RBG – The Movie Documents a Psychoanalytic Treatment of the Culture

The Documentary Movie RBG – a title made possible by the creation of a meme title, The Notorious RBG, based, in turn, on the rapper TheNotorious B*I*G’s moniker – chronicles Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s personal and professional life – including her lived experience of being suppressed as a woman, then fighting for women’s rights – first arguing for them before the supreme court, then working to support them as a justice on the Supreme Court bench.  The notorious link indicates the ways in which she has achieved rock start status in her 80s - an unusual thing to do for a woman.  And the movie complements her moniker, presenting her as a hip icon.  I am intending to include this movie as required viewing for my History of Psychology course in the fall.

There are two reasons for including the movie in the course.  No, RBG is not a psychologist, but the course is structured – after spending most of the semester talking about a bunch of dead white guys and how they formed the science – to describe the ways that marginalized groups – ethnic minorities and women – worked their way both into the profession but also into the culture.  For instance, Mamie and Kenneth Clark, whose work with white and brown dolls was pivotal in convincing the Supreme Court to overturn the Plessy vs. Ferguson decision of separate but equal in the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education case also marked the first time that the Supreme Court used any social science data to influence a decision – an important landmark in the development of psychology as a science, but also in the ways that we think about how we as a culture use data to inform our thinking about important issues.

Describing how racial prejudice created oppression has not been hard.  I have used a Ta Nehesi Coates lecture that he gave on our campus and an interview that Bill Moyers did with James Cone to help the students increase their awareness of this.  I think that they also have a good intuitive grasp of racial discrimination.  But helping them appreciate the oppression of women has been more difficult.  Because of the work that RBG and others have done, the oppression of women is significantly less apparent currently.  Recently it has become apparent that racism and sexism are not dead.  As RBG describes in a dissenting opinion when the Supreme Court took the teeth out of the voting rights act, the Supreme Court decided to throw away an umbrella in a rain storm because they were dry.  But in the classes that I am teaching, in the University where I am teaching, indeed, in most Universities today, women outnumber men – and I have to explain that colleges before the 1850s did not admit any women.  In the film, Harvard Law School, after two hundred years, finally has a class where the women equal the men (when RBG was there, she was one of nine women in a class of over 500).  So it looks, at least on the surface, like women are (and it is hard to imagine that they haven’t always been) being treated equally.  The students don’t get it that there was a lot of work that was done to create this equal footing world that they perceive and that sexism and racism still exist behind the scenes.   For some of them – it is hard to comprehend that it ever existed, much less that it still does - and this film includes the ways that sexism was written into law.

Thurgood Marshall

The second reason to include the movie, then, is more subtle.  Even when the effects of discrimination were more blatant than they are today, they were insidious and, to many, invisible.  RBG defined her task of arguing cases before the Supreme Court as educating the men who were sitting on that court about the existence of sexist treatment of women.  They believed, I imagine, that women existed in an exalted position – the pedestal that RBG disabused them of.  She had to imagine the justices, in one extremely funny but also poignant line, as kindergartners who needed to be taught, step by step, how the unequal treatment of women was a problem for everyone, and the movie walks us through this process, using, among other things, the six cases (five of which she won) that she argued before the Supreme Court.  She is clear that the road map she used to demonstrate sexism was one based on the success of ThurgoodMarshall and others who fought for civil rights for African Americans by using the fourteenth amendment to bring equal treatment under the law to all.

Gloria Steinem

While RBG characterizes this as teaching in the kindergarten metaphor, and it absolutely is, I think it is psychoanalytically based teaching, where a group of very bright men – arguably among the brightest, deepest thinkers in the United States, are unconscious of the ways in which women are suppressed and that they – as the entity that is responsible in our government for protecting the individual rights of citizens – are colluding in that suppression.  Educating them, then, is a psychoanalytic task.  It is a task of interpreting the unconscious wishes and helping these men become aware of what is denied and avoided.  It is the path that led from Mahatma Gandhi, through Martin Luther King, Jr. to the Women’s movement led by Gloria Steinem and others.  This camera ready path of nonviolent resistance, including marches and speeches was, this documentary maintains, not the path that Ginsberg trod, but one that was in parallel.  While Gloria Steinem and her group was working on convincing the public of the rights of women, it was up to RBG and other legal minds to change the opinions of the nine men in the Supreme Court.

 The court system in any society is, essentially, the conscience of the culture writ large.  And, as is the case with the individual, that conscience has tremendous blind spots.  We are able to forgive, or overlook, or be unaware of the impact of many of our actions – indeed, we are frequently blind to what is driving many of our behaviors.  We can engage individually, and, I believe, collectively in such defensive maneuvers as reaction formation, where we turn our fascination with a subject into the opposite – a rejection or suppression of it – as when we spend so much time objecting to sexual content of material that it becomes clearer and clearer that our objections allow us to spend more time with content we appear to object to.  Gandhi helped the English realize that they were acting in ways that were inconsistent with their morals by having sending wave after wave of unarmed people to be beaten by British soldiers – and filming the violence to be sent back to England as newsreels.

The task of the Ginsbergs of this world is more subtle.  They have to work within the cloistered world of the nine Supreme Court Justices and help them recognize what is going on the world.  These individuals have worked very hard to get where they are – and they generally come from tremendous privilege as well.  Though their task is to help those who are not fairly treated, their path to the chairs that allow them to engage in this process have been paved by individuals who have no privilege – and they have profited from that lack of privilege for others (RBG was asked by the Dean to justify having taken a position at the school from a man).  Those who have benefited most are most likely to be blind to what has put them in this place of privilege.  So it is the task of those who are not privileged – those who are marginalized – to engage with the privileged to help them see that.

RBG herself, somewhat ironically, is an example of the out-of-touchness of the justices.  She works so hard that she has no time for television.  She has never seen herself portrayed on SNL, for instance, until the filmmakers show her a sample of it.  I remember in my research listening to an old tape of a prominent and influential psychoanalyst working with a young mother who wants to get her child a Big Wheel.  The analyst has no idea what she is talking about, and she has to explain what it is.  Our culture can seem insidious and pervasive, but it, ironically, does not necessarily reach those, like RBG herself, who actually determine huge chunks of it.

Ginsberg was asked what prepared her to teach the justices about the ways in which women were disempowered.  She responded that she learned two things from her mother – to be a lady and to be independent.  By the first, she meant that she was not to be distracted by what she called “useless” emotions like anger.  It was apparent that she worked throughout to remain cool and focused on the task at hand – to keep her responses focused on moving the ball forward.  Just as with a psychoanalyst, this is a good trait.  Our patients frequently want to throw us off the scent, including by riling us up.  At our best, we can use the emotions that are stirred not to get derailed but to follow them to their source, to better understand the motives of our patients.  Similarly, RBG, when she was arguing her cases before the court, was baited by the justices - including their using sexist thinking - as they argued against her positions.  She reminds us that to have stooped to responding out of anger would not have served her case.  Later, as a supreme court justice, we can hear in her batting aside the irrelevant arguments of attorneys that would have sidelined the argument, but she does so with restraint - with what the Jesuits would call indifference and what the analysts call neutrality.  

The second piece of advice from Ginsberg's mother was also a gendered piece of information – that if prince charming comes along, that is fine, but you should be prepared to engage in your work on your own.  Now the irony is that prince charming did come along – RBG met and married a man who was incredibly supportive of her and the work she was doing – a man who was as interested in her mind as he was in how cute she was – rare for his time – though the reluctant stepdaughter assures me that it is still true that men who are interested in women’s minds continue to be rare.  Rare as it may be, we need empowered and privileged people who are sensitive to what other people mean and feel in order to make progress.  This is as true in psychoanalysis as it is in politics and, unfortunately, in both fields we almost certainly fail more often than we succeed.  Hearing the Other is a difficult task.

Justice Scalia, one of the conservative justices with whom RBG was able to cultivate an alliance, takes the position that the task of the court is to interpret the constitution in terms of how the framers of that constitution intended the language.  The problem with that position, as RBG pointed out, is that the framers of the constitution did not look, think or feel as we do (until they start rapping – as in Hamilton).   In so far as our consciences are inherited from the early prohibitions and teachings of authority figures in our lives, those consciences are poorly equipped to deal with the complex issues that we confront as adolescents and then even more so as adults.  While the teachings may be a very useful guide, they are rarely useful when applied in a rote or unreflective manner, despite what the fundamentalists, whether on the bench or in the pulpit, tell us.

One of the nice moments in the movie was when Ruth Bader Ginsberg is invited to speak at the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), a college that became co-educational as the direct result of one of the rulings for which she wrote the majority opinion.  Her position when she wrote that opinion, which many objected to, was that we should wait and see what the outcome of that opinion would be.  She was following here in the empirical footsteps of the Justices who admitted the data from Mimi and Kenneth Clark – she, too, is an empiricist.  It was nice to see a female graduate of VMI beaming as Ginsberg addressed the assembly.

My students frequently don’t get how pervasive sexism has been and is.  One of the examples of this is when they write papers on a psychologist, Mary Ainsworth, who invented a test of attachment, the strange situation, that is still used today.   They invariably cite an interview with her where she denies that she ever ran into sexism except in one instance when she was not paid what her male colleagues were.  They then go onto relate numerous instances of sexism from her history.  They almost never seem curious about this.  They almost never say, “How is it that this very smart woman who accomplished a great deal didn’t realize how much more she might have accomplished if she hadn’t been the focus of gender based discriminatory practices.”  They don’t get the irony that they are colluding with her and many other women – and even more men – to see the sexist world that she grew up in as “just the way things are”.  They don’t seem to get it that, despite this still being woven into the fabric of our culture, it will require vigilance on the part of women and men to avoid overlooking that.  Fortunately RBG did not do that, and, fortunately this film has been made which I hope will help open my students eyes to something that is really hard to see – in part because it, like water for fish, is all around us.

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