U.S. President Barack Obama has nominated Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. Her confirmation seems inevitable, and she will be the third woman and the first Hispanic to serve on this highest Court. Pundits report that she is the most experienced nominee in a century. Certainly her nomination is also a nod to diversity: female, Latina. But, while some might think diversity would have been better served by, say, a lesbian nominee, there is significance in Sotomayor’s postmodern view that it is “important to acknowledge the influence that personal experience could have on decisions.”
Psychoanalysis, too, is entering an era where there is no longer an objective authority, where individual subjectivity can no longer be ignored as if it does not have influence. Who each of us is, including all our experiences, influences every thought, every action, every relationship, even as we strive as analysts to be with our patients.
And if Sotomayor’s breadth of experiences, including those with loss, poverty, and illness, as well as motherhood, Ivy League education, and as a judge, allow for more of the “empathy factor” (empathy: the ability to put yourself in another’s shoes) then I am with Chris Kelly when he jokes in his “Empathy for the Devil: …I can’t imagine how it feels to be against empathy.” Empathy is not only a mainstay in our therapeutic work, but it is a too pervasively absent quality on the world’s political stage. Should it not also pervade the judicial system where both fairness and mercy must be held in balance?
Sotomayor, who quipped that a "wise Latina" could reach a better decision than a man, admits she “fell flat” when trying to play off Sandra Day O’Connor’s comment that a wise old woman would probably arrive at the same decision as a wise old man. Much has been made of Sotomayor’s injudicious comment. Though poorly expressed, Sotomayor makes a valid point about the value of differing perspectives in applying the law.
On NPR this morning, the host said it differently, “Lots of different people can have lots of valuable experience.” This is what we might call perspectival realism: that no one has a god’s-eye view, instead each of us brings only a tiny slice of reality of experience from a vast array of possibilities in experiencing of an idea or an event. I might hope that an old woman might arrive, not at the same decision as an old man, but at a different one, equally valuable, offering yet another slice. If Sotomayor fell flat, it was in her temporary lapse of empathy when one privileges one sex, one ethnicity, or one subjectivity over another. All of us have lapses. If we are to remain connected to one another, particularly in the consulting room, then we must allow lapses in the other, negotiate our way through, and keep with the work of relationship.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Sotomayor, Empathy, and Perspectival Realism
Monday, July 6, 2009
Should Psychoanalysis be Taught?
In The New Yorker last month (June 8 & 15, 2009), Louis Menand, a professor of English at Harvard, in A Critic At Large, asked the question “Should creative writing be taught?” He quoted The University of Iowa Writers Workshop website which explained that
“…writing cannot be taught but writers can be encouraged.” This, naturally, got me to thinking about psychoanalytic education. Can one teach others how to be an analyst? or do we only encourage gifted clinicians to broaden their skills, by, for example, encouraging them to trust themselves, to include themselves, to look beyond themselves?
Because, among other things, an analytic attitude is both a way of thinking and a way of being in relationship, I have often wondered how instructors convey how to be an analyst. Do the therapists who cross the training door thresholds need only to learn theories and techniques, or do we as instructors need to model a way of being which also conveys not only what we do in the consulting room, but how we are? Having had the pleasure of participating as an instructor in courses, workshops, and seminars with mental health professionals interested in psychoanalytic thought, I am always in a quandary about how much right brain/ implicit learning to balance with how much left brain/didactic and explicit information to convey.
In observing colleagues I have sometimes not understood the answers in their models of instruction. [I have, for example, seen some instructors behave as classical analysts (anonymous, abstinent), saying little, encouraging little, as the candidates or attendees ‘free associate’ to the assigned reading material. Some have utilized bubba meisahs, regaling students with their own experiences. Some tolerate not only no other opinion, but no space is created in which others might speak. On occasion, if more than two instructors teach, I have seen them argue with one another about their ideas, sometimes getting uncomfortably personal, and seemingly oblivious to inviting student participation. None are behaviors that instructors may have explicitly wished to encourage in the consulting room.]
I try to imagine how varying theories might influence modeling how to be. As an instructor, can I encourage and co-create curiosity, enthusiasm, respect, and a space for mutuality, all ways of being in the consulting room? And how does one do this? When I think of my professional life I think of the many changes in analytic attitude which have evolved in my work. And I have great regret for analysands in my early training who I deprived of mutual recognition and relationship; where I took the stance of being the one who knows; and with whom I took pains to hide my love for them, stingy in my abstinence. In recent years, a number of my patients have found love for the first time. I like to imagine I had some small part in this, that is, having found my patients loveable, they reconfigured their convictions about their unlovability, and voila.
But how are we to reconfigure ourselves as instructors so that trainees reconfigure any old ideas about passively taking in what is spouted or printed? How do institutes allow for such alternative understandings in the classroom as to encourage therapists to allow for them in the consulting room? How do we model perspectival realism?
Ironically, here, in the psychoanalytic outpost of west central Florida, there are three or four psychoanalytic training institutions, but only a handful more of analysts. Here we have a few members of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and a few more who are members of the International Psychoanalytic Association, and a bit more who have had various training experiences and also go by the name ‘psychoanalyst.’ These training programs exist, not because of an interest in, nor a demand for, more training from local clinicians, though we all hope to cultivate the interest and demand (Build it and they will come), but because analysts in this area have found it exceedingly difficult to hold the tension between differences: differences of personalities, styles, power, and ideologies. I often wonder what implicit communication this sad fact models for potential trainees.
It is very hard to think independently in an institute and stay connected. For women in our local analytic community this may be even more difficult. One female colleague poignantly asked at a national workshop how one can hold on to one self while affiliating with an institute. Some find the only alternative is to align oneself with a powerful man of the hour. Another female colleague asked if, in Tampa with its tendency to empower machismo in male analytic leadership, perhaps the local analytic community cannot bear to brook ‘uppity’ women. She remained herself and was shunned by some, despite gracefully using her different voice.
In private practice, we strive to co-construct bridges between differences with clients/ patients, and they have some motivation to be in relationship with us. Where groups differ dramatically, it takes more than analytic being to be a skillful engineer.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Fears of Difference: The Diversity of Holocaust Experiences -- a film series
USF's Department of Women's Studies
The Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society
The Tampa Bay Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies
USF's Library's Holocaust and Genocide Studies Center
The Florida Holocaust Museum, St.Petersburg, Florida
~~~Time and Venue: 2PM @Tampa Campus Library,
University of South Florida, 4202 Fowler Ave., Tampa, FL 33620
Film: Korczak
Scholar: Cornelis Boterbloem, Ph.D.
USF, Professor of History
Clinician: John Hartman, Ph.D., Psychologist/Psychoanalyst
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Film: Facing Windows
Scholar: Patrizia La Trecchia, Ph.D.
USF, Assistant Professor & Director of Italian Studies
Clinician: Edward Stein, M.D., Psychiatrist/Psychoanalyst
Sunday, November 8, 2009 ------ *Program Begins at 1 PM*
Film: Paragraph 175
Scholar: Tamara Zwick, Ph.D.
USF, Assistant Professor of History
Clinician: Will Spell, LMHC, Psychotherapist
&
Film: Hitler’s Hidden Victims: Black Survivors of the Holocaust
Scholar: Edward Kissi, Ph.D.
USF, Associate Professor of Africana Studies
Clinician: Kim Vaz, Ph.D., Psychotherapist/
USF, Associate Professor of Women’s Studies
December, 2009
No film – Happy Holidays!!!
Presenter: Leita Kaldi
6:30pm-8:00pm
For More Information Contact: Urszula Szczepinska
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Film: The Reader
Scholars: Margit Grieb, Ph.D.
USF, Assistant Professor of World Languages
Darrell Fasching, Ph.D.
USF, Professor of Religious Studies
Clinician: Elizabeth Reese, MSW, Psychoanalyst
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Film: The Summer of Aviya
Scholar: Rina Donchin
Director, USF’s Hebrew Program
Clinicians: Edward Stein, M.D., Psychiatrist/Psychoanalyst
Harris Feinstein, M.D. Psychiatrist
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Film: A Secret
Scholar: John Hartman, Ph.D., Psychologist/Psychoanalyst
Clinician: Lycia Alexander-Guerra, M.D. Psychiatrist/Psychoanalyst
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Films: And the Violins Stopped Playing and Purple Triangles
Presenter: Yale Strom, Artist-in-Residence, San Diego State University -- PENDING FUNDING
Clinician: Michael Poff, MSW, Psychoanalyst
Sunday, May 9, 2010
Film: The Nasty Girl
Scholar: Kim Vaz, Ph.D., USF Associate Professor of Women’s Studies
Clinician: Michael Poff, MSW, Psychoanalyst
Click here for film descriptions.
USF Libraries Holocaust & Genocide Studies
The Center’s mission is to cross international boundaries to engage information specialists, scholars, educators, students, analysts, and activists in a centralized, interdisciplinary, collaborative, and synergistic approach to genocide education, mental health and public policy, and prevention.
The Florida Holocaust Museum
The mission is to honor the memory of millions of innocent men, women, and children who suffered or died in the Holocaust. The museum is dedicated to teaching members of all races and cultures to recognize the inherent worth and dignity of human life in order to prevent future genocides.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Psychotherapy in the Entertainment Spotlight
Posted by Heather Pyle, PsyD
Considering the recent success of HBO's acclaimed series, "In Treatment", it would seem that a refreshingly different spotlight is being cast on the field by the entertainment industry. While not a new release, "What Do You Make of These Sounds", Dar Williams' (known for her music on the New England Folk scene) poignant song about psychotherapy has been receiving renewed interest on psychology internet listservs recently. It's good to see the benefits of therapy are in the public eye despite the current healthcare climate and seductive appeal of the ever-present "quick fixes."
If you haven't yet heard this song, the video is available on YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR5_DvbMLJk . It is well worth a listen.
Lyrics (Courtesy of Lyricsmode.com)
I don't go to therapy to find out if I'm a freak.
I go and I find the one and only answer every week.
And it's just me and all the memories to follow.
Down any course that fits within a fifty minute hour
And we fathom all the mysteries, explicit and inherent
When I hit a rut, she says to try the other parent
And she's so kind, I think she wants to tell me something,
But she knows that it's much better if I get it for myself...
And she says
Oooooooh,aaaaaaah, what do you hear in these sounds?
And... oooooooh,aaaaaaah
What do you hear in these sounds? ? ? ? ?
I say I hear a doubt, with the voice of true believing
And the promises to stay, and the footsteps that are leaving
And she says "oh", I say "what? "...she says "exactly",
I say"what, you think I'm angry
Does that mean you think I'm angry?"
She says "look, you come here every week
With jigsaw pieces of your past
Its all on little soundbytes and voices out of photographs
And that's all yours, that's the guide, that's the map
So tell me, where does the arrow point to?
Who invented roses? "
And.......Oooooooh,aaaaaaah
What do you hear in these sounds?
And...oooooooh,aaaaaaah
What do you hear in these sounds? ? ? ? ?
And when I talk about therapy, I know what people think
That it only makes you selfish and in love with your shrink
But oh how I loved everybody else
When I finally got to talk so much about myself............
And I wake up and I ask myself what state I'm in
And I say well I'm lucky, cause I am like east berlin
I had this wall and what I knew of the free world
Was that I could see their fireworks
And I could hear their radio
And I thought that if we met, I would only start confessing
And they'd know that I was scared
They'd would know that I was guessing
But the wall came down and there they stood before me
With their stumbling and their mumbling
And their calling out just like me...and...
Oooooooh,aaaaaaah, the stories that nobody hears...and...
Oooooooh,aaaaaaah, and I collect these sounds in my ears...and
Oooooooh,aaaaaaah, that's what I hear in these sounds...and...
Oooooooh,aaaaaaah, that's what I hear in these......
That's what I hear in these souu ouuun nnnds!
Words and Music by Dar Williams
Thursday, May 28, 2009
"The Temple Guardian"
Because the subject matter is about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (and the Tampa Bay Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies, T-BIPS, supports a network of low fee - pro bono therapy for family members of Afghani and Iraqi soldiers and veterans, called The Veterans Family Initiative, VFI) and because it was written by Charles Larsen, a long time colleague of mine at the Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society, and perhaps because it is set in FLorida, a mutual colleague of mine and the author's sent me a description of the novel "The Temple Guardian." Here is our mutual colleague's description:
The Temple Guardian, by Charles Larsen, is an action packed literary novel available from Amazon.com.
“The Temple Guardian,” delves into the consequences, including ripple effects, of warring upon several people. A Haiku precedes each chapter.
The male protagonist is Michael Stark, age 55, a Vietnam combat veteran who has struggled with his demons for many years. His female opposite is Norma Jennings, a nurse who has been impacted upon by her former husband’s service in the First Gulf War.
Almost all of the contemporary action takes place in South Florida, and in a small fictional town near Steinhatchee. Explosive action and sensual explorations are juxtaposed with philosophical, tranquil, and lyrical experiences. Dreams, flashbacks, and reflections provide insight into the way events, past and present, weave themselves into our lives.
It is a novel about the process of emerging from the crippling effects of post traumatic stress, a struggle that most of us engage in while attempting to build our lives into meaningful wholes. There are apparent movements toward acceptance and resolution, then setbacks in the current world, which threaten to reverse any apparent progress. There are near Platonic dialogues between Michael Stark and a Catholic priest (also a Vietnam veteran), as well as between Michael and a Vietnamese man who once held him captive under horrific conditions. There is vivid action in the flashbacks and memories of both Michael and Norma Jennings. Contemporary action takes place in North Florida, the Everglades (where Michael’s 17 year old daughter is assaulted by drug dealing Vietnam veterans), and in the Florida Keys.
“The Temple Guardian” is a tale of struggle, of overcoming, and also failing. In the end there is a resolution of sorts to the angst felt by Michael and Norma, namely a sense of hope.
Friday, April 17, 2009
Wide Sargasso Sea: The Ghosts Between Them
Wide Sargasso Sea was written by Jean Rhys (a pen name) and published in 1966 winning wide acclaim. It is a story of the life of Antoinette Cosway, a Creole, who came of age six years after the slaves were emancipated in the West Indies. It was a time when the old planter class was being displaced with new English settlers. Antoinette and her family lived in the shadow of the splendor they once enjoyed. Rhys’s novel is an effort to tell a story about the mad wife of Edward Rochester in Charlotte Bronte's novel Jane Eyre, but centering it around the issue of race and imperialism in the 19th century.
Dr. Kersuze Simeon-Jones and Michael Poff, MSW facilitated the film discussion. Dr. Kersuze Simeon-Jones is an Assistant Professor of Francophone Literature and Africana Studies at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Michael Poff, LCSW is in private practice and specializes in child, adolescent, adult and family psychoanalytic psychotherapy, and adult psychoanalysis.
Dr. Simeon-Jones focused the discussion on the concept of the “outsider;” specifically the “crazy Creole woman” locked in the attic of her home. She interrogated the idea of sanity and who gets to judge it. In the film, the “crazy Creole woman,” Antoinette is taken to a cold and frigid place where she can not be herself and where she is belittled and observed as an oddity in another culture. The film can be seen as a commentary on the marriage between the Caribbean and Europe in which Europe has a certain image based on stereotypes and prejudices about the Caribbean people from the beginning of the relation, but it was never based on reality. Assuming much about Antoinette, but not really knowing who Antoinette is, Edward grows angry when he begins to learn about her family and past life from those who are bent on undermining her happiness. Unable to reconcile his image of a wife, from the real wife, he becomes cruel to her.
According to Dr. Simeon-Jones, Antoinette is “mad” not because of heredity, but beca
use of a series of unfortunate circumstances that conspire against her. Her mother was plagued with problems and tragedies, poverty, loss of her son, and social ostracism; she was not available to offer a stable, affirming environment to Antoinette. She ends up locked in a room, drugged by her black warden and made to have sex with him. Antoinette witnesses this scene and it is the last she sees of her mother. Antoinette ends up in a loveless marriage in which she is poised to repeat her mother’s life. From the beginning of their relationships, her husband Edward never really loved her but was more interested in impressing his father and gaining access to her wealth.
Michael Poff discussed the internal world of the characters as a manifestation of the unconscious of the author, Jean Rhys, who lived in isolation in England and suffered from alcohol addiction and probably depression. The novel is an expression of her imagination.
If she were a patient in therapy, the analyst would ask for her associations, thoughts and feelings. Poff relied on his own emotional reaction to the entire story as additional information about what the inner life of the author might be. Her subjectivity could be characterized as pain-filled, helpless, and a regression far away from loving relationships toward a more paranoid stance. The characters in the film occupy a paranoid position because they are lacking in empathy and trust; as a result they have a need to control others and can not see any good in the other person.
This paranoid position begins with an idealization, a stance in which the beloved is seen as having no faults. Antoinette and Edward hope to find in their union, a perfect relationship. But as their togetherness brings them in touch with their own humanity, each suffers narcissistic injuries in which shame comes to predominant. Antoinette’s self-esteem is strained because she is considered a “white cockroach.” Edward’s self-esteem is challenged because he does not feel validated by his own family. His rigid thinking about femininity and masculinity, only serves to wound and enrage him when he begins to learn that Antoinette not only might not be a virgin, but that she may also be “mad.”
The couple’s problems explode because Edward begins to devalue Antoinette’s attributes that endeared her to the audience: her joy, playfulness, strong sexuality, and her eccentricities. Edward is so repulsed by these traits not only in Antoinette, but in him too – (that he might be a little crazy or a little boyish) that to acknowledge them as part of him is unthinkable and therefore he projects his unwanted traits onto Antoinette turning her into an object of revulsion.
The abundance of lower-level defenses: paranoia, splitting, magical thinking, and denial, spells doom for their marriage because both are regressed to the pre-Oedipal developmental level. In the pre-Oedipal mindset, people feel an abundance of shame. They fear people are going to ridicule and laugh at them. Edward is caught up in maintaining his image and is enraged by learning that others know things he does not. The abundance of themes of capturing, containing, cruelty, control and not letting something out points to the problem of anality;--what’s inside can’t come out because it is too dangerous. It must be controlled. Antoinette digs in the dirt looking for gold, not finding it, in the end, her shame and rage ignite and she kills both Edward and herself.
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Dr. Kersuze Simeon-Jones is an Assistant Professor of Francophone Literature and Africana Studies at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Dr. Simeon-Jones received a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies, focusing on the Comparative History and Literature of the Black Diaspora, from the University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida. She received an M.A. in French Literature and Francophone Literature: Africa and the Caribbean, from Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey; she received a B.A. in French Literature and Spanish Language & Literature, also from Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Dr. Simeon-Jones’s primary teaching and research interests include Francophone Studies: history, literature and culture, Comparative Literature of the Black Diaspora, Black Internationalism: Literary and Socio-Political Movements,Women History within the Diaspora. Her forth coming book is 19th-20th Century Literary and Socio-Political Writings of the Black Diaspora (Lexington Books; forthcoming).
Michael Poff, LCSW is in private practice, Tampa and specializes in child, adolescent, adult and family psychoanalytic psychotherapy, adult psychoanalysis. He completed training as a psychoanalyst at the Carter-Jenkins Center, Tampa in 2005. He is a supervisor to clinicians in psychoanalytic psychotherapy practice and is a psychoanalytic staff member, The Carter-Jenkins Center, Tampa. He is currently co-authoring a chapter on health and relationships, in nursing textbook: Comprehensive Women’s Health Care, edtied by Alexander, Hood, and Mallard-Johnson. For over twenty years, Mike Poff has been coordinating local annual psychoanalytic society film series and has been a field instructor, supervisor for MSW students in training, USF School of Social Work, a guest lecturer USF Department of Psychiatry and the USF School of Nursing, an outpatient psychotherapist with the Menninger/St. Joseph’s Psychiatry Center, Tampa and a Child and family psychotherapist, The Children’s Home, Tampa.
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Friday, April 10, 2009
Women in Crisis Film Series -- The Piano Teacher with Dr. Margit Grieb and Dr. Kim Vaz
The University of South Florida’s, Margit Grieb, Ph.D., an Assistant Professor of German in the Department of World Languages facilitated the most recent film discussion in the Women and Crisis series along with Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society board member, Kim Vaz, Ph.D. Dr. Grieb noted that the film was aptly set in Vienna, Austria given its’ focus on sexuality and violence, particularly, sadomasochism.
Dr. Grieb noted that Austria gave rise to early thinking about sexual perversion with work of the Austro-German sexologist, Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing and later in the work Sigmund Freud. For Dr. Grieb, the main character’s (Erika Kohut) sexual practices are an outward expression of her state of mind with respect to her overbearing mother and her young lover.
According to Dr. Grieb, Jelinek’s work critiques Vienna’s “high-culture’s” male-dominated, capitalist social structure that author says exploits and subjugates women. This is the world of this repressed, oppressed, and oppressive piano teacher. Erika Kohut found the perfect world for her icy exterior in the tyrannical world of the piano conservatory. Just as Erika’s mother commands, demands and controls her; Erika reigns over her students like a despot.
Dr. Grieb oriented the audience to pay attention to the way the director created distance between the audience and Erika by not using close-up or ‘point of view shots.’ She asked the audience to decide if the use of distance helped viewers cope with the disturbing scenes. Did the director’s technique make us less emotionally invested in Erika and more able to view her with a critical eye?
After viewing the film, audience members had the following questions: "What causes people to victimize others?" "What makes them turn out that way?" "Was Erika sadistic to her students to 'save' them from her fate?" "How is it that a person can go to work and seem ‘normal,’ yet have so many problems at home and emotionally?" "Can a woman really be considered a “phallic” mother in a patriarchal society?"
Kim Vaz discussed the film from the perspective of a clinician and from the viewpoint that it was a story about malignant trauma. Drawing on the work of Stefanie Teitelbaum, Sue Grand, Harriet Kimble Wyre and Rayan LaMothe, Dr. Vaz explained that malignant trauma occurs at the hands of people and is unlike traumas derived from natural disasters. Malignant trauma is so difficult to recover from and to treat because the betrayal involved leaves surviors with an inability to symbolize or put into words their experience of victimization. What is so shocking to their psyches is that their abuse happens in the context of their abuser’s unwillingness to see their humanity.
Erika’s pervasive feelings and acts of envy, rage, sadomasochism, aggression, and despair arose from her chronic abuse inflicted by her mother’s insistence that she become a successful pianist and her disappointment in Erika's job as a piano teacher. Erika is in bondage to her mother, who never recognizes her daughter’s separate subjectivity.
Erika’s inability to escape her mother’s control gives rise to many bizzare behaviors. As Rayan LaMothe notes, "families and cultures transform victims of malignant trauma into perpetrators of these very traumas on others." Sue Grand’s idea is that "to escape the catastrophic loneliness" 'victims-turned-perpetrators' like Erika, become the perpetrator using violence and sadism to inscribe their loneliness on their victims." This Erika does expertly. Picture: "Tatto Girl" by Nina Frasier
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Margit Grieb teaches courses on German film, literature, language and culture and directs the USF Film Studies Certificate Program. She has published articles on videogames, German cinema and television, Avant Garde Feminist new media productions, and the films of Wim Wenders. Her book German Film in the Wake of New Media is in publication. Currently, she is working on another book project, an edited anthology of essays dealing with depiction of Native Americans in German films, books, and amusement parks. (Pictured: Dr. Grieb's students at USF. )Sunday, April 5, 2009
OLD SCHOOL ACCENT ON THE NEW: Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society Hosts Robert Michels, MD
In an early morning conversation with Tampa colleagues, Robert Michels, MD described transference as an accent. Like a language learned early in life that will always color future learned languages, transference will color all interpersonal relationships. Current relationships are always influenced by early relationships. While accents enrich experience, hopefully there will be enough learned phonemes for there to be flexibility.
Both in early conversation and in his morning presentation, Michels gave an historical approach to the competition of orthodoxies. He noted how difficult it was last century for analysts to liberate themselves from Freudian ideas and Freud's mythos. He noted, as well, the major shift from attention to (unconcious and repressed) content, managing both the transference and the resistance, to attention to process and the way one chooses not to reveal content; a shift from defense analysis to character analysis.
In the 21st century, with the popularity of the Relational approach and with the recognition of the negative effects (such as narcissistic injury), of austerity, clinicians now think of themselves, not as 'expert,' but as collaborative colleagues with patients. Today, clinicians are less committed to one theory, and, instead, pluralism (in theory) exists. Analysts are less authoritarian, and less able to sit comfortably assured that their theory or technique or shibbolith is the one. Michels advocated having as many tools as possible, and then skillfully using the one applicable to the moment.
Michels is a brilliant mind, facile enough to have his finger on the pulse of changing theory and technique. Ironically (or maybe not), the presentation, as one attendee noted, was an enactment of the difficulty in giving up what was learned early in career (ego psychology) in order to flexibly apply or adapt to the new. Michels thick 'accent' on contempoary theory was noticeable, but the morning was none the less accessible and enjoyable.
Friday, April 3, 2009
Volver: Against Idealization of Mother-Daughter Relationships in Pedro Almodovar's Films
Volver, a film by Pedro Almodovar, starring Penelope Cruz is a tale of a family of women and their intergenerational experience of sexual abuse and the murders of the fathers/perpetrators.
We watched this film as part of the Tampa Bay Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies (T-BIPS), The Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society (TBPS), and the Department of Women’s Studies at the University of South Florida film series, “Women in Crisis: Scholarly and Clinical Perspectives.” Adriana Novoa, Ph.D. USF’s Humanities and Cultural Studies and Horacio Arias, M.D. facilitated the discussion with the audience. 
[Pictured left to right: Adriana Novoa, Ph.D.; Kim Vaz, Ph.D.; Horacio Arias, M.D.; and USF student David Astril.]
Dr. Novoa noted that Volver is just one in a series of Almodavar’s films (Talk to Her, Bad Education, All about My Mother) that continues his focus on the impossibility of the unity between men and women and the romanticizing of all female family and friendship groups that provide unconditional support, renewal, and protection.
She interprets Volver against the backdrop of a contemporary Spanish society in transition between village and city life. In the region of the country in which the film is set, the idealization of the mother as matriarch is particularly strong. The mythology and fantasy is that the mother allows for the adult to have a woman to return home to who will offer a perfect asylum.
In the film, Irene the mother of Raimunda and Sole pretends to the girls that her marriage to their father was a perfect love in which he died in her arms. The truth turns out to be that he was a womanizer and a child molester, a truth Irene ignored for years, casting her daughter Raimunda out of the family to keep from having to face it.
The movie is replete with splits: male vs. females; men are dangerous women are safe; the d
ead vs. the living; ghosts vs. real people. Irene exists in a dissociated state. She is both dead and alive, a ghost and a real person. She arrives to her daughters lives in the city in the trunk of a car; she has a stench from her constant flatulence and she sleeps under the bed.
It is only in her dissociated state that Irene can “not notice” that her daughter is being abused. The daughters are themselves confused. They ask and wonder if their mother is alive and does the forgiveness the mother says she has returned to give coming from the mother who is alive, or the one who is dead.
Novoa sees
Alamodavar’s views as retrograde and sexist. He is playing into the values of an authoritarian state that says that the mother is responsible for holding the nation together. He provides a romanticized vision of the return of the mother to a terrorized and torn society, ripped apart by the unchecked destructiveness of the father who rapes, violates and disunites the family/nation. Once the man is dead, reconciliation can occur and women can help heal the fractures.
This essentializing of the female characters minimizes the negative qualities that are a natural part of mother/daughter relationships that are steeped in a history of betrayal. Irene feels rage against her husband and a lack of remorse for murdering those who have betrayed her. Irene burns the people who cause her pain (her husband and his lover) and or casts them out of her house (e.g. her daughter).
Dr. Novoa n
oted that in Almodavar’s hands, Irene is a terrible mother imposing her will on her children dominating them and celebrating their failures at love because it makes room for her. For Irene, single women need not be alone she tells Sole, implying that her mother can fill the romantic void. Mother and daughter can share the same bed. Irene demoralizes her daughters through critiques of their bodies (in a way that leads the audience to wonders if Irene blames Raimunda for her own molestation).
Dr. Arias pointed out that the film uses comedy to ease our anxiety about sexual abuse. But but joking about our problems does not eliminate the need to actually process them – to learn new ways of handling our ambivalent feelings for the people we love. In his analysis, Dr. Arias said that the Irene (Raimunda’s mother) was unable to have a loving relationship with her husband and was incapable of emotionally connecting with her daughter. Because Irene did not have the ability to relate, she could not teach her daughter how to resolve the problems in her own intimate relationships with her male partner for whom Raimunda had both loving and hateful feelings.
Raimunda was unable to resolve her contradictory feelings about the hate that she felt for her father because of his abuse and the rage she felt toward her mother for “not noticing” the abuse. Her rage against her mother was coupled with the longing and need for her her. Because Raimunda was unable to handle her complex feelings generated by her husband’s masturbation and sexual inappropriateness with her daughter and to assertively protect her daughter – i.e., repeating the failure of her mother, the abusive man ends up dead. The goal of therapy for people with this type of ambivalence would aim to help them integrate these disparate emotions and tolerate and make sense of the contradictory affect in order to have relationships that neither devalue or idealize the other person.
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