan supposedly had an important sexual history while I had none. Dan then admitted his fantasies about my past lovers, his fear that they had accessed parts of me that were walled off from him. How, nine years into our marriage, could our sex life still be under the thumbs of exes we no longer talked to or even desired? The thought made me angry and nauseated.

Fifty minutes later, Dan and I stumbled down onto the street, wrung out and dazed. Then we went home and solved the problem, at least at first. I hate to sound all Ayelet Waldman here, trumpeting her steamy sex life with Michael Chabon, but we had excellent sex. We were terrified not to. Yet once we proved to ourselves that we weren’t fools to be married — that we could have as charged an erotic life with each other as we had with others before — the backslide began. This time, the retreat was painful and abrupt. One day Dan found a box of old snapshots in the basement and brought it upstairs, thinking he’d show his old self to our daughters. The cache turned out to include pictures I saved of ex-boyfriends, photos Dan proceeded to fling, to the girls’ great amusement, across the room.

“Remind me again why you invited so many ex-lovers to our wedding?” Dan e-mailed me at 6 the following morning — neither of us could sleep. “Also, at the time, you had told me that you’d never slept with two of them. It only emerged later over time that you had. So what was going on there? Not completely ready to relinquish the past? Immaturity? Self-protection? Are you enjoying having a sexual history, too?”

In his novel “Before She Met Me,” Julian Barnes explores the rabid jealousy we feel for spouses’ former lovers, as if we expect our partners to have lived in anticipation of meeting us. This jealousy, Barnes writes, comes “in rushes, in sudden, intimate bursts that winded you.” It then lingers on “unwanted, resented.” This was our experience. The inquisition continued for days. Why had I not told Dan I’d slept with _______? I lied 11 years earlier for the weakest of reasons: I lacked the presence of mind to tell Dan the truth, that I did not yet think he had a right to know all the details of my sex life before him. But now Dan was my husband, my full catastrophe. He allowed this reckless poking into all corners of our marriage. He even stopped seeing me as predictable and tame, and the old lie hurt. “This is the central trust issue in a marriage,” Dan said the next day as he made me lunch. “Can I trust you when you tell me you haven’t slept with somebody else?”

The following weekend: jealousy again (or was it an attempt to fuel our eroticism with tension?). I said yes a bit too forcefully when Dan asked if I’d noticed a well-muscled young man at the pool. Dan was allowing for my sexual free agency, granting me my full humanity. We lived, raised children, worked and slept together. Now we needed to gouge out a gap to bridge, an erotic synapse to cross. It was exhausting. “That guy did the epitome of bad-values hypertrophy training” — vanity weight lifting, in Dan’s estimation, just to get buff. “You’re like a guy admitting he likes fake boobs. And he had chicken legs. Did you notice that, too?”

VI.

What is a good marriage? How good is good enough? Ultimately each philosophy of what makes a good marriage felt like a four-fingered glove. The passion apologists placed no stock in the pleasures of home. The communication gurus ignored life history. I came to view the project as a giant attempt to throw everything out of the messy closet that was our life and put it back in a way that resembled an ad for the Container Store. Not everything fit. It never would. We could tidy up any given area and more quickly and easily than we anticipated. But despite ongoing sessions with endless professionals, we couldn’t keep the entirety of our marriage shipshape at once.

Still, night after night, I’d slide into bed next to Dan. He often slept in a white T-shirt and white boxer briefs, a white-cased pillow wrapped over his head to block out my reading light, his toppled stacks of cookbooks and workout manuals strewn on the floor. He looked like a baby, fresh and full of promise. In psychiatry, the term “good-enough mother” describes the parent who loves her child well enough for him to grow into an emotionally healthy adult. The goal is mental health, defined as the fortitude and flexibility to live one’s own life — not happiness. This is a crucial distinction. Similarly the “good-enough marriage” is characterized by its capacity to allow spouses to keep growing, to afford them the strength and bravery required to face the world.

In the end, I settled on this vision of marriage, felt the logic of applying myself to it. Maybe the perversity we all feel in the idea of striving at marriage — the reason so few of us do it — stems from a misapprehension of the proper goal. In the early years, we take our marriages to be vehicles for wish fulfillment: we get the mate, maybe even a house, an end to loneliness, some kids. But to keep expecting our marriages to fulfill our desires — to bring us the unending happiness or passion or intimacy or stability we crave — and to measure our unions by their capacity to satisfy those longings, is naïve, even demeaning. Of course we strain against marriage; it’s a bound canvas, a yoke. Over the months Dan and I applied ourselves to our marriage, we struggled, we bridled, we jockeyed for position. Dan grew enraged at me; I pulled away from him. I learned things about myself and my relationship with Dan I had worked hard not to know. But as I watched Dan sleep — his beef-heart recipe earmarked, his power lift planned — I felt more committed than ever. I also felt our project could begin in earnest: we could demand of ourselves, and each other, the courage and patience to grow.

Elizabeth Weil, a contributing writer, is working on a memoir about marriage improvement called “No Cheating, No Dying.”

Quote

To achieve, you must push yourself to perform.
To grow, you must push yourself to learn.
To advance, you must accept and adapt to change.

Leave nothing to chance

Be prepared and try to stand out!
Practice, practice and practice!!

Job-hunting takes a line from dating

Job-hunting takes a line from dating
By MARK WHITEHOUSE, The Wall Street Journal

CHICAGO — In job-hunting, as in love, finding a match can be a harrowing experience that all too often ends in unhappiness. Some economists think they know how to make it less painful — and they are using their fellow dismal scientists as guinea pigs.

At this past weekend's annual meeting of the American Economic Association, which hosts a vast job market for aspiring professors, academics tested a technique — borrowed from online dating — to more efficiently match job candidates and potential employers. It is called "signaling," and it is designed to reduce the time and cost of hiring professors by weeding out those who aren't serious prospects and homing in on those who are.

Signaling depends on a centralized system through which each job seeker sends signals — essentially electronic pings — to two potential employers. With a limited number of signals to send, the logic goes, candidates will send them only to schools where they really want to work.

Job candidates were warned not to waste signals on schools that should already know they are interested or are out of their range, but instead aim at schools that wouldn't otherwise be aware of their special interest. Schools also were told not to take the absence of a signal as a brush-off.

"Think of it like a dating site," says Alvin Roth, a Harvard professor who chairs the AEA's Ad Hoc Committee on the Job Market. "We're trying to figure out if we can help people make matches."

The allusion to dating is apt. The AEA system shares an idea and an advisor — Stanford economist Muriel Niederle — with Cupid.com. On that online dating site, women face a problem akin to that of employers: Men signal their interest in women by sending electronic messages, but because it is easy to send hundreds of messages, it is difficult and time-consuming for women to separate spammers from good prospects.

In the summer of 2005, at the suggestion of Prof. Niederle and MIT economist Dan Ariely, Cupid began allotting each of its male members two electronic roses a month, which they could send along with messages to women whom they wanted to impress. The scarcity of roses motivates the suitors to be selective and serious.

"It's been a wonderful thing," says Eric Straus, CEO of Cupid.com, who estimates the roses have increased a suitor's chances of getting a reply 35 percent. "One of the problems in online dating is that men are ignored and women are inundated. Anything that allows a message to stand out is a great benefit."

Economists couldn't have found a better testing ground for their ideas than the grueling market for newly minted economics Ph.D.s. Every year, about 1,000 soon-to-be doctoral graduates converge on the site of the AEA meetings, creating traffic jams at elevators and squeezing as many as 30 job interviews into three or four days. Time and space constraints get so severe that candidates often find themselves sitting on hotel beds as they pitch themselves — sometimes to five or six interviewers, who typically are male and might include Nobel Prize winners and heads of economics departments.

"It's quite unpleasant, especially for women," says David Colander, a professor of economics at Middlebury College in Vermont. He estimates that, because of the arduous nature of the selection process, the hiring of one young professor can cost a school from $10,000 to $15,000.

This year, 2,300 new jobs were listed at the AEA. Amid the noise and rush, potential employers make a lot of mistakes in allotting their attention. Some lower-tier schools, for fear of being spurned, avoid interviewing graduates of top-tier programs, thus missing some who might have had a special reason to choose them due to location, family or hobby considerations. Others set their sights too high, inviting candidates who would never accept their advances, leaving better matches feeling unappreciated and unwanted. As a result, many qualified candidates fall through the cracks.

Profs. Roth and Niederle belong to a growing field of economics known as market design, which is rooted in the idea that markets, if left to develop on their own, often get into trouble and need to be fixed. Market design's most notable achievements include federal auctions for radio spectrum, which have earned the government billions of dollars in revenue, and the National Resident Matching Program, an automated clearinghouse that successfully matches hospitals to new doctors based on preferences each side feeds into the system.

If the signaling experiment works for economists, it could lead the way to meaningful improvements in a broad range of markets, from college admissions to placement of freshly minted business graduates and lawyers. "We want to make markets work more efficiently," Prof. Roth says. "That would result in more people being happy with their jobs, in more firms being happy with their employees and presumably society being more productive."

It is still early to say whether the endeavor will succeed. In all, Prof. Roth says, 969 job seekers sent signals, suggesting that most at least gave it a try. Participants offered mixed impressions.

Ethan Kaplan, a professor at Stockholm University who is interviewing candidates this year, said the signaling led him to focus on one prospect who otherwise might not have stood out.

Whatever the outcome, some have doubts that economists would ever willingly submit to a fully efficient market, such as the one that assigns doctors to hospitals. "The academic job market is a thing that could be enormously rationalized," says Prof. Colander, who has proposed an automated clearinghouse for economists. "But that doesn't mean that economists want to have their lives structured by a market."