Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Visits To Kill a Mockingbird's Nest

When I delivered my eulogy for my father, it was a mixed review of him.  I noted that he was a free thinker and a contrarian, and while these traits made him a valued friend, it could be confusing from the perspective of being his son.  My sister's was much less ambivalent; she sung his praises, especially around the moral code that he lived by and held us to.  I agreed with what she said, and she with me, but they were very different views.  When a parishioner who knew Dad but not me came up to me afterwards and commented on what I had said by noting that I was raised by a regular Atticus Finch, I wondered who she had been listening to.  Atticus Finch is one of my heroes.  His was to have been the name of the first cat I could have (my Dad was allergic to cats and we didn't have them growing up), but he was a she, and therefore we called her Scout.  When a male cat finally sauntered along, he has became affectionately known as Atty - the whole proud name is just too much for one small critter to bear.

Atticus Finch has stood for all that is good in parenting and all that is good about southern gentlemen.  He stood up to defend Tom Robinson, a black man in the thirties who was accused of raping a woman who had actually been trying to seduce him.  It didn't matter that the all-white jury convicted Tom, Atticus was revered by the African American Community in his small Alabama town, and by a nation struggling with the Civil Rights movement when the book was published in 1960.  In the story, when the white trash father who accused Tom Robinson of rape is humiliated by Atticus in court, he seeks his revenge by trying to hurt Atticus' children - Jem and Scout (Jean Louise).  Boo Radley, the oddball next door neighbor comes to the rescue and kills the man, and the law (and Atticus) agree that it is best to leave him out of the story, to say the man died falling onto his own knife, because Boo could not handle the glare of publicity that would accompany a trial.

Go Set a Watchman is, as best I can surmise, the first rough draft of what would later become To Kill a Mockingbird.  It has been released this year as a book, though it was written better than 50 years ago, and it has, apparently been left untouched.  It could have used a good edit.  But something vital might have been lost.  This first approach to the story, instead of being told through the eyes of the six year old Scout (as was the case in the final - To Kill a Mockingbird - version) is told in the third person and is primarily about the grown up Scout, now going by the more proper name of Jean Louise.  She is coming home from New York at the age of 26 to find that her hero, Atticus, has feet of clay.  He holds beliefs that she finds deplorable, he consorts with despicable men, and she doesn't know how to reconcile all of this with the man that she thought him to be.

Well this is, even more clearly than To Kill a Mockingbird, a memoir thinly disguised as fiction.  And the dialogue, especially at the end, which is supposed to be poison tongued, comes out a bit preachy - and therefore misses some of the bite that I think it was intended to have.  I don't know that Harper Lee (which is a pen name, Harper is Nelle Lee's middle name - her given name is her grandmother's name spelled backwards) or Jean Louise is able to really lay into Atticus.  I know that I couldn't.  But she does her best.

Most of the reviews that I have read, including one from the New York Times, bemoans the fall of Atticus as a moral beacon.  I get people's attachment to Atticus.  Not only were cats named after him, but I modeled my own parenting on his - one tangible piece of that is that Atticus read to Scout, running his finger under what he was reading.  This led her to become a precoscious reader. I was disappointed when this did not lead to the same result with the reluctant sone.  But hat I think is Atticus' critical test in Go Set a Watchman - and one which he passes with flying colors - is not his position vis a vis race relations in the south, which he is savaged for, but the test with Jean Louise.  Jean Louise takes the position that Atticus is acting immorally because she learned her ethics from him and he is not acting in accordance to them.  Atticus' brilliant response, supported by his eccentric, but equally beacon like brother, is that Jean Louise's disagreement is proof that she has become her own person - that she has built her own moral code, and that this is worth celebrating.  Indeed, she should move home, not to care for her old man in his arthritic demise, but to be a good and worthy engager in the battle to solve the problem of civil rights in the south.

First, from a psychoanalytic perspective, Harper Lee has a much more advanced view of morality than Freud did.  Freud's model (which I have discussed in more detail here in response to the current dilemmas psychologists are facing as we confront whether we sold our ethical principles to the Department of Defense) mirrors Jean Louise's model and is based on an infantile internalization of the other's (usually a parental figure's) moral system through a process known as identification.  While I believe (as does Jean Louise and millions of readers who have incorporated their version of Atticus into their own moral code) that internalization is a powerful mechanism, that is not the end of the story.  We are not simply at the mercy of an internalized system, we also organize it, shape it, and build it.  The superego, if we want to call it that, is not a static entity - it is a fluid and dynamic one - otherwise why would we write and read books like To Kill a Mockingbird.  These books are intended, in part, to provide materials to help flesh out the structure that is erected over the internalized foundation.

When Harper Lee published To Kill A Mockingbird, our cultural foundation was in disarray.  It sat in much different soil on its southern exposure, and the cracks there may have been wider, but the issues of what to do with our ex-slaves, who counted in our constitution as only 3/5s of a person and who were allowed, when that document was written, to be owned by other human beings, had tendrils that reached far to the north.  For an interesting look at Racism in the north during the thirties, read Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge - or follow the links to my post about the former.  The white majority's conceptions of what an African American was were radically different then than they are - or might be today.  And books like To Kill a Mockingbird, as well as manifold experiences, have helped us develop different cultural and personal palettes from which to think about race.  We, like Jean Louise, can have radically different views about race than our parents did.

Is Atticus' behavior deplorable?  Atticus' brother tries to help Jean Louise wrestle with this question in part by having her look up the definition of bigot, which he accuses her of being while asserting that Atticus is not one.  She reports a bigot is "Noun.  One obstinately or intolerably devoted to his own church, party, belief, or opinion."  He accuses Jean Louise of running from the racism around her that she finds deplorable instead of, like her father, engaging with it and trying to understand it.  I think this is a deeply, and powerfully psychodynamic observation.  It is much more difficult to look at the ugliness in the world than it is to run from it - to take the moral high ground and say that I know that this is wrong.  The early version of Atticus, the one as an upright man who only did the right thing, was the version that a young girl needed to "set a watchman"; to form the basis, the foundation, for the conscience she would develop.  This appeared to be what Atticus' brother calls a collective conscience - Jean Louise believes she has internalized it whole - but it is not and it cannot be.  We each have our own conscience.  One that is tawdry and filled with imperfections as well as grand beacons.  And it is up to each of us to figure out how to let that conscience guide us, direct us, and to use it to engage with others - as Atticus and his brother do.

Our collective conscience - the one that doesn't exist and that is affected by things like books, was not ready for the book "Go Set a Watchman".  We needed the simple clarity of right and wrong that Atticus Finch, seen through the eyes of a six year old, could provide.  We needed to learn that we could act on principle and that we could change the world.  What Atticus and his brother had to tell us as adults is that the change that we would impose is a violent one.  It gets at the very identity of the person that we want to change.  And we don't give up our identity without a fight.  So if we are to truly change - to do the really tough work of transforming ourselves from becoming bigots, we need to see each other, and hear each other, and engage with those ugly and dark sides of ourselves and others that we would prefer to keep hidden.

This is a much more complicated and darker message than the bright one from To Kill a Mockingbird.  It is offered, I think, to an audience that Harper assumed was more mature.  One who could see the complexities of being a southern man in the middle of the twentieth century - and, by the way, of being a contemporary American.  She may have misjudged us.  We may, like the woman who heard my eulogy and substituted my sister's for it, have wanted our heroes to be simple - something that we need in at a certain stage of development - we may not be ready for the complex heroes that we also need to not just right a wrong but wrestle with the devil and in so doing to see The Lord. To recognize that God and the Devil may not be separate entities, but co-inhabitants of our soul.

OK, before I finish preaching, three notes:

One - Harper Lee followed the advice of her imaginary uncle, left New York and moved back to Alabama.  She chose to live among her people, flawed thought they may be, and, I presume, to engage with them - unlike her cousin Dill (Who was, in real life Truman Capote), who fled to other climes.

Two: Torture is a part of the human experience.  It is morally reprehensible and wrong.  It is also something that Psychology, which has chosen human experience as its scientific province - should know as much as can be known about it.  And, when we know it to be evil, we should work to prevent it being used - and look to other means to achieve the ends that torture would, theoretically, achieve.  But we should also continue to know and study the human impulse to torture and to study the impact of torture - not by inflicting it, but studying its effects because they will emerge organically.

Three: Look no further than police killings of Black Americans to see that the complications of these issues still live within us - in the north, in the south, as whites and as blacks.  What does race mean to us?  Answering that question requires giving up our bigotry - which is threatening because it is part and parcel of our identity.  Fortunately our identity can evolve and can actually thrive in the wake of an upheaval that we feared would be lethal.

OK, sermon over, as is Harper Lee's.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.   For a subject based index, link here.

For other posts looking at Race in America see: James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree, and applied to a Rock Musical, Dorothy Holmes presents to the 2016 Psychoanalytic Convention, 2017 Convention Aktar, Powell and Trump, hearing Ta-Nehisi Coates talk, Black Lives Matter,  John Lewis' March, Get Out, Green Book and Blackkklansman, Americanah, The Help, Selma, August Wilson's Fences, Hamilton! on screen, Da 5 Bloods, The Black Panther, and Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me.

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Lily King's Euphoria - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst finds Anthropology Thrilling

At the end of her career, Margaret Mead was the chief curator of the Natural History Museum in New York.  In that role, she used to be a regular visitor at the Menninger Clinic (she came to give talks - not as a patient).  It was long before I worked there, but people still talked about her visits.  It was said that she stated that she liked Freud because his theory of sexuality, one that is based in a belief in our essentially bisexual nature, was consistent with her experience of her own sexuality.  After reading Lily King's novel Euphoria, a highly fictionalized account of Mead's groundbreaking work in Papua New Guinea in the 1930's, it is likely that Dr. Mead was also referring to Freud as explaining something about the sexuality of the tribal people she had observed.

I find it ironic that Mead found Freud to be a sort of scientific soul mate.  On the surface, their methods couldn't be more different.  Freud waited in his consulting room for a very narrow and rarified slice of highly cultivated Europeans, most of them female, to consult with him about unusual symptoms they were experiencing.  Margaret Mead travelled to the ends of the earth to observe people who had never had an interaction with a Westerner and tried to discover how people in their "natural" state might function.  While Freud talked to people in their native language, Mead was observing them, in part, as objects.  While she worked to learn their language, she never became fluent in it, and lived with people for a limited amount of time, observing them.  At one point Mead is picked up by Europeans in a boat on the river in the jungle.  "In her mind Nell [the name given to the Mead figure] was writing:
- ornamentation of neck, wrists, fingers
- paint on face only
- emphasis on lips (dark red) and eyes (black)
- hips emphasized by cinching of waist
- conversation competitive
- the valued thing is the man, not having one, necessarily, but the ability to attract one.
She couldn't stop herself."

And this anthropological mindset was infectious.  Suddenly things that had looked so familiar around me became strange and unusual.  Our customs became just that: customs.  And there was an oddness to them.  A dance - a ritual became something that felt constructed and artificial instead of natural and organic.  And that can be part of the clinical experience, too.  This thing that feels so natural to this person - and to me when I am empathizing with it - can also feel strange, odd and foreign.  It can be a symptom - something that puts us out of step with ourselves and/or with others, while also feeling as familiar and natural as the smell of our sheets when we lay down to sleep.

The conclusions that Freud and Mead reached were also, again on the surface, very different.  Freud concluded - based on his very narrow sample and his talking with his friends and analyzing his own dreams - that the Oedipal conflict is a universal human experience.  Mead reported that the customs of tribes of people separated by relatively little geographic distance displayed huge differences in the kinds of cultural traditions they had, including sexual traditions.  Further, these tribal people raised their children in ways that were radically different from the ways that we Westerners did, something that rattled our safe worlds where we, like Freud, believed that what we did was simply the way that things are done when done properly by humans.

On the other hand, Mead's methods, as portrayed by King, were remarkably like Freud's - right down to building the house that her subjects came to.  Oh, sure, she travelled to other's homes and Freud made housecalls, but they both believed that individuals could be studied on the home turf of the one studying using that person's methods.  One of the fascinating things about this novel is that the three anthropologists, who end up in a love triangle, and their differing cultures are portrayed just as different tribes and their various cultures are portrayed.  The English anthropologist, who came timidly and had most of his stuff stolen by the tribe he was observing, focused on getting access to various tribal ceremonies so that he could observe, record, and, hopefully, piece them together and "understand" them.  While he sounds a bit wimpy, in fact he is sympathetic to Mead's view, and he is privileged by the author, along with the Mead character, to have his subjectivity portrayed.  Mead's husband, a lunkhead American who takes no notes, goes native, joining the men in hollowing out canoes, and who treats Mead badly, does not get this treatment.  He is an oddity - a person who is unstudiable - someone whose culture seemingly can't be understood - even by the author who created him and perhaps by he himself.

The Mead character is, of course, at the center of the triangle, at the center of the village she and her husband are studying, at the center of the novel, and at the center of the home she and her husband have built and furnished with gingham curtains and hundreds of books that are shipped in by porters along with the Rorschach cards that she shows to the villagers in the hope of getting access to their subjective experience.  She wants to know how these people think, what their experience is like.  She studies them, as Freud did his patients, not as curiosities - see the picture below of Freud's mentor Charcot demonstrating the curiosity of hysteric symptoms to his neurological colleagues - but as people, as human beings with living breathing internal worlds worth connecting with and trying to understand - at least in his best moments - sympathetically.  Of course, both of them were pioneering an entirely new way of engaging with people and they look - objectively to us, much more like the culture that they came from - imposing their views on those around them - than like bold and new observers of the human condition.

Mead's writing, as described by King, sounds like Freud's writing, especially about his early cases.  This is the writing of the novelist.  In Freud's case, the writing of a man using his free associative process as the driver of his material, and this writing does not feel properly scientific and it appeals to a broader audience, one that is broad enough, in Mead's case, to pay for the porters to carry the books and buy the building of the house - something that, we are led to infer from his actions because we don't have access to his internal world - threatens the masculinity of her husband.  This gender role reversal just happens to be mirrored in the tribe they are studying - a tribe where the women make the living and, in their ritual dances, thrust at the men (who are dressed in female clothing) with carved phalluses that they wear.

And this, it seems to me, symbolizes the revolution that Mead is continuing, one that was started by Freud before her (or maybe Shakespeare - the poet for a female ruler), one that privileges subjectivity over action, one that allows for the ascendancy of what has previously been the province of women and that now becomes the stuff of study and the stuff of interest to communicate.  And this revolution, one that will eventuate in shifting role expectations, shifting concepts of what mature sexuality looks like, and shifting notions of what shape gender identities can take, will also anticipate female voters and then elected rulers.  Who knows, maybe even a president of the United States.

And somehow this novel, despite showing the clueless Victorian ways of Mead imposing herself on those she would observe, also demonstrates her humanity - with the natives and with the anglo men and women in her life whom she comes to love.  She touchingly refers to two kinds of love - the heady love of wine and the maternal comfortable love of bread.  She talks about she herself being able to stay in the wine love space with those she loves even as their love for her turns to bread.  And the book evoked in me an odd eroticism - the heady wine like eros of mystery - of what might lurk out there and what it might feel like to engage with that.  Yes, there is an overtly erotic scene - but it was less arousing, frankly, than the broader sense of these three people engaged with each other and with the people around them - from a distance and up close trying to puzzle out what it means to be human - as a Western civilized person and as a primitive tribal member.  And this quest, this engagement with the unknown, feels deeply and powerfully erotic.  The desire to know - about people in general - about this person in particular -  is arousing.

Now I have to admit that when I am in museums like the Natural History Museum or The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Pacific Island Wing is one that I steer clear of.  I am more interested, as was the case when we were recently in the Smithsonian's Natural History Museum, of following the kids to the Dinosaurs, the Whales and the Diamonds.  I find Wesern Art to be more interesting than primitive art.  Lily King's novel has caused me to rethink my prejudice against the Pacific Islands.  That said, I'm not sure that I will find the artifacts that much more interesting.  In fact, in a central plot piece, the collection of an artifact seems to me to point out the inhumanity of creating museums as warehouses of dead artifacts.  I don't know that I will head towards the dioramas in them, but I am interested in the books that Mead and her cohort wrote  (see also the bibliography and sources at the end of Euphoria) - books about the culture - including the sexuality - of the tribes that she encountered.  The description of the interaction between a westerner and these people seems fascinating and lively - perhaps the written word is the best way - or at least a very important way (pictures are good too) to preserve what we have been able to ascertain about those whom we study - what we have learned about the variety of human experience that is possible.

In an endnote, I would like to point out that this novel literally does violence to the life of Margaret Mead.  I'm not sure of the reason for this and don't want to go into it in part because it would be a spoiler, but I do think it curious that the author seems to me to be so uncomfortable with what Mead has unleashed that she wants, in her novel, to show just how threatening it can be.  Is this a cautionary tale?

Also, you may be interested in my own perambulations through a foreign culture, that of Nicaragua - the chronicle of which starts here.

I think it important to acknowledge the central feeling state in this book - Euphoria.  This is the feeling state that, according to Nell, occurs about eight weeks into the study of culture - when there is a sense of "Aha - I think I've got it."  This is inevitably followed by a feeling of hopelessness about understanding anything about a foreign culture.  I think it is interesting that the average number of psychotherapy sessions is about seven.  This corresponds with the time frame the author attributes to Mead.  Maybe we quit treatment when we believe we understand the other in the flush of that first brief Euphoria - and before we realize just what a monumental task it really is to bridge a gulf that promises Euphoria, but only to those with the guts to hang in there through the difficult times when we realize just how foreign the task of connecting can be.

Post script:  Last night, after writing this post, I found that there are complete versions of Mead's book, Coming of Age in Samoa - the link goes to a mediocre pdf, you may be able to find a better one.  Though I only started the text, it feels very modern, very readable and, though I was tired, I was drawn into it.


To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

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The Avengers - Age of Ultron - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Contemplates Heroic Narcissism

Marvel Comic's Avengers series and its spin offs have become a staple of the reluctant family's shared entertainment.  Even the reluctant son, who now hates going to the movies, was immediately on board with the plan to see this film the weekend that it opened.  We all agreed as we left the theater that it had lived up to our high expectations - that it was enthralling, exhilarating and deeply satisfying.  Despite its roots in comic books (or maybe because of them) and being an action movie, this movie's plot was so complex and interwoven that when we started to talk about it, it took us the ride home and beyond to untangle just the surface layers of what happened in what order - and there was much intriguing stuff - including dream sequences - that went undiscussed and likely will here as well.  And, frankly, I have lost some of the intricacies over the time that has intervened.  I have been letting this movie marinate while writing about other things, but some of the meat may have fallen off the bone while it was stewing in its juices.

The Avengers are a group of super heroes each of whom, a reviewer noted before we saw the first movie, is a first class narcissist.  The review was positive - the reviewer enjoyed the film - but he or she wondered about the limits of our ability to appreciate the exploits of a loose competitive confederation of self involved and flawed people with superhuman skills - apparently the reviewer is not a sports fan (ba da bing) (nor prescient - by the time we get to The Avengers Endgame the crowd has only grown).  OK, so that begs the question even more, what is it that we find so compelling about the brew of superhuman ability and self involvement?  Why are we drawn to this stew, not just in its first iteration, but repeatedly, seemingly with a greater hunger each time?

First, a disclaimer.  I am not a Marvel Comics geek.  As a child, my very limited taste in comic books ran more towards the DC comics Superman variety - simple, straightforward good guys plunked down on the earth from another planet, trying to get by anonymously, but called on in extreme circumstances to do good just because that was the right thing to do and, after being imperiled, they prevailed - and the good guy was always too modest to come clean with the woman he loved about his secret identity and exploit his superhuman powers to woo her.  I think the closest Avenger to this type is Captain America - a super skinny kid from New York named Steve Rogers (played by Chris Evans), nerdy and clumsy - the guy all the girls look past; he is drafted into the Second World War and is given an experimental serum, which, though intensely painful, transforms him into someone with superhuman strength, and he is given a shield made out of Valadium, the strongest metal in the known (comic) universe, he is able to both attack others (the shield is apparently the first Frisbee) and defend himself, but his real strength in this group of misfits is his ability to function as a military leader, binding them together - reminding them that they are on the same team, and assigning each a function fitting to their character.

The mastermind of the group is, however, Iron Man/Tony Stark (Played by Robert Downey, Jr.).  He is both the son of a military industrialist, and one in his own right.  Stark enterprise's ability to craft weapons that kill and maim people has made him fabulously wealthy.  He is also fabulously smart and, together with his Artificially Intelligent side kick, JARVIS, he is able to engineer incredible military equipment, including the Iron suit that he wears that allows him to fly and do other superhuman feats.  Iron Man is partially powered by a heart like module in his chest which both provides strength (and perhaps intelligence?) but is also sucking the life out of him - more so in previous movies - maybe this glitch got fixed when I wasn't looking.

Btw, I went looking for an answer to the question of Iron Man's heart like thing, which is not explained, to my satisfaction at least, in the movies, and disappeared down a rabbit's hole named Google.  The back story on these characters in the comics is complex and changing - they have been retooled over the years as the threats to the US have morphed.  At least in one version, Stark's heart is destroyed when he is forced to work with others to build weapons for the enemy.  He was also originally modeled after Howard Hughes.  In any case, in the current movie iteration, he lives above his corporate offices in Manhattan in a penthouse atop a truly cool building with his Girl Friday (Pepper Potts) - also the CEO of his company - played by Gwyneth Paltrow - and races formula 1 cars.  Pretty sweet.

The thing about being as powerful as Stark is, he wants to be even more powerful.  So when the sword that Loki made a big deal about in the last film, the one with the tessarack (sp?) in it, the one that gave all that power to the bad guys, is on loan to him for a couple of weeks, he can't help but monkey around with it.  He enlists the aid of Dr. Bruce Banner - who could not be more mild mannered, polite and interested in doing good than when he is  played by Mark Ruffalo.  Of course, when he gets angry, mild mannered Dr. Banner becomes The Hulk and smashes everything in his path.  But Dr. Banner, who is smart enough to impress Stark and who works well with him, somewhat reluctantly agrees to evaluate this tessarack thing with Stark.  Well, it turns out that the tessarack contains a basic program for a sentient machine creature.  Stark and Banner work together with Stark's A.I. buddy JARVIS to install this program in a creature - Ultron.  Their intent is a good one - to produce a creature that will protect all of us from the bad stuff out there - but as happens in these things, they don't really know all of the ramifications of what they are doing (I have heard, and it may be an urban legend, that when the first nuclear test took place, some of the scientists posited that it might set up a never ending chain reaction that would explode the world.  Despite there being no definitive proof that this was not the case, the test explosion, which would determine whether it was so or not, of course went on).  So, in a plot that the reluctant son recognized as being lifted straight from Isaac Asimov's "I Robot", Ultron is charged with protecting human beings and, in a fit of hyper logic determines that the best way to do this is to kill them all because if they keep on living, they will simply continue to create ways to harm maim and murder each other.  

Well, while the Avenger Boys are trying to figure out who is strong enough to lift Thor's hammer (Oh, yes, one of the Avengers is a Norse God - one who comes here from his own world, Asgar, and adopts us because we clearly need looking after.  It was his brother Loki who believed that we needed to be told what to do rather than to be looked after - but noblesse oblige and tyranny are all but bedfellows - see my review of the Boys in the Boat).  The ability to lift Thor's hammer is supposed to be determined as much by moral righteousness as brute strength (only Captain America can budge it), Ultron defeats JARVIS and runs off to the laboratories of other bad guys in a nondescript Eastern European country to build himself a body and an army of robotic followers.  He finds twins with superpowers to help him; they happen to hate Tony Stark because their parents were killed by a bomb from Stark Industries.  So Tony Stark and Bruce Banner have to confess their sin of fiddling with powers in the Universe that are beyond them, and the Avengers are back in the business of fighting bad guys.

Ultron lures the Avengers to the place where he is securing Valadium for his projects, including making an even more perfect version of himself, and here the girl twin uses her powers to inflict dreams on the Avengers: The Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), a bewitching double agent able to destroy enemies with her charms as well as her physical strength - dreams of her abusive childhood as she was trained to be a ruthless spy by the Soviets; Captain America remembers the 1940s - a time with people who were lost to him as he lay frozen under the sea for decades; Thor has dreams of his planet and the intrigue there; and Iron Man has dreams of failing the Avengers.  The Hulk is, not surprisingly, driven mad by his dreams and smashes a third world city for no apparent reason - other than to give Iron Man a chance to work out a way to entomb the unstoppable force that is the Hulk so that he can come back to his senses.

Ultimately, the dream girl reads the mind of Ultron, and realizes that his plan is even more evil than her experience of Tony Stark.  The twins want to join sides with the Avengers, but need to be convinced that the Avengers really do have people's best interests at heart.  When Ultron uproots the twins' city to hurl it back to earth - with the intent of creating an explosion that will annihilate the population of the entire planet, the Avengers work with the twins to both evacuate the city as it is pulled into the sky without any loss of life and to simultaneously sate our thirst for destruction by killing all of the thousands of robots that Ultron has created to do his dirty-work.  The ballet-like movements that occur in these fights - many of them in slo-mo so we can appreciate every bit of their aesthetic beauty - are breathtakingly well done.  The large scale special effects are also overwhelming in their grandeur and their terror, but I think it is ultimately the humanity of the Avengers that draws us into this work.

We are all familiar with the work of Freud who posited different aspects of ourselves - aspects that were named the Ego, Id and Superego by his translators.  I think that the concrete representation of psychologically separate aspects of ourselves as individual elements predated but anticipated a development within psychoanalytic theory of dream interpretation where one layer of an interpretation is to consider whether each of the characters within a particular dream might be representing aspects of the dreamer's personality - a part of him or herself, as it were, that can be quite different than other aspects of the self.  If we think of this movie (and I generally think of all movies in this way) as a dream, and think of the satisfied viewer as the dreamer, these narcissistic superheroes may be characterizing not just part of our identification with powerful, self absorbed others, but a veritable dictionary of primitive, invincible - all but eternal aspects of ourselves.

This may sound a bit of a stretch, but bear with me.  Modern theories of narcissism (and they range from Kernberg's narcissist who is quite touchy - think Iron Man or the Hulk - to Kohut's narcissist, who is more empathic but also a bit thin skinned and torn about acting - perhaps Thor and Hawkeye (who provides a safe haven for the group with his - surprise, surprise - family in the middle of the movie) are more at this end of the spectrum) suggest that a critical component of personal development is narcissistic development - the development of a sense of self - one that is ideally integrated, but that may involve a great deal of fragments to pull together into that integrated whole.  The Avengers might be a representation of our internal selves - aspects of ourselves that develop to meet particular needs in particular situations.  Even those of us who are most action oriented have a watchful component (Hawkeye) of ourselves that we will occupy at the right moment.  We don't develop in a smooth manner - creating a narrative that is uncluttered by fits and starts, feints and retrials.  If we did, analysis would not be much fun.  We may have a dominant narrative - our primary identification may be with Captain America's being bullied but staying true to his own integrity and being the quintessential company man - but we also, and this may be part of why it has to be a separate character - identify with Iron Man's dislike for authority and willingness to create his own rules.

So the genius of Stan Lee, the mastermind behind the Marvel Comics Empire, is that he is able to fathom the myriad components of our self experience and integrate them into a stable of characters that mirror not just the range of people out there in the world, but the range of self states that we can call up internally - depending on the situation and our own history.  It should come as no surprise, then, that when I delve into the history of these characters as they were presented in the comic books that there is a shifting of the presentation of each character across time.  This may mirror our own individual development across time - the rage of the infant is different than the nuanced anger of the adult - but it may also be tracking our collective cultural identity development - in so far as we mirror Stan Lee and his stable of writers' development - as we move forward towards the always fluid solution to being a single entity - a person (or a culture - think of the US culture, whatever that is) with a stable sense of self - and on a personal and cultural level we have multiple conflicting agendas and approaches to solving problems - many of them having at their root the need to preserve the personal but also the corporate self - both physically (to ward off attack) but also psychologically - to feel good and competent and, in a word, like a superhero.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

I have written also written about The Avengers Endgame, Captain Marvel, Black Panther and, in the DC Universe, the movie Wonder Woman.

Of course, I have written about many other things as well - to access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

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