Mark Solms, Luba Kessler and Teaching Neuropsychoanalysis.

Teaching neuroscience to candidates at our psychoanalytic institute has always been a chore that they have abhorred.  OK, in the parlance of psychoanalysis, they have resisted the opportunity to learn about neuropsychoanalysis.  I went to a presentation today by the Department of Psychoanalytic Education at our annual Psychoanalytic Convention in which they were asking four questions:

1. What is neuropsychoanalysis?
2. How do we integrate information from two realms – objective (neuroscience) and subjective (psychoanalysis)?
3. What are the implications of bringing neuroscience to bear on psychoanalysis?
4. How should we teach neuropsychoanalysis?

The lead speaker was Mark Solms, and whenever Mark Solms speaks, I do my best to be there to listen.  I don’t always understand what I hear, but I think he is in the process of getting something very important about the working of the mind.  I have had a hard time conveying that to students, though.  They find what I have to say experience-distant and filled with jargon.  So the fourth question – how do we teach neuropsychoanalysis – was most on my mind.  Solms stated that he wouldn’t really address that part – and he didn’t directly talk about it directly – but he did something better – he showed how to do it.

The issue (as I see it) is that neuroscientists are interested in the mechanical properties of the mind.  This leads them to think as mechanics – as engineers – and as scientists.  They want to know what the parts of the mind are and how they interact.  So when they teach, they frequently show pictures of the brain – or draw neurons – and they talk about structures of the brain and how they function.  This style of thinking and communicating is dry, precise, and technical.  And dull - especially to people who are looking for an interesting story.

Clinical psychoanalysts, then, are interested in and communicate through narrative.  They listen to and tell stories.  They use metaphor.  Where the neuroscientist is likely to be concrete and visual the psychoanalyst is likely to be abstract and auditory.  They are talking about the same thing – the human mind – but those who can speak to the other – or speak the other’s language – are few and far between.  Antonio Damasio is one of these and Mark Solms is another.

Today Solms chose to speak not with slides, and not by drawing on a black or white board, but just to talk.  He decided to tell a story – the story of how he became interested in neuroscience – and how his primary interest (he maintains) is psychoanalytic.  And this is just what the doctor ordered.  Let’s talk to the analysts in the analyst’s language.  I think his conscious intent was to manage psychoanalyst’s anxiety about being taken over or dictated to by a science that feels like it is not their own.  The question posed in the conference brochure was, after all, "Is Neuroscience the New Basic Science of Psychoanalysis?"  But in the process of assuaging our fears, he may also have introduced a means of communicating.

Solms began by talking about a critical incident in his childhood.  His brother fell from a height and had a head injury.  When his brother returned home, he looked the same, but he was not the same person.  It was not just that he had cognitive challenges, but that his personality had changed.  In that moment – as a pre-scientist – Solms realized that the brain and the mind are related.   His relation with his family also changed.  His achievements, as he began to surpass his brother, were not celebrated in the way that they would have been.  He stated that he had a revelation in the moment of speaking, that the sense of family grief over his brother’s death may have been the critical element in his choice to minister to those with neurological damage – that he may well have wanted to help address something that was damaged not just in his brother, but in his brother and in himself and in the family as whole.  A psychoanalytic insight.

In any case, he studied neuroscience, but something was missing.  The brain was being studied, but not the mind - and that was his true interest.  He travelled from South Africa to London to study psychoanalysis so that he could learn something about the mind.  He then began talking to his patients – something that had, to that point, been unheard of in neuroscience.  Doing that, talking to his patients, led him, very quickly, to discover low hanging fruit – new unheard of things in neuroscience.  So, for instance, he discovered that in those patients who had strokes and lost their ability to use their left sides and also had denial of this loss that the denial sounded like psychoanalytic denial – not, as had been assumed to that point, a neurological inability to be aware of the loss.  So by talking with the patients he was able to help them work through the denial and to “cure” the denial so that they could acknowledge that they had difficulties - thus making their treatment, and lives, better.  He gave two other examples of work that he published early on – and I made notes of that, but just discovered that I have lost the notebook I was using.  Not sure whether that is a neurologically or psychoanalytically determined loss – it is on the last plane I was on, flying back from New York as I was beginning to type this….

Oh, I remembered one!  Solms used neuroscientific methods to study dreams.  This involved tracking REM sleep – which neuroscientists discovered was related to dreaming by waking people up in the middle of REM.  But once they tied them together, they quit asking people if they were dreaming and just used REM sleep as the marker of dreaming.  By waking people up, Solms was able to clarify that the part of the brain that is responsible for REM sleep is NOT the part of the brain that is responsible for dreaming.  When the dreaming part is injured, if the REM part is unscathed, people continue to have REM sleep but they don’t dream.  On the other hand, if the REM part is damaged, but the dream center is not, people will stop having REM sleep, but they will dream.  Amazing how a scientific paper appears when you ask people questions!

The point of the illustrations (one of which I’m still trying to remember – I think it also had to do with dreams), is that Solms was using psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic insights to inform his understanding of neurological conditions, not the other way around.  This was intended to reassure us that he did not want to use neuroscience to reduce psychoanalysis, but rather to use psychoanalysis to inform our understanding of neuroscience.  That said, he acknowledged that once the bridge was built, it becomes a two way street and we can traverse it back and forth.  Neuroscience is getting to the point where it can begin to inform psychoanalysis and we should be aware of that and ready to include neuropsychological work in our thinking about the mind.  If we don't do that, he warned us ominously, we will become obsolete (as if that wasn't already a worry).

His intent here was to point out that we should be aware, but not wary.  His position, with which I agree and have already stated in slightly different form, is that psychoanalysis and neuroscience are actually engaged in the same undertaking, but using very different methods.  He proposed a re-visioning of psychoanalysis not as something that is based on a particular theory of the mind or on a particular perspective, but considering it to be the study of mind from the position of the subjectivity of mind.  Neuroscience is, then, the sister study from an objective perspective of the same thing - the mind.  Solms’ evidence, from his brother and many clinical interactions, is that the brain and the mind are intimately linked – and that we can’t study the one without, in some form or fashion, studying the other.  So he ends up continuing to find that Freud’s neurological hypotheses – which Freud did not have the apparatus to test – hold water: the brain (when viewed objectively by neuroscientists) functions as a close observer of the mind (through describing subjective experience to someone deeply interested in that and prepared to listen to it) would imagine that it does.

Solms took us back to Descartes' Mind/Body distinction – to the difference between the objective and the subjective – with a simple illustration.  If we close our eyes, all that we experience is the subjective self.  That is the mind.  If we open our eyes and stand in front of a mirror, then we are in contact with our objective selves – we are able to see what that self looks like and to treat it as an object. 

Another of the lovely turns of mind that Solms engaged in was to point out that Freud chose – in opposition to those around him – not to have the phenomena fit the methodology (the behaviorists decided that the only thing that could be studied scientifically was what could be studied objectively – so the mind was left completely out of their thinking about psychology – so it became a psychology without a psyche).  So Freud created a method – listening to dreams and listening to patients – that allowed him to hear the mind at work.  We will be able to hear that mind more clearly, Solms maintains, when we understand the structure that supports it.  And this is what Freud called metapsychology - the structures that make the subjective experience of the mind possible.

Solms was presenting as a member of a panel.  The next two panelists – a neuropsychoanalyst, Richard Kessler, and his psychoanalyst wife, Luba Kessler, presented on neuropsychoanalysis as well.  Richard Kessler’s presentation was largely in the neuroscience style.  Luba Kessler’s presentation used psychoanalytic understandings of the self – focusing primarily on the work of Kohut – to point out the neuropsychology of the self.  This was a second, lovely example of providing a narrative framework around and through which to present neuroscientific principles.  It worked from psychoanalysis towards neuroscience, rather than the other way around.  I think this is likely to be an approach that will be better received within a curriculum. 

The challenge for a psychoanalytic faculty is to find faculty members who are conversant in both neuroscience and psychoanalytic theory and are able to create a psychoanalytic narrative that weaves in neuroscientific principles.  This requires a kind of neuroscientific fluency that Solms and both Kessler’s were able to demonstrate, but one that is going to be difficult for the neuroscientific layperson to engage in – which is necessary if one of the laudable but stretch goals of the department of psychoanalytic education is to be achieved – to infuse neuroscience into the entire curriculum at psychoanalytic institutes.

When someone is able to speak both languages delightful moments occur.  For instance, there was a question from the audience about neuroplasticity, and Solms was able to clarify that the promise of neuroplasticity is turning out to be less pervasive than originally thought.  It is more prevalent in neurological registers that focus on the external world – and there was a technical name here which might be in my lost notes – and Solms suggested that these registers are the equivalent of Freud's Ego.  These are also neurological registers that are focused on the internal experience – and Solms equated these with the Id – and they are much less neuroplastic and take much more work to make changes in their functioning.  He quipped that it is hard for these registers to learn and to forget.  He used this as a jumping off point to suggest that it might explain why psychoanalysis takes so long – we are working with recalcitrant neuronal structures.

[I have a weird example of the differences between the registers that involves this post.  I was linking to this post from a post on Anton (Tony) Kris that I wrote almost 10 years ago.  I remembered that, in the talk I am writing about here, Solms had referred to the difference between episodic memory (the technical term I could not remember above for the registers focusing on the external world) and semantic memory (the registers focusing on the internal world).  The intriguing thing is that I remembered them by the term that I could not remember after the flight and the lost notebook referenced above.  The terms had been encoded in episodic memory and were gone - temporarily - but the concepts were recorded in semantic memory - and could, ironically, be reference more that two years later (it is now May of 2021) by those terms because the terms are links to the semantic - meaning level and more firmly encoded idea)

Having just finished Antonio Damasio’s new book, The Strange Order of Things.  It was reviewed by Solms last year and it has helped me learn a bit more about the relationship between the brain and the mind.  I will link to that when I have written that post.  In writing about it, I will learn more – and perhaps become a tad more familiar – learn a bit more of pidgin neuropsychoanalysis – and in reporting on it – and your reading the book, you may advance a bit as well.  We are standing on the edge of a brave new world and I think we need to figure out how to teach about it with enthusiasm so that our candidates can both understand and become excited about the possibilities that exist for connecting across that bridge.  That said, I think that the fluency with which both Solms and Kessler spoke is something that I, and may other analysts will not be able to emulate easily.  It will take considerable work for us to be comfortable enough to speak knowledgeably and competently about both of these worlds in plain English.


I report on Solms presenting the following year (2020) at the same conference, along with Antonio Damasio here.  I have also written about Solms book (2022) The Hidden Spring.

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 Green Book and BlacKkKlansman – Dreaming about Race

We recently went to see The Green Book at a Saturday matinee at a “sort of” alternate movie house in one of the close in suburbs to our city.  The crowd was mostly older – the place was nearly sold out – and it was almost all white.  The crowd seemed to enjoy the movie – and I certainly did.  It was a feel good film that felt genuinely good.  I was willing to overlook a couple of minor continuity problems to just plain enjoy it.  Which shouldn’t have surprised me.  One of the reasons that we went to see it was that Wesley Morris reviewed it for the New York Times and he, like others, was decrying it for being too “feel good”.   Peter Farrelly’s Direction (he of Dumb and Dumber and There’s Something About Mary fame) is up against Spike Lee (BlacKkKlansman) for the directorial Oscar.  Morris is convinced that Farrelly with win because he has made a film that makes us feel good about race (the way Driving Miss Daisy did – a film that won four Oscars in 1989 – while Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing that was nominated for two in the same year, won none).  Morris’s thesis is that history will repeat itself with the Oscar’s as Farrelly’s film is a feel good film about race while BlacKkKlansman does not leave you feeling so good.

What leads to the difference between the two films?  This time, Spike Lee has tried to make a feel good film – spoiler alert – the bad guys blow themselves up and the most racist guy on the police force gets set up in the ending to the film and is headed to the pokey with no parole – but the film does not have a feel good vibe.  I think that this is because the films are both dreams – dreams about race – but they are dreamt by very different people.  The dream of BlacKkKlansman is the dream of a black man – the script is adopted from the memoir of the first black police officer on a particular police force – Ron Stallworth (played by John David Washington).  The story begins with him and it is largely told through his eyes.  It is also directed by Spike Lee who wants us to know that racism is not dead.  More centrally, he wants to communicate what it feels like to live in a racist country, and he dips into a(nother) period of blatant racism (his final montage is of the Charlottesville Unite the Right march and Trump’s pronouncements about it) in order to help us feel what it feels like to be a black man living in a racist era.

Not so in the Green Book.  We start here with the prejudiced white guy.  While the story is largely centered on  Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali), a classically trained and effete jazz pianist, we start by being introduced to Tony Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen) a New York Italian muscle head who works as a bouncer at the Copa Cabana.  Laid off for eight weeks while the club is remodeled, he is hired by Shirley to be his body guard as Shirley and his trio go on a tour of the segregated Deep South.  Tony Lip is a bullshitter (thus his nickname) and he is deeply connected with his family – he is devoted to his wife and two boys and he is connected with his in-laws, talking to them on a daily basis.  His family connections are contrasted with the isolation of Shirley, who is portrayed as living in a strange nether world, estranged from his living brother, cut off from black culture by virtue of having been raised in Russia after he was discovered to be a piano prodigy when he was four, then cut off from classical playing when he returned to the states as he was told that whites would not believe a black could play classical music.  This film, like BlacKkKlansman, dips into a clearly racist time and starkly racist part of the country to help us feel something very different than what Lee would have us feel – to feel hopeful about the possibility of warm and close relationships across racial lines.

Both of these films, ironically then, are buddy films.  BlacKkKlansman jolts along with the two buddies at the center of it – two cops – one black and one Jewish (Ron Stallworth's partner, Philip "Flip" Zimmerman is played by Adam Driver) figuring out how to confront each other but also how to connect with each other.  But their relationship is far from smooth – the black cop is the first black cop on the force and the Jewish guy is conflicted about, surprise surprise, Doing the Right Thing.  It has been some time since I saw BlackKklansman, but my memory of it is that the leader in this pair is Stallworth.  He confronts Zimmerman about his Jewishness in order to help him realize that bringing in the Klan would be a good thing.  Both he and Zimmerman are “passing” – Zimmerman as a goy both at the department and then with the Klan – Stallworth as a non-cop with his girlfriend who is advocating for black overthrow of the power establishment.  In this film about identity, the two main protagonist’s are pretending to be someone they are not.  Then, in the center of the film, they together impersonate Ron Stallworth who interacts on the phone with the voice of the “real” Ron Stallworth and, in person, in the form of Zimmerman.

Green Book is also a buddy film; one of the road trip variety.  Is there any better place to get to know someone than on a long road trip?  There is nothing to do but talk.  That said, the hierarchy in this film, with Shirley as the employer, does contribute a bit of tension at the beginning.  In part because of Tony Lip’s comfort with who he is, which is largely based on his being a member of a close knit and very white, if not a completely assimilated American family (Italian is still spoken among the family members), Tony reaches across the aisle to push Shirley – to get Shirley, whom Tony does not see as being black enough, to try fried chicken – for instance.  But the emphasis in this film is not on the differences – when Tony Lip runs into some mob friends who want to hire him away from Shirley when they are in Atlanta – Shirley who, unbeknownst to Vallelonga is fluent in Italian peeps him out – and when Shirley himself is caught – again spoiler alert – in an anonymous YMCA tryst – Tony Lip finesses what could have been a game changer by referring to his knowledge of the complications he has seen in show business – these men are portrayed as working primarily to understand and help each other.  I think the basis for the difference in the "feel" of the two films is that each of these men is working from a sense of comfort with who it is that he is, while those in BlackKklansman are essentially anxious about their identities.

Both movies are nominally based on actual events.  Both movies take significant liberties with those events.  Lee heightens the drama of the resolution to the KKK case considerably and makes up the bad cop being sent away out of whole cloth.  Stallworth's character has never gone public for fear of KKK retribution, so he is made Jewish by Lee for effect.  Meanwhile, Farrelly embroiders Shirley’s isolation – setting up his being embraced not just by Vallelonga but by Vallelonga’s family.  Both films, then, are visions, dreams, fantasies of what a particular cross racial resolution could look like.  Both include comfort on the part of whites.  The white police force and the white David Duke led KKK are quite comfortable in Klansman, and the Italians – Tony Lip, but the whole clan – are quite comfortable in Green Book (not to mention all the whites that the pair come across in the south – while the blacks are seen hoeing bedraggled soil).  The blacks are uncomfortable in both films.  Stallworth needs to be constantly on his guard – and Shirley is portrayed as isolated and needing support (even as he teaches Tony Lip how to write a proper love letter and is working from a position of cultural superiority).

In both films the discomfort – the thing that the dream needs to address and to process – is experienced by the black protagonist.  In both films the transformative move needs to be made by the black man.  They need to move into the white world in order to be right.  When that move is portrayed from the perspective of the black man, it is an uncomfortable dream – I have to alter the world or the way that I see it in order to live successfully in it.  This is an unpleasant experience – whether I have to incite a riot – as Lee did in Do the Right Thing – or whether Stallworth has to make the white establishment uncomfortable by bringing down the KKK and making his black girlfriend uncomfortable by being an agent of the establishment.  This dream (Lee's/Stallworth's/the viewer's) is a transformative dreams.  These are the kind of dreams we look for in psychoanalysis.  They lay the ground work for our becoming different people.  In analysis, we are looking for someone to give up an immature attachment and become more mature.  But these are not comfortable dreams to have - they involve turmoil and loss as well as promise of something new.  When the dream is the dream of the white man, the discomfort is minor – the black will make the changes in the world or in themselves that will allow them to come into my world.  This will shake me up a bit – I will have to manage my prejudice in new ways – but the vast majority of my world will be unchanged.  That dream feels much better.  It is a dream of reassurance – including that this person whom I thought was my enemy can be my friend – and whether in the guise of Driving Miss Daisy or the Green Book it is a much more comfortable perspective – a wish fulfilling perspective rather than a paradigm threatening one.  We don’t have to wake – as we do with a Lee film – we can stay comfortably asleep.

I was at a panel yesterday at the American Psychoanalytic Association where three black women and a black man were presenting on the subjectivity of being black.  They talked about many things and, at the end of the talk, the first response was from a white man.  I frankly did not understand all that took place, but in his attempt to welcome the panel into his world, the panelists took offense.  When he asked to clarify what he intended, the moderator would not let him do that until after all of the other questions were addressed.  The issue as they described it – I think – was something like who gets to stand where as what.  And they were asserting their ability to stand as black men and women at the podium and to determine what and how the world would be understood.  This was an uncomfortable moment for all – and one that the moderator – a psychoanalyst – was encouraging us to sit with.  It brought into the moment – in the way that happens in the best psychoanalytic moments – an alive moment of affect – of emotion.  And it was therefore pregnant with the discomfort that might lead to changing not just a thought - but something deeper - something in the gut.

Ultimately I think that the question of whom the Academy graces the Oscar to hinges largely on the willingness of the largely white academy to sit with the discomfort of a dream that is asking us to wake up – to realize what it means to live in discomfort and to realize the cost of change – to realize how difficult it will be to live in a multicultural world – versus supporting a dream that allows us to stay asleep - comfortable in the knowledge that this will always be a white man's world and those who want to enter it will have to do the changing. 

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.

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text.

The Favorite - A Period Piece for Our Time

The Favorite, Queen Anne, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Rachel Weisz, Emma Stone, Olivia Colman, Politics

We think we have it bad these days.  Politics creates anxiety and divisiveness and we here in the United States seem, at times, to be the dominant power in the world and it doesn’t seem at all clear who is at the tiller or, when someone is, what their intentions are.  It could be worse.  We could be ruled by a Queen who is in poor health and getting worse, a Queen who faints while addressing parliament, a Queen who is afraid to articulate what she believes and perhaps weirdest of all – a Queen who is more interested in playing with her 17 rabbits than governing.  Now the rabbits.  She has one for each of her now deceased, stillborn or miscarried children.  It is unimaginable to me that someone could have been pregnant 17 times and not have one single living child.  How could she not be obsessed with rabbits?  Her grief must have been huge.  But it does interfere with her governing.  It focuses her on what she has lost and, I think, on how she has failed, and keeps her occupied with trying to fix through fantasy what can’t be undone.  And the country that depends on her is at war and needs her to be making important decisions about how to manage that war and this Queen who is focused not on her capacities and abilities, but on her inabilities and insecurities, is the one that her people must depend on.  And the Queen, in turn, because she is so inconstant, relies on someone with whom we can quickly see she has a very strange relationship indeed – someone who manipulates and shames her and who plays on her manifold insecurities mercilessly.  Ouch.  I guess it could be worse…  (or is this a commentary on our current situation?)

But we know none of this at the beginning of the film.  All we know is that we are travelling with a pretty woman in a coach.  When she catches the eye of an attractive young man, he starts masturbating – she gets thrown out of the coach - she ends up in mud and, well, I’ll just say it, shit, and then walks to the palace (the palace first inhabited by Henry the VIII and a very dingy and dark palace it is – more like a castle -  where she is hoping to be employed by her cousin – the woman with the manipulative relationship with the queen).  Instead of being hired as some kind of lady in waiting, she is sent down to the bowels of the palace to work as a scullery maid because she shows up smelling like shit (quite literally)!  So we are introduced to this madhouse that is the governing place for one of the world powers and we see the top most layers – and the corrupt relationships there – and the bottom most – where our apparently innocent coach travelling woman is tricked into dunking her hand into straight lye by the other scullery maids and has to sleep on a tiny mat surrounded by scores of men and women snoring away on their own mats when they go to bed at night.

Well, it turns out that the pretty girl is named Abigail Hill (played by Emma Stone).  She was born into a royal family and was educated well when she was a child.  She speaks multiple languages and has knowledge of herbal remedies.  Her father, who drank and gambled away the family fortune, lost her in a game of cards to a German man who, she reports, not only had a skinny penis but was stupid enough to believe that women bleed twenty eight days a month.  She may be pretty and look innocent, but she is knowledgeable of both book learning and the ways of the world.  We don’t see it at first, but she is as manipulative as her cousin Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz) who has the ear – and the ability to dominate - Queen Anne (Olivia Colman). 

The reluctant wife, who saw this film with me, was struck (as was I, though I think not as viscerally as it didn’t hit quite so close to home for me on the gender front) by how vulnerable women were in this era of history – the time just before the King Georges start appearing – not too long before our own little revolutionary war (actually, it could have been pretty much any time in our history).  There is some irony in her response in that these three women turn out to be incredibly powerful – they are being portrayed as the most powerful people in their era and this is in many ways a film that celebrates the power of these women.  But I think it is also right on target.  The ways that they are the pawns of men, the ways that they don’t feel themselves to be solidly standing on their own two feet, the ways that they feel precarious in their positions of power end up leading them to rely on each other and to undercut each other in ways that drive the central drama of the film.

Anne, the one with the most powerful hold on legitimate political power, knows that she is the power of the land and asserts that with terrifying certainty – sometimes at the moments when she is most precariously concerned about just what the right thing to do is.  But her insecurities – that are played on like a Stradivarius by Sarah – range from her looks to her health to her capacity to think clearly – and these insecurities undermine the sense of power that she should feel over her own mind.  Without this essentially feeling of security in herself, she is vulnerable to manipulation – and afraid to assert the very real political power that she has.

Abigail, the one with absolutely no real power at the beginning of the film, the woman who is used and abused by everyone from her father to the fellow traveler on the coach, relies on her wits, her knowledge of herbal remedies (to soothe the open lesions on the legs of the Queen) and her ability to appear innocent and wholly taken by another – to love another without reserve and with absolute loyalty – to not just ingratiate herself with the Queen, but to become essential to the Queen’s well-being and stability.  This allows her to rise well above her status as a scullery maid – indeed to become a lady again – and it allows the queen to find her keel – to gain a certainty – especially in her relationship with Sarah – that she has never had before – though at the cost of losing Sarah’s love – a not insubstantial cost.

Sarah appears to have the most solid command of herself – and she uses that to exercise her control over the Queen – but it is a sadistic control – one in which she is publicly subservient – but privately very much in charge of her.  Sarah is married to the person heading the army that is fighting the French – and is ensuring that the Queen provides the material (by doubling the taxes) and political (by keeping the war going rather than settling a peace) support that her husband needs to win the war and bring honor to himself – and by extension to her.  Sarah is also – and Abigail discovers this in a very perilous way – not just the Queen’s manipulative ruler, but her lover.  And the sexual love between Anne and Sarah is yet another venue where their manipulative engagement with each other gets played out.

Abigail’s insertion of herself into Sarah’s relationship with Anne, including by turning her ministrations of Anne’s pained legs into sexual ministrations that turn into a love affair that has a very different feel to it – the feel of Abigail’s veneration of Anne as opposed to Sarah’s mastery over her, supports Anne becoming more certain of herself – more centered in who she is – much less perilously perched atop her own misgivings and uncertainties.  Anne becomes a more decisive (though a much less well informed) ruler.  She feels better about herself and her ruling capacities, though it appears that she is steering the ship of state on the advice of a somewhat childish and certainly ill-informed supportive partner – Abigail.

It is at this point that we see Abigail coming into her own – making the most of the power that she is consolidating.  She takes revenge on some of those who have abused her, forms strange alliances with others, but sets about destroying her one true competitor – Sarah.  Abigail defeats her so soundly and so profoundly that it is, frankly, stunning – both to the audience, but also, I think, to Abigail.  She takes the tail of the tiger – and not only survives but somehow throws it off the boat.  And so Sarah, the most powerful one at the beginning of the movie, is banished.

The resolution of this state of affairs - the installation of a new power behind the throne, is less than satisfying.  Abigail proves to be a much less useful container to Anne’s insecurities when it becomes more apparent that her love is largely a ploy – and Anne must work to maintain the illusion long after Abigail has abandoned trying to maintain it with any rigor.  Anne is now not just beset by physical ills, but it is clear – in a marvelous bit of make-up and acting – that she has suffered a stroke.  The dissolution and bloat that were characteristic of the court before the appearance of Abigail thoroughly infect Abigail – or perhaps she contributes to any even greater dissolution – and when Anne finally realizes the extent of Abigail’s liberties, Anne reasserts herself as Queen, putting Abigail clearly in the role of servant – and the film dissolves into a montage of rabbits – thousands of rabbits.

The director, then, is inviting us to wonder what those rabbits symbolize.  We know that they are symbolic of Anne’s aborted, stillborn and dead children.  They are more broadly symbolic, I think we can safely say, of the ways in which Anne’s intentions to govern – herself and her kingdom, and her last two lovers – are aborted and stillborn.  Despite her immense wealth and power, Anne is (I am aware of thinking at the moment – like the men around her) unable to bring forth legitimate new life.  She does not produce an heir – she is the last of her line and a new royal line must start – but she also is powerless to bring her life and her reign to a close in anything even loosely approximating grace.  She ends up being an isolated, petulant child, ordering around other children, while is she also desperately trying to govern – using a magnifying glass to read documents of state while Abigail lies nearby distracting her.

Sarah had served as a kind of severe and controlling maternal figure who kept Anne in line and allowed her to timidly feel that she was in charge.  But this was a charade.  Both Sarah and Anne knew that Anne was not up for the job of governing herself much less the country, which gave Sarah the illusion of holding the true power so that she experienced herself as governing Anne and therefore the country.  But Anne, I believe, resented that.  She knew that Sarah’s control – Sarah was her oldest friend, confidant and protector – was indeed control – and while it passed for love, it played on her insecurities – deepening and reifying them.  Sarah’s position with Anne was that her love was real because it was honest – she let Anne know both the truth of her loveliness, but also asserted when that was not the case so that Anne could know the cold hard truth about herself and the world.  Sarah believed that her love - the love of limits and truth telling - was the love that Anne truly needed.

Abigail’s love – though largely feigned – was more deeply desired by Anne.  And, whether real or feigned, it had a real, if temporary, effect on Anne.  She became a more effective ruler of herself and, oddly and by coincidence, of the country.  Using Abigail’s metaphor of a party to understand warfare proved prescient while being far from a standard military tactic.  The success of Abigail’s supporting Anne’s confidence was that it allowed Anne to throw off the yoke of Sarah’s rule and assume her own.  Even without the stroke (which I think can be understood as a symbol of the impact of losing Sarah on Anne) she was paralyzed in the wake of losing real if self-serving counsel.  Abigail’s promise of greater certainty – of more balanced self and country rule – turned out to be illusory.  A false promise.

If I were, for a moment, to do violence to what I think is a piece of art and use it to my own ends – I might do that in two ways.  In the first, I would think of Sarah and Abigail as two therapists/advisors of Anne.  They both, unfortunately, have their own interests in mind and so both “treatments” are doomed from the get-go.  None the less, Sarah’s “treatment” of Anne is a treatment that is based on giving her the insight that she needs to govern.  We could think of this as a authoritative model of psychotherapy where the patient is not capable of managing her life, so we do it for her.  When it is our interest rather than the patient’s that is at the fore, the treatment is not a treatment, but an imposition. It is the relationship of Sarah to Anne that the vehicle for the real “treatment” – and that treatment is to undermine the well-being of the Queen, for it is only when the Queen is uncertain that Sarah can feel powerful – and that is Sarah’s true goal.  So the treatment is really a gas lighting. 

If we think of Abigail’s “treatment” as a more modern, relational treatment, it too fails, not because it does not offer insight and support but because it, too, is corrupt and aimed at helping Abigail achieve power – not helping the Queen do so.  Abigail does not offer genuine love of Anne – and she does not believe in Anne’s power to function autonomously – she just believes that her own life will be better if Anne believes herself to be more competent than she actually is.

In a world that is short on resources – and even the richest courts in the world can be remarkably short on the resources that really matter – the putting of others and the putting of the country before the needs of oneself – the ability to support the autonomous functioning of the other – can become the most needed resource that is in the shortest supply (and this can be true of psychotherapy when a patient cries out for direction, but really needs to learn how to assert self-control).  When women are not empowered – when any of us are disempowered - it is difficult to truly think of what is in the best interests of all – we tend to look out for ourselves.  I think this may be the implication of what the reluctant wife was seeing as the consequence of the uncertain fate for women.

So I promised to do violence to this art in two ways – and the second is to think of it as an intentionally anachronistic piece – something that I think is advertised to the viewer not with the sexual shenanigans (We watched a piece called A Very English Scandal the other night about male homosexual hijinx among the ruling elite of Britain in the 1970s – the more things change the more they might be the same); the anachronistic quality of the film is advertised with a dance number where the highly scripted and tightly choreographed dancing all but becomes a modern street dance – we can think of this movie as a commentary on those currently in power in various places in the world, but the replacing our current rulers with others just like them has the potential to be every bit as toxic.  Just choosing women whom we would herald as saviors doesn't solve the problem.  Should those women prove to be as short on psychological resources – as limited in their sense of comfort and certainty about their personal power – we would be in the same mess.  We would have rulers who are incapable of being confident enough to assert their power usefully, including being confident enough to wonder about how the world might be rather without really knowing rather than to assert how it will and must needs be in order to manage their own insecurity. 

What this underscores, then, is the importance of assessing, in a republic, the character of those that we elect to office.  Ultimately we need people who have enough self-confidence to be able to govern effectively.  But distinguishing between earned, solid self confidence that is based on realizing that the world is a complicated place and one where, as Abraham Lincoln pointed out, we should be praying that God is on our side – rather than being certain (or telling him) that he is, from the self confidence that comes from an absolute certainty that one’s own position, based on one’s own idiosyncratic views of the world, is always right, can be a difficult call. Anne was always able, because she was an absolute ruler, to assert her rule.  And she knew that once she said, “I have spoken”, that was the law of the land.  In a democracy, such a position is not possible.  We are always at the mercy of shifting views and changing opinions.  That has become a much more complex reality with the changing and increasing numbers of information sources, and our recognition of character as an electorate is going to be sorely tried as we are confronted with the wider range of the humanity of those who would lead us.  We will have to elect imperfect, but therefore more flexible and helpful leaders.

To access a post looking at similar issues in the last season of the House of Cards link here.

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