Psi – HBO presents a Brazilian Psychoanalyst

Psi is an HBO series about a Psychoanalyst in Sao Paolo, Brazil.  He is recently separated from his wife (an attorney) and two stepchildren, and he hangs out with a friend who watched his parents die and now works in a graveyard, and a former student, who was an anthropologist before she became a psychoanalyst.  A friend of mine, a film analyst and Spanish Literature faculty member at my University, joined me to present the fourth episode at our local psychoanalytic institute last night and to lead a discussion about it.  My friend is from Argentina, and knows quite a bit about South American culture – so she was quite helpful in understanding some of the context of the series.

My friend stated that Sao Paolo is a city of 20 million and that this series is less about Sao Paolo or Brazilian culture, and more about living in a megalopolis and the resulting alienation that can occur.  To underscore this, the version of the series that is available in the US on HBO has been dubbed from Portuguese to Spanish and has English subtitles.  My friend suggested that this could just as easily have been set in Mexico City, for instance, as Sao Paolo.  Further, it is about a relatively small slice of the socio economic pie in Sao Paolo.  All of the characters – to her eye – are white.  When I noted that the Analyst’s ex- wife is dark skinned, she responded that this is a decidedly American read, where our notion of one drop of blood in a hundred leads us to describe a person as of African descent – where in Brazil, where she has lived, the much higher ratio of people of African and Indigenous descent leads to a much different way of reading race and color.  The cultural slice is one that is of high socio economic standing and lives in a relatively homogenous euro-centric social sphere.

The fourth episode - the one we watched - presents three interlocking stories about death.  It starts with the death of Regina, Milton’s husband.  Regina was a patient of Carlo – the analyst – and she and Milton also came to Carlo for couple’s therapy.  Now Milton invites Carlo to the funeral, and then Milton consults with Carlo.  The second story is the story of a woman in Carlo’s practice who has been seeing Carlo for some time – and during that time she has complained about her brother who has recently died, along with his son, in a car accident, and she has not been able to bring herself to tell her children about that.  Finally, Carlo’s stepdaughter is in the process of losing the family dog, to whom she has become more attached as the dog is dying.

Carlo, around whom all of this revolves, observes the actions of his patients – he comments on them – and he seems, at least to me, to be somewhat removed from them.  Not quite clinically, but almost.  He is more human with his stepdaughter – when his ex tries to tell her daughter that things will be alright, he clarifies that the dog will die.  He is almost cruel in pretending to be the dog’s spirit and telling the stepdaughter that she has not cared for the dog – not played with him, fed him, or wanted to spend time with him, until now when he is on death’s bed – and then feels badly about having crossed a line.  He is clearly affected by these losses, however.  He reads a letter from his father about his father’s wishes not to have a priest comfort him as he is dying – fearing that his anti-God stance will soften when he is confronted directly by his mortality.  He also consults with a medium – through his friend the gravedigger.

The medium says two interesting things to him.  The first is that he is the medicine for his patients – and that being the medicine is much more difficult than prescribing medicine – but also that it is different from being a friend or relation.  This is actually a quite intriguing observation – one that I could write a post about – though in some ways the episode becomes a meditation on this observation.  The second thing that the medium does is to encourage him to connect with the spirits that are calling to him.  This, for a skeptical man – as his friend calls him – could be a problematic piece of advice, but he takes it more or less in stride, and remains as open to this as he is to his patients and their various beliefs.

Milton is, for me, the more poignant of the two patients.  He is convinced that Regina, who was highly religious and badgering him to become religious, is now a spirit – indeed he believes he saw her spirit leave her body – and he is looking to connect with her wherever he can – including in Carlo’s office – where he believes she may choose to come visit him.  Carlo clarifies that he does not expect this to happen, but notes that he becomes the lightning rod for people from his patient’s past, and that, since he knew Regina, he is more likely to serve that function for Milton.  He goes on to point out that Milton has an unrealistically rosy picture of his relationship with his wife, which was actually quite problematic.  This becomes, for Milton, an example of Carlo channeling his wife.  Carlo wonders why Milton wants so desperately to be in contact with his wife.  When Milton states that it is to ask forgiveness for killing her dogs, whom Milton hated, Carlo thinks that the amount of detail that Milton uses in telling the story indicates this is not the real reason, and Carlo confesses that he really hated his wife – she smelled bad, she was stupid, and he wants to confess that, because of this, he was not a good husband.

The woman who lost her brother, then, also did not appreciate her brother when he was alive – and finds herself feeling somewhat hypocritical about her feelings of loss at his death.  She is also inhibited about telling her children who, when Carlo talks to them, take the news quite matter of factly and don’t seem to wonder what the big deal these adults have about death.

Carlo’s stepdaughter’s dog dies, and she constructs a sign to put on his grave that states that just as he barked in life to scare off robbers, he will bark in death to scare off bad spirits.  The family funeral seems to provide a nice sanctuary and support as she grieves the animal – perhaps in some sense doing that for the family as a whole.

I organized my remarks about the episode around Freud’s paper, Mourning and Melancholia.  This dense and difficult paper is easier to understand when there is an interpretation – and I think Thomas Ogden, in his book Creative Readings, does a very nice job, both in the introduction and in the first chapter describing what is so ground breaking about this paper.  At the heart of it, at least in the context of this episode, is Freud’s observation that acknowledging our ambivalence about relationships is really tough to do – much tougher than Carlo’s soft croonings about them to his patients would indicate.  In fact, Freud maintains, we would rather stay connected with those we have lost – even when that loss has been of someone about whom we are ambivalent – than to move forward with our lives.

Milton – for all his complaining about Regina and how she held him back and stuck his nose in smelly stuff when she was alive – deeply feels her loss.  I imagine that she also supported him – and called him to be his better self – and did all those things that can become invisible in a marriage – especially when we begin to focus on the negative qualities of our spouse.  Only when our spouse is gone do we want them – in a way that we may not have been able to acknowledge when they were available.  Divorcing couples frequently reunite many times in the process of becoming divorced as they act out this dance of ambivalence.  The final scene of Milton has him walking down the stairs leaving Carlo’s office, touching the banister as he goes.  We puzzled over this in the discussion – wondering if he was touching the banister that Regina had touched – and being in contact with her – continuing to look for her, or perhaps he was letting go of her, realizing that she was no longer there, and he would have to move on without her, the outcome that Freud saw as the healthy one - the one that prevents melancholia (depression).

The kids were much less ambivalent.  They did not particularly like or feel connected to their uncle, and even less so to their cousin, who had bullied them.   When Carlo suggested that the cousin might now be in heaven, the daughter corrected him, stating he would simply become a skeleton.  This was the joke that ended the episode - the sensitive analyst - trying to be sugar coated medicine - was served by the kid who was not at all concerned by the death of her cousin.

The children's mourning process - letting go – something they seem to be able to do more easily, may be a result of the ways that they were less alienated from those around them, we came to think in the discussion.  They could more clearly hate and love those they were in contact with – whether a dog or a human – without as much apparent conflict between those two states.  As we age, our relationships become more complicated, and we are also closer to death, and thus more anxious, perhaps, about moving forward in our lives.  We no longer have the illusion of immortality, so we don’t let go of those we have lost as a means of hanging onto things as they have been.

My co presenter – who has seen more of the series – noted that Carlo is much less removed from children than from adults across the episodes.  He seems to be able to connect with them easily, while adults find him to be somewhat distant – perhaps aloof.  We, as viewers, observe him in various moments in his life – public and private – becoming voyeuristic – somewhat in the way that analysts view their patient’s lives.  We – or at least I – want to connect with him – and more than that  - help him connect with those around him.  I am relieved to hear that he connects with kids in other episodes.  Being the medicine for his patients seems to weary him, and he does not get much relief from his extra therapeutic contact with other adults.

In a post discussion conversation with one of the participants, we noted how alienated we are all becoming – through the use of our various devices that give us more and more surface connections with the world.  Analysis is, especially for those of us who gather to talk about it, a hoped for means of connecting with others.  Even that, this series would suggest, is laborious – for patients and analysts alike (unless we are young…).  And, while analysis may help us confront the obstacles to connecting with those around us, and this may feel like being in contact, there is a weird paradox that the analyst, who is consistently immersed in the stuff of life - relating all the time to his patients -  can become the most alienated of all - observing but not deeply connecting with those around him (or her).

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