Unrelenting standards schema is the feeling of pressure that comes from perfectionism, the feeling that nothing is ever good enough, with the constant demand to do more making you feel flawed. A June 2022 study appearing in Personality and Social Psychology compared perfectionism to just working with set goals for excellence, and found surprising results: Perfectionism leads to worse outcomes, not better. In fact, other studies reveal that, not only does perfectionism bring worse results, it also can make you miserable and that your life is lacking in creativity and less fulfilling (Brown and Beck, 2002). Perfectionism means being stuck with standards that are always too high, and anxiously focusing on them. Autism with co-occurring exceptional cognitive ability is often accompanied by severe internalizing symptoms and feelings of inadequacy. There is evidence that suicide risk is partly genetic in nature, with heritability estimates ranging from 17 to 55% Some evidence for potential mechanistic overlap between the biology of suicide and of autism comes from a study that identified mutations in a well-known autism risk gene, NRXN1, as increasing risk for suicide (William et al., 2021). In a general population study (which included autistic individuals) increased polygenic risk for autism was found to be positively associated with suicidal thoughts. Furthermore, autistic children with suicidal thoughts inherit more genetic risk factors for self-harm ideation than expected (Warrier & Baron-Cohen, 2021), lending further evidence to potential shared biological mechanisms between suicide and autism. Unrelenting standards schema begins at the pre-verbal level, as you take in the non-verbal case of attachment, before you are fully comfortable with expressing yourself through talking. This means that perfectionism is felt in the body, as much as it goes along with perfectionist thinking. Source: www.sciencedirect.com
Tennessee Williams admitted: "I write out of love for the South. It once had a way of life that I am just old enough to remember—a culture that had grace, elegance, an inbred culture, not a society based on money. I write out of regret for that. I write about the South because I think the war between romanticism and the hostility to it is very sharp there." Williams, wrote Gore Vidal, "could not possess his own life until he had written about it." Although he was rarely forthcoming about his sexuality, homosexual love was “spiritual champagne” for Williams, and a way to short-circuit depression. About his drinking Williams lied routinely that he was on the wagon when it was clear that liquor had got him licked. The tragedy was that Williams was a liability to anyone who cared about him; ultimately only his writing mattered. Williams was both the protective/destructive Stanley Kowalski, and also the gentle, spiritual but manipulative sensualist Blanche Dubois. As Elia Kazan well understood, "Blanche DuBois is Williams. I saw Blanche as Williams, an ambivalent figure who is attracted to the harshness and vulgarity around him at the same time that he fears it, because it threatens his life." By 1969, his brother Dakin had him committed to a mental institution, a decision which quite clearly saved the playwright’s life; to show his thanks, Williams wrote Dakin out of his will.
Williams never failed to ask Geraldine Page how things were operating on the stage, both with plays in which she starred and with those he would beg her to read. Page, in a fashion similar to that employed by Laurette Taylor in The Glass Menagerie, had an ability to shift the focus of a play toward its leading female character. “She recognized that the women I had written into my plays, and which I had asked her to play, were the center of the play, the scaffolding of the building I had constructed,” Williams said. "She has the mind of a writer, which is the highest compliment I could pay her. She was also unafraid of honesty or silence, two things I always think of when I think of her. She didn’t need approval or find comfort in empty conversations that bond people together. She had an understanding of why we were all gathered together to create theater that I have only found in perhaps two or three other people. I didn’t think of leaning on Gerry’s shoulder or calling her up in the middle of the night for comfort and a few laughs. But I would call her—and I have called her—to remind me of why we do this, why we matter, why we have to get it right. She lives the poetry she cannot write. I write the poetry I cannot live.”
“I’m a dreamer, I anticipate events, emotions, and I am often disappointed. I could learn so much from her. She took my writer’s dream and melded it with images and feelings of her life. I think of Geraldine Page as the finest, sharpest needle, capable of piercing any dream fabric and creating any number of patterns. She had no patience or sympathy for unintelligent, unexamined people or situations, and in that first encounter with her in 1952, she let me know that Summer and Smoke, on Broadway, had been two of her least favorite things: thoughtless and unclear. And I agreed with her. Her emotional intensity has been compared to a singer capable of holding a particular note for an astonishingly long time, leaving an audience on edge, wondering if the artist can survive such a commitment, then marveling when the note ends and a new note is pursued, held, conquered.”
Williams expounded: "We destroy ourselves every day, and then we rebuild. Some of us can survive this damage and use it to good effect—through work or sympathy or charity or awareness. I do not have this ability, and my failure to be a good steward of my talent led to some clashes with Geraldine, who is a fearsome guardian of her mental theater, from which emerge her characters, which are crafted from something I can only call majestic. Hers is a titanic talent; her vision is frightening. She has an incredible intellect, and it is attached to a talent that is something like a ton of dynamite bearing a one-inch wick. It explodes frequently and beautifully, and it is lethal to be stupid in its path.” Writers, Williams explained, “create scratches on pieces of paper. We hope and we dream. We try to locate those moments in our life when things happened and we were left stranded and stunned and wondering and asking ‘Why?’ Geraldine Page poured blood and flesh into my pages—and the pages of others—and left me wondering ‘Why?’
Although Williams was also an admirer of Joanne Woodward, “a beautiful Southern belle, equally gifted for stage and film,” none, however, in his estimation, brought the process of thought and intention to the stage as Geraldine Page did, not even Marlon Brando. “I have never doubted the existence of God,” Williams asserted soberly. “I’ve been told that all straight lines in the universe are eventually curved and a curving line may eventually curve back to its beginning, which might be something in the nature of rebirth. After all, high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.” Williams had once described to Luchino Visconti the effect of watching a young and pliant James Dean dancing and swaying, clad in a robe and bearing scissors, taunting an unyielding yet clearly amused Geraldine Page, her back hard but her eyes eagerly taking in Dean’s allure. Clearly, Williams was jealous of Dean, a paradox due to his homosexuality. But maybe Williams was in love with Page. The play was The Immoralist, based on the novel by André Gide; and to the play’s director, Daniel Mann, Page described, from her reading of Gide’s work, a religion of male beauty to which she nightly converted and submitted. When she looked at James Dean on that stage, he was her God, his body her Eucharist, and her soul empty and ready to be filled with his gifts. Offstage she found Dean to be gifted but undisciplined and spoiled. —Follies of God: Tennessee Williams and the Women of the Fog (2015) by James Grissom
James Dean may not have had the career he had -- he certainly would not have made the pictures he did -- if it had not been for one woman, Geraldine Page. They were both members of the Actors Studio, but they became close in late 1953, when they were cast in The Immoralist, Ruth and Augustus Goetz's adaptation of Andre Gide's novel. From the first day of rehearsal, December 18, 1953, there was trouble. Page and Jourdan clashed, while Dean was rattled by insecurity and fear. "Jimmy was very nervous and frightened," recalled Salem Ludwig, an understudy and the show's Actors Equity Association representative. "He overcame his fear by pretending to be a tough guy. He was young, and this show was a big step in his career." The new director was Daniel Mann, who fixed the staging but failed to recognize Dean's paralyzing terror. The young actor's lack of confidence caused him to act out, demanding attention from those around him. The situation reached a breaking point one day, until Dean finally spun around, retrieved his jacket, and stalked out of the theatre. Rose, who watched the episode unfold from the empty auditorium, decided to fire Dean. There was only one problem. Page wouldn't stand for it. "My mother," Angelica Page said, "told the director and the producer, 'You're letting pure gold walk out of that door. If he's not in this show, I'm not in this show.' She meant what she said, too. If Jimmy was not going to be there on opening night, she wasn't either."
Rose must have believed her: Dean was not fired. But Page still had to make sure Dean didn't quit. "I got a call from Geraldine that Jimmy was in her room," Ludwig recalled. "I went up and there was Jimmy sitting there, furious, ready to kill someone. 'Jimmy, what happened?' I said. 'I didn't want to get in a fight,' he said, 'so now I'm packed and ready to go.' I said, 'You can't do that. Nobody will hire you in the future.' He said, 'I don't care. I'm leaving.' "Then I said, 'Jimmy, there are six blacklisted actors in this show who haven't worked in a long time. If you walk out and the show closes, they're out of a job,'" Ludwig said. "There was a pause. Soon tears started to flow down Jimmy's cheeks and he said, 'I'll do it.'" Dean did well in the Philadelphia tryouts, but he hit his stride in New York previews. Elia Kazan saw the last preview and sought out Dean after the show to offer him a lead role in East of Eden, complete with a Warner Bros. contract. So, on opening night, after turning in a stunning performance, Dean handed Rose his two-week notice. None of this would have happened, of course, if Page had not put her professional reputation on the line and threatened to quit the show if Rose fired Dean. When the conflict with Dean developed, Rose may not have realized the situation had both professional and personal implications for Page. Starting around the time of the first rehearsal and continuing into the play's New York run, she and Dean had been having an affair. The attraction was obvious. Beautiful and captivating, Dean projected a powerful sexual appeal, while, with her classic leading-lady looks, Page radiated her own allure.
As if to create mementos of the affair, Dean made freehand drawings for Page, which he did only for those people about whom he cared deeply. A talented amateur artist, Dean enjoyed drawing informal sketches on the backs of napkins and sheets of paper. Page cherished the drawings, putting them for safe keeping in a small, white envelope on which she wrote: "Please save these masterpieces for me by Mr. James Dean." "According to my mother, their affair went on for three-and-a-half months," Angelica Page said. "In many ways my mother never really got over Jimmy. It was not unusual for me to go to her dressing room through the years, obviously many years after Dean was gone, and find pictures of him taped up on her mirror. My mother never forgot about Jimmy -- never. I believe they were artistic soul mates." In Being James Dean, I note the affair ended when Dean went to California to shoot East of Eden. Dean's talent might have taken him to Hollywood anyway, but if Page had not kept him in The Immoralist he would not have gone there when it did by landing the part in East of Eden. As it happened, not quite 18 months later, he would be dead, having created a small but memorable body of work that has made him an enduring icon. —"The Woman Who Made James Dean a Star" (2016) by Paul Alexander
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