Sherlock: What is the nature of healing?

 Sherlock, Sherlock Holmes, Benedict Cumberbatch, Series, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Mystery, Psychopathy, Psychopathology

 

Usually I find a movie made from a book to be disappointing.  The book seems so much richer – it is filled with inner thoughts, but perhaps most importantly, I have seen – envisioned – the environs so clearly and accurately that the representation that is on the screen is disappointing, sometimes jarringly so.  One exception to this was the Harry Potter series of movies.  Somehow, they seem to have gotten the visuals right enough – they weren’t the same as mine, but they were somehow proper.

I liked reading Sherlock Holmes books when I was a kid.  I didn’t love them – I liked them.  Detective novels, mysteries, have never been my genre.  But Sherlock I admired.  He could observe things and make deductions from his observations.  I think I saw him as very smart and, growing up in a family that admired smarts, I admired him and wanted to emulate him, but feared that I could not.  He was too reserved to be the kind of person that a wild thinker – an impulsive individual – like me - could ever grow into being.  I also found the stories somewhat formulaic and lost interest in his ability to deduce things from simple observation.  It felt like a nice party trick, and I think I was frankly too young to understand the backstory that was also being told that knit together the individual elements of the manifold cases that were presented, so I did not become a fan.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered the series Sherlock, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock and  Martin Freeman as Dr. John Watson.  Admittedly, the visuals from my 10-year-old brain have faded quite a bit in the ensuing decades, but I still vividly recall the sea of red headed men waiting to apply for a job in one story.  What is refreshing about this series is that it creates a novel palette – not only does it update the London Environs, its characters are contemporary with contemporary concerns, and this, I think, humanizes the story.  This is an instance of a movie making characters more, not less, robust – more three dimensional, at least for me.  Even though I had not been a fan, I recognized something of the characters in their contemporary versions.  I vaguely recalled that Dr. Watson had been a military doctor, and, while it never occurred to my ten-year-old self that two gentlemen roommates might be considered gay – that might have been a private thought of an older reader; here it is a theme the series publicly repeatedly plays with.

But what was most gratifying is that these two men are not stodgy at all in the ways that I had imagined them from the book – yes, they are middle aged, living in London and solving crimes with no apparent compensation (which could have been a sign to an older reader that this is partly a fantasy), but the two of them are more like impulsive little boys recklessly careening about town, Sherlock showing off his brilliance and, in the process, alienating everyone within earshot, and John being well intentioned and smart, but very much put off balance by this creative ball of energy – Sherlock – that only he and their landlady seem to be able to tolerate much less embrace, and he finds himself consistently apologizing for Sherlock and trying, as best he is able, to manage him.

The series is four seasons long with three or so episodes per season.  The reason to blog about it has less to do with the visceral pleasure of the series, which is considerable (this is good television), and more to do with what I think the central question that the series asks.  I think this series wrestles with the question of what evil is.  And I think it is wrestling with a particular type of evil – cruelty.  “What is the basis of cruelty?” ultimately becomes the question that is addressed in the final season – and I have to say that the final episode contains so much cruelty that the reluctant wife, who enjoyed the series as a whole – wished she had not seen it, even though we were both enthralled and couldn’t wait for it.  She said, “There is no redeeming artistic value for being that cruel,” by which she meant being that cruel to the viewer.

I will try to avoid spoilers while talking about the underlying dynamics.  I don’t know that I will be successful.  I will also acknowledge that the elder reluctant stepdaughter let me in on some of the back and forth between the writers and the public – the fanbase – and some of the concerns about whether the writers respected their audience.  I think this question is relevant.  Less relevant is the information that this was Cumberbatch’s break out role and Freeman, who was forever endearing in Love Actually, is still physically endearing and uses the same physical humor but adapts it to playing a very different role.

There are three other central characters in the series: Mycroft Holmes (played by Mark Gatiss who is also a co-creator), Sherlock’s older brother; Jim Moriarty (Andrew Scott), Sherlock’s arch enemy; and a mystery character, another Holmes sibling, in the final season.  Each of these characters are critical to fleshing out the concept of cruelty.   Each of the characters is also a member of a very exclusive stratum: they are members of the upper classes (or live as if they belong to that class – without having to earn a living) and are each much more intelligent – and manipulative – than the people around them.

One implicit question that the show then asks is whether the brand of cruelty that is depicted and explored here is garden variety evil or whether it is a special class of evil; for instance, a type of cruelty that is only available to those with the high class intellect, cold hearts, and substantial means to play out this type of cruelty.  Indeed, is this a type of cruelty that only the Brits, the most brutal of all colonial societies, could mete out?  And, indeed, is it the type of cruelty that only high class Brits – those who are raised by nannies, or wish they had been – could mete out?

Sherlock describes himself as a “high functioning psychopath”.  Technically, psychopathy is characterized by a lack of empathy – an emotional connection with a victim would interfere with the desire to harm the victim – though in fact there is, I think, in lived psychopathy of the cruel sort a great deal of empathy – the psychopath, especially the sadistic psychopath, enjoys the feeling of mastery over the terror that he evokes in the other.  There is a sense of not being at the mercy of forces that are outside of one’s control but instead being the master of the experience of terror that others are having.

While we are diagnosing the characters, Sherlock could also be considered to be Aspergerish – or, using more contemporary language – being on the spectrum.  He has the cold logical quality of Spock, but also Spock’s emotional transparency – his feelings are every bit as on display as his brilliance, even though he himself – perhaps through denial or simple thick headedness – does not seem to be nearly as aware of this as those around him, including the audience.  This is, I think, part of what makes watching him feel so compelling instead of repulsive – we want to reach out; as Mrs. Wilson, the landlady/housekeeper who has a history of being married to a drug lord, does and as Watson constantly has to.  We want to take Sherlock under our wing and soothe the disturbance which he radiates but seems oblivious to.

His older brother is cut of the same cloth, but instead of careening without regard to the ways in which his actions affect others, as Sherlock does, Mycroft is cautious.  Arguably brighter than his brother, he is not the lone wolf his brother is.  Quite the contrary, he is a company man.  He serves the Queen and uses the resources of the government to keep an eye on his brother – to keep him out of trouble.  Mycroft sees in Sherlock the potential for great evil, apparently because of Sherlock’s obsessive interest in solving cases.  What Mycroft doesn’t see is that keeping Sherlock’s past from him confuses him rather than protects him and makes him more vulnerable rather than less so.

Moriarity, in this mix, is utterly unhinged.  He is truly a psychopath without a connection to others of any sort other than the power that he exercises over them.  Insanely self-obsessed, his toxic narcissism leads him to demonstrate how uniquely evil he is.  He engages Sherlock in play, promising to harm people if Sherlock cannot solve his puzzles fast enough.  And Sherlock takes the bait.  Indeed, play is a consistent theme in the series – not just between Sherlock and Moriarity, but also between Sherlock and John and Sherlock and Mycroft – but it does have the feeling of English boarding school play – where cruelty is woven into something that should be an analogue for harming others – not the thing itself.

I am reminded of a friend who went to Harvard.  He said there was a consistent experience that he observed there among the students; it was a sense of here I am, one of the best and the brightest, I am among the best and brightest – is this all there is?  There is a kind of disappointment that, despite our tremendous gifts, we are still human, and still vulnerable to ordinary human experience.  By being outrageously cruel, perhaps we gain control over our surroundings and experience ourselves as being god like – and therefore a bit immortal.

Moriarity’s compulsion to cruelty is presented as a kind of fun house version of Sherlock’s drive to solve crimes.  Sherlock is drawn to the game – to figuring out what is going on – by a sense of boredom.  He turns down cases that are too easy.  We get the sense that he is both tortured by his brilliance, but also only happy when exercising it.  His intelligence is an itch that constantly needs to be scratched.  Moriarity, on the other hand, seems to be entirely interested in setting up the game.  In doing this, he is untethered and enjoys exercising his power to terrorize as a means of keeping his boredom and disdain at the human condition (and perhaps his own mortality) at bay.

Sherlock is exposed, when John marries, as deeply connected not just to Watson, but to Watson’s wife.  This gives the lie – perhaps – to the psychopath label.  Isn’t one a psychopath not because he cannot empathize – we are all born with the potential to care for others (though that would be a question - if Sherlock were born on the autistic spectrum might his genetics inhibit his ability to empathize?).  Might we all be generally equipped to empathize at the get go, but learn to override that ability – to not attend to that information rather than not having that information at least theoretically accessible? Is Sherlock deeply defended against how deeply he cares about others?  If so, this, on some level, he must realize, is his kryptonite, so he works to build walls against experiencing his concern for others, all the time expressing that concern by taking on interesting cases – ones that require that he think about the motives that drive people to be cruel and help him to provide those who have been wronged some measure of justice – some sense that the cruel person has paid for their cruelty.  

Holmes’ interest in mysteries is, it turns out, rooted deeply in the central mystery in his life, a mystery that has haunted him since he was quite young.  I am not going to reveal it – it is too delicious (and cruel) to spoil it if you haven’t seen the series all the way through, yet.  I will let you know that Mycroft plays a hand in keeping this mystery from him, but most telling, it is Sherlock’s own mind that has deceived him across the course of his life.  He is not just emotional disconnected from others, he is deeply disconnected from himself.

So, it makes sense that Sherlock is forever searching for clues – making sense of every everyday mystery that surrounds him, as if he is reassuring himself that he will not be deceived again.  He blames his deception on his senses and his reason, and he tunes them to a fever pitch in order that they (he blames his senses, I think) will never disappoint him again.  His ability to piece together clues reassures him not just that his senses can’t deceive him, but that he can’t deceive himself (and, in this, it turns out he is gravely mistaken).

In this internal battle, Sherlock is a lot like Freud.  Freud imagined that we have veridical memories of all that has taken place in our lives.  It probably didn’t hurt that Freud had a prodigious memory – he spoke English so fluently that he enjoyed Shakespeare without translation (Shakespeare is an author that I, as a native speaker, struggle with).  But there were many mysteries in Freud’s early life – indeed in all of our lives – that he, and we, using his techniques and ideas, tried and try to ferret out.

But back to Sherlock.  The essential problem is that memory is, as Elizabeth Loftus has famously (and sometimes infamously) reported to us, transformable.  We do not recollect so much as reconstruct. Freud, according to Mark Solms, suggests that memory’s primary task is to predict.  We gather information not so much to know what has happened as to figure out what will happen.  So, Sherlock stuffs his mind with facts which he uses to solve crimes – and famously avoids those facts that aren’t relevant to crime solving (in an example from the original, which shows up in the series, Holmes does not know that the earth revolves around the sun because it couldn't help him solve a crime).  Sherlock therefore imagines the mind as being limited.  It has only so much RAM and he doesn’t want to clog it up with useless information.  This, by the way, also suggests that memories can be jettisoned forever, Sherlock believes he can not know (while Freud believes we cannot not know). 

Apparently Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was a physician himself, modelled Sherlock on one of his medical school professors who would diagnose his patients not from an interview, but from a careful physical exam as they walked into the examining room, making all kinds of uncanny deductions about their habits, aptitudes and failings based on their physical presentation.  I remember once that someone at the Menninger Hospital commented that David Rapaport, a psychologist and psychoanalyst who studied psychological testing there, hoped that we would one day be able to diagnose someone “by the part in their hair.”

Sherlock’s ability to take others as objects, and to divine their intentions – to dive deeply into their souls in search of motivation – is, it turns out, the result of having been deceived.  His affections for another was the catalyst for the one who felt spurned to do horrible things.  I am being somewhat coy here, and this is where the backstory re-emerges.  The authors of the miniseries publicized that the elements of the backstory were present in the earlier seasons and the fourth season should have be soluble by the fans.  The fans dutifully concocted theories about what had happened but, as in all good mysteries, they were apparently and generally wrong.  Unfortunately, the authors expressed disdain for their fans, and the fans cried foul – stating that they had been had.

But isn’t that the nature of mystery?  Do we ever quite nail who the perpetrator was until things get narrowed down significantly and couldn’t it often have been someone else and we are right more by chance than by really figuring out the motives of the killer?  Perhaps that is because we are all capable of murder.  We do all have the motivation to kill everyone else in the room at any given moment, but we are held back by a variety of forces.  On the most primitive level, we fear retribution or censure for doing something bad or wrong.  On a more advanced level, we are ambivalent about most anyone who is important enough for us to want to kill them – we also love them and would miss them if they are gone.  But perhaps most importantly we have learned to manage our ambivalence – in a whole variety of ways.  We bury ourselves in our work or convince ourselves that we are all working towards common goals and that we need everybody on board to reach them.

I think that Sherlock is the more interesting of the characters because he is closest to losing the ties that bind us to each other.  His interest in crime seems to be a thinly veiled attempt to sublimate his interest in murder – he seems to over rely on the defense of reaction formation; working in the area that is his biggest interest and the thing that he most needs to defend against.  Try as he might, he ultimately can’t jettison the memory of what happened.  He transforms it – he reconstructs it into something different – but, in his heart, he retains the essence of the primal betrayal.

Holmes, then, becomes a very Freudian character.  He has deeply buried his long-lost memory, but it will out, showing up in ways that shape his very character and his choice of profession.  He keeps picking away at the thing that he would pretend is gone.  He does this incessantly, constantly and, apparently unconsciously.  The need for maintaining this unconscious schism is revealed in the final episode.

There was talk of an additional season after what proved to be the final season, but there would, in my mind, be no need for it.  Holmes has been cured.  He no longer needs to keep his secret and to fondle it at the same time.  If he were to continue to use his gift to solve crimes, it would be an empty exercise, not the one driven by the compulsive need to know.  The tragedy has been resolved, the tension is gone, and, as Freud famously said of the result of psychoanalytic treatment when the neurosis has been cured, Holmes has been freed to lead a life of ordinary misery.

What we might have witnessed would have been the processing of his grief.  In solving the central mystery in his life, Holmes would have come to realize that it involved losing not just one, but two of the most important people in his life.  These losses would be caused by something out of his control – the envy of one for the other.  To connect with more than one person presents a particular kind of danger – the danger of the Oedipal triangle – and part of what this series shows is that the Oedipal triangle does not just play out with our parents but with every significant set of relationships in our lives.  By virtue of being in contact with others we imperil ourselves, but we cannot live without those important others, so we lead lives of restraint, hoping that the intensity of our affections does not end up causing us unintended consequences.

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