Suits; American TV series; Psychology; Psychoanalysis; Psychoanalytic/Psychological understanding of suits and the law.
Suits is a nine season, 10-16 episode per season drama series that has recently been streaming. It is the first such long series that I have watched from beginning to end (I never made it to the end of Mad Men, for instance), though I have made it to the end of shorter, series – both in time of episode and number of episodes, including Succession, another long drama series.
When the Reluctant Wife first proposed that we watch it, I was intrigued in part because the Reluctant Son is in law school and I was curious to see how the law was being portrayed – to see what I might learn about the law. Spoiler alert – the characters play fast and loose with the law – and the script frequently leaves big holes in it about how conclusions are reached and what the legal issues actually are. The characters seem to be explaining the law – or, more frequently, the reasons why the law would force someone to do something they don’t want to do so they settle – but I learned very little about the law from the program. The Reluctant Son was a much more reliable source about a world that I know very little about.
Not only are the descriptions of the law thin, so is the entire premise of the show. Mike Ross (Patrick J. Adams) is a kid who is doing a favor for a friend who is a drug dealer. He is being pursued by the police when he is carrying a briefcase full of marijuana in an office building and he ducks into a law office, where he talks his way into being interviewed for a position as an associate attorney at the most prestigious and cutthroat practice in the city. In the interview, we discover (as does the partner, Harvey Specter (Gabriel Macht) that Mike has a photographic memory.
It turns out that Mike, though he has studied law books to illegally take the LSAT for others, has not graduated from college. The same drug dealing friend who set him up to get caught with a briefcase of weed got him kicked out of college for cheating. Yet Mike still has faith that this drug dealing best friend guy has his best interests at heart. Well, the small-time drug dealer has met his match in filling the father role in Harvey Specter – the best closer in New York – and someone whose scruples are both much more in tact and much looser than Mike’s best friend brother/father figure.
It turns out that Mike desperately needs a father figure. His parents died in a car accident when he was a tween (or so), and (we learn much later) he was screwed out of a reasonable settlement by an unscrupulous lawyer. His grandmother has raised him to be a morally upright, good boy, and he is supporting himself through being a bike messenger and getting a hefty fee to take other’s LSATs for them. Harvey offers Mike an opportunity to make an honest man out of himself – to use his talents to engage in the law – on one condition – no one can know that he is not actually a lawyer.
This secret turns out to be Mike’s only moral failure. Even carrying around weed was to help someone else out – a moral action that cancels out the illegal aspects of it (at least in his mind – and presumably in the minds of the viewers) – and Mike’s moral compass continues to be his guiding star, and the star that increasingly guides the very high powered law firm – all while Mike is learning from Harvey about how to use “leverage” to manipulate people into doing what you (or your client) need them to do. He becomes, in essence, Batman – a vigilante working at the margins and/or outside of the law – where the law can be defeated by an evil presence because it is constrained to act within the law – and the vigilante’s moral compass can stay focused on true north. Of course, in the jocular interplay between Mike and Specter, Mike is Robin and Specter is Batman.
One of the reasons I stuck with this show as long as I did was the artful way that cliffhangers were used. For the first few seasons everyone who knew about Mike’s secret was in danger of being found out in seemingly every episode – and the circle of people who knew kept widening and the danger to the entire firm became more and more in the balance. Eventually the cliffhangers hung on other aspects of danger – including in Mike’s evolving relationship with his work mate, girlfriend, fiancé, and eventually wife Rachel Zane (Meghan Markle – who left the show after the seventh season to become the Duchess of Sussex). Will they (whoever they is this week) be OK? Will they be found out? Will the new person who discovers the secret use it as leverage? To what end? Tune in next week… or, since it is streaming – don’t touch that remote – we will answer the dire question in the next episode.
Somehow this set of cliffhangers remained generally engaging though it was also exhausting and even tedious at times as we would binge on two, three, and sometimes four episodes at a sitting. I think one reason it was not more tiresome is the contentious nature of each of the characters. Partly in their role as attorneys, or legal secretaries, or paralegals they were confrontational with their clients – but also with each other. There was a kind of bracing authenticity to the interactions as people would tell each other what they really thought about the other and about their relationship or, if it was impolitic to do that, they would talk with each other about what was really going on in a professional or personal relationship and strategize about how to handle the situation. These conversations were refreshingly direct, honest and the communication was clear – even if its intent was to figure out how to tell a lie to someone so that the desired outcome would be achieved. Combativeness seemed to be an essential cornerstone to being so clear in their communication (Harvey boxes as a means of staying fit – carrying the pugilistic feeling literally into the ring).
Another element that kept my attention was the genuine likeability of the characters. Donna Paulsen (Sarah Rafferty) is Harvey’s mind reading secretary – sort of an attractive Radar O’Reilly (a character on the TV show M*A*S*H who always knew what his commanding officer needed) – and Donna is always a covert love interest – only at the end of the series do she and Harvey become a genuine item (and the tension of not being straightforward about their attraction to each other in this show that is based on honest interaction only increases the ironic tension). Her caring for Harvey, but really for the entire firm is the counterbalance to Mike’s moral uprightness in a sea of turpitude. And she sees Harvey’s moral fiber beneath his make the deal at any cost outward armor. Louis Litt (Rick Hoffman), a winsome and clownish character who is always artlessly climbing towards the top of some hierarchy while being a loveable buffoon who inevitably fails in his efforts but is always contrite when he realizes his errors, provides comic relief and, as his character develops, pathos.
The show, in a word, articulated my worst fears about the legal profession. These lawyers were more interested in their own well-being and were working hard to beat every other lawyer – but they had a kind regard for each other and treated those that they bonded with as family.
When I was a graduate student, there was a term for people who cared about each other but not about the rest of the world. This was a type 2 psychopath. A type 1 psychopath was someone who viewed everyone as an enemy and felt no remorse for harming others as long as they were able to profit from the interaction. A type 2 psychopath is one who behaves like a type 1 to everyone outside of the core social group - often their family. Outsiders are all marks to be taken advantage of, but they care deeply about those who are in the family. In this way, this show might mirror the Sopranos – or another show about the mob – who are a well-known group of type 2 psychopaths.
Does it worry me that my reluctant son, reluctant though he may be, is going to be working for a high-powered law firm? Will he become focused on the firm’s profits at the expense of his very soul? Yes, that worries me. Do I hope that he will have the integrity of a Mike and keep the firm on the moral high ground? There are indications that this may happen. He was a summer intern at the firm he will be working for and while there he observed one of their top lawyers depose a man who was suing the company the firm represented. The firms attorney, by building a relationship with the plaintiff – by treating him as an ally rather than an adversary – an ally in investigating the truth of what happened to him – was able to clarify that the person had, indeed, been injured, and needed to be compensated, but it was not the company that the firm represented who was responsible, but another party, and the plaintiff agreed (and so did that plaintiff’s attorney) that it made more sense to sue the other company. This was a regular Specter and Mike move. Let’s make sure that the bad guys pay – and that our guys are not the bad guys.
Of course, it is not always the case that our guys are the good guys. One of my old reluctant roommates from graduate school asked me to listen to a podcast about BP’s Deep Water Horizon oil spill and its aftermath. The podcast is called Ripple. It documents the antics of BP and their attorneys to protect the corporation from suits over the long-term effects of fisherman who were hired to clean up the spill after their fishing was ruined by it – and the fact that only one person has successfully negotiated compensation for the health consequences. This person represented himself for a long time in the fight, calling in attorneys to help only near the end of a twelve-year battle, but most importantly, he had moved to Tennessee and had the case moved there. His belief is that the court system in and around the gulf coast is essentially owned by BP – and the podcast made the point that BP had been put in charge of the clean up and of documenting its effects on the environment and the workers by the federal government. It was a case, the podcast maintained, of the fox guarding the hen house.
A case where the fox is guarding the henhouse is exactly the kind of case that Mike championed on the show. When Megan Markle became the duchess of Windsor and left the show, it was easy to write she and Mike out – they went to the west coast and joined a firm that engaged in going after big corporations. He could not continue to do that at a New York law firm that was tasked with defending corporations – those corporations would not hire a firm that was going after businesses like themselves. Mike was increasingly portrayed as taking the big firm tactics and using them in support of the little guy – using leverage, but also bluffing – and calling the other person’s bluff – essentially playing high stakes poker as a means of resolving disputes.
Some would say that this is psychological warfare and should be right up the alley of a psychoanalyst. There are, in fact, two psychotherapists who play significant roles in the series. And though the psychotherapists are clad in Hollywood garb, the writers and actors got the essence right – both therapists are anti-suits in their approach – they are working to ally themselves with their clients and to help them see through the context of a caring relationship how out of balance their lives are and the importance of moving relationships to the center of their lives rather than treating relationships as additional areas in which to exercise leverage. Interestingly, both psychotherapists engage in boundary violations with their patients – demonstrating the dangers of becoming too passionately involved in professional relationships by their actions…
But psychological warfare is not, ultimately, what practicing psychologists and psychoanalysts study, even though that warfare or poker playing gets dubbed "psychological". I would be a terrible poker player. I am not trying to outwit my patients. I am trying to connect with them. Sometimes that does mean that I have to practice abstinence – meaning to step back and let them solve something for themselves – or to feel something deeply even though that may be painful and all I can offer at that moment is myself as witness to their pain. And also as witness to their survival of the lived experience of it.
The reluctant son took a class in law school last semester on mediation. There was a lab associated with the class, and he needed to mediate ten cases at a small claims court across the course of the semester. Courses were referred to mediation as an alternative to trial. If the cases were not successfully mediated, if the parties could not come to an agreement, the dispute would go back to a trial and the judge would decide how to resolve the issue.
We discussed the cases and the ones that were most successful (meaning that the reluctant son was pleased with the outcome) were the cases where there was a dispute between friends or family members over some financial issue. The complainants were frequently able to come to an understanding of the underlying issues – and there were even cases where the emotional disagreement was identified and addressed!
There were other cases that were more complicated. Someone who had been in section 8 housing for 10 years was moving to a new apartment and the landlord wanted to keep the $200 deposit because the apartment needed to be painted and the carpet needed to be replaced. The tenant sued to get his deposit back. The landlord’s lawyer came to the mediation and threatened to countersue for $400 because of other damage they found. The lawyer “generously offered” not to countersue if the complainant would drop his case to get his deposit back. The reluctant son was not allowed to tell the complainant that the lawyer was using leverage and likely bluffing. The complainant agreed to withdraw his suit – and was satisfied with the result: from his perspective he had saved $400!
The reluctant son tells me this last case was consistent with the evidence from studies of mediated solutions. Poorer people have poorer objective outcomes from mediation, but they have higher satisfaction with the outcome of the mediation process than do more well-heeled people who make use of this avenue.
In my view, the legal system should be used as a court of last resort. Most of our disagreements are not primarily about money. In fact, most of the disagreements that provided the cliffhangers on suits were not primarily about money, but more often about grudges, or getting even, or trying to get more power, and money became the means of determining the outcome of the issue. This was generally satisfying as the good guy – the one we identified with and that Mike and Harvey Specter represented – almost always won. But the legal system is about winners and losers and it is an adversarial system that determines who is at fault – who is to blame. Real life problems are rarely that simple. And the more complete solutions require bargaining in good faith – meaning, bargaining based on the assumption that the other person, too, is a good person.
It is also the case that, in real life situations, to achieve the best possible outcome, the kind the reluctant son will feel good about, we need to be as candid and upfront as the characters in Suits are. We need to let people know how we really feel about the issues that affect us. This is difficult to do. We have been socialized to be indirect, to be "polite", which means, on some basic level, duplicitous. We need to hide our feelings and to pretend to resonate with the feelings of the other.
In order to make a negotiated system work well, all parties need to act in good faith and to be honest and direct. This means that they have to assume that the other person is a well-meaning individual who also wants to find a harmonious solution to whatever difficulty is being faced and that they will represent their true desires truthfully. Rarely do we achieve this state of affairs, and so we, especially in the United States, settle back into a position that what the other person is doing is not fair and we triangulate in someone to referee between us. Sometimes, as in Louisiana, that referee appears to be biased against us. Sometimes we need to find an advocate who is wilier at the “psychological” ability to outwit the other guy – which often means coming to have a sense of who that person is, what they want, and why they want it not by listening to what they say, but by inferring what their motives are by closely watching their actions and then figuring out how to provide a satisfactory version of what they really need rather than what they think they need. Ultimately, in the final season of suits, the characters that we came to be identified with, the people that we cared about, had a “happy” ending – which generally involved their finally expressing and addressing their relational needs – and ultimately, at least for some of them, giving up on the rat race that had used money and adrenaline to create the illusion that those needs were being addressed. Of course, this let's the air out of the balloon of unmet needs that has kept us glued to the set, and we are oddly deflated by at all this happiness...
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