Culture and Insanity

In an earlier blogpost I wrote about the potential for culture to both create mental illness and label normal illness as mental illness. I thought it would be useful to delve a little bit more into this cultural effect in this blog entry. The phenomenon of Hikikomoris or those who withdraw socially is worthy of further examination.

Andy Furlong talks about the phenomenon in a 2008 article of the Sociological review. The phenomenon presents us with, first of all, an example of a culturally created form of mental illness and, secondly, with an example of normal experience being recolonized by mental ill health.

Normal experience recolonized by mental illness

Looking at the second claim first one can see that the focus on hikikomori as an exclusively psychological phenomenon within a homogeneous group of people. Furlong points out that Hikikomori covers a number of subgroups of people including Otaku and another subgroup characterized as the alternative scene. The first Otaku are seen as ‘nerds’ and ‘geeks’ but they don’t seem to suffer from any recognizable psychiatric condition or peculiar individual psychological malaise. The group forming the alternative scene do not even fit the criteria for Hikikomori but they are still lumped in with the others even though they do leave their homes, form relationships with people and take the freelance work that is the market provides for youths.

When a young person exhibits detachment and lethargy in Japan Myalgic Encephalomyelitis or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) are not used as diagnoses. They have a very popular syndrome which they like to call ‘Student Apathy Syndrome’. Perhaps they could add to that a syndrome called ‘I’m sad because my dog is sick syndrome’ or possibly a  ‘human condition syndrome.’ The Chinese attitude towards mental health similarly recolonizes normal experience as mental illness. The stigma that is attached to conditions in China definitely adds to the problem. Seeking help from therapists or psychiatrists is a method of last resort coming only after the stage of family, friends and religious healers have been passed. It represents the giving up stage of the family. Additionally the Chinese experience is shaped by the very long periods required and culturally sanctioned by families learning to cope with the difficulties of one of their members.

The Culture in China establishes the individual’s thoughts and feelings as something to be kept within the family. The culture of shame in turn then has created a culture and phenomenon of the somatization of mental difficulties. This is following the pattern of traditional Chinese emotions which sees each of the major emotions as having a corresponding organ which it effects. Tsung-Yi Lin, MD, discussing it says that heart was supposed to be the site of happiness, anger the liver, worry the lung, fear the kidney and desire the spleen.


Cultural creation of psychological problems

It might seem somewhat contradictory to argue that normal experience is being transformed into mental illness and then argue that the culture is creating mental illness. There is psychological difficulty and there is mental illness and I am not trying to suggest otherwise but the creation of this ‘mental illness’ is in large part created by the culture. It is the attitude of mislabelling and mishandling normal psychological difficulty that turns it into mental illness. The exclusively taxonomical approach to the phenomenon is belied by the job market in Japan.

There used to be a system called ‘Jisseki-Kankei’ which involved teachers taking on job placement functions and featured strong links between schools and employers. This system imploded with the recession in the 1990’s. In 1992 1 million job offers were made to Japanese High School Graduates. That number fell to 0.6 million in 1995 and then to 0.2 million in 2003. In a culture that attaches self-esteem to regular jobs and makes no room for second chances it is not surprising that suicides peeks the around March which is the end of the fiscal year and the time when people are let go from their jobs. In terms of the mishandling of the symptom I would give the following example. One approach is for a team of workers to forcibly enter the room of the hikkimoris and scold them for their sloth before removing them to their institution where they would be forced to see the error of their ways.

This, unsurprisingly, does not work. The Japanese public remains sympathetic to these institutions even after one died detainee after being chained to a pillar for four days. Apparently though that’s cool and the public evinced sympathy for the Director because Hikikomori are of course free riding deviants who should be brutally killed. It wouldn’t cross anyone’s mind that perhaps the problem is symptomatic of a wider societal dysfunction perhaps the one that thinks its cool to torture culturally created outcasts as free riders (To death!).

Returning to the Chinese example again one sees a number of culture-bound syndromes described by Tsung-Yi Lin, MD. All of the syndromes he mentions have an important feature in common and that is the somatization of anxiety and fear. To that extent they are culturally created difficulties. There is, for example, Koro which is characterized by panic that the penis will shrink into the abdomen and the person will die.

Then there is frigophobia where patients suffer from an excessive fear and intolerance of cold in terms of temperatures and foods of cold or ‘yin’ nature. Finally, I will mention Shen-k’uei which is characterized by weakness, fatigability, insomnia, anxiety and hypochondria. This of course if not dysphoria in China but of course caused by excessive masturbation, nocturnal emission or intercourse and for this reason is often called sexual neurasthenia. The regressive features within Japanese and Chinese mental health cultures might seem to be easy pickings. One could easily say it’s not that bad in Ireland for example. Yes it is not that bad but it is a bit that bad. While the hikkimori problem is not our problem the issues it raises are issues in Ireland even if less pronounced. The same with the Chinese example we may not have a culture that’s as obsessed with somatization but we still talk in terms of controlling symptoms. We will still conflate symptoms with the illness rather than recognise that everyone has their own unique symbolic world or umwelt. If we were to look at people, and by extension societies, in terms of their symbols we might learn of the great mass of societal dysfunction or insanity.

"The first Split"

Real Experience

One book that always intrigued me was An American Dream by Norman Mailer. The book came to me at a time when I was unsurprisingly depressed. I know that Norman Mailer's writing has a horrible mysogynist bent to it but it was the central idea that caught my attention. In the book, according to Wiki's summary - 'Stephen Rojack, is a decorated war-hero and former congressman, a sensationalist talk-show host, and is the embodiment of the American Dream. In an alcoholic rage, Rojack murders his estranged wife, a high society woman, and descends into a lurid underworld of Manhattan jazz clubs, bars, and Mafia intrigue after meeting Cherry McMahan, a night-club singer and the girlfriend of a highly placed mobster.'

Rojack is liberated by the experience of throwing it all away and it is only after this that he is able to get into the experience of life.Watching the film Pearl Harbour though I experience the opposite feeling. Each still from that film could be on the front of a post card or some sort of pin up. I am left with the feeling that perhaps the film's makers should have turned their hand to making softcore pornography instead. Or even hardcore pornography. At least that would have been a bit more real!




Watching Vanilla Sky with Tom Cruise recently I took a similar message that people crave real experience. Complete experience. As we are repeatedly told throughout the film the sweet is not as sweet without the sour. In the later part of the film Tom Cruise’s character lives in a lucid dream when he is in a frozen state. He is given the opportunity to forget the negative experiences of his life. He chooses the moment of his rejection by Penelope Cruz’s character as the moment for his memory splice. This is not good enough though. He insists on finding out the truth later on and he is presented with a choice of whether to continue living the dream of to live the imperfect ‘real’ life.

He chooses the ‘real’ life even though he is told that his finances will soon run out. Even before this though his mind rejected the perfection that he could have experienced in this dream world. He instead plagues himself with guilt about the way he treated Cameron Diaz’s character. He confronts himself with the consequences of his actions. There is another element to Vanilla Sky that is interesting. That is the idea of the importance of actions and their consequences. This idea also ties into the idea of ‘real experience’. At a point in the film Tom Cruise’s character makes a decision to sit into Cameron Diaz’s car after she proposes having sex that nobody will know about. In the scene just previous Tom Cruise has fallen love with Penelope Cruz’s character. She represents the 'real' woman. She is not taken in by Tom Cruise’s money and charm and holds an additional job as a dental assistant just to support herself.

This 'reality' causes Cruise to decide to be vulnerable with her and he reveals that his nickname in the company is ‘Citizen Dildo’. Penelope Cruz reproaches Cruise’s character on the meaning and importance of friendship. She knows that it was his friend who was interested in her first and he tells her that she is more right about this than she knows. The feeling of love is present with Cruise but the feeling is not enough. He is still not the sort of man whose actions follow through with the love. He gets into the car and sets in train a series of actions that lead to his disfigurement and Cruz leaving him. This reflection on the film reminds me of a section in John Finnis’ book, Natural Law and Natural Rights.
In that section Finnis wonders whether pleasure is the whole point of the human endeavour and concludes that is not. He points to Nozick’s experience machine and offers us a choice. He asks us to suppose that we could be plunged into an ‘experience machine’ which, by stimulating your brain while you lay floating in the tank, would afford you all of the experiences you choose, with all the variety (if any) you could want: but you must plug in for a lifetime or not at all. Finnis wonders is it not clear that one would choose the experiences of discovering an important theorem, or of winning an exciting game, or of reading or writing a great novel, or even of seeing God...or any combination of such experiences?


It seems to connect with Cruise’s experience in Vanilla Sky for as Nozick rightly concludes, one wants to do certain things (not just have the experience of doing them - and this applies to Cruise one wants to do love not just to have the experience of doing love); one wants to be a certain sort of person,through one’s own authentic, free self-determination and self-realization; one wants to live (in the active sense), oneself, making a real world through that real pursuit of values that inevitably involves making one’s personality in and through one’s commitment to those values.  (as again amply demonstrated by Cruise whose self-examination comes to dominate his lucid dream).

 
(Here Cypher’s choice to plug himself in to such an ‘experience machine’ is hollow. He wants to be someone rich and important and then he adds ‘like an actor’ but isn’t that exactly what he is? - An actor. He is not the sort of person who does these things but the sort of person who wants to experience these things. He also includes that term that he does not want to remember anything outside of the Matrix perhaps wisely noting that his mind would reject the ‘unreal’.


21 Grams

In 21 Grams we are dealing with the stories of three lives that are brought together by tragic car accident. Jack Jordan, an Ex-Con, who has found Jesus rounds a corner too fast and hits the husband and two little daughters of Cristina Peck. Cristina Peck authorizes the transplant of a heart from her dying husband. Paul Rivers, a dying mathematics professor receives the heart. Each of these characters is in some way being pressured to accept a different reality to their own. Peck’s father urges her to move, like he did with his wife (Peck’s mother), after her death. Peck rejects this entreaty to accept a different version of life to her own as does Paul Rivers.This rejection reminds me of Kevin Spacey’s character’s similar rejection in the film shrink.
Paul Rivers rejects the pretence of a happy relationship with his partner and the ‘bandaid’ of an artificial insemination pregnancy being placed over a wound that has already bled dry. He wants to find out where his heart came from. The hospital staff and his partner inform him that the family remains anonymous but that he can write to the family if he wants. Paul hires a private detective and finds out who authorized the transplant. He demands the real from his life - becoming involved in her life, getting embroiled in her struggles, trying to stop her taking drugs and buying a gun to avenge her husband’s death. The gun we are told by the private detective who sources it is known in the trade as ‘an orphan’.
This is symbolically interesting to me because the gun a symbol of potency, action and aggression is a gun without a history. It is free from pretence but it can do the most damage and it can perform the most action. Later when Paul's body is rejecting the transplanted heart he chooses a terrible death in lieu of going back to the hospital because it is a death on his own terms out in the world of experience.

Finally, the Ex-con, who’s pick-up truck hit the father and two daughter’s resists his wife’s appeals that he not turn himself in. She suggests that the family needs him and nobody witnessed his involvement with the ‘Hit and Run’. He needs to follow his own logic and experience his own relationship with God. He resists any attempt to alter the message and his experience by either his wife of the reverend when he meets him in prison. When Paul Rivers shoots beside him and tells him he needs to disappear he comes to Paul's hotel room and demands that he shoot him if he is going to shoot him. This is him putting his life in God's hands and following the trend of his experience.

Like Jaubert in Les Miserables he must face the totality of his experience. The guilt and the responsibilities represented by the reality of his experience. He tries to live in a motel and reject his experience but this ends with bloody confrontation with the consequences he tried to run from following him to his motel room. He then becomes involved in Paul and Peck’s story and after Paul turns the gun he brought on himself. He brings Paul to the hospital and he says that he shot Paul but he is let off for lack of evidence. This is God letting him go and telling him to go back to his family presumably. It is in line with his own experience though and this is the important point.

Diane Arbus




Diane Arbus was a woman who lead a sheltered life but then went on to take photos of the marginalized. She seemed to experience something of the real in the psychic danger she experienced in her work. Susan Sontag seems to be suggesting that Arbus' suicide could be viewed as a sort of combat death. Having trespassed certain limits, she fell in a psychic ambush, a casualty of her own candor and curiosity.


She photographed people who were referred to as freaks at the time. She said that we all have a trauma in our lives and since freaks are born with theirs that makes them aristocrats. How original a way of looking at the world? Sontag's words relating to the unreality of experience for Arbus seem to capture the essence of my point exactly and for that reason are worth quoting in full.

'One of the things I felt I suffered as a kid' Arbus wrote ' was that I never felt adversity. I was confined in a sense of unreality...And the sense of being immune was, ludicrous as it seems, a painful one.' Sontag also relates the example of Nathanel West, another artist interested in the deformed, who feeling much the same as Arbus took a job as a night clerk in a seedy Manhattan hotel. Sontag suggests that for Arbus her method 'of procuring experience, and thereby acquiring a sense of reality was the camera. By experience was meant, if not material adversity, at least psychological adversity - the shock of immersion in experiences that cannot be beautified, the encounter with what is perverse, taboo, evil.

Instead of people whose appearance pleases, representative folk doing their human thing, the Arbus show lined up assorted monsters and borderline cases - most of them ugly; wearing grotesque or unflattering clothing; in dismal or barren surroundings - who have paused to pose and, often, to gaze frankly, confidentially at the viewer. Sontag writing of her work says that the photographs of deviates and the real freaks do not accent their pain but, rather, their detachment and autonomy. The female impersonators in their dressing rooms, the Mexican dwarf in his Manhattan Hotel Room, the Russian midgets in a living room on 100th Street, and their kin are shown as mostly cheerful, self-accepting, matter-of-fact. Pain is more legible in the portraits of the normals: the quarreling elderly couple on a park bench, the New Orleans Lady bartender at home with a souvenir dog, the boy in Central Park clenching his toy hand grenade.

Norms (So called)

'Freaks' - (So called)

The connection between Kubrick and Arbus is another I would like to find out more about.
A still from the Shining seems inspired by Arbus' photo of identical twins. There is an interesting article on the idea of duality in the Shining and the point it makes about the image of the twins is that the forced symmetry is even more unnatural than the natural symmetry. The blog notes that it was a brilliant decision to cast to girls who are not identical and actually probably of different ages. It does seem to capture an the Arbus photo and suggest that the attempts to beautify and order experience actually can make something quite unnatural.

http://www.flickr.com/groups/31766670@N00/discuss/72157594384287718/

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/moviesnow/lat-lacmaku420121024173024,0,264309.photo

Love in the chaos

On being normal and other mental illnesses

Sanity as a political construction


The DSM-IV, in its introduction identified as one of the components of the definition of mental disorder the fact that ‘the syndrome or pattern must not be merely an expectable and culturally sanctioned response to a particular event, for example, the death of a loved one.’ Now bereavement is a no brainer to me. I don’t think it was too big of them to say it is ok to be sad after a loved one dies. It’s the reasoning that gets me though. The bereavement sadness is not a mental disorder because it is  (a) ‘expectable’ and a ‘culturally sanctioned response to a particular event’. This seems to capture the essence of the DSM and of the approach to madness more generally.Madness is an arbitrary, politically constructed entity, designed to suit the prevailing culture.




Richard Bentall also notes that there were a series of landmark studies carried out in the 1970’s demonstrated that psychiatrists in the United States and Russia were almost twice as likely to diagnose their patients with schizophrenia than their counterparts in Britain or elsewhere in Europe. In China there is no depression just lots of people with somatic disorders featuring lethargy and other physical complaints. The diagnoses are made to suit the culture. It suits the the United States and Russia to have more schizophrenia. It suits the Chinese to place no focus on the subjective mental state of depressed people and create a physical condition in its place. The culture is characterized by a marked focus on the group to the exclusion of the individual. The Japanese seem to do away with the idea of mental illness altogether.

There is an interesting blog post entitled - ‘Can Culture create Mental Disease? The Rise of ‘Hikikomoris’ in the wake of the Economic downturn in Japan.’ It deals with the social withdrawal of young adults in the wake of waning job security and the linkage of self-esteem. This to my mind is very much a problem that has been manufactured by the culture. Further equating having a job to self-worth another cultural invention has resulted in a special location, the sea of trees, for committing suicide. Rather than dealing with the problems created by a cultural insanity it is ignored and people Aokigahara to kill themselves. 

Culture then can not only distort the mental life of the individual but it can also create problems where otherwise there would be none. The illusion of rigid separation between the different categories of diagnoses is reinforced by the arbitrary exclusion rules inserted in the DSM. Taking DSM-IV as the example it states that patients may not be diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia if they also meet the criteria for schizoaffective disorder, major depression or mania. The DSM’s makers have not adequately addressed the issue of false positives that arise under their system. They ignore the issue of diagnoses being comorbid by arbitrary exclusion.

The DSM provides the following gem of a disorder to illustrate the cultural point- Oppositional defiant disorder. I would like to thank Gareth Stack for discussing this in his Open Learning talk. This disorder is characterized defiant behaviour towards authority figures and refusals to comply with the requests of the majority. So madness could theoretically just be the result of thinking for yourself and trying to be an individual. Conduct disorder similarly manufactures an illness out of not following the rules. Culture then not only creates real problems where would otherwise be none but if creates fake problems where there are none. Perhaps being 'mad' is the sanest response. Breaking the rules in societies where politicians are corrupt and venal, groups regressive in the pressures they exert on the individual and rules patently absurd, counterproductive and odds with one another seems understandable. Also at least when we are feeling our feelings our experience is our own. This seems superior to the position in the modern capitalist society - a fragmented life lived for the approval of others. This clip below from network captures some of the feelings that we might experience in today's fragmented society. In that film Howard talks about the feeling of just wanting to be left alone in our living rooms or being told of horrible events that occur on the news as though that is the way things are supposed to be.

Sanity in this society is supposed to be represented by what Richard Sennett described as the new ‘flexible character’ in an ever accelerating, globalized capitalistic society by using terms that very much resemble the features of the narcissism or borderline pathology. There is an acceleration of momentary events, mobility of work life, futility of communication, fragility of relationships, receding loyalty and commitment. The symptoms of a growing fragmentation of society as a whole. This trend is only mirrored by the individuals who more and more tend to ‘compartmentalize’ their lives, their relationships and their attitudes, without striving for coherence. People today live in worlds, simultaneously or successively, that are not related to one another. Society then is stark raving mad even on the terms of the DSM.

The colonization of normal life experience by madness

The problem with this taxonomical approach to mental health is that everyone is different. It is all about individual context. Mental health is a lot more than just psychomotor retardation and disturbed sleep. Our experience is our own. Our feelings and our reactions to things are our own personal things. In fact if we were to take a book like Irvin Yalom’s Existential psychotherapy to heart we may be accused of imbibing depression. Yalom suggests, here and in his other writings, that we should take heed of Thomas Hardy’s proposition that ‘If a way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst.’ He discusses the fundamental isolation which each person is forced to bear. He also deals with the idea of the meaninglessness of life and the ever present spectre of death. Were he not a world famous Stanford psychotherapist he might be accused of having a morbid preoccupation with death. We might suggest that he feels worthless or that because his life has no inherent meaning he must have a disorder of some sort.

R D Laing, in The Divided Self, says that he ‘is quite sure that a good number of ‘cures’ of psychotics consist on the fact that the patient has decided, for one reason or another, to play at being sane. At another point in that book talking about the onset of psychosis that in many cases there is no such qualitative change, but a transition extending over years, at no single point in which it may be clear whether any critical point has been passed. What this tells us is that the outward signs and behaviours may bear no relationship between the underlying ‘sanity’ or insanity. Additionally there seems to be a closer relationship between the so called signs of mental ill health and positive mental health than might be expected. But then society may actually have no interested in improving the internal world of individuals but merely in manufacturing passive consumers, who work and don't disrupt things. 

In a society where market research and media elements are trying to find out and sell our patterns of behaviour. Maybe I am a woman falling into such and such a socio-economic category and am on my way home from work. There are a half-dozen companies that 'know' what I think and will that information or exploit it to sell me something I don't know. The division of labour is such that, as discussed in Alain de Botton's book, the Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, there are people whose only job it is is to write the copy for the 'moment' chocolate biscuit angled at women from a lower socio-economic background. Their break from the pressures of life is the angled exploitation of a biscuit company's cynical marketing department. When confronted this sort of world it is hard not to sympathize with characters like that played by Michael Douglas in falling down. One feels that my life experience is my own and perhaps I need to do something destructive or out of the ordinary so that my experience cannot be packaged and sold back to me. The two clips should capture some of my feeling here.

The first clip captures the idea of our experience being fabricated just to sell things to us in Mad Men. The second clip captures a bit of insanity from michael Douglas that seems on one level to be a thouroughly sane reaction to an insane society. Symptoms then can come from a rational place. This argument is twofold. First of all ‘symptoms’ can come from a rational place. Richard Bentall in his book Doctoring the mind offers the following link between victimization and paranoia. He points to a population survey conducted by sociologists in El Paso in the United States, and Juarez in Mexico, that found that ordinary people who are highly paranoid tend to live in socially marginalized circumstances that left them powerless and prone to victimization. This reminds one of the joke that just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.

So a ‘symptom’ could be an understandable response to life experiences. More than that the ‘symptom’ might possess a greater inherent rationality. R D Laing talks about psychotics delusions capturing an existential truth.He mentions Julie, the Schizophrenic, and says that we can see existential truth in her statements that she is not a person, that she is unreal, and we can understand what she was getting at when she said that she was trying to become a person, and how it may have come about that she felt at once so empty and so powerfully destructive. Laing suggests that even when what the patient is striving to tell us is told in as clear and straightforward a way as he knows how, the nature of his anxieties and his experiences, structured as they are in a radically different way from ours make the speech content necessarily difficult to follow.

So what we have said first of all is that sanity is a political and cultural construction. We have said that the human condition presents us with a number of human givens that it is perfectly reasonable to think about. We have then argued that symptoms can come from a rational place or have a rational purpose as their driving force. Advancing this what we are now going on to say is that the good and the bad reside closely together.

In Carl Rogers’ book Client Centred Therapy he talks about change occurring when people are feeling at their bleakest. This he suggests is because the process of therapy involves a painful process of letting our guard down and reorganizing our personality. The self, as Hegel suggested, depends on an internal dialectic for its intrapsychic structures and operations. Any meaningful interaction with a person involves an engagement with the way they choose to represent and symbolize their experience. Two examples can be furnished from Yalom’s writings. The first of Carlos, a man who suggested that he would enjoy rape if it were legal. It was not from first principles that these abhorrent views were changed but from following the dialectical logic of his own representations and logic to their conclusions. The second is a woman who viewed her anger as a black ooze which caused all those who touched her either to abandon her or to die. Again it was only by engaging this patently irrational symbolization of experience that Yalom was able to communicate in a meaningful way with this patient. He was able to show her that he was able to come into contact with this ‘black ooze’ without becoming ‘tarred’ by it. Taking the argument one step further we could view one’s ‘madness’ and unique symbolizations as representative of our unique specialness.

The symptom of mental ill health is also the creative impulse that spurs someone to paint a picture or create a beautiful piece of music. It is the vulnerabilities and the flaws that to a large extent make the person special. Yalom talks about the myth of specialness which is shattered by an awareness of mortality in his terminal patients.Our lives will be forgotten by all but a few who are close to us and our life purposes are our own artificial constructions. If we accept this and that we will never be the strongest or the most special we have to look somewhere else we have to look somewhere else for our individual specialness. We have to find our specialness in the unique and even skewed way in which we perceive the world. If we take Alfred Hitchcock we can make this point. Alfred Hitchcock is described as a brilliant director and as a great ‘auteur director’.

The reason he is seen as this great auteur director is because there is no question of his authorship. With other directors they can produce perfectly good films but they are not bringing anything of themselves to the films. The auteur on the other hand has a creative vision. His creative voice is distinctive enough to shine through the collective process. Hitchcock’s voyeurism, his paranoia, his preoccupation with guilt and his chauvinism towards women are unmistakably imprinted on each of his films. Here they are not evidence of a mental disorder but evidence of high art. One does not have to be a famous director to be special or to see the world uniquely. Your experience is your own and you life is your own.Any sort of thoughtful interaction with life’s existential questions or preoccupation with the fact of death does not have to be symptomatic of depression. 

These elements should be treated as highly individual natural ways of responding to human experience. However, even if we were to treat these as symptoms of a disorder we would still need a highly individualized inquiry. Markova and Berrios suggest that the structures underlying mental symptoms and subjective complaints should be primarily seen as unstable, and as dissimilar to structures underlying tables and trees. In their view, the structure of a mental state such as ‘depressed mood’ is fuzzy because it depends on the individual judgment of the person experiencing the state. In their view mental symptoms are above all personal constructs: ‘They are constructs in the sense that subjects create sense or construct a meaning out of an inchoate preconceptual and preverbal experience. They are personal in that although social and cultural influences will aid in their articulation,the experiences themselves are unique to the individual and inaccessible to anyone else’. 

So a preoccupation with death, being an outward manifestation, does not necessarily relate to the inchoate preconceptual and preverbal experience upon which things like depression are based. Arnold H Modell talks about metaphor as being a link with this internal preconceptual and preverbal experience. In his book metaphor and the meaningful brain he points to Giambattista Vico, his Descartes, in support of the idea that 'metaphor is not simply a figure of speech but primarily a mode of thought. Trying to get in touch with the psychic turbulence of the unconscious may the root of masses of art. Modell suggests that it clear that metaphor exists apart from language because we have gestures, visual images, feelings and bodily sensations which can all function as metaphors. Art and creativity often comes from this metaphoric process. We take something base and we convert it into something and higher with aesthetic quality. We are able to transfer meaning from one area to another, make comparisons and elevate ordinary painful experience to art like in the Greek tragedy and all of its variants. Striving after the painful raw fucking experience of sensations gives us the material to produce. 

Giambattista Vico says that it is noteworthy that in all languages the greater part of the expressions relating to inanimate things are formed by metaphor from the human body and its parts and from the senses and the passions'. Could it be that a large chunk of our art is as a result of trying to get in touch with the very experience that the establishment would label as a symptom of mental disorder. In Yalom's books he refers to himself and his feelings as his instrument of therapy. His Stradivarius of therapy. He included a lengthy and toxic rant about fat people and his countertransference towards fat controlling women like his mother for a reason. That reason is the same reason Maroda pays such attention to her initial feelings with a patient. Their feelings are a useful source of information and a part of their experience that is not be denied. Some people call it madness I call it being a human being. I will leave you with this clip to enjoy.

Review of Zero Dark Thirty

Zero Dark Thirty fails to deliver on many fronts. One of its great failures is in not effectively creating sympathy for our main characters. Now I have said this to people and been told - 'Oh that's just really clever. They want an unsympathetic portrayal of the Americans. However that simply is not the case. The film tries at multiple points, rather aggressively, to gain our sympathy for the Americans. It starts with the most cynical and least effective of its sympathy ploys at the very beginning. It plays the phone conversations of the people who died in the Twin Towers at the very start of the film. Later we are shown footage of news coverage of 7/7 and various other terrorist attacks. The film's makers might have realized though that they could not simply exploit this footage to try and trick people into re-experiencing the trauma. At some point they actually have to make some film and attempt to make some characters for us to feel for and relate to. They knew they had to bring some of the terror to the main American characters in the story. This too is poor just  like the attempts to piggyback on existing pain surrounding the attacks failed dismally. (For me anyway.)

So the second strand of the sympathy offensive is bringing it home to the main characters involved. No easy feat when your main characters are involved in the unlawful internment and torture of terrorism suspects. So we must who do we get as our main character. It has to be somebody we can really relate to. Someone who we can see is feeling this. What we get is Jessica Chastain. She plays a cold, seemingly motivationless, historyless redhead. Somebody should have told them not to make her a redhead. Even if the real life woman was redhead you don't make her a redhead. Redhead in filmland means evil, borderline or both. Redheads have a long history as heartless baddies. So Jessica Chastain's character then takes to torture like a duck to water and the comparisons are instantaneous for me. She reminds me immediately of Faye Dunaway's character in Network. Dunaway in that film comes across as a vacuous, almost Borderline, being of pure evil.

 

 In that film she helps to organize the murder of a man who she has made into a star. This is because she can find no other way to end the failing show that she created herself. I think of Gillian Darmody, the mother of Jimmy Darmody, in Boardwalk Empire. She persuades her son to carry on a murderous conspiracy of assorted disaffected politicos, kills a migrant worker, has sex with her son, tries to make her grandson forget her mother, collaborated with a gangster to have the main night club/ entertainment spot blown up leading to many deaths, tyrannically runs a brothel (stamping out any humanity towards her grandson and any humanity that might choose to try and flourish along the way) and various other crimes. So red hair and a cold, impersonal manner not a great start. Even with Boardwalk Empire we get a better character developed. We know Gillian Darmody is the way she is because she was raped when she was younger. We also see it with Faye Dunaway in her desperate attempts to avoid abandonment in the clip above.

Chastain though has none of this in the film she is depicted as a heartless pain in the balls. No boss on earth would tolerate her drawing in marker in window to get attention for her project. Her conversations with Gandolfini's character deliberately make her a character without a history. The point is markedly made that she has worked on nothing else but Bin Laden.One is left with the impression when she enters the film that she is some sort of alien who never really fits in with the rest of the film's universe. She refers to herself in the third person as a the 'motherfucker'.

After a brief interchange of a few meaningless words Chastain's character rather unconvincingly has a friend.They eat in a hotel. An explosion happens - the audience does not connect the real life disaster with Chastain and her token friend. It feels forced.  I continue to not feel for the characters who have not been built compellingly. A scene shows Chastain's  'friend' eating alone.  Chastain's friend refers to family members or relatives and plans. Friend is isolated. Friend eats alone. Friend gets predictably blown up in something the audience saw coming a mile off and she should have scene. Friend feels more like character function for gaining sympathy more so that a character of any depth. Now I tip my hat if the film makers were actually trying really hard hear to make the American characters look like cunts by failing to establish their sympathy tricks properly but I don't think it would be that meta. The featurette clip above seems to have the filmakers refer to Bin Laden again and again as either 'the most dangerous man in the world' or 'arguably the most dangerous man in the world'. I would go with the latter and would preface it with 'it could be tenously argued...' The film's climax does have some token enemy firing of a an AK47 but for the most part the Bin Laden job involved killing women or unarmed people before reaching Bin Laden who was arguably infirm. Now Bin Laden was a terrorist arsehole but I think the reason we don't see any footage of the attack or photos is because the job probably involved killing him in his infirm, deteriorating old man mode. Now don't get me wrong he was evil and deserved punishment but a few hard drives and a dead old man is hardly fucking D-Day.

If you want to watch a better film. Watch Munich. Now they no how to do sympathy. Properly. The killing if the Israeli athletes is split into multiple segments spaced throughout the film that actually show us some of the horror of the events in a way that brings it home to us. We get heavy rumination on bibilical verse and stories. Extended bits on values. We make friends with the enemy and then have to kill them. One of our number is seduced and it could have been Bana's character and we feel that temptation and we are glad that we resisted it and then we feel guilty because we shoot a naked woman who did it. Then we wonder whether we need to kill certain people and we start to crack up. In Munich we get a sense of ideology and morality and in short context. Characters we can relate in situations that we can see developed and explained. The characters have beliefs, thoughts and feelings. Now look at Zero Dark Thirty. Terrorism is bad. Yes. Established in the mind of everybody. Killing Bin Laden is a priority because... Torture works because....Characters feel ambivalent about torture because..... Chastain wants this because...(apart from token friends sympathy function character that is).

Note the presence of feeling and giving a fuck about characters in the above clip and then compare to Zero Dark Thirty.

Sex and Death painting

I used this in a talk as an example of sex and death in a talk for Gareth's Open learning week which is at the time of writing ongoing. Soon after this point of the painting I made a blunder. Painted the sky wrong and then tried to take off the top of the page with disastrous results. Chalk it up to experience. The image on the left comes from an alchemical illustration used in Jung's book on dreams and the one on the right of a hammerhead shark and a maiden is representative of sex.

Lincoln Review

A personal reading of the film Lincoln leads me down my well travelled road of Enantiodromia. The film to my mind shows us that the height of moral courage resides very closely to all manner of lying and corruption.(See the following link for more on that - http://www.nhinet.org/beran.htm ) My response to Lincoln breaks down into, 

• A discussion of some of the more interesting filming choices.

• A discussion of some of the character traits of Lincoln, Leadership and some elements of broader historical context.

• A discussion of what I see as the underlying theme of Lincoln the film.

Filming choices

Filming Lincoln from the back was an interesting way to begin the film. It suggests that Lincoln was as much a spectator of events as he was a leader of them. In a sense Lincoln is also a spectator to himself. He must listen to soldiers recite to him his own words and meditate upon their meaning. It is towards his own compass and direction that he must turn in order to move forward.

Before reversing his decision to meet with Confederate peace delegates he refers to an axiom Euclidean geometry.The axiom - ‘Things that are equal to the same thing are also equal to one another.’ It is in response to a wireless operator telling him that he is an engineer. To my mind it Lincoln’s mention of the axiom seems to be talking past the wireless operator. This, however, underscores for me the private source of Lincoln’s leadership impulse. Throughout the film the symbols he uses are those of solitary pursuits. He refers to landing the amendment as being like harpooning the whale which draws Ahab and his lonely obsession immediately to mind. At another point the imagery of a compass is used calling to mind the profession of surveying. The profession of George Washington. The mention of Euclid, however, deserves special attention.

Before we get into the meat of Euclid’s significance there is an irresistible irony that must be shared. Euclid, seemingly the source of Lincoln’s decision to scupper the peace negotiations in favour of the 13th amendment is also used as a source for the opposing thought by Thomas Jefferson. He mentions Euclid once in his Notes on the State of Virginia to stress the inferiority of the black man.  He says that in the faculty of reason blacks were ‘much inferior’ to whites, ‘as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid.’ Euclid for Lincoln, however, represents the solitary source of his knowledge. He set himself the task of mastering the six books of Euclid after one dismal term in congress and political failure. While his other fellow lawyers were snoring on the eighth circuit. Lincoln maintained his mental equilibrium nonetheless and concentrated his thoughts into the small hours of the morning. Euclid then represents the ability of Lincoln to ignore ‘interminable snoring’ and the voices of others to follow his own slowly worked out logic. Euclid represents the solitary pursuit that worked as a salve in the aftermath of political defeat and that is why it is interesting in terms of its placement in the film.



Returning to Lincoln's character traits, as per the film, we find that there is a strong overbearing influence of his wife. We find that this marital misery is given a lot of time and this is another thing that Hertzberg is critical of. It is good that this influence gets such attention because it is a recurring trope with powerful political leaders that they are really, to the point of embarrassment, unable to handle their family relationships. Lincoln obviously here has more difficulty in dealing with his wife than with the affairs of State. Napoleon was similarly humiliated by his cuckolding wife and his overbearing mother who impressed upon him the importance of keeping political appointments within the family. His indulgence of his family is probably a large factor in his downfall. In giving control of the Spanish campaign he ensured that it would play out dismally. In the case of Stalin Simon Sebag Montefiore has him hiding from his wife in the toilet during her hysterics. The film Lincoln has Robbie, Lincoln's soon, accusing him of not allowing him to enlist in the war because he is afraid of his wife. Lincoln slaps him and this for me confirms the truth of Robbie's words. The man who is able to quietly decide in the midst of a civil war cannot separate himself out from the views and emotions of his wife.

Finally, we see in Lincoln that Lincoln was extremely self-reflexive. As discussed above the filming choices have Lincoln brought to himself. He is very much a witness of his patterns and his behaviour. When an exasperated Stanton remarks that he does not want to hear another of Lincoln's interminable stories Lincoln takes special relish in telling the story. The use of the story as a conversation interrupter and impasse breaker is something that we see again and again throughout the film. It is something of which Lincoln, both the man and the film, are very aware of. Another feature that shows this self-reflexivity is that he allows his personal life to interrupt his public life when it becomes too much to deal with and vice versa with his private life.


 


Depicting the assassination of Lincoln off screen was another interesting filming choice. The internet furnishes me with a Spielberg interview where he talks about not wanting to exploit history and talks about the assassination being done ad nauseam in other films and programmes. On this point I have to agree with Spielberg and the clip above shows just how badly the assassination can be depicted. There is more to the decision though. The audience is tricked when it sees instead watching some show in another theatre. For a few seconds we think we are in Ford’s theatre and we wonder what’s Tad doing there and that’s not Our American Cousin on the stage. It brings to mind something Paul Schrader, of Taxi Driver fame, said. People would rather be confused than bored with films. Nowhere is this more true than where the entire audience knows that Lincoln is going to be shot as a matter of historical fact. Like Shakespeare’s Duncan Lincoln is killed off stage/ off screen and we are forced to deal with the effect his shooting has on his son and others rather than on the pure violence of the act. The choice of including Lincoln’s speech at the end after a fancy effect with a flame seems a little hackneyed. Following Hendrik Herbert analysis the final ‘awkward scenes have a Disneylandish, audio-automation, theme-park air about them.’

There are a few more interesting things about the assassination which I feel like mentioning anyway. The Ford Theatre eventually became a place for storing government documents until the weight of documents caused a collapse that killed a lot of people. Also when Lincoln was being assassinated someone tried to carve him up but a wire stopped the knife and saved him. The men in the household to my knowledge got better despite being knifed whereas at least one of the women went into decline and died afterwards. This is based on my rough remembering of team of rivals.


Character traits of Lincoln, Leadership and some elements of broader historical context

The film tries to bring home the point again and again that though he is surrounded by people Lincoln his utterly alone.The lighting is often dark and Lincoln’s face often shrouded in darkness. We mostly inhabit darkened rooms with fireplaces and mirrors. The shots around the fireplace cause me to have a reverie involving another leader Napoleon. Frank McLynn’s biography of Napoleon suggests that [a]nother Bonaparte peculiarity was an insistence on always having a fire lit, Winter or Summer.

Forever complaining of the cold, he would kick the blazing logs while he talked.’ The fire suggests to me the unceasing movement and energy that both leaders required. A sense of going somewhere and of satisfying some drive or political ambition. In the case of Lincoln even his stories from which he derives great pleasure and comfort are used to masterful political effect. In the few hours where he does actually sleep his dreams inform his decisions. One of which (dreams) we actually see depicted in the film. The dream again his concerned with solitary movement at great speed.

Following the comparison with Napoleon we find that Napoleon would not rise later than 3am. He would mull ‘ over the most urgent affairs of state, he would take one of his famous boiling hot baths, then go back to bed at 5am for an hour.’ What Napoleon described as ‘his after midnight presence of mind’ seem to connect with Lincoln as well. In the film we see him at 3:40 am in the morning deciding whether to pardon a 16 year old boy. Finally, another part of the treatment of Napoleon seems to connect with Lincoln and his treatment in this film. McLynn says that some people suggest that Napoleon was  a ‘dual man’, in a unique sense, that he was a man who lived in space and time and who observed the ‘other self’ doing so many remarkable things, that, to put it another way, he lived on an equal footing with his own destiny. That the filming choices (especially those of depicting his dream and making him a second hand witness to his own speeches) lead me into a reverie of Napoleon and Lincoln’s character traits suggests to me that the response to this film will be different for every person. In a certain sense I am still watching Lincoln and my review is to a large view informed by a whole range of other materials. This is a thinking man’s film. A film for people who know what it is to think like a lawyer or a politician.

And overall it is a film that concerns itself with authenticity. Even Hendrik Hertzberg in criticizing the film is forced to row back in a criticism of its authenticity.And overall it is a film that concerns itself with authenticity. Even Hendrik Hertzberg in criticizing the film is forced to row back in a criticism of its authenticity. In talking about the assassination of Lincoln in the film he suggests that the film his outrageous in its depiction of Tad going to the theatre alone. He asks with incredulity ‘wouldn’t the manager, knowing the President’s young son was in the house, have had the lad escorted out before making such an announcement?’ Later he has to go back and change his tune. To save face he has to say that the manager announced but only after the rumour had circulated the theatre.



The political necessity of lying


The main message in the film for me relates to the political necessity of lying. The case that Lincoln puts to the Confederate delegates is that idea of democracy should sustain them and that it is something to which they can aspire one day. The film in in a sense about lying, or at the very least bending the truth, to reach a morally superior position. I think the film also speaks to a legal obsession with form. Lincoln seems obsessed with a form of truth that is in fact lying. In the climactic scene where voting takes place on the 13th amendment to the Constitution Lincoln tells a whopper of a lie with the truth. In what is described as a ‘lawyer’s dodge’ Lincoln gives the House to believe that there is no Confederate peace delegation by suggesting that as far as he knows there will be no delegation coming to Washington nor does he believe there will be. This is the truth but it is also a lie.

Thaddeus Stephens, the leader of the house played by Tommy Lee Jones, must egregiously misrepresent his views and denounce his views relating to racial equality in favour of mere equality before the law. Lincoln gives his cabinet a lengthy explanation of the different legal forms that he will use to abolish slavery. Considering slaves property, not considering them property, considering the succession states a different nation and considering them not a different nation. I think the film is about both Lincoln's and its obsession with these forms. Everyone is so tied up with process and form. This obsession with form goes so far that Lincoln the master of this lawyerly form entreats the members of his cabinet to focus on the 'Here-and-Now'. ( Now after having only recently read four of Yalom’s books I found this particularly gripping. Lincoln was probably not referring to the symbolic importance of actions within the therapeutic relationship and hour but the entreaty was all the more effective for me because that phrase was used.) So the film is about lying and form over substance but also paradoxically about seeing through form to substance.