Inception: A movie about dreams gone awry

Inception is a movie about dreams that tried to accomplish too much.  Unfortunately I think it overreached and was not quite able to deliver on all the threads that it provided.  So why would I ask you to consider this film – why would I write about it?  I think because it is a film that I thought had great promise.  I assume that you are here because you, too, thought that it had great promise – and you may think that it delivered on it.  I will talk a little bit about why I think it failed as a film – about how the narrative focus got lost, and then I will talk about why, despite its being a failed narrative, it is still a compelling movie.  But I will also propose that there is a danger of the allure of the visual promise of film can interfere with our understanding of how dreams – and movies – work.  Dreams and movies involve using images as symbols – but I think the visual richness of this film and the concrete approach to the material drew us into a story that was more concrete than would have been ideal.

Inception is about dreams.  What could be better fodder for a psychoanalyst’s interests?  And, at its heart, it is also about psychotherapy.  But the psychotherapy is a weird, coercive psychotherapy.  The implanting of ideas in a person’s unconscious, through interacting with that person’s dreams, leads them to change their lives.  This is not unlike what takes place in actual psychotherapy.  There, though, the therapist and the patient work together to think about how different concepts might be integrated into the mind, and therefore dreams, in new ways, so that the person can function more healthily.  But the twist is that not only is this idea being implanted without the person’s knowledge, but it is not a health oriented wish, rather it is a diabolical plot to undermine the other person’s functioning.

The movie’s sci-fi premise is that dreams can be directly accessed through a contraption – and maybe with the help of a drug – and that we can join another person’s mind and then substitute our own architecture of a dream for the architecture of the other person’s mind and dreams.  The resulting dreamscapes that are created on the screen are tremendous.  They are rich, complex, intriguing and powerful variants on reality that feel, well, dream like.  We are privy to vivid but also lucid dreams that are being controlled not by the dreamer but by an outside agent.  They are also dreams that are filled with action filled tropes.  This is explained as the host dreamer trying to get rid of the invading dreamer’s ideas.

The action plot of the film feels shopworn.  It is borrowed from Mission Impossible – both the TV series and the films, Ocean’s Eleven, and a thousand other thrillers that feature a good guy – Dom Cobb (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) building a team of specialists to take out the bad guy.  But in this case, the bad guy isn’t so bad at all.  He is the son of an industrialist who has created a virtual monopoly and his father’s rival hires the hero – or coerces him really, to convince the son to destroy his father’s legacy when his father dies so that the competitor can be competitive with the companies.  OK, maybe we can get behind the idea of undoing a monopoly and have an antihero take this down – but we now have too many people’s psyches in play.  Who should we focus on?

The interplay is between the rival industrialist (Saito played by Ken Watanabe) and the industrialist’s son (Robert Michael Fischer played by Cillian Murphy).  We inhabit both of their dreamscapes – or distorted variances of them, following Dom Cobb and his accomplices through them.  Yet neither of them is the person of interest.  We are distracted by them, though.  Their worlds are interesting.  We want to know more – and for a while think we will learn more – about the son – and his struggles and who he is.  We spend the better part of three dreams in his mind – even if the architecture is provided by yet another red herring – Ariadne played by Ellen Page, the architect hired by Dom Cobb to build the spaces.  She is named after the maiden who tended the Minotaur’s labyrinth, she is young and beautiful – and she is the one who gets to know Dom Cobb’s flaw and to help him work to heal it.  One might think this healing would happen through love – and I think it does – but Dom and Ariadne do not become the central love pair in this film.  Ariadne is just another piece of fifth business left on the road side of this complex film.

The central love relationship in this film turns out to be a creepy one.  Dom Cobb had been married to a woman, Mal Cobb (Marion Cotillard), with whom he spent years building a dream scape with endless buildings.  We enter this dreamscape, and there are two qualities of it that are remarkable – the buildings in it are mechanical replications.  It is a massive empty city that is modern and faceless.  It is dead.  At its center is Mal’s home from her childhood.  In it lies the central secret that she is hiding.  Presumably an event – presumably traumatic – from her childhood.  This event, whatever it is, is locked in her inner world, and has kept her from coming to life.  Despite Dom’s love, and despite their having had two children that Dom deeply loves, Mal is drawn inevitably back to the dream world – to the sterile fantasy world and the hidden trauma in it that she has created with Dom. 

When Dom and Mal awakened from their dream world (which is often achieved by dying in the dream) and returned to the “real” world, Mal was not convinced that it was real – and she wanted to return to the dream world they created together.  She did this by committing suicide in the real world – inviting Dom to join her.  When he didn’t, she had constructed things so that it appeared that Dom had killed her.  Dom then had to run from the United States and from his children because he was wanted for Mal’s murder and he could not prove that he hadn’t done it.  Saito is able to convince Dom to work for him by promising to “fix” the legal system so Dom can return home.

Dom ultimately must, with Ariadne’s help, say goodbye to Mal, whom he has been keeping alive in his dream world.  I think that this situation is a difficult psychological problem.  It is hard to say goodbye to any love – but it is especially hard to say goodbye to a love that was never really alive.  I think this is particularly hard to do because the lover (Dom) expects that his love will be able to bring his love (Mal) to life.  When that doesn’t happen, when she dies – especially through suicide – it is harder to give up because the basis of the relationship has always been hope – hope that the other will come around.  And the lover has always been psychologically been dead – so her death – or the ending of the relationship – doesn’t feel that different than the state before – she is still dead – and he still hopes for her life.

This kind of relationship – a relationship in which the lover is in love with someone who is dead – or unable to love him or her back in any meaningful way – is one that feels oddly alive when inside it, but from the outside it is apparent to others that the deadly relationship is one that sucks the life out of the lover.  So I suppose that the failure of the relationship with Ariadne to bloom makes some sense – Dom is dead to anyone – except perhaps to his children, to whom he has no access.

It is ironic, then, that in a film about the inner lives of people – a film where we have such vivid pictures of what occurs in their minds – we end up seeing the lives of the dreamers through other people's eyes - in the case of the relationship between Dom and Mal we see it primarily through the eyes of Ariadne.  She ends up being the true therapist in this movie.  She helps Dom realize that his connection with Mal is not one that is sustaining him, but one that is killing him.  By freeing Dom she is able then to help him be able to free Saito, who in turn comes through on his promise to free Dom from his legal entanglements. 

The film ends with a note of ambiguity.  Has Dom awakened from his dream or is he living in a dream world?  Are his children, with whom he is reunited, alive?  Or was his relationship with Mal the real one?  This is not completely resolved – and I think the question that is being asked is ambiguous enough that it allows us to answer it based on our predilections.  Do we think that the internally enlivening relationship with a dead other is real living?  Or, are we in favor of living with real, living, mutually loving others?  This is a weird dichotomy – but the movie suggests that the children can remain in a kind of suspended animation, apparently neither negatively impacted by our absence – even death – and that they wait patiently for us to return.  Of course, this is a dream.  I think that we have to remain engaged in the real ongoing lives of those around us, especially our children, even when we are caught up in the depleting parts of our lives.

I think this movie fails, at least for me, because I think that the dreamers – the writer/producer/director, the actors, and those who were so successfully involved with crafting this film – may have lost track that the film – and the dreams within it – is/are not real, but rather are symbols of something greater.    The movie seems so real – so immediate and so vivid – and so tied to reality.  This movie fails in kind of the opposite way that the first surrealist movies about dreams failed.  Those movies presented dreams in all their craziness – and they were all but nonsensical.  This movie does the opposite.  It explains what is happening in the dreams – and the plan of the dream is so clear – so concrete – that the complexity of the dream does not quite stay open.  I get that the director was afraid of losing his audience, but in the process he may have not allowed them to engage as much as they might have with this very rich material.  He leaves us with a minor mystery - a nagging one - but one that is dichotomous.  Dom is in a real world or a dreamscape.  Real dreams - and movies that mimic them - leave us with many more unanswered questions - and with hints about how to address them.

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Attachment and Psychoanalysis – a new vision out of a research discussion group.

Psychoanalysis is a profession that involves lots of talking.  There is the talking – and listening – that an analyst does with his or her patients.  There is also the talking that takes place in supervision and in classes and in other interactions where psychoanalysts are talking about what it is that they do.  Then twice a year (or, in some cases, more often), they get together to talk some more at conventions.  One form of that talking at conventions is discussion groups, which are just that, discussions of aspects of being a psychoanalyst.

This year there was a discussion group that I co-led that created a minor epiphany that I think is worth sharing.  The discussion group was on psychoanalytic research and I presented a model of what happens based on listening to recorded psychoanalyses.  This model, which emerged out of a factor analysis of the data that we generated while listening to recorded analyses, is pretty straightforward.  The model suggests that psychoanalysts and their patients, when all is going well, engage in a kind of parallel play.  While the psychoanalyst listen as a psychoanalyst – meaning that he or she listens to and comments on what is happening between themselves and the patient – the patient focuses on talking about the things in their lives that are problematic.  And when this is going on, the patients are able to engage more and more deeply in describing and understanding the worlds that they live in.

After I walked through this model with a little, but not a great deal, more detail than I just did in the last paragraph (I have included a picture of the model here), a member of the discussion group noted that this is what happens in a psychoanalysis, even after we have made the “relational turn.”  What he meant by this is that there has been a huge transition in how we think about psychoanalysis since the time of Freud.  Freud, who was the only bona fide psychoanalyst who never went through his own analysis, emphasized drives and defenses as a means of understanding the human psyche – and he did not include the drive to attach to others in his theorizing.

As we have watched infants, and as we have gone through our own analyses, we have discovered that we do, in fact, work hard to attach ourselves to people who are important to us.  We have also learned that it is not just the insights that we receive from psychoanalytic interpretation that lead to improved functioning, but it is the quality of the relationship with the analyst that is related to improved functioning (this is part of the relational turn).  This could lead us to suppose that a psychoanalyst should become “touchy feely”.  They should be focused on helping the patient/analysand feel comfortable and warm and, perhaps, connected to the analyst. 

What the person looking at the data was saying, though, is that the quality of the relationship is highest not when the analyst is focused on making the patient feel connected to the analyst, but that the patient feels most connected to the analyst when the analyst is doing psychoanalytic work.  When we engage in parallel play – being empathically attuned to the patient in the context of trying to understand him or her better – then the patient feels able to engage in the difficult work of thinking about how it is that they are related to the world in which they live - and can explore the connections here more deeply.  It is not that the patient becomes dependent on the actual relationship with the analyst (though that is certainly something that occurs), but that the patient becomes dependent upon having a place in which they can function autonomously because the analyst is attending to the stuff that normally interferes with their being able to think clearly about the stuff in their minds and in their lives and how those things interact.

Even after the relational turn, it is the case that it is the support of the autonomous functioning of the patient that appears to help the patient feel and be more autonomously competent.  Not a bolt of lightning, but a piece of illumination that I found helpful.  When I mentioned it to a research colleague who was not at the meetings he noted that it is interesting that though we know that psychoanalysis works, we still have a great deal to learn how it works.

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Carol Gilligan becomes a member of the American Psychoanalytic Association

Carol Gilligan, who wrote an essay titled In a Different Voice in 1968, would go on to publish a book with the same name using the title essay as a central element.  In that book, she spoke not with the faux objective passive voice of the social scientist, but with a personal, deeply felt subjective voice that rang in the ears of women and men for decades, leading many people to rethink what it means to be a woman – what it means to be a man, and what it means to be human.  In honor of this and the other work that she has done, the American Psychoanalytic Association made her an honorary member and she, in turn, agreed to deliver the plenary address at the meeting of the association this year.

Gilligan spoke to an enthusiastic roomful of psychoanalysts with, as a female friend of mine sitting next to me noticed with some pride, not a hint of make-up on.  She was, most definitely, herself, including on the high-def screens that allowed us all to have a front row seat in her talk.  And she talked about another person who is very much herself – Greta Thunberg – who has taken the world by storm by being herself – and talking with passion about the world that she cares so deeply about.  Gilligan helped us see that our attraction to Thunberg comes from Thunberg's ability to hold onto the truths that an 8 year old experiences – Thunberg was first exposed to a film about global warming when she was in second grade and this experience precipitated a depressive experience for her.

Unlike her peers who learned to get along to go along as she entered puberty, Thunberg held onto her passionate little girl voice.  Gilligan talked about how Thunberg’s parents started altering their behaviors related to their carbon footprint because they saw that she was not consoled by their empty promises that "everything will work out".  Perhaps in part because of her parents responsiveness, though maybe also because she is on the autistic spectrum, Thunberg’s tenaciously intense ability to speak truth to power, has led her to rally people like no one else has been able to do to the cause of saving the planet.

This latter day version of Gilligan’s own assertion of her voice is one that Gilligan found evidence for in the story of Eve in the Garden of Eden.  But she had to dig for it.  There are two creation stories in Genesis.  One of them is about God creating the heavens and earth and creating humans in his own image – male and female he created them.  Then a second story gets crammed onto the first.  In this story, God creates Adam, but Adam is lonely.  He needs someone who will be an Ezer Kenegdov in the (transliterated) Hebrew.  This term – which is really straightforward – it means someone who will push back against – someone who will assertively question – has been translated by the King James’ version as a “helpmate”.  Well, the tenor of Ezer Kenegdov, according to Gilligan, is a bit more than someone who holds the ladder while the man fixes something – it is a person who asserts her position with her own voice.

Gilligan traced her own ability to articulate her voice back to her childhood.  Her mother took her to a class on how to raise children based on psychoanalytic principles, and the teacher proposed that her mother support Gilligan being able to call attention to things that need attention – that she should support rather than suppress Gilligan’s voice.

Of course, when Gilligan discovered psychoanalysis as an adult, she discovered that it contained all kinds of crazy things about women that were the result of men talking about the minds of women.  Her work became a clarion call for other women to take up the psychoanalytic mantle and shake it – to begin to assert – in a woman’s voice – what a woman’s subjectivity was actually all about.  The standing ovation that her address brought was a testament to her having served as an Ezer Kenegdov to an entire discipline without ever having been a member of it.  What a potent voice. 

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We the People - A Response to the Decision of the Senate to Forego Evidence

The Senate's decision to forego seeking witnesses or evidence in the trial of President Trump appalled The Reluctant Son and me.  We have sent the following letter to the editor of our local newspaper.  I don't expect them to publish it, but I am pleased that we were able to articulate our thoughts - and that we still live in a country where, for now, we can continue to do that.

We The People

Alan Dershowitz

In arguably the most significant moment of his distinguished career, trial law expert Alan Dershowitz stated that “If a President thinks his re-election is in the public interest, anything he does in pursuit of his re-election is legal.” This misreading of the constitution was dangerous not only because it elevated the president above the law, but because it offered an invitation to the Senate to lift itself above the law as well.

The Republican Party, headed by Donald Trump, is threatening those Senators who do not vote against additional testimony, documents and ultimately Trump's removal with withholding support of their re-election efforts (in an eerie echo of Trump’s threat to withhold funds from the Ukraine).  Senators, whose constitutional duty is to act as impartial Jurors in a trial, have chosen to knuckle under to this threat.  They are voting for their own self-interest as if it were the interest of the country.   Despite his admission that the President’s conduct was both illegal and impeachable, Marco Rubio voted against further evidence and will presumably vote against removal, arguing that removal would not be in the best interest of the country.  

We fought a Revolutionary War to get out from under a tyranny that was not answerable to the electorate.  The Senators have urged us to express our beliefs at the ballot box.  We should do that not just with the President, but with the Senators who have skirted their duty and held themselves above the law. 

Rob Portman, who was either duped or actively colluded to cover up the withholding scheme, did not recuse himself, as David Pepper urged him to do in our local paper, from a trial in which his behavior was implicated. Realizing that the calling of witnesses would submit the president’s (as well as their own) actions to further investigation, Portman and the other Senate Republicans decided to admit that wrongdoing had already been proven but that it didn’t merit removal.

Though an adept political move, this action ultimately gives free rein to the office of the presidency, in turn violating the system of checks and balances Portman and his colleagues swore to uphold. 

Mitch McConnell has orchestrated a jury fixing with the president.  

Neither Portman nor McConnell deserve to serve in the body whose job is to “Advise and Dissent” and both should be defeated when they run for re-election.   We must return the government of the country to the people of the country.  

No individual or institution is above the law in the United States of America.  

We The People must become the final jury.




I posted this as a political comment to the paper.  In the context of psychoanalysis, I think we can learn that Alan Dershowitz, like Trump himself, says what he really means - and then, when he is caught at it, he retracts it.  But his audience hears and understands that his retractions are not his true message.  It is like the buly who sucker punches the other kid and then says he didn't mean to and asks for forgiveness.  Well, he did mean to.  I think Dershowitz is telling the Senators, "You, like the President, can do anything you want to do."  And I think they have heard him.  The question is whether we agree with that.  Are we going to be the kids who vicariously glory in the strength of the bully - or are we going to be what one of my colleagues calls the "Moral Rebel", who takes the uncomfortable position that the bully is NOT repentant, he is wrong and needs to be contained.  He is not made of the same stuff as the other kids and shouldn't be allowed to play with them.  At this point, the question of whether we have the ability to function as the Moral Rebel is too close to call. 

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