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Wednesday 27 February 2013

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.






Tuesday 26 February 2013

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.

Wednesday 20 February 2013

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.









Tuesday 19 February 2013

Bull picture
















Sort of inspired by Picasso's bulls. The bull is a projection of male sexuality and the woman ...well the woman is a woman.

Monday 18 February 2013

Sea Creature



















Another painting of mine. The beginning of it was I tried my best to draw hypnagogic imagery with a pencil in my hand and my eyes closed. The position of the pencil on the page was difficult to track and when I was working on it later it became more about bringing the forms together into more consistent larger forms. This is how the two characters or sea monsters at the centre of the picture come into being. The sea as usual represents the unconscious. The Stingray and the baby come from one of my dreams. The stingray in the dream was the child's mother.

Sunday 17 February 2013

The importance of symbolism

This discussion would like to support a number of propositions.



  • The first is that the use of symbolism and metaphor is an  extremely important part of how people relate to their experience.
  • The second is that any effective communication with people requires an engagement with their symbols.
  • The third is that any creative product cannot help but symbolically betray the psychology of  its creators.


Symbolism is an extremely important part of human experience

The first point then is that symbolism is an extremely important part of human experience. Karen Maroda talks about the use of metaphor as being one of the most effective ways of getting through to some of her most troubled patients in therapy. Throughout her book, Psychodynamic techniques - Working with emotion in the therapeutic relationship, she discusses the effectiveness of symbolizing experience when treating patients with Borderline Personality disorders. Borderline personality is a condition marked by frequent splitting in defence of the ego and patterns of intense and unstable relationships. In short they are the bane of the therapeutic world, disliked intensely by mental health professionals and forever crossing boundaries. They are frequently thought to be ‘incurable’ so the notion that symbolic discourse could be efficacious in their treatment invites excited examination.

Maroda suggests that ‘[m]etaphor is about making cognitive connections, establishing meaning and creating new cognitive and emotional pathways.’ When trying to discuss the emotional impact one patient with BPD was having on others she used the metaphor or symbol of her responses being like using a bazooka to kill a fly. This example immediately resonated with the patient as did another allusion to the television show Third Rock from the Sun. This metaphor is said not only to have captured her experience but given her room for creative play. It is a metaphor that she turned around in her head for weeks and weeks deriving much humour and insight from it. The gist of the comparison was that the aliens in the television show while having a detailed of understanding of how humans lived had difficulty dealing with some of the most basic things that humans do. 





In further support of the importance of metaphor she brings in the work of Levin and Modell. Their work suggests that more brain centres light up in response to metaphor than any other form of human communication, thus indicating the formation of new neural pathways arising from and in response to the symbolic.

Any effective communication with people requires an engagement with their symbols

In his treatment of patients Yalom suggests that to effectively treat a patient one must engage with the symbols the patient chooses to achieve success in the therapeutic alliance. In treating a surgeon whose brother and husband had both died Yalom talks about having to deal with her symbolization of her grief/ rage as a ‘black ooze’. Yalom knows he must engage with the metaphor of the black ooze (and the idea that anyone who comes into contact with it will either abandon her or die) even though it is patently irrational he knows he must engage with it. It is only by dealing with her anger and her bitterness and not being ‘tarred’ by it that he can undermine the symbolization. At another point in the book he describes one woman’s hallucinated insects as ‘symptoms, which were symbolic, oblique cries for help’.

At yet another point in the book the deterioration of another relationship is described. This is his relationship with Paula a collaborator in a group of terminally ill patients. After a long period of neither of them talking to one another they decide to meet for lunch. It was then that Paula produced a lichen covered rock from her bag that she described as her anger rock. Yalom queried whether Paula was angry at him. The rock signified anger but at the same time Paula described her brother who died at the age of seventeen as her rock. It is towards an engagement with this symbol of a rock that he feels he must return his attention when they meet again. Yalom says to Paula that: -



Your saying that your brother was like a rock makes me think of another rock, the anger rock you once placed on the table between us. Do you know that you never until this day mentioned your brother to me? But his death helps me understand some of the things about the two of us. Maybe we’ve always been a threesome - you, me and your brother? I wonder if his death his the reason you have chose to be your own rock- the reason you would never let me be your rock

? Perhaps his death convinced you that other men would prove frail and unreliable?

Her response to him is to say that ‘[n]ow it’s time to feed you’. Yalom immediately examines this for symbolic content. He wonders whether it is an acknowledgement that he has in a sense ‘fed her’ emotionally or spiritually. Seeing Yalom, one of the world’s most eminent therapists, search so furiously for the symbolic in his interactions speaks to the importance of engaging with the symbols.


Any creative  product cannot help but symbolically betray the psychology of  its creators

It is remarkable found that Maya Deren disavowed any connection with the European tradition of experiment, rejecting the continental version of surrealism for relying too much on the unconscious.She is right that creativity represents a logical, imaginative extension of a known reality. However, she does not afford enough credit to the role of the unconscious in her own work. Even in the most deliberate of artwork the psychology of the creator is put on display for the world to say. Before returning to Deren’s work in Meshes of the Afternoon it is worth looking at one of the progenitors of cinema. Before there was D W Griffith there was Melies an illusionist turned filmmaker. His films were most definitely ‘logical, imaginative extensions of a known reality’. They carried with them the deliberate acting and stiff constructions of the stage and yet they still spoke to the unconscious of Melies. Eric Rhode suggests, in his History of cinema, that Melies’s famous image of the rocket in the eye of the moon in a trip to the moon speaks to infantile feelings concerning sexual assault. 


 

Rhode suggests that ‘themes borrowed from Gounod, Berlioz, Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe are shorn of their promise and made subordinate to his psychopathology. Rhode says that Melies symbolism was so limited that had his films been longer ‘they would have a mind piercing monotony’. He draws out attention to the fact that a grimacing decapitated head, usually his own, is a recurring motif and that this is probably a form of genital displacement. In Meshes of the afternoon similarly the logical and deliberate enterprise of making the film cannot exclude the unconscious. The symbols even if chosen unconsciously often carry some other signification not immediately apparent to the chooser.

In Meshes of the Afternoon Maya Deren was probably trying to get at trying to find her own personal identity within a conventional relationship. She probably wanted to deal with the paradox that she feels at her safest when awakened by her boyfriend when she should have been running from him the whole time to find herself. It is he who returns the telephone to the receiver. Phones are used in dreams to suggest a lack of communication between the dreamer and whomever she is trying to get through to in this case herself. The film could, however, be read much more simply. It could just be about fellatio being sanity restoring. This is probably not the logical, imaginative extension Deren envisaged.

Following Freud the key in Meshes would be a phallus but if we follow a Jungian train of thought we get more the idea of keys as opening up areas of life.This latter version was probably what Deren was aiming for but even following this line of thinking we arrive at the penis version of the key. Jung would have amplified the image of the key with myths, etc to find out the essence of keyness. If we take the french folk tale of Bluebeard it his illuminating . Bluebeard took a wife and gave her a set of keys for every room in the house there was only one room that he forbid her from entering. She used the key that allowed her to enter the forbidden room and saw the bodies of many women. When Bluebeard returned he discovered blood on the key and told her that she could now join all of his former wives in the forbidden room. The blood on the key here could be taken to represent the blood produced after the hymen is broken upon discovery of sex.

In Meshes Deren takes the key from her mouth. Which is symbolic of taking a phallus from her mouth. She repeatedly tries to take possession of the phallus only to have it resist her efforts and return to the table before turning into a knife. This could be a form of penis envy or lack. This phallus as a knife is then driven into her mouth and then she is awoken by Hammid who puts her in connection, (by returning the phone to the receiver). The knife is initially seen in bread. Bread being symbolic of love or affection that the knife can provide. After the bread though the knife is seen in isolation as a tool of destruction. Perhaps Meshes of the Afternoon could be renamed Enlightenment at the end of a man’s penis.


Breakfast at Tiffany's

Looking at Breakfast at Tiffany’s we see that the symbols throughout the film are interested in the difference between what is real and what is mere artifice. Whether conscious or not the production of the film concerns itself with what is real in people and speaks to the preoccupations of the films producers. Even to the point of making significant changes from the book. At one point in the film Holly and her writer friend have sex and this is after they remove party masks which are symbolic of their social masks. Its inclusion in the film where it had not occurred in the book suggests that it speaks even more to the psychology of the film's creators.The film repeatedly deals with the theme of a lack of substance itself being substance.





Mirrors are used from nearly the opening scene to let us know that we are not dealing with real woman but with some reflection of the woman. The only real relationship that she has throughout the entire film she has to make unreal by calling him by her brother’s name. She only has sex with him after they both take of two party masks, again symbolic, of the masks that they present to the world. The version of herself that she sees herself as having left behind at the age of fourteen is represented by a nameless cat that she tries to rid herself of at the end of the film. She reassures the cat there are plenty of rats where she is abandoning him perhaps these are the same 'rats' and 'super rats' that she has to deal with throughout the film.


Her agent says early in the film that she is a phoney but ends the film by referring to her as the most real phoney around. It is this paradox that the film concerns itself with. When the writer talks about saying that he wants to marry her at the end of the film he tries almost to smuggle the proposal into her world of abstraction and life lived at a remove. Even then it is something she simply will not register. When she is forced to deal with some reality and past in the form of her husband whom she has run off on she cannot do this. She tries to get the one person with whom she has a real relationship with to do the dirty work for her. Even here her one real relationship is lived at the remove of being attached to her brother. Furthermore what I think initially attracted her to him was that he was similarly trapped in a fiction. His relationship with a decorator who supported him. The film is conscious of this tension between the real and the false that it is creating but it is not conscious of all of the instances where this point is made. A close re-watch of this film would throw up unintended symbols and comparisons that were perhaps not fully planned out in the creative process. The changes from the book to the film invite more examination in terms of the psychology of the film's producers.

Friday 1 February 2013

Dialectics of Symbols

Introduction

Behaviours within a therapeutic hour are symbolic of the way that a patient deals with all of their relationships. The patient who apologizes for the lock that is broken on Yalom’s door is asked does she more generally feel the need to apologize for things that were not the her fault. The client who arrives late or makes a point of paying a lower fee may be asserting their dominance or value over the therapist (and by extension all people). 




The hour of therapy is extremely meaningful. In fact Yalom attaches particular significance to the first dream related in therapy. We also find Maroda attaching particular significance to the patient’s first words or statements about themselves. Within this transference or ‘symbolic field’ we find arrangements of opposites.Sabina Spielrien’s article on destruction as a cause of coming into being serves as both a good introduction to this ‘coincidence of opposites’ and also the dialectical operation of symbols. She refers to Stekel’s idea of polarity and her discussion is replete with examples of symbolic relationship between the opposing elements of sex and death.

This dialectical operation of symbols is illustrated with an example from Slavoj Zizek.He quotes Hegel as saying that ‘[b]y repetition that which at first appeared merely a matter of chance or contingency becomes a real and ratified experience.’ He takes the example of the assassination of Julius Caesar suggesting that towards the ‘opinion’ that still believed in the Republic Caesar’s actions could only seem to be an arbitrary act and as something accidental. To this ‘opinion’ if one could only remove this one individual from the picture the Republic would be ipso facto restored. In murdering Julius Caesar, the conspirators allowed for the reign of Augustus, the first true Caesar. Zizek suggests here then that ‘[t]he truth here emerges from its very failure’. The murder of the Caesar exposed the truth of its own non-truth. The death of Caesar then establishes Caesarism. In the same way a symbol used to represent experience can expose the truth of its own non-truth.

Dialectics in practice

It seems that deep progress within therapy requires this dialectic to create insight. In his book, Client Centred Therapy, Carl Rogers remarked on the suddenness of change and how it seems to occur almost invisibly. He also noted the contradiction that an acceptance of the nature of Miss Cam caused that shyness to fall away naturally. A pattern will through its expression expose its own non-truth. Miss Cam was shy and withdrawn presumably because she felt that she was not a person who could be worth relating too. She then responded by making herself a person not worth communicating to. Through this process of making herself not worth communicating with she actually proves that she is inherently worth communicating with .More generally Rogers’ discussion of therapeutic change Carl Rogers suggests that the sense of progress and achievement is not only felt in moments of elation and pleasure, but also when the road seems darkest, and the confusion greatest.

In Love’s executioner Yalom deals with Carlos, an initially extremely unpleasant man. Here a  symbolic ‘coincidence of opposites; allowed Carlos to realize a transcendence within his personality. His adjustment of his representations of women, and people more generally, did not arise from first principles but rather at the the extreme zenith and overextension of his misogynist and even pro-rapist representations of women. Through the sudden inclusion of his daughter within his symbolizations their meaning was forced to radically change.  If we look at the way that patient’s choose to symbolize their experience we can place those symbolizations within their broader context. Food offers an example of one such symbol.

The symbolism of food

This symbolic meaning of actions in what Yalom call the  ‘Here and Now’ relationship between the therapist is a regular staple of the HBO show, In Treatment. Oliver uses food symbolically taken to be symbolic of love or emotional nourishment. Paul explicitly draws the link between the empty fridge in Oliver’s father’s house and the perceived lack of emotional availability.In Love’s Executioner it deals with the symbolizations of an obese patient. As she began to lose weight she was forced to deal the contradictory quality of those symbolizations.

She was repulsed by fat people something she offers as a reason for being able to tolerate Yalom’s early disgust towards her weight. At the same time as she lost weight it became clear that the loss of weight had become linked to her father’s own wastage and death. Weight then represented a protection against death at the same time as representing, presumably, the ill-health that would bring her more rapidly towards death. Eating less symbolized death for her but through eating less she found herself becoming healthier. Food, a multi-faceted symbol,
can be taken to signify love and yet through bringing on ill-health as in the case of Oliver.It can also represent vitality over death but in practise signify exactly the opposite.Signs then signify one thing when we leave them at rest but another when we actually start consciously using them.

Death and Rebirth

Returning to Carl Rogers we can see a more explicit example of this symbolization process.His patient Mrs. Ett being discusses her experience as follows:-



I’m sinking into a tomb. That’s just what it his , little by little I’m going into a tomb. Everything is closing up on me. (Pause.) If I could only break away the walls. (Pause.) And yet actually, my coming here has helped me, so maybe I have to continue coming here. Maybe that will help me get out of it.



The tomb is a symbol and it encompasses two opposing notions. That of death and rebirth. The tomb represents death but also treasures that have not been seen by human eyes for thousands of years. Death itself is also connected to rebirth and sexual potency.


Explicitly so in the case of Egyptian mythology to which ones mind his inexorably drawn at the mention of the word ‘tomb’. Joyce Tyldsley said of cow goddess Hathor that ‘her sexual power closely connected to her role as guardian of the dead’. It was further suggested that the relationship between the grave and the womb would have been obvious to the first Egyptians, who buried their dead in rounded pit graves in a contracted or foetal position. Sexual potency was an essential concern for the afterlife and something that featured prominently in tombs and graves.



Ra, the Egyptian Sun God travelling of the solar boat through the underworld. In the mythology Ra was carried by the Meseket, or the Night boat, that would carry him through the underworld and back towards the east in preparation for his rebirth. These myths present the sun rising as the rebirth of the sun by the sky goddess Nut; thus attributing the concept of rebirth and renewal to Ra and strengthening his role as a creator god as well. Additionally, when Ra is in the underworld he merges with Osiris the God of the dead and becomes the god of the dead.Here too we see the symbolic relationship between the opposites of life and death. The representations that Mrs. Ett relates, when placed in their broader symbolic context, point towards rebirth as well as death.

Hegel talks in terms of it being clear the ‘unconscious spirit is the very structural foundation of the self, as pure activity always in flux and in a psychic state of turbulence.’ Hegel would argue that this dialectic is both the inner organization and the content of unconscious spirit. He would advance that the Self is provided with its intrapsychic structures and operations by this dialectic. It can never be reduced or localized and it can only be conceptualized as pure activity.


Even where our symbolizations are taken by use to have some settled meaning we are again and again surprised at the contradictory meanings entailed by the symbols we choose. It seems that the unconscious will seize upon symbols that tend to make us the butt of our own internal psychological jokes.Once when the author was jokingly referring to himself and his friends as founders of psychoanalysis one of his friends selected Adler. On the surface Adler was just another extremely talented person within the founding of the psychoanalytic movement. The selection, however, belied the fact that the symbol of Adler was effectively sidelined and excluded from the movement in a hostile way and was heavily involved in formulating the inferiority complex.