The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel – An Anachronistic Comedy that is Just Right for Our Times

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is a comedy series currently available through Amazon Prime (hopefully it will stream on other platforms at some point – it is too good to be confined to one platform).  Most of the eight episodes in the first year culminate with the title character delivering a crisp, brutally honest, deeply funny stand up monologue in a variety of venues in the late 1950s New York – and each is a high point that drives you to want to watch the next episode.  The show has been criticized for its anachronistic depiction of an era that did not welcome integration, diversity of sexual object, and acceptance of Judaism in the ways they are presented.  I think that criticism is justified in so far as this is a period piece – but I believe that the anachronistic elements are not an attempt to rewrite history, but clues that this is not written about that time but about ours and the ways in which the show deviates from history point us – as in a dream when the elements don’t quite hang together – toward the realization that the depicted reality is not the intended one, but symbols – I believe – of our time and how we need to live now.  This is a subversive – as all comedy is subversive – cry for women and others who are marginalized to celebrate who they are, what they believe in, and to support them in their efforts to make the world a better place.

I have written recently about RBG, the documentary movie about our eighty something year old supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg who has recently risen to rock star level fame, to the effect that I believe the film will be a helpful teaching tool to clarify to our kids, who can only intermittently see that the world continues to be sexist (and racist) what the roots of sexism (and racism) are by referencing periods in which that is more blatantly depicted, even though it wasn’t apparent at the time.  We see the same thing in Mad Men, where, I maintain, Don Draper, at least in season one, is not a misogynist, per se, but expresses misogyny as a member of a misogynistic culture.  The scary thing is that he does not stand out as misogynistic, but fits like a hand into the glove of the culture. In both Mad Men and The Amazing Mrs. Maisel, the sexism, to our current eye, is clear, but then it becomes not so clear as the women in various ways collude with it.  The men and women smooth off the rough edges and we see a vision of a world – like the terrible subway set - that is neither as it was, nor as it is, but weirdly, in some ways, as it could and should be, while also being a false and shifting shadow of a grittier, more complicated real world that we need to figure out how to live in, one that is filled with dirty subway cars that jostle and bang and much more crowded streets in New York, even in the 1950s and 60s, than are depicted here.  And we are relieved, in the monologues, and through other comedy, to see the structures that constricted be exposed and, at least for a moment, toppled.

The cultural sea change that allowed us to see the formerly invisible racism and sexism has required the diligent effort of many marginalized people over the course of many, many generations.  These people have been doing psychoanalysis to the culture – that is, they have been making what was unconscious conscious.  It has required the work of people in disparate fields working in concert, if only at a distance.  RBG (and other men and women) did this in the legal world; she as an attorney arguing before the Supreme Court, and Gloria Steinem (and many other men and women) did it by stirring up big crowds and helping them have rational arguments about needed social and cultural change.  Mrs. Maisel, based, according to Wikipedia, “loosely” on comediennes such as Joan Rivers and Totie Fields, is articulating the ways that comedy helped us recognize the looniness of our sexism and, I think, helps us recognize it in the current world.  It is also a testament to the power of a woman articulating her experience in a way that others can resonate with.  The power of the unconscious - and of culture - is to cover this back up once it has been exposed - and the process of psychoanalysis - and of comedy - is therefore never ending.

The roles of the stand-up comic – and of comedy generally – are manifold.  In one of Freud’s early books, he compared the functioning of jokes to the functioning of a dream.  From this perspective, the person listening to the joke is led along a path that has a conscious thread and an unconscious one that is supporting it.  If a kind of dream state is induced in the listener by the integrity of the joke and the punch line is appropriately timed, the reveal of the punch line is the “other” meaning that was being hidden underneath the conscious story.  Comedians, then, transgress unconscious boundaries by their very nature.  But they are also conservative.  They show us, by their pratfalls and their blundering, which we laugh at, what not to do and this helps us understand what is forbidden, what is off limits – and helps us avoid that.  Comedians rock the boat, but also right the ship – pointing out the unresolved conflicts in the old ways of doing things, and suggesting alternative ways of resolving them.  Crash through this – avoid doing that.  Zig zag through life alternately engaging with and avoiding danger - and use each interaction to propel you to the next.

Mr. Maisel (Joel, played by Michael Zegen), our heroine’s husband, is the original stand-up in the family, but he is terrible at it.  In his day job, he has been installed by his uncle as a vice president at a plastics firm – by night, he steals material from Bob Newhart records and delivers it poorly.  Mrs. Maisel (Miriam or Midge, played by Rachel Brosnahan) plays the role of the supportive – indeed – perfect wife.  She keeps his home, cares for the kids, does the shopping, looks glamorous (including putting on cold crème only after he has gone to sleep and then waking early to curl her hair and put on make-up so that he wakes to her perfect beauty) and she bribes the owner of the comedy club with her home cooked brisket so that he can get earlier slots that are more likely to deliver laughs (though this does not help him much).  Mr. Maisel’s perfect life ends up being too much for him, and he leaves Midge.  She, dazed and confused, wanders from their upper west side apartment to the club in the Village where he has performed earlier, ostensibly to retrieve the baking dish the brisket was in, but she wanders on stage and, in a drunken and deranged state, delivers a monologue about what has happened to her that day and, in the vernacular of the club, she absolutely kills it (before she is carted off by the police for indecency).  The stage manager – Susie Myerson played by Alex Borstein - a woman people mistake for a man – notices her skill and, because she doesn’t want to be insignificant and senses that Midge does not want to be either, decides she will manage her, and they become a warmly dysfunctional team that fights through the remaining seven episodes to figure out how to do comedy while Midge figures out how to manage her family as it falls apart around her after the revelation that her husband has gone.

Midge runs into Lenny Bruce (played by Luke Kirby) first as an audience member, then as a fellow arrested person (she bails him out when he is picked up for lewdness the same night she is and he later returns the favor), and then he lets her share the mic at a club and, in the final episode, he introduces her as his undercard at a show.  The inclusion of Lenny Bruce, the improvisational comic who broke boundaries that allowed later comics to enjoy freedoms he could only dream of, underscores (in my mind) two things – first his appearance in New York at this time as if he has achieved the fame he will only achieve later underscores the anachronistic nature of the series.  Second, connecting Midge with Lenny underscores the free associational, improvisational, jazz and underneath it all, psychoanalytic thrust of this series.  In psychoanalysis, the exploration of the unfettered mind – the only directive is to freely associate - takes place on the couch with the analyst as audience and interpreter.  For Midge, when she, as Lenny did, is just letting it fly in front of an audience – and we are laughing with her as we hear, as she does, what is coming out of her mouth and we are, as she is, making what little sense we can of her mind as it reacts to what is occurring in her life, the comedy club becomes the psychoanalytic space and the audience – with its laughter and support – becomes her analyst, guiding her towards truths that are more clearly articulated.

The series, then, is filled with conflictual material for Midge to “work out” on stage.  One of the conflicts in the movie is between the straight laced – or apparently so – upper west side proper Jewish housewife, who is obsessive to the nth degree and the comic – the bride who, still wearing her wedding dress the morning after her wedding, invites her new husband, still in his tails, to discreetly follow her into the ladies at the diner where they end up having breakfast so they can do the dirty deed.  Miriam, the housewife, regularly exercises, measures her ankles, thighs and waist on a regular basis, and wears the latest fashions.  Her repression is not as severe, however, as that of her mother, Rose (Marin Hinkle) whose neurotic concern with appearance, appearance, appearance drives her very narrowly defined life.  Miriam has learned how to utilize the control that her mother expresses without being controlled by it – and while remaining in touch with the curiosity and verve that the control would suppress.  She stays vibrantly alive while her mother mostly just vibrates in place – worrying that this or that might not be perfect but without quite being articulate about it and without having the capacity to change things.

Another tension is between Rose and her Columbia Professor husband Abe (Tony Shalhoub), whose wish for an orderly world, one that is run with the clockwork precision of his field of mathematics, is continually foiled by the women in his life who don’t stick with the simple plan of doing the right thing.  There is, however, more apparent substance under the surface with Abe, and he is able to connect with and to provide support for Miriam, even as he is ranting to and about her – his love for her is apparent even, or perhaps especially, in his disappointment in her.  One of his disappointments is the way that her marriage to Joel has brought him into contact with Joel’s parents – Joel’s father runs a sweat shop producing clothing and his mother is a world class worrier and both look more like recently immigrated Jews than the more patrician and respectable Abe.  Abe, despite his visceral disappointment with Joel and his parents, is constantly encouraging Midge to patch things up with her husband as, from his perspective, a woman cannot live without a man.

Other conflicts are present visually and play out in the comic interaction.  Susie, Miriam’s manager, is clearly from the “downtown” world (really the Village) and is both awed and non-plussed by Miriam’s uptown digs and function.  Miriam, as a pending divorcee, takes a day job as a make-up sales person at B. Altman’s and she is there thrust into the world of working class women doing a job while looking for a husband.  The variety of social strata and relationships depicted in the series are tied together by a society that dictates roles for individuals in different sectors of that society that are divided and determined by class, race, and gender.  Midge’s life, but also her comedy, bridges and exposes the cracks between and among these sectors – illuminating the construction of the society as she simultaneously deconstructs and savages it – hilariously creating space for she and the audience to appreciate the tensions that she experiences as she walks back and forth across and through these various separate spaces that are all intended to support human life but at the same time require that essential elements of being human are suppressed.  As much as we, and Miriam, despise Joel for leaving her, it becomes clear that he, despite being weak and therefore pitiful, is not a bad person, and he is playing at being an adult rather than embracing it.  We end up feeling for him (a little) in spite of ourselves.

Ruth Bader Ginsberg made a statement, and it was one that helped her argue her cases before the Supreme Court – to the effect that repressing women is bad for all of us.  This movie celebrates the dangerous and painful joy that is possible, both with Mrs. Maisel, but also between she and her audiences, when a more authentic way of living – a life that involves articulating the pain and acknowledging it – and owning who she is as a person – both as a repressed upper west side Jewish woman and as a lively, naïve, enthusiastic person trying to figure out how the whole thing works – engages in living and infectiously encourages us to join her.  I will spoil one of her final wonderful jokes by relating it here.  After she is confronted at her job by the woman with whom her husband had an affair about tampering in the woman’s relationship with the man who is still her husband, she asks, “What are the f*cking rules?” and then she asks the question again, but with a different inflection that implies, “What are the rules about f*cking?” 

This comedy, with its very current vernacular and its integrated night clubs at a time that they did not exist in this form, and with the frank language that, at the time was called the language of sailors and wasn’t permissible in the clubs she is working, is not about that time, but about our time – a time when we believe that we are free to express ourselves as we will – and yet I have to wonder about using the asterisk in the paragraph above.  What are the rules?  And if we are really free to make them, how will we do so?  What will we discover about ourselves and our society as we shed those rules?  Are some of them necessary?  Do we have protocol for a reason?  Does it work?  For whom?  When?  When should we deviate from that?  One way to discover that is to blow past the rules; to disregard them.  When we do that, what occurs?  Do we discover greater freedom or a different kind of bondage?  What are the limits of what we can live without?  In what context do we do that and to what end?

Miriam becomes a comedian because Joel blows past the rules – he doesn’t quietly keep a secretary who is dumb as a post on the side as a mistress, he runs into the secretary’s arms as if his life with Midge were the problem and he uses that as an excuse to avoid expressing his dissatisfaction with life more generally.  This, in turn, causes Miriam to blow past the doorman, out into the world, wearing only her nightgown and she finds a place – a relatively safe place – to express what it is that she is experiencing – and she finds a responsive audience.  Where are the spaces that afford the safety to explore these ideas – especially when those ideas are inherently unsafe.  The analyst’s couch is private and there is a contract of confidentiality.  The comic’s mic is very public – how will Joel deal with being the object of scorn – he can dish it out, but can he take it?  How will her parents react as Midge’s public life collapses the complex structures they have erected to keep their lives apparently clean and friction free?

By setting this series at the beginnings of a time of social and emotional upheaval that we eventually survived, I think it is encouraging us to explore who it is that we are at a time when we may have settled into a self-satisfied sense that things are all right.  It may be telling us that things are not all right.  That those who are in power haven’t followed the rules – and that has created problems.  I think this series is encouraging those who are not empowered, but may be more empowered than they know – women like Mrs. Maisel, who have a tremendous amount of privilege but may live in gilded cages – to explore that freedom and to revel in it.  And who among us, the empowered, does not live in a gilded cage?  One of the many problems – and perhaps one that is being enacted – is that it is those with privilege who are most likely to exercise this freedom – including in dangerous ways.  Miriam is endangering those around her – her parent’s relationship falls apart, her time at the club is time away from her kids, and her relationship with Joel, as it should be, will be sorely tested.  The story of those who are truly marginalized, who most need to explore alternative means of expression, may not be told as frequently because the margin for error there is much smaller and the expression of freedom more often has dangerous and self-damaging repercussions.  But isn’t that where the freedom of expression modelled here most needs to be exercised?

Miriam works hard at her newfound craft, as she worked hard as a Russian Literature major at Bryn Mawr.  She refines her message.  She brings all the privilege that she has been afforded to bear on the problem of how to articulate what it means to be free – and to do that in a way that others can resonate with – not because they are being paid to work to listen to her (Susie serves the role of this foil and teacher), but because to connect with her is to experience some of her freedom – to soar with her as she, not completely freely, but in a guided and shaped form of free expression, discovers how to articulate something true and real about her own and thus about many other peoples’ most important, and human, functioning.   What she creates is not a veridical account of her life as lived, any more than our free associations are a stenographic record of our lives, but a version of it that illuminates the aspects of it that are both problematic and, because they are so particular, universal.  Her audience – the one in the coffeehouse, and the one in our homes, resonates with this effort, laughs with her about it, and applauds her for the courage it takes to live as she does.

  

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Eli Zaretsky’s Secrets of the Soul - Is Psychoanalysis a Science or "merely" a Philosophy?

Eli Zaretsky’s “Secrets of the Soul” served as background and wallpaper as I co-taught a class this spring titled “Reading Freud”.  I found this book grounding, helpful and orienting as it and the class moved more or less chronologically through Freud’s writings.  But I was also aware that I was doing battle with Zaretsky (and perhaps the students in the class) over a central concern: was Freud merely a figure who was shaping, but also a product of the zeitgeist (which, if we leave out the merely qualifier, was surely the case, and Zaretsky documents many of the ways in which this happened with exquisite and insightful detail) or was Freud articulating something deeply and powerfully true about the human condition – something that, even if not accurate in detail and, indeed, something that is blatantly inaccurate in many ways – was an essential truth?  Zaretsky, as an historian, writes as if the former were the case.  Psychoanalysis was a fad, as it were, that blew into town, stirred things up (quite a bit – it was defined by but also defined modernism), but that disturbance is largely passing and we are moving towards the next new way (post-modernism was one stop on that train) to experiencing the human condition.  As a practicing analyst and a scientist interested in the functioning of the human mind, I am strongly tied to the latter position and so felt in continual tension with both Zarestsky and the class as we talked about the ways that Freud has influenced us.

I co-taught the course with a faculty member from the English department.  It was an intentionally cross disciplinary course, with my colleague and I demonstrating for the class different approaches to the readings that faculty from different disciplines take.  That said, there was a fair amount of overlap.  The other faculty member and I are both graduates of our local psychoanalytic institute, and he talked about how reading Freud with clinicians (he had long known Freud as a scholar before doing what is called research training – training for academic rather than applied purposes- at the institute) had lead him to think differently about reading texts; both Freud’s texts but also poetry, his area of specialty, and literature more generally.  He found himself questioning his basic tenets about reading a text that come from his discipline as he reads texts after psychoanalytic training.

In clinical work with patients, and in one’s own analysis, which is part of the training, the psychoanalytic perspective – one in which people, including authors, artists, directors and writers of films, actors in the film, but especially the people reading books, or looking at works of art, or the viewers of films – concretely demonstrates that there is an unconscious – and a conscious – mind at work and that our own unconscious and conscious minds are interacting with each other – and with the  conscious and unconscious mind of the artist as we engage with a work.  This complex configuration is one configuration – not the only one – but, I believe, an essential one – to exploring the experience of taking in what it is that someone has to offer (and the psychoanalytic description of it is based in the process of psychoanalytic listening that takes place in the consulting room).  The reading of a text, then, becomes very personal.  What does the text mean "to me".  To me, this is not a fad or a type of critical position to take with regards to works of art, or history, or even as we think in more applied areas like politics or the economy.  I experience it as something that occurs – regardless of how aware of it we are.  In my writing in blog posts, I am trying to articulate one (or more) layers of that with regard to my interaction with a particular work of art or, in some cases, lived experience.

I was reading an essay recently about Shakespeare and the author’s position was that Shakespeare’s works could be excised from all the libraries in the world, all the films of his productions erased, every future production stopped and we would not lose a great deal because his work has so thoroughly infiltrated the work of every other author since he wrote that the works would be preserved in abstentia by their presence elsewhere.  Freud has not had this pervasive an effect, though Zaretsky makes a pretty good case for the wide sweep of his ideas and the ways that authors across an amazing range of disciplines have had to incorporate his position.  But Zaretsky concludes that his influence, like that of say Descartes, or Hegel, was prominent at one time, is still somewhat relevant, but it is no longer at the forefront of what we need to consider when we think about the human condition.  I guess my position is that Freud is more like Newton, or Darwin.  These thinkers carved nature at the joints.  They didn’t always have all of the facts right – but they were generative and we cannot think usefully about physics or biology, respectively, without either of them. 

The irony in Zaretsky’s position is that he stays closely focused on Freud himself.  He is treating Freud as if he were a Descartes, or a Hegel – an historical figure who had certain views that defined his era and had an influence on culture.  That was certainly true of Freud.  And the ways in which Zaretsky artfully talks about Freud’s arguments and ties them to cultural phenomena is impressive.  So Freud’s description of the psychosexual phases of development is clarified in Zaretsky’s description of it – and even more importantly, maybe, Freud’s removing sexual object “choice” from gender – Freud’s articulation of human sexuality as essentially bisexual – which in turn opens the door to our movement towards understanding gender itself as something that is fluid rather than primary and dual – all of this is treated as a position on the human condition that was integral to the tectonic changes in thinking about sex and gender that occurred during the twentieth century and that continue to evolve.

Even more fundamentally, Zaretsky directly compares Freud to Calvin and the founders of Methodism who carved out the family – rather than the church or state – as the primary base from which to work, something that was part and parcel of the first Industrial Revolution.  Zaretsky’s thesis is that Freud’s focus on the individual supported Fordism – the second Industrial Revolution – where the individual could leave their connection to the family – or hold it as an idea – and become primarily identified with the corporation.  Zaretsky recognizes the irony of this – that Freud, the champion of pursuing the individual psyche, should contribute to the faceless front of the modern corporate monolith but I think he and I have a different understanding of the underlying currents in Freud’s thinking that end up supporting our making use of Freud in this way. 

What Zaretsky underemphasizes is that Freud was not just articulating an intellectual position or creating a series of content based inferences about human functioning, he was creating a.) a method of listening and b.) positing that the mind be studied in a certain way – with a dynamic unconscious that determines many of our actions.  So, while Zaretsky talks about others who have developed these ideas – Jung, Horney, and especially Lacan – he talks about these theorists not as developing a new branch of scientific discovery – as the those who followed in Newton’s and Darwin’s shoes did – but as people who are engaged primarily in dialogue with Freud – working within a rather narrow paradigm that is appealing during the time frame (and a little after) that it is presented.  They are not, in his mind, filling out an approach to the problem of the unconscious and how it works, but they are proposing different mechanisms – different content based approaches to – different philosophies of – the human condition.  I agree that they are, in part, doing that, and I agree that this is the way in which the different schools of psychoanalysis have been defined and these are the lines across which the great theoretical battles and wars have been fought.

If it isn’t apparent, I am not the person to be objectively evaluating the truth of Zaretsky’s position.  There is evidence for it in every modern introductory text book on Psychology where Freud is pilloried and derided as a guy who had some historically interesting ideas, but was not a true scientist and not someone who has contributed to current scientific thinking in a generative way.  But it is also the case that there is a vibrant and living engagement, both clinically and academically, with the life of the unconscious mind that is currently occurring and that Zaretsky does not connect Freud directly to.  Contemporary Psychoanalysis is comfortable with theoretical plurality.  Indeed, there are many additional theoretical positions that are likely to emerge that will enhance our ability to connect with each other and understand the human condition and they will likely be written about as contributions to an evolving variety of approaches rather than as works that are intended to compete for the mantel of being “right” or as complete descriptions.   We are trying to understand the most complex closed system in the known universe – it will take many windows to see how the thing holds together.

My own way of thinking (today – at this moment) about Freud is that he did two things: he described the hardware of the human psyche and then he spent a considerable portion of his energy tracing the software.  The irony of this is that he (and Zaretsky, I think) confused the two.  For instance, the Oedipal Complex, seen by Freud as a necessary element to be traversed by every human, and, in Totem and Taboo, as the basis of culture – all culture – is, I believe, a culturally determined developmental moment – and, ubiquitous though it may be in Western Culture – it is not “hard wired” but something that is, indeed, a product of the zeitgeist - and something that is traversed within a particularly pervasive dominant culture, so that it seems ubiquitous.  So, from this perspective, I believe that Zaretsky is right.  Freud the philosopher will be superceded, augmented, and challenged as the culture morphs, partly under Freud's influence and partly as we discover other culturally determined ways to “program” the human mind.

The part of Freud, unfortunately, that is like Shakespeare, the part of his writings that have infiltrated the culture so strongly and have determined so much of the arc of the twentieth century, are those parts that talk about how we operate.  What gets lost – and the reason we need to keep reading Freud – has to do with the process of connecting with our unconscious minds.  As I detailed in arecent post on dreams, the class – in the reading of the early Freud, learned to interpret not just the writings of authors, but also their own dreams – they discovered that they themselves have a dynamic unconscious.  They create, unbeknownst to themselves, complex and wonderfully useful commentaries on their own lives that are represented using idiosyncratic symbols that they can decode to appreciate the working of their own minds.  Their midterms, after reading Freud’s early writings, were fascinating – and sometimes wildly “wrong” – they got low scores on their speculative papers because they wandered off in directions that didn’t make much sense.

The latter half of the course focused more on the content of Freud’s thought about culture and his structural model of the mind – a very useful model, the one that is referred to in all the textbooks, and one that is relatively easily understood in a superficial way.  The students’ final exams, then, were dull – but they hewed to the “right” answer and their interpretations of works of art were narrow, but “correct”.  They knew how to apply the old, stodgy Freud to any problem, and they did that artlessly and flatly.  And, as a result, they achieved better grades across the board. 

We have learned a lot about neurology since Freud wrote.  We know more about the conscious mind and how things like cognition and memory work (indeed, my metaphor of hardware and software is stolen directly from that literature).   And I think this supports Zaretsky’s central thesis.  Psychoanalysis has had a crisis about where to house itself.  If it allies (as it has) with psychiatry, it ends up selling out the approach to the individual that is at its heart when the taxonomy of disease entities is described and we start to treat not the person – to understand them not as an individual – but as someone suffering from a collection of symptoms that is just like the person we saw last week and we concoct a treatment for them that is based on that.  Similarly, psychology, with its necessary focus, as a science, on replicable results based on observable phenomena is not a culture that supports idiosyncratic exploration.  It is, in hindsight, no accident that later Freud – the Freud of the ego, the id, and the superego – is the Freud that is taught in psychology textbooks and that leads the students and the broader public to get the “right” answer and to become good citizens of a modern world that is dominated by corporate entities – and is one in which we bind our anxieties about life and death by working for a reliable institution that will support us and our family.  We, as I have done in my association with the university, sell out.

James Cone, then, has something to say to Freud from the perspective of religion – that Christianity – intended for the marginalized as was psychoanalysis – gets perverted when it becomes the tool of the central power.  Rather than, for instance, psychoanalysis helping white empowered males recognize and struggle with their passive wishes and fears, it  has been used as a tool to subvert those fears - it has been used as a work around to distance ourselves from them - and to scape goat others - as when it was used by psychiatry and psychology in the middle of the last century to pathologize homosexuality.  And we are left on a precarious safe base – afraid, rather than empowered to explore the wonderfully complex minds that we have been equipped with.

I was tempted to end this post on this note, but I’m just not willing to do this.  I think that we will continue to struggle, as the early Freud did, with being wrong about who it is that we are and that we will continue to look for clues in our idiosyncratic and our shared histories to understand how it is that we function as individuals and as a society.  And I believe (isn’t it weird that all science is based, to a certain extent, on faith) in the intransigence of the unconscious – something that is as real as the astrophysicists' dark matter – and just as invisible to the observing eye.

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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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Dreams

Dreams are as familiar to us as anything else that has happened to us in the past 24 hours.

Dreams are as strange to us the weirdest, most incomprehensible movie we have ever seen.

To Dream is to aspire to something great - something fantastic that we would like to become.

When Sigmund Freud was working to understand how the mind worked, he used dreams as the portal to the hidden workings of the mind or, as he put it, “Dreams are the Royal Road to the unconscious.”

He meant that the unconscious mind is something that we can’t, by definition, see at work.  If consciousness is the eye that we use to observe the world and the workings of our mind, it does not “see” the unconscious.  But it does see dreams – the weird movies that we unconsciously construct and play for ourselves night after night.  And, he reasoned, if we understand how the dream is constructed, we will understand something about the part of our minds that we can’t see.

People have often tried to connect meaning to dreams.  There have long been books describing what this or that symbol in a dream “means”.  Freud agreed that dreams use symbols to communicate to us, but he proposed that we use idiosyncratic symbols – each of us makes up our own sets of symbols –and that we use the symbols to hide the meaning of our dreams.  He promised, though, that if we can crack the code, we can understand the logic of a dream.

Why do we code our dreams?  Freud proposed that dreams are intended to keep us asleep.  To do this, they grant the wishes to the parts of ourselves that want something – and would wake us up to get it.  In kids who are hungry, he observed, they will dream of eating something wonderful, and this will satisfy them enough that they can stay asleep.

As we get older, the things that we want get more complicated, and many of the things that we want are things that we feel uncomfortable wanting.  We may want the boss’s job, for instance, but if the boss were to know that, the boss might object, and so we hide that desire from the boss, but also, Freud proposed, from ourselves.

So, instead of dreaming about taking the boss’s job, we might dream about beating someone at a game.  The person that we beat would resemble the boss in some important way, but also NOT resemble the boss in some other important way.  Our unconscious recognizes the symbolized person as being equal to the boss, feels satisfied by the dream, and lets us sleep.  The conscious does NOT recognize the person as the boss and so does not wake us up in alarm that we are doing something that is forbidden.

This seems like a very complicated thing for our minds to be doing when we are asleep – and to decide whether this is accurate, we need to decode a dream, not always an easy thing to do.  This spring, though, a class of students was able to do just that.

In a class called “On Reading Freud”, we read and discussed a famous dream of Freud’s, the Irma dream from his book “The Interpretation of Dreams”.  We also read his essay about dream interpretation, “On Dreams”.  We also read a cautionary tale about what happens when Freud harassed one of his patients, Dora, into accepting his interpretation of her dream (She fired him).  Then I presented one of my dreams and the class interpreted it with me.  We also interpreted various pieces of literature as if they were dreams.

Then, the students, who had been asked to keep dream journals, were asked if they would volunteer to interpret their own dreams.  Four brave souls did, and the class of about twenty broke up into groups of five to hear about the dreams and to try to help the dreamer understand his or her dream.  The groups were instructed to offer suggestions, but to remember that the dreamer would be the ultimate authority on the dream and not to push an explanation.

In each of the groups, something similar happened.  The dreamer began to make sense of his or her dream.  This was described by the dreamers as “unnerving”.  They thought they were bringing essentially meaningless dreams to class, but the dreams had important and relevant information about what was currently going on in the dreamer’s life, about their wishes and desires, and, in a word; about their dreams.

In two of the groups, after the first presenter had some success, others in the group acknowledged that they had brought dreams as well but weren’t willing to present until they knew it was safe, and these members (in one group, all five presented a dream) had a similar experience of discovering that the dream was not just random, but had important meaning.

This process, of discovering meaning in something that is familiar but strange, evokes a feeling that Freud described as “uncanny”.  Uncanniness is the sense that something that we did not understand opens up and reveals something that we oddly, and in some unknown way, always knew to be the case.

As students, but also patients, work to understand their dreams, they get to know themselves in “uncanny” ways.  They discover things that they always knew about themselves, but had never been able to articulate – they had never been able to put the ideas into words.  Dreams, which initially feel foreign and just weird, can come to feel more like artistic creations that comment on our experience; and the unconscious – something that was once totally unknown to us - can become an ally in making sense of the complicated process of living.

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 Black Panther: Marvel teaches us something about healthy narcissism.

Marvel's Black Panther is a film I have seen twice in the theater, something I rarely do and also something I was initially reluctant to do with this one; but I was ultimately glad that I did.  I first saw it with the reluctant son while visiting him at college.  It was a father/son weekend, so the reluctant wife did not go along.  In between, I watched Infinity Wars and also dialed up Captain America – Civil War on the home video front just so that I could more deeply immerse myself in the Marvel universe.  Why not?  It seems that most of the world has done this – and that an entire army of CGI specialists are being employed and having their moment on the screen as the theater stays full waiting for the enigmatic teaser at the tail end of the credits after each “episode”.  Something this enthralling to so many of us must have something to say about us, n’est pas?

Well, the Black Panther turns out, I think, to have a lot to say about us, and stands in a very interesting relationship to the predominantly white and male universe that Marvel has rolled out to this point.  And one of the things that it has to say has to do with the importance of women, something that I was so unused to looking for in this type of film, but perhaps in films generally (OK, if I want to heap more concern on it, maybe I overlook women’s roles outside of the movie theater, too), that I didn’t pay enough attention to the women the first time I saw the film and did not notice the different roles that the women around the Black Panther played in helping him be the character that he so nobly portrays.

The Black Panther is T’Challa (played by Chadwick Boseman), the leader of an (imaginary) African nation Wakanda that has existed in secret for hundreds of years.  T’Challa’s father, T’Chaka (played by John Kani) was killed at the beginning of the Captain Marvel: Civil Wars film where the Black Panther first appeared.  In that film, the Black Panther does not take sides in the Civil War – he is consistently focused on finding the perpetrator of the crime that sets the action in motion and, because he is not caught up in the posturing and bickering and fighting, he gets the man who killed his father and brings him to justice.  He is the quiet superhero who gets the job done while everyone else is raging at each other.

He is also distinguished from the other superheroes because he is understated and self-effacing.  He does not call attention to himself in the vain, preening, OK, narcissistic ways that the other heroes do.  We are drawn, I think, to Iron Man, for instance, because he so clearly needs our approval.  The Black Panther is more like Bruce Banner, as played by Mark Ruffalo.  He is deferential, with a wry sense of humor, but also a wry sense of himself.  There is a kind of “how did I get here?” expression that pervades his character.

So I will talk about the complicated movie that gives the backstory on the Black Panther from the point of view of the women in the story – they, his connection with Africa, and perhaps the mysterious substance Vibranium – may distinguish the Black Panther, I think, from the other superheroes in this universe.  In the process of doing this, I may shed light on certain aspects of the movie, but will miss some of the important plot lines – lines that were clearer to me on first viewing.

Ramonda (played by Angela Bassett) was the female figure that I could distinguish on the first showing.  Wise and older, Ramonda is T’Challa’s mother and a regal queen who, as a mother, has a good handle on the strengths and weaknesses of her own children.  She knows them, she is proud and unquestioningly supportive of them; she also very quickly moves from being Queen to being a refugee when T’Challa is presumed dead.  And, as important as she may be, she stood out to me as kind of a stock character. 

The problem I had was with distinguishing between the other three women who supported and protected T’Challa.  I think I had this problem for multiple reasons.  Probably the first reason was because of my male chauvinism, which is intimately bound up with focusing on the male hero – not on those who are supporting him.  This was aided and abetted, however, by the cool irreverence with which each of the three treated him – irreverence that bordered on disdain – and it could be read as that except that they were also clearly deferential.  Each was attached to him, in her own way, and each was ultimately caring for him, concerned for him and supportive of him, but also cool to him.  They were, none of them, subservient even though each was ruled by him.  These similarities in their relatedness to T’Challa served to group them, in my mind, into a sort of female archetype that hid the differences in their characters and in their relationship to T’Challa.

I remember once lounging at the pool with three of my women friends around me.  A male friend swam over from the other side of the pool where he had been observing us.  He commented that seeing me from across the pool allowed him to imagine that the interactions between us were much lovelier than it felt when he joined us – where he experienced the women – in relation to him and to me – much more like the many sisters he grew up with than whatever it was that he was imagining – and envying – from afar. 

The first woman of the troika in the movie that we are introduced to is Okoye (played by Danai Gurira).  She is the general of the royal army.  She is striking for her shaved head and laser like focus on threats and how to address them.  Her irreverence/disdain is expressed towards T’Challa in the opening scene when she predicts that he will freeze when he comes face to face with his former lover whom they are bringing her back from her work as a spy.  Okoye, the head of the Wakandan special forces and T’Challa’s chief body guard, is deeply loyal- but it turns out that this loyalty is to Wakanda and not primarily to T’Challa, despite the fact that she is very personally attached to him.  When he has been apparently overthrown, she, in spite of herself and her personal loyalties, pledges her support to the usurper and to the continuity of Wakanda.   

The second woman, Nakia (played by Lupita Nyong’o), is the ex-girlfriend whom T’Challa “rescues” from her undercover mission of protecting women who are being enslaved in Nigeria.  In fact, she doesn’t need rescuing, but he needs her to be present at his coronation.  She has the power both to freeze T’Challa – he stumbles to be coherent when first seeing her again, almost costing them their lives - but also to encourage him, especially if he wants to win her back, to reconsider the non-interference policy that Wakanda has practiced for centuries, hiding their technological superiority from the western world.  As his potential queen, she holds considerable power – but she is in no hurry to utilize it – if he does not agree with what she proposes, she will go back to doing what she loves – and, though she will be disappointed that he did not see the light, she is not dependent on his doing that nor does she “need” him.

  

Finally, Shuri (played by Letitia Wright) is T’Challa’s kid sister who is brighter than T’Challa, sassy, and plays Q to his James Bond, providing him with gadgets, including his suit.  Shuri makes fun of T’Challa, checking whether he froze and delighting in the fact that he did, but also suckering him into a prat fall and disparaging his forever bringing in broken white boys for her to fix.  She is also the one of this troika that is most able to express the ways in which she idolizes him and is most open about how attached she is to him and fearful of losing him.

In so far as comic book characters are shaped by their relationships, including their early relationships with other comic book characters – so in so far as this is a work that expresses something true about human relationships and human development, T’Challa’s character is different from the other superheroes, I believe, because of the relationships with these four women.  And the particular way in which his character is different is that he is a narcissistically healthy individual.  His powers are more thoroughly and complexly woven into who it is that he essentially is rather than being add-ons or unwanted intrusions or the result of some traumatic transformation.  He is thoughtful about his powers in ways that the other superheroes are not, and he is grounded in his sense of himself in ways that he will use them in ways that they are not.

Now, as I write this, I realize that only Thor has grown up in a culture where his powers are an expected part of who it is that he is.  But Thor’s royal family does not provide the kind of nurturance that T’Challa’s does.  Of course, T’Challa’s family includes the shameful secret of T’Chaka’s murder of his brother for telling the secrets of the culture – and the subsequent abandonment of T’Chaka’s brother’s son, T’Challa’s cousin – the usurper who comes home to challenge and apparently successfully overthrow T’Challa - N'Jadaka or, by his American name, Erik "Killmonger" Stevens (played by Michael B. Jordan).  But let me return to that later.

Narcissism, or self-love, is, I think, a necessary and central component of every single person’s development. In successful narcissistic development, self-esteem is woven seamlessly into who it is that the person is – so much so that the issue does not seem to emerge.  Adjectives like self-confident, easy to be with, centered, psychologically healthy, and, apparently paradoxically, selfless - characterize these people.  So the last thing that we are likely to think about is their narcissism.  Narcissism has a bad connotation.  The narcissist all but screams “Look at me!” partly as a result of fearing that if we don’t do that – if we don’t admire them – they will cease to exist – it is only in other’s eyes and minds that they feel alive because they haven’t been able to internalize a stable sense of themselves as valuable that allows them to navigate the most painful moments in life – the moments of narcissistic injury.  But I think the narcissistically “healthy” individuals have not somehow been able to bypass the painful process of narcissistic development and facing moments of narcissistic injury, but they have actually engaged in integrating self-confidence into their core selves as a result of experiencing and surviving these moments – more or less intact.

T’Challa, as narcissistically competent as he is, is vulnerable to narcissistic crises.  The “freezing” that occurs is at the moment when the object of his love – the person he admires, but also the person whom he most wants to be admired by – is in his sights.  He questions whether she will admire him.  Now, he may also, perhaps, be swept away by her beauty and being in her presence, but all three women emphasize and don’t let him not know that they know that he froze.  That he asked himself, “Am I worthy?”  And he knows that he cannot answer this question, it must be answered by others – by her.  That is, his value is ultimately not internally determined, but determined by others.

When Barry Larkin, the gifted shortstop for the Cincinnati Reds, was inducted into the baseball hall of fame, he related the following story.  When it was apparent that he was not just going to be a professional ballplayer but a star, an older star had him lie on his back at second base in the one the large baseball parks.  The other player asked him how he felt.  Larkin responded that he felt small.  The other ballplayer remarked, “Good.  Remember that feeling.  Baseball is big.  You are small.  Baseball is bigger than you.” 

T’Challa is reminded by these women who love and adore him that, as important as he is, he has limits, that he does not know it all, and that it is the tribe, not the individual; it is the country, not the person, that matters.  T’Challa is selfless not because he is not narcissistic, but because he is deeply narcissistic and deeply narcissistically loved, but also known by others and because he knows himself that he has limits and that he is loved not in spite of those limits – but partly because of them.  Despite his becoming the king, it is the country that he is king of that is important, and he should be working to be worthy of the honor of his crown, and the country is there to be served by him, not the other way around.

I think it is far from accidental that the most comfortable and human of the Marvel Superheroes is African and that he radiates not the external powers that we might envy, but the internal power that we hold most dear, but that is very hard for us to achieve.  James Cone, in his theological position that the cross and the lynching tree are equivalent,  articulates the ways that being the one who is “done to”, which is the basis of the Christian religion, is an easier position from which to consolidate a character of integrity than from the position of the one who is “doing to”.   In so far as T’Challa is a thinly veiled African American character, but also a representative of an entire continent that has been “done to”, I think he is being used to represent how this development can perhaps best take place from a position of apparent disempowerment.

Of course, the story of his cousin, N'Jadaka, is the cautionary tale that clarifies that just being done do does not make one noble.  In fact,  N'Jadaka is ultimately depicted as terminally wounded and unsavable, even with all the Wakandan resources, and his wounds lead him to destroy many lives and nearly the country of Wakanda.  He represents the taking on of a false version – a comic book version, if you will - of the white power approach to the world – the approach that the only way to power is to subdue others – to subjugate them and to exploit them – to become colonizers who are better at it than the white man.  This is a failed narcissistic path that is all too common. This is not T’Challa’s path.

I think that T’Challa, determined by the dynamically complex relationships he maintains with the four female characters, proposes that narcissistic fulfillment does not come as N’Jadaka proposes from taking what was not given to you by using the full measure of your powers (as the colonizers do – taking home their booty and then protecting it to essentially prove their worth), but it comes from continuing to live – openly and constantly -- in tension with those around you who are constantly evaluating you and from whom you are therefore in constant danger of narcissistic failure – but these selfsame people are the  those who love him most deeply and part of that love is to both support but also help keep his self-love in check.  Another way of saying that is that narcissistic health is not some goal that is achieved, but a constant state of self-regulation that occurs in the context of our relationships with people who (when all is going well) love you.  In T’Challa’s case, though he has the resources to move ahead, he is constantly in danger of losing them, and the women around him continually remind him of that so that he does not forget that and lose their esteem and value that he ultimately depends on.  

What is endearing about T'Challa's character is that he wears the mantel of this complex set of interactions lightly.  He knows that the judgment, critical though it may be, comes from a place of love and caring.  That those around him are not saying, “You have to live up to this standard or I won’t love you,” which is the kind of message that creates problematic narcissistic development, nor are they saying, “Whatever you do is fine with me because I love you,” which is a promise that is very hard for people to keep.  Instead they offer a reality based and orienting message, “We hold you to a high but we believe achievable standard based on who you we know you to be.”  And he says, in effect, “Yeah, I am that guy – or I’m trying to be.  Sometimes I will fail.  Sometimes I will disagree.  We will talk about it when that happens and work something out.”

Now, wouldn't it be nice if we all had a network of at least four people who were working with us at all times to help us maintain our internal equilibrium?  In the real world, this kind of attuned connection, ideally, takes place early in our development.  We carry forward the expectation that some form of it will be available through the connections that we have with others.  Narcissistic issues - problems with managing interpersonal relationships - emerge when there hasn't been enough early attunement for us to reasonably expect it later - so we withdraw from the world at the slightest hint of rejection - or we parade our accomplishments before others as if that would make up for what is missing.  An important part of long term treatment of narcissism is providing the kind of reparative attunement that will afford people the opportunity to join in the network of sustaining interactions, that include survivable narcissistic injuries, in the course of everyday living.

I watched the movie 42, another Chadwick Boseman film, as part of the process of grieving his loss.  I have written also written about The Avengers End Game, Captain Marvel, Age of Ultron 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. 

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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